The Pastrami Knish Has Landed

Pastrami?! She hardly knew me!

Starting today, Malt & Mold will be carrying the Pastrami Knish, along side Spinach & Roasted Garlic, Kasha, Vanilla Bean Cheese and Chocolate Hazelnut Cheese. I supplied mini versions of potato & caramelized onion, broccoli cheddar and the pastrami to Malt & Mold for their Grand Opening this past weekend, and according to reports, 9/10 eaters went straight for the meaty bites.

I must say, this is the quickest a knish went from experimental mode to the sale floor. Thanks to Kevin @ Malt & Mold for allowing his customers to be Knishery NYC's guinea pigs!

Malt & Mold to offer...FREE KNISHES?!

For a brief period in the space-time continuum, there will be TWO things in life that are free: love & knishes.

This coming Saturday, June 16th, from noon to 8pm, Malt & Mold will be holding their official Grand Opening, as they just got their liquor license and are now selling beer on tap via growlers and the like.

To help celebrate, Knishery NYC is giving away a limited number of mini-knishes in three flavors: potato-onion, broccoli & cheddar and a new flavor: Pastrami Coriander. There is only a limited number of knishes, so first come first served.

Pastrami Notes:
I actually only had my first pastrami knish a year or so ago, at a Laura Silver knish lecture. It was very...unimpressive. It was smooth mashed potato studded with a few slivers of thin sliced pastrami, shaped like a cheese log, lightly breaded in something crunchy and fried, very similar to a potato croquette from a mid-western high school prom, if Woody Allen was the principal. Bleah.

So I went to that counter at Katz's that always seems underutilized and ordered myself a few pounds of the UNCUT stuff. That's right, a big ol' block of pure pastrami. At home, I cut the side of blackened, fatty meat into batons a.k.a. thick stubby matchsticks. When dealing with something like bacon in French cooking, this shape gives a huge bang for the meaty-flavor buck. I mixed it in generously to my standard potato-onion mix, and loved how the outside coating of the pastrami started to mix in with the filling. The main spice in it is coriander, so I took some ground Berber coriander from my spice rack and amped it up -- the coriander is like a megaphone for the pastrami, and it is not messin' around.

It's a work in progress, but definitely shows promise out of the gate.

"Excellent knishes!" - Flo Fabricant

The NY Times is gettin' hep to the knishin' going down these parts! Rumor has it that as Mz. Fabricant left Malt and Mold, she muttered "Party time!" as she got into her Gremlin. Bolding is mine....

FOOD STUFF

Brews and Bites Off the Usual Track

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

By FLORENCE FABRICANT

Published: May 29, 2012

Suppose you are deep downtown, where Canal Street and the Lower East Side disappear into blocks of apartments past Seward Park, and you crave a beer. No, not just a Corona, but maybe something artisanal, like Ithaca Beer, from upstate. Kevin M. Heald’s smartly tailored little shop, Malt & Mold, is there to help. With his beard and hat, Mr. Heald (shown), 43, looks every bit the monger of cheese and beer he calls himself. He has assembled about 50 craft beers, mostly domestic, and a well-curated assortment of cheeses, also artisanal and American, along with some imports like taleggio. Pickles and chocolates from Brooklyn, yogurts, vinegars, crackers and cured meats line the shelves and display cases. For now, the beers are in bottles and cans; eight tap lines, and growlers in various sizes, await a state permit. The shop may be out of the way, but it is the only local retailer for the excellent sweet and savory knishes from Knishery NYC, a new company; for salami by Charlito’s Cocina, of St. Louis; and for ice cream from the Bent Spoon, of Princeton, N.J., which shares the freezer with Blue Marble, Adirondack and Van Leeuwen.

Malt & Mold, 221 East Broadway (Clinton Street), (646) 238-0272, maltandmold.com. Knishes are $4 for savory, $3 for sweet; Charlito’s Cocina dry salami is $15.50 for a six-ounce piece, and Bent Spoon ice cream is $9 for an 18-ounce container.

My Kasha Brings All the Boys (& Girls) to the Yard

Sign of the Times, if the Times were a Knish.

