If you've visited Reading Terminal Market in the last few months, you surely know of all the construction that's been going on. One of the bigger projects in the Center Court area has been the move of DiNic's (which I truly believe makes the best sandwich in the city). The photo above was taken at close of market yesterday. By the time you read this today, it'll be open for business with approximately twice the capacity as the old space.
Robert has some cool info on the signage above the stall in this post.
DiNic's
Reading Terminal Market
12/Arch
Su & M: 8am – 4pm
Tu – Sa: 8am – 6pm
(215) 923.6175
We joined Nick and Theo, partners in crime behind The Food Experiments, at Local 44 last night for some awesome Brooklyn Brewery brews. We really enjoyed the newly released Main Engine Start, a 6% ABV Belgian singel which feels like a nice session brew. They are traveling around the country pitting some of the most inventive amateur chefs against each other in battles of tacos, pork, booze and—in Philly—cheese. Sunday's Philadelphia Cheese Experiment at World Cafe Live will be a four hour long cheese-based feastival [tickets $10].
We met them earlier today on their Philadelphia Sandwich Crawl: 12 sandwiches in six hours. First stop: Picky's favorite sandwich in Philly: DiNic's. 10.15a we met them. Oh yes, you gotta start early if you want to eat all this food. We had to wait until 11a to get the famed pulled pork so we started with a rare roast beef with horseradish, sharp provolone and broccoli rabe. Here's Theo getting nostril deep into the juicy sandwich.
When the clock struck 11a, Theo rushed to the line. We got the first pulled pork of the day. Here's Theo and Nick with Theo's longtime friend Alain (sp?) and the Italian pulled pork with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe.
Here's Theo with a wet juicy bite of the sandwich.
Here's Nick about to take a ginormous bite out of the king of sandwiches (in Picky's humble opinion).
We parted ways and bid them well on their journey across Philly. Hopefully they will not have exploded by Sunday.
We were lucky enough to be invited on a preview for the new Philly HomegrownCity Food Tour done in conjunction with GPTMC's Philly Homegrown initiative. City Food Tours owners Eric Matzke & Robert Weinberg led 15 of us around Reading Terminal Market and down towards our own neighborhood, the Gayborhood (we still don't know anyone who calls it "Midtown Village") with several stops along the way to stuff us full of local goodies.
The first stop was at Fair Food Farmstand, Picky's day job. Fair Food's new General Manager, Kristin Mulvenna (left), took the group through a quick history of Fair Food (it started off as a single folding table in the back of Reading Terminal about eight years ago) and the plates of goodies she had in front of her. We had sliced super crispy heirloom York apples from Beechwood Orchards with some spring wildflower honey from Two Gander Farms, Sylvia's granola topped with Pequea Valley maple yogurt and a hunk of challah from Four Worlds Bakery out in West Philly.
Here's a look at the year-old newish space for Fair Food which is about 3x the size of the old space in the back of the Terminal. Lots of seasonal everything available 7 days a week as long as the Terminal is open. If you're looking to buy a great, locally and naturally-raised bird for Thanksgiving, Fair Food is your spot and you can order one here. If you want one of the prized heritage red bourbon turkeys, Monday the 15th [today!] is your last day to reserve one.
Here's Eric talking in front of Salumeria, one of two dedicated cheese shops in the terminal. Salumeria prepared a selection of local cheeses for us to enjoy.
We had (clockwise from the left): a very peppery Peppercorn Jack and sharply salty Misty Lovely (a ricotta salata), two goat cheeses from Misty Creek Dairy in Leola, PA. They gave us a feel of the range of goat cheese available in the area. Cherry Grove Farm's cousin-to-cheddar Herdsman was up next to cool off our palates. (Picky is a huge fan of Herdsman cheddar — see this post from earlier this year.) To finish, we had hunks of God's Country Creamery's Country Blue, a mild-mannered blue.
Our little heard of local munchers filing into Tweed.
Chef David Cunningham came out from behind the kitchen doors to walk us through the tasting plate and give us a little history on Tweed. Chef Cunningham regularly visits farms in the area — he's stood by the rivers where his trout comes from and seen his hogs up close and personal. As he told us, for him, "local food is not a fad." It's a way of life. Above, Chef Cunnignham takes a glance at the plate in front of Art from Foobooz.
