PORKCAMP: FROM PIG, TO PORK, TO PLATE

I have twittered about it. I have put pictures up on Facebook and I have even written an article about the event for The Independent. So, just to finish things off and give the final word on the wonderful weekend that was PORKCAMP, here is a quick post about it on DH.

There is not much else to say, once yu have read the article other than it is invitations like this that confirm, if I still ever need confirmation, that my decision to base the second half of my life around the mantra “GO EVERYWHERE, EAT EVERYTHING” was entirely the correct one.

The invitation came from my new chum Florian back at the tail end of 2010 and there was not one chance that I was ever going to turn down an opportunity to spend time with fellow meat enthusiasts even if it did mean braving temperatures of -19o. There was the promise of good company and great food, the offer of a bed in a local apartment and, more importantly, the chance to experience at first hand the fact that for me to deal with my passion for flesh another of the Lord’s creatures had to give up its life.

I have no problem with that, it is the natural order of things, but I do believe that if we are going to eat animals the process from pig to pork to plate should be transparent and the end for the animals should be efficient and as stress free as possible. At Porkcamp, I saw how these things can be done well and the end result meant that what ended up on our plates tasted even better for knowing how it got there.

Most of all, however, Porkcamp was, as all things involving food should be, about community. What started out as a group of disparate individuals brought together from all over Germany by one man’s vision and the use of social networking, ended up as a close knit group of friends making solemn promises to stay in touch and create other events like this.

I am, as I say in the article, working on PORKCAMPUK, which if it is a tenth as remarkable as the original will be well worth attending. Watch this space.

LANGER'S: TAKING THE #19 TO MACARTHUR PARK.

For as long as I have been coming to L.A, in recent times, my good chum, John Haskell has been telling me “one day, I’ll take you to Langer’s for a pastrami sandwich”. Today after over eighteen months of promises we both manged to sculpt time from our schedules to finally share that lunch at one of L.A’s most famous diners.

Langer’s Delicatessen opened in 1947, with just twelve seats and still sits in the same location at the corner of Seventh and Alvarado, near the famous MacArthur Park, in what is now a predominately Latino part of the city. The opening of a subway station less than a block away in the 90’s is credited on its website as one of the main reasons for its survival, both in the face of several economic downturns and threats from encroaching gangland culture. Now, after over sixty years of serving what many consider to be the best pastrami sandwiches in the country, it is now very firmly established as a treasured local institution and was already filling up with people as we arrived and squeezed into a booth a little before 11am.

John has been a regular at Langer’s since he was first taken there in 1970 and has never veered from his usual selection, Langer’s most famous sandwich, The #19. This comprises hot pastrami, coleslaw, Russian dressing and a slice of Swiss cheese on baked rye bread. Although the menu is vast and the plates being carried by the waitresses to other tables all looked tempting, there was little chance I was going to try anything else on my first visit.

We shared an ice cream scoop mound of chopped liver while we waited. It needed a good dose of salt, but was a pleasant enough way to distract ourselves until the sandwiches arrived ten minutes later. When they did, it was easy enough to understand why John had warned me to “come hungry”. The #19 is a challenging plateful with excellent rye bread sandwiching thick slices of warm hand cut Pastrami, beef which is cured, smoked and steamed to produce that distinct colour and those darkened edges. The end result is moist and juicy with the creamy slaw adding a crunch to each bite and the slice of Swiss cheese giving the whole thing a slight tang. Only the pickles let the side down, needing more sharpness to cut through the richness of the meat.

Comparisons with its East Coast rivals in the “Best Pastrami Sandwich” stakes are inevitable and the pastrami at Langer’s certainly bears a closer resemblance to the Katz’s pastrami than the wafer thin, but delicious light pink slices I tried recently at Johnny’s in Culver City. It’s hard to make a call on the meat without another visit to Katz’s, but the rye bread used at Langer’s is certainly streets ahead of its rival. It is prepared for them, I am told, by a baker out in The Valley and then baked one more time on site to give the sandwich an extra crunch to the crust. A far cry from the poor effort made on the Lower East Side.

Good pastrami, it would appear does not come cheap and our bill including the chopped liver, two sandwiches and two terrific chocolate malts came to just shy of $60 including tax and service. A lot to pay for a quick lunch, perhaps, but not too much to sample a piece of local history and certainly not too much to spend time in the company of one of my favourite people in Los Angeles.

VIRTUAL FARMERS MARKET: DIRECT TO YOUR DOORSTEP IN 3D

Regular readers of DOS HERMANOS may recall that, last June, I put up a post about Marcus Carter, perpetual motion in human form, who sells the worlds best peanut butter. Delighted though I was to find a UK source for one of my favourite things to eat, my initial reason for meeting Marcus was to discuss his nascent online project The Virtual Farmers Market which he hoped would bring food shopping into a new era with the use of online gaming technology.

