Food Trucks

by Heather Shouse

  NY Dosas’ Special Rava Masala Dosa

  Serves 12

  All of the optional condiments for serving are available at most Indian grocery stores.

  2 cups rava/sooji (or semolina or Cream of Wheat, if you can’t find it)

  3 cups rice flour

  ¼ cup maida (fine wheat flour)

  ½ cup cumin seeds

  1 tablespoon ajwain (also called carom)

  1 tablespoon salt

  6 cups water

  2 pounds potatoes, peeled

  1 cup olive oil

  1 tablespoon mustard seeds

  ½ white onion, finely diced

  2 teaspoons ground turmeric

  5 curry leaves, minced

  Handful cilantro, minced

  1 carrot, julienned or finely diced

  3 red bell peppers, julienned or finely diced

  Coconut chutney, for serving (optional)

  Mint-cilantro chutney, for serving (optional)

  Sambar, for serving (optional)

  Combine the rava/sooji, rice flour, maida, cumin seeds, ajwain, 2 teaspoons of the salt, and the water in a large stockpot and mix well until it forms a thin batter. Cover the pot and leave it outside in a warm place for 2 hours to ferment.

  While the batter is fermenting, boil the potatoes in a saucepan with enough water to cover them until they are soft. Using a fork, crush them lightly, but don’t mash or purée them; leave some cubed chunks.

  Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large, deep sauté pan over medium heat. Add the mustard seeds and cook for 2 minutes. Add the onion and sauté until translucent. Add the potato chunks, the turmeric, curry leaves, and the remaining 1 teaspoon salt and stir to combine. Taste and readjust seasonings with more salt, if needed, and turn down the heat to low.

  Heat 1 tablespoon of the remaining olive oil in a large nonstick pan or griddle over medium heat for about 3 minutes. Using a ladle, transfer a small circle of batter to the middle of the pan. Use the bottom of the ladle to gently spread the batter into a larger circle, swirling it in a clockwise circle. Add a second ladleful of batter around the first circle and spread the batter once more so that you have a crepelike round the size of the pan. After 3 minutes, the crepe should become crispy and lightly golden in color on the bottom. At this point, scrape off the top, uncooked layer of the batter with a spatula, leaving only the crispy part on the pan. (You can transfer the uncooked layer to the bowl of batter.) Working quickly, so that the dosa doesn’t overcook, add a pile of the crispy potatoes just to one side of the center of the dosa, and top with a sprinkle of the cilantro, a bit of carrot, and a bit of red bell pepper. Use a long spatula, or two spatulas, one on each side, to fold the dosa in a half-moon shape and transfer it to a plate. Repeat the same process with the remaining batter and fillings, adding more oil to the pan before cooking each dosa. Serve with the chutneys and sambar.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  Word among New York’s culinary cognoscenti is that at one time Chinatown was lousy with street food, most of it about as regulated as backyard wrestling. These days, most of the eating has moved indoors, not that you won’t find a few sit-down storefronts where the sidewalk out front might actually be cleaner. Still, a handful of carts manage to do good business, likely because they’ve each carved out their own niche, getting tongues wagging for one or two particular specialties. Of these, the standouts include an unmarked cart on the southeast corner of Mott and Canal where The Wus, a mother-father-son team, have a way with fried chicken. Hoisin and garlic salt do half of the work, mixed into the cornstarch that clings to each piece, but the matriarch handles the other half, deftly dunking the drumsticks in vegetable oil to the most perfect shade of brown. Over at Grand Street and Bowery, at Huan Ji Rice Noodles, scissors fly with each order of cheung fun. The ribbons of silky rolled rice noodles are snipped with precision over a seemingly bottomless takeout container, topped with spongy curried fish balls, and finished with a hat trick of oyster sauce, peanut sauce, and sesame seeds. Save room for dessert; a few steps away toward Christie Street you’ll find All Natural Hot Mini Cakes, where Shao Chen, an adorable seventy-something Hong Kong native, methodically works to classical tunes piped out of a small stereo lassoed to the cart, churning out tiny pancake puffs on a waffle iron pocked with round divots for browning batter. Similar to Dutch poffertjes, these mini cakes are nothing more than flour, sugar, eggs, and a little milk. They’re slightly sweet, completely perfect with a cup of coffee, and, at only a buck for twenty, truly a vestige of old Chinatown.

