More Diners, Drive-ins and Dives
Page 13
This joint’s making a lot of people very happy, with more than sixty pies every hour. The pizza dough gets sauced, trimmed, and sent for toppings in under a minute—an assembly line like none other. Get this: to keep up the pace, these guys throw the pizza peels (boards) at each other across the kitchen. The explanation? When you’re working a ten-hour shift, you try to walk as little as you can. It’s the way they’ve always done it. Rose even has a technique for making breakfast pizza. She’ll show you how to crack the eggs just so, placing them raw on top of the cheese pizza, with a little oregano and a sprinkle of water, and then topping with fried pepperoni before putting it in the oven. If you’re gonna eat eggs, this is the way to do it—on a thin crust covered in fried pepperoni. This isn’t just coming and getting a pie, this is a come-to family joint. This is an event.
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[GUY ASIDE]
Here’s the thing—I pulled up on a humungous street on some side of Chicago, I was sick—had a sinus cold or something—and there were trucks hauling by. And I am not really a deep-dish pizza fan, so I was thinking, I don’t know if this is gonna work. But these people are making some of the thinnest, crunchiest crust in the world. They’re putting Italian beef, onions, eggs, olives, and everything on top of pizza, and it’s to die for. You’ve gotta watch these dudes throw the pizza peels—the wooden ones. They snap when they throw it, and at the last nano-second the other guy grabs it. Incredible. A year and a half later Rosemary came to one of my shoots while I was in Chi-town and asked if I wanted a pizza, cuz I couldn’t make it over there before I had to leave. They took the pizza that was coming out of the oven for one of their customers (and gave him four free pizzas in exchange) so they could drive it over to me at the final location and I could have it before I left for home! So kewl!
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Italian Roast Beef Pizza
ADAPTED FROM A RECIPE COURTESY OF ROSEMARY GEORGE, OWNER OF THE ORIGINAL VITO & NICK’S PIZZERIA
Rosemary uses her beef sliced thin in Italian beef sandwiches or cut thicker with heavy gravy for dinner as well as offering it on a pizza.
MAKES 1 SERVING
Fresh pizza dough
1 cup of your favorite pizza sauce (Rose uses a can of Stanislaus with a bit of water)
2¼ cups shredded mozzarella (Rose actually grinds hers)
4 ounces very thinly sliced rare Italian Roast Beef (recipe on Italian Roast Beef)
1. Preheat the oven to 475°F, with a pizza stone, if you have one, on the bottom rack. You want the stone to be very hot, so leave it in there about 45 minutes or the middle of the pizza will be mushy, says Rose. If you don’t have a stone, Rose recommends using two layers of heavy-duty aluminum foil. (“You don’t even need a freaking pan!”)
2. Stretch a premade pizza dough to make a 12-inch round. Spread a thin layer of pizza sauce on top. Scatter just a handful of mozzarella over the sauce and top that with the roast beef. Top with the remaining mozzarella and bake on a baking sheet or directly on the baking stone until the crust is crisp and the cheese bubbly, about 15 to 18 minutes.
Italian Roast Beef
ADAPTED FROM A RECIPE COURTESY OF ROSEMARY GEORGE, OWNER OF THE ORIGINAL VITO & NICK’S PIZZERIA
MAKES 8 TO 12 SERVINGS
½ cup kosher salt
½ cup dried basil
½ cup dried oregano
½ cup granulated garlic
¼ cup granulated onion
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 (5- to 7-pound) roast beef round, fat cap on
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
1. Preheat the oven to 300°F. Combine the salt, basil, oregano, granulated garlic and onion, and the black pepper in a mixing bowl.
2. Trim all the fat from the beef round. Rosemary grinds the trimmings, but you can cut them up into bite-size pieces. Put the trimmings on the bottom of a roasting pan and sprinkle with some of the seasoning mix. Put the roast beef on top and coat the beef well with more of the seasoning mix. Drizzle the olive oil over the top of the roast and pat it into the seasonings.
