(credit: NYSF)

Feed Your Hole first came out a little over a year ago, but were recently off the street for a couple of months over the winter rebuilding the engine on the truck.  Last week they returned to the street.

With a name like Feed Your Hole, you know the food is going to be in your face.  When you see the truck, that’s yet another sign.  If you like big, sloppy burgers, hot dogs and fries, this is the place for you.

It took a little time to peruse the menu, and I decided to get a Cheese Dog for $3 and chili cheese fries for $5.

(credit: NYSF)

Sean told me he sources most of his ingredients (meats, cheese, produce) from Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, which New Yorkers know is a more authentic Little Italy than the touristy one on Mulberry Street.

The hot dog was an average-sized dog, but it was 100% beef and skinless.  That means it didn’t “snap” when you bit into it, but was probably healthier without skin.

The cheese sauce was on the light side, not a heavy cheese, and seemed to have a couple of different cheeses .  I really liked what the pickles did with the cheese and hot dog.  I usually put relish on my hot dog, and this was in the same family.

The chili cheese fries could have been a meal unto itself. A big portion of thin fries were topped with chili, cheese sauce and a few jalapeños.  Sean’s chili was meaty, tomatoey and spicy.  Topped with cheese sauce, it was even better.

My only complaint was the fries were too soft for a heavy topping like this.  I like my fries crispy to begin with, and with chili and cheese on top, they really need to be crispy.  Thin fries are fine, but they have to be more well done.

Even with limp fries, Feed Your Hole is still one of the more interesting food trucks around.  But don’t go if you’re in a hurry, because Sean cooks everything fresh from scratch.  You might have to wait 10 minutes, but nothing is pre-cooked like at some other places.

They did add a new person solely to take orders and handle money.   Now there are 3 people in the truck instead of 2, and it does help things go a little quicker.

Feed Your Hole can be found on twitter here and on our Mobile Munchies twitter feed.  They don’t hit the widest swath of Manhattan, but are worth the effort to track down and visit.

(credit: New York Street Food)

I’m glad lots of the food trucks change up their menus from time to time or have rotating specials.  That gives me a chance to try something new for lunch on a regular basis.  In fact, I got to try 2 new things on my visit to Gorilla Cheese late last week.

What caught my attention was the special, a jerk chicken melt, which cost $7.  When I was ordering I saw a new dessert called “apple pie melt”. I like apple pie (and cheese), and it only cost $3, so I decided to give it a try.

(credit: New York Street Food)

The weekly special had lots of breaded jerk chicken, muenster cheese and sliced tomato on French bread.  The jerk chicken was nice and peppery, with a decent amount of heat.

The muenster cheese was a good, creamy match with the peppery chicken.  As you can see above, the bread was grilled to a golden brown.  This was an enjoyable sandwich, with a crispy exterior, and a soft, tasty interior.

When I finished the sandwich and was ready for dessert, I reached into the bag and pulled out…another sandwich?  I didn’t realize the “apple pie melt” was a grilled apple pie sandwich with cheese!

(credit: New York Street Food)

Oozing out the side of the sandwich were sliced apples, cheddar cheese and a thick, red, syrupy sauce.

I took a bite and got a mouthful of apple, cinnamon and some cheddar cheese, but mostly apple and cinnamon.

I couldn’t quite place what the red sauce was, so I asked James, the owner.  He told me the red in the apple pie melt was pulverized red hots!  That would explain the cinnamon flavor…and the sweetness.

Two sandwiches was a bit much for lunch and dessert, but they were both delicious.  One way to solve this dilemma is to go to Gorilla Cheese with a friend and split the sandwiches.  That way you can have lunch and dessert without eating two sandwiches, like I did.

Gorilla Cheese gets around to different neighborhoods for lunch and dinner, so you should check their twitter here or our Mobile Munchies twitter feed.  They have a special sandwich each week that’s usually a good way to go.  The special sandwiches are generally $7, and you can add a side order of tater tots and a bottle of water for another $3.

(credit: New York Street Food)

Food Freaks sandwich (credit: New York Street Food)

Yesterday the NY Times had a feature called Rethinking Grilled Cheese.  To us it was more like celebrating grilled cheese, because we’ve been following and talking about three of these guys for quite some time.

Last June at the Taste of the Parks, we raved about the braised short rib, gruyere, blackberry jam, pickled red onions and watercress on grilled sourdough (pictured above) from Food Freaks.  At the time, we said it was our favorite dish of the day, and there were several past Vendy Award Finalists at the event.

