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ANNOUNCER: We travel across the country
to find the most unique ethnic eats.
AARTI: Cook's Tortas in Los Angeles.
MATT: The sandwich that gets
the most attention is the ahogada.
AARTI: They will tell you to take some napkins
and you should probably take about twice as many,
'cause it's messy, sister.
MIKE: Pecking Order in Chicago.
TAMARA: Filipino fried chicken is unique.
MIKE: Before she even puts it in the fryer,
it's already cooked.
LEE ANNE: It's the marinade. It's the flavor.
It's the spices.
AARTI: Balaboosta in New York.
TAMARA: Shrimp Kataif is one of the most
talked about dishes.
It's so crunchy, when you bite into it, it's like--
MATT: Riffs Fine Street Food in Nashville.
AMANDA: You have this soft, pillowy bun
and then there's rich meaty, fatty oxtail.
It's sweetly acidic salsa in every bite.
TED: These are Unique Eats .
AARTI: Every culture in the world
has their own version of a sandwich.
AMANDA: We have our heroes and our hoagies.
The Chinese have the bao.
The Italians have the panini.
LEE ANNE: The classical version of a sandwich
within Latin culture is called the torta.
The best place to get it is Cook's Tortas.
MATT: Monterey Park is an outer neighborhood of LA.
When you enter Cook's Tortas,
you're presented with this huge, wall sized blackboard
with all the sandwiches listed on it
and each with a number.
Uh, number 26, please.
AARTI: The chef Ricardo Diaz
has created 500 different tortas
and they're all in his mind.
It truly is all about the bread.
TED: They start in the middle of the night
and they bake it in a stone oven
in the back of the restaurant
and they'll bake it throughout the day,
so it's always fresh.
And keep in mind they're making
500 to 600 sandwiches a day.
Ricardo makes this in-house aioli, he calls it crow sauce.
It's essentially fresh made mayonnaise with extra garlic,
spices and a little bit of heat.
TED: So what happens when you put
the crow sauce smeared bread down on the griddle is,
it just sort of erupts and melts
and gets absorbed up into the bread.
AARTI: One of the most popular sandwiches
is the milanesa, which is this thin piece of breaded beef
and even more of that crow sauce.
What makes the milanesa unique
at Cook's Tortas is the marinade.
TED: They're blending roma tomatoes
with eggs and garlic.
The tomatoes and garlic will flavor the meat
but the high amount of acidity will also
help it tenderize very quickly.
AARTI: After it's been marinated,
they are coating it in a combination of panko
that's mixed with oregano, cumin, basil,
red pepper flakes, salt and garlic.
AMANDA: The steak is sliced so thin
that when it gets deep fried,
it just sort of curls up and gets crispy.
TED: To build the sandwich, more spicy garlic mayo
is spread on the bread.
Then pickled jalapenos go on top.
Then the fried milanesa.
And it's all toped off with fresh tomato rounds.
AMANDA: And the fresh tomato and the spicy jalapeno
was such a great counterpoint for that fried steak.
TED: But also there's something about that
crow sauce, the garlic and the smoothness of it
that adds something special to the sandwich.
It's really lovely that--sort of spicy,
sort of vinegary,
cuts through all the breading, delicious.
MATT: The sandwich that gets the most attention
and rightfully so, is the ahogada, number 10.
Because this sandwich is a perfect 10.
Right on.
AARTI: The word ahogada means to drown.
They will tell you to take some napkins
and you should probably take about
twice as many 'cause it's messy, sister.
AMANDA: The sandwich is so delicious
because they're starting with pork carnitas.
It's pork shoulder cooked in pork fat
with orange rind till it's falling apart tender.
What is not to love about this?
RICARDO: Then we shred it a bit,
put it in a sandwich and we start covering it
in kind of like a warm tomato salsa
and a very, very spicy chile de arbol.
AARTI: They top it with onions escabeche
which are essentially like crunchy pickled onions
and then is sandwiched between the griddled bread.
What do I love about a sandwich
that's drowning in delicious, smoky tomato gravy?
Its awesomeness.
When you're eating it and you're like,
I want to lick my fingers and--
it's just so good.
AARTI: You get this perfect bite of, sort of,
chewy bread, chewy meat,
the pop of pickled onions,
a little bit of heat so it's just sort of
stinging your lips a little bit.
It's a brilliant sandwich.
RICARDO: The tongue sandwich here at Cook's,
what we call lengua in Spanish,
was basically my favorite sandwich growing up.
AMANDA: Ricardo serves it like a BLT.
Instead of using bacon,
he uses lengua, so it's an LLT.
I know, you may not want to try it,
but you've got to try it.
It's incredibly tender.
And it actually has a good deal of flavor,
like if you like dark meat, you will like lengua.
AMANDA: You should take the trip if you're in Los Angeles
and get to Cook's Tortas.
AARTI: I mean, this place is packed
morning, noon and night
and the food is just plain old delicious.
MATT: They just take it to the next level
in terms of the quality of the bread
and the ingredients as well
and the imagination that's brought
to bear on constructing all these
different combinations of awesome Latin ingredients.
LEE ANNE: What makes Pecking Order so unique
is how she's making the chicken.
