Top Food Truck

Tops is a food truck specializing in small batch sausages. They had some technical issues over the summer, but it appears that they're back. The picture is an older one; they've dropped some of the variety to focus on sausage, which is probably a good thing. Along with the sausages, they serve chili, and have the usual potato chips/soda options for a side.

The bratwurst is good, with the right blend of flavors. It's topped with chopped tomatoes, raw onions, and 'jojo sauce', a slightly sweet, slightly spicy yogurt based sauce. The topping are good and blend well with the sausage. The texture is a bit mushy however, with a limp casing, and a too-soft bun only compounding the problems here.

As far as the chili goes, it tastes pretty good. It's well balanced, with not to much tomato, not too much beef. The beef chunks might be a little bit larger than ideal though. It's very sweet, and not very spicy even after adding Frank's hot sauce. Not the sort of chili I'm really looking for, if I'm just wanting chili, but I can see how it might go well on a hot dog.

Lately, I've been wanting to make a hash for dinner. It has something to do with the surfeit of potatoes we've been getting in our CSA, but especially with fall coming on, it's a nice comforting dish. I based it on a recipe for Red Flannel Hash from Rick and Ann's restaurant in Berkeley, but with some changes. I used to make a sausage and onions dish when I was in law school, and still enjoy playing with sausage meat, so I used de-cased sausages in place of the bacon. I also added some jalapeno and vinegar to kick it up a notch. It turned out pretty good, and it's a nice, easy recipe to have in mind.

First, I started the potatoes steaming while I peeled the beets. I chopped a jalapeno, onion, and a garlic clove. I also sliced open the sausages and removed the casing. Once the beets and the potatoes were done steaming, I started frying the sausage. After the sausage was browned, I removed it and deglazed the pan with some vinegar, after which I added the aromatics. Once those were brown, I added the potatoes and beets in, mashed them, and once they had heated up a bit and gotten a bit brown, I put the sausage back in and let it all meld together.

It was really quite tasty, with just a couple flaws. First, the sausage didn't actually have enough fat to grease up the pan, so I should have added some oil/butter/fat to the pan before putting in the aromatics, and certainly before adding the potatoes. Second, I'm not sure the beets ended up as well cooked as I would have liked. But the jalapeno and vinegar gave it a good kick, the flavors worked really well together, and the combination of beets, sweet potatoes, and russet potatoes had a really nice color. Recipe after the jump.