(credit: New York Street Food)

The Times thought that Milk Truck had the best traditional grilled cheeses sandwich.  We haven’t tried their traditional grilled cheese, but loved their ham and cheese, as well as the bacon cheddar blue grilled cheese (pictured above).

As for Morris Grilled Cheese, we’ve been there three times, and our favorite sandwich so far wasn’t even grilled. It was a feta, cucumber, zucchini and basil on rosemary focaccia.  It was cool and refreshing on a very hot day last summer, and we absolutely loved the rosemary focaccia (pictured below).

Congratulations to our friends at Food Freaks, Milk Truck and Morris Grilled Cheese, who all got some quality time in the Paper of Record.

(credit: New York Street Food)

The most recent of the grilled cheese trucks in the city is the Milk Truck.  They started out operating a stand at Brooklyn Flea, and expanded to other food events around the city, including Madison Square Eats, before coming out with their truck last November.

The Milk Truck is known for obsessing over their ingredients, from the thickness of the bread slices to everything in between.  They also use an old fashioned sandwich press, which gives each sandwich thick, distinct ridges.  These are among the most visually appealing grilled cheese sandwiches around.  But what about the taste?

Anything with blue cheese usually moves to the top of my list, but add bacon and there’s no question!  I ordered the Bacon Cheddar Blue, which cost $8.50.

In addition to thick-cut bacon, creamy cheddar and pieces of blue cheese, there were a few caramelized onions and pickle slices in the sandwich.

The menu said they were spicy pickles, but I didn’t notice anything spicy about them.  The pickles did add a lot of taste to the sandwich though, offsetting the cheeses and bacon nicely.

The crust of the sandwich was crunchy, and the rest of the bread was soft.

One thing with the sandwiches from the Milk Truck is they appear thin when you get them, but don’t let that fool you – they are packed with flavor.  Make that several flavors.  This was a delicious sandwich!

In the warmer weather, the Milk Truck has really good milkshakes.  In the winter, they recently started with beef chili, mac & cheese, tomato soup and other seasonally-appropriate dishes.  You can see the daily specials menu here from the day I went.

The Milk Truck spends a lot of time downtown on the corner of Wall & William Streets, but sometimes they are on 23rd & Park, Tribeca or Brooklyn on weekends.  To be sure, check their twitter here or our Mobile Munchies twitter feed.

short rib, gruyere, blackberry jam, pickled onions & watercress

Step into my lair young grasshopper, and you will discover the secrets of a Grilled Cheese Master.

Shocking as it may sound, there may not always be a grilled cheese vendor around when the yearning hits.  In these cases, you might have to make a grilled cheese sandwich at home.

But it’s not as simple as it sounds.  There are things you should know that could help make your good grilled cheese sandwich into a great one. (Mayo?)

Stephen Cusato from Food Freaks Grilled Cheese, a cart by Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, recently did an interview with Scoutmob talking about how he makes delicious grilled cheese sandwiches.  We can attest to this.  In our opinion, Food Freaks was one of the highlights at the Taste of the Parks event last June.

So follow these guidelines, and you too can be a Food Freak at home.

Grated Cheese Melts Better
I’m not even going to begin to talk about American cheese right now. We don’t use it on the cart, so I’d never tell you to use it to improve your grilled cheese-making ability. It’s totally cool if you like it; it melts great and it’s classic. We just chose not to use it, mainly because it’s technically not a cheese. I digress: grated cheese just melts better than slices. FOODfreaks laboratory-tested.

The Bread is Half the Battle
Bread could cost us 10 cents a sandwich, instead it costs us about five times that. Why? Because bread makes up 50% of each grilled cheese, so we spare no expense. Orwasher’s Bakery bakes our bread but there are tons of great options for you to use. Our favorites are potato Pullman and wheat Pullman—Pullman is the traditional shape of bread you normally see in stores—as well as country white and free-formed sourdough. Free-formed means it’s not baked in a pan, but rather on a sheet for a more rustic shape. We’ve found the best no-frills grilled cheese is made with a good quality potato Pullman loaf. I promise it’ll make all the difference.

The Fort Greene

Use Mayo, Not Butter
Not what you expected, huh? You may even gasp in disbelief but yes, mayo is our lube of choice when making a grilled cheese. Mayo has a higher smoke point than butter, meaning it withstands heat better and allows the sandwich to cook longer, giving the cheese time to melt before the bread gets too dark. We actually put the sandwich on the cooking surface dry, toast it, then spread a very thin layer of mayo on both sides to create a golden brown exterior, one you just cannot get with butter. It also results in a less greasy sandwich.

Think Outside Just Bread and Cheese
FOODfreaks was created with the vision that a grilled cheese is an open canvas for culinary creativity. You could throw American cheese on Wonder Bread and call it the best grilled cheese ever, but the possibilities are much greater when you start to think differently. Empty out your fridge, slice up some vegetables, make your own spreads, and try to get wild. There is much more to a grilled cheese than cheese and bread. Fruits, jams, meats, and especially vegetables! I’ve even thought about putting seared tuna in a grilled cheese. Bottom line: Don’t be scared to get creative.

Proportions Matter
Not enough cheese or bread that’s too thick will not make a good grilled cheese. Same goes for adding extras. If you want to add a chicken cutlet to your grilled cheese, make sure it’s thinly sliced. If you want to throw in some roast beef or pastrami, don’t pile it high like Katz’s deli, then it just becomes a regular hot sandwich. A balanced ratio of bread to cheese to extras will make your finished product that much better, so pay attention to the amount of each ingredient you use.

You can follow Food Freaks Grilled Cheese on twitter here, and their website is here.

There are currently 3 grilled cheese trucks in New York, and they are pretty different from each other.  Today we’re going to talk about the Morris Grilled Cheese truck.

The Morris Grilled Cheese is named after the great-grandfather of the owner, who was a Russian immigrant that drove a produce and meat truck.  The Morris Grilled Cheese truck was reportedly an old NYPD paddy wagon, with bars for handcuffing suspects still intact when they bought the truck!

I was in the mood for Italian food, and Morris had a sandwich with ricotta meatballs, provolone and homemade marinara sauce on focaccia bread for $8.

I’ve had sandwiches from Morris before on focaccia, and the bread was delicious. It’s golden brown with rosemary on top.  In the cold sandwich I had over the summer, the focaccia was really soft.  Grilled it wasn’t quite as soft, but it was still a wonderful bread.

In my experience, hot Italian sandwiches are mostly meat with some cheese.  This sandwich was mostly cheese with some meatballs.

The provolone cheese had more of an edge to it than mozzarella, which you would normally expect with meatballs.  It melted well and was nice and gooey.

The meatballs had an herby flavor, and the homemade marinara sauce was light and tasty, but the predominant flavors in the sandwich were the focaccia and provolone.  This is a grilled cheese truck after all.

You can follow the Morris Grilled Cheese truck on twitter here or on our Mobile Munchies twitter feed with other food trucks.  They have a pretty interesting menu with top-notch ingredients that changes every so often.  You can see the current menu here.

We passed by the Morris Grilled Cheese Truck recently and saw they had expanded their menu with some interesting new sandwich choices.  In addition to a few classic grilled cheese sandwiches, they also had a hot pastrami, chili & cheddar, and the one that caught our eye right away – The Blue.

Not only did it have blue cheese, but there were also pickled beets (which are in season) and duck prosciutto (!)

Today’s Lunch is The Blue ($8) from the Morris Grilled Cheese Truck.

While me and two other people were waiting for our sandwiches, the guy in the truck gave us each a taste of their hot apple cider, which was delicious.  It was made with nutmeg, cinnamon, brown sugar, allspice, clove and a little orange zest, and was very nice on a cold winter day.  It reminded me of an apple version of our favorite winter drink – grog – but without the rum.

The sandwich came out of the griddle a gorgeous golden brown color, and they sprinkled a little sea salt on top.  I asked him to cut it in half, and the color was even more striking with the beets in the middle.

The first thing I noticed upon taking a bite was the beets were still “al dente”.  The beets I’ve had recently in other dishes have been totally soft, but these  had a little body left.  The beets did not have a strong pickled taste either, which was fine with me.

The cheese melted well, and had a nice blue cheese taste, but was a bit salty.

The duck prosciutto had a darker and deeper flavor than prosciutto made from ham, but it was a bit salty too.

Between the “bit salty” cheese and prosciutto, and the salt sprinkled on top, the overall effect was the sandwich was too salty for my taste.  I’m not a big salt lover to begin with, so maybe it’s just my sensitivity, but I would have preferred less.

Perhaps a meat that absorbs salt rather than has its own would have been a better choice – or don’t sprinkle salt on the top of The Blue, which already has enough.

I almost forgot to mention the bread, which was sourdough, and it made a nice grilled sandwich.  It was thick enough to hold the fillings and still have some body after grilling.

Today’s Lunch from the Morris Grilled Cheese Truck was still pretty interesting with the blue cheese, beets and duck prosciutto, but I would have preferred less saltiness in my sandwich.

I definitely want to try the pastrami sandwich from Morris Grilled Cheese.  I realize it’s not going to have much in common with a Jewish deli pastrami sandwich, but it does sound good.

