Buffalo Food-In-Food & Food Piles
Two Dishes From One Prep
Towards a Classification of Food
Food piles, food-in-food, soup.
These are the three food categories as my college friend Lucas once loosely declared. And, you know what, it works.
Food piles are classics and cover a lot of ground. Stir fries are a great example of a food pile. Now that it is summertime and veg is back, who doesn’t love the refreshing nature of salads — the healthy person’s food pile. Canada’s poutine is a great food pile. Rochester’s Garbage Plate is aggressively a food pile. Noodle based pasta dishes are also food piles. I’d even argue they are stir fries, but we can save that for another time.
Chicken wings, and nearly all cuts of meat are food piles, but perhaps a bit more elegant as they are a homogenous pile.
Food-in-food is what stops all pasta from being a food pile. Mandu, filled dumplings (but not dumplings like spaetzle), sandwiches, sundaes, and banana splits — all food-in-food.
Food-in-food is generally comfort food. It is lower-class in terms of who generally eats it/originates it. Repetitive in preparation, generally portable, easy to eat.
Food-in-food is populist in nature. Even if there is plating segregation like in a classic meatloaf, mashed potato, and veg dinner.
Everything else is soup.
A Buffalo Staple
Most of Buffalo’s additions to the world’s food vocabulary are humble. Chicken wings are an attempt to use the less rarified parts of the animal. Beef on Weck, roast beef served medium-rare and impossibly thin on a kimmelweck roll, is a trusty food-in-food sandwich. Sturdy, salty, and savory.
I’d like to add to those two the Stuffed Hot Pepper. For those who may not know, Billy Ogden’s is viewed as the originator of the Stuffed Hot Pepper. This Buffalo Spree article does a nice job of providing background information as well as a classic recipe for the super cheesy stuffed pepper.
A Buffalo Staple Further Buffalo’d
I kind of always want to make stuffed vegetables. Any kind, really. But, each week when I go grocery shopping, in the sausage case — our daughter eats so much sausage, she absolutely adores it, and all sorts: kielbasa, chorizo, Andouille on occasion, hot dogs always, and, of course, breakfast sausage — there are locally made Stuffed Hot Peppers.
Now, I love stuffed vegetables and I love sausage, but somehow most local Stuffed Hot Peppers leave me cold. I think they get too creamy. For me, the cheese isn’t the star. I want the heat of sausage and the heat of the pepper to be balanced by the cheese.
Normally I’d buy premade Italian sausage and take it out of the casing. (The way I look at it is, I can always take it out of the casing, but I can’t put a pattie into a casing.) However, ground pork was on sale for something like 50% off because the best buy date was in two days. I can’t turn down that kind of deal, so we’re going to make a cheater sausage.
1# of ground pork
1/2 tbsp each of:
smoked paprika
oregano
fennel seeds
fennel powder
chili flakes
garlic powder
1/4 tbsp of salt
Mix together thoroughly and then brown in a pan until cooked. Drain and set aside. I made this the day before I made the peppers. You could make this a few days ahead if you wanted to. Additionally, you absolutely could liberate some sausages and avoid all this.
I mixed the seasoned, cooked pork with one pound of farmer’s cheese. It’s traditionally a pierogi filling so these makes it even more regional, adding a Slavic element. Additionally, I real like using farmer’s cheese here instead of ricotta because it is so much drier. One of the issues of the classic stuffed hot pepper is the filling oozing out. The denser the mix the better.
#1 cooked pork mixture
#1 farmer’s cheese
Now it is time to fill the peppers. Many recipes will have you cut of the top of the pepper and pipe the mixture in, but since the stuffing is much sturdier, I made a slit in the pepper from tip to stem.
The two pound filling mixture would be enough to stuff about a dozen peppers. Since it was just my wife and myself I stuffed six, saving the rest of the filling for a pasta dish coming later this post.
For the peppers and for the pasta dish, you will need a total of one quart of tomato sauce. I, eventually, will post my tomato sauce recipe. It is wonderfully hands off. However, it is a sauce form canned tomatoes and since we are heading into summer, it’ll be fresh tomatoes and oven avoidance as much as possible over the next few months.
Either way, you need a quart of tomato sauce. Lol.
And a lot of pecorino. Or parmesan. Or whatever cheese you like, really. Though I suggest a hard cheese.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In your cooking vessel — an 8 x 8 pan would be great, I suspect — pour a 1/2 quart of sauce. Place peppers so they are about half covered in sauce and snug in your cooking vessel. Absolutely shower the peppers in pecorino. Cover them in foil and bake them for 30-45 minutes. They will be cooked enough after 30, but if you really like your peppers lacking structural integrity, keep going.
Then, crank the over to 475 and uncover the peppers, letting the hard cheese get a little crusty. 15 minutes should suffice.
Take them out of the oven. Once around the track with a nice olive oil. A sprinkle of basil if you got it, and there you have it: a delicious Buffalo example of food-in-food.
Leftovers
There most likely will not be leftovers of the peppers themselves. That said, we did only use half of the filling and half of the tomato sauce.
One thing that isn’t too much of a hassle to cook during the hot months is pasta.
Pasta has a reputation for being an elegant dish, but it’s just a food pile.
And this pasta comes together so fast you’d think you were a restaurant.
Combine the tomato sauce and the leftover filling and heat until fully combined.
Prepare whatever noodles you like however you like them. Toss them in the sauce and top with some basil and fresh chili if you desire. You got yourself a twenty minute dinner.
Coda
This week I found myself listening to Woody Guthrie. Here’s “Greenback Dollar.” It’s a love song, but I was thinking more about these lyrics:
I don’t want your greenback dollar
I don’t want your silver change
Maybe it’s because the first AI political candidate is running for office, or maybe it’s because there are still people in Bulgaria wearing masks and off the grid but I know about them because of my smart phone, or maybe it’s because I think the over/under on dead American citizens after the election in November has to be 200, but there’s something about the way Guthrie rejects that which isn’t real (the dollar) and reaches for that which is (his past lover) that resonates.
As always, thanks for reading. Lmk if you make any of this stuff or have any questions or just want to chat in the comments.
Y'know how some people seek to ... elevate a food, make it seem less humble than it might be, etc. etc. etc.? You've done the opposite here and I love it. Food pile on.
You take out the seeds from those peppers before stuffing? I had never seen these before moving to Buffalo and still never tried them. Going to make this though, looks good!