The Full Court Press of Knishes

J. Lin not pictured.

Scheming, scheming, bubble & boil! Mid-week, I did a full-court knish press to present a full plate to a fellow traveller on the path of starting an updated modern Jewish-inspired food product. In the house was none other than one of my original inspirations to get knishy with it, Danny Macaroon, of, ummm, Danny Macaroons! (Noah Knish just doesn't have the same ring to it.) I caught sight of a Danny Macaroon table at Smorgasburg last summer, a week before I attended Laura Silver's knish lecture, and it all just clicked.  Later in the summer, I introduced myself to Danny, and this that and the other, he's comin' to dinner!

I spent a day in the kitchen while looking after the baby, had a baby sitter come in the afternoon -- thank goodness, because I was getting nothing done. Having to run out because you discovered that your potatoes were too close to the oven and sprouted over night didn't help with the schedule.

Full court press: one day, two different kinds of dough, 2 different cooking methods, nine different fillings. Here is a run down of what I made, with notes on production and outcome....

Square circled

• Potato: Kinda like how vanilla ice cream custard is a base for many many other flavors of ice cream, the potato filling is great on it's own, but is also used as a base for the spinach, sweet potato and broc-ched, as well as a binder for the kasha. This batch came out well, but I went a little too far with the salt, brought it right up to the edge of big flavor/too salty. For the other knishes that took it in, I skipped adding more salt.
• Fried Potato: Second time I've whipped these up, again surprised how good they are. 400 degree peanut oil, same filling and dough as the baked, just square and contained. Plop in the square in, wait until it looks nice and golden & serve. Talking to Danny Mac, I realized how hard these will be to sell in any setting other than where it is fried to order. Damn my American palate, this is good! 

Multiknishical

• Spinach - Roasted Garlic: Four heads of garlic roasted in the oven, wrapped in foil and hit with oil and salt. Only gave it an hour, tasted good but a bit too firm, had to run them through the garlic press. Did about a 3/4 spinach to 1/4 potato mix as an experiment and...yup, 50/50 is the right way to go. This was the only knish Danny Mac didn't finish, said he wasn't a huge garlic fan. On one hand, if the garlic was mushier, it would have blended in better, lesson learned. Then again, Danny has macaroons for brains, so what the heck does he know?!

The Children's Champion

• Broccoli-Cheddar: Working only with what was on hand, I didn't have as much broc as I'd like so I chopped in finer to spread it. (Once concept taught in c-school: the more surface area you give an ingredient, the more able it is to contact the taste buds and give a bigger flavor.)  Hmmm - still needs more broc BUT I do like the texture and mouthfeel of small bits of broc. I imagine next time when I up the broc amount, the flavor (amplified by the fat of the cheese) will step up a level. Of note, this seems to be the only knish my toddler seems to go gaga for.

Yam, Bam, Thank You Maam!

• Sweet Potato: I don't like sweet potatoes, they have a weird texture and are too damn sweet to be a potato. 

Oh Sweet P, how did I ever doubt you?!

However, when mixed 50/50 with the plain potato mix, it works to give a nice light orange color, it becomes extra silky instead of loose, and the note of sweet is just right. I'm happy.

Ka$ha is no second rate Lady KnaKna. -sigh- I'm sorry.

• Kasha: There is a reason why you hit your freshly toasted kasha with boiling water and not cold water: if you hit it with cold then bring it up to heat, you will have very mushy kasha - instead of soft individual grains, you will have an undifferentiated gray mass that looks like mashed potatoes that have been used, abused and left for dead. I tossed the first pot and started over, but it made me think - some day, I may have a use for this, a trick where I can subtly add kasha flavor to something without the granular texture...
• Brisket: Oy. Oy. What the what! I just made brisket knishes for the first time a few weeks ago, and I held aside a cup of my last brisket in the freezer for this. However, instead of going to the nice market, I sourced my tripe from a small super market close by. It read "Canadian-previously frozen" and was a half section of a roll of tripe, unlike last tripe I used, which was fresh and NY State raised. So as with before, I boiled the hell out of it for about 3 ours. Last time, no issues, it came out looking a little bit smaller but ready for grinding. THIS time, after 10 minutes, a weird bleachy ammonia smell took over my kitchen for an hour, and when I checked it 3 hours later, it had disappeared!! Dissolved into the water, leaving behind a few threads of white snotty-looking slime!!! Aigh dios mio!!! So suffice to say, these brisket knishes went with out the softening power of nice bouncy tripe, and like a meat perogie in a Slavic diner in the East Village in the early 80s, were a bit heavy. I mixed it 50/50 with kasha, which flavor wise was the right deal, but it was just a bit leaden. Perhaps I could have thrown a few eggs in there. Next time I'm gonna get the right tripe.