You can follow Morris Grilled Cheese on twitter here or on our Mobile Munchies twitter feed here.

One of the more eagerly awaited food trucks in New York has been the Milk Truck.  Keith Klein and his posse have been building their reputation at food gatherings such as Brooklyn Flea over the past couple of years, and they recently had a stand at Madison Square Eats.

We enjoyed a grilled ham and cheese from the Milk Truck stand at Madison Square Eats, so we’ve tried their food once before, but this is our First Look at lunch from the actual Milk Truck.

We were tempted to go with their special, which was a classic grilled cheese and tomato soup combo ($10), but changed our mind at the last minute to the Three Cheese Grilled Cheese ($7.25).  I figured if I’m gonna have grilled cheese, let’s go for three different types.

After I ordered and was waiting for lunch, I started talking to two people with a camera and microphone who were filming something at the truck.  They turned out to be journalism students at Columbia University who were doing a project on food trucks for their class.  I ended up doing an interview while my lunch was being prepared, and ended it by taking a couple of bites on camera.  That’s why the sandwich above has a couple of bites taken out of it.

The first bite on the corner was very crunchy, with the end of the crust being almost like a snack food.  The second bite got into the cheeses, which melded together deliciously.  There were cheddar, gruyere and blue cheese, giving the sandwich both sharpness and creaminess.

And there was a tartness inside the sandwich too, with thin slices of caramelized granny smith apples.  This was a nice touch, with the apples adding a whole other dimension to the sandwich.  Apples go very well with most cheese.

As for the bread, that added a couple of dimensions too.  The bread had a little rosemary in it, adding an herbiness, and the ridges made by the sandwich press added texture.

Today’s Lunch from the Milk Truck was very good.  The sandwich had a lot of different things going on, not the least of which were a trio of gooey, melty cheeses offset by tart pieces of apple.

Based on the two lunches I’ve had from the Milk Truck, the sandwiches appear thin when you get them, but don’t let that fool you – they are packed with flavor.  Make that several flavors.

You can follow the Milk Truck on twitter here or on our Mobile Munchies twitter feed.

We’ve been expecting to see the Milk Truck on the street for a while now, and yesterday it finally appeared.

The Milk Truck was operating a stand at Brooklyn Flea, and has been at many other food events around the city.  Despite their name, Milk Truck has only had an operating truck since Fashion Night Out in September, and now they are finally taking the plunge.

We had the pleasure of enjoying a grilled ham and cheese from the Milk Truck at Madison Square Eats, and it was delicious.  Can’t wait to try more of their sandwiches – and we hear their milkshakes are really good too.

You can follow the Milk Truck on twitter here, and they are also in our Mobile Munchies twitter feed.

I had to talk to James from Gorilla Cheese NYC about the Amazing New York Food Trucks 2012 Calendar, and he had a new special this week – a cheesesteak melt – which gave me a perfect excuse to head over there.

While I was waiting for the sandwich to be cooked, James asked me to try a new version of his mac & cheese, so that was Today’s Lunch: a grilled cheesesteak melt ($7) and a side order of macaroni & cheese ($3.75).

The sandwich was sliced rib-eye steak with sauteed onions, American cheese and a little ketchup on French bread.

The first few bites had that great combination of grilled steak and gooey cheese.  A couple of bites in, I started getting sauteed onions in the mix, and a touch of ketchup.

With such tasty sauces at the truck, I was surprised to see ketchup on the sandwich. I’m not a big fan of ketchup on meat, but a little bit on this sandwich rounded out the overall taste.  I’m glad they used it sparingly, because too much ketchup would have been a disaster.

A special shout-out has to go out to the American cheese, which was a good choice to go with the steak.  The American cheese was strong enough to stand up to the steak, bit not too strong to overpower it.  Kraft singles are so ubiquitous, a good American cheese is almost a revelation.

After eating some of the sandwich, I opened the macaroni & cheese container.  The mac & cheese was made with gruyere, fontina and cheddar cheese.  Gruyere, like Swiss cheese, can have a bite, but the mac & cheese was smooth. I bit into it, but it didn’t bite back.

There was some black pepper in the mac & cheese, and something that mellowed it out.  I think it was nutmeg, but don’t quote me on that.  Whatever it was, it added a nice flavor.

Today’s Lunch from Gorilla Cheese was very tasty, but what would someone from Philly think about it?  I guess that depends on how open-minded they are.

The cheesesteak melt from Gorilla Cheese was not your classic Philly cheese steak sandwich, but it was meaty, gooey, grilled and enjoyable. That’s good enough for me.