Hot Dish: The brisket burrito at Truck

Executive Chef Fidel Garcia with Truck's brisket burrito. The popular spot has been in Bedford more than 11 years. Below, Brisket Burrito, the vintage decor af Truck, and a selection of desserts. Amy Sowder Photos

By AMY SOWDER

Guests at Truck restaurant in Bedford might not realize they notice — but they notice.

When they order the popular brisket burrito, they can taste the quality of the brisket sourced from Niman Ranch, an award-winning U.S. family-farm cooperative known for its taste, strict animal welfare protocol, and sustainable, humane agricultural practices. 

They may not know why the guajillo sauce, or salsa roja, tastes so smoky, slightly spicy and a tad fruity. But once a month, owner-chef Nancy Allen Roper or one of her kitchen staff pick up 250 pounds of the guajillo peppers at the airport, shipped directly from New Mexico where they’re grown.

And as often as possible, Roper picks up fresh produce for the coleslaw from the New Canaan Farmers Market and other nearby markets and farms. The organic black beans are grown in upstate New York.

“We are crazy about our sourcing,” says Roper, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, former caterer and former restaurateur of Boxcar Cantina in Greenwich. “Our focus is on ingredients, a lot organic. We know a lot of farmers.”

This casual, colorful, vintage eatery opened more than 11 years ago with reclaimed barn paneling and Formica tables. Dishes feature an eclectic mix of northern New Mexican fare inspired by Native American, cowboy, and Mexican cuisines. The restaurant’s name stems from the location’s former purpose in the late 1940s as a trucking rest stop along Route 22. At 340 miles, it’s the state’s longest north-south roadway stretching from the Canadian border to New York City. Truckers would carry meat, dairy and produce from upstate farms to metropolitan tables, resting in Bedford along the way.

The brisket burrito was born eight years ago, when the beef farmer Roper worked with at Ox Hollow Farm had extra brisket and asked if she could use it. At the time, Roper had just made brisket at home from a recipe in a new cookbook, “Sunday Suppers at Lucques: Seasonal Recipes from Market to Table,” by Suzanne Goin, who worked with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. Roper brought the idea to Executive Chef Fidel Garcia, who’s worked at Truck for 11 years. They both thought the brisket would be excellent in burrito form.

Truck goes through eight or nine briskets a week, which typically weigh 14 to 15 pounds each. “Brisket has so much flavor because of the fat marbling,” Roper says as Garcia’s gloved hands grip the waiting browned meat, dripping in saucy, softened, chopped vegetables. “We trim them more than we would at home because people request it.” 

To prepare the raw cut of beef when it first arrives at the kitchen, it’s seared in olive oil to create a slightly crusty brown exterior in a rondeau pan, a large, wide stainless steel pan that’s great for searing, braising and stewing meats. They add chopped organic carrots, onions, garlic, celery and bay leaves, plus two magnums of a California merlot blend — the same wine used for Truck’s sangria. That’s the equivalent of four standard bottles of wine. 

Back in the pan, the brisket roasts for six hours, and then it rests overnight to be sliced the next day for service.

Garcia seams the meat, a butchery term for cutting along the natural seams of the animal’s muscles, the areas of connective tissue where muscles separate. He does that for the initial big hunk, then cuts small chunks against the seam. “It’s easy this way for putting it in the burrito, and everyone wants the strings,” Garcia says.

When an order comes in, Garcia throws an organic whole-wheat tortilla onto the flat top grill and waits for the heat to create a bubble. Then with the warmed tortilla placed back on the line, he adds just the stringy, drippy brisket chunks and shredded Cabot Monterey Jack cheese, and rolls it up. Garcia  inserts the rolled burrito in the oven for two minutes before taking it out.

“You can see the cheese is melting,” Garcia says, pointing to oozing on both ends. On the plate, he spreads a ladle-full of guajillo sauce and spreads it into a shallow pool, taking up two-thirds of the plate. The foundational sauce has guajillo chiles, ancho chiles, onions and garlic. Garcia roasts the pods, softens them in water, adds oregano and purees it into sauce.

“When you’re in New Mexico and you order a burrito, they ask, ‘red or green sauce?’ And you ask which is hotter there,” says Roper, who grew up in Albuquerque. Truck also offers the green sauce, which they make with more heat.

Next come the black beans and a scoop of the cilantro rice. Then the warm burrito lands on top of the sauce pool. Garcia drizzles in zig-zag fashion horseradish crema and Truck’s BBQ sauce, placing a spoonful of coleslaw on one end with a sprinkling of beluga lentils, reminiscent of a “Sunday Suppers” cookbook technique. Then, a slice of brisket on the other side of the burrito makes its mark, announcing to all who gaze upon it the outstanding umami within those rounded tortilla walls.

“People think Mexican food is easy, but just to make a good pico de gallo is a lot of chopping. All we do is prep, prep, prep,” Roper says. “I’m not into fine dining, but I’m into good ingredients.”

Her restaurant isn’t trying to showcase one cuisine as authentically as possible. It’s about combining cultures, cuisines and ingredients — like how American life really is.

“What’s nice about Bedford is we really mix things up a lot,” she says.

Truck is located at 391 Old Post Road, Bedford.