Pigs in Blankets in the Times

Thank god Florence Fabricant wrote about pigs in a blanket in today's New York Times food section. Otherwise, how would we know they are cool again?

Well, to me they were always cool. Mmm. Yes, some crescent roll dough, a package of Li'l Smokies (or maybe Li'l Smokies with Cheese), a quick assembly line, a cookie sheet, twenty minutes in the oven, some Jufran and a bottle of yellow mustard...that's all that it takes.

And yet the Times supplies us with a list of the best pigs in blankets purveyors in the city. Well, I suppose some people can't be bothered to make their own retro-trashy food. I say if you are ordering take-out apps, order something that your seven-year-old can't make on their own. The palpable bile in my tone aside, I'm happy to see mini sausages in the news.

How Food Can Become Contaminated

I promise this will be the last post about food handling regulations. After today, it'll be nothing but sausage, sausage, sausage all of the time.

Today was hopefully my last visit to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene at 42 Broadway. I was there on Friday with what I understood to be the paperwork required to get my license, but they gave me the runaround—my Social Security card didn’t use my maiden name as my middle name, my tax ID was under an LLC, not my individual name, blah blah. I lost my patience and left. Today it got all squared away because I returned to 42 Broadway with reinforcements—my sausage cart supervisor. She explained to the cantankerous lady behind the glass that my paperwork was indeed correct. The folks working at these NYC government offices are taught to accept only scenario A; in case of scenario B, don’t ask for help or examine any guidelines—just say no. The lady behind the job was following this approach with impressive conviction. I’m surprised anyone can manage to sell food anywhere in this city.

Another (and kinder) lady behind the glass took a photo for my I.D. badge, which should arrive in the mail in a matter of weeks. Six to eight, in fact. That’s how long Sprint told me it would take to process my rebate. Let’s see who’s faster, Sprint or the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Your guess is a good as mine.

In the meantime, I’ve been casting a critical eye on mobile food vending carts. It’s like I’m an unofficial health inspector. The violations are just racking up. The dueling street meat carts of Steinway Street in Astoria, for instance, both have coolers sitting on the sidewalk next to their carts. All components of your operation must be in, on, or under the cart—not on the sidewalk. Carts in Manhattan, at least the busy pedestrian parts, couldn’t get away with that crap.

Then today on the way home from C-Town (a crappy New York grocery store chain) I passed another popular Astoria street meat cart. It always smells so inviting, the sizzling meat gurgling in the bright yellow-orange sauce. Yet I still have to take the plunge of actually stepping up to the cart and getting food—I go to that area to visit C-Town and buy groceries for dinner, not to eat a rice plate while sitting on the curb of C-Town’s parking lot.

Usually while walking past the C-Town street meat cart I focus on the delectable smell, but today I zoned in on the prep areas of their cart. They had sauces stored in the sink, which means a) the sauces were almost definitely in the danger zone between 41 and 140 degrees F, and b) they don’t wash their hands very often, because the sauces would get in the way. Heaped up about six inches high to the side of the flattop was a huge pile of cooked meat, ready to be served, threatening to spill off the flattop and onto the sidewalk. On the opposite side of the cart a compact fry-o-lator churned with hot oil, a few falafels bobbing up and down. Every inch of flat space was taken up with squeeze bottles, Styrofoam containers, steaming cooked food, steaming raw food…

I’ve worked in tight kitchens before. You have to get creative if you want to make tasty food with efficiency. Sometimes you can dream up things to make life easier, clever storage solutions or systems with better flow so you don’t crowd other people’s prep stations. Sometimes, in the process of doing that, you break a sanitary guideline. Sometimes guidelines are dumb, but usually they exist for a pretty good reason. That street meat cart by C-Town was crawling with time-saving health code violations, and I decided it was best to leave them a mystery, so I walked past the cart and into C-Town, where the surly clerks would soon be stuffing my romaine lettuce and red bell peppers into white plastic bags.

How to Wash Your Hands, Part 2

After the first day of our Mobile Food Vendor License class at the Health Academy up in Harlem, we all went back to our respective homes and…well, maybe some of us studied for the exam the next day. I did, actually; the class workbook came with about a dozen insanely easy fill-in-the-blank review worksheets, and I filled them out while waiting for MySpace pages to come up.

