Favorite regional specialties

Most of Chicago's famous food is not so great for you. Vienna Beef hot dogs, Italian beef, deep dish and thin crust pizza, gyros, jibarito (a steak sandwich encased by plantains!), paczki...

Personally, I think the thin crust pizza is generally better than the deep dish, and I do love me a good beef hot dog with all the fixings (except relish).

....Edit....

Let me tell you what I miss about Philadelphia: proper cheesesteaks (none of this mozzarella and peppers crap), Tastykakes, water ice, zeps! (which are really just a Norristown thing), tomato pie

As has been discussed in many a Food Board conversation, I'm all about the New Jersey-style pizza.  So that's one thing my neck of the woods has going for it.  I'm near Princeton, and that's an epicenter for spectacular ice cream and gelato; not necessarily a traditional regional specialty, but it's undeniably one of Princeton's strong points.  I mean, there's also the superior produce of central Jersey, but that's not really a culinary specialty...

Oh, and I'm Philly-adjacent but have no strong opinion of Tastykakes and Herr's.  I should probably eat more Herr's, because I do love potato chips, but I'm not a fan of snack cakes so Tastykakes are pearls before swine when given to me.  And the aforementioned spectacular ice creams keep me from spending my frozen-treat calories and moneys on Rita's.  I'm so bad at living here!

As y'all can imagine, it's a little weird hailing from the United States's single greatest food region, thanks, (Louisiana) and living in a place (Michigan) mainly known for pasties (not nipple guards, but Cornish pies that came over with miner immigrants to the Upper Peninsula) and paczkis (Polish jelly donuts that proliferate wildly around Mardi Gras). That said, the beer is infinitely superior (I definitely hold to Michigan being the best beer state east of the Mississippi).

One of my goals in doing a lot more home cooking has been to familiarize myself with the food culture I definitely took way too much for granted growing up (and thereby have a ready source of supply). There's not a lot I don't like about the cuisine, though I think I prefer Creole to Cajun, as the former's a little more interesting and involves more seafood.

Faves:
Jambalaya, though I still haven't made it from scratch. I have to get on that soon, though a lot of cooks, even in Louisiana, make it from the kind of mixes that my mom always used to make us when we were kids (she's from Mississippi, but she shares the habit with a lot of cooks down there of using store-bought rouxs).

Just about anything involving crawfish, because they're not available up here in stores, to the best of my knowledge (they live in streams and lakes in Michigan, but not in the kind of numbers that would encourage commercial farming or even recreational catches). Etouffee is probably at its best with crawfish.

Shrimp... pretty much anything, though I can make a mean Shrimp Diane (Empress Peach said it was the best shrimp dish she'd ever had, though, our history aside, I'm guessing an Ohio upbringing won't have exposed her to many other possibilities). I want to try Shrimp Creole soon.

Michigan beer:

Bell's Two-Hearted, my favorite beer of all time. Strangely, it's the only Bell's about which I'm really passionate or even favorable. The annual renewal of Oberon is a big deal around here, but I'm lukewarm on it after going nuts about it when I first moved here thirteen years back.

Founders Dirty Bastard, rich Scotch ale I'll often get around Christmas; syrupy and filling. Their porter's pretty good, too.

Arbor Brewing Sacred Cow IPA, my local's most popular beer, and the one I invariably drink while there.


The Stuffingtacular She-Hulk I actually picked up some Old Bay at the store for the first time last week; we used to use it in our clam chowder at the cafe and I intend to start using it in mine, though I'll still use some Tabasco when needed.

LazBro I understand purists' objections to bean-less chili, but I loved Texas chili the last time I tried it (from Don Fearing's Texas Food Bible), and it's one of the things I'll be making this week, now that I found a good place to get dried chilies.

Philadelphia was my two favorite regional food deals: cheesesteaks and scrapple.

Scrapple might be a thing that exists in other parts of Pennsylvania I dunno. In PA I just go to Philly and have only seen scrapple in Philly since it does not exist in any other American city I have ever been in.

I'm sure I've mentioned this here before, but I haven't been able to eat scrapple since my grandfather found a chunk of tooth in his slice one morning. He laughed and said "well, at least it's not mine!" ::barf::

Eh, I'll take my chances. I love scrapple, especially with a little bit of real maple syrup drizzled on top.

