Chelsea Market Makers: Recipes, Tips, and Techniques from the Artisans of New York's Premier Food Hall

INTRODUCTION

Chelsea Market is home to many of New York’s premier craftsmen, cooks, bakers, and food purveyors. As parts of a dynamic whole, the people who have contributed to this book bring to it a range of talent, knowledge, and wisdom that comes from specializing in their particular craft in the company of like-minded specialists. The fast-paced lifestyle characteristic of New York City makes it all the more important that we take time to appreciate and value true craftsmanship.

While Chelsea Market fills with its own particular energy from the time the doors open until after dark, the space is also home to a mix of skilled, passionate makers whose daily work demonstrates the value of deliberate creation. No matter how busy the retail stores or restaurants might be, the symbiosis between the front and back ends, the retailers and wholesalers, is fundamental to what Chelsea Market is to our community. Most vendors at the Market are wholesalers first and retailers second. That’s a good thing for you if you shop at the Market because it means you’ve taken out the middleman. Many of the market’s vendors are the sole importers of the goods they sell, but far more are curators of the best ingredients—the very raw materials of the soups, breads, gelato, candies, cakes, cookies, pastas, stews, cocktails, tacos, ramen, crêpes, and sandwiches they make every day.

Whether you come to the Market to buy your ingredients, to eat, or to do a little of each, it’s difficult to get very far down the corridor without eating something—maybe one of the incredible salt caramel–chocolate fudge brownies Pat Helding makes at Fat Witch or the best organic hot dog you’ve ever tasted from Jake Dickson at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats or an astonishing lobster roll from Ian MacGregor at the Lobster Place. Whatever you find yourself popping into your mouth as you shop and look, you’re bound to witness crowds of businessmen, mothers, nannies, sightseers, and serious chefs doing just what you’re doing. Some rush through to return with their bounty to their own kitchens, while others engage with the space slowly, as if experiencing a county fair for the first time.

One of the qualities we love best about the Market is the way its vast array of choices prompts our desire—to consume, of course, but also to make, create, and participate. Take Esther Choi, who opened Mŏkbar a little more than a year ago at age twenty-eight. She has been making kimchi since she was old enough to trail behind her grandmother’s skirt into the kitchen. Esther was born in Philadelphia, but she’s a first-generation American with deep roots in Korean food culture. We’ve gathered Esther’s unusual knowledge of traditional ingredients and techniques while at the same time capturing the freshness and dedication (her stock takes more than ten days to make from start to finish) that make her kimchi ramen unlike any other in our ramen-obsessed city. This is but one example of the people, personalities, and voices that fill Chelsea Market and make it a destination for makers and consumers from across New York City and beyond.

Situated in the heart of the historic Meatpacking District, Chelsea Market is perfectly at home. At the turn of the previous century, Meatpacking was a central market location in the city, with more than 250 slaughterhouses and packing plants, because of its proximity to the rail line and the Hudson River. It quickly came to include a variety of other craftsmen, from cigar makers to import-export businesses. Through the ups and downs of the past one hundred years, the neighborhood has remained a market hub. The building in which Chelsea Market is housed was once the Nabisco factory—and the birthplace of the venerable Oreo cookie in 1898 when the companies merged. In 1990, New York City developer Irwin Cohen spearheaded the redevelopment of the existing buildings, connecting the entire block via a passage on the ground level. He then invited a handful of wholesalers to try retail.

This one-million-plus-square-foot space is now home to Chelsea Market, owned, managed, and curated by Jamestown, with more than fifty artisan food purveyors filling the lively concourse. In addition to the varied mix of tenants who occupy the public space on the ground level, what tourists and locals alike don’t see is that the market is also home to a multitude of office tenants who fill the upper floors, including MLB.com, YouTube, Food Network, NY 1 News, and Google.

One of the things we like best about the Market is the sense of history and the collective spirit of production that makes the vendors and other occupants of the building something like one dynamic, purposeful whole. The diversity of Chelsea Market today mirrors the development of the Meatpacking District, a neighborhood known throughout New York City for its food, fashion, art, and technology. With the addition of the Whitney Museum of American Art just down the street, the era of the new Meatpacking District has arrived, and Chelsea Market remains solidly at its core.

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APPLES AND OTHER FRUIT

We rely on the Manhattan Fruit Exchange and the Latilla brothers who own and operate it for sharing the knowledge they’ve accumulated during their almost thirty years in the business. The brothers began by selling produce to just one restaurant in 1974. Today, three decades later, with two generations working at the Exchange, they’re still in business, now with hundreds of restaurants, plus a retail store and suppliers from around the world to match. When you shop there you’re buying directly from the wholesaler—just one step away from buying from a grower at a farmers’ market. You can’t get any closer to the source unless you pick the fruit yourself.

Step into the chilly walk-in retail store in Chelsea Market and you’re likely to discover something new, or, if you’re a professional, you’ll encounter prime specimens and varieties of fruit you can’t find anywhere else. We open this chapter with New York’s most famous contribution to the fruit world—the apple. It’s a humble, honored fruit.