Up front is the pork tenderloin with sauteed onion and apple. To the right, trout served atop a delectable sauce of brown butter, honey, capers and chopped walnuts. To the left, a beet salad with frisee, walnuts, French breakfast radishes and a hunk of chèvre.
The final stop on our journey was Capogiro on 13th Street for a blind taste test of six offerings.
Here's a closeup of each flavor. Given the time of year, you can probably guess the first flavor by sight alone, but the rest were tougher. At least one person from our group guessed correctly on each flavor. (Sadly, Messy guessed wrong pretty much every time.) Since Capigiro's offerings change daily, we're not too concerned with giving away what we had, but we'll leave it up to you to find out. Select the redacted text to see the answers. From the top: pumpkin, sesame (Picky's favorite), fig, pineapple mint, pear, apple. These treats were a great way to polish off the afternoon!
A City Food Tour is a terrific way to get a nice feel of the different food options available in town, interact with local foodies, and learn a little history. Their five permanent tours are available year round. Reservations are required, but you can call as late as one hour before tour time to reserve a spot. Tours are limited to 15 each, but you can book a private tour of up to 150. This Philly Homegrown Tour will be offered on 3 Saturdays between now and Christmas, so place your reservations before they're all sold out.
We haven't written about it much here, but a few months ago, Messy was diagnosed with a plethora of food allergies — and it's made eating out (and eating in general) more difficult. The City Food Tours folks were so incredibly accommodating, making sure that Messy never accidentally ingested any potential allergens. In fact, they were so on the ball, they actually had to remind Messy of her allergy when she forgot and tried to indulge in one delicious-looking treat that happened to contain egg. So, if you have food allergies or other dietary restrictions, don't let it stop you from going on a City Food Tour. They are more than happy to take care of you without making it a big deal.
Here's a video from Philly Homegrown about the local food scene
Strong blue cheeses are not for the weak. They're not for every cheese lover even. This blue cheese won't knock you down as hard as some other cheeses, but it most definitely packs a punch and will turn some away. Common Folks brings their Incanestro to the table and dares you to take a big bite. Common Folks makes their cheese (this one's certified organic too) out in Leola, PA, a bit east of Lancaster and as far as I know, it's only available at Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market.
In case you've never seen a cheese like this, with it's gorgeously deep grooves on all sides of this magnificent, medium sized wheel, it's an Italian basket molded cheese. I found this page from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company's website explaining a bit about the style. Canestri is Italian for wicker basket. The cheese curds (once separated from the whey) is pressed directly into the baskets where they sit and develop those gorgeous grooves in the thicker than usual rind.
The cheese is inoculated with mold spores (it's aliiiiiive!) and poked with metal rods allowing the mold to travel through the cheese and form those characteristic veins you've seen in blue cheeses. Riiiight, but how does it taste?
My co-worker, and in house cheesemonger, Paul Lawler, writes the blurbs for our cheeses and I'll quote from his tag:
A bold and meaty — even porky blue!
I gotta agree, it's meaty, bordering on porky. It's immensely salty. It's a heavy cheese on the palate. The only saltier cheese available at the Farmstand is a cow's milk feta from Keswick Creamery which we sell in little tubs resting in brine. Eating a piece of this cheese, the rush of flavor is bigger than you'd expect from taking a whiff of it beforehand; it's not an immensely stinky cheese. It's creamy and a little bit crumbly. It's a sticky wheel to cut and it'll stay all over your fingers if you try to crumble it over a salad by hand (that salad better not have any bacon in it or it'll be overload!). I know that Mme. Fromage [who we dined with last night!] is most definitely a fan as she tweeted:
My local cheese of the moment: Incanestro, a porky blue. Salty, creamy, meat-tastic.
I'll close this post with a shot of the rind of the cheese. Wedges of this decadent Italian style blue cheese to for $18/lbs so a nice 1/3lbs hunk will run you $6. It won't break the bank, but it's a little something different from the more standard cheddars Americans love to love. Ask for a taste, but remember that the taste will be fullest after letting the cheese come to temperature.