3. Roast for about 1½ to 2 hours until the internal temperature registers 130°F (medium-rare) on an instant-read thermometer. Remove from the oven and let stand for about 20 minutes before carving.
MIDWEST
BBQ SHACK
EST. 1997 GO WHOLE HOG, WHERE HEAT MEETS HEAT. SO GOOD THAT IF YOU PUT SOME ON TOP OF YOUR FOREHEAD YOU CAN WATCH YOUR TONGUE BEAT YOUR BRAINS OUT TRYING TO GET TO IT.
Here I was on the last leg of my real-deal barbecue-athon, in Paola, Kansas, about forty miles south of Kansas City. Now, a lot of folks think of this as cattle country, but you might change your mind after you taste some of the tasty pork at the BBQ Shack. From whole hogs to racks of ribs, it’s go big or go home at this joint.
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TRACK IT DOWN
1613 E. Peoria Street
Paola, Kansas 66071
913-294-5908
www.thebbqshack.com
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BBQ Shack was a big gamble that paid off big for Rick Schoenberger. He left his corporate job to turn his hobby into his business. Now he’s firing up the monster smoker, cranking out the classics and some surprises—like chicken wings and homegrown jalapeño poppers. One customer says, “I send my heavyweight wrestlers down here to gain weight.”
And if you order ahead, he really will do an entire hog. It starts with his homemade rub of salt and sugar, ground celery, chili powder, black pepper, granulated garlic, seasoned salt, granulated onion, paprika, mustard flour, allspice, and a little ground clove. He sprinkles it on the inside of the split hog, rubs some olive oil on the skin, and closes it up with chicken wire before hauling it into the smoker. (I thought I’d pulled a hammy!) It goes low and slow all day. It renders down practically all the fat and cooks in its own skin, so there’s just flavor galore in there. As one customer said, “It’d make a rabbit hug a hound.” Good eats.
OWNER’S NOTE: We actually had to move! We’re in a new building now primarily due to Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives—we just outgrew the other place. We’ve just seen a second surge, because they ran the show again a week ago. A lot of the new customers would have loved to see the old place, but we’ve done a good job keeping the ambience. It’s the same good barbecue.—Rick Schoenberger
“DADDY, I THOUGHT ONLY ONE LITTLE PIGGY WENT TO MARKET?”
While the whole hog is a special order, Rick’s everyday menu is keeping the place packed. Here in barbecue country, people won’t stop raving about his brisket and his ribs, real good and real tender. He’s serving burnt ends and homemade sausage, and he’s even loading up the smoker with chicken wings. Most people just take ’em, fry ’em, and sauce ’em. But he seasons ’em, smokes ’em, and deep-fries ’em to order.
Along with his rub he sprinkles on dried chipotle for a kick and he smokes them for a couple hours. Amazingly, all that seasoning stays on them when they hit the deep-fryer. It’s a lot of work for a chicken wing, man, but it sure is good.
Rick grows jalapeño peppers in his garden, and he makes poppers out of them the way they did before the chain restaurants got ahold of them. They’re cored, then stuffed with cream cheese and with a water chestnut that’s been marinated in brown sugar and soy sauce. He then wraps them with bacon, skewers them with a toothpick, and sprinkles a little dry rub on top before smoking. I’ve had smoked Brie, smoked mozzarella—but smoked cream cheese? That’s wicked, great flavor. (And there goes the theory that cooking the jalapeños cools them down—wow! That’s hot.)
Rick really is a BBQ bad boy. The rub, the smoke, all done low and slow.
BBQ Shack Chicken Wings
ADAPTED FROM A RECIPE COURTESY OF RICK SCHOENBERGER OF BBQ SHACK
Note from Rick: At the BBQ Shack, we cook up to forty pounds of wings at a time. We just dump the wings in a big plastic tub, dump some of our All-Purpose BBQ Rub on them, and mix them up. I am sure most any barbecue rub will work.
