It’s a year since we printed our Meat Issue—just named best special issue of the year at the Edible Communities publishers’ summit, woot!—and we’re thrilled to follow that up with an entire edition dedicated to dairy. We had a blast putting together this luscious lactic lineup but the funny thing is that, after months hunting tales about eats from teats, this issue remains true to tradition.
That is, despite doubling the butterfat, we still followed our standard master recipe for cooking up an Edible. Which starts with a dash of booze—namely the Brandy Milk Punch at Rye, complete with Ronnybrook milk and cocoa nibs from the Mast Brothers. Feel at home yet? Good. Next we added a few scoops of melting pot tales, including a guide to I-can’t-believe- it’s-not-dairy treats in Sunset Park’s Chinatown (here’s looking at you, vegans) and a profile of a family that’s been making big batches of Mexican cheeses by hand every morning for twenty years.
We whisked a good measure of Old School flavors, including a whopping eight-page photo essay on pizza and a pin-up shot of a 110-pound piece of provolone from 1959 that might make you feel you were born too late. As always, we season liberally with stories on innovative entrepreneurs, including hipsters making raw nut milk in Bushwick, a Dumbo coffee roaster who dreamed up 7% milk and a former Per Se cook who now drives a Greenmarket-minded grilled-cheese truck that just might merit four stars.
You’ll sink your teeth into food justice as we get amped for the Brooklyn Food Conference (see you there) and get to know “Milk Not Jails,” a nonprofit that will have you buying more quarts in the name of prison reform. Seriously. Next comes a heaping helping of places that put Brooklyn on the culinary map. We profile Saul Bolton, the trailblazing chef I’ve come to think of as our borough’s own Danny Meyer. And we go behind the scenes at Stinky Bklyn, the Smith St. shop that’s made Carroll Gardens as delectable as any neighborhood across the river.
But we wouldn’t be Edible Brooklyn if our main ingredient were anything but the locavore lifestyle. So true to farmy form, we’re got stories on a spectacularly high-fat upstate butter, Williamsburg ex-pats turned goat herders, a sheep dairy’s shop in Park Slope, an urban forager who cooks weeds in cream, a locavore chef ’s memorable field trip to Ronnybrook Farm and the dairy ups and downs of the most famous pastry chef in New York. Naturally these stories are unhomogenized, so cream will rise to the top. Shake well before reading.
Stinky Bklyn stacks world-class cheese on Smith Street.
Photo credit: Max Flatow.