Things had gone a bit quiet from Marcus since our initial chat (and if anyone has had their ears talked off by him, you will know that is a hard thing to achieve) and I wondered if he had decided to concentrate on his other businesses ventures, putting aside the VFM because of the development cost it was incurring and the time it was taking from more profitable endeavours.

Then, in January, I got the call to say it was up and running and he came to my apartment to give me a demonstration. I wrote a piece about it for The Guardian's WORD OF MOUTH blog, where the response was, to be honest, a bit sniffy. I can understand why. The fun and games of finding your way around the virtual market is all well and good, but if the service and the product is not up to scratch, then it is all so much piss and wind. There was only one way to find out if it was any good or not and that was to spend some of my own cold hard cash to see what happened.

I had not played a video game since the early 1980's when the very notion of table tennis on your TV set was a central story for Judith Hann on Tomorrow's World. Despite that, I found the website easy to navigate and a fun diversion as I was able to "walk" around the market and meet the producers, clicking on the link to see short videos of them describing their products. The ordering system is easy and a few button presses later, I had reached the minimum order level of £30 (now reduced to £25 I notice) and received a mail telling me that my goods were on their way. True to their word, an AM order one day received an AM delivery the next day. The packaging was secure and fresh produce, in this case a package of Label Anglais chicken breasts, was surrounded with ice packs. All in all an easy and pleasant ordering experience.

None of this would matter, of course, if the produce wasn't up to much, but Marcus has worked hard to bring in excellent suppliers from the UK and further abroad and, although the list is a bit limited at the moment, it is growing all the time. Mind you, as long as he keeps stocking Koeze Cream Nut Peanut Butter he will be hearing from me a lot more than he ever could have wanted.

Well worth a try.

L.A. FEELS LIKE COMIN' HOME: A HARD HAMBURGER HABIT TO BREAK

It wasn’t the best burger in Los Angeles by any stretch of the imagination. Hell, it wasn’t even the best in this neighbourhood, with the glories of The Apple Pan only a few short blocks away (I think). But, as I bit down into my “sassy” cheeseburger made with cheddar and dipped a crunchy French fry into a sludge of yellow mustard, I had to admit that it still tasted better than 90% of the examples I have experienced in London.

And, that’s the truth of it. Hamburgers will always taste better in the U.S. even the lousy or average ones. In the end it boils down to context. Just as a pint of beer will never taste better than when it is sipped in front of a roaring fire on a cold day or fish & chips when eaten from the wrapping on the way to a lower division football game, so a hamburger needs a touch of the red, white & blue to truly hit the spot.

For all the talk of buns, meat, leaves and cheese, the secret to a good burger really has very little to do with sourcing the finest ingredients known to man. A good burger needs to be made with decent stuff, of course, but it also needs a top notch short order cook who is smarter than the skillet and it needs the appropriate surroundings. In short, for a burger to be really, really good, it needs to be made in America.

Today’s lunch was almost inevitable. I have been craving a decent American hamburger since I got back to the UK after New Year. Despite my best efforts and the opening of some new places promising much, it just had not happened. So, forgetting my declarations to Sybil that I would eat more healthily in the run up to the wedding, I caved and decided that my first lunch back in the City of Angels had to involve something slapped between two halves of a bun.

I had noticed Hamburger Habit on my last trip and research showed that it received decent crit from the locals and might be worth a visit. Unfortunately, Sybil had decided to take the car into work, which meant that, if I wanted a burger centric luncheon, I was going to have to walk. That’s almost as rare an occurrence in L.A. as finding a decent burger joint in London, but my craving was by now full on. I slapped on some factor 30 and headed out on what turned out to be a six mile route march.

Was it worth the hike? Not really, but then few things would be that don’t involve a massage from a cute 20 year old cheerleader with daddy issues. But, had I travelled the three miles each way by car as most sane angelenos would (a round trip of about all of ten minutes) I would have had very few reasons to complain.

Hamburger Heaven is a faux 50’s style diner, which normally means lousy food. But, the burgers here are sizable and cooked to order, the ingredients are decent and the fries pretty close to perfect. The end results are acceptable, if unremarkable by local standards, but seemingly impossible for all but a few back in Blighty.

The bill came to $9 including a $1 thrust into the tip jar and I was back out on the road, slurping on a free refill of diet Coke, about 15 minutes after I arrived. No muss, no fuss, no highly researched concept and no twitter campaign.

It’s good to be back in L.A. It’s already beginning to feel like home.