Nick Bergus

Alex swears — SWEARS! — Pagano’s is the place to go for a cheese steak in Philadelphia. Or at least North Philly.

I wasn’t going to argue. I was just happy for two things: first, to eat a real cheese steak for the first time in years, and, second, to not have to deal with the schlock of Geno’s and Pat’s.

 I’ve given up even trying to approximate the cheese steak at home. Steak-ums create the wrong kind of greasy mess and I just don’t have a pan with enough cooked-in tallow to get the right beef flavor in the steaks. And furthermore, it is impossible to the get the appropriate rolls outside of Philadelphia.

(During my Summer in Tampa, I tried Frankies version of a cheese steak, lured by the “best cheese steak south of Philly” proclamation on their sign and was surprised disappointed disgusted at what I was presented with.)

We can debate (and we will) whether Cheese Whiz is appropriate on a steak or not. I say no, Alex says yes. Look, who’s the native Philadelphian here?

So, yes, Pagano’s. South of the projects of the 1950s and 70s, north of the projects of this century. The inside is small, the walls covered with grease and photos of the owner and his employees. A simple menu, as any real steak shop should have (I was surprised disappointed disgusted to see a chicken cheese steak at the bottom, as if this was Applebee’s, but I digress), one price listed for each. None of this half-sandwich bullshit.

We were handed a huge stack of napkins along with our sandwiches. This could only be a good sign indicating the full greasiness we were about to consume.

I won’t bore you with the gory details, but yes, they were good. Very good. Greasy. Overflowing with meat and fried onions. The kind of cheese steak that forces you to take a nap and then skip the next couple of meals. Not that I will. I do, after all, have to get some scrapple for breakfast.

 Matt Steigerwald knows what to do with a pig. That’s obvious to anyone who has eaten the house-made charcuterie at Lincoln Cafe, his restaurant in Mount Vernon.

And when faced with an entire hog (a rare mulefoot in this case) and a competition, he knew how to make that pig sing.

So at Sticks, an elegant art studio surrounded by woodlands and corporate office sprawl, Steigerwald and his Lincoln Cafe crew set up shop in a place that wasn’t built for cooking. He faced off, 140 miles from his kitchen, against some of the best Des Moines, an increasingly hip and food-savvy town, had to offer: Bill Overdyke of Centro, Andrew Meek of Sage, Tag Grandgeorge of Le Jardin (who teamed with caterer Cyd Mull) and Jammie Monaghan of the Embassy Club.

He hauled his entire pig, in various states of completion, along with as much kitchen equipment as he could possibly need, the 140 miles.

And, when the votes were counted, he’d won.

I voted as a judge at Cochon 555 in Des Moines. I tried every single dish the chefs put in front of me — brains on rye, heart wrapped in pureed liver, lard ice cream with cracklings, truffled pork loin, liver mortadella, a couple barbecue-on-a-biscuit sandwiches. We were asked to rank the five chefs in three categories: presentation, flavor and utilization (their ability to use as much of the pig as possible). Picking a “winner” was difficult.

It didn’t help that by the time we got to the balloting, I’d been consuming wine and swine for some three and a half or four hours (one tends to lose track of time under such conditions). And, even though I knew I would be eating pork from about 5:00 on, how could I turn down La Quercia proscuitto and a mountain of cheese beginning at 3:30 that afternoon?

We got fed by Sage’s Meeks first. The favorite was a lovely piece of pork belly from a hereford hog, marinaded in orange and something else and sprinkled with sea salt (I am a sucker for large crunchy pieces of salt as a garnish).

Next came Le Jardin and a gorgeous set of dishes from a duroc. The standouts were a simple, salty pork-consomme bloody mary and smoked pork shoulder (a popular preparation that night) served on a cracker spoon with a strawberry sauce.

The Embassy Club’s Monaghan went Southern with a tamworth. Barbecue on a biscuit. Dirty rice. A pork loin in a bourbon sauce. Perhaps owing to Monaghan’s background as the Embassy Club’s banquet chef, he avoided temperature problems that hurt the earlier cooks. And perhaps owing to the amount of wine (and the bottles that Scott Bush, president of Templeton Rye, brought to the table), my notes became less descriptive and more terse. “Really, really good” these read.

Steigerwald offered a very nice selection of garde manger, a head cheese and liver mortadella, especially. Another version of North Carolina barbeque that was impossible to not compare with Monaghan’s (Steigerwald’s was better). A pozole, a traditional Mexican pork-and-hominy soup.

We were stuffed beyond the breaking point. Then came Centro’s Overdyke and his Guinea hog. More rillets and a fantastic rolata di coteccino (Centro’s spelling, not mine) that I am totally unable to describe. My notes are absolutely no help at this point. The page says Centro and then — nothing.

Then we voted.

While we waited for the votes to be tallied, we were plied with even more food (all bacon-infused desserts). I declined.