Doesn't that look absolutely delicious? It's an open face egg sandwich. Fried for a few minutes on each side so the yolk isn't entirely set, still a little oozy, but not fully drippingly so. A slice of Metropolitan Bakery's French table bread (my favorite base bread). A dab of El Yucateco habanero sauce for a little burn. Now what if I told you that was a goose egg?! Yep, that's a tiny sliver, the last 2 bites, of a gigantic goose egg from Pecan Meadows Farm out in Newburg, PA.
I picked up two of these beauties at Fair Food in RTM last week. We got them in on Thursday and they're $3 a pop. The eggs are 4.5" from end to end (3" tall) and 7.5" around the waist. I don't have a scale handy, but it's roughly 0.5lbs or so, maybe a little more 0.40lbs. It's a little heavier than 3 chicken eggs in my unscientific kitchen test. The color of the eggs range from stark white to a scratchy light brown like in the photo above. I don't know exactly what kind of goose the eggs are from, but I'll find out and update the post.
Here's a chicken egg (from Natural Meadows Farm as previously posted about) in front of the goose egg.
After cracking a chicken egg and a goose egg, I compared the shells. The goose egg shell on the left is the bottom piece so the top piece is the narrower, longer part. Without a micrometer handy, I'd say the goose egg was fully twice as thick as the chicken egg and that chicken egg is pretty thick. When I hit the egg on the side of the bowl for the first time, it basically laughed at me. And this is coming from a guy who's now very very used to cracking an egg pretty hard from these much thicker shelled farm fresh eggs. A couple more clangs and I had it.
So here they are side by side. Yes, I know, they're not perfect comparison vessels, but I think many people are familiar with those small, glass prep bowls (4" wide) and your basic cereal bowl (6" wide). The goose egg's yolk is about the size of the whole chicken egg. The albumen of the goose egg was so remarkably clear. After seeing how cloudy an emu egg was [see here], I expected this egg to be closer to that. But it was just as clear, if not clearer, than a chicken egg. Based on how it tasted and the texture, I'd say it had more water content in the albumen, but didn't taste watered down.
I broke the yolk and flipped it. The yolk bled out a little bit and took up even more of the remaining 20% of the pan.
Here's your basic egg sandwich I made for Messy. A fried egg with some cheddar and Oldwick Shepherd (mold ripened sheep's milk, cave-aged 3-4 months from Valley Shepherd Creamery). Note, her sandwich is on Metropolitan's multi-grain loaf which is a tad bigger than the French table bread, but basically the same size.
Here's the fried egg on your average plate (not a full sized dinner plate), with 2 smallish slices of bread. This sucker was huge. But how did it taste? It wasn't different from a chicken egg to me. If anything, it wasn't quite as tasty as the Natural Meadows eggs. I'm just spoiled by them really. I'm told that goose eggs are richer than your average egg, more sulfury, but the Natural Meadows eggs are just unreal. But that's not to say that the goose egg wasn't tasty – it was delicious. The albumen turned a very white white and fluffed up nicely. I have one more goose egg to try out (Messy vehemently refused to eat a goose egg) so I'll be scrambling one up soon. I hit this fried egg with a sprinkle of sea salt and fresh cracked pepper to bring out the flavors. Then I dabbed a couple drops of El Yucateco for a little tingle on the lips which is how I love my eggs.
We got a bunch in on Thursday, but I have no idea how many are left for the next week. Call the farmstand to see if there are any for you: 215.627.2029.
With Easter approaching, here's a shot of some colorful eggs that aren't dyed. Above is a rainbow dozen from Mark Skinner's Natural Meadows Farm hens. Mark raises 16 kinds of heritage breed chickens on his farm out north of Harrisburg. He makes the trek into Philly several times a week going to various farmers markets to sell direct and some other spots around town where he wholesales.
