It’s called a New England style hot dog roll. They are nothing special except for shape, they are sold right alongside plain old hot dog buns, made from the same dough. (they’re in every grocery store here in the northeast, maybe they are exotic in other parts of the country).
Who all does this offer extend to? See, I’m, um, sometimes in Chicago.
Actually, I’d not heard of this truck and have wanted to try a lobster roll for a long time. It looks like they’re in Andersonville regularly which isn’t too inconvenient.
I picked up a lobster roll for lunch yesterday. The cold mayonnaise one, because that’s the only one that was available. The bun was toasted, of course, and was so flattened in the process it was hard to see how it started out. It was effectively a small piece of bread under the lettuce.
It was delicious.
Yeah, those style hot dog buns can be a bit rough to find in other parts of the country. I’m pretty sure you can find them if you know where to look here in Chicago, but I’ve never seen them at the major groceries. I could swear — but I may be conflating a memory — that I’ve seen them in Phoenix at a Fry’s or Basha’s.
I remember the first time in Boston getting a hot dog and being confused and amused, heck bemused, by the bun it came in, not having heard of this style of bun at the time (about 30 years ago.)
What is nice about this style is you can butter the sides and toast it on a griddle for extra flavor and texture.
We had cold rolls in Boston…it was disappointing.
While we’re on the topic:
Lobsters were so abundant in the early days—residents in the Massachusetts Bay Colony found they washed up on the beach in two-foot-high piles—that people thought of them as trash food. It was fit only for the poor and served to servants or prisoners. In 1622, the governor of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford, was embarrassed to admit to newly arrived colonists that the only food they “could presente their friends with was a lobster … without bread or anyhting else but a cupp of fair water” (original spelling preserved). Later, rumor has it, some in Massachusetts revolted and the colony was forced to sign contracts promising that indentured servants wouldn’t be fed lobster more than three times a week.
That’s a good article, but it left out what i think is an important element of lobster getting expensive: refrigerated trucks.
Lobster tastes best when it’s cooked live, and served quickly. Canned lobster is somewhat flavorless, if nutritious.
The ocean produces more than enough lobster to serve the coast. And when it was expensive and difficult to get fresh lobster away from the coast, it was abundant and cheap on the coast, and poor people feed it to their kids, and new englanders ate it on summer weekends with the hot dogs. But when refrigerated shipping became cheap, suddenly, the market for lobster was much larger. Large enough that coastal states put limits on harvesting it to avoid driving it to extinction. And it got expensive.
In a related point, most “lobster tails” are not New England lobster, but are a related animal with smaller claws, often harvested in south African waters, that was frozen and shipped long distances. It’s rather bland and tasteless compared to a healthy fresh Atlantic lobster.
Yeah I think “Maine Lobster” or even “lobster” is a aggressively protected trademark by the Maine Lobster fisherman association.
I recall a fast food place having fried lobster bites, that was actually langostino, they went after.
The lobster in all New England and Nova Scotia I thinks the same species.
I do think this is the superior lobster. Big ass tails are often Australian Rock Lobster, which comes in second place IMO.
The rest of various lobsters available can be quite stringy and gamey. Pacific lobster you might get on vacation in Mexico is horrible.
I finally learned this the hard way when I bought some warm water lobster tails from Costco