Smorgasburg is a food market held at the East River State Park on weekends seasonally. They're back up and running for the Spring and it seems they've come a ways since last year with more vendors and drawing bigger crowds. Walking around and eating food, talking about food, looking at food . . . I think I'll be going a lot more this year. I started off with some balsamic strawberry cheesecake bites from Bite Me that had a good amount of tartness and creamy cheesy filling, but the best part was the crumbly outer layer. $2.50 per bite is a little expensive, but not unreasonable for being handmade per order.
Got a bag of hot and smoky beef jerky with spicy pepper glaze and dry rub from Slant Shack Jerky. Not too tough, very smoky, comes in a large sheet that looks very appetizing when unfurled rather than the small bits and strips a lot of jerky comes in. $8 a bag.
The label art on this hot sauce is probably one of the best: skeleton drinking blood from wine glass whilst hovering over naked maiden holding a dagger--obviously the skeleton can't hold his liquor so it sprinkles over said fair lady. Heartbreaking Dawns had a large selection of specialty hot sauces with tropical nuances. I tried a whole slew of them and they were all very interesting flavors with a common theme of balancing sweet and heat. If you like complex flavors or are a hot sauce fanatic these are great for only $7 a bottle. I got the "1498" Trinidadian Scorpion Sauce: scorpion peppers, scotch bonnets, apricots, blueberries and carrots.
Hot pastrami with mustard from Brooklyn Cured was a small treat for $5. This slices of coriander crusted pastrami with a slight sweetness from honey brine. The crusty roll had a satisfying crumble to it and the mustard was crunchy with whole seeds intact.
I believe this merguez was also from a Brooklyn Cured stall: pork sausage with dill yogurt sauce on a warm pita, tasty and filling. The sausage was very thick and the spice from it overshadowed the subtleness of the yogurt sauce a bit. The pita was super tender, altogether a great deal at $7.
Lastly, I picked up fig balsamic vinegar from D'Vine & Olive and kimchi and soy pickled peppers from Mrs. Kim's. The fig balsamic is great because the sweetness from teh fig negates some of the bitterness of the usual balsamic vinegar. The kimchi had a really beautiful red color and was a bit hotter than most of the mediocre store-bought kimchi in NYC so I'm excited to find a better alternative. Soy pickled peppers are insanely addicting, I dice them and throw on everything now and it's a problem, because I'm going to have to buy like 10 jars a month. The vinegar was $13 and the kimchi and pickled peppers were $7 each.
More Smorgasburg updates to come.
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