Category: Food & Drink

Breaking down a pig at Lincoln Cafe

There’s a reason Matt Steigerwald and the Lincoln Cafe crew won the pork extravaganza that was Cochon 555 in Des Moines: they know how to deal with a whole pig.

Recently, I witnessed Steigerwald and his sous chef, Andy Schumacher, break down a 250-pound pig (that’s on-the-rail weight, or the pig less guts, hooves and blood).

While they are certainly no master butchers (they occasionally would stop and double check with each other before making key cuts), they have more practice than most cooks in Iowa.

The restaurant started buying whole hogs last fall, Steigerwald said, because he wanted to learn how to break them down and Schumacher was interested, too.

“It’s given me a greater respect,” said Schumacher.

Steigerwald points out that the financial risk is pretty low, too. The scraps, turned into sausage and served as a lunch special, for example, can pay for the $330 pig.

But it’s also the only way to get a lot of specific pig parts. Want to make head cheese? Pork-liver pate? You better buy yourself a whole hog and then figure out what to do the rest of it.

“There are a lot of good parts that aren’t being utilized,” said Steigerwald. Well, at other restaurants, anyway.

Update
The story I wrote about Lincoln Cafe for Corridor Buzz has been posted.

Photos from my cell phone: a food tour

It’s practically impossible to buy a cell phone without a camera. Yet most of the pictures I take with mine are forgotten before the next phone call.

The other night, over for dinner at some friends’ home, Matt completely obliterated the blueberry waffles (he switched to pancakes). It was such a failure, I snapped a low-quality picture to remember the moment for the next five minutes by.

Which led me to look at other pictures, taken and promptly forgotten, on my phone. This one, of a book titled Dead Meat, was taken and sent by Emily, who has written some nice things about the urban chicken movement in Salem, Ore.

 There were several pictures from last summer’s visit to Hog Heaven, a barbecue joint in Nashville, Tenn., I ate at on the way back from my stint at a dying newspaper in Florida. The place is just a few picnic tables in a screened porch. The barbecue is delicious.

The pig painted on the wall fits so perfectly with the nearby Parthenon. No, really, there’s a full-size Parthenon.

And then there’s this. Taken at a Publix supermarket in Tampa, Fla., on, I believe, my first afternoon in town. I knew at that moment that Florida was much, much odder more racist than I had even suspected.

Where bacon doesn’t come from

What is it with kid’s classics misinforming? (Example: Curious George, who has no tail, is not a monkey, curious or otherwise.)

Tonight, we were watching Adam Sandler in Bedtime Stories (don’t ask). The movie’s two main child characters have never had bacon. Sandler’s character tells them that it comes from next to a pig’s butt.

Um, no (see figure A).

Nasty. Just Plain Nasty

“Now you can top off your dessert with your favorite soda flavors!” declares the ad for A&W, Dr Pepper and Crush soda “dessert toppers” on top.

“OR! you can top off your meats with your favorite soda flavors!” suggests the ad for barbecue sauces on the bottom.

Why am I suspicious that the dessert toppers and barbecue sauces are the same thing in two (slightly) different packages?

Three things for better grilling

You seriously suck at grilling. Let me help right your wrongs. It takes three free-or-cheap things. It’s easy.

A charcoal grill
I know you just spent $1,000 on your shiny propane grill with fold out range and adjustable racks. But that was really your dumb fault. I use a rusty Weber hand-me-down whose legs fall off every time I move it. Mine is better than yours.

Hardwood charcoal
The reason you bought that propane grill was because you hated the stench of Kingsford smoke every time the wind changed direction. Real wood smoke actually smells good. And that’s before you add maple wood chips.

An old aluminum can
OK, you also need lighter fluid, matches and some newspaper (a disappearing commodity), and starting a charcoal fire isn’t as easy as the click-click-click electric starter on your propane grill. But it is this easy:

  1. Get a commercial-size can. Every restaurant has tons of these from tomatoes, olives or whatever. Take the ends off the can. Now you have a chimney. Set it in the bottom of your grill.
  2. Instead of spraying lighter fluid all over the charcoal (which, unsurprisingly, makes whatever it’s used to cook taste EXACTLY LIKE LIGHTER FLUID), squirt lighter fluid all over an unfolded sheet of newspaper. Crumple it up and put it inside your can-chimney.
  3. Loosely pile the hardwood charcoal on top of the newspaper. Light a match and set the newspaper on fire from the bottom.
  4. When the flames are shooting out the top and there’s a whitish ash covering most of the charcoal, pull the chimney off the top, releasing the charcoal. Redistribute the charcoal, put the grate on top and wait 15 minutes or so before grilling.

See? Easy. Happy Memorial Day.

The problem with, and the pleasure of, farmers’ markets

The worst part of farmers’ markets, or at least Iowa City’s farmers’ market, is this: the market is just predictable enough so you start depending on certain people selling certain products.

That works until, one day, it doesn’t.

Today, for example, I stopped by to see Eric, the plants-and-chicken guy, because I wanted a frozen chicken. He had, he said, been cleaned out by the Motley Cow Café. And we needed honey, but the good honey guy — with honeys from different flowers (can you call those varietals?) — was nowhere to be found.

But that same unpredictability is what makes the market so great, so serendipitous. In weeks past, I had somehow missed the stall for La Renya, Iowa City’s excellent Mexican market and taco stand. Or, though it seems unlikely, perhaps it hadn’t been there before.

Whether new or overlooked, La Reyna was now selling frozen tamales, available in vegetarian, chicken or pork. Relatively reasonable, too, at $5 for four. Paired with salsa, the tamales — well-cooked pork, solid corn flavors and slightly fatty — were a fantastic lunch.

I should have bought more, because they might not be available next week.

Anticipating Chef’s Table restaurant in Iowa City

I was hoping for lunch at The Chef’s Table, a place that has been open just a week and a half now, but it’s only serving dinner.

The dining room is gorgeous and very French Laundry. At least as French Laundry as it gets in downtown Iowa City.

Barr has posted some pictures of the construction on the restaurant’s blog, but there seems to be a dearth of information otherwise.

Because it’s buried on its own website, the restaurant’s vitals:

Open Monday through Saturday, 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.
Closed Sunday
Phone (319) 337-0490
Address 223 E. Washington St., Iowa City

Templeton Rye bottling

Sam and I have been debating industrial food processing and how much companies have a responsibility for transparency over on his blog lately. Here’s a nice video from Iowa’s own Templeton Rye (one of my new favorite things, by the way) showing their bottling process. And there are many more videos documenting the process of making the whiskey.

I’m surprised by how much handling by real actual people each bottle gets.

Danny Wilcox Frazier’s “Driftless: Stories from Iowa”

I haven’t had a chance to watch the entire half-hour of Iowa-native Danny Wilcox Frazier’s Driftless: Stories from Iowa from MediaStorm yet.

But I’ve watched the fifth segment, “Country Butcher,” and I know that I will finish the rest of it. It’s a moving story.

I spoke with Joe Kuba, the butcher in that segment, a couple years ago as part of my reporting on “A Pig in Three Parts.” I couldn’t get him into the final piece (though that’s his bloody floor grate in the background). He did appear on this blog, albeit without a name.

Frazier elicited some moving stories from Kuba, stories that I wasn’t able to. That always stings a little. Nicely done, Mr. Frazier.