Category: sandwiches

And now, the Scrapple Taco

Posted by Andrew – August 18, 2009

Back in May, I brought you the Scrapple Hoagie to what can best be described as partial acclaim. To be fair, neither Scrapple nor the Hoagie is native culinary terrain. I grew up in the great Southwest–dividing my youth between El Paso, TX and Tempe, AZ–where Mexican food is king. But in the ten years I’ve lived in Philadelphia, the Taco Gap has slammed shut. The Mexican food you can get in this city is as good as can be found anywhere in the United States. It won’t be long before even Joey Vento‘s offering a zesty tomatillo salsa on his cheesesteaks. (The Mexican Torta will eventually eat his lunch. Objectively speaking, it’s a superior sandwich. It’s a hard-working sandwich. It has dreams, but it never forgets where it comes from.) Anyway, in a relentless pursuit of everything fusion and maybe a little…healing, I present the Scrapple Taco:

What you’ll need:

A pound of Scrapple
An onion
A lime
Some tortillas (I used flour, but corn will work just as well)
Cilantro
A bottle of hot sauce of your choice

I cubed the Scrapple, but given it’s steady degradation once on the fire, you may as well just mash it into the pan.

You don’t need any oil since the Scrapple will render enough fat to take care of all that. Keep a lazy eye on it, but basically, you want your Scrapple to brown and evaporate most of the liquid. I scraped the pan occasionally. It took about twenty minutes to cook a pound of Scrapple down to this fistfull of chips. Delicious delicious chips:

In the meantime, slice your lime, dice your onion and chop your cilantro. All are essential to a fine taco unless you’re part of that small and unfortunate tribe of folks who taste cilantro as soap.

Set aside the Scrapple chips and keep the heat on the pan. In the residual fat, you’re going to want to lightly saute your tortillas (whether corn or flour). I cook them until they just start to bubble. They need to retain their softness so they can be folded, but a little browning really brings out the flavor and adds a little crispiness to the final product.

Assemble your tacos and season with lime juice and salsa to taste:

These were seriously delicious, and I think Scrapple presents some great opportunities for more subtle seasoning. Before cooking, while the Scrapple is still soft, you could easily mix in additional ingredients like seasonings, jalapenos, or even cheese. Incidentally, I had originally intended to include Queso Fresco on these, but my local supplier was depleted. That mild Mexican cheese would make these even better.

As a first step in the Pennsylvania Dutch-Mexican fusion movement, this isn’t bad. Could the Soft-Pretzel Sopaipilla be next?

Category: Fusion, meat, sandwiches
3 Comments

The Scrapple Hoagie

Posted by Andrew – May 12, 2009

There’s a new web series, Peter Arthur Stories, launching May 14th as part of a Pennsylvania tourism initiative. From the trailer, it looks like it’s going to follow a young man on a romantic and food-filled (Shoo-Fly pie!) adventure through Pennsylvania, and it got me thinking about some of the great Pennsylvania foods. So, of course, I made this Scrapple Hoagie. If you’re not familiar with Scrapple, think of it as the meatatarian’s tofu, and it makes a damn fine sandwich, if I do say so myself:

Category: bread, meat, sandwiches
3 Comments

The Endless Bounty of the Pork Picnic

Posted by Andrew – January 11, 2009

The pig is pretty damn good in almost all its edible forms, or at least all the edible forms I’ve tried. Sure, there might be a tail fritter or hoof souffle that I’d find disagreeable, but until I make that mistake, I’m sticking with pig. This summer I found a pork picnic at my grocery store in the 10 pound range for less than $8. I promptly froze it, and this weekend–some six months later–I turned it loose for pulled-pork.

The prep for a chunk of meat this large is non-trivial. There’s a half-inch think slab of fat and skin along the bottom of the piece of meat that you’re likely to want to cut off. I didn’t want to waste it, so I decided to try my hand at making crackling. I went here first but then just figured I could fake it. I cut the slab of fat into thin strips and just set to cooking.

Pork fat splatters a lot, so I upended another frying pan over top of this one to contain some of the mess. Here’s how it looked about half an hour later:

In the meantime, I seared the chunk of meat in a heavy-bottom pot. After browning it all the way around, I added a couple of spoonfulls of rendered fat (from the crackling) and sauteed three onions until softened. Then I deglazed the pan with a mixture of red wine vinegar and water and added the meat back in along with some dried lemon grass, some salt, and a hearty squirt of Vietnamese hot sauce.

And while I was dishing out rendered fat, I figured I’d make up a little cornbread using a variation on the recipe in the Joy of Cooking (or “Rombauer” as it’s known around here). Here’s how that looked going in: