My wife brought me home some delicious treats from Germany. Namely: MEAT!!! And meat from a famous German shop to boot, Metzgerei Schlosser.
There was also a selection of German booze, cheeses, spreads, jams, and odd condiment packets:
My wife has no idea whether these meats were pre-cooked, cured, smoked, or whatever, due to the language barrier and lack of information on the packaging. So I will essentially be boiling them and/or grilling them to be safe. Hope I’m not destroying anything!
This recipe is pretty easy to execute, and every time I make it, it delivers with amazing flavor and texture. Crispy skin lemon and herb chicken legs with sautéed chorizo broccolini.
STEP 1
The first thing you need to do is make the lemon-herb paste. This is basically made “to taste,” so you can vary the proportions and amounts to your liking. Just keep the consistency to a paste and not too liquidy. Combine your salt, cracked black pepper, crushed red pepper, oregano, onion powder and garlic powder into a small dish or bowl and add lemon juice. Stir until mixed into a paste.
That shit is going to smell amazing: very Greek/Italian. Try not to shove it down your throat just yet, because you need it for the later steps.
STEP 2
pre-heat your oven to 350, rinse and prep your broccolini, and chop up your sausage as such:
STEP 3
Next, you’re going to shove some butter and your lemon-herb paste underneath the chicken skin, without completely removing the skin from the meat, of course. Spread it around evenly so you don’t get any blank spaces of flavor. Don’t worry either – you’d be surprised how much the butter helps to slosh the spices around once it gets cooking. Get down into those drumsticks too!
STEP 4
Get your vegetable oil in a pan and heat it up. You shouldn’t need more than two cups of oil. Just enough to get the majority of the chicken skin into the hot oil should do the trick. Then drop your chicken legs in, top-side down.
You’re going to flip these bitches once they get golden and crispy. Try to keep the skin covering the meat too on the bottom side when you flip it (that part of the skin doesn’t quite connect to the meat as well as it does in other areas).
STEP 5
Remove the chicken from the frying pan once the other side gets nice and crispy brown, and place the legs onto a baking sheet. Pop that shit into the oven for another 20-30 minutes, top-side up.
STEP 6
Clean your pan (or use a second one), and then begin to sautee your sausage/chorizo. When they start to release some grease, you can add your broccolini in there as well.
STEP 7
When the pan is nice and hot, and your broccolini is really cooking, I want you to hit the pan with a few ounces of water to deglaze the pan. Doing this releases all that nice brown sausagey goodness from the pan and puts that flavor directly into the broccolini.
Once the water is all evaporated from the pan again, your broccolini should be fully cooked and your chorizo should be slightly crisped and browned. Plate that shit.
STEP 8
Remove your chicken from the oven and plate that shit alongside your broccolini.
That’s it. Super simple, and this will feed two people, unless you’re a fat fuck like me and can eat it all by yourself.
I also like to add sliced onion and fresh garlic into the broccolini sautee as well sometimes. When I did this recipe, I didn’t have that stuff handy, but here’s a shot of the finished plate from a previous night when I made the dish with onions and fresh garlic. As you can see, the skin actually came out a little nicer that time, due to better butter coverage and frying technique.
I follow Carnivore Club on Instagram due to the high quality images of incredible meats that they post. When I’m telling you that they post some of the best quality foodporn, I’m being dead serious…
They’re located somewhere far, far away from NYC, so I figured I’d really never get to try one of their boxes of products unless I spent big dough and ordered something online to have it shipped. Well, to my surprise, they were offering a Groupon deal! There was a massive discount on a premium box of meats (along with a $15 credit to use on your next purchase).
A premium box is a real wood humidor of sorts.
A subscriber can get monthly deliveries of high-end meats at their doorstep. This is what the unboxing looks like:
There are generally four meats per box, though not all boxes are this amazing. Mine was filled with iberico shit:
Again, mine was a premium box (which is generally much more costly), made of real wood, nice hidden hinges, ultra high quality meats, etc. The regular packaging is a faux wooden box, still very smart looking. But take a look. Mine even came with the humidity gauge and shit.
“Satisfy your inner carnivore” is printed on the box, as well as an image of their logo.
Okay so let’s get down to the goods here. The box came with four meats, and I’m going to review each one and provide some pretty pictures.
The first thing I did was to slice up some of the chorizo, which you saw in the video above.
If you treat your meat like you would treat your own dick, you’re always going to enjoy it. This stuff was super flavorful. It wasn’t overly spicy to the point where you couldn’t keep shoveling slices down your throat. The fat content was soft and malleable, melts between the heat of your fingers. Really nice.
This next shot is everything together. The chorizo, plus the other three packaged meats.