Some of my fellow pupils may have needed to study because of language hurdles; the class is taught in English, but the workbooks came in about a dozen languages—so half of the lesson could have been gibberish to them. And maybe some students didn’t have a language barrier, but they did have a stupid barrier. So perhaps good but dim little students went home to practice hand-washing all night long, even though there was no practical segment of our exam.

Class on exam day commenced late. I forgot my #2 pencil, but the kind fellow next to me lent me one. It would have been great if we were to take the test right off the bat, but we wound up having a review session for about an hour. Then we had a very practical Q. & A. session with our sprightly instructor, Akin, about health code violations. For instance, if you are working at someone else’s cart and an inspector comes and writes up a ticket, who pays—you or your employer? (Your employer.) I wanted to ask if it was a violation to wear jewelry. Would hoop earrings be a violation? How about a simple ring that’s not a wedding ring? But I didn’t ask, because I wanted to take the test, not sidetrack Akin and open up what might perhaps grow into a heated debate.

Akin announced a 20-minute break before the test. I’d not brought any snacks, as I had the day before, and I was starving. So I ran down the street to the roach coach I’d passed the day before to order some cheap, dirty food. It was a fairly big roach coach/street meat hybrid, selling hot dogs, gyros, hamburgers, knishes, shish kebab, and probably bagels and ice cream, too. The cart was positioned right in front of a hospital entrance, and I saw a man in scrubs with an plastic I.D. badge around his neck run out and order a chicken gyro plate. See, even health professionals patronize roach coaches.

A wizened neighborhood lady got in front of me and ordered a hamburger. The man taking the money shouted the order to the man working the grill, even though there was no need to shout since they were in close quarters. The grill man slapped together a hamburger, the cash handler stuffed it in a small brown paper bag and handed it to the wizened lady, and the lady pulled the foil-wrapped burger out of the bag. She peeled back the foil and the top of the bun flopped off, reveling anemic patty under a pile of tired, shredded iceberg lettuce. “It fell apart!” she cried. “I didn’t do nothing to this hamburger and it fell apart!”

The roach coach cash handler shrugged. “I don’t want this no more,” she said. “I want my money back.” She seemed a little nuts, the kind of person it’s wisest to give into. Better to lose $3 than make a big scene in front of gyro-plate-buying doctors in scrubs. He gave her the $3 back, and she limped off, hopefully in search of a more nourishing lunch. What can you expect from a $3 roach coach burger, though?

It was my turn to order. I got two hot dogs, which turned out to be those “dirty water hot dogs” that they boil instead of grilling or griddling. The dogs were a buck each, and the grill man wadded them up in regular grocery store aluminum foil, which the cash handler then bagged and gave to me. Two dirty water hot dogs with yellow mustard and ketchup. The buns were gummy, the franks lukewarm and mealy. This roach coach didn’t sell no Sabrett dogs—their franks were without a pedigree. They were USDA Grade Barely Acceptable, like school cafeteria hot dogs. Well, for two bucks, I got what I paid for.

I had five minutes to be back in my seat, taking my test. I gobbled those cocks down in about 30 seconds and rushed back to the Health Academy.

Back in the classroom, my fellow pupils had reassembled. Akin asked us for a show of hands to tell him who would be needing tests in what languages. I kept track of this: we had people taking the test in Farsi, Spanish, Greek, Russian, English, Chinese, Arabic, and Bengali. Had the two native Vietnamese speakers in the class chose to take the test in English, we’d have at least one booklet of each language in the class.

This really ticked me. Here we were, people from all over the world, and the thing that brought us together was the desire to sell food from pushcarts. We all wanted to take the test and hit the streets to seek our fortune. I felt a wonderful solidarity with all of them.

Except these two Latina ladies, who I think were fixing to cheat. Akin zeroed right in on them before the test was to begin, and he put them at opposite ends of different rows. I wonder of they passed.

I did. I completed my test in about two minutes (we had thirty), and I reviewed my answers to the 15 questions before handing in my answer sheet, just to be sure I didn’t make a stupid mistake and fill in the wrong bubble. Then I settled down with my book, The Age of Innocence (mention of sausages so far: zero) and read until Akin softly called out my name to inform me that I’d passed, and that I’d earned a perfect score, and that I was free to go.

