Youtube comments of Adam Ragusea (@aragusea).
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Q: Is that steak raw inside?
A: Nah. It is on the rare side, which is how I like it. One thing I've learned since I started making videos (I'm a radio guy) is that cameras lie, especially about color. You can't trust the colors you see in a video. I can make some tiny tweaks to a filter or a light, and a steak will go from pink to red to gray without actually changing. Keep watching my videos, though, and I'll be able to afford a nicer camera with better color reproduction. I'm shooting on a real cheap DSLR with a kit lens.
Q: Is that steak burned on the outside?
A: Nah, see the above answer. Cameras tend to make dark brown look black. That's one of the reasons why food stylists do crazy stuff like painting food with shoe polish or whatever to make it look brown.
Q: Will this method work with other meats?
A: Yeah, anything you would consider slicing thin before eating.
Q: Why not season the outside of the meat before cooking? Won't that make it taste better?
A: Seasoning the outside right before cooking will definitely result in a salty crust, which can be nice. But with this recipe, I'm going to toss the steak in its own juices, which would redistribute the salt from the crust to the entire surface area of the meat anyway, so there simply isn't any point. And seasoning right before cooking absolutely will not flavor the interior of the meat. Kenji's experiments showed that it takes at least 40 minutes for salt to draw moisture out of raw meat, dissolve into the moisture, and then be reabsorbed. You should try his method sometime, which basically involves seasoning the meat the day before.
Q: Are you sure the pieces are really absorbing the surrounding liquid?
A: I think so! The commercial meat industry refers to this phenomenon as "pick-up." At the same time, though, I'm sure what's also happening is the "sauce" is congealing as it cools and is simply sticking to the surface of each piece. That's a desirable result, too, right? So I figure, who cares how much of either factor is at play?
Q: Didn't you already make a video about this?
A: The first food video I ever made, about a year ago, was a more complicated version of this recipe. I wanted to do it again, now that I'm a little better at making videos. Gonna redo my old roast chicken one, too. June 6.
Q: Will you ever cook any damn vegetables?
A: Yes! I've been waiting for stuff in my garden to ripen before I do a bunch of vegetable recipes.
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Some updates since I made this video: 1) I have been going with a wetter dough lately. Wet doughs, counterintuitively, seem to get crispier. I figure that's because they're more pliable, which allows more steam to escape during cooking. If you want a precise recipe with weights, look elsewhere. I don't like getting out my scale unless I have to. I can judge hydration pretty well by feel, and I reckon you can too with a little practice. I still think 2 and 1/4 cups water + 5 cups flour is a good starting place. Add more flour until it reaches a stickiness that you can handle. The only downside to extra hydration is that the dough becomes sticker and harder to work with. Part of the reason I went with a pretty dry dough when making this video is that I was worried about the pizza sticking to the peel while I got all the shots I needed. 2) I have started not only taking my tomatoes out of their packing liquid, but also washing them off under running water in a sieve. It's crazy, but that really makes a difference in a raw tomato sauce like this. The packing liquid is just so bitter. And I've been experimenting with different tomato brands. With really good tomatoes, I don't need the tomato paste. I would rather not use paste. 3) Many commenters have mentioned some affordable home pizza ovens that intrigue me. I think I'm going to give the Uuni a try and report back. Ultimately, my pizza still lacks the very distinctive flavor you get from baking at a thousand degrees. 4) If you have thoughtful, constructive, evidence-based advice for how I could improve my recipe, please give it to me. But if you're going to tell me I'm doing it wrong simply because you've always done it another way without interrogating why, please keep it to yourself.
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Q: What do you mean you devised this recipe? I've seen this before.
A: Cool! I haven't seen another recipe that applies the par-boiled roastie technique to a fry shape, but I'm not at all surprised to hear that others exist. There's nothing new under the sun. But I did work out the particulars of this one on my own. Totally possible I just reinvented the wheel. Still good fries, though!
Q: Have you thought about adding baking soda to the water to make the outside more crispy?
A: No, but I'm intrigued. Alkalinity helps with browning. I will say, however, that I'm not sure I would want to accelerate the browning process on these. The interior needs a long cooking time in order to get really soft and fluffy, and I wouldn't want the exterior to get overly brown while I'm cooking the interior. Really dark brown on these tastes burned.
Q: Have you thought about roughing up the fries a bit before they go in the oven to get more fluffy exterior that'll go crisp in oil?
A: That works great with a more conventional roast potato shape, but these long thin shapes are really delicate when they first go in the roasting tray. That little shake I give them is about all the trauma they can take at that stage.
Q: What's up with that thumbnail?
A: I thought it was funny and intriguing! (And yeah, maybe I thought it could draw the ASMR crowd...)
Q: Have you thought about using a slotted pan?
A: I'm intrigued, but would't the oil drip out the bottom? We need that oil.
Q: What's up with you having ads now?
A: A man has to make a living for his family. Also, Squarespace really is good. http://squarespace.com/ragusea
Q: What's up with two ad breaks per video?
A: The particular format of the ads is negotiated on a case-by-case basis with the sponsor. You'll see a different format in next week's recipe. Personally, I like this format, because it discloses the sponsorship arrangement right off the bat, but then gives you some more content before you get to the main ad body.
Q: Why was your first talking-head shot out of focus?
A: I shoot by myself, and the talking-head shots are tough. I had my camera on face-tracking autofocus, I could see on the monitor that it had zero'd in on my face, but it's not possible for me to see on a tiny monitor halfway across the room if the shot really is in focus. Between this and my day job, I really don't have time to go back and fix stuff unless it's a real disaster. I'm learning every video, though, and I think it'll all keep getting better. The entire reason I started making cooking videos in the first place was to work on my video skills. I'm still pretty new to the medium.
Q: Why were some of your shots over-exposed?
A: I'm still really struggling with how to light and expose for white ingredients. I'm working on it. Everything looks overexposed on the cheap field monitor I'm using, so that's no help. I've tried using the level meter, but the black table and the white plates just seem to throw it off.
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Q: Who actually eats rare chicken?
A: Chicken sashimi really is a thing in Japan, but the more likely scenario in which most people in the world would eat underdone chicken is by accident. I know that most people watching this video are aware that underdone chicken is dangerous. My goal was to explain WHY underdone chicken is dangerous, while medium rare beef is generally safe.
Q: WHY are pathogens more likely to be present in the interior of a chicken piece, as opposed to the interior of a cut of meat?
A: From Dr. Diez: “Scientific evidence has shown that bacteria can be detected inside of the muscle tissue of chicken, but in very rare instances they are found inside of a bovine’s muscle. The explanation may be that bacteria can penetrate the tissues of chicken via the lymphatic system, and that because of the size and shape of the chicken carcasses, they are more prone to absorb fecal bacteria when slaughtered.”
Q: People in my country commonly eat raw meat of various kinds, and we’re not dead yet. Why are you being so cautious?
A: Food safety standards vary dramatically across the globe. Dr. Diez and I are in the United States, and this video is about how to safely consume the mainstream U.S. food supply. Here’s a response from Dr. Diez: “A foodborne disease is a complex event that is influenced by a series of factors that involve the pathogen, the person and the environment. First, it depends whether the pathogenic microorganisms are actually present in the piece of meat — as much as 30% of raw chicken may have pathogenic bacteria, and in the case of beef and pork, it’s typically less than 10%. Second, humans have a series of protections against the invasion by pathogenic organisms that involve the acidity of the stomach and our immune system. Third, because of this protection, if the microorganism is present in very low doses, then it will die before it can make us sick. And fourth, the conditions that the meat had been subjected to before been ingested affect the ‘fitness’ of the microorganism to make us sick and then can be more susceptible to not causing disease. The recommendations are intended to minimize the risk to its minimal. Many of those countries in which meat is eaten raw do not have epidemiological systems that allow us to tell if someone got sick from meat. In many countries, getting a foodborne disease is considered just part of life and consumers do not get outraged if they develop symptoms, even mild ones.”
Q: You said that pink pork and beef are safe, but what about tapeworm?
A: Beef and pork tapeworm do not pose a significant risk in the mainstream food supplies of the U.S., Canada and Western Europe, where the bulk of my audience lives. They do pose a significant risk across much of the Global South. If tapeworm is a big risk where you live, you can kill it by cooking your meat to 145 F (63 C). For steak, that means cooking to at least medium.
Q: I’ve eaten underdone (or raw) meat in the U.S. many times, and I’ve never gotten sick. How is that possible?
