Often we overlook simple and easy preparations when putting together backyard cooking and camp menus. A memorable hotdog grabbed for a quick meal-on-the-go in a Chicago dawg parlor set me thinking. It reminded me that grilled bratwurst sausages, with sautéed green peppers and onions, served on warmed buns with brown mustard, relish, mayo, and onions and tomatoes, were a tradition on Gold Country Fly Fishers club outings when I first arrived in the foothills. That dawg, a beer, a short rest on shore to compare notes, a fly tip if yours weren’t working, and maybe another dawg if there were leftovers, completed the break. It raised your spirits and sent you back into the water as though the Energizer Bunny had changed your batteries.
I recently visited Chicago for the first time. After several Midwest-size alehouse beers, bar patrons on either side of me responded to my query regarding what regional restaurants to try while I was in town. I was enthusiastically directed toward a deep-dish pizza place, a classic steakhouse, and a Chicago hotdog parlor. There, they weren’t serving haute cuisine, but haute dawgs.
Returning home, I set out to see what types of sausage and wieners for grilling could be found in local grocery stores and butcher shops. Shortly afterward, a local paper published a feature on a new artisanal butcher in town who specialized in pork products and specialty sausages. This led to a tip about a heritage pig farm that was selling Hungarian Mangalitsa heritage pork from their ranch and at farmers’ markets. I headed for town to catalogue the meats and to see what was out there other than mass-produced, preservative-laden hotdog buns. It would take longer than I thought, but I was starting to think about an entire camp meal built around a number of different grilled sausages, an array of condiments and toppings, and the best buns or wraps I could buy or make.
Hotdogs vary in quality, like anything else. You can get kosher franks, all-beef franks, ballpark franks — on ad infinitum. Frankfurters come from German knackwurst. Classic styles are mostly pork in natural sheep-intestine casings, which are missing from many American sausages where synthetic casings are used. The natural casing is what gives the frank that nice “pop” and bite texture. I prefer the steamed variety when I get the craving, but hotdogs lend themselves to grilling in camp. The secret is having topnotch dogs, buns, and condiments and toppings.
Casper’s and Kasper’s, its off-shoot competitor, were frankfurter emporiums in the Bay Area. There have been lawsuits over the name. Aficionados are fanatics about which is best. Their foot-long dogs and buns are steamed. Up here in Grass Valley, a frank lover brought Casper’s buns and weenies to Julie’s Hotdogs, now owned by another proprietor and called Pine Street Burgers. They are still steamed, have that “pop,” and satisfy the obsessive hotdog fetish.
I remember two exceptional dawg experiences. One was a ballpark frank in St. Louis at my first major league baseball game. Perhaps that frank was better because we bumped into Stan Musial in the tunnel, and I got an autograph, but the combination of good ingredients and the aura of the experience left the tastes and smells indelibly imprinted in my mind. Then, a decade ago, I was in Argentina with a consortium of angling friends, looking for adventure, big trout, golden dorados, and authentic local food. I had put the two-and-a-half-week-long trip together using an Argentine agent.
One of my requirements was Argentine food, not American everywhere we went. No turkey or PB and J on the river. This wasn’t a difficult request. Argentineans love grilled meat and have the highest meat consumption per capita in the world. Evening meals on the river were memorable and included red stag (a large deer) and freshly killed lamb on the padrilla (iron cross). We had grilled meat at noon and ate it with homemade empanadas, washed down with ample amounts of treasured malbec that never left the country as an export. Restaurants in our staging towns featured Italian, Swiss, German, and Spanish cuisine as good as any in the home country. Why? An immigrant population that brought much of their European food traditions with them during and after World War I.
They ate late. One of our group was a strong-willed executive used to eating dinner early. We arrived at restaurants at 10:00. Frustrated, he asked our major domo if he could go early. The answer was, “of course,” but he waited outside till 10:00, when they opened the doors and the first customers filtered in — Spanish, Germans, Swiss, Austrians, Italians, and Argentineans. The food and drink was very good, and we didn’t have to get up early.
A midday lunch stop in the vast Paraná River Reserve, where we were chasing golden dorados, was on a low-lying island. We scrounged for enough fuel to cook sausages on a small portable grill. The Argentine chorizo sausage filling was light, juicy, airy, and unlike denser Mexican varieties, whose distinct orange/red color generated by cumin, paprika, and ancho chili powder gives more bite, has more fat, and stains shirts. We reveled in getting out of the boats for a break and grabbed grilled sausages as soon as they were done, never sitting down, in part because of the huge 10-foot-long snake skins we found in our clearing.