TED: The skin is really thin.
It's a crisp, shattery crust, which I love.
MIKE: Balaboosta in New York.
It's sweet, it's chewy, it's earthy.
How could you not want to eat your vegetables,
if they taste that good?
TED: Chicken is really one of the most
approachable ingredients.
And it's used in so many
different cuisines across the globe.
MIKE: In the north of Chicago,
there's this tiny little neighborhood restaurant called
Pecking Order, their specialty chicken.
LEE ANNE: And the owner Kristine Subido
is showcasing chicken from her own culture,
Filipino style.
I opened this place mainly because Filipino food
is not familiar to a lot of people.
TAMARA: Before I went to Pecking Order,
I'm not gonna lie, that pretty much
the only thing I knew about the Philippines
was that Imelda Marcos used to have a lot of shoes.
Not really helpful in Filipino cuisine.
MATT: Oh, my gosh, I mean,
you've got tropical influences, Asian influences,
sweet, sour, salty.
LEE ANNE: What makes Pecking Order so unique
is how she's making the chicken.
It's the marinade. It's the flavor.
It's the spices.
If you've watched the show for more than a minute,
you've seen fried chicken.
We love fried chicken on the show.
Filipino fried chicken is unique.
Unique.
Unique.
TAMARA: In a mixing bowl, she combines garlic,
bay leaves and peppercorns.
Then she adds tamari which is a thicker,
darker and richer soy sauce, cane vinegar and lemon juice.
TED: This liquid is then added to the chicken
and here's the surprise.
It's more than a marinade, it's a poaching liquid.
MIKE: So already this fried chicken is unique
because before she even puts it in the fryer,
it's already cooked.
KRISTINE: It gives it that Filipino touch
and flavor that I don't think you can find anywhere else.
TED: The Filipino style is to do a very thin, crisp, crust.
TAMARA: And what's awesome is that, you know,
the chicken has already been cooked off
in all these aromatics, so it has all that
beautiful flavor already cooked into the chicken.
TED: The skin is really thin.
It's a crisp, shattery crust, which I love,
just love that style of fried chicken.
A classic Italian appetizer is a dish called arancini
which are basically stuffed, deep fried rice balls,
traditionally made with a risotto rice.
TAMARA: So to make it Filipino,
she takes Japanese rice,
stuffs it with chicken coconut adobo
and then deep fries it.
TED: She uses a Japanese short grain rice
that's been perfumed with garlic and oil.
MIKE: She fills it with a chicken
that has been simmered in coconut milk,
tamari and fish sauce.
TAMARA: She then rolls them in flour,
rolls them in egg wash
and then finishes them in panko
and they are ready to be deep fried.
So they're going to be really crunchy.
The sauce that they're served with,
it's like a scallion sauce, garlic scallion,
slightly bitter, oniony, de-licious.
MIKE: I mean, there's a savory filling with coconut milk
and there's pungency from the fish sauce
tasting kind of exotic,
but then there's creamy rice on the outside
and the crunch of fried food.
It's really a nice little snack.
For those of you who want a more traditional vehicle of
getting that chicken in your mouth,
you can get the City Bird sandwich.
Chicken thighs are marinated in tamari soy sauce,
cane vinegar, fish sauce,
garlic, bay leaves and peppercorns.
KRISTINE: The unique condiment
in this sandwich is chicken liver butter.
It is liver that's been sauteed with garlic and onion
and then whipped with butter.
MATT: On top of the liver goes two grilled chicken strips.
And then on top of that, two fried eggs.
Some house made thinly shaved pickles go on top of that
and then fresh cilantro.
I just loved all the textures and all the tastes.
The bread had a little sweetness to it
but not too sweet.
MATT: The pate is sort of there.
You might not even be aware of it
but it reinforces everything that's savory about it.
And then on top of everything is--
there are these fireworks like the cilantro, the...
The spicy pickles and the acidity.
This sandwich was a slam dunk.
It, like, totally worked.
TED: What's really delightful about Pecking Order is that,
here's a chicken restaurant that has a real character.
TAMARA: It was really nice to learn something
about a cuisine I didn't know anything about.
And see spices that I use every day
used in a different way together.
MATT: In a world brimming with chicken options,
we are so fortunate to have restaurants like Pecking Order
which twist the formula with an ethnic perspective.
TAMARA: Shrimp Kataif
is one of the most talked about dishes of Balaboosta.
Oh, my God.
You could eat like six of these
without even trying, right?
MATT: Riffs Fine Street Food in Nashville.
TAMARA: Carlos and B.J.
offer an oxtail bowl with pineapple salsa.
The meat is so tender,
it's just falling off the bone.
AARTI: New York City is the kind of place
where you could meet someone from basically
every country in the world.
You know, we're all here
and we're all bringing our food with us.
AMANDA: I can walk down the street
and go from Mexico to India in one block.
It's amazing.
AARTI: Balaboosta is located
in Soho in New York City.
Balaboosta is this awesome Yiddish word
that means the perfect housewife.
Ting.
EINAT: The core and the heart of this restaurant
is definitely Israeli and Mediterranean.