When Steigerwald won (and was handed a trophy, a bottle of Templeton Rye and, I’m not making this up, a painting of a pig leaping into a pond) it felt like an upset. The Des Moines crowd had picked an out-of-towner. People had been coming up all night, he told me: “They would taste something and say, ‘Where the hell are you guys located?'”

What put Steigerwald over the top, as I told Cecelia Hanley of The Gazette, was his pozole. It was such a delicious, porky soup. And it offered a surprise: with a bit of cheese submerged just out of sight below the surface.

Ben Gordon, who blogs at Food Tour of Iowa, has a nice set of photos from the event.

 More about snout-to-tail eating at tonight’s Cochon 555 later. Tonight you’ll have to be satisfied with two photos that illustrate what I didn’t get to witness while I was sequestered, eating and judging the porcine handy work of five talented cooks.

To demonstrate the skill it takes to break down an entire pig — complete with head and skin — why not have someone break down an entire pig?

 So there was Aaron King, of Garden Market in Des Moines, going at a roughly 75-pound duroc with only the aid of a hacksaw and his knives, while everyone around him ate pork.

He was out of practice since the last time he had taken apart a whole hog was five years ago, and that made him nervous. It took him about an hour and a half, and he ended with all the bits laid out and a tidy, cleaned ribcage.

Oh, how I would have loved to stand and stare as Aaron dismantled that animal. But I only caught the beginning and the end.

It’s been a little more than a year since I put a bullet into the brain of a pig. And, while we’ve been noshing on the remains since, I’ve been remiss by not blogging about it. So a laundry list:

• There was the brunch with the in-laws at which we ate my bacon as both strips and in a quiche (the crust of which used some of the lard) and a sage sausage from ground pork scraps. Sorta like The Onion‘s Entire Meal Pig-Based story only better.
• My mother roasted a cola-brined ham — juicy with a luscious caramelization on the outside — for my graduation party a year ago that did that hog proud.
• We had so much ground pork that we were, for a time, putting it in practically everything. (For some reason we never tried pork burgers, a traditional hog-farmer meal.) But the best sausages were the ones we ground ourselves, hacking muscle and fat off the shoulder bone and letting it sit in the fresh ginger, sage and salt.
• There was the lardo. And the face bacon. And the comic that went with it. (No food poisoning, I’m happy to say.)
• We smoked a couple chunks of shoulder on the grill and ate a feast of pulled pork, and a smoked-hock-and-white-bean soup was a fantastic mid-winter meal.
• And there was the requisite pork chops, both bone-in and boneless ones hammered flat. Iowa tradition.

Despite this plethora, our freezer still holds an abundance: baby-back ribs, some loin and a few chops, an uncured side, hocks, another six-pound bucket of lard, a chunk or two of shoulder.

But there’s some room in there. Maybe it’s time I go looking, as a butcher would say, for a “beef.”

It’s truffle week on my good friend Emily’s blog (that’s her photo above). And we ain’t talkin’ no Freedom Truffles neither. These black truffles are from the mountains of Oregon, her new home. She dug an ass donkey load herself yesterday which is actually impeding her writing duties:

My hands aren’t really ready to type the story of my own truffle hunt. In the end, I spent about five hours coming through dirt with a rake to unearth about twelve of these little black truffles and came back covered in mud and with newly discovered back muscles.

But she’s already posted a taste of truffles — shaved in risotto — on Twitter.

I’m jealous. I will have to take her up on the Oregon food-and-wine tour she offered.

 I was a teenage coffee snob.

I would not drink an espresso shot unless it was pulled in 20 seconds. I refused to drink coffee that wasn’t freshly ground — in a burr grinder — immediately before brewing. I would not subject coffee I brewed to the abuse of a coffee-maker hot plate, insisting instead on a thermal carafe.

During the time in high school and college I spent as a barista, I looked down on the idiots to whom I served almond-coconut lattes with soy milk. And would I smile when a customer ordered a double machiato. They knew what they were drinking; they were a kindred coffee spirit.

Flash forward several years. A friend is explaining why she hates visiting her father-in-law. He is a cheapskate for the ages. She enumerates the sins of his cheapness. Then, at least as I remember it, she gets to the story’s kicker.

He actually makes, she says with a tone that suggests that this sin is akin to winging trespassing neighborhood children with a BB-gun, he actually makes a pot of coffee every morning that he drinks the entire day, long after it has become drinkable and gets pissed if I pour it out and make fresh.

And that’s where she lost me. While I was too ashamed to admit it then, I will now: I drink day-old coffee all the time.

I resisted drinking day-old coffee for so long, either dumping the leftovers or serving them to my wife. But now I find finding left-over coffee in the pot a minor pleasure: in the morning means drinking coffee without the fuss of making it.

Sure their are times when the bitter skunkiness of day-old coffee sends spasms down my spine, but if Michael Ruhlman can profess a deep love for percolators and Folgers, surely I can live down a willingness to drink day-old coffee.