A: Just because something is risky doesn’t mean you definitely will get sick. While pathogens are always present in meat to some degree, they are not always present in concentrations that would be enough to make you sick. U.S. food safety regulators work to enforce practices designed to minimize the presence of pathogens, but the system doesn’t always work, and these temperature guidelines are designed to keep you safe in the event of contaminations that can occur in various links of the supply chain. There are documented outbreaks all the time. Another thing to consider is that people’s immune systems vary. Sometimes your body is able to fight off an infection, and sometimes it isn’t; some people’s immune systems are particularly weak, such as young children and elderly people. There are many factors that go into determining your risk, and nothing is certain. But following these basic temperature guidelines will keep you out of most trouble.
Q: What if I get really high-quality meat from a farm?
A: From Dr. Diez: “Foodborne pathogens are zoonotic organisms that live naturally in the intestines of livestock and they do not discriminate from one type of production system to the other. Despite the fact that we have made significant progress in developing pre-slaughter food safety systems, they are yet to be fully implemented. The incidence of pathogenic bacteria in poultry and meats has been declining thanks to the multiple interventions during slaughter and meat processing that the industry has been implementing for decades, but it is still far from eliminating all the pathogens completely.”
Q: Does freezing really make fish safe to eat?
A: As Dr. Diez said, freezing helps, but it’s not a sliver bullet. Bacteria can survive freezing, though studies have shown that Vibrio (the bacteria Dr. Diez mentioned) can be mostly killed (i.e. most of the bacteria dead, some still alive) by long freezing. The main benefit of freezing seafood is that it’s good for killing parasites, which are the primary risk with seafood. In the U.S., the feds actually mandate that most fish species sold for sushi have to be frozen, for this purpose
Q: Can’t you make meat safe by heating it to lower cooking temperatures than those recommended and then holding it there for a long time?
A: Yes, pasteurization is a function of both time and temperature. You could kill the pathogens in a chicken by holding it at a temperature less than 165 F for a long time. That’s easy to do with a method like sous vide, but that’s hardly a common method for home cooking. I made this video to speak to the way I think most people actually cook at home. If you want to get more advanced, that’s great.
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Q: So are you saying that deep frying is bad because you're bad at it?
A: Yes. I think home cooking should be easy, especially for someone like me who is pretty practiced. To quote MPW, "Cooking should be a pleasure. If it's a job, get a takeaway." (Takeaway is British for takeout.)
Q: Do you realize those are potato wedges, not fries?
A: I think that's a distinction without a difference. Long, deep-fried pieces of potato are fries. You want to cut yours into more traditional shapes, go for it. I think the wedge shape is convenient to cut and structurally sound for home frying.
Q: What if I like deep frying at home? I've made the necessary equipment investments and I'm good at it.
A: Cool! I'd love to come over for dinner. I'll have to jet before clean-up, tho.
Q: Are you actually this angry/upset about deep frying?
A: No, not really. I mean what I say, but I also mean it all in good fun.
Q: Did you throw that bottle of used oil in the recycling bin?
A: No, in Macon the green bins are trash, the blue bins are recycling.
Q: Why don't you buy a cheap tabletop deep fryer?
A: The money is not the barrier. If I bought a specialized piece of equipment for every cooking task that could use one, I would run out of counter space very quickly. I'm already out of counter space. Also, they seem kinda yucky. If you come from a culinary tradition where you deep fry several times a week, I totally understand how that's a good investment for you. It's rather like a rice cooker; if you eat rice with most meals, sure, makes sense to have one on your counter. That's not my situation, and I'm hardly alone in that regard.
Q: Wait, aren't you the guy with the three-day lasagna recipe? And fries are too hard for you?
A: A few points here. 1) As I said in the lasagna video, that's a special occasion recipe for me; 2) While that recipe is time-consuming, I don't find it to be wasteful, smelly, messy, dangerous or unpleasant to make. I find deep frying to be wasteful, smelly, messy, dangerous and unpleasant; 3) That lasagna recipe makes 18 adult portions of food that are all done at exactly the same time. That is not possible without a commercial-scale deep fryer; 4) That lasagna is amazing. I have rarely had Italian-American food that good at a restaurant. In contrast, amazing fries are pretty easy to find at restaurants, which are able to produce them at scale easily and cheaply, unlike me.
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Q: Why didn't you just do the hot spoon trick?
A: Indeed, you can spread a layer of sugar over the custards, get a spoon extremely hot, and then press it into the sugar to caramelize it. If that works for you, great! Here's why I don't like it. 1) The best way to get a spoon that hot is by holding it over the flame from a gas stove. I, like most Americans, have electric; 2) If you're doing several custards, you have to keep heating the spoon back up. My method is very quick and easy for doing several custards at once; 3) It's actually kinda hard to get the spoon in there and around all the edges. Some people bend a spoon to a right angle to make it easier. Again, not a big deal if you're just doing one, but if you're making enough for a crowd, not convenient.
Q: Isn't that just flan?
A: In the sense that flan and crème brûlée are very similar desserts, sure. But no. Flan is a custard topped with caramel sauce. This is a custard topped with a hard caramel candy.
Q: Can I do this with different sized ramekins?
A: Possibly, but I haven't tested it. The no-bath method here makes it a bit more risky. Either do a test run when you don't have hungry people waiting, or use a water bath. If using a bath, I'd do 300 F, not 250 F. And I might do three egg yolks per two portions.
Q: When you did the torch version, why didn't you do a second layer of sugar?
A: Indeed, people will often spread a second layer of sugar down and blast it again with the torch. That gets you a smoother look and a thicker topping, which some people like. But I really prefer a very thin topping. Also this video isn't about the torch method.
Q: Why didn't you use a real vanilla bean?
A: I wanted to make this recipe as simple and easy as possible. Vanilla beans are very expensive and add a few additional layers of complexity to the process. It's best to precook your custard when using a vanilla bean, both to extract some flavor from the pod, and also get the custard more viscous so it'll hold the pulp in suspension. If you just put the pulp into a raw custard, the seeds will all settle to the bottom in the oven.
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Q: Are you sending a bad message by telling your audience that you, a person with a perfectly normal body for a 37-year-old man, need to lose weight?
A: I worried about that, but look, everybody has their own goals, and these are mine. I'm fine with how I look, but I don't feel very good, and I don't want to buy all new clothes. When I'm stronger and leaner than I am now, I have more energy, less back pain, and I sleep way better. And yes, a leaner me will also probably present a more "marketable look" in the video medium, which is something I do need to think about these days. Also I have a hot wife, and that alone is a good reason to try to keep my shit tight. But you do you.
Q: Why can't you put more herbs and spices on that bland fish?
A: You absolutely can, but I find decoupling nutrition from pleasure helps me maintain focus on my fitness goals during times like these. I believe they call it "functional eating."
Q: What was up with that intro?
A: It was an homage to the Hodgetwins — fitness YouTubers who used to start all their videos with something like, "Hey man, you looking to make some gains?" And now that I've explained the joke, it's not funny anymore. But they're still funny, so you should go check out their channel.
Q: Why don't you pronounce the "h" in "herbs"?
A: It's very rare to hear an American pronounce the "h." People here who do it are usually either making a mistake, or they're being pretentious by trying to sound British. I sound pretentious enough as it is.
Q: Why did you pronounce "Vidalia" like that?
A: I have been to Vidalia, Georgia, and the surrounding onion-growing region many times. It's an hour from my house. I've interviewed onion farmers there. How I said it in the video is basically how most people there say it (though I lack the Southern drawl). You can say it how you want to say it.
Q: Do you realize that freshwater fish aren't technically seafood?
A: Yes. So do the marine biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and yet they still talk about freshwater fish on their website seafoodwatch.org because in English we don't have a better single word to describe all the aquatic animals we eat.
Q: Do you realize that carbs are actually great/awful, or that strength training is great/awful, or that some other nutrition or exercise thing is actually the worst/best?
A: I am hardly an expert, but I've interviewed lots of scientists and read lots of scientific literature about diet and exercise. If you're saying something like this to me, I think it's probably the case that you are massively oversimplifying the available science. Also, good nutrition is bespoke nutrition.
Q: Why do you squat the way you do?
A: Squat form is a very controversial thing on the internet, in part because there are lots of different ways to squat depending on your goals (i.e. playing football vs growing Tom Platz quads) and also because good squat form is highly dependent on your own personal biomechanics. I've been squatting many years, and I've had trainers look at my form several times. This is the basic form that I have found works with my structure, and it's hardly unusual. However, I will go deeper, lower-bar and certainly much heavier as I progress. I've been almost sedentary for a year. Especially as I get older, I find that I need to be VERY cautious about any exercises involving spinal compression until my core strength comes back on line. The squat you see me doing here is what feels safest to me at this stage in my process. And yes, I deadlift too, but it will be several weeks before my core is strong enough for that.