I gathered my things and left. As I went up the staircase, the Greek woman (or the Russian lady, I’m not sure) asked me if I’d passed. “Yes,” I said.

“Good luck!” she said. I wished her luck as well. I didn’t have to ask her if she’d passed, because she was smiling (besides, a monkey could pass that test). We walked out into the Harlem sunlight, past the roach coach/street meat cart, and in our idealism we dreamed of how much better our pushcarts would be.

How to Wash Your Hands, Pt. 1

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Health Academy has granted me a Mobile Food Vendor License. In short, I passed my 15-question test with flying colors. So, probably, did every other person in the room with a pulse. A cheat sheet for the test would read: Hot food hot, cold food cold, wash hands after poop, danger zone bad.

Anyone working at a mobile food vending unit in New York City needs this license, and the only way to get it is by taking a two-day food-handling class up in Harlem. Those wishing to work in a restaurant here in New York need to take a five-day class, which I did as part of my curriculum at the Culinary Institute of America in 1997. But that class (even if it is three days longer) will not do for a Mobile Food Vendor License—nope, you have to learn information specific to serving food from a pushcart.

It costs $56 to enroll in the class, which culminates in a pass/fail test. I made sure to bring a good book and a new issue of The New Yorker to my first day of class, because I assumed I’d be bored witless.

It wasn’t so bad—with the exception of the first hour. We started at 12:30, not noon, which we had been told was the starting time. Perhaps this was a trick, because the classroom’s fifty-odd desks were not filled until 12:29. I’d read an article about surfboard blanks and started one about the reconstruction effort in New Orleans by the time our instructor showed up. He was a small man with very dark skin, and I’m not sure where he was from originally, but he had an intriguing accent.

The first half-hour of class consisted of roll call. Akin, the instructor, called out our names, and one by one we walked up to his desk to show him a photo I.D. He then issued us workbooks in the appropriate language. I considered opting for a Spanish workbook just for a challenge, but I stuck with English.

Men and women of all ages and races were there with me. Everyone seemed surprisingly attentive and earnest, not cynical at all. The classroom, which smelled like cleanser, resembled the classrooms I’d sat in during high school, except this classroom had a full-blown mobile food vending cart pushed up against the left wall. It was a shiny new model, quite similar to the cart I’d be using, but instead of a grill it had a flattop.

After the endless role call, Akin the instructor told us a bit about himself. He’d been a health inspector for 7 years, and a supervisor for 6. I’m not sure how long he’d been teaching this class, but he had a good method based on repetition and reinforcement. He’d tell us a few key points, ask us questions about them, and then we’d repeat them back at the end of the section. The biggest key points were about washing hands (you need to do it with soap and warm water, rubbing the hands together vigorously for at least 20 seconds) and keeping food out of the danger zone (germs thrive between 41 and 140 degrees F, and will double in half an hour when stored between these two temperatures).

Akin had an amusing way of talking about the symptoms of food-born illness. He clutched his stomach and then bent over a bit and went “brtt, brtt, brtt”…the sound of puke or diarrhea hitting the bowl of a commode. I’ve had food poisoning before (who hasn’t?), and it makes me think that even very clean establishments can slip up. The world is so full of germs—germs on food, germs on poop, germs on hands, germs on doorknobs, germs on hair—that it’s amazing we’re all not dead. Personally, I think some of these people who are so concerned about germs and have antibacterial soap and spray and hand gel probably slip up themselves. Have you ever counted to 20 when washing your hands? It’s a long time, man. No one washes their hands for a full 20 seconds unless they are a surgeon. For all you folks who visit the sausage cart, though, I’ll try.

Who Has Good Personal Hygiene?

This is from my Mobile Food Vendor Food Protection Course workbook. After lots of learning and lessons, I had gained enough knowledge to choose the correct answer, B. However, B is not a hygiene ideal; her fingernails, for instance, are far too long. And she appears to be wearing jewelry, which is not appropriate--maybe one of her earrings could fall into a hotel pan full of sauerkraut.

Cream Cheese + Hot Dog = Seattle

This just in: Folks in Seattle eat their hot dogs with cream cheese. Well, some of them do. It says so here and here.

