A Well Rounded Meal

For almost every food adventurer, a market is almost equivalent to an amusement park. The seemingly endless new food options that surround you are enough to make anyone even slightly interested in food dizzy. The coolest foods that I have never even heard of I have almost always discovered at a market. In fact, my first blog post revolved around one of my favorite markets in the world, Chelsea Market. Over spring break I discovered another market almost as fantastic.

Essex Market- Wikimedia

Actually, my family and I were walking towards the Chelsea Market already, but after walking over the highly scenic Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn into Manhattan (easily over a two hour walk) we were quite famished and could not possibly make it another ten blocks to get to our favorite market for lunch. So instead we were forced to look around right where we were. And it just so happened that the Williamsburg Bridge lets off right near the Essex Street Market. Of course we were all far too tired and hungry to think about it too much, but we rushed into the market eagerly searching for our next meal.

The Essex Market had a huge variety of drastically different food options, ranging from Japanese to Mexican to Sicilian and more. But the biggest takeaway from the entire market was by far the Sicilian food. One stand in the Market, called the Arancini Brothers specialized in arancini and indeed had almost nothing except for over ten different kinds of arancino.

By now you're probably wondering what in the world an arancino is as I had absolutely no idea what it was when I first saw it either. Arancini are basically just balls of carbs with all kinds of different foods stuffed inside of them.

We started out by ordering only the Bacon-Cheese-Burger, Taco-Cini, Buffalo Ball, Mushroom Taleggio, and Nutella, but after getting hooked after the first ball, we quickly rushed back in line to order every other arancino on the menu. They were warmed up as you ordered them so that your first bites are into an extremely hot and soft pancake-like covering, perfectly seasoned with moderate amounts of salt and garlic and hot filling. The best filling by far was the Bacon-Cheese-Burger as the gooey melted cheese went perfectly with the garlic covering, and the freshly ground beef was perfect for adding some substance to an otherwise snack food. However there was not a bad ball, even the super weird ones like The Everything with lox, cream cheese, capers, red onion, and tomato, were perfectly balanced and delicious. And of course, one could never go wrong with Nutella.

And once you're done with the arancini balls, you can move on to more balls for dessert! Not more than 50 feet away from the Arancino Brothers is a stand that sells cake balls. If you are not familiar with the cake ball craze, cake balls are just what they sound like: succulent balls of cake. They sell a dozen different flavors, but the best I had was the red velvet. The cake balls were perfectly moist and packed more flavor in one ball than some full sized cakes.

So if you're ever in the mode for arancini and cake balls, Essex Market is the place to go!