Q: If you're dieting, why is there Coke and other unhealthy things in your fridge?
A: I am not the only person who lives in my house. Also, regarding the other ingredients, I am continuing to develop/test/shoot normal recipes for this channel, because not everyone in the world wants to eat cauliflower rice and tilapia for the next two months. Hell, I don't really want to.
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Hey y'all, thanks for watching the vid! A few supplemental thoughts...
I will absolutely cop to going with an oversimplified and provocative title here. Sometimes it's easy to sum up a 13-minute piece of content in a few words that people will actually want to click on, and sometimes it's not. You usually either need to sacrifice nuance or clickability, and anyone who makes content for a living constantly struggles with the reality that you can't inform anyone if you don't get their attention, and you can't express your entire piece in a headline (because if you could, there'd be no reason to keep writing beyond the headline).
But, if you've watched the video, I think you'll understand that the basic message is this: If you're a typical over-fed First Worlder (like me), any diet that gets you out of caloric surplus and replaces junk foods with nutrient-dense ones is probably gonna be great for you.
The sense in which I'm calling keto "stupid" here is very narrow — many (most?) people who think they're doing keto aren't actually eating few enough carbs to be in ketosis, and there is not (yet) scientific literature proving that keto has therapeutic benefits for metabolic syndrome beyond those conferred generally by losing weight and eating less junk.
The sense in which I'm calling the raw diet "stupid" is narrow — many of its proponents call it a more "natural" diet, which is in conflict with the weight of anthropological opinion, they often fail to consider reductions in bioavailability of nutrients from raw foods, and they often fail to consider the safety implications of eating raw.
The sense in which I'm calling paleo diets "stupid" is similarly narrow — many of its proponents call it a more "natural" diet, which is in conflict with the weight of anthropological opinion.
I think the science and history behind all of that stuff is interesting, and I thought you would too, so I made a vid about it. That's all!
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Hey everybody, here's a point I make in the video, but I wish I had made a little earlier on (judging by the comments): The easiest way to maintain cast iron is to cook with it all the time. Our great-grandparents didn't obsess over polymerization blah blah blah. They just cooked in the damn thing. They cooked most meals they ate (unlike a lot of us today), and most of those meals they cooked in their cast iron. Cooking in it constantly will maintain a decent seasoning, and iron pans generally only start to rust if you don't use them. So, as I said, if you're gonna use it all the time, I think cast iron is great. That's why you have people commenting here saying, "I never worry about any of this stuff and my pan works great!" That's probably because they're cooking with it all the time, which is awesome. But if you're not gonna cook with it all the time, I do think there are better options, assuming you can afford them.
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Q: So, really, are you bothered by the memes?
A: No! Certainly there are some comments that bother me a lot (such as the vile trash that pops up here whenever a woman appears in one of my videos), but the jokes are cool. All good. Especially with the "season x instead of y" stuff — I hit you with a clickbaity video title, and it worked, but the flip-side of that is I've gotta be ready for you to throw it back at me. I'm a big boy, I can take it.
Q: Are you still a professor?
A: Yes, but my colleagues are currently searching for my replacement, and I'll drop down to adjunct status at the end of this semester. I love my university, I love teaching, but YouTubing at my current level is far more profitable than being a rank-and-file liberal arts faculty member, and I have little kids with empty college accounts. Luckily, I love YouTubing — it's like teaching, but I can reach far more people, and instead of charging them tuition, I just ask them to watch a couple ads.
Q: How much money are you making, exactly?
A: At the moment, more than I need. Not movie star money, but good doctor/lawyer-type money. You might wonder, then, why I make you sit through sponsorship segments. The answer is that I'm pretty sure my income will plummet as soon as the U.S. economy hits a recession, which I worry is just around the corner. When companies hit hard times, one of the first things they cut is their marketing budgets. I'm saving now while I'm riding high, because I don't imagine I will be forever. Also, come December, I'll need to buy health insurance for my entire family on the individual market. If you don't live in the U.S., feel lucky that you don't know how outrageously expensive that will be — probably 3x my mortgage payment, for garbage insurance that won't pay for anything.
Q: Are you going to start posting more non-food videos to the channel?
A: I don't know, what do you think I should do? I was thinking about starting a second channel once I'm no longer teaching full-time, where I could do videos about all the other stuff I'm interested in. Do you think I should do that, or keep it all on one channel?
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Q: Why do you hate the metric system?
A: Why don't you watch videos before commenting on them?
Q: But srs, you'll admit this is a clickbaity title, right?
A: Meh, ish. In the annals of YouTube clickbait, this has gotta be in like the fifth percentile in terms of egregiousness. I can't inform or entertain anyone if they don't click, thus all content creation must be done with that basic exigency in mind. That said, I just changed the original "The problem with metric recipes" title to "My problem with metric recipes," to underline the subjectivity of this issue. This is absolutely an American/Liberian/Burmese problem, not a global problem.
Q: Why don't you just convert to metric?
A: Metric is better in every objective way, but the fact remains that I live in the U.S., and virtually all non-narcotic products are sold here in U.S. customary measurements (which is not the same as Imperial, btw). Since the majority of my audience is from outside the U.S., the thought has definitely occurred to me to switch my entire operation to metric. I might still, at some point. But for right now, I think my current measurement system is a more honest expression of who I am, where I live, and how I think. And, of course, the U.S. does remain, by far, my most important single market. But as I said, I will now be doing basic metric conversions of my recipes in the descriptions.
Q: Why the shot at Gordon Ramsay?
A: While I'm sure Gordon is a wonderful family man, and he is certainly a great chef, I think his public persona is bad for humanity. He's been turning workplace abuse into entertainment since "Boiling Point," and I'm not laughing. He might say that's merely his TV persona and not how he actually conducts himself professionally anymore. Perhaps that's true, and that's great for his employees, but the fact remains that he's projecting a role model to authority figures everywhere, and I think he is thereby perpetuating the same kind of toxic workplace environment that he suffered under MPW, among others.
Q: Why are you getting so hung up on the relatively minor quantitative differences you're discussing in this video, when you're a noted advocate of eyeballing ingredients and of generally being un-fussy in the kitchen?
A: That's a fair question, and it's something I struggle with a lot. I really hope that most people who watch my recipe videos will just take the basic idea of the dish and then adapt it to their own needs, rather than follow it to the letter. And I reckon many (most?) do just that. However, I think the precise recipes I write in my descriptions are more likely to be followed by beginners, and I really worry about leading them astray. Therefore, if converting a recipe from U.S. units to metric causes any of the problems I discussed in this video, the people least able to roll with those punches are also the people most likely to be using the written recipes in the first place, which is why I worry.
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Q: Is this an ad for Target?
A: Yes, and we disclosed as much multiple times and in multiple ways. I talked a bit about my decision to do this in my community post from yesterday (where I gave my followers a heads-up that it was coming), but I'll reiterate some of those points and add some new ones. 1) I really do like Target, and really did like these groceries a lot. I don't endorse products I don't like; 2) This is an extra video in my schedule, so I'm not giving you this in place of anything else; 3) Target was a delight to work with on this. They were super professional, and they encouraged me in many ways to make an entertaining and informative video, not just a commercial; 4) This gig enabled me to make some really overdue equipment investments that are already improving the channel; 5) I've worked in professional media my entire adult life, and have seen way too many talented friends laid off as the traditional business models collapsed. If a company like Target wants to patronize my work in this way, thus enabling me to make more things that are valuable to you, I think that's a win for everyone involved.
Q: Is it not true that there are three nights in a week?
A: I would describe that as a lie by omission 😉.
Q: How long do the pickles last in the fridge?
A: For safety's sake, I wouldn't push it past 10 days or so (but that's probably conservative). The flavor really does improve after a few days in there, though they're good after a few hours.
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Q) Why do your chicken legs contain broth?
A) Because they're super cheap. Processors of very inexpensive meat in the U.S. inflate the weight of their product with water, I think usually via a weak brine solution. It doesn't really make a difference in a long-cooked dish like this. Yes we also have normal meat in the U.S.
Q) Why do you sound different?
A) I'm getting over a cold. Wait until you have small children in school — you will be sick more often than not.
Q) Did you butcher all the Indian words?
A) No, I pronounced them with an American accent, because I have an American accent. It would be weird if I tried to affect someone else's accent.
Q) Why do you pronounce cumin "KOO-min"?
A) I have no idea, but lots of people pronounce it that way. Maybe it's how my parents said it. Every dictionary I've tried mentions this as a common pronunciation, which means I am hardly alone: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cumin?s=t
Q) Why didn't you put ghee in the marinade?