Oatmeal  Hashbrown Knish: it's what's for breakfast

• Hash Brown-Oatmeal: First time experiment, needs work but the concept is solid. Start with some left over oatmeal. Not some lame quick cooking rolled faff, but proper hardcore steel cut Irish oats. No half-oatin'! I prepare my breakfast oatmeal with brown sugar, salt, butter, vanilla and cinnamon. It keeps it real up in the hizzy. It makes me speak 1990s ebonics, yo. Any way, like kasha, this grain needs a potato counter point. So instead of going to the potato knish mix bowl, I cubed a potato and cooked it in butter.

MC Potato Hash lockin' it down

Then the potatoes met the oatmeal and was joined by two other breakfast elements: some egg and some maple syrup....

Maple sizzyrup!

In the end, not particularly good but has potential. I liked the syrup's flavor, the whole thing is sweet and savory, and the browning of the potatoes gave a nice toasty flavor that complimented the oatmeal. In the future, the potatoes will be cubed smaller, and in addition to syrup, all the add ins of the oatmeal (brown sugar, vanilla, etc) will be amped up. Also, lose the butter and use oil or shortening, to keep it in a kosher stylee....

• Chocolate Hazelnut: Due to time constraints, rather than continue to experiment with hazelnut paste and dutched cocoa, I reverted back to an earlier recipe from the Knishening, that involved Nutella. The filling hit it's mark, and Danny Macaroon seemed to really like it (he is a man with a professional sweet tooth, after all) but I'm still not happy with it's form factor.

A carpenter's dream

Cooking it loaf style on a flat sheet just makes it go too flat, and to keep it at a reasonable portion, it looks too much like a cookie. I want knishes! I think I just need to find some long, thin loaf pans or something.

 So there ya go. If your still reading this, you must really care! (Or at least really like ebonics-based jokes!)  Since you've come this far, a note on KnisheryNYC's future...

As I hinted at earlier in the post, I got NOTHING done while having a 3 month old baby underfoot. I've come to the realization from this day of cooking that my plans for the season are overly optimistic, if I don't want to semi-abandon my young family. I was thinking a few tables every weekend, but now I think one or two tables this season is more likely. In addition, I have 2 or 3 vendors in mind who expressed interest in carrying my knishes in their shops, which means anyone can go get 'em anytime -- expect some announcements in the next few months. Around that time, I'll start offering special orders to the public. In the begining, it'll be limited to the 5 boros, but once I get the packaging down, shipping will be offered to. 

Thanks for everyone's enthusiasm and support so far! I hope to get a knish in yo mouf sooner than later. F'shizzle!

ADDENDUM

 

Want to see this child boop a raw knish? Here ya go...

(all booped knishes were promptly unbooped then baked in a 400 degree oven to prevent boopalism)

Knishery NYC Sponsors the Blue Card 5 Boro Bike Team.

During my life, I've been very lucky to be able to professionalize my hobbies. I've helped run an indie record label, I've worked as a graphic designer, and I've cooked in restaurants (as well as muck about with a certain Knishery project you may be aware of!). One life-long hobby that I've just been too fat/noncompetitive/slow to indulge in professionally is cycling. However, last year I was recruited to be the Team Captain for the Blue Card's first-ever team in the 5 Boro Bike Ride. The Blue Card is a charity that provides funds and services to the remaining Holocaust survivors who are in need. The 5 Boro Bike Ride is a huge, multi-level bike ride that tours through the entirety of NYC.