  The Arepa Lady

  FIND HER: Roosevelt Ave. between 78th and 79th Sts., Queens, New York

  KEEP UP WITH HER: www.myspace.com/arepalady

  In Manhattan, foodie yuppies (fuppies?) talk about her in hushed tones, as if she were some mythical creature like the Loch Ness monster: “The Sainted Arepa Lady, she’s under the 7 train in Jackson Heights grilling up the most amazing arepas you’ve ever had—cash only, Fridays and Saturdays until four or five in the morning.”

  In Queens, no one really talks about her, and if they do they don’t call her the Arepa Lady. They call her by her name, Maria Piedad Cano. They speak to her in Spanish, usually ordering along the lines of, “Dos arepas de queso, una arepa de choclo, y dos chorizo.” They don’t blink at seeing a sixty-five-year-old woman working a food cart until 5 a.m., patting arepas with a spatula as they brown on the grill, waving away neighborhood drunks with the other hand, waiting until the train rumbling overhead passes before telling customers what they owe. She’s done this for twenty years, in this same spot, during these same hours, selling the same food: Colombian arepas, small discs of cornmeal dough that are tossed onto a flattop to brown on both sides. The smallest of the three Maria sells are plain arepas, only a little bigger than a silver dollar, almost eggshell white, and somewhat dry, the common starch served with grilled meats and most other meals throughout Colombia. When Maria folds shredded mozzarella into the cornmeal, it becomes an arepa de queso, taking on an almost spongy quality, puffing up a bit as it cooks. These she slathers with margarine and tops with a second cheese, crumbly queso blanco. But it’s her arepa de choclo that is surely the Arepa Lady’s holy grail. The most labor-intensive of the lineup, the choclo are made from fresh sweet corn that Maria slices from the cob, soaks overnight to loosen the seed germ, grinds by hand in a large stone mortar known as a pilón, then cooks and kneads into a dough. The dough sets up over a day or so before she pats it out into pancakelike rounds with a true yellow color. Griddled to golden brown and then folded in half with a spoonful of white farmer’s cheese tucked inside, the arepas de choclo are slightly sweet, with a nutty texture from the fresh kernels.

  With her thirty-one-year-old son Alejandro translating by her side and stoking the grill’s fire while scored chorizo links sizzle away, Maria recounts how her legendary cart came to be. “I came to America in 1984 with my husband and four sons, right here to Jackson Heights,” she says. “I started working at the cart of a Colombian man, selling shish kebabs, but after a year I decided I wanted my own cart, so I got one. At first I was only selling chorizo and pork kebabs, simple, just marinated in onion and garlic and sold with baby potatoes.”

  But after a couple of years, Maria explains, she noticed that although Jackson Heights was becoming the unofficial entry point for New York’s Colombian immigrants, no one was selling arepas on the street, a common sight in her country. She started making the plain arepas and the arepas de queso. When, soon after, a couple of other arepa spots popped up, Maria set her cart apart by grinding the corn herself to offer arepas de choclo.

  Over the years, she developed a routine, preparing the arepas throughout the week from her home while raising her four boys, loading up her cart on Friday before wheeling over to her spot, working 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays, attending church on Sunday, and starting the whole thing over come Monday. Winters she flees the cold to visit family that remains in Colombia, but her travels don’t always line up w
ith the dates of her six-month vending permit, which she has to apply for annually. When she’s working without a permit, Maria usually works her “old cart” so that if the police hassle her and end up seizing her cart, they won’t get the shinier, newer model she upgraded to a few years back. “I’ve been here so long they don’t bother me that much, but sometimes they decide to, maybe since the arepas got famous,” she says. “When I first started this was a bad, bad area, but the neighborhood has changed so much since, and now it’s safer for people to come and business is better.”