A) I think there's plenty of fat in the chicken pieces and the yogurt. If I was doing white meat pieces, I think ghee (or oil) would be important, but I doubt it would make much of a difference with dark meat.
Q) Why did you need red food coloring to get the same color my Indian grandma gets without it?
A) Probably because your grandma uses way more chili powder, because your family, like probably most South Asians, exhibits chronic capsaicin desensitization. Those of us who don't eat super-spicy food all the time are far more sensitive to the burn, says science. This will be the topic of Monday's video.
Q) Why do you keep translating stuff for Brits?
A) Because the U.K. and other Commonwealth countries represent my second-biggest audience demographic after the U.S., because they are often demonstrably confused by U.S. kitchen terms, and because I do have an affinity for British culture, owing to my travels, my interest in history, and my voracious consumption of old BBC and Channel 4 cookery programs.
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Q: This seems like a lot of work. Can I just buy this somewhere?
A: You'd think so, but I've never found one that tasted remotely like real demi-glace. Let me know if you do.
Q: Could you simulate this stuff through some combination of gelatin, bouillon, mushrooms, soy sauce and some such?
A: I am intrigued, and will be giving this a shot.
Q: Could you do this faster with a pressure cooker / instapot?
A: I suppose, but I'm not into pressure cookers. More trouble than they're worth, IMHO. The time issue here isn't an impediment for me, since it's totally unattended time.
Q: Could you make this with chicken feet, instead of wings?
A: I would imagine so, might even be better, and would probably be cheaper. Chicken feet are generally not available in mainstream U.S. grocery stores (EDIT: apparently they have them at Walmart, see below), but you can often find them in Latin or Asian groceries here.
Q: How is it possible that the smells and fat could be so gross, and yet the liquid would taste good?
A: Lots of volatile compounds leave food during cooking, and fat traps aromas. That's why if you put some cookies in a box with something strong-smelling like mint, all the cookies will taste minty. The butter traps the smell.
Q: Did you steal this idea from Babish?
A: No. As I said, I stole it from Chef John. It was news to me that Babish did a demi-glace recipe recently. I've had this on the books for a while. This demi-glace is a crucial ingredient in the Christmas dinner I usually make, which I have scheduled for next Thursday. It really shouldn't be surprising that recipe youtubers would often be making the same stuff, independent of each other. Nothing new under the sun.
Q: Why did you post this a day late?
A: Factors entirely outside my control. Sorry!
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Q: Was that cheese $599??
A: Hah, no. $5.99.
Q: Didn't you already do this recipe? https://youtu.be/KcM_MZoJWOo
A: That's a recipe for a baked mac & cheese. When I made it, a lot of people asked me if I could do a recipe for stovetop mac & cheese, so that's what I did! The recipes are not interchangeable — generally if you're gonna go stovetop, you want much less milk/water.
Q: Is this better than Kenji's recipe, which just requires macaroni, cheese and evaporated milk? https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2017/01/3-ingredient-stovetop-mac-and-cheese-recipe.html
A: That's for you to decide! Kenji's recipe is brilliant, but I do think emulsifying salts get you a noticeably smoother product that's also more stable — it reheats better, for example. But Kenji's use of evaporated milk for its protein content and viscosity is brilliant. Another advantage of this recipe, though, is that you can get the lactose content way down by using water instead of milk. Old Man Ragusea is getting lactose intolerant too, I'm sad to say.
Q: Do Brits really call American cheese "cheese slices"?
A: Yes! Looking at the grocery sites, that's generally how they're marketed. (Search "cheese slice" at Tesco, for example). I think I first heard the term in this Heston vid: https://youtu.be/6WPq5jtW5J0 Some folks here are saying they call it "plastic cheese," which makes sense, though that's obviously not the therm you'll see on the package at the store! Another marketing term I've seen for it across the pond is "burger cheese." If you're unsure of what you've got, just look at the ingredients and look for emulsifying salts. Processed cheese has them, real cheese doesn't.
Q: Does it have to be the "deli deluxe" American cheese?
A: Absolutely not. Kraft Singles, for example, would be fine. Anything that has sodium phosphate or sodium citrate in the ingredients should work. Or, as I demonstrated, you can just buy some sodium citrate, which is what I do.
Q: Could you boil the mac in the milk instead?
A: It would be tricky to cook macaroni in that small a quantity of milk without the milk burning, but I'm sure it's possible.
Q: Did you accidentally show your address here?
A: Meh, kinda. Not a big deal. In most American counties, your address is a matter of public record if you own your home, which I do. Tons of peoplefinder websites scrape the tax records and aggregate them in searchable databases, like anywho.com. You could get my address by just googling "Adam Ragusea address." You're on your honor to not come murder me.
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Hi everybody, I've heard some concerns, so let me make something really clear: Rendering meat kosher is a complicated process of which this salting procedure I demonstrate in the video is simply one phase. As I mentioned in the vid, there's the butchering process to consider, and more. This video is not about how to make meat compliant with Jewish dietary law — it only engages with that topic in as much as it is relevant to the historical origins of "Kosher salt" as a marketing term for coarse salts, which is what the video is about. If you really want to learn how to make food suitable for a religion, I am not your man!
Here's one thing I think I got wrong: OU regards Morton table salt as "not Kosher for Passover," which is a much more specific and narrow designation than "not Kosher." And certainly iodine is not the only factor they consider there, which is why I said the salt is not Kosher "for a few reasons." Writing these videos is always a balancing act between giving enough context to maintain accuracy, and cutting out details that would make the video last forever. I often have to use phrases like "one of the reasons" or "among other things" to communicate that what I'm mentioning is part of a much bigger thing, but it's not the particular thing we're talking about today. Regardless, "not Kosher for passover" is a much more specific thing than "not Kosher" — that much I definitely got wrong.
And certainly, don't come to me looking for authentic Hebrew pronunciations! As always, I generally try to use the most proximate anglicization for non-English words. Whether I got to the closest proximate anglicization on Chabad, I'm not sure! I'm hearing no? [UPDATE] The consensus below seems to be that "h" is a better anglicization than my "sh" for the throaty Hebrew "ch."
If anybody has more concerns along these lines, I'll try to update this pin accordingly.
[UPDATE] People seem to think my video gave the impression that Jews frequently kasher meat themselves. That was not my intention, and it isn't the case. Kashering is generally part of the kosherbutchering process, and is done by pros before consumers buy the meat. (At least, that is the case in highly developed economies — I imagine it might be different in a traditional agrarian context.) When I mentioned in the video that public health authorities frown on washing meat at home, some people took that as an implication that kashering is commonly done in the home. I understand how I might have unintentionally given that impression. FWIW, my intent was only to explain why I, in demonstrating kashering in my own kitchen, was violating the very public health advice that I was promulgating in this recent video I did on meat washing: https://youtu.be/90Nd_vh3yk8
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Q: What exactly is "American cheese"?
A: It's a mixture of cheeses, usually Cheddar and Colby, that have been ground up and reconstituted with emulsifiers. It melts smoothly and at low temperatures.
Q: Can I get this "American cheese" in my country that isn't America?
A: You tell me! I researched that topic a bit and came up with more questions than answers.
Q: Will other kinds of American cheese work?
A: Yeah, I've made this with Kraft Singles before. It was fine, but the flavor of the Deli Deluxe is noticeably better.
Q: Did Kraft pay you for this?
A: No. I'll always disclose any sponsorships. I want to avoid mentioning brand names whenever possible (outside of a sponsorship agreement), but this is a case where I really think a specific product gets a better result.
Q: Could I make this recipe with "real" cheese?
A: Try it and let me know how it goes! I've tried doing this with Gruyère (a classic melting cheese) and the result was a sloshy broken mess. There's a reason that more traditional recipes call for melting the cheese into Béchamel (milk thickened with roux) instead of just plain milk — the roux thickens the sauce and helps keep the fats reasonably in suspension as they're baked in the oven. As I said in the video, I think it's the emulsifiers in the American cheese that make this recipe work without roux.
Q: What's your dad's name?
A: Dr. Stephen Ragusea. He's a psychologist. He lives in Florida, hence the shirt, but he was born in New York, a third-generation Italian American. Yes, his second-generation New York Italian-American mother taught him to make this with American cheese. U-S-A!
Q: Do you know your camera has a dead pixel?
A: Yep. New one came in the mail today, along with a very fancy new lens. Future videos (and thumbnails) should have a noticeably sharper look. Thanks for watching my videos, thus providing me with the revenue for those investments!
Q: Should I leave a disparaging comment about processed cheese products and the people who enjoy them?
A: Nope.