APPLES

Vito Latilla begins pestering his New York growers for the new crop of apples in mid-August, when the first upstate fruit is ripe enough for picking. After the first hard frost, sometime in November, he leaves them alone, turning to the South for citrus. As you know if you like apples—who doesn’t?—the quality and variety of the fruit available year-round has exploded in recent years. Given the crazy abundance of types on the market, from heirloom varieties to new hybrids, if your favorite is Red or Golden Delicious—the vanilla ice creams of the apple world—it’s time to look further afield. There’s no longer any excuse for a bad apple.

One of Vito’s favorite apples happens to be dominating the market at the moment. It’s an Australian hybrid with a balance of tart and sweet called Cripps Pink, trademarked in 2012 under the name Pink Lady. The Pink Lady vies for space and attention with its closest competitor, the Honeycrisp. Developed at the Minnesota Agricultural Research Station and trademarked in 1988, the Honeycrisp is a tad too sweet for Vito’s taste. (We’re big fans of it.) Both varieties are outstanding eating apples—crisp and firm with tender skin protecting the flesh’s large cells. These apples practically pop when you bite into them, and they hit the palate with tart juice infused with notes of citrus. They are at once fragrant, sweet, and refreshingly bright. Bred for extended shelf life, these beauties hold their staying power in the produce aisle right into March, even if the unmistakable bold, honest flavor of a local apple only a week or two off the tree won’t keep beyond Thanksgiving.

CITRUS AND BERRIES

By the time apple season comes to a close in late October, you’ll be encountering the bright temptation of clementines in tidy wooden boxes, followed quickly by a new crop of grapefruit, oranges, lemons, and eventually mandarins. Before you know it, strawberry season will rescue you from waning citrus, defining the opening of a new season as much as the rising temperatures and the appearance of local asparagus and fiddleheads. As the months pass, the early spring bounty is overtaken by cherries and currants, and then by the miracle of perfect raspberries and blueberries. You’ll be tired of the heat by the time the final blackberries have ripened or been plucked by hungry birds. By then apples are well into their own season before it all begins again. With the vagaries of weather and heat determining the strengths and weaknesses of the season’s fruit, every year is different enough to make each crop feel like a new adventure.

MELONS

As one of the best produce buyers in Manhattan, with any number of fruits available to him, Vito chooses to consume as much watermelon as possible throughout the summer months, extending the season by locating the earliest available melons in May and the latest fall melons in October. Vito never fails to get his hands sticky from the juicy melons he chooses, since he knows better than anyone how to identify a ripe, sweet melon. His advice? Look at the flattened oval on the bottom of the melon where it rested in the field—it’s called a field spot. The spot should be distinctively yellow and fairly well defined. A melon without a spot was picked long before it ripened. He advises you to pick up your melon—heavy is good. Actually, Vito’s fail-safe rule is to seek out produce that’s heavy for its size. It’s a solid tip to remember since it can be applied to a range of produce including melons, lettuce (always pick the heaviest head of romaine), sweet peppers—even onions.

We suspect Vito loves watermelon as much as he does in part because it’s one of those fruits that have not yet been doomed to year-round ubiquity. Sure, he says, you can now get just about any fruit no matter what the season, but that doesn’t mean you should eat raspberries in January. Vito doesn’t—he saves the pleasure for when they’re in season, and we recommend you do the same. As even the most seasonally out-of-tune shopper knows, winter berries, peaches, plums, and cherries have been flown in overnight from Chile, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, or Australia. In other words, they’ve come from half a world away. Vito points out that cool-weather, non-tropical fruits are meant to be harvested ripe and tend to lose their flavor quickly once picked. We take this to mean it’s not really worth the expense to buy them when they’re not in season—coming from so far away, whatever flavor or scent they may have rubs off in transit.

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Rustic Apple Streusel Pie

SARABETH’S BAKERY WITH MANHATTAN FRUIT EXCHANGE

Here, one of Chelsea Market’s goddesses of baking, Sarabeth Levine, offers her legendary pie recipe. It will take you through every step, and, because of the streusel topping, there’s no crimping crusts or weaving lattice. The combination of tart apples, a hint of Grade B maple syrup, Sarabeth’s famously tender crust, and a lightly caramelized top will have you lingering at the table, shaving off just one more sliver, until you whittle your pie down to nothing.

Serves 8

4 pounds (1.8 kg) Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, and cut into ⅛-inch (3-mm) slices

⅔ cup (135 g) granulated sugar

3 tablespoons all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling out the dough

2 teaspoons pure maple syrup, preferably Grade B

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

¾ vanilla bean, or ¾ teaspoon vanilla extract

½ recipe Tender Pie Dough (recipe follows)

1 large egg, beaten

1 recipe Streusel Topping (recipe follows)

Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Place a baking pan in the oven to heat.

Stir the apples, sugar, flour, maple syrup, lemon juice, and cinnamon together in a medium bowl until well combined. Cut the vanilla bean in half lengthwise, scrape out the seeds, and add them to the bowl with the apples (or add the vanilla extract) and stir until combined.

Place the dough on a lightly floured work surface and dust the top with flour. Roll out into a 15-inch (38-cm) round. Transfer the dough to a 9-inch (23-cm) pie plate, centering it in the plate and letting the excess dough hang over the sides. The dough should not be stretched over the edge of the pan; it should rest there easily, slack rather than taut.