Harlem Halal

Here's an illustration of a hybrid Street Meat-Roach Coach, parked about a block away from the Harlem Health Academy where I took my Mobile Food Vendor class. I didn't get any closer to take the photo because I was trying to be sneaky. Anyhow, there on the side of the cart you can see photos of hamburgers and gyro plates. The green signs list the Halal plates available. This is a pretty big cart; there were two guys inside, plus one on the sidewalk hanging out and talking to the customers as they waited.

Street Meat and Beyond

New York offers way more street food than just hot dogs. In fairness to non-sausage pushcarts, here’s a rundown of what I’ve seen around.

First off, there are two main types of carts: processing and non-processing. Processing carts perform some kind of preparatory function with the food: it is mixed, cooked, cut, heated, fried, melted, sliced, etc. A non-processing cart serves food as is. You can scoop ice cream on a non-processing cart, but once you pour chocolate syrup over the ice cream, you’re processing. Most carts are processing.

-Street Meat. These processing carts serve Halal meat, typically chicken, in a variety of forms: on a stick, over rice in a yogurt curry sauce, in a pita like a gyro. My lovely husband Joe coined the term “street meat”; these carts may have another nickname, but I don’t know it yet.
-Nuts 4 Nuts. These are processing carts that roast and lightly candy nuts like peanuts, cashews, and almonds; the nuts are served warm, and the smells rising from these carts are very enticing. I luh Nuts 4 Nuts. If you are concerned about sanitation and contamination, Nuts 4 Nuts carts are relatively safe.
-Mr. Softee. Okay, these are soft-serve ice cream trucks, not carts. In the summer they can be found every few blocks all over the city. They serve Good Humor ice cream novelties, as well as overpriced but pretty decent soft-serve.
-Roach Coaches. These carts tend to be boxier, with the cart operator inside the cart, not standing next to it. Roach coaches are especially popular in the morning, when they offer bagels, donuts, muffins, and coffee. Some roach coaches are processing, some are not. They might have a real name, but it’s not Roach Coach. Some Roach Coaches sell what are known as dirty water hot dogs—boiled franks served lazily on squishy buns. This is no way to treat a hot dog.
-“Park Carts”…I’m not sure how to describe these carts, other than to say that they always appear on the perimeters of big parks, like Prospect Park and Central Park. They sell Good Humor ice cream novelties, gross stale big-ass pretzels, hot dogs (grilled or dirty water), and knishes. Avoid these carts unless you are having a hunger emergency; their overpriced wares are of inferior quality.
-Produce carts. Usually these non-processing carts sell mostly fruit. The guys at these carts always lick their fingers before tearing open the plastic bags they bag your fruit in—gross!
-Italian ice carts. These carts are usually small, selling flavorful and refreshing Italian ice for pretty decent prices.

The Healthy Bums of Bleeker Street

On that first day of sausage cart work, the day of the informal tasting, I had an amusing exchange with a few bums there. Bleeker Playground is a park with a playground, yes…but there’s also a mess of benches off to the side, outside of the playground’s wrought-iron fence. Lots of benches mean lots of bums, but they seem pretty docile. You never can tell with bums, but as long as you approach them with caution, they can be pretty cool. Depends on the bum, I guess. They may look, smell, and act inhuman at times, but bums are people too, and their lives are often mired in stories much more interesting than the average person who has a home.

To prep for the tasting, we cut some tasty baguettes in half crosswise—you get two sausage rolls from one baguette. But the baguettes are a few inches too long for the sausages (you want a little sausage poking out—it’s what folks pay for, the sausage, and it’s sort of phallic, too), and we needed to trim off and dispose of a two-inch segment of the baguette.

This left us with a bag full of perfectly wonderful baguette rounds. Normally I’m the kind of person who would bring them home and make bread pudding or croutons, but it was in the mid-90s that day—way too hot, for some reason, to haul a bag of bread bits around. So I took them over to the bum benches and offered them to a pair of bums.

“Would you guys like these?” I asked. “They’re from fresh baguettes.”

The bums smiled, cigarettes dangling from blistered, stained lips. “Thanks, sweetheart,” one bum said, “but white bread is the worst thing for you. That and white sugar.”

I smiled at them and returned to the cart, pitching the baguette bits in the trash can on the way. I love it when strangers call me sweetheart. Maybe someday I will buy them wheatgrass shots, and they can mix their vodka in them.