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Q: Didn't Babish just make a video about pan pizza? Are you just copying him?
A: He sure did, and it was great, as usual! https://youtu.be/J_3v7DEkjsk But that's just a coincidence. Now that I have sponsors, all my stuff has to be scheduled several weeks out; I've had this on the books for a while. My recipe is also very different from his, and I'm sure he'd be the first to tell you that none of us "own" something so basic as pan pizza.
Q: What do you mean it's safe for me to broil this in a non-stick pan?
A: According to my infrared thermometer tests, the exposed rim of my pan only hit about 350 F under the broiler before the pizza was done. Nonstick pans don't start breaking down until at least 570 F. In a test, it took my pan 20 minutes to get that hot directly under the broiler, totally empty. Again, you'll get a deep-dive on Teflon safety in Monday's vid.
Q: Did you accidentally release this video early?
A: I always upload my videos a couple days early as unlisted, because I need to send them to experts for fact-checking, and to sponsors for approval. Apparently there is a bug in YouTube's system, where if you assign an unlisted video to a public playlist, it will be listed via that playlist, so at least 50 people were able to watch this one early as a result. Won't make that mistake again!
Q: Can I get one of those vintage restored cast iron pans your friend gave you?
A: Absolutely! David sells them: https://www.instagram.com/whatsuphomerskillet/
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OK, from the comments, it seems I need to clarify some points:
1) Yes, there are many tricks to keep brown sugar from clumping. But as I said in the video, even if it didn't clump, I would have no reason to buy it, because I already have white sugar and molasses. I use white sugar for lots of things. I use molasses to make gingerbread cookies at Christmas. There is no reason for me to buy a third product that is just a combination of those two products I already have, especially considering it requires special storage.
2) No, I don't use my food processor to combine white sugar and molasses to make brown sugar. 99.9% of the time when I need brown sugar, it is in the context of a recipe where I'm already going to be mixing sugar with a bunch of other wet ingredients. Rather than using brown sugar, I might as well pour white sugar in the bowl, dab in some molasses, and then mix it all together when I'm mixing in my butter, eggs, etc. This does not add any extra mixing or extra dirty dishes to the process. I actually think it's easier and cleaner than using brown sugar, because white sugar doesn't stick to measuring cups. I think I made this pretty clear in the video. The reason I showed the food processor technique was to A) show how mixing those two ingredients really does yield a product that is identical to store-bought brown sugar, and B) show a method for creating crystals of brown sugar (without any other ingredients) for those rare situations in which someone like me would need them. But, to reiterate, I just mix the molasses with my sugar when I'm mixing in all my other wet ingredients.
3) Using white sugar and molasses in combination with each other has the added benefit of allowing me to control the ratio. If I'm making a recipe that calls or light brown sugar, I can drop in about a tablespoon of molasses per cup of white sugar. If I'm making a recipe that calls for dark brown sugar, I can drop in 3-4 tablespoons. This eliminates the need to buy multiple kinds of brown sugar, or to combine white sugar with brown sugar, as many recipes call for.
4) I'm making a personal argument that is specific to my situation (though I reckon my situation is pretty common). I could imagine other situations in which it might still be convenient for you to keep brown sugar in your house. If, for example, you often use very small quantities of brown sugar (for mixing into tea or oatmeal), it would be difficult for you to measure out a tiny drop of molasses. If you do that, then it absolutely makes sense for you to buy brown sugar and keep it in an airtight container. If you don't do that, then I would suggest trying the molasses trick.
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Q: What happens if I age my dough more than a week?
A: The longest I've ever pushed it is 10 or 11 days, I think. The bread starts to get an unappetizing gray color around that time, but still tastes amazing. I bet you could push your dough even further (farther?), I just never have — because I wanted to eat it.
Q: Can you make actual pizza with dough this old?
A: Yes, but I prefer to make pizza with dough that's maybe five days old. When it gets to be a whole week old, it gets so soft and sticky that it's hard to shape into a very thin pizza, and it's hard to get it to release from the peel. Honestly, the dough tastes good at every stage in its evolution, it just tastes different. So I tend to make four portions of dough on a random night, and then I can make pizza whenever I want over the next week, and each day it will taste a little different, but still good.
Q: Do I really need a pizza stone to make this?
A: You could play around with using any heavy pan as though it were a pizza stone, though the specific pre-heat times will vary enormously depending on the type and thickness of the material. You could also just do this on a baking sheet, though you wouldn't get a crispy bottom. Maybe try pre-heating the baking sheet?
Q: How did your kids feel about eating pizza bread every day for a week?
A: Honestly, even they got sick of it by the end!
Q: Do you really think this is a replacement for traditional sourdough breads?
A: If you're willing to be open to different things, yeah, I kinda do. One of my broader arguments about cooking in post-modernity is that I think it's dumb how we're constantly bending over backwards to recreate foods that evolved for a time and place where we no longer live. I understand nostalgia — I indulge my nostalgia all the time, in and out of the kitchen. But I think we'd live better lives it we put more of that effort into evolving new foods that are specifically suited to our own time and place. When it comes to bread, I'm sure that baking would have evolved very differently if we'd had refrigeration this whole time. Mixing in a pre-ferment, rising it, punching it down, rising it again, punching it down again, etc, etc — these are things you need to do if you don't have a refrigerator. You can achieve an amazing sourdough flavor by simply aging the dough in the fridge for a while. Can you make the exact same loaf shapes, and will they taste exactly the same? Probably not. But those loafs evolved because they were well-suited to the old methods. I want to develop new loafs that are suited to post-modern life, where we all have refrigerators and no time.
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Q: Didn't you previously have a pinned comment here about how you weren't going to post a FAQ because it was Thanksgiving? And then didn't you asked people how their turkey was coming?
A: Yes, but it is now the day after Thanksgiving, so I'm going to attempt to answer some common questions.
Q: Why are you recommending that I use a very dark chocolate bar? Can't I use milk chocolate if I don't like dark chocolate?
A: Milk + dark chocolate = milk chocolate. Milk + milk chocolate = very milky chocolate, which maybe you'll like, but I suspect you'd think was kinda bland.
Q: Do you realize that 70% cacao isn't "very dark" or "very intense" to me?
A: Yes, and I'm so very impressed by you and the relative scale of your genitalia.
Q: Is that a tiny whisk we saw you using to mix the gelatin with the water?
A: Nope, it's handle of the measuring cup I used to pour the water in.
Q: Why are so many of your videos sponsored by Squarespace?
A: I assume because I generate a lot of sales for them, and because we like working with each other. But you'd have to ask them.
Q: Could I use agave syrup or maple syrup instead of honey?
A: Agave syrup, definitely. Maple syrup, I'm not sure about. I've read that maple syrup is not a fully inverted syrup, and an inverted syrup is useful to mix with the cane sugar because it makes it impossible for the syrup to form crystals and seize up into a sugar ball in the pan. But that's only a possibility, not a certainty, anyway. So, maple syrup would probably be fine.
Q: Do you realize that you just revealed your street number to the world?
A: Yes. I'm in the phone book. I'm a home owner. My address is an easily googleable matter of public record. To try to purge the internet of my address would be a futile exercise. The way that real celebrities keep their addresses off the internet is to employ infocsec firms to do it constantly. You're all on your honor to not show up and murder all of us.
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Q: So does that frosting have raw eggs in it?
A: No no, the boiling syrup definitely cooks the egg whites when you beat it in. If you do that in a metal bowl, you'll feel the sides get really hot. 240ºF syrup is no joke.
Q: Wouldn't it have been easier to pour the boiling syrup into the eggs in a stand mixer?
A: Absolutely, but I've decided to avoid using my stand mixer in videos whenever possible. I don't want people to get the impression that they need such an expensive piece of gear to make the recipe, because most of the time they really don't.
Q: Could you brown that meringue with a torch to make it like a toasty marshmallow?
A: Absolutely, go for it. Italian Meringue is often used in Baked Alaska.
Q: Could you get a deeper flavor by blooming the cocoa in coffee instead of milk, or by adding espresso powder?
A: Totally, I'm just not a big fan of coffee, and I kinda like how this recipe doesn't taste too "grown up."
Q: Do you have to bloom the cocoa in a hot pan like that? Can you just heat the milk in the microwave?
A: You don't have to do it in the pan like I did, but I think that method is super convenient, because it only dirties one dish, and I also think it improves the flavor, because the cocoa actually toasts a little on the bottom of the pan.