This year, Knishery NYC is proud to sponsor this team. A knish or two will be distributed to anyone who rides on the team. Additionally, any person who donates $200 or more to my fundraising goal will get one dozen knishes of their choice either delivered by bike (in the 5 Boros) or delivered overnight (in the continental USA) in mid April! Here is the link:

http://www.imathlete.com/donate/NoahWildman


Click through to read more about the event, the Blue Card, and my motivation for supporting this worthy cause.

Here is a snapshot from last year. Just think, had they waited a year, they would have had some knishes in their pockets!

From left to right: Me, Lil' Bobo, Raoul, Fontina La Rue, Heshy the Brisket Man, Shmendrick, Joyce, and Big Earl. In Front: The Knishmobile

ADDENDUM:
I was at Whole Foods on Houston today with my 2-month-old strapped to my chest. On the walk back, we passed by Yonnah Schimmel's. I stopped and stared in the window, reading the framed reviews which some seemed to date back almost to its establishment in 1910, dreaming the knish dream. Whilst in my knish-reverie, I was not noshing on one of Shimmel's potato-bombs, but I was chomping down on brown rice avocado & cucumber nori rolls. If there was something less bomb-like in YS, perhaps I would have considered it for a casual afternoon nosh... Ah, to build a less bomb-like knish, to compete with the brown rice nori rolls of the world.... reminds me of the story of my great grandpop, a rabbi who went to South America to makes some money as a goucho....but that's for another time...

A load of tripe! And brisket.

Heeeeeere's the beef!

Recently, the Forward asked me to contribute a knish recipe using brisket leftovers. Not having any on hand myself -- it's not Passover, and my significant other sadly does not eat meat -- I had to go and do a beefy brisket. (As this is Knishery NYC and not Brisketery NYC, recipe is in the addenda below.)

I went through my hugely massive knish library of 4 or 5 old Jewish cookbooks and poked around for meat knish recipes online. What struck me the most? The recipes I found were not that different from stuffed cabbage, derma, or perogie stuffing. Cooked meat is ground up; a secondary meat is ground up for texture; a starch or grain is added for filler; a binder is needed; and a seasoning, typically salt and pepper, is dashed in. Lung was mentioned a few times as the secondary meat, which unlike some organ meats (I'm looking at you, liver!!), is mild in flavor. Not readily available at my local markets, I picked up some tripe.

I do, I DO have a stomach for brisket knishes!

Tripe is cheap, and tripe is weird. It's cow stomach, and doesn't really taste like anything. But in my experience eating it at dim sum, it's kinda rubbery, like stomach. And it looks weird. And like tofu, it takes on the flavor of what it's prepared with. I simply boiled it for 2 hours, in water, and when it came out, looked....exactly the same -- no shrinkage, no color change, no nothing.

So first a rough chop...

The Chop House

And then off to the grinder...

The Grind House

And out comes this hash...

The Hash House

Grinding cooked meat is similar to chopping it very rough, and very fine, except instead of just chopping (which is straight and clean and neat), the grinding process also tears, loosening the fibers that were tightened by all the cooking.

In the morning, I prepped:

• A cup of kasha (which yields 3 cups once cooked); its whole granulation makes a nice match for the size of the grind of the meat.
• Caramelized onions (a few pounds of onions with shortening and salt in the oven for a few hours, overlapping the meat cooking).
• The potatoes -- boiled and mashed to make a batch of dough.

The filling came together and looked about right. Even though a solid half of the mix was kasha and onion, the color and texture of the meat really made it look more like 75-80% meat.

Brisket Knishes, nikkit and raw!

I took this opportunity to make my first full-sized knishes via the rolling method. On first go round, I cut the dough into the same shape as I did for the minis. But when I tried to roll the dough, it wouldn't close. So I improvised, reattaching a sheet to double the dough.

I've never seen such a large circumknishen...

I immediately noticed how crumbly the filling was -- next time gotta up the eggs for more binding power.