We actually bag the wings
in freezer bags, one dozen per bag, and freeze them. When we get an order for wings, we grab a bag out of the freezer and fry them about two to three minutes, then serve. For hot wings, you can either mix some ground hot peppers in with your rub or after the wings have fried, put them in a container with a lid, pour a couple of ounces of your favorite hot sauce into the container, shake the wings up, then serve.
MAKES 24 WINGS
12 chicken wings, tips removed, split at the joints
About ¼ cup All-Purpose BBQ Rub (recipe follows), or your favorite rub
Vegetable oil, for deep-frying
1. Sprinkle just enough rub on the wings so you can still see the skin. You don’t want the rub too thick. Then smoke the wings for approximately 2 hours at 250°F.
2. Serve the wings right out of the smoker, or cook them in a 350°F deep-fat fryer for approximately 1 minute to crisp up the skin. If the wings have cooled down, let them fry until they are warm throughout.
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[GUY ASIDE]
I liked this place the minute I walked in. I mean, Rick had a signed Don Knotts photo on the wall—and I was a big fan of Barney Fife. It was a small little kitchen, but busier than all get-out. He had a big smoker on wheels out in the back, a rolling smoke machine. So, I remember we were doing the whole hog back there, but the chicken wire that we had to contain the pig wasn’t long enough. I took a look around and said, get me some wire snips and a pair of gloves. After snipping some more wire off a nearby fence, I grafted the chicken-wire blanket to wrap around the pig to put on the smoker. Everyone was going, “Where did you learn to do that?” It’s one of the things my dad taught me. (When I was a kid he’d make me straighten out the nail if I bent one instead of getting new one.) I asked Rick what he did when I wasn’t around, and he said he has a lot
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All-Purpose BBQ Rub
ADAPTED FROM A RECIPE COURTESY OF RICK SCHOENBERGER OF BBQ SHACK
MAKES JUST OVER 4 CUPS
1½ cups kosher salt (can be celery salt, garlic salt, seasoned salt, onion salt, or a combination)
1 cup sugar
¾ cup Spanish paprika
Scant ½ cup chili powder
Scant ½ cup finely ground black pepper
3 more spices of your choice, to taste
Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and you’re good to go!
MY FAVORITE GAME, “WHERE’S GUIDO?” (CAN YA FIND ME?)
Jalapeño Poppers
ADAPTED FROM A RECIPE COURTESY OF RICK SCHOENBERGER OF BBQ SHACK
Most barbecue/fireplace stores sell chile-twisters for coring the jalapeños and racks that will hold one, two, or three dozen poppers upright on the grill. Start this recipe a day ahead because the water chestnuts need to marinate.
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
1 (8-ounce) can whole water chestnuts
1 cup soy sauce
½ to 1 pound light brown sugar
12 jalapeño chiles, the larger the better
8 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
6 slices thin-sliced bacon, halved crosswise
All-Purpose BBQ Rub (see All-Purpose BBQ Rub)
Special equipment: jalapeño grilling rack
1. Put the water chestnuts and soy sauce in a nonreactive bowl. Add enough brown sugar to cover the chestnuts completely. It will dissolve as you put it in, so it may take a fair amount of brown sugar. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
2. In the morning, stir the mixture up. Slice the stem ends off the jalapeños and core them. Put the cream cheese into a quart freezer bag. (At the restaurant they put the cream cheese into the bag and warm it in a pan of water that is on their steam table.) Cut a little bit of the corner off the bag and use it as a pastry bag. Pipe some of the cream cheese into the tip of the pepper. Now stuff one or two chestnuts in. (You may need to cut the chestnuts in half.) Leave a little space at the top of the pepper. Wrap each pepper with a half slice of bacon and use toothpicks to keep the bacon in place. Repeat with the remaining chiles. Stand the chiles in the rack. Sprinkle a little bit of the BBQ rub over the tops for some color.
3. Heat a grill to medium-high heat. Grill the poppers with the lid closed until the bacon is done, about 15 to 20 minutes. Watch them closely; if bacon grease pools, it will catch fire. An offset fire (indirect heat) works best.
