Three days to Hester St AND four days to Grub St!

Today was a stutter-step, a day away from the kitchen to take meetings, teach my weekly culinary class at a high school in Brooklyn, and steel myself for the next 3 days living in a cloud of dough, potato, onion, fillings, baking, storing, worrying, kvetching, etc. Well, those three days just gave birth to a fourth!

KnisheryNYC is teaming up with La Crepe c'est si bon to share a table on Sunday at the massive Grub Street Food Festival! La Crepe is a local shop on Eldridge St in the heart of the Lower East Side, and I guess their way of big-upping the 'hood is reaching out to little fish like KNYC to see if we'd like to hang out for a day. I'm excited, flattered, a bit nervous and greatly looking forward to two days of back-to-back feeding y'all some 'nishes.

Tomorrow, food-porny knish shots from the first round of baking.

And kickstarter!

4 Days to Hester: Pumpkins, Kasha & Spinach

Another day of prep, can't bake knishes today as I don't want to be serving not-so-fresh knishes on Saturday. Working by myself with a baby nipping at my heels and pushing everything through pots, pans and ovens sized for home-cooking definitely makes a few days of prep necessary to make a few days of knish making possible.

So what went down at KnisheryNYC HQ today? Due to limits of the kitchen, we had to outsource the making of the pastrami. We took a whole side of the meat from Katz's home and had our way with it.

Many moons ago I tried a pastrami knish and it was just a tube of mashed potatoes with little slivers of deli-sliced pastrami scattered in. KnisheryNYC's knishes will have thick nubbins of hand carved pastrami studded all through out. And freshly ground coriander. Oh yes.

We went into our fields and harvested a few bushels of kasha just for you. And then we, uh, put them in a box, took them out of a box, tossed them with some egg and quickly sauteed them....

Out of the caste-iron and into seasoned boiling water for a quick simmer. Sauteing with egg before simmering guarantees the kasha will have some definition, and not just be an odd groaty tasting mush.

To lighten up the kasha and get all seasonal wit' it, we chopped up some pumpkin (and some butternut squash), baked it in the oven, then mixed it in with the kasha.

I've never done this before in this style -- I could have chosen to mash the squashes and use them as a binder, but I think soft cubes of pumpkin will give a nice punch of flavor.

And then there was the spinach, chopped, tossed with oil and salt and baked for 30 minutes. Tossed again with the mashed roasted garlic from last night, and it's ready to go.

Finished up ahead of schedule, so I peeled 15 lbs of potatoes while feeding an amusing the gremlin that was dogging me all morning:

Yes, I peeled potatoes 48 hours before I need to use them. But have no fear, this will not hurt the potatoes. Once peeled in a pot covered with water for about 30 minutes, I changed the water, dropped a tiny capful of vinegar in with fresh water to cover, covered the pot, and into the cool, dark closet until I need them Thursday. I would usually put them in the fridge at this point, but it's getting just too jammed up.

Tomorrow, I'm out with other work and teaching a culinary class. However, I'm taking a meeting in regards to the knishing in the morning and may have an interesting announcement to make tomorrow evening. Stay tuned!

And kickstarter!!

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.