From top left: Tiny, Charlie, Bruiser, Chuck, Sloppy, Jerome, Biggie Smalls, Sloppy 2, Precious, Egghead, Dumdum and Horace

Even raw, the knishes were spilling out a little -- one was the binding issue, the other was that I used two too-short sheets to roll them. Also, perhaps, my hand-skills of shaping them once cut and rolled needs improvement, something that'll happen when I make a few 100 more in this style....

Outta the oven, cut open and...

Crazy Sexy Crumby

Tasted good and honest -- meaty but not overwhelming like meatloaf. The kasha and onion really balanced the brisket and the tripe was very subtle, making the whole affair a little looser and softer.

ADDENDA


Cooking Brisket: Made up a brisket recipe on the fly, as I was well familiar with the cooking method from my culinary training -- drop the meat in a heavy pot with lid, cover with liquid and aromatics, bake low (250 to 300ish) for 3 or more hours, let rest before slicing thin.

Into the cast iron pot went:

• a quart of beef stock
• a full head of crushed garlic
• a table spoon of brown sugar
• a teaspoon of salt
• a teaspoon of coriander
• a dash of smoked paprika
• a dash of Worcestershire sauce

Before - Limp Brizket

After - A brisket only a bubbe could love.

(If I had red wine on hand, I would have thrown that in just to make it a lil' Frenchy.) The brisket cut comes from the lower front of the cow, right above the front legs. It is tough & thoroughly worked, so it has a lot of connective tissue that, when baked slow and low, becomes tender and moist. By braising it in liquid, it further prevents it from getting dry & tough.

Bubbe: My grandmother (and probably yours, too) had a big, cast iron meat grinder that attached to her counter top to do things just like this, in the days before the modern supermarket where you could just go pick up chopped meat. I admit that

1. it made me miss my Ema and 
2. it made me regret I never did any cooking with her. 

I do remember her matzoh ball soup, particularly because she'd boil a chicken for hours to make the soup base, but then she'd tear it apart and include the overcooked chicken bits in the soup. Oof -- if only she'd known that you can cut off the meat raw, boil the carcass, then cook the meat separately and then include it in the soup. No wonder my mom was such a horrible cook. Amazing, great person, but horrible cook.

Tripe: The editor at the Forward was concerned about the tripe factor -- the readers might be put off by its inclusion in the recipe. So I suggested other filler/softeners, like portobello duxelle and TVP, for those squeamish around offal. I guess that's just how we roll at Knishery NYC -- no half-steppin' in the exploration of knishitude. I don't know if tripe and lung is the future of the knish, but you can't go into the future if you don't know the past. I gotta start working on the lung/tripe/gefilte tripleplay knish...

Rollin' into 2012

Eeny meeny mighty minis!

Life with a new infant (and a toddler on school vacation) did not allow much time for me to make -- and sell -- holiday knishes. But I was able to knock out some miniatures that seemed to be a big hit at the season's social gatherings (where I was inevitably asked: "So, how's the knish business coming along?" Sigh). At this point, even if I don't have the time to produce mass amounts of my product I still have to keep my knishnaut helmet on. Thus:

1. I made my first batch of mini-knishis;
2. I tried out the rolling method of assembly;
3. I reformulated the chocolate hazelnut knish.

Why? Because:

1. Two- to three-bite appetizer knishes are low-commitment kings at potlucks and multi-food family gatherings;
2. Rolling is how knishes are made in large quantities quickly in professional settings;
3. While the chocolate hazelnut knish easily got the largest, happiest raves at the Knishening, I want to eliminate Nutella from the recipe, a very lazy ingredient.

In culinary school, it was impressed upon us why appetizers are so expensive: despite the smaller quantity of food per serving, it's literally multiple times the amount of labor. So to make minis, some labor-saving techniques were called for. And if you do any amount of knish research, you'll find that the description "hand-rolled" is mentioned multiple times by those trying to hype their wares...even if hand-rolled says cigars and bagels to me. Hmmm.

Until now I've been cutting squares of dough, plopping a measure of filling in the middle, then folding it up, shumai-style. But if the same quantity of food that yields twelve knishes could do more than FORTY, why do three times the amount of labor? Hence:

Obligatory nikkit knish shot, perves!