Coney Island Baby

This being the glorious tail end of summer—we have, what, at least four weeks left of lovely weather and a few weeks before school starts for those unlucky young’uns—it’s an ideal time to evoke images of Coney Island. I’ve only been there once, early this May, when it was still spring.

For those who have never been to Coney Island, the utterance of the name will still not fail to conjure up images of hot dogs…Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs. In fact, some sources go so far as to claim Coney Island/Nathan’s as the birthplace of the hot dog, but I heavily dispute this (the birthplace of the hot dog could be anywhere some hungry sod first slipped a sausage into a hunk of bread and called it a day). Even so, Coney Island’s role in American hot dog lore cannot be underestimated.

New Yorkers have been heading out to Coney Island for oceanside frolicking since the early 1830s, when a shell road led out to the place. It was a den of gambling, whoring, and full-body-coverage bathing suits. A friend told me that Coney Island was built as an attraction to get people to ride public transit to the end of the line, but this is not true; over the years, many forms or transit, such as boats, roads, street cars, and trains, have been employed to make it easier for folks to get to Coney Island. From what I’ve read, the subway extension to Coney Island was completed in the 1920s, allowing poor folks access for around a nickel.

Nowadays you go on the N trail to get to Coney. We took the N from its northern terminus in Queens and rode it all the way to Coney Island, the southern terminus. It takes over an hour. Bring a book or some friends and a Mad Libs tablet.

There were big Coney Island eateries prior to Nathan’s, but Nathan’s is the only old-schooler going strong today. Restaurateur Nathan Handwerker opened his place around 1916, but didn’t find success until the early 1920s. (Get the full scoop here.)

Nathan’s is now a national franchise, selling hot dogs in food courts in malls and airport terminals. I’d never had one of their dogs, though, until visiting Coney Island in May. Might as well hold out for the original, huh? Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

“We ate at the Coney Island Nathan’s today, Sunday 5/15. Joe was angry because the ditzy girl at the counter mistook our order and we wound up with two extra hot dogs, making a grand total of 4 hot dogs between me and Joe. The breakdown:
-1 kid’s meal (hot dog w/kraut, fries, Diet Coke, toy)
-1 kid’s meal (hot dog w/onions & kraut, fries, Diet Coke, toy)
-2 hot dogs w/onions & kraut
The franks themselves were good—long and slender, good snap, griddled & greasy w/a natural casing. The buns were cold—well, not hot—and they were very bad-squishy by the time we got around to eating the final two dogs. Nathan’s only has spicy mustard—no yellow. Forget the ketchup, even if their onions are not the sweet, tomotoey ones like Gray’s Papaya. Nathan’s onions get lowest marks: slimy, too oniony, too long and wormlike, and most of all smacking of tinned black pepper. Ick! In my estimation, black pepper has no business being on a hot dog unless it’s mixed into coleslaw.
Nathan’s fries are thick, broad and crinkle-cut. They are too heavy/mealy and the ones in our kid’s meals were in dire need of salt. I feel pre-salted fries are far superior to those which the diner themselves applies the salt. Skip the fries.
Kelly told me that the Coney Island Nathan’s is not the best one because they can get away with being mediocre. I readily believe that. Coney Island was a blast, but Nathan’s was a lowlight in a day of highs. I ate 2-1/2 dogs and am feeling ill. I have a long way to go before I am a hot dog pro.”

Coney Island is worth a visit for its other attractions, most notably the Cyclone roller coaster and the Sideshow. The place wrings its appeal out of a faded, decaying glory. People come for the sadness of its midway full of skuzzy carnies and the greasy fried clams that every Coney Island food stand sells. The also come for Nathan’s 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest, where that skinny Japanese guy always wins. Even if the dogs are mediocre, one must visit Nathan’s when at Coney Island. That’s all there is to it. Maybe get one lone hot dog and move on.

A Sausage by Any Other Name

A S&T reader emailed me his thoughs on my use of the word "cock" when applied to sausage-on-a-bun foodstuffs. He found it unrefined. I agree. But my pal Rev. Pamatmat uses it all of the time, and it I caught the bug.

I've been saying cock because I wanted some variety; "frank" and "hot dog" were becoming tiresome and overused. Let's make a list of nicknames for our little friend Mr. Hot Dog and see if any are worth using again.