My boat partner and I got two of the last sausages and saw some leftover bunlike bread. We combined them into two of the best hotdogs we had ever eaten. Later, we would learn that choripán (chorizo on bread) is second in desirability only to steak in Argentina. The chorizo sausages are the number-one appetizer at their traditional asados, Argentine barbeques, in addition to the heavier meats, often served with heavenly green Argentine chimichurri.
On our first stop to fish for dorados in the afternoon, my partner Dirk cast his five-inch fly to the junction of two channels and began his retrieve. Two-thirds of the way in, and just before he started to pick up again for another cast, his line went limp, offering no resistance coming in. We were baffled. Eager to catch another hard-to-come-by golden dorado, I cast almost immediately. Like Dirk’s, my line went limp halfway into my retrieve, severed as though cut by a razor. It took a while, but a light bulb finally went off. Flesh-eating piranhas in the waters of the reserve liked the meaty scent of the chorizo that was transferred to our lines after gobbling the dawgs. At our estancia that night, we found laundry soap and washed our hands before and after eating lunch throughout the rest of the trip. Two hundred-dollar lines were rendered useless before we got the message.
I found that La Tienda, an online Spanish mail-order grocery store here in the United States, carries and will ship Argentine chorizo. Flavor comes from Spanish pimenton, which is made from smoked red peppers. Likewise, German sausage can be ordered from Midwestern businesses or from Germany itself. Black Forest is one Internet company.
Bruce Aidells is an artisanal butcher from Berkeley who has become America’s top sausage authority. His Complete Sausage Book is a creative chef ’s bible. The company’s precooked product line includes some of my favorites, including Cajun style andouille, habanero and green chili, spicy mango and jalapeno, chicken and apple, and sundried tomato. Precooking at the factory of these mostly chicken-and turkey-based sausages lends them to a variety of uses. I use Cajun-style andouille in my Spanish pork and piquillo pepper stew and in a French cassoulet, where duck, pork, lamb, onions, sausage slices, spices, and duck stock are slowly baked with white beans topped with bread crumbs to develop taste and release sumptuous aromatic flavors. The slight bite of the andouille sausage marries together the individual subtle flavors.
For a campfire or backyard meal, I like grilled sausages, but the precooked product can be tasty, is a time saver, and rates high in food safety. At home, microwaved or quickly heated in a skillet, they make a great on-the-run breakfast or lunchtime snack when wrapped in a warm tortilla.
Sausages containing pork — it’s often the main ingredient — should be cooked to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, then allowed to “carryover” another five degrees. Uncooked poultry products should be cooked to 165 degrees. As with all quality meats, overcooking will dry them out, and you want them to come off the grill juicy. Thicker sausages, such as Argentine chorizos, register internal temperatures fairly well with a digital meat thermometer.
There are at least a thousand German sausages. Common ones are blutwurst, bockwurst, bratwurst, cervelat, and knackwurst, which is the German frankfurter. Most are made primarily of pork. Bockwurst and bratwurst are often thought of as breakfast sausage. We simmer smoked, precooked bratwurst in a shallow pan with a little water and eat it for breakfast with Grey Poupon Dijon mustard. They grill well and make for a different taste and texture sensation when paired with a good bun or torn apart and eaten with fresh biscuits. Or slice leftover sausage thinly and cook with fresh mushrooms and scrambled eggs for a sumptuous 10-minute, one-dish breakfast meal. Just add fruit and good coffee.
Forage in bakeries for something better than three-week-old hotdog buns: Dutch-crunch rolls, ciabattas, soft baguettes, sourdough or artisanal bread, hoagies — better yet, make your own. As with pizza, homemade doughs are the best, and you won’t want to go back to those things that hang on grocery store racks. That said, I buy frozen pizza dough that is dynamite at a specialty deli. Friends swear by Trader Joe’s premade dough. Try some wrapped around a good grilled sausage in pig-in-the-blanket style, impaled on a stick and held near a searing campfire flame.
Quality tomatoes in season such as green zebras, Carolina golds, and garden-fresh heirloom tomatoes, along with Maui onions, grilled onions, vinegar-soaked red torpedo onions, Arizona sweets, or Vidalia onions will raise that bar another inch or two. Prowl around and see what you can find.
Sausage is a sumptuous outdoor meal ingredient that can be stored, transported easily, and cooked quickly. Start by foraging for specialty products that will raise the bar right out of the gate. Tonight, I found Italian and sweet Italian sausages, as well as my butcher’s version of Mexican chorizo and fresh brats. Likewise, quality nontraditional condiments such as aiolis, specialty mustards, bruschetta toppings, tapenades, pestos, roasted tomatillo salsa, pico de gallo, and my favorite, a chimichurri sauce, will elevate taste and texture and bring out the best of the artisan sausage maker’s creation.