ENDNOTE: Thanks again for your support and positivity regarding the sponsorship. I'm the primary breadwinner for a family of four, I've got a mortgage to pay and college accounts to fund, and I can't just be doing all this work for fun (though I am having a great time doing this). More than the money itself, it's important that I diversify my income sources so that I'm not overly reliant on one stream that could cut off at any time. I promise you I will never accept money to say things that aren't true, and I won't endorse things I don't actually like. I've been really impressed with Squarespace, both in dealing with them behind the scenes and in using it to build my new site, which is gonna look awesome. So, legit, use my referral link and save that 10 percent! http://squarespace.com/ragusea
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Q: So are you really saying there's no point in baking a cake from scratch? What if I enjoy baking from scratch, or I like how baking from scratch teaches me things?
A: I am absolutely NOT say there's no point in baking from scratch. I'm saying that, in my view, "because I want to eat a cake that's like the kind I can get from a box" is not a sufficiently good reason to try to imitate it from scratch. "Because it will be fun" is a great reason, so is "because I don't want the kind of cake you get from a box."
Q: Why didn't you talk about ways that people can modify cake mixes to, say, make them less sweet?
A: Because the video was already almost 13 minutes long! But if you want to learn more about that, Dr. Miller recommends Anne Byrn, "The Cake Mix Doctor" — https://cakemixdoctor.com/
Q: So is all "bleached" flour chlorinated, and does it therefore have the structural properties you were talking about?
A: No. From Dr. Miller — "Bleached cake flour is chlorinated. The chlorine whitens the flour and also changes the functional properties. Bread flour and all-purpose flours that are bleached have been treated with benzoyl peroxide, which simply bleaches out the yellow pigments in the flour to make the flour whiter in color. The benzoyl peroxide has no functional effect in the flour — only aesthetic."
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Q: Can I do this with store-bought tomatoes?
A: Sure, I've tested it with grocery store tomatoes. Not as good, but still damn good. Honestly, pound-for-pound, this may be my favorite recipe I've done.
Q: Could I fire-roast the tomatoes instead?
A: No doubt that would be delicious, but I think it would be a different sauce. The real magic with this one, IMHO, is the caramelized layer you get on the bottom of the pan, and that only comes from roasting in the oven long enough to get some real reduction happening.
Q: Don't you feed your kids?
A: The little one eats off our plates, the big one is super picky.
Q: Does your finished pasta look kinda dry?
A: I'm a big fan of minimally-sauced pasta, but you do you.
Q: Seriously, angel hair pasta?
A: Yeah, I'm not a fan either. I opened up the pantry that was all that was left. (No judgment if you like angel hair.)
Q: Why do you break your pasta in half?
A: I seek to minimize twirling.
Q: Could I use this as a pizza sauce?
A: You could, but I wouldn't. In my experience, pizza sauce works best with barely cooked (or totally raw) tomatoes. Pizza needs that brightness. Heavily cooked tomato sauces on pizza tend to give you a flavor profile that tastes more like lasagna than pizza. IMHO.
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Q: Aren't red potatoes bad for mash? Don't they set up like library paste when they cool?
A: Yes, if you only use red. But the mixture of the two types of starches you get by adding in a Russet (or any floury potato) fixes that problem. I like the red skins. Yukon potatoes are nice too, but where I live you can only buy those in giant bags.
Q: What was the brown thing in the frozen peas?
A: A little piece of stem. Not unusual. I took it out.
Q: Why frozen peas?
A: Good fresh peas are really hard to come by. They start losing their sweetness the second you pick them. I speak from experience; I used to grow them. The few times I've gotten fresh peas at the farmer's market, they've been starchy by the time I could eat them. Frozen peas are the greatest frozen vegetable. The farmers/processors are able to pick and freeze them at their peak of sweetness, and the flash freezing process they use really preserves the texture. The times in my life when I've had perfect fresh peas have been moments of divine inspiration, but they've also been few and far between.
Q: Can you be more specific about why you didn't like the breast-side-down method?
A: 1) It didn't cook the dark meat as much as I want, though it did a better job than standard roasting; 2) There wasn't nearly as much good fond, so the gravy was pale and bland; 3) The breast didn't have time to brown as much as I wanted; 4) It was kinda hard to know when to flip it, and the flip was kinda physically tricky. The breast stuck to the pan and the skin tore.
Q: Why didn't you make Yorkshire pud?
A: I'm willing to be proven wrong, mate, but I've eaten many yorkies in the U.K. and in my own kitchen, and I think they're overrated. I think the gravy is a higher use for that fat. But you do you!
Q: Why did you let that lemon seed just drop into the gravy?
A: Because I'm not fussy. Unless it's for a dessert or something, I never worry about catching the seeds. They haven't bothered me yet. But you do you.
Q: I saw some pink flesh in your leg quarters. Are they undercooked?
A: No, they're cooked to smithereens, which is how I like my dark meat. The flesh right around the hip joint will pretty much always be pink, even if you cook it to a really high temp, as I did. This is one of many reasons why color is an imperfect gauge of temperature in meat.
Q: Why is your gravy pale?
A: I wouldn't call it pale; I'd call it blonde, which is how I usually like poultry gravy. You could make yours more brown by cooking the roux for longer. Personally, I really dislike the flavor of brown roux. In the U.K., they're also fond of using additives to brown their gravy, such as a liquid caramel coloring they call "gravy browning." You could also use that, I guess!
END NOTE: I really want to thank everyone for being so positive and supportive about my first sponsorship! Skillshare is a great company, they've been great to work with, and you'd be doing me and yourself a favor if you clicked on the link up top and got your two-month trial. I also want to thank my agent, Colin West, who is out there making a lot of things happen for me with his bad-ass Scottish accent. I put a lot of time and effort into these videos, and it's great to have my labors rewarded via good ol' fashioned commerce. As a long-time journalist, that's a very unusual experience for me!
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Q: Are you just butt-hurt that someone made fun of you for ordering your curry mild?
A: Chillax. Though I do sincerely believe the argument I made in this video, I intend that argument to primarily serve as an amusing framework for us all to learn some interesting science about why chilies make us feel the way they do. I consider these Monday (or, in this case, Tuesday, due to administrative delay) videos to be journalism, and I think one defining aspect of journalism as a form of communication is that its primary function is to inform, rather than to persuade. You can write an opinion piece where you're trying to persuade people to see things the way you do, but that mission should be secondary to the primary goal of giving them enough information to come to their own conclusions. I think I gave you plenty of information in this video to come to an opposing viewpoint. Eat what you like to eat, and be more informed in the act.
Q: Why are you using plastic products a week after you told us that food plastics are messing with our hormones? https://youtu.be/BIvHrC_mS_M
A: We make choices in life in which we have to balance many competing interests. Based on what I learned making that video, I've chosen to replace most of my reusable food containers with glass, and to stop microwaving my plastics, but I don't think it's feasible to banish all food plastics from my diet, and even if it was, there are other interests to consider. This is purely a guess, but I would guess the net effect of food plastics has been to make our food supply safer, even when taking endocrine disruption into account. Also, I love canned tomatoes, and would probably eat them even if I knew they would literally kill me. I gave you some information; make your own choices with that info, and I'll make mine.
Q: But seriously, why did you turn a science video into an argument about toxic masculinity?
A: You may laugh, but I suddenly find myself in the position of being a 37-year-old man with a large audience of much younger men. I am seriously worried about the concepts of masculinity that I see metastasizing among young men these days (especially in certain online communities), and I feel an obligation to offer a model of masculinity that I believe is better for the world. I know that when I was a teenager, the male role models society offered to me were either the same-old unenlightened meatheads or painfully ineffectual and unsexy '90s men. I had no idea how to navigate between those two extremes until I found two male role models who taught me, in large measure, how to be the man I try to be today: Henry Rollins and Anthony Bourdain. It's possible to be an enlightened bad-ass — to care about other people's feelings, to be smart, to be nurturing, and also to be resilient, assertive and, frankly, fuckable. I learned that from Hank and Tony, and if I can pass that wisdom to others, I will. The kitchen is a place where I think a lot of these issues come up.
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Hey all, I'm seeing a lot of folks commenting, "I've been washing meat my whole life, and it's never made me sick!" A few responses to that:
1) You would have absolutely no way of knowing if doing this made you sick. Most people who get a minor foodborne illness either don't know they had it, or would have no way of knowing how they got it. People usually assume it was the last thing they ate, but foodborne infections have incubation periods of days or even weeks.
2) No scientist I've talked to about meat washing characterized it as a major health risk. They're simply telling you it's a risk that isn't worth taking, unless you have some specific, compelling reason to wash the meat, which many of you do. Just try not to splash much water around.
