The Truck Food Cookbook

I’m on sale. But only for a limited time. Get your...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:49:50 -0500

I’m on sale. But only for a limited time. Get your hot-off-the-press copy of the Truck Food Cookbook on the cheap. Right here: http://goo.gl/u9r65

Generous Book Forum article I somehow missed this summer

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:01:05 -0500

Generous Book Forum article I somehow missed this summer

#TruckFoodCookbook Twitter Chat

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 16:05:00 -0400

THIS WEDNESDAY

Can’t get enough of food on wheels? Let John T Edge & Workman show you how to enjoy the movable feast without having to track the food trucks down! Tweet using the #TruckFoodCookbook hashtag, and send us your tips or questions about how to replicate your favorite truck food. Your tweet will qualify as an entry for a chance to win a copy of The Truck Food Cookbook by John T Edge!

On Wednesday 9/12/2012 at 8pm ET/7PM CT, we will announce the winners during a live Twitter chat with John T Edge (@johntedge). Follow the chat with the hashtag #TruckFoodCookbook and get the answers to all of your questions & more!

Maybe the best gig of the extended book tour: Shindig in...

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:24:25 -0400

Maybe the best gig of the extended book tour: Shindig in Florence, Alabama, August 24, with Billy Reid and crew. Got to hear the Alabama Shakes play. Jennifer Cole of Southern Living has the report.

Last victory lap stop on tour, Torchy’s at the South...

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 10:50:41 -0400

Last victory lap stop on tour, Torchy’s at the South Austin Trailer Park, for a migas taco.

South Congress lot in Austin. Wurst Tex for a Predator &...

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 18:05:00 -0400

South Congress lot in Austin. Wurst Tex for a Predator & Prey, made w rattlesnake and rabbit. Here’s a report from KUT on the phenom there.

See you tonight in Houston at El Real Tex Mex. Three-course...

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 09:35:01 -0400

See you tonight in Houston at El Real Tex Mex. Three-course dinner, $60, includes book — and backflip by me.

Book People in Austin — my hosts this Wednesday night at 7...

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 10:23:00 -0400

Book People in Austin — my hosts this Wednesday night at 7 — have been eating their way though my recs and recipes, including the Texas Cuban, pictured above. Check their blog for deets.

Trucking in the Triangle

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 07:58:54 -0400

Andrea Weigl has a Q&A in today’s Raleigh New and Observer. Smart inquisitor, that Andrea:

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that award-winning food writer John T. Edge would write a book about the nation’s food truck scene.

Edge’s first magazine piece was about three nights he spent working a Lucky Dogs cart in New Orleans leading up to New Year’s Eve. He was fascinated by the hot dog carts described in John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces.” He and a friend once tried to operate a hot dog cart in the courthouse square in Oxford, Miss., but failed miserably.

And Edge fell in love with street food on a trip to Vietnam where he’d skip the group’s restaurant meals to eat from the street carts.

“I remember sitting on a curb in Saigon with my feet in a gutter eating a banh mi sandwich and thinking, ‘Wow. This is great,’” Edge recalled. “All the ingredients were beautifully fresh. One woman was raising cilantro in a patch near her cart, not because she was a fancy pants chef trying to establish provenance but because that was a cheap way to get cilantro on her sandwich.”

Edge says the country’s food truck revolution was just beginning, so he visited a dozen cities to document the scene. Edge will be at Durham’s The Regulator Bookshop at 7 p.m. Wednesday to discuss his new book, “The Truck Food Cookbook: 150 Recipes and Ramblings from America’s Best Restaurants on Wheels.” He talked to us last week about reporting this book and eating at trucks across the country:

Q: How do you quantify the research you did for this book? Miles traveled? Cities visited? Food consumed?

I tried to go back through my notes and figure out how many trucks I went to in total. It was north of 250.

Q: What did you discover that surprised you?

Madison, Wis., surprised me. You expect there to be a really great scene in L.A. Climate is conducive, and because of Mexican-American migration, taco trucks have been part of the fabric of L.A. forever. Yet you travel to a city like Madison, which is famously cold in the winter. I remember being there in December. There’s snow everywhere. There’s people selling on the university mall at the heart of the campus. To see Madison was really kind of eye-opening. … Madison has a city employee (and) it’s his job to work with this coterie of citizen eaters who walk around once or twice a year with their clipboards looking very efficient and kicking the tires on the carts and trying to make decisions like, “Should we have two east African carts or is that too many?”…The city’s mothers and fathers think of street food as a civic asset. That’s pretty refreshing.

Q: Is there a city that dominates in terms of food truck culture?

It might be Austin. Austin – last time I checked – had about 1,000 vendors. They may not be active all the time. There’s 1,000 licenses out there.

In Austin, there is haute truck food and there is traditional, old-guard truck food. It’s just as important and just as good. The taco trucks of Austin are wonderful. You buy a well-made open-faced taco on a freshly made corn tortilla at a great taco truck. You look at the composition on the plate. There’s a beautiful aesthetic at work: the shingle of the avocado slices across the top, the hash of cilantro, a carefulness and kind of discreetness about the toppings. I think a city like Austin is interesting because it covers the spectrum.

When we talk about this food, there’s a tendency to talk about this and watch as foie gras-peddling chefs steal in to take over this category, I think that would be a shame. The old guard stuff, the traditionalist stuff from Mexico, is just as important as the haute stuff.

Q: What are some of your favorite trucks across the country?

