Trailer Food Diaries Cookbook: Houston Edition, Volume I

By Tiffany Harelik

In Houston, everyone from enterprising chefs at established restaurants to home cooks who love to eat has taken their recipes to the streets. From the Heights to Montrose and bars in between, food truck concepts are peppered around the Bayou City, feeding hungry Houstonians everything from bacon jam to cookie-flavored cashew butter, beer-braised lengua tacos to fried escargot. These creative mini-restaurants on wheels have shared the best of the best, including flavors from southern, Asian and Bayou cuisine. Join Tiffany Harelik as she brings the Trailer Food Diaries to Houston and explores the recipes and personal stories behind Houston's tastiest trend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781625845405

Tiffany Harelik

Serving up the American dream one plate at a time, Tiffany Harelik is a travel and food writer with a focus on iconic street food culture. Joined by her best friend and food truck entrepreneur Maurine Winkley, the girls put on their aprons to add jams and sauces to the Trailer Food Diaries collection.

Book preview

Sauces and Spreads

Bacon Jam

Golden Grill

Chocomonsterlicious Almond Butter

Monster PBJ

Chimichurri Sauce

Stick It

Citrus Aioli

Speers Rolling Bistro

Cinnamonsterlicious Peanut Butter

Monster PBJ

Cookiemonsterlicious Cashew Butter

Monster PBJ

House Whole-Grain Mustard

Good Dog Hot Dogs

Sesame Oil Vinaigrette

Coreanos

Bacon Jam

Courtesy of Golden Grill

Bacon jam is part of the Green Eggs and Jam sandwich from Golden Grill, as featured in the image on the right.

2 pounds bacon

4 medium red onions, diced small

1 tablespoon fresh garlic, minced

4 cups light brown sugar

1¼ cup unseasoned rice vinegar

½ cup mirin

pinch of five-spice

pinch of Japanese seven-spice

• Dice bacon in medium-sized chunks and start rendering on medium heat for about 10 minutes or until most of the fat is rendered out. Strain fat out and save ½ cup. Add bacon and ½ cup fat back into pan along with diced red onions. Cook on medium heat until onions are very caramelized but not burned. Add minced garlic and continue to cook on low for about 10 more minutes. Add remaining ingredients and cook as long as needed to reduce by one-third, or until you reach desired consistency. Use immediately.

Golden Grill

Matt Pak is the chef behind two popular Houston food truck concepts: Koagie Hots (Korean BBQ) and Golden Grill (grilled cheese sandwiches). Koagie Hots started first, Matt explains. I came up with both concepts before we started anything and decided to do Koagie Hots first. Two months later, I opened Golden Grill. The name Koagie is a combination of the words Korean and hoagie, while Hots, he explained, is a play on the name of several of the late-night places in New York that combined the name of the city with hots behind it.

Prior to opening his food trucks, Matt worked in New York, Las Vegas and Scottsdale before settling into the food truck groove in Houston, Texas. I never went to culinary school; I just learned from working under great chefs and taught myself. I moved when I was twenty-one from New York to Vegas and started a catering company with my friends. A few years later, I moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where my parents had moved. There I worked under some well-known chefs for a few years and then made my way to Houston. After working at Benjy’s for four years under one of the best guys you want to work with in the restaurant business, I decided didn’t want to work for anyone else, so I decided to open a food truck. Originally, I wanted to open a restaurant, but the investment and overhead is hard in Houston with property so expensive. A food truck is a little flashier and can evolve more rapidly. Eventually, I’ll open a restaurant, Matt explains.

On his Koagie Hots truck, most of the recipes were a trial-and-error learning process. However, the kimchi recipe is one passed down from his grandmother. I modified my grandmother’s kimchi recipe to make it fit the American palate: a little sweeter and spicier, fresher and more sour, shares Matt. This special kimchi is also used on the Golden Grill truck on the KimCheese sandwich, which contains kimchi, cheddar and a fried egg on whole wheat.

On Golden Grill, everything is made from scratch. The bread is baked fresh daily from a local bakery, explains Matt. The menu changes a little according to season. It’s so hot in the summer and so cold in the winter, we change it up. There are options to build your own grilled cheese or get one of our specialty sandwiches. The Green Eggs and Jam is their bestseller. It contains green tomatoes, gouda, a truffled egg and bacon jam. The Buff Chic offers buffalo chicken breast, cheddar and garlic ranch sauce on sourdough, and there are many other specialty sandwiches to try. There are six cheeses to pick from when building your own sandwich and close to ten add-ons.

His partner, Shawn, is an entrepreneur in the Montrose area who is well known in the Houston bar industry. His partnership was especially helpful because I park Koagie Hots right outside of his bar, shares Matt. Koagie Hots has a permanent spot Tuesday through Sunday, although they do pickup lunches and catering events. Matt attributes the more mobile nature of the Golden Grill to the grilled cheese truck’s increase in followers. Our followers for Koagie Hots are definitely different than our followers on Golden Grill. Golden Grill is growing fast. We have surpassed our followers on Koagie Hots.

Chocomonsterlicious Almond Butter

Courtesy of Monster PBJ

This almond butter is a great substitute for Nutella. It goes well on sandwiches, waffles, pancakes, apples, bananas, cookies, graham crackers or ice cream. You can also heat it up and drizzle it like chocolate syrup.

2 cups roasted, unsalted almonds (other nuts would work too)

1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract

¼ cup agave nectar

½ cup chocolate chips

½ cup milk of your choice

• Add the nuts to the food processor and process until smooth. If you are using raw nuts or less fatty nuts, you may need to add a tablespoon of light oil (grape seed, coconut or nut oils work well).

• Add in the rest of the ingredients slowly and keep processing and scraping down the bowl for another 5–10 minutes or until