SACKETS HARBOR — Have you seen the ads in the paper for Sackets Harbor Kitchen?
"Dinner Just Got Easier! Sackets Kitchen is now open!"
What is Sackets Kitchen? It's not a restaurant. It's not a takeout place.
I guess you could call it a new cooking-at-home concept. While not a franchise, it is patterned after a movement on the West Coast that has become popular the last few years.
Sackets Kitchen is in a big brick building on the Madison Barracks property. It used to be home to Jefferson Community College's culinary arts program, so it has a large commercial kitchen that meets state health department standards.
Now it's a facility where you can assemble your own meals-to-go and bring home healthy food that you cook in your own kitchen. You don't use the commercial kitchen at all. They've taken a big, open space and installed new stainless steel work stations with built-in plastic cutting boards on top, refrigerated space below and plastic compartments filled with chopped vegetables at your fingertips. Dried herbs and spices are on top of each unit.
Here's how it works: Book your two-hour day or evening session online in advance. Indicate the number of meals you'd like to prepare, from two to 12. Then choose your entrées — things like balsamic grilled chicken, black bean and cheese burritos, Cabernet beef, teriyaki salmon, chicken with white wine/brandy marinade, pasta with Romesco sauce and pork chops Parisienne.
The meals are billed as "gourmet," but there's enough variety to even please the most discerning member of your family. (You can substitute fussy or picky or pain-in-the-neck for discerning, if you wish).
My friend Mike booked our session for us. The Web site says this is supposed to be a fun and relaxing experience, so bring along a bottle of wine, if we wished.
We did.
But we didn't expect a group of 10 ladies to show up with a picnic basket full of wine and fruit and cheese. Guess they'd been there before, so in a flash they took over the plush couch and chairs in the room and set up their bar on the coffee table.
Time to get to work. After a quick orientation by one of the employees, we were ready to assemble our meals. Each station has step-by-step instructions for the dinner you're preparing.
We began with Asian chicken wings. You take the raw chicken wings from the station fridge. They're in a heavy-duty Zip-loc bag. Then you follow the recipe:
Add 2/3 cup chopped green onions. They're all chopped in a compartment in front of you. Just find the 1/3 cup stainless steel scoop and throw two scoops in your bag with the wings. Add the indicated amount of soy and sesame oil. Follow that with two tablespoons of hot sauce from the shelf with the spices. Then a teaspoon of Kosher salt (the measure is right in the box) and a half-teaspoon of cracked black pepper.
Zip your bag, and stick on a label printed with concise cooking instructions. Put your name on the bag with a marker and put the bag in the large stainless commercial refrigerator. Wash your hands and head for the next station.
We continued the process with garlic and herb shrimp, Maui-style mahi-mahi, garlic chicken piccata, Florentine pasta bake and calzones. The bow tie pasta was already cooked and the smoked ham chopped for the pasta bake, but the calzone assembly left a little more to the imagination.
Six flat discs of dough were brought from the real kitchen to the calzone station.
You get couragous stretching the dough into an oval calzone shape. Then you can get creative with the ingredients in front of you: tomato sauce, sliced pepperoni, mozzarella cheese, diced green pepper, chopped red onion and any number of dried herbs and spices. You fold the dough over to make a half-moon shape, put it in a large foil pan, cover it, and slap on the cooking instructions.
I'm quite sure our bottle of Sauvignion Blanc was influential in our courageousness and creativity at this point. But Mike and I were all done assembling our meals. The ladies were a lot louder and some were still assembling their meals. We were headed home with our dinners in a cooler to cook up a feast.
Four hungry kids — two in high school and two home from college — were waiting for us. Each of our entrees was intended to feed three or four people. Ordinarily you'd freeze what you didn't plan to consume immediately. But with our teenage taste-testers ready to chow down, plus three adults, we decided to cook all six of our dinner creations so we could tell you about them.
Here are some notes on the preparation and our hungry teens' comments:
Calzones (inside out pizzas): Mike and I found that they stuck together in their foil pan. It was a bit of a mess getting them onto the cookie sheet to bake. I think we should have floured them before putting them in the travel container.
"I liked them — it filled me up." "I didn't like them — too much bread crust." "Too much sauce — I wished there was more cheese." "Why not just get it from a pizza place?"
Asian chicken wings: These were baked in the oven.
"These were good." "Wing meat was tender." "I liked the sweet and spiciness in tandem." "Delicious. Definitely the best thing I ate."
Garlic and herb shrimp (plump shrimp in a savory marinade of garlic, white wine and parsley): I did a quick stovetop sauté, removed the shrimp when just pink, reduced the sauce slightly and poured it over the shrimp.
"Delicious — great." "The right amount of crispness and tenderness." "Perfectly cooked — tender and altogether awesome." "I really liked the garlic butter sauce."
Florentine pasta bake (bow tie pasta, chopped spinach, ricotta, smoked ham): We poured the pasta mix into a casserole and baked it.
"I liked it, but thought it was a little bland." "I would have liked more ham." "With some added salt, I thought it was decent."
Maui-style mahi-mahi (in a teriyaki, sesame and lemon marinade): Mike grilled the fish outdoors; I heated the marinade through to make a sauce.
"A little bland." "Would have tasted better with a sweet sauce like pineapple." "Bland but tender." "It did not taste like anything, not even fish."
Garlic chicken piccata: These were oven-baked, with capers, olive oil, lemon juice, thyme and tarragon.
"Loved the chicken breasts." "The capers were good — mmm." "I thought the dish was just regular — nothing I couldn't have made by myself."
OK, get out your calculators. We assembled six dinners at a cost of $120. That's $20 per entrée or about $5 per person. The dinners don't come with sides, so you have to provide your own starch and veg. No salad or dessert either.
Is this a good deal financially? That's for you to decide. The fun factor is definitely there for the "assemblers," especially if the ladies with the picnic basket show up at your session. There's no cleanup. There's no onion or garlic to chop and maybe rot in the crisper. And you don't have to buy sesame oil or dried tarragon that will sit in your cupboard for the next five years.
We concluded that for most people, it really is homemade, it's healthier than most takeout, and it gives the frustrated "gourmet" cook in the house a chance to show off his or her stuff. And you can't argue with the convenience of pulling a bag of nutritious food out of the freezer in the morning and having a decent dinner at home that evening.
It's not quite restaurant quality, but it's certainly a lot better than most people serve on any given night at home.
Our thanks to Beth, Rachel, Greg and Vaughn for their help with this review.
And to Mike and Mary for letting us mess up their oven and stove (be sure to use a cookie sheet with sides when you bake the wings ...)
You can contact Walter E. Siebel via e-mail: wsiebel@wdt.net.
Sackets Harbor Kitchen Co.
109 Barracks Drive
Sackets Harbor, NY
646-2122
A new, innovative concept in cooking — meals you assemble, then take home and cook at your convenience. You can prepare six to 12 meals in a two-hour session.
There's something for everyone, from basic to upscale: garlic and herb shrimp, Florentine pasta bake, calzones, Maui-style mahi-mahi, Asian chicken wings, garlic chicken piccata and more.
Rating: 4 forks