-red hot
-frankfurter
-frank
-weiner
-weenie
-tubesteak
-dog
-and, of course, cock

Readers, I need your help--can you think of any I'm forgetting? My list seems awfully short. "Tubesteak" is so gross and funny--it's one of my favorites, but I'll never use it myself; I like hot dogs too much, and I'm not a fan of steaks or tubes.

Gray's Update

This afternoon I lunched at the Garment District Gray's Papaya (8th Ave. & 37th St.) again. This time they put the sauerkraut on the dogs as I had requested, and they were much better than the kraut-less dogs I'd had a there a few weeks prior. The onion sauce is too sweet to have on its own. Also, my papaya drink was less frothy this time. It raised my spirits greatly, although my poor stomach is rebelling against me.

I was there in the Garment District looking for sewing notions. My search for an 18-inch zipper took me to a store that sells nothing but zippers--invisible zippers, brass zippers, molded zippers, you name it. They customize zippers. But the line was too long and the zipper selection was overwhelming, and I left the zipper superstore empty-handed.

So, back to the tale of the sausage tasting, my first day of work. I'd earlier related how we wheeled our shiny new cart some 20 blocks to the restaurant owned by the chef who's a partner in the sausage venture. Three young ladies pushing the rather large cart down the street...it may have been quite a sight. Pardon my racism here, but usually you don't see young white chicks pushing food carts around. People took notice.

Not all mobile food vending carts have the good fortune to be pushed by theee people. Most of these vendor dudes transport their carts solo, though their carts tend to be equipped with a hand brake. Ours has none. What our cart does have is a tiny sink, a grill, a steam table, and a number of storage areas for food and dry goods.

We loaded up the cart with pork and beef sausages, baguettes, bottled water, sauces, paper towels, and plastic straws. Then we pushed it over to the playground that will daily host the sausage cart once it's up and running for real. That day, though, our first go at the cart, was an invite-only tasting; we did not yet have the proper permits to be selling to the public.

The chef, J., rode the soda bike after us. We won't just sell cocks, see--we'll have freshly prepared sodas, too, served from a tricycle similar to those that ice cream vendors use. There's a cooler on the back end and a place to put up an umbrella for shade.

After about an hour of poking around and meeting with other sausage cart partners, the setup was complete and the sausages were sizzling on the grill. This is another difference: our sausaged are grilled on a grill, not griddled on a flattop. And we don't have a steamer, and we don't use buns. We serve the sausages on baguettes that are toasted on a spear-like device that burrows a hole in the bread and toasts it from the inside out. Impaling the baguette on the toasting spear in an incredible phallic task, but after a few snickers we got over it.

The grill was fired up, the sauces in their squeeze bottles, and the invited guests began to arrive. Chef J. demonstrated to us future sausage cart overlords how to properly assemble the sausages. The cocks themselves are pre-cooked and only need to be heated through on the grill until they show some light charring and blistering. Then we grab a toasted, bored-out baguette, squirt the requested sauce inside, and stuff the sausage in there, making sure the sauce is properly distributed. That's that. Sausage time.

It's pretty easy. We all had a go at the grill, flipping sausages and squirting sauce. I had a blast. It's been years since I've been in a professional kitchen during service time, and while this was hardly demanding work, it was thrilling to lord over a smoldering heat source. We passed out cocks to the invited guests--mostly kind hipster professionals who were extremely patient and sausage-savvy--and generated many curious looks and a good number of inquiries from passers-by. It went off rather smoothly.

I had two sausages that day: a beef with feta-tomato sauce, and a pork with grainy mustard. I think I prefer the pork sausage, but I'm a pork fiend. The beef-and-feta cock was extremely satisfying and substantial. We'll sell the dogs for $5 a pop, and lemme tell you, that's the best $5 lunch to be had in New York. (The best $2.75 lunch I mentioned at the beginning of this blog). My second cock--the pork one--tore up my mouth from baguette overexposure. I learned my lesson: if I cross the one-dog mark, eat dog #2 sans baguette.

After the guests thinned out and gradually returned to their work at advertising firms and whatnot, our tasting was over. We wheeled the cart back to Chef J.'s restaurant and broke it down. After some light wiping-off of stainless teel surfaces with bleach water, I looked at my rag and saw it was covered with black crud. That, folks, is the air in Manhattan. The crud on the rag was in my lungs. I can't wait to see what the cart will look like after a full day in the park. Viva air quality!

