The Best Lobster Roll In the World – Red’s Eats

If you’re ever driven up into Maine on Route 1 you know what I’m talking about. There in the town of Wiscasset, sitting hard on the west side going north just before the Sheepscot River Bridge, sits Red’s Eats. Red’s opened in Boothbay in 1938, and moved to the north end of Wiscasset in 1954. The traffic jams in Wincasset are legendary for this simple reason - Red’s sells a perfect Lobster Roll for $14.00 that people stop for from miles around. In fact the traffic is so bad that they are proposing to move Red’s Eats about 50 feet and put in a new bridge that will divert around Wiscasset and its legendary lobster shack.

Red's is a real lobster shack, a building built around a small house trailer with a single window where you both place and pick up your order. The lines can be 100 feet long on a hot summer day. About 25,000 cars a day cruise through town during the summer months. The cars at the intersection can be backed up a mile or more. It’s worth it.

Each Red’s Lobster Roll contains all the meat from a one-pound lobster extracted in glistening chunks and piled into a toasted split-top bun served with a cup of drawn butter or mayonnaise. It is lobster-eater's nirvana.

Red's Lobster Roll Recipe

New York Times article

Herbal Butter

Over the years I have always used herbal butter for corn-on-the-cob until it has become second nature. After multiple requests here is the recipe for this simple nectar. After all, if it tastes good it has butter in it.

2 sticks butter
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup chopped fresh herbs; basil, thyme, parsley, lavender, rosemary, oregano, as you wish
1  teaspoon apple vinegar
freshly ground pepper to taste
sea salt to taste

Slowly melt the butter in a sauce pan and add the ingredients. Blanch your just-out-of-the-field corn in boiling water for two minutes or less. Drain and pour the herbal butter over the corn in the bowl. This is also great on any grilled fish, boiled potatoes, grilled onions, boiled cabbage and carrots, and on and on…

Enjoy!

Deconstructing Alice Waters


Anthony Bourdain is the quintessential lighting rod in the narrow confines of the US food world. Folks either love him or hate him. I loved Kitchen Confidential because it humanized the shadowy world of fine dining. He told the truth – or at least his version of the truth.

In his latest book, Medium Raw, we have the added surprise of an older Bourdain who actually has distilled (literally) into an excellent writer. There are the obligatory “Emperor’s New Clothes” undressing of pretentious and over hyped celebrity chefs of course – that’s his trademark. But even here his skill in deconstructing Alice Waters is akin to watching a fine surgeon at work.

Where Bourdain really shines however, far beyond “food writing”, are in his chapters in which he roams the world in jewel-like vignettes of food experiences, and in the amazing profile of the fish butcher at Le Bernardin. Justo Thomas prepares 700 pounds of fish at the country’s best fish restaurant every day – 1,000 pounds on weekends! He is an artist, as is Bourdain’s description.

Or not – you either love the guy or you don’t.
 
Richard Wottrich

Truffles are no Trifle

Italy’s “King of Truffles” died on June 17 at age 79. Paolo Urbani and his brother ran Urbani Tartufi, which claimed control of 70% of the world market for both black and white truffles. Along the way Urbani introduced Italian truffles to the world as well.
Truffles are the coveted fungi above all others dating back to medieval times. The 18th-century French gastronome Brillat-Savarin called truffles "the diamond of the kitchen". Urbani’s family founded the firm back in the 1800s.

The white truffle or Alba madonna (Tuber magnatum) comes from the Langhe area of the Piedmont region in northern Italy and, most famously, in the countryside around the city of Alba. It is also found in Croatia, on the Istria peninsula in the Motovun forest alongside Mirna river. While in Dubrovnik in 2007 I had ethereal white truffles showered on creamed white noodles that were nectar from the gods.

Growing symbiotically with oak, hazel, poplar and beech and fruiting in autumn, truffles can reach 12 cm diameter and 500 g, though are usually much smaller. The flesh is pale cream or brown with white marbling. Like the French black truffles, Italian white truffles are highly esteemed.

The white truffle market in Alba is busiest in the months of October and November, where a 1.6-pound white truffle sold for $150,000 on Nov. 8, 2009 during the 79th White Truffle Festival. In 2001, the Tuber magnatum truffles sold for between $1,000 and $2,200 US per pound; as of December 2009 they were being sold at 10,200€ per kilogram ($28,130 per pound).

The Chinese truffle (Tuber sinensis, also sometimes called Tuber indicum) is a winter black truffle harvested in China. Due to their fast growing nature, Chinese truffles are often exported to the West as an inferior-quality substitute of Tuber melanosporum. Restaurants have been known to serve Chinese truffles and claim they are the real deal.

Urbani has a vast network throughout Italy that supplies the firm with truffles and provides it with competitive information. Farmers keep secret the location of their truffle trees and they have been known to poison competitor’s dogs. Historically truffles were hunted by pigs, but they love to eat the stuff, so dogs have been substituted. Old truffle hunters, known as Cavatori, or extractors, can be recognized by the fingers they have lost to their truffle pigs.

Today more than half the annual black truffle production is farmed. But the illusive and prized white truffles must still be gathered in the wild. As for Urbani, his daughter Olga will carry on the family tradition.
Richard Wottrich