AMANDA: It's very rare that you see Mediterranean
and Israeli under one roof.
You put these two cuisines together
and I don't think there's anybody
that doesn't like this.
When I think of cauliflower, I think of steamed cauliflower
that my mom served me as a kid
and I always hated it.
Obviously, my mom wasn't making it
like Einat makes it.
AMANDA: They start with cauliflower florets
that have been blanched in boiling water.
They're cooked but they have a little crisp left to them.
PAT: Into a re-sealable plastic bag
they put flour,
ground pink and white pepper corns and salt.
The coated florets are dropped into the deep fryer
until they're gorgeous golden brown.
AARTI: It has this beautiful light vinegar dressing over it.
And then currants and pine nuts,
these are little splashes that are added
to give it a little richness.
PAT: They are topped off with a sprinkling of fresh parsley.
It's sweet, it's chewy, it's earthy.
And then you have a little bit of acid from this vinaigrette
and it just sort of rounds it out
and it makes it feel like a complete dish.
How could you not want to eat your vegetables
if they taste that good?
Shrimp Kataif is one of the most talked about dishes
of Balaboosta.
TAMARA: Oh, my God.
You could eat like six of these without even trying, right.
They're so good.
AARTI: So Kataif is a shredded fillo dough,
incredibly light and crispy.
Each shrimp is simply encased in Kataif,
almost like a pig in a blanket.
Then these little, gift-wrapped shrimp
are dropped in hot oil.
So that now it's golden brown and crispy
and almost shatteringly crispy.
She serves these shrimp on a bed of greens
and then tobiko sauce
which is this sort of briny fish egg sauce
with a little bit of wasabi in it.
It's not Mediterranean, it's not Israeli.
It has a little bit of this Asian flair to it,
but it works.
A little like--mind blowing.
AMANDA: It's so crunchy.
When you bite into it, it's like...
TAMARA: And then that juicy shrimp in the center,
it just all--sort of all these elements work to create
a dish that's much greater than the sum of its parts.
The best part about Chef Einat is that she's surprising you.
PAT: I love the flavors that she's bringing,
flavors that I'm not gonna experience
anywhere else in New York City.
AARTI: You're seeing what happens
when an Israeli woman living in New York is exposed to food
from all over the world
and what her noggin comes up with.
And that's cool.
LEE ANNE: Riffs Fine Street Food is killing it.
You have this food truck that's serving a blend
of Asian and Caribbean street food.
ANNOUNCER: If you want to know
where to find all of these delicious dishes,
go to CookingChannelTV.com /unique-eats.
All over the world, street food is very popular.
Here food trucks are bringing us
street food of other cultures.
AMANDA: In Nashville, Tennessee, there's a unique food truck
that's serving a blend of Asian and Caribbean street food.
LEE ANNE: Riffs Fine Street Food is killing it
in Nashville right now.
Two friends collaborate to run Riffs.
Here's Carlos Davis, who hails from Barbados
and loves to play around with Caribbean flavors
and then Michigan native B. J. Lofback
who actually specializes in Asian cuisine.
LOFBACK: The truck was really born
out of a love for street food,
taking those ideas not just from this country
but from all around the world.
When we come and we serve food out that window,
it's something that we've put a lot of thought into.
Carlos and B.J. offer an oxtail bowl
with pineapple salsa,
which is kind of an Asian Caribbean riff
on the steamed pork bun.
The guys braise the oxtail for 4 hours at 325 degrees.
The meat is so tender it's just falling off the bone.
LEE ANNE: The pineapple salsa
that goes on top has red bell peppers.
It's got red onions.
It's got a ton of, like, sweet, juicy, diced pineapple.
AMANDA: It gets a generous
shower of fresh basil and cilantro
and then a little bit of honey for extra sweetness.
What holds the filling is the bowl.
It's a steam bun made with flour, water,
sesame oil and yeast.
You have this soft, white, pillowy bun
and then this rich, really meaty, fatty oxtail
topped with a sharp yet sweetly acidic salsa.
And you get all these flavors in every bite.
When I see a thing called the heart attack burger,
um...
I see it on the menu and part of me wants it
and the other part of me is frightened.
I don't want to die.
TED: It's a burger that's about the richest thing
you've ever tasted.
The key to it is, it's a grind of 50% short rib beef
and 50% smoked bacon.
LEE ANNE: The chef takes this really
rich cream mac and cheese,
slaps that on top of the bubbling cheddar
that's already on the griddle.
You add your caramelized onions.
TAMARA: You add a sweet tomato marmalade.
The thing that fully sends it into the heart attack
is the fried egg.
LEE ANNE: It's a two handed grip
and you get into it and here-- you're looking at it,
you're like, ah, you're so bad for me
but you're gonna be so good.
MAN: How was the burger?
Well, it's delicious.
MATT: Carlos and B.J. may cook out of a truck
but they're really talented
and everything seems very, very freshly made to order.
LEE ANNE: They're bringing their international influence
to the Nashville audience
and they're making delicious street food
at a price that can't be beat.
So, go Riffs.
Mega crispy.
TOGETHER: Mega, mega, mega.
( making noises )
( clucking )
( babbling )