After the cart was spic-and-span, we wheeled it 20 blocks back to the parking garage. The goal is to store the cart in a depot where they will empty the waste water and refill the propane, etc., and where it will safely be stored under government-approved conditions. Until then, it's the 20-block commute.

My cock co-workers and I then went out for drinks with the sausage cart business partners, their treat. I had sangria, then a Bud Light, and then a shot of tequila. The partners/investors/Chef J. were in a good mood, happy to see the fruits of two years' labor in tangible sausage form. Me, I was just drunk. How I blundered into that fatal combination of alcohols I do not wish to say, but I was smart enough to excuse myself before I passed out at 7:30pm after a mere three drinks. I stumbled to the subway, my tummy full of cocks, and promptly got on the E train, which took me all the way to Roosevent Street before I realized I needed to be on the V. Whoops.

The Maiden Voyage

There is a finite number of moblie food vendor permits in New York City, and among those there is a set number of permits for hot dog vendors. Those permits are all taken, in fact. So how is this young Turk of a sausage cart that I'm working for manage to get into the game?

By not selling hot dogs, that's how. All along I've been refering to this project that I'm working with as "the hot dog cart." Well, legally they can't sell frankfurters because those permits are all taken; they instead have a permit for gourmet foods, and our gourmet food is sausage. Yes, yes, I know--a frankfurter is a sausage. But we legally can't sell franks.

The government has special standatds outlining what makes a frank a frank. As long as the sausages we sell don'y meet those standards, we're in the clear. Here's some text from the code of Federal Regulations:
"Frankfurters (a.k.a., hot dogs, wieners, or bologna) are cooked and/or smoked sausages according to the Federal standards of identity. Federal standards of identity describe the requirements for processors to follow in formulating and marketing meat, poultry, and egg products produced in the United States for sale in this country and in foreign commerce. The standard also requires that they be comminuted (reduced to minute particles), semisolid products made from one or more kinds of raw skeletal muscle from livestock (like beef or pork) and may contain poultry meat. Smoking and curing ingredients contribute to flavor, color, and preservation of the product. They are link-shaped and come in all sizes -- short, long, thin, and chubby." (See the full page here.)

The sausages served at our cart (or, more accurately, the sausages that will be served at our cart) are not emulsified (or, to use the language abouve, comminuted); they are somewhat coarse and moderately spiced, but quite flavorful nonetheless. The all-beef ones in particular are very beefy and robust. A company upstate makes them exclusively for the cart. The pork sausages taste a bit more trad, not quite as burly. They are in natural casings and about the diameter of a regular frank, which leads me to belive they are using lamb casings.

But enough about sausage specs. What about the cart? Friday was its maiden voyage. The thing was brand spanking new and stored in a parking garage--a temporary measure. Three of us met at the parking garage to push the cart about twenty blocks to the restaurant that one of the sausage partners owns. There, on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, we washed off the cart, filled its water tanks, put in the propane tank, and stocked the bins with ice and sausage supplies.

Pushing the cart--500 pounds of cart--is not too tough. The back wheels are fixed and the front wheels pivot, so the back pusher is the engine and the front puller is the steerer. The biggest challenge is navigating around pedestrians, who do not always yield to the 500-pound cart. Also, the sidewalks down there get narrow, so there are times when an inch makes the difference between skinning a poor urban tree and barely skinning a porr malnourished urban tree.

The hubby is getting restless, I must shre the computer...more on sausage cart debut in the next post.

Hot Dog Safety Update!

The date of my two-day class to become a licensed mobile food vendor approaches. It’s good for the public to know that these folks selling weenies from carts are at least required to become aware of safe food handling practices. There are actually a lot more hoops for a mobile food vendor to jump through than your run-of-the-mill line cook.

From what I hear, the basic refrain of the class—which is perhaps blearily elementary—is “Keep hot foods hot, keep cold foods cold.” That potato salad? Chill it. If it’s prepackaged in a plastic cup and on display, that display should be refrigerated or on ice. The Dean & Deluca where I worked in St. Helena, CA got busted for keeping its pre-made sandwiches at room temperature, so there are folks who enforce this. Of course, it’s more important to keep high-protein food out of the danger zone (between 40 and 140 degrees F, I think), because bacteria especially loves protein. So that tuna salad sandwich that made you sick—it was probably not the mayo, which is fairly acidic and inhospitable to bacteria, that did it. Nope, it was the tuna.