3) To my knowledge, the only research that's been done on this is observational studies where they watch people cook and then go back and look for bacteria or its surrogates. As far as I can tell, no one has finished any epidemiological research (large-scale studies of actual human populations out there in the real world) that would tell us how much meat-washing elevates your risk of foodborne illness.
4) Assuming meat-washing does indeed raise your likelihood of foodborne illness by a few percentage points, keep in mind that you would have no way of perceiving that on an individual level. Most people get sick from food at least a few times in their life, and unless you're part of a major outbreak where public health investigators get involved, you'll probably never know what made you sick. Things that just elevate your risk a little bit are usually only perceivable at the population-level, where scientists can use statistical analysis to isolate variables.
5) Whether you should care about something that might only raise your risk of illness by a little bit is entirely up to you. Personally, I'm not that worried about it. I'm just interested in the cultural dimension here. I still don't know what this "raw" or "fresh" taste is that y'all are trying to wash off!
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Q: The quantities in this recipe are so specific. Aren't you the guy who just likes to eyeball stuff?
A: Yes I am, but as I said in the video, this is Adrianna's recipe, not mine, and she and I naturally have different approaches. She's a pro; I'm just a dude in his kitchen. She needs her cakes to come out exactly the same every time; I don't. Again, the main goal of this video is to show Adriana's icing techniques for this cake — you could just bake any chocolate and white cake recipe you want, or bake from a box. Here you can see her baking the same cake with boxed mix: https://youtu.be/CZDFwqHkPec
Q: This recipe calls for brown sugar. Aren't you the guy who just mixes a little molasses in with the white sugar instead of buying brown sugar?
A: Yes, I am that guy, but again, this is Adrianna's recipe, not mine. Her house, her rules. But it is also true that brown sugar is just white sugar with a little molasses in it.
Q: Why are most of the quantities in metric?
A: Again, Adriana's house, Adriana's rules. It's quite common for pro bakers in the U.S. to use grams. Bakers, scientists and doctors in the U.S. pretty much all use metric.
Q: How do I get in touch with Adriana and see more of her cakes?
A: https://www.instagram.com/ohhoneybakingco/?hl=en Also, she does have a YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXcful70QdE8LGOx8uZSf7A
Q: Aren't you on a diet?
A: Yes, but I make the videos for you, not me. I don't think you want to see videos about fish and cauliflower rice for two months.
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Q: I can't drink alcohol, so what can I use as a substitute?
A: I addressed this question directly in the video at 4:50. My recommendation is white balsamic vinegar diluted with water or stock, but there are lots of other options that people in these comments have been discussing.
Q: Aren't you supposed to only cook with wine you'd want to drink?
A: I've cooked with great wine, I've cooked with crappy cheap wine. In most dishes, I can't tell the difference. The subtle flavor distinctions just get drowned out by the other ingredients. Even in those dishes where I can taste the difference, it just isn't a big enough difference for me to care. I'm not a chef, and I am not striving for perfection. I'm a busy person trying to cook good, easy meals for my family on a budget. But you do you.
Q: How long will wine last after you open it?
A: In my experience, it'll stay good enough to cook with for 2-3 weeks if you close it back up again and put it in the fridge. It'll start to get more sour over time.
Q: What about fortified wines like sherry or vermouth?
A: Those are great. They taste good and they'll last a lot longer after you open them. But I don't think they are a perfect substitution for white wine. They're stronger, and they lack the bright fruity flavor that I really appreciate from wine. I like how white wine freshens up the taste of food, and I don't think fortified wines really do that.
Q: What about mirin or hard cider?
A: I love them both, and they're both great substitutes for white wine (provided that you get dry cider).
Q: Does all the alcohol burn off when you cook it?
A: It really depends how you cook it. I'll be showing some of the research that's been done on this question in next Monday's video.
Q: Should I leave a comment making a joke about how you're an alcoholic?
A: No. I'm not an alcoholic, and alcoholism isn't funny.
Q: Should I leave a comment making a racial joke about the color white?
A: No. Racism isn't funny.
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Hi, thanks for watching the vid! No, this is not an "authentic" gyro sandwich, and I certainly did not present it as such. This is a mash-up of a Greek-American-restaurant-style gyro and a sloppy joe sandwich. If you wanted to get something closer to a real Greek-American-restaurant-style gyro without buying a vertical broiler and keeping it running all day, I'd suggest buying (or making) a gyro loaf, cooking it in the oven until solid, resting it, shaving it into thin strips, then laying those strips onto a sheet pan in a single layer and browning them under the broiler. No, people in Greece don't pronounce "gyro" the way I do. The way I pronounced it here is a very common American pronunciation. I go to lots of American gyro joints and I can't remember the last time I heard it pronounced any other way, though no doubt it is. I'm sure if I'd said it some other way, people would still be mad. BTW, the way I pronounce "cumin" is very common as well: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cumin?s=t. No, I don't hate Alton Brown. I think he's the best. He's a transformational figure in American cooking and cooking media. I try to improve upon ideas he gave me, which is how we honor the legacy of those who came before us.
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Q: Why did you insert politics into a food video?
A: The corn vs flour tortilla dynamic is political whether I acknowledge it or not. Just read my comments every time I cook with flour tortillas. A lot of people view the flour tortilla as emblematic of diluted, commodified, Americanized Mexican food, and yes, as an emblem of cultural appropriation. I don't think you come to my channel to hear my political opinions and I make an effort to not shove them in your face, but lots of food topics intersect directly with political ones, and I'm not going to pretend the political dimension doesn't exist when it's directly relevant to the food I'm talking about. And when I give you my own opinion, I make an effort to present you with an alternative opinion, or at least with enough information to empower you to come to a different conclusion than mine. I think I did that in this video (assuming you made it to the end), but if you want some more views that differ a bit from my own, read this piece by Gustavo Arellano (the guy in the video), who is generally skeptical about charges of appropriation: https://www.wweek.com/restaurants/2017/06/07/let-white-people-appropriate-mexican-food-mexicans-do-it-to-ourselves-all-the-time/
Q: Are cultures not supposed to exchange ideas? Don't we get a lot of wonderful things that way?
A: I feel like a lot of people leaving comments like this didn't make it to the latter part of the video where I tried to illuminate the difference between harmful cultural appropriation and benign (or mutually beneficial) cultural exchange. If you're a member of a group that has hurt another group a lot and is currently dominant over that group, I think you should be particularly sensitive about how you adopt and use cultural items from that group. (Yes, the lines of membership around such groups are usually blurry, but they're still real, and we still have to deal with them.) That doesn't mean you don't borrow. I've made several Latin American-inspired dishes on this channel, but I do things to avoid hurting people when I do it. I don't presume to represent "authentic" versions of dishes. When I take an idea from a specific person, I credit them, and when they spend a lot of time helping me make the video, I pay them. When I do a video like this one that deals a lot with someone else's culture, I make sure to seek out members of that culture and to let them speak for themselves, instead of presuming to speak for them. I think a lot of what people dismiss as "PC" or "SJW" is just being considerate of other people's feelings, even if you don't understand them.
Q: Hasn't "cultural appropriation" been defined historically as any culture grabbing an idea from another culture — not necessarily a dominant culture grabbing an idea from an oppressed one?
A: Indeed, this is true. However, the term "cultural appropriation" has been undergoing a very common linguistic phenomenon known as "perjoration," in which a word or term that was previously neutral acquires a negative connotation. This may be the result of changing social attitudes on the phenomenon being described, but the more likely explanation is that it simply represents a kind of abbreviation. A classic example would be the word "attitude." It's a neutral word, but if I say you have an attitude, you know I'm saying you have a shitty attitude. This evolution of the word doesn't reflect any kind of evolving social norm — it's simply a shortening. We used to say "bad attitude," then we shortened it to "attitude." A similar thing happened recently to the word "anal." If I say, "You're being so anal," you know that I mean anal retentive, and not anal expulsive. Likewise, I think the evolution of the term "cultural appropriation" is simply a shortening — when most people use that term now, what we mean is the bad cultural appropriation.
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Q: Why didn’t you score the bread?
A: That dough is too wet. If you scored it, it would immediately smoosh back together again. No point.
Q: Why did you spray it instead of putting a pan of boiling water in the oven to create steam?
A: Not only does the pan of boiling water method create a mess that then needs to cool down before you can clean it up, it also doesn’t work very well. That’s why most of the recipes that call for it tell you to use it in combination with a spray bottle, or do to something crazy like fill the pan with river rocks to create more surface area for the water. I think the bottle is way easier and works better. But you do you.
Q: What do you mean salt doesn’t kill yeast?