Instead of 80+ tiny squares, we got three big ones with a carefully laid log o' potato-onion filling...

Circumknishen.

Then, once rolling it all up, I chopped it into 1-inch pieces. Surprisingly, the chopping action opened and spread the end that was just done...and sort of sealed the end being currently chopped. Thus, only a small amount of handling was required to seal the bottom and get the top to a nice symmetric look.

I came at the chocolate hazelnut cheese knish with the same rolling technique, but these were not to be mini -- perhaps smaller than what you get at Schimmels or what you got at Stahls, but the same form factor: a wedge of rolled knish, with two open ends.

The World's Largest Chocolate Cigar

My current chocolate hazelnut recipe tasted pretty good (so they say) but it's been rubbing me the wrong way, what with the from-a-jar Nutella. Knowing I could do better, I tinkered with a combination of dutch cocoa, hazelnut paste, and shortening. Then I sprinkled sugar on the crust after applying the egg wash, baked it and...

Knishloaf

From here, some slicing and dicing and...

Voila: The look is right, far superior and less handwork than using a cupcake tray. However, the taste was all off, not sweet enough, too dry, hazelnutty in the wrong way. It left me some clues how to come correct next time, though.

Next up, in a couple of weeks: Off to a kosher kitchen for my first stab at 100% kosher knishing! Hopefully you'll all be pestered by a Kickstarter campaign coming soon, too...

Addendum 1:
My KitchenAid mixer died a loud and clanky death while making this round of knishes (I had to make the sweet knish dough by hand -- a shanda). Now I'm onto my third stand-mixer in less than five years. Why? One: I use them a lot. The other reason: Bagel dough.

Kneading bagel dough in a standard KitchenAid mixer will kill the motor if you walk away and let it knead the dough as much a you need it to. After spending a few years working with pizza in a professional setting, one becomes surprised that a 5-quart stand mixer just won't quite have the same torque and raw power at a 100-quart floor mixer. Oops. Due to common sense and a slumping economy, I was able to snag a 6-quart lift model (twice the wattage) for about the same price of the lower-level tilt head model.


Addendum 2: 
I ate an empanada recently. Send a knish to South America, have him marry a local, and their baby will be kinda like an empanada. Anyway. The actual shop is kind of what I envision a first iteration of a modern knish shop, minus, y'know, the pork sausage, the salsa, and the yeast dough. Metro Empanadas have a quality product, if you're into that kinda thing.

Knishnaut: One is Not Like the Other

Left: Old & Busted. Right: Like Will Smith in MIB, it makes this style look good.

Knishes are baked...unless they are fried. Among the pizzaratti, there is something called the "Pizza Cognition Theory." It states that:

The first slice of pizza a child sees and tastes (and somehow appreciates on something more than a childlike, mmmgoood, thanks-mom level), becomes, for him, pizza. He relegates all subsequent slices, if they are different in some manner from that first triangle of dough and cheese and tomato and oil and herbs and spices, to a status that we can characterize as not pizza.

Now take out the word pizza, and insert the word knish. For the average New Yorker, the defining knish is not Mrs. Stahls, the same way most pizza-heads can't really claim Di Fara's as their ur-slice. For many (particularly non-Jewish) people, if they have an early, formative experience with a knish from the days before foodies and artisanal mayonnaise, it would be... this:

Deep fried squares, usually sold from a cart along side hot dogs, an echo of the time of knish-carts from the time of our grandparents. These are Gabila's knishes, a.k.a. Coney Island–style knishes, and while I may take time at a later point to delve into this history, only three things are of import here:

1. They are not too available on carts anymore due to DOH & Giuliani, but are still widely available in supermarkets.
2. They are fully enclosed in dough.
3. They are deep fried, not baked.

So a few days ago, in an attempt to eat healthier after eating way too much crap for the week before and few weeks after my son Lil' Knyshy was born, I decided to make some spinach knishes, strictly for home use. With some left over dough and some plain potato filling, I strapped on my knishnaut helmet and I went to work on exploring the outer reaches of what my knishtchen could produce....

Mandatory nudie knish pic, you pervert.