Argentine Chimichurri Sauce
2 cups packed fresh Italian parsley
4 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled
1/4 cup red wine vinegar Freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
4 teaspoons dried oregano (I prefer Mexican)
1 cup extravirgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes (try chipotle for a boost)
In a food processor, pulse the parsley, garlic, and oregano to fine dice. Transfer to a stainless steel bowl and add the olive oil and vinegar. Whisk and season to taste. It’s good to make your sauce a few hours early so flavors can marry. The chimichurri can be stored overnight in an airtight container your refrigerator. High-quality oil olive and red vinegar enhance flavor. In Argentina or Chile, one would pair this with a smoky malbec. Here in California, it pairs well with a zinfandel or cabernet. Chimichurri pairs well with most meats and some fish. Try making it with cilantro instead of Italian parsley — bolder, but interesting.
Virtual Foraging: Highway 49 from Coulterville to Oakhurst
By Richard Anderson
A few of you know that, aside from publisher and editor of this magazine, I’m also a county supervisor, and this past October I attended a local-government conference at a lodge in Fish Camp, near the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park. (Yes, I did pack a fly rod.) I would mention the lodge as a possible stop for foraging anglers, and its accommodations were actually quite nice, but the food was only OK, the prices were those one might experience in a big city (such as unexceptional cocktails costing $14), and the creek-fishing nearby I found sketchy during the hour I had free.
To reach Fish Camp from Truckee, I had taken I-80 to southbound Highway 99 and then east on Highways 140, 49, and 41, a drive of roughly five hours, and one that shows quite well the ongoing suburbanization of the Central Valley. To return home, I decided to take Highway 49 north all the way to I-80, particularly as I had never been on the stretch of 49 below Highway 120. I’m glad I traveled that route. Low, rolling hills covered with blond grass, dark oak in the draws, gave an impression of untouched pre-Gold Rush countryside, and 49 between the microscopic community of Bear Valley and the slightly larger town of Coulterville had almost no traffic — an unexpected, wonderfully lonely piece of road, wholly unlike the congested sections farther south in and near Mariposa and Oakhurst.
But it was a long trip, roughly six hours, with a quick drive-through at McD’s. If I had been traveling with someone else, we surely would’ve pulled over somewhere for a sit-down meal. After I returned home and reflected on the journey, I wondered about the restaurant options between Oakhurst and Highway 120 that I had zipped by in my haste to get back to Truckee. Were there places worth stopping for?
As an experiment, I Googled “good eating along Highway 49,” and the first item on the resulting list was a TripAdvisor page titled “Restaurants near Scenic Route Highway 49.” Using its map, I scrolled along the route and clicked on each restaurant, trying to figure out if it might be worth a visit based on the photos of the establishment and its offerings, and comments from diners. From north to south, here’s what caught my eye.
Coulterville. The Magnolia Saloon, claimed as one of the longest operating bars in the West, is well-regarded by visitors for its burgers, although one found the premises “a little tired.”
Bear Valley. Visitors were enthusiastic about the Louisiana cuisine they enjoyed at the Original Bon Ton Cafe.
Mt. Bullion. At least one visitor to the Airport Inn, which apparently focuses on burgers and sandwiches, was “pleasantly surprised by food and staff.”
Mariposa. Whereas commenters for the restaurants above numbered in the tens, in Mariposa they were in the hundreds and at times exceeded a thousand, hardly a surprise for this gateway community to Yosemite. Here is where you can find something resembling fine dining, albeit casual. Three restaurants looked particularly interesting: 1850, with one reviewer extolling its craft beer selection; the Charles Street Dinner House (“the place to have dinner”); and Savoury’s (“classy venue,” “quite good for such a small city.”)
Ahwanee. The Hitching Post bar has “fabulous plain food.”
Oakhurst. The largest town on this stretch of 49, and likewise a gateway, Oakhurst offers a sizable range of dining opportunities and a fly shop. Restaurants that looked intriguing include Erna’s Elderberry House (European cuisine), South Gate Brewing Co., Smokehouse 41, Oakhurst Grill, Sweetwater Steakhouse, Branding Iron Steakhouse, Crab Cakes Restaurant, and the Kyoto Cafe.
Of course, one must be skeptical of on-line comments about restaurants, but it’s clear that anglers traveling this southern section of Highway 49 need not pack a cooler to dine well.
