October 10, 2011 - 2:54am
Biting into the Mark's Carts cook-off
BY NICOLE ABER
- Nicole Aber/Daily
Saturday afternoon, the six food carts of Marks Carts on West Washington Street faced off in a cooking contest sponsored by French cookware manufacturer Le Creuset. Here at The Michigan Daily, we’ve tasted the samples and given you our take on the competition at Saturday’s cook-off.
The Lunch Room, which serves vegan fare, offered a tasty stewed vegetable medley atop fluffy rice and a toasted multigrain baguette. Called the fall harvest aloo yoop stew, it was a combination of potatoes, sweet potatoes, cauliflower, red bell pepper, onion, chickpeas and peas. The vegetables were cooked to a perfect consistency with coconut milk, curry, vegetable broth, seasoned pepitas — or squash seeds — and spices. The ingredients cooked for about an hour, according to Phillis Engelbert, co-owner of The Lunch Room, and the excellent timing showed. The vegetables tasted just right — they weren’t too soft, and the stew had texture and steered clear of a soupy or mushy consistency. The curry and other spices gave the yellow-orange stew a slight kick, though it didn’t overpower the other flavors in the dish. It was slightly sweet from the sweet potatoes and coconut milk, slightly spicy from the curry and all around an autumn comfort food that didn’t weigh you down. It could have used a pinch more salt, though, to bring out the flavors that much more. Underneath the stew was multigrain rice that made each spoonful even more satisfying. The stew was complimented by a piece of multigrain baguette toast brushed with garlic and oil and crisped to perfection. With just the right amount of crunch, the toast partnered well with the stew and contributed to the harmony of fall flavors abound in the dish.
Next stop was the Humble Hogs, which featured a truffled macaroni and cheese with white cheddar, gruyere and prosciutto. Though the Humble Hogs didn’t take home the cook-off prize, it’s The Michigan Daily’s winner. The Humble Hogs’s dish had all the makings of a perfect mac and cheese — not-too-soft macaroni; nutty, salty cheese that’s not on overload and a few surprises. The surprises in this dish were the always-delectable truffles, the delicate, savory prosciutto, nutmeg — which brought out the nuttiness of the cheese — and an ever-so-slight kick from the cayenne pepper. The dish also had an interesting array of textures — something that’s often missing from mac and cheese — from the al-dente macaroni, the bits of crisped prosciutto and cubed bread. Many mac and cheese dishes are baked with a breadcrumb topping, but the Humble Hogs took this one up another notch and used whole cubes of bread. Soft from baking, yet retaining a slight crunch, the bread complimented the soft macaroni perfectly. But the star ingredient, of course, was the cheese with its salty, nutty flavor that smoothed over the taste buds and made us never want to eat from-the-box mac and cheese again.
San Street seems to be a favorite among regular customers, with steamed pork buns in high demand even with the plentitude of free samples Saturday. San Street’s pork buns even got a shout-out in the recent New York Times “36 Hours Ann Arbor” photo slideshow. Yesterday, the cart served up “Not Your Korean Grandma’s Kimchi Stuffing,” a unique twist on the Thanksgiving staple. The stuffing had a complexity of both flavors and textures. It was smoky from the bacon yet bitter from the kimchi. The variety of ingredients in the dish made the stuffing a multi-layered one: The soft, but not mushy, brussel sprouts and kimchi were paired with slightly chewy pieces of bread, which — being Zingerman’s Roadhouse Bread — scored high notes in itself. All in all, the stuffing combined classic dishes from two different cultures — American stuffing and Korean kimchi — and made them sing together.
The winner of the cook-off was Hut-K Chaat, which aims to serve healthy Indian food packed with flavor. Its winning dish — shanu chaat — was no exception to the cart’s mission. With both sweet and spicy flavors, the shanu chaat was a combination of crushed chickpeas, colocasia leaves, baked multigrain chips, potatoes, peas and Hut-K Chaat’s special sauce. The dish was topped with “chickpea flour savories,” the dish’s ingredient list read, or a crunchy, crushed chip-like topping that introduced a new texture to the vegetable medley. Though some of the ingredients paralleled several that were in The Lunch Room’s fall harvest stew, the two dishes had completely different flavors. The shanu chaat’s nutritional value was evident, and not just from its green color. The tender colocasia leaves resembled spinach, but were slightly starchier. It’s clear Hut-K Chaat owners Swaroop and Sumi Bhojani have more than health in mind when it comes to their food. The flavors were interesting and complex, and the dichotomy of textures made the dish far from boring.
Each dish brought together elements of autumn in its own way. But because the carts are so different, comparing the dishes to one another was a little like comparing apples and oranges. If served at a dinner party, each would most likely be devoured and the licked-clean plates would be piled high next to the sink. But the mac and cheese, with its nutty gruyere, savory prosciutto and delicate truffle undertones, would be the dish everyone would be talking about the next day.
Unfortunately, two of the carts were out of samples when the Daily was at the cook-off. Darcy’s Cart’s Chelsea Chile Verde and Debajo del Sol’s Jay’s Cassoulet were available during the event but are not included in this review.
