5 Days to Hester Street: Dough n' Onions

If knishes were the Enterprise, these would be dilithium crystals.

Hopefully this will be the last time I'll be cooking in quantity from my home kitchen, so I thought I'd sit down and document it a little, create a little time capsule to look back at when I'm in charge of a multi-national knish konglomerate.

Including this past day, it is five production days to the Hester Street Fair. (And Wednesday I'm taking a meeting for my other work stuff, and teaching culinary at a high school in the evening.) Thing is, if you make a knish more than 2 or 3 days in advance and don't freeze them, they start losing maximum flavor. So Thursday and Friday are the big baking days, but there is plenty to do before then.

Today was two major components: caramelized onions and dough. All my savory knishes, regardless of flavor, have a healthy dose of properly caramelized onions. Forty pounds of onions, minced, tossed with some fat and some salt, then slow-baked for about 8 hours. Cooled, drained, stored.

Balls of knish dough, rare imported giant slugs, or black market butt-implants: you be the judge.

My dough is potato based, so thirty pounds of potatoes were peeled, boiled and sent through a food mill. Due to lack of a commercial-sized mixer, I had to do ten batches. Eggs, fat and salt beaten, then potatoes added and beaten some more. Flour added and mechanically kneaded until it comes together, wrapped and stored. Too busy for grammar.

I found I shorted my potato pile, and needed to turn a couple of bagged potatoes into mashed potatoes in the shortest amount of time possible, as I had to leave time to clean up, feed my 1 year old, shower and go pick up my toddler from school. So I did what every great chef does: I googled a video.

And it worked! The potatoes came out wetter than I like, but for the purpose of potatoes for dough, it was more than acceptable.

In the evening, after Mrs. Knishy took over child care after a long day of work of her own, I roasted a pile of garlic heads, which will cool over night and be ready to be processed into a spinach filling tomorrow...

The house smelled like wonderful onions this morning. Smells like round roasted garlic this evening. So tired. So knishy. And it's only day 1!

And Kickstarter!

Thanks / Hester Street This Saturday

Wow! Thanks to everyone who kicked in to our Kickstarter so far, we're 25% of the way there. Please keep on passing on the word -- to help, here is an outtake from the video where Mrs. Knish felt compelled to jump in and give you a piece of her mind. It's not for the faint of heart!

Knish-production is starting at the HQ, caramelizing buckets of onions and putting together dough. This coming Saturday, unless there is another freak storm, we'll finally be debuting at the Hester Street Fair from 10am to 6pm. Though subject to change, this is the menu:

• Potato & Caramelized Onion
• Spinach & Roasted Garlic
• Pastrami & Coriander
• Kasha & Pumpkin

In addition, we'll be doing a sampler of one mini each. Well, I gotta get back to cooking before Baby Knish wakes up and demands my attention. Thanks again!

Knishstarter

Click here to visit the Kickstarter page

Giving birth to a knish start-up and a establishing a new baby boy around the same time are not two great tastes that go great together. It'll make you mix your metaphors! Anyway, after a lot of build up, here is the big news, in four parts. Two biggies, two....not so biggies.

1. KICKSTARTER: We gone dun it, now! It starts today, ends in 30 days. See video above for the basics, and visit the page for the full story, the goodies you can get for contributing, and more!
2. HESTER STREET FAIR: After our debut was smooshed by the cold hand of a freakishly snowy late October day last year, we're debuting...again. Saturday, October 20th, at the Hester Street Fair. Come meet your knishmaker, and have a nosh.
3. MALT & MOLD IS ON FIRE: Well, not literally, more like electrically glowing with heat, because they just got an electric oven-thingy that can heat your knishes up to a toasty temp if you want to eat them on the spot.
4. KNYC ON YOUR SCREENS: A network-affiliated film crew will be filming Knishery NYC baking for the Hester St Fair, then filming at the fair itself. Details TBA.

Phew! This is a short post, but long-gestating. That's it for now, expect updates leading up to the 20th and the end of the Kickstarter campaign. Thanks!!

My Knishes TALK!

If these knishes could talk, what would they say? Well, the two fine people pictured below came to KnisheryNYC headquarters yesterday and spent a few hours finding out. They were kinda disappointed to find that knishes are actually just inanimate objects that you are supposed to eat, but once they got over it, they filmed me making our signature knishes and talking about three things I consider myself an expert in:

• Myself
• Makin' 'nishes
• New York (because all native NYers are experts in NYC, fugeddaboudit)

Heather & Mitch, knish-anthropomorphisers

Heather & Mitch have been working on a documentary about New York City accents called If These Knishes Could Talk for over half a decade, and now that they are near the end of filming, they found they were light on actual knish content. I asked Heather why she'd feature the knish in the title of her passion project that ostensibly was not about knishes, she replied, "I was hungry." After an awkward pause that never happened because she didn't say that, she explained that to her, the knish was a proud and uniquely NYC icon that still exists, but seems to have faded a bit in recent decades, just like the Noo Yawk accent.

Did they go to a dirty water dog cart for their knish? NO! Did they go to the Gabilla factory to check out a big machine stamping out doughy yellow fried potato bombs? NO! Did they  go to Smorgasburg and change the name of their doc because Heather discovered Korean Tacos? NO! They came to the Lower East Side, and filmed me giving birth (excuse me, boith) to these little ones:

From left to right, from top: Hymie, Nachum, Malka, Elie, Schlomo, Milli, Edie, Edna, Milty, Aggie, Miriam, Harry, Sara, Herschel, Hershel, Hershell, Rodrigo and Sol.

And guess what? After Heathala and Mitchala took their fare share, the rest of the kids are now at Malt & Mold ready to be adopted! Just think! You can be eating a famous knish that is starring in a big moderate budget Hollywood NYC action adventure documentary!

Speaking of Malt & Mold, they're having a beer tasting this Saturday (8/11) from 4 to 7pm. On hand will be a whole mess of mini knishes (spinach & roasted garlic, pastrami and potato & caramelized onion) for sampling with your beer. Huzzah!

And no, that was not the big news I've been hinting at this summer. Plans are still in the work, so stay tuned!

Eat some freebies this Saturday!

What's up, Knishophiles! Some announcements are coming down the pipe, but until then...

Malt & Mold will be having a beer tasting this coming Saturday, July 21st. That's right, free beer. And what's better with free beer than FREE KNISHES. We're baking off a whole mess of minis to munch on while gettin' yo drank on. Be there.

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.