new york glimpses: easy-bake

As long as we're at the beginning, we might as well start with breakfast. Easily, one of the best aspects of staying with friends in the city was that we could get an early start to try a different bakery nearly every day. We've written about our wishy-washy indifference to brunch before, but baked goods we heartily support.

So as soon as we had a morning in the Lower East Side, we made a return pilgrimage to Doughnut Plant to see if it matched our sugar-coated memories from last year. Since their flavors rotate seasonally, we snagged two new creations - a creme brulée doughnut and a rose petal one - along with a classic "Blackout." Excellent doughnuts, terrible coffee. But, oh, how those pastries tasted! The creme brulée was a tall dome, glazed with a hard sugar crust and filled with a light, eggy custard. While it was good (though no comparison to it's namesake dessert), I preferred the rose petal doughnut and the heady perfume that came through in each bite of its glazed exterior. The verdict, however, relied upon the Blackout, which won us over to doughnuts when we first tried it last year. In every way, its dense, gooey, chocolate crumb held up to our memories. We spent a good 20 minutes reasoning out how they could possibly make a doughnut taste so much like flourless chocolate cake. We may never know.


As we left Doughnut Plant, I looked up at the neighboring storefront to see a sign for Kossar's Bialys. I remembered the name from Mimi Sheraton's poignant (downright sad if you're the type to cry over a food book) The Bialy Eaters, and knew that we had to stop in for a second breakfast. According to Sheraton, Kossar's is among the last places in America where you can find a decent bialy, so we selected two of their garlic versions (along with some more "nouvelle," though delicious, challah bagels). Kin to the bagel, bialys are a bit flatter and have a rougher crust and a shallow depression in the center. While bagels gain their glossy exterior from a pre-bake dip in boiling water, bialys are simply put in the oven, as-is. Nestled in its dimple, the Kossar's bialy had a smear of salty, poppy-seed studded garlic mince that made the roll absolutely addictive. With the experience of Kossar's under my belt, I can say that until now I have tasted some sorry bialy impostors.


Later in the week, we continued our search for early-morning, Yiddish baked goods; next on our list was Yonah Schimmel's Knishery. While A and I have commendable appetites, we very well may have met our match in the knish. I have to admit that prior to Schimmel's, I was as unfamiliar with a knish as most gentiles. Helpfully, Edible Manhattan just ran an article on the endangered knish - that lost icon of New York cuisine - which sheds some light on this overlooked pastry. A classic knish is composed of an imposing mound of seasoned, mashed potatoes, which is wrapped with a pastry band and baked to steaming perfection. It easily weighed a pound and even split between the two of us, that thing was a struggle to complete. That's not to say it wasn't a savory delight, particularly with a dab of deli mustard.


The further along we went in our breakfast escapades, the larger our pastry discoveries seemed to grow. On our last day in the city, our friends Macy and Annie took us to Carrot Top Pastries to witness some terrifyingly-large croissants (frisbee-sized!) and the squarest muffins I've ever seen. We smartly steered away from the croissants and ordered their signature carrot muffin, with heaping tops spilling over the lip of the muffin pan. Like a moist, lightly-spiced slab of carrot cake, the muffin was a meal unto itself and went great with some pretty decent diner coffee.


Finally, our stomachs led us to Momofuku Milk Bar later that afternoon. While not technically breakfast (I'm not sure you could confidently call any of Milk Bar's offerings the best start to your day), there were early-morning staples peppered throughout a menu of decadent sweets. A branch of the David Chang's coyly inventive Momofuku mini-empire, Milk Bar was set up to showcase the creations of pastry chef Christina Tosi, who was profiled as a bit of a sugar-coated evil genius by the New York Times. In a crowded, standing-room-only space, they serve up compost cookies, crack pie, candy-infused soft-serve, and their infamous cereal milk - the infused leftovers of a bowl of soggy cereal. If we weren't down to our last few hours on the trip (and their food weren't so damn filling), we could have easily committed ourselves to slowly working our way through their Wonka-esque array of surreal sweets.


As it was, we sampled the sour gummy soft-serve (which won that hilarious remark, "It really does taste like sour gummies!") and order a serving of chocolate mint ice cream, an English muffin sandwich, a loaf of green-curry banana bread (for the plane!) and something called, "The Volcano." The soft-serve was redolent of Thin Mints and incredibly satisfying. A's English muffin cradled a poached egg, bacon and meltingly sweet onions, while my "Volcano" seemed to include a little of everything. Bacon, braised onions, gruyere, cream, potatoes were held inside of what resembled a sourdough bread bowl. Think of it as a neo-knish, stuffed with scalloped potatoes. Of course, we enjoyed everything with the ubiquitous bottles of sriracha sauce at each counter. It's really no wonder we had such stomachaches for the flight home.