The top left is the chorizo that I sliced, so we will skip that, since I already talked about it. The top right was another type of chorizo. This one was softer, a little more moist, had less fat content and a more smoky flavor. Clearly they had different diameters too. I really thought I was going to get jipped here with two of the same type of meat, as far as flavor goes, but the two chorizos were very different from one another. The bottom right was the salchichon. Like the chorizo, this had good melty fat content, but it was a more mild and more pure flavor. You could taste the meat, unencumbered, because it wasn’t laden with spices. Very crisp. The sparse peppercorns really made it pop too. The bottom left was the dry cured ham. This was really soft. It had the texture of a very high quality prosciutto, with a clean flavor. Really nice meat, excellent non-stringy fat. It wasn’t paper thin, but the flesh was so soft to the touch that it was difficult to get each slice up in one piece. That’s freaking tender shit!
Overall this was a great buy. If I didn’t get a Groupon deal, I might have thought it was a little overpriced, but then again I am not a rich bastard. Some of you bank-makers out there might find this to be a good price given the supreme quality of meat that you get in each box. So give Carnivore Club a try. I think you’ll like it.
UPDATE
Since I had a credit with Carnivore Club, I ordered a regular box. The quality is once again incredible. Take a look at the unboxing here:
Inside, there is a card that tells you all about the meats you are about to eat, along with suggested pairings like cheeses.
Here’s what they look like unwrapped – like shriveled penises:
While a shriveled penis is admittedly not the greatest look in the world, I’m pretty certain that these taste much better than a shriveled penis. If any of you have had both, give me your opinions.
So as I was going over my note card along with my packaged meats, I noticed something. The “salami picante,” #4 on the note card, was swapped out for “campo seco.” It seems the provider ran out of the salami picante and substituted the campo seco instead, but Carnivore Club was unaware and unable to update the note card in time for the shipment.
No bother to me, really, other than the fact that campo seco and cerveza seca were somewhat similar in both look and flavor. Cerveza seca was a bit leaner, however, while campo seco had large blobs of delicious fatty white spots throughout – most of which were surprisingly tender.
The chorizo was good. Not too potent and garlicky, as some can be, and it had a mild heat to it that didn’t overpower.
The clear winner by far, however, was the “trufa seca” truffle sausage. It was coated with a sea salt and was vibrantly flavored with that earthy and robust truffle flavor. Absolutely delicious. I’ve never tasted something so unique in this kind of product.
I highly recommend purchasing meat from this supplier, which was Charlito’s Cocina. And if it isn’t obvious, I am a big fan of Carnivore Club. This box alone would cost WAY more if all items were purchased separately, so you’re getting a good deal along with such great service. I let Carnivore Club know about the swapped sausage issue for #4, and they insisted on sending me the salami picante even over my protestations. Good people!
My wife and I initially tried going to a dumpy joint near Penn Station to use a Groupon, but the place was closed. So I said, “Fuck it, babe. Let’s go to the fucking Breslin and get some sick grub.”
The place is awesome inside. I was digging the bar area so we skipped on getting a proper table. Plus the light near the windows were better for photos.
I had the house gin and tonic, which was dressed up with all spice and a little lime. It was nice.
I ordered the famous lamb burger. Despite the lack of lettuce, this was easily one of the best burgers I’ve had in Manhattan. Juicy, tons of flavor, not gamey, and distinctly Mediterranean or Greek due to the combination of lamb with feta cheese and red onion. All it needed was romaine and maybe some olives to really make it jump out the gates. The bun was crispy but not too hard to the point where your mouth gets all scratched the fuck up. It was incredible.
It came with thrice fried French fries and a little tub of cumin flavored mayonnaise. The mayo was close to overpowering but not quite. Just enough oomph. The fries were perfect, natural cut golden brownies that were seasoned just right.
My wife tried the seafood sausage. This thing was buttery and bursting with flavor. Made from lobster, shrimp and scallop, you could actually see the chunks of meat in the sausage as you cut into it. So good. Light, too.
The fish and chips were amazing as well – just needed a bit of salt to finish on the batter after frying.
I’ll definitely be back for the English breakfast and a few other items that looked amazing, like the gingerbread carrot cake pancakes. Maaaaan…
Other great things here:
Scotch Egg:
Lamb Chops:
Meat Pies:
Pork Chop:
THE BRESLIN
16 W. 29th St.
New York, NY 10001
This place is a massive German / Bavarian beer hall in midtown that serves up massive brews in massive mugs (and boots).
I came here soon after it opened with a lot of excitement in my heart, because I absolutely LOVE German beer halls. There’s just something about the fun group atmosphere that makes it unique.
Anyway, it was here that I discovered a really amazing grapefruit beer (Schoffenhofer). After drinking it, I was on the hunt, and even found some at a local distributor on Long Island. Needless to say, the fridge remained stocked with them until we moved back to the city.
Aside from the great beer selection, they have a nice fun menu too. We tried the pate, the HUGE pretzels, the wieners, and some sausage.
I sincerely hope this place becomes a bigger draw with bar folks. It has the potential for being one of the city’s best places for drinks.
UPDATE – SCHNITZEL WAS AWESOME!!!
REICHENBACH HALL
5 W. 37th St.
New York, NY 10018