The only things I can think of off the top of my head are fry sauce, scones (more like sopaipilla than english tea time), and maybe some dutch oven stuff. Most mormon stuff is bland, beige, and big to feed a horde of ankle biters. As for Vegas there's not much uniqueness besides shrimp cocktail, since the city is basically only fifty years old.

OOOH! Fun! I love this thread!



Ok, Rhode Island (or Northeast) based things I love:

Matunuck Oysters
Doughboys It's fried dough coated with powdered sugar and cinnamon. Like a beignet, but a LOT heavier. Beignets are better
New England Clam Chowder.
There's Rhode Island clam chowder, but that's basically just a fish soup. It's dumb. 
Stuffies. Generally quahogs (large clams) stuffed with a vegetable breading. Sometimes they add sausage. I don't like those. 
Del's Lemonade. A slushy with lemon, sugar, and water/ice. There's other flavors, but lemon is the best. You can add a pretzel stick if you so choose. Or booze if you're in college. 
Party Pizza Strips You'll find these at any social gathering. Cheeseless strips of focaccia style dough  topped with an overly sweet tomato sauce, cut into rectangles protested by grease-smeared plastic wrap, served somewhere between cold and room temperature. They look like garbage food, but man, they're pretty addictive.
Grilled pizza Invented in providence! Very thin crust pizza. They grill the dough so it gets good char, then finish with added toppings. 


Rhode Island things, that I don't love.
Coffee milk. Don't be fooled and think this is coffee with milk. It's a coffee syrup that's added. As a kid, when you'd get those free lunches in the summer that are shrink wrapped, there'd be a milk carton in there, with either regular, chocolate, or coffee milk.
Clam Cakes. They're not bad, and I will crave them in the summer, but basically hush puppies with a clam inside. 
Hot Wieners. Get yourself a sleeve full of them, all the way (minced onions, chili, arm hair...)
Calamari I mean, i like calamari, but it's not a "rhode island" thing. Yet my state feels like it is. So much, they made it the "state appetizer" (stupid). 


Years ago, a friend of mine did a Rhode Island Day cookout, where it was all the food mentioned above (except calamari. so stupid). He also had an anchor throw (state seal), and made a Big Blue Bug pinata (look it up). It was a great idea. 

I can't believe I forgot this one - the Baltimore lemon stick. Basically it's a lemon with an old-fashioned peppermint stick stuck into it, and you suck out the juice using the stick as a straw. 

Do you serve it on pasta? I've never had a true Cincinnati chili, I don't think, but I love Texas chili on spaghetti. Mrs. Snape thinks this is weird, but I stand by my assertion that if it's good on a baked potato, it's good on pasta, and vice versa.

I serve it on spaghetti mostly but I do it on hot dogs also. My GF mostly eats it on baked potatoes with cheese and claims it's the best thing ever.

"True" Cincinnati chili is supposed to have beans as an added option (beans and/or onions get added to the top of your pasta/chili/cheese concoction as you like) but I like to add a ton of kidney beans to mine when it's cooking to give it some extra fiber.

I tried Scrapple once at some diner on the Jersey shore. I was with a bunch of PA natives though, and got a lot of props for trying it. Not necessarily something I'd go back to.

On another trip to New Jersey, at yet another diner, I ordered eggs and "hash" expecting it to be corn beef or something similar. Instead it was lots of, um, alternate cuts and had a greasy, very organ-y, taste. It did not sit well the rest of the day. So does "hash" mean something different in that part of the country?

I did the whole toasted ravioli, red sauce, swimming in cheese experience on the hill in St. louis and I have to admit I loved it. I don't know what it is about what makes it taste "right" vs other places that just cater to it without hitting the mark. Ditto east coast Italian places. My wife and I are in Atlanta now, and one thing we always loved when we lived here was their old school Italian joints, and so Sunday night we went to one and had a great time.

Vietnamese-style crawfish sounds terrific.

Oh man, yeah, soy sauce is essential to a fajita marinade, IMO. Every marinade can have its own jazz-like improvisations, but the soy sauce in the downbeat.

Have you ever found a place in Dallas that does that? I went to places high and low and never found it, and the fajitas never seemed "right" to me. It wasn't until I went to a Houston place and tasted distinctive soy sauce in the marinade (which then crusts wonderfully on the grill) that I realized that was what I was missing.