  She’s become a street vendor legend, raised a family, and makes a decent living, but she admits that although the late hours are wearing on her, she’s in no place to retire yet. “When I win the lottery, that’s when I stop selling my arepas.”

  Arepas de Queso

  Serves 6

  2 cups masarepa (arepa flour)

  2 cups hot water

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

  3 tablespoons margarine

  1 cup queso blanco (crumbly white farmer’s cheese)

  Mix the masarepa, hot water, and salt in a large mixing bowl and let rest for about 10 minutes. Knead the dough until it starts to take on a sheen, kneading in the shredded mozzarella as you work. Form 6 round patties about ½ inch thick and set aside.

  Heat a large nonstick pan or griddle over medium heat. You’ll use about 1½ teaspoons of margarine per arepa, so add the margarine to the pan according to how many will fit at a time without crowding. After each arepa browns on one side, flip it and immediately baste the top with a little of the margarine from the pan. Continue to cook until both sides are browned and lightly crispy.

  Transfer each arepa to a plate and top with a sprinkle of the queso blanco before serving.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  Williamsburg, Brooklyn, measures an eleven on the hipster meter. The boutiques are great, bars are plentiful, and, yes, there are food trucks. Occasionally, the Van Leeuwen truck pulls up in the ’hood to scoop its artisan ice cream, but you can score their pints at Whole Foods throughout New York. What you can’t get at the grocer are fish tacos from Endless Summer (Bedford Ave. between 6th and 7th Sts.). The brainchild of two musicians—Bad Wizard’s Curtis Brown and The Jewish’s Jeffrey Jensen—this boxy white truck has taken flack as gringo Mexican, has been under fire from local businesses looking to squash the competition, and is staffed by dudes who seem stoned half the time and hung over the other half. Still, when it’s parked on Williamsburg’s main vein Bedford Avenue, the line is never less than a dozen deep with people waiting on the very popular fish taco: crispy-edged tilapia tucked into tortillas with purple cabbage, white onion, cilantro, and crumbly cotija cheese. Sure, you can get pork, beef, or chicken, but in this part of town, the buzz is the thing.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  In Queens you’ll find two cousins operating different Italian sausage trucks only a bun’s toss away from each other on Woodhaven Boulevard (one marked D’Angelo’s, the other Dominick’s). In Manhattan’s Financial District, John Braun slaves away in his own sausage rig, joking that, as a relative by marriage, he’s the Cinderella of the family. Still, his stepfather, Dominic Felico, trained him well before his passing in 1995, setting him up with a hundred-year-old supplier, Continental Capri in Jersey, and the truck John has now operated for sixteen years as Dominic’s (Whitehall and Bridge Sts.). Suits from Wall Street stand next to construction workers wolfing down juicy fennel-flecked sausages, either crimson from chili powder or deep brown, sweet, and mild. Caramelized onions and peppers top John’s best sellers, but the one menu item that sets this truck apart from its kin is piping hot cheesesteaks, streaked with fat and smothered in liquefied American, “the thing I got that they don’t,” as John says.

  Jamaican Dutchy

  FIND IT: W 51st St. between 6th and 7th Aves., New York, New York

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.thejamaicandutchy.net

  Square white guys in suits and ties queuing up for Midtown lunch carts is not an unfamiliar sight. But you do tend to notice when one of them is bobbing his head to Marley tunes floating out of a cart marked by a waving Jamaican flag, especially when he’s shouting to anyone who will listen, “This jerk chicken is the bomb!”

  O’Neil Reid has seen it before, so he nods in appreciation without looking up from the Styrofoam container he’s loading up with rice and peas, fiery chicken thighs, and caramelized plantains. It’s just another Friday, and Jamaican Dutchy is just another Midtown lunch cart, handing over plastic bags of the day’s meal to nine-to-fivers who’ll head back to the office and wolf it down in ten minutes, trying not to slop hot sauce on their computer keyboard. But O’Neil’s cart stands out as one of only a couple of Jamaican operations in the area, and it’s the leader for intense flavors and daily specials like braised cow foot, peanut porridge, and goat stew. Granted, most of the customers ordering from that lineup hail from the Caribbean like O’Neil, but the fact that they’re even offered is impressive.

