Coconut & Lime is firing up the panini press for a series of recipes this week, and taking some beautiful pictures along the way.  Rachel Rappaport’s mouthwatering recipes are making us hungry for crispy pressed sandwiches like Sesame-Ginger Pork and Prosciutto di Parma with Capicola.  We will be checking back throughout the week to see the tasty combinations that Coconut & Lime is sure to put between grilled bread.

We caught up with Coconut & Lime’s creator Rachel Rappaport:

Unbreaded: Can you give us a little background about C&L?
Rachel Rappaport: I started Coconut & Lime back in 2004 as a place to share my recipes with friends. It slowly grew until the point where I now do it full time. I really enjoy creating my own recipes for food and sharing them with my readers. It is a lot of work but worth it when I see how well my recipes are received by people who make them in their own kitchens!

UB: You’ve made a lot of sandwiches.  Can you give us some lessons learned?
RR: While I enjoy buying fancy meats and cheeses to make my own gourmet sandwiches, I really love making sandwiches out of leftovers from other meals. It makes the idea of eating leftovers much more palatable; it is almost as if you weren’t eating leftovers at all.

UB: If you could eat any sandwich in the world right now, what would it be, and from where?
RR: Luckily my favorite sandwich is easily obtained at our local Italian deli. It is called the Old World Italian and has great Italian meats and cheese and an olive spread that is truly divine.

UB: What’s your favorite sandwich to throw together in the middle of the night?
RR: Grilled cheese! Made with sharp Cabot cheddar and occasionally some Canadian bacon or tomato.

Via [Coconut & Lime]

Lou Sarcone Jr., the fourth-generation baker on 9th Street in South Philadelphia, is known among his family simply as Junior.  His father, also Lou, and his son, Louis, share more than a name – they share a commitment to keeping a very old business operating the way it did a very long time ago.  That is not to say that they haven’t modernized Sarcone’s Bakery – which they have – but they have done so while maintaining their focus on delivering the exact same product, time after time after time.  Using premium Pillsbury flour; giving the dough a full 2 hours to rise; baking the bread in the old brick ovens to bring out the flavor.  “It’s just like making a gravy,” said Sarcone, “Slow cooked food tastes better.”

So the food you put on that bread better be good.

For Lou’s cousin, Anthony Bucci, food is a passion.  A former executive chef at the Wyndam Franklin Plaza hotel and a longtime veteran of the family bakery, he now runs Sarcone’s Deli.  The deli is not a typical hoagie and sandwich shop.  They serve food that you’d expect to find cooked in a restaurant or your own home, but on that crusty, chewy, flavorful bread.  It’s the preparation and ingredients that differentiates them from traditional “lettuce and tomato” hoagie shops.  House-prepared roast beef, roast pork, meatballs, chicken cutlets, and eggplant are just some of the restaurant style cooked dishes that find their home on a Sarcone’s roll.  Juicy ripe roma tomatoes and bits of prosciutto, sopressata and cappicola that don’t make it onto sandwiches become the starter for the gravy for the hot sandwiches.  If you like marinated fresh asparagus and a balsamic drizzle, you can get it on the roast beef sandwich.  If you like house-roasted peppers and roasted garlic with fresh herbs, spread it on your veggie sandwich.  And if you like DiBruno Bros cheeses, gourmet cured meats and imported parma prosciutto, why not get them on an Old Fashioned Italian sandwich?

Anthony and Lou admit, it always starts with the bread.  And at Sarcone’s Bakery, the business is all about tradition.  Listen to the previous generation, and do exactly what they do.  It’s like whisper down the lane; without all the context and subtext, something can get lost along the way.  Five generations of Sarcones have donned the baker’s whites and pledged to keep the bakery exactly the same.  As Lou’s grandfather said, “put too much food in your mouth, you can’t chew.”  It’s about staying in business.  It’s looking at 90 successful years of history and believing that the business could continue for another 90 years.  No wholesale, only retail.  They’ve seen lean times before and economic booms but the business has remained steady and focused.

A mainstay on the Italian Market if there ever was one, Sarcone’s has witnessed the sell-off of the generations-old businesses a few blocks away; but Lou Sarcone believes that history repeats itself and he welcomes a new generation of business owners coming back to the market.  Not just businesses, but Sarcone sees the influx of young professionals, students and young families into South Philadelphia as a good thing for everyone.