Last week, in the great Malt & Mold Knish Drought of '12, Proprietor Kevin sent me a note that several people had been inquiring about a kasha knish. Oddly enough, I had already put kasha into the pipeline to bloom this week. Evidence that Knishery NYC and the Lower East Side are on the same knish wavelength, darn it!

Vanilla, "Great Art", and New Knishes for Sale

That ain't dirt, son,  that is real grown-@ss vanilla bean! 

Spent a day making knishes for sale at Malt & Mold. Starting today (Tuesday 5/22), on tap will be potato onion, spinach-roasted garlic and three flavors new to M&M: Kasha, vanilla sweet cheese, and chocolate hazelnut cheese.  Rather than use an alcohol-laced vanilla extract, I always scrape whole vanilla beans for a bigger, purer flavor. Go get 'im!

They were out of stock over the weekend, but we're learning and hopefully there will be no more interruptions in the supply chain.

ADDENDA:
I  popped in on the Hester Street Fair and sampled a few items from Pie Corps. I had two savories, one was potato curry, the other was beet-horseradish. They strongly reminded me of Cornish pasties I used to eat on a regular basis when I lived in England (most common flavor - potato cheddar with lots of onion), which are the root pie for Jamaican beef patties, if you want to start tracing hand pies across the globe....but I think that' a different blog.

I first had the curry potato, cubes of potato slow cooked, nice texture, mild spice, very British with the brown flaky crust. The second was quite surprising. I asked the woman behind the table which savory she would recommend. She said she was a vegetarian (to which I wanted to say, so I guess you're NOT the proprietor?) and steered me to the one I wanted least, the beet-horseradish. I just don't like beets, even when I made them  in culinary school in a variety of ways -- they just taste like metal and dirt.

I'm familiar with beet-flavor horseradish from the purple horseradish served with gefilte fish at the passover table. The sweetness of the beet cuts the heat of the horseradish, and the sharpness of the horseradish takes away the dirt metallicness of the beets. Same thing happened in this delicious pocket pie. Chunky cooked pieces of beet in a thickened beet juice matched with fresh white horseradish to make a perfect sweet-spicey chord, with the crust bringing it together and calming/amplifying it with a fatty flake.

"Good artists borrow -- great artists steal." 

I am so developing a beet-horseradish knish!

ADDENDA 2:
Amazing how 30 lbs of onions cook down into less than 10 lbs of caramelized goodness. If pizza is just a vehicle for cheese delivery, then a proper knish is just a vehicle for caramelized onion delivery.

ADDENDA 3:
Vanilla is a culinary passion of mine. "Vanilla" means plain and boring, but REAL vanilla...oh my. The problem with even the best vanilla extract is that the more you use, the more your product...will be altered by the alcohol and water you are pumping into it. If you use more and more real vanilla bean pod-paste, your product will get....just more and more vanilla-y. (FYI, I save all my scraped beans and put some in a nest of sugar to develop vanilla sugar, and the others I put in a jar of grain alcohol, and when it's full, I blend it, strain it and cut it with 50% water to create quadruple strength extract for personal use in things like smoothies and wot-not. Vanilla is MAD expensive, I've seen it at two pods for $10 at Wholefoods, but you can get a pound for $20 here -- pennies on the bean, well worth it if you want a more delicious kitchen...or sweet knish.

Cheese Knishes Delayed

Unfortunately, upon cutting up the cheese knish loaves this morning, they were all together too loose and runny to be served or sold. I'll be tweaking the recipe and making them open-faced cupcake style, and should be available for sale in about one week. For an artisanal knish maker and artisanal knish lovers, those, my friends, are the breaks! Let my friend Kurtis explain further...

Update: Cheese Knishes Coming to Malt & Mold

 I'm happy to report that the knishes are moving briskly at Malt & Mold, and they're already on their third delivery since opening about a week ago. But look at the picture below...

Hey! You got cheese on my knish! Yo! You got knish on my cheese!

There is a lonely platter of knishes surrounds on all sides by wedges of cheese, rounds of cheese, slices of cheese, cheese to the left of me, cheese to the right of me, stuck in the middle with cheese cheese cheese! What's a knish to do?

If you can't beat them, join them. Starting Wednesday, Malt & Mold will be carrying cheese knishes. We're starting with plain vanilla and chocolate hazelnut, and we'll go crazy from there, depending on the feedback.