For your edification, here are the USDA’s hot dog handling safety guides. Not much to learn here unless you are a total food-handling ninny.

Gray's: The Cheapest Best Dog in New York

My darling husband, in a comment about a former post, said that Sabrett hot dogs suck. I know what he means, but I’d like to note that Sabrett (parent company: Marathon) franks themselves do not suck; they are of high quality, and they dominate the frankdom of NYC (read more about it here in Ed Levine’s 2005 New York Times article). It’s just that a lot of these little street carts in Manhattan that serve Sabrett franks do an awful job of preparing them—it’s a injustice to Sabrett, really.

To prove my point, Sabrett/Marathon in all likelihood supplies the franks to my favorite NYC hot dog joint, Gray’s Papaya. If Papaya King is about presentation, Gray’s is about thrift. Those dogs are infamously cheap and infamously edible. It’s the best lunch deal in New York: two hot dogs and a papaya drink for $2.99. I think a single dog is a whopping 75 cents. Where in Manhattan, let alone anywhere in the USA, can you get a hot dog deal like that? (Maybe in West Virginia, maybe, but those dogs are another thing altogether.)

Gray’s offers pretty much the same concept of Papaya King, but the menu is not as extensive (Papaya King sells fries, but who needs fries when you could have a second hot dog instead?) and the premises tends not to be as tidy. That’s what you get for a 75-cent hot dog.

There’s a great Gray’s/Papaya King debate that has been raging for years. My allegiance is with Gray’s, even if they are a Papaya King knockoff started in the 1970s by a former Papaya King employee. That’s because of nostalgia. I used to work at a magazine test kitchen in Manhattan, and every morning I’d go down to Balducci’s (the original location; this was the late 1990s) to buy groceries for the recipes I’d be testing that day. Sometimes if I screwed up—which, sadly, was not infrequent—I’d have to go back downtown and get more supplies so I could re-test the recipe. It might be around or after noon, and I might be hungry. In a great anthology called Roadside Food I’d read about papaya dogs, and one day while looking for a subway entrance close to Balducci’s I ran across a Gray’s Papaya, and I had to try one of the Recession Specials they’d mentioned in the book (the Recession Special is the aforementioned 2-dog, 1-drink, $2.99 steal).

I was hooked. I loved the cheapness, the speed, the frank-papaya combo. It became a special treat to go to Gray’s and have what I call 30-second hot dogs. Most food I believe is best eaten like a civilized human: sitting down, savoring the bites, talking with friends or family or alone, reading a great book or magazine. Cloth napkins are a plus.

Well, with hot dogs, I’m not that way at all. I like to gobble them down while standing or walking, and I usually do it in under one minute per frank. It’s a great way for an urbanite to connect with their inner savage.

So, because of the soothing hot dog respites I took in the West Village (at 6th Ave & 8th St), my heart belongs to Gray’s. Gray’s dogs are sloppily assembled, and their buns can be unevenly toasted. Each hot dogs comes on a flimsy, tiny paper plate that you can cradle around the bun like a taco shell. The papaya drinks are frothier and seemingly less pure than Papaya King—they have almost an Orange Julius thing going on.

This Gray’s in the West Village is what I think of as the Papaya Dog Triangle. There’s a Papaya King (7th Ave & 14th St) nearby, and two knockoff-knockoff papaya dog joints as well, Chelsea Dog and Papaya Dog. I have not yet worked up the courage to visit these imitators, but my feelings are that two papaya dog sellers are enough. Here in Astoria on Steinway, there’s a place called Mano’s Papaya. My husband and I ate there once, and we were disheartened with their dogs and drinks—not enough oomph. My rule of thumb is the more non-frank/non-tropical items on the menu, the less focused and less spellbinding the papaya dogs will be.

Sadly, my last Gray’s Papaya visit was a letdown. We were in the Garment District shopping for fabric and saw one somewhere around 34th St. I had the recession special and my heart did not skip a beat. Perhaps now that I live in New York the availability of my hitherto twice-a-year papaya dog splurges has tarnished some of their sheen. Either that, or it’s not as good as the West Village Gray’s.