Sarcone’s Deli has plans to move into a newly renovated space next to its current location on 9th Street later this summer. (The current space will be put to good use but plans are still being developed.)  The bigger growth plan centers around 10-15 new franchise locations in the tri-state area over the next few years.  So how does a business so deeply ingrained in its environment extend outside of its location?  Sarcone’s has pledged to maintain tight control over the product and training new staff.  Keep it geographically limited, keep a handle on quality, and follow the Sarcone’s operator’s manual to the letter: serve up restaurant food on the very best bread.

Already one former franchisee has had the Sarcone’s brand pulled from his shop for cutting corners and cheating the customer.  But it was a valuable learning experience for Lou and Anthony, a lesson that will stay with them as they grow their vision beyond 9th Street and into the suburbs.

Gallery

Sarcone’s Deli
734 S 9th St, Philadelphia, PA 19147 (Google Map)

Barbecue is popping up all over Philadelphia these days. From the recent opening of Q BBQ & Tequila to the popularity of pulled pork sandwiches on gastropub menus (think Slate, Pub & Kitchen, etc.), the heat is on for competitors in this category. The newly opened Bebe’s Barbecue on 9th Street in the Italian Market is the newest foray into smoked meat. We unbreaded their signature item, a Carolina-style pulled pork sandwich, and found that is has the right stuff to smoke out the competition.

Bebe’s pulled pork sandwich starts with a cut of pork shoulder coated thickly in homemade dry rub. It is then smoked for twelve hours, when it emerges tender and with a pronounced and flavorful “bark,” or crust created from the rub. To construct the sandwich, the pork is pulled apart by hand, tossed with homemade Lexington-style barbecue sauce (a tangy red sauce with a deep and complex flavor), and served on a toasted roll. “Don’t waste good bread on barbecue,” proprietor and chef Mark Coates says. “The bread should melt away… it’s about the meat.”

Coates, an affable and charismatic character with a Southern drawl, was born in Charlotte, NC but raised on a chicken hatchery in Mississippi. On the hatchery, he got started on barbecue with his family’s chicken recipe (whole chickens mopped with vinegar, butter, and lemon over an open flame). Coates’ grandmother Bebe, the namesake of the restaurant, taught him how to cook early on and he still calls her for recipes. But it wasn’t until 1998 that Coates learned the nuances of Carolina-style barbecue from an uncle in Greensboro.

When Coates moved to Philadelphia in 2005, he settled in Bella Vista and perfected his pork and other goodies on a home smoker. After tossing around the idea of opening a restaurant with friend (and now business partner) Tamara Van Winkle for a couple of years, Coates finally pulled the trigger in April and moved into his Italian Market location.

Why a barbecue joint in the Italian Market? Coates was reading an article in The Inquirer about girlfriend Heather Bryson’s sculpture installation at The Inquirer’s offices on North Broad (she also owns B-Squared gallery up the street from the market). In the same edition of the paper, he stumbled upon Rich Nichols’ article about the revitalization of the Italian Market. “It clicked,” Coates says, adding that “the Market has a reputation for thriving during tough economic times.”

Besides the pulled pork, which is also served as a platter with two sides and cornbread), Bebe’s serves a rotating selection of dry-rubbed, smoked ribs (“try them without the sauce first”), brisket, and whole rotisserie chickens. Look for the brisket and chicken as sandwiches when available. Sides, which are all vegetarian, are made in-house and include collard greens, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes and Dixie-cut cole slaw. Coates sources everything he can from the Italian Market itself, and stresses that his kitchen lacks a freezer, microwave and can opener–which means that everything he serves is fresh.

Despite his commitment to authentic Southern barbecue traditions when crafting the pulled pork, Coates is eager to incorporate the flavors of today’s Italian Market into his cooking.  On Sunday mornings, he makes a nod towards the market’s heritage by serving prosciutto and provolone sandwiches on homemade biscuits.  Noting the explosion of taquerias and Mexican grocery stores in the area, he is experimenting with pulled pork tamales.  He even imagines someday serving smoked tofu sandwiches for the vegetarian crowd.