Well, it's square--so, square I made it. Well, rectangular, anyway. It's hip to be a square, and it's post modern to be a rectangle.

For ODB, as he likes his knishes raw.

Then I folded it up, used a bench scraper to seal the edges and then....

Little did he know that it was not a Jacuzzi...

In culinary school, we spent weeks on each method of cooking -- sautéeing & pan frying, roasting & baking, poaching & braising, curing & smoking & more. Only one method got a single solitary day: deep frying. In the lecture part of the class, the chef explained that if you have your time and temp right in deep fry, you are pretty much guaranteed to come out delicious -- and that's why the combination of fancy egg-timer-technology and non-trained high school drop outs can make perfect french fries at McDonalds for 50+ years all over the globe.

But a handmade knish does not come with time and temp instructions, so I had to wing it. Using a quart of peanut oil (peanut, because it has a high smoke point) that I zapped up really hot -- 500 degrees (french fries go good at around 450), I decided to just eyeball the frying until it looked about right. Unlike fried chicken, I would not have to worry about pre-cooked innards being raw, and a higher fry temp would prevent much oil from being absorbed by my knish.

Boil, boil, toil & trouble.

The knish started looking pretty golden at about 30 seconds, and I let it go for another 15 to get some nice mahogany spots all over the crust, guaranteeing some nice brown flavor. I cut it open, and it was nice and hot on the inside.

I am an American. If you deep fry it, I've been trained to automatically like it. When I went to try this knish, I was thinking, "Well, I didn't make any consideration for this method -- I'm using the same dough and the same filling as a baked knish, so let's pay attention to how this needs to be adjusted." After taking a bite, my only thought was, "Oh my. I need to take another bite." And my second thought was, "If my grandma was from Mumbai instead of Israel, this would be her very oniony, very underspiced samosa." And my third thought was, "Oh shut up, stop thinking so much, this is kinda good." I have a few ideas for improvements, but this was a very auspicious Coney-style knish v 1.0.

I had a few Gabila's knishes lying around (because if you are a Knishman, Rule 38.3 of the Lifestyle Code dictates you must always have a few Gabilas lying around) so I put them down, head to head.

Two generations.

Which one would you like to eat?

ADDENDUM: I was hoping to do a round of holiday knishes for special order for Hanukkah/Xmas/New Years ever for special order, like I did for Thanksgiving. While making this recent round of knishes, I took responsibility for caring for Lil Knyshy:

Lil' Knishy rides a bouncy table full o' Spinach Knishes

Caring for an infant while making 72+ knishes is like working with one hand tied behind your back. It took me a little longer, but all the knishes came out to my satisfaction, and in the evening I got into mad-scientist mode with the boiling oil after everyone went to sleep.

However, the preschool my toddler attends was put on emergency hiatus (another story for a non-food-blog post) and for the next two weeks I will have two arms and one leg tied up plus a rope around my waist tying me to a cranky radiator. So I will be forced to skip this holiday season and focus on some winter holidays -- please check out the poll on this blog as well as our Facebook page.

Thanks to everyone for their support!

Cabbages, cabbages

Recently, I got an random email:

If you can even approximate a Mrs. Stahl's Cabbage Knish (Brighton Beach) you'll have a devoted customer for life. Please advise.

The Eggcreamer, Encino, CA

I replied:

Oh man. I grew up on Mrs. Stahl's, but because I was a kid, I only had access to what my parents would buy, and that did not include cabbage!!

Though I have not rolled them out yet, I have tinkered with a cabbage knish -- it's one of the few fillings that are as old and traditional as potato and kasha (and I keep a steady supply of home made 2nd Ave Deli-recipe health salad in the fridge.)

Could you do me a favor? Describe to me, in as much detail as you can muster, everything you can remember about a Mrs. Stahl's cabbage knish, and next time I take a crack at it, I'll keep what you say in mind. Thanks!

-N

Anyone else out there have fond memories of a favorite cabbage knish? Though I love cabbage, I never had a cabbage knish that I would campaign for President of the Knish Klub...

Is Tablet Magazine calling me a Fatty McFatfat?!

I'm not doughy, I'm big boned!