MIDWEST
BOBO DRIVE-IN
EST. 1953 STRAIGHT FROM THE FIFTIES AND STRAIGHT TO YOUR CAR
One of the things I love about Triple D is finding the kind of places that belong to the whole town. The kind of joints that feel like they’ve been there forever. In Topeka, that means Bobo Drive-In.
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TRACK IT DOWN
2300 S.W. 10th Avenue
Topeka, Kansas 66604
785-234-4511
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From double cheeseburgers to Coney dogs to fresh-cut onion rings made every day, they’re keeping with tradition here. They’ve got the sweet stuff, too, like chocolate malts and their famous hot apple pie with ice cream, which Bob Bobo started serving back in 1953. It was Bob’s aunt’s and mom’s original recipe, and it’s the same today.
Richard Marsh and his wife, Tricia, bought the place a couple years ago—despite a total lack of experience in the restaurant business—after a friend in real estate called and said he’d found the perfect thing for them. It was a dream come true. They’ve got the original Bobo’s recipes and the staff that’s been the heart of this place for years. Betty Ramsey, for one, who moved here from England, has been making these all-American burgers since 1975. She presses down on the meat with equal pressure so it goes down flat, nice and thin. A little salt and pepper, cheese in the middle, and it’s got a great crust on it. And they do seventy-five pounds of onions a day for the rings. They sift them in flour, shake off the excess, then dip them in the pool of milk and into cracker meal. Then dust them with salt when they come out of the fryer.
The chili comes from the original owner’s recipe, and so does the Spanish sauce on the Spanish burger. It starts with ketchup, minced onion, sugar, paprika, cayenne, some more secret seasonings, and a scoop of lard, then cloves and star anise go into a spice ball and it all cooks together for forty-five minutes. Reminded me of a sloppy Joe that hasn’t been ground up: good eats.
Then there’s that apple pie. It’s just not something you see much of at drive-ins, and nobody’s making it like Jo Mendoza. They have an apple peeler that looks like Johnny Appleseed could’ve used it, and she makes fifty pies a day—been doing it for more than fifteen years. That’s over 195,000 pies! Tricia took on a pie-eating contest against customer Lisa Bassett, no hands allowed. Lisa was laughing, but Tricia was all business and won. It was vicious. But everybody’s a winner at Bobo’s.
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[GUY ASIDE]
Everybody loves Bobo Drive-In—a great little place. They make the apple pies down in the basement, and the coring machine is crazy—I was afraid I’d get my shirt caught or get lobotomized, one of the two. Then upstairs you get the nostalgia of a genuine drive-in—they either have it or they don’t, and the ones that have it are the ones that survive.
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THAT DUDE IN DA CORNER PASSED OUT FROM TOO MANY BURGERS.
Apple Pie
ADAPTED FROM A RECIPE COURTESY OF TRICIA AND RICHARD MARSH OF BOBO DRIVE-IN
Bake up a few and have your own Bobo pie-eating contest, no hands allowed.
MAKES 1 (9-INCH) PIE
Dough
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon fine salt
1 cup solid vegetable shortening
6 tablespoons cold water
Filling
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
¾ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
6 apples, peeled, cored, and sliced about ¼ inch thick (a mix of different types all year round; we use what’s available)
1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2. FOR THE DOUGH: Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl. Using a pastry blender or two table knives, cut the shortening into the flour to make a coarse meal. Sprinkle the cold water over and toss with a fork until it comes together. Divide the dough in half and roll out two 10-inch crust rounds on a lightly floured board.
3. FOR THE FILLING: Combine the sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Line a 9-inch pie pan with one crust. Mound the apples on the crust. Sprinkle the sugar mixture over the apples. Place the second crust on top and press the edges with a fork all around to seal. Bake until the crust is golden brown, about 50 to 60 minutes.
MIDWEST
CAFE ON THE ROUTE
EST. 1998 A SMALL TOWN WITH BIG FOOD ON ROUTE 66