Bebe’s will be a fine addition to the booming food scene on 9th Street. As Coates puts it, “If you want a hoagie, go to Sarcone’s. If you want roast pork, go to George’s. For some real barbecue, come to Bebe’s.”

Bebe’s Barbecue
1017 S 9th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19147 (Google Map)

One of our favorite Italian-Americans and an expert on Italian meats, Giulia Umile, educates us on the nuances of Italian cured pork.

Domestic Prosciutto
Curing ham is an art involving only a few different elements: salting, temperature and time. For twelve months, artisans move the hams from room to room in the curing facility so that different temperatures and humidities can play their part in the curing process. A truly versatile food, Prosciutto can be used virtually anywhere; from cooked dishes to antipasto to an elegant snack. It pairs well with crusty bread, peppers, olives and sharp cheeses.

Prosciutto Di Parma
From the regions of Parma and Langhirano of Emilia-Romagna and one of Italy’s finest foods.  Aged for over twelve months, Prosciutto di Parma contains only 2 ingredients; pork and sea salt. The special curing process is what gives this meat its outstanding flavors and texture.  Passed down for generations and made under strict quality conditions, the tradition and skill of curing this ham consists of hand rubbing each leg of pork with a precise amount of sea salt to make sure the cure is ideal. The prosciutto then moves from curing room to curing room, each with different temperatures and humidity settings to moderate the curing process.

Genoa Salami-Artificial Casing and Natural Casing
Named after Genoa, the city in which it was born. A fine textured pork sausage full of garlic and spices that is arguably the most popular variety of Italian dried sausage in the US.  It is typically aged for over 3 months, during which time a cord is wrapped lengthwise around the sausage at regular intervals to form its shape.

Hot Capicola
Capicola is a traditional sausage produced in a number of regions of Italy. It’s made exclusively from the pork butt, which is aged for a minimum of thirty days in brine before being packed into a casing, where it is cooked and further aged to allow the flavor to develop. Hot Capicola is typically seasoned with crushed red hot peppers, salt and garlic to complement the rich flavor of the pork with a spicy hot accent. Hot Capicola can be paired with Italian bread and provolone to make an authentic Italian sandwich.

Sweet & Hot Sopressata
This typical Salami, characterized by a distinctive flavor, was traditionally produced for centuries in the Southern Italian old-country farmhouses and villages (originated in Calabria). It is made of coarse-ground pork, so it has a different texture and flavor than the more widely known, finer-ground salamis. Sweet Sopressata is seasoned with garlic, salt and black pepper, and cured up to nine months in a natural casing. Hot sopressata is made in the same method, however spicy hot peppers are added before the curing process for that extra kick and red color throughout the sausage.

Mortadella
Originating in Bologna (nickname “la grassa”, which means fat), Mortadella is made of finely ground pork mixed together with cubes of high quality pork fat (from the throat) and sometimes pistachios or pine nuts. It gets its name from the Roman word for “mortar”; in ancient times, a mortar and pestle were often used to grind meats, fruits, and grains.  These ingredients are combined in casing and hung to slowly cook in brick ovens for up to 24 hours.  Mortadella is best enjoyed with an excellent piece of Italian bread, and not much else.

Pancetta
Often called Italian bacon-however unlike American bacon- pancetta is not smoked, but rather is cured with a variety of spices, herbs, and garlic. Pancetta is usually rolled and tied in a cylindrical shape, then hung to dry. Pancetta that is made in Florence, however, is left flat.

Bresaola
The leanest of the Italian cured meats, bresaola is salted and air-dried beef from the tenderloin or fillet. It is dried for up to three months, and when finished is a deep ruby-red color. Unlike other Italian meats, there is very little visible fat.

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What makes me an expert?
1. First generation American; both parents were born in Abruzzi and moved to the US during their teen years.
2. Raised in a family rich in Italian culture; I’ve spoken both languages since I was 3.
3. My father owned a salumeria in West Philadelphia the majority of my life, and specialized in Italian meats and cheeses. He also owned an authentic Italian café across the street, where he served amazing Italian coffees and gelato.
4. We cured our own salami in the basement of our West Philadelphia row home.
5. My name is Giulia Umile. Enough said. If I was a boy, my name would have been Umberto.