The eggs come in the coolest colors from your plain white and light/medium/dark brown to cream, maroon, brown speckled, blue-green and what one person exclaimed to me at the Farmstand: "like Mississippi mud". A few months ago, I got Mark to sit tight after dropping off an order of eggs at RTM to scribble down all the varietals of hens he keeps: Light brown eggs: Speckled Sussex, Russian Orloff, Turken / Naked Neck. Brown eggs: Wyandotte, Buckeye, Delaware. Dark brown eggs: Marans, RI Red. Speckled brown: Welsummer. White eggs: Hamburg, Ancona, Blue Andalusian, Leghorn, Black Rosecomb (more of show bird), Old English Redcap. Green-blue eggs: Ameraucana.
If you'd like to grab a dozen or few of these eggs, you can catch Mark at The Piazza Farmers Market on Saturday 10a – 2p or at Weaver's Way Co-op up in Mt. Airy or at Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market.
And one final tip: if you're looking to hard boil eggs, use older eggs. The egg shell will separate from the egg easier with older eggs.
Cherry Grove Farm makes some amazing cheese. Their raw milk cheeses are all aged at least 60 days (US regulation, so even their brie isn't a true brie) in their "cave." They make a decent variety of it too as you can see on their site here. Their cheeses also look nice too which doesn't hurt. Above is their Maidenhead cheese:
Semi soft cheese washed with local beer from Flying Fish Brewery in Cherry Hill, NJ. Super flavor and creamy texture are but a few of Maidenheads' attributes!
To me, it's like a harder, stinky brie. I'm no super cheesehead, but I like me a good cheese so forgive my lack of a proper cheese lexicon. It's definitely a creamy cheese, like Cherry Grove describes it as being, not dry and brittle and not buttery like a brie. Cutting into the wheel, the aromas are released and all that are within a few feet of it will smell it. It's not one of those take a step back because the nose hits you so hard cheeses, more of a pleasing stink to it.
Next up is their Herdsman which, I believe, they just started distributing last year. From the site:
Most often compared to cheddar, this creamy raw milk cheese is our best melting cheese for anything from an omelet to fondue. Unlike cheddar, Herdsman does not separate when melted.
I couldn't tell you about the Cherry Grove recommendation to use it as a melting cheese in omelets since it's so delicious on its own. I don't recall the flavor being as complex as it is this year. Last year, it was more of a fluke cheese from what I recall. They didn't intend to make it, it just happened. Perhaps one of those happy accidents in the cheesery.
And here's how we cut wheels of cheese at the farmstand. For perspective, that's your typical 8" – 9" chefs knife. This wheel of Cherry Grove's Toma Primavera is about 17" in diameter.
This washed rind recipe comes from the Piedmont Section of the Italian Alps. Toma has a deep, creamy flavor and can be best be described as "tangy." It melts beautifully and releases a stronger aroma and flavor when melted.
The Toma is my favorite of the Cherry Grove line. It's got a delicious, old, aged flavor, but without the crumbliness. It's got a richer color to it than the Herdsman (which I didn't take the time to distinguish enough while taking and editing the photos, d'oh) making that much more pleasing to the eye. I'm told that DiBruno Bros. further ages and washes the Cherry Grove Toma to a more brilliant red (bacteria) colored exterior. Very cool. This will lead to a distinctive taste different from what you'll find when purchasing Cherry Grove Toma elsewhere (like at Fair Food).
Cherry Grove has a really cool operation just north of Princeton, NJ. I really want to take a field trip up there to see everything. Reading the description of their farm lifts my spirits. Pasture raised cows producing luscious milk which makes delicious cheese. The whey from the cheese making process going to the pigs which live in a forest in the middle of the property. 1,000 pasture raised chickens roaming free. Even the wood they use for heat and hot water is from a great and sustainable source: tree surgeons drop off piles off wood on their property. This saves the surgeons money from dumping fees at landfills and this gives Cherry Grove free fuel! Awesome.
All of Cherry Grove's cheeses are available at Fair Food from (I think) $14.99 – $21.99 /lbs. We also have the Shippetaukin Blue, but I didn't cut any of it the other day, so no photos. It's an incredibly salty blue. Also on the crumbly side. I prefer my blues much creamier. A co-worker of mine couldn't finish the little chunk I cut for her as it was too salty. I'm pretty sure Whole Foods carries Cherry Grove cheeses and DiBruno Bros definitely does. I'm no good at pairing foods together, so you'll have to go somewhere else for that. I like cheese with just about everything. Happy munching!