  “I’ve been in New York for ten years, and when I was working security downtown I would go to different carts for lunch,” he says. “But then I said, ‘You know what? I could do better.’ So I got a cart and I asked my mom about recipes. We live together, so she helped with taste testing, giving me opinions, especially with the breakfast porridges. My mom makes the best porridge in the whole wide world. Trust me.”

  I do. I’ve had O’Neil’s version, and it pretty much flips the bird to American oatmeal. The porridge rotates daily: cornmeal on Mondays, banana and oats Tuesdays, plantains Wednesdays, hominy Thursdays, and peanuts Fridays. No matter the base, the key is Mother Reid’s secret of adding four different kinds of milk to the starch as it cooks: fresh milk, sweet milk, condensed milk, and coconut milk. Ridiculously rich and filling, it could fortify someone enough to head out into the wilderness and slay a wild beast, or at least make it from the subway station to the office on a cold winter morning.

  “Mostly, though, the Midtown crowd, they come for my jerk chicken,” O’Neil says. “And I don’t soften it up … it’s got some heat.” Ginger, garlic, allspice, Scotch bonnet chiles, and a couple of “secret spices” go into the jerk rub, which gets massaged into the chicken to soak overnight before the thighs and legs hit the grill. Slow-cooked stew peas and braised oxtails are equally time-intensive, but worth the effort: O’Neil packs up most nights with an empty cart. “The cart life is what you make it. If you’re just going to sell hot dogs, everyone else is already doing it,” O’Neil says. “I’m here to do some real business, so I give them a full menu of Jamaican cuisine. I know if the food is good, people will continue to find me. I’m here for longevity.”

  O’Neil’s Jerk Chicken

  Serves 5

  1 bunch green onions, chopped

  1 bunch fresh thyme, chopped

  ½ cup ground allspice

  8 Scotch bonnet chiles

  1 tablespoon salt

  1 onion, chopped

  10 pieces bone-in dark-meat chicken

  Combine the green onions, thyme, allspice, chiles, salt, and onion in a blender and purée.

  Rinse the chicken and pat it dry. Massage the jerk rub into each piece of chicken and let marinate in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours.

  Prepare a grill for indirect cooking over medium heat or preheat the oven to 350°F.

  Place the chicken on the grill over indirect heat or in a casserole dish in the oven. Cook until the skin is nicely charred and the juices run clear (about 45 minutes on a grill, 1 hour 15 minutes in the oven). Serve hot.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  Okay, so I know I said I wasn’t going to include anyone in this book that doesn’t actually cook on his or her truck, but rules were made to be broken. Two trucks in NYC who do all of their production in a real brick-and-mortar kitchen are Treats Truck (twitter.com/thetreatstruck) and Rickshaw Dumpling (twitter.com/rickshawtruck), and both are worth a stop if you see them on the road. Kim Ima left the theate
r world to start up the bakery case on wheels she dubbed Treats Truck, and now she starts her days at the crack of dawn, pulling classic cookies and bars hot from her oven in Red Hook. She then loads them onto a streamlined silver step van, tools over to Manhattan, vies for a parking spot in Midtown, and opens the window for business. Sandwich cookies in combos like brown sugar with vanilla crème and oatmeal with seasonal jam are big sellers, but it’s the pecan-topped butterscotch bar that has otherwise civilized suits cutting in line. Likewise, the goods on the Rickshaw truck aren’t actually made in a mobile kitchen; dumplings the likes of chicken–Thai basil and pork–Chinese chive are assembled back at the company’s Dumpling Bar in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, under the guidance of award-winning chef Anita Lo. Still, massive steamers keep the puffy pouches warm on the run, until they’re tossed into a carton by the half dozen and paired up with dips like soy-sesame and lemon-sansho. Don’t miss the calamansi-ade, a super refreshing drink made from Filipino citrus fruit—you’ll need it by the time you get to the front of the line.