There are a number. The Swamp Shack in Portland. This guy, Trey Corkern, who had worked the line at Galatoire’s and grown up in New Orleans. He was making amazing crawfish pies and made his own creole cream cheese. … I think about the doughnuts from Chef Shack in Minneapolis, which are cardamom-spiced doughnuts with a really kind of muted, dusky curry flavor. I think about a very simple but by no means simplistic corn flour tortilla made in the moment topped with fat curds of scrambled eggs and blanched runner beans that I had at the Taqueria Las Palmitas in Houston. I think about the morning burger at Only Burger (in Durham).

All those dishes are representative of the best of what this food is, which is someone doing a couple or three things really well. It’s the modern equivalent of a barbecue joint. You don’t trust a barbecue joint that serves chips and queso. You trust a barbecue joint that says: “We got hush puppies or white bread. Which one do you want?”

Chalking the Taceaux Loceaux menu for the event tonight at...

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 18:42:27 -0400

Chalking the Taceaux Loceaux menu for the event tonight at Garden District Books in New Orleans.

Independent Weekly on June 20 Event in Durham

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 08:12:08 -0400

by Victoria Bouloubasis

Photo © Lou Weinert

Given his repertoire, one that includes books on fried chicken, donuts and apple pie, celebrated food journalist and Southern Foodways Alliance directorJohn T. Edge needs no introduction to the culinary culture of the South. So when he’s hanging out at a food truck and is handed a cardboard tray piled high with an unpronounceable menu item, “that’s kind of a moment I long for,” he says.

Edge will be at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop Wednesday, June 20, at 7 p.m. to present his latest book, The Truck Food Cookbook: 150 Recipes and Ramblings from America’s Best Restaurants on Wheels. OnlyBurger, one of Durham’s first food trucks, will be parked outside and open for business, andFullsteam brewery will serve their beer. OnlyBurger and DaisyCakes are featured in the book with recipes; Klausie’s Pizza, Farmhand Foods andLocopops are mentioned with praise.

Edge will present a slideshow of his travels in researching the book.

“There’s nothing I can tell y’all about Durham’s scene,” he says. “Y’all know it. You eat it.”

Instead, we’re promised “a portrait of truck food all across America.” Edge traveled throughout the country for one year to food scenes that “felt most kinetic,” from San Francisco and New York to smaller cities like Minneapolis, which had only four vendors at the time of his research. (Edge also writes a monthly New York Times column, United Tastes, exploring our country’s increasingly global fare.)

The cookbook was inspired by a trip through Vietnam, where street food was “everyman’s indulgence. A democratic buffet, almost,” Edge says.

“A pleasure for me in researching this book was stepping up to a cart or a truck run by a recent immigrant from Vietnam or from India and not knowing how to read the menu well, but by the end learning something about that place and those people. That’s one of the promises of truck food. You gain a situational passage, another longitude and latitude.”

“One of the things I admire about Durham,” he says, “is that it has embraced recent Mexican migration. For people of Durham, a paleta is as common a term as is popsicle. And that’s important. When we talk about street food in America, we’re talking also about a younger generation of folks who are really riffing on working-class taco trucks.”

His book features taco trucks in Texas and Arizona. When he’s in town, he gets his fix in Carrboro.

“I’ve eaten many times at the one that sits up at Fitch Lumber Company [Costa Sur].”

“I think one of the great things about this [food truck scene] is that these are not concepts, which usually means that someone would conceive something and exploit a business niche. [The owners of] these trucks are cooking from their hearts—like their crazy Uncle Lou’s fried chicken or their favorite aunt’s paratha.”

For six months in Oxford, Miss., Edge and a friend had a hot dog cart and “failed miserably.” Dunce Dogs (“Think Genius, Eat Dunce”) sold natural-casing hot dogs slathered with pimento cheese. “We didn’t realize ‘Oh yeah, we have full-time jobs and children less than 4 years old.’ It was completely bonkers and completely idealistic, but that’s why I wrote the book.”

Ozersky in Time says Truck Food is Here to Stay

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:18:46 -0400

Ozersky in Time says Truck Food is Here to Stay

Tostilocos and Truck Food on The Splendid Table

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 07:43:23 -0400

Tostilocos and Truck Food on The Splendid Table:

Listen for me yammering for about five minutes at the close of the show.

Great Interview in the Philadelphia Inquirer

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 07:39:36 -0400

Great Interview in the Philadelphia Inquirer

Truck Food Cookbook on NPR's All Things Considered

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:40:03 -0400

Truck Food Cookbook on NPR's All Things Considered :

Meet Bambi Galore, the living sundae, who escorted me from the...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 09:07:51 -0400

Meet Bambi Galore, the living sundae, who escorted me from the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop here in NYC to a mortuary down the street, for a talk last night about my Truck Food Cookbook.

Philly Truck Food in action @pitrucopizza. Oven on the truck....

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:16:06 -0400

Philly Truck Food in action @pitrucopizza. Oven on the truck. Eggplant pie on the way.

Join me in NYC on June 8. Seriously.

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 15:39:12 -0400

Join me in NYC on June 8. Seriously.

Fine night at Parnassus Books in Nashville. Thunderstorms, but...

Wed, 30 May 2012 06:05:42 -0400

Fine night at Parnassus Books in Nashville. Thunderstorms, but crowd still welcomed this little roadshow. Great trucks on hand including Biscuit Love, Retro Sno, and Riffs, pictured here in photo by Chris Chamberlain, with the rainbow that emerged at close of storm.

Kind Words from Bob Carlton in Birmingham

Sun, 27 May 2012 14:00:46 -0400

Kind Words from Bob Carlton in Birmingham