A: I’m sure it will, but only in sufficient concentration and if given enough time. I have made many bread doughs. I have tried putting the salt right into the water with the yeast, and I have tried adding it to the flour instead, as the chef dogma would have you do. There is no difference in the rise. Salt does, however, interfere with the chemistry involved in the no-knead process. You can get a better texture if you let it rise without salt, and then fold the salt into the dough before you proof it. I tried that. I don’t think it makes a big enough difference to be worth it.
Q: Why didn’t you shape the dough with some fancy folds and pleats?
A: I’m lazy, and this dough is extremely wet. I’m not sure if I could shape it if I wanted to. But the wet dough makes for a very open structure and makes kneading and punching it down totally unnecessary.
Q: Why do you have so much milk in your fridge?
A: I have very small kids. And the open pint was leftover from a weekend car trip.
Q: Why do you have X in your fridge?
A: Keep in mind that I am not the only person, or the only adult, who uses that fridge.
Q: Why didn’t you put sugar or oil in the dough, like you do with your pizza dough?
A: The sugar and oil in my pizza dough is chiefly there to enhance browning. It’s hard to get pizza crust sufficiently brown in a home oven, and those additions help. This dough, in contrast, is plenty brown by the time the inside is cooked.
Q: Are you bothered by the memes?
A: No, but I do think jokes about alcoholism are kinda dick. Anyone who has lived with it themselves or via someone they love knows it’s not funny. Or, rather, the joke had better be REALLY funny to earn it.
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Q: Isn't it way cheaper to cook at home?
A: I feel like folks who are saying things like this in the comments didn't watch the video all the way through, since cost is something I discussed at length. I will reiterate, though, that certainly you CAN save a lot of money by cooking for yourself. However, I don't think you should take it for granted that your home-cooked meal will necessarily be cheaper than something you could buy prepared or semi-prepared from a grocery store, or from a restaurant — assuming you live in a highly developed country like the U.S. I've certainly seen a lot of people, usually beginner home cooks, waste a lot of money trying to recreate fancy recipes at home. The point I make in the video is that you can't expect to eat the same way you would from restaurants and still save money just by cooking it yourself. You can't expect that much variety — you've gotta embrace leftovers. You can't except to follow every recipe to the letter — if you buy a new spice or something for every recipe, you're never gonna use enough of it to make it cost-effective, etc.
Q: Why is the lighting different in this video?
A: Because I'm experimenting with different things. At the pace at which I work, pretty much all of my experimenting has to be done in an actual video, and I would agree this experiment was a failure. I've been wanting to try something different from my softbox kit because I don't like how they make people look so airbrushed, and recently some people have been saying they thought it looked like I was talking in front of a green screen. The single-point lighting I did in this vid was the same as the set-up I used in the pizza cheese video (which I liked the look of), except I had to shoot this one at night, so there was less ambient light in the room and the shadows were therefore more severe. I'll keep playing with it. But since my kitchen is getting demolished in a week, there's gonna be about a month where all the Monday videos will be shot somewhere else, so the look is going to vary a lot for a while.
Q: Why did you show a picture of Cleveland when talking about highly developed, post-industrial economies?
A: Honestly it was the only city skyline footage I had at hand. I was dipping into that file anyway, because the beef footage I showed at the beginning was from West Side Market. Also I love Cleveland. And before you snark, remember that places like Cleveland, for all their problems, are still highly developed in the global context.
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Q: Why did you use your stone when you just made a video about how pizza steels are better? https://youtu.be/UWVEgoEGnkY
A: Fair question. You'll note that I made this white pizza twice in the previous video — once on the stone and once on the steel. You'll also note that when I made it on the steel, the pizza stuck really badly to the peel and it came out amoeba-shaped in the end. So, that's why the footage I used for this video was of the pizza I cooked on the stone! It came out nicer! Also, good stones still work great!
Q: Can you make extra sauce and reheat it later?
A: In my experience, this sauce is TERRIBLE reheated. It breaks instantaneously. I make it fresh every time. Maybe if you stabilized it with some cornstarch or sodium citrate you could save some for later.
Q: You really can't find whole milk, low moisture mozz where you live?
A: I think this is a rarer product than many people seem to realize. People have sent me links to a cheese at wal-mart, and it's not actually low moisture. It's just medium moisture. Cheeses sold as "low moisture" have been dried using a high heat drying process that causes additional fermentation and intensifies the flavor. Low moisture, part skim mozz is really common in U.S. grocery stores, but the full-fat version is harder to come by. I live in a small, poor city in the deep south. We just have normal grocery stores down here. Maybe in your city you can get it.
Q: Are heavy cream and double cream really the same thing?
A: Well, not quite. As i understand it, double cream has a fat percentage somewhere in the 40s, and heavy cream usually in the 30s. But they're the most analogous products, as far as I know. I don't think the percentage really matters much for this recipe. I even made it with half and half once, and it was still good. The cheese is really what's doing the thickening, not the fat.
Q: Why are you warning us against eating too much Alfredo sauce?
A: Extremely high-fat foods send me straight to the bathroom. You?
Q: Is that really Alfredo sauce?
A: In the U.S., yes, this what most people call Alfredo sauce. Some people use milk instead of cream, some people use more butter. But that is Italian-American Alfredo sauce. In Italy, Alfredo sauce involves pasta water and perhaps no dairy at all, other than the butter. I'm Italian-American. That is the perspective of this channel.
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Q: Is “African-American domestic worker” just a euphemism for “slave”?
A: As we said in the video, domestic servitude of this era was functionally an extension of slavery in many ways, but this house was built 50 years after the American Civil War, emancipation, and the end of de jure slavery. I think it would have been inappropriate for me to refer to the woman or women who worked here as enslaved people.
Q: Is this evolution particular to houses in former slave states?
A: Not entirely. Cooking used to be much dirtier work generally, and it used to be much more of a fire hazard, so it’s not uncommon to see the kitchen set apart from the living space in old homes all over the world. There’s lots of interesting comments about that below. Keep them coming!
Q: Can I have a beautiful kitchen like this designed and built for me, too?
A: The brilliant Brant Freeman is open for business: https://www.freeman-cabinets.com/
Q: Is your kitchen on the second floor?
A: Not really, my house is on a slope. That which is the first floor at the front is the second floor at the back.
Q: Did you just dox yourself by showing your street?
A: You could google my address right now, if you wanted. When you own your home, your address is a matter of public record. There are a million websites that scrape and aggregate all the public tax records containing that information. I don't go out of my way to put my exact coordinates in videos, but at the same time, I'm not going to go out of my way to hide them, because they are readily available on the internet, and there's (almost) nothing I can do about that.
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Q: Are you sick of eating turkey yet?
A: Yeah, but it's not that bad. I only had to make two to do this series of videos. I ate some and froze some.
Q: What happened to the pinned comment that was here before?
A: I accidentally deleted it while I was trying to update it!
Q: Should I make a pedantic comment about how heat technically moves from warm to cold, not cold to warm?
A: No. We all took high school physics too. We know.
Q: Why don't you stuff your turkey?
A: I do my stuffing separately. I don't like how stuffing in the bird comes out gummy and also slows down cooking, but you do you!
Q: Why did you leave the wings on the carcass?
A: I'm not a fan of turkey wings. I pick the meat off them after dinner and use it in a pie. If you like them, you can have mine!
Q: Why do you use chicken stock in the gravy and not turkey stock?
A: I'm not aware of anywhere I can buy turkey stock, and chicken is fine. Most of the flavor comes from the drippings anyway.
Q: Why did you put all that seasoning on the breast only to wash it away with the clarified butter?
A: I didn't wash it away. I put enough seasoning on the breast to coat the whole bird, and then used it to coat the whole bird. This minimizes the number of times you have to wash your hands.
Q: Why did you bother seasoning the skin at all when it's not going to flavor the meat and most of the flavor in the meal is going to come from the gravy?
A: Because I like tasty skin, Lauren loves tasty skin, and it helps to flavor the gravy a bit. It also smells nice when it's cooking.
Q: Why didn't you cook the turkey in some other, probably more elaborate way?
A: For reasons I discussed here: https://youtu.be/1rb2iQALiXU If you've found a different way that works for you, then I think that's awesome!
Q: In the Monday video, you said you don't like to brine because it makes the gravy inedibly salty. Then in this video, you said you like to make your gravy a bit too salty because its salinity will be diluted by the meat. Aren't these two statements in conflict?
A: No. A little too salty and a lot too salty are not the same thing. There's rather a big difference.
Q: Why did you waste so much water thawing the turkey?
A: I didn't waste it. I used it. My shooting schedule demanded that I thaw the turkey more quickly than I could in the fridge, and they're not selling fresh turkeys in my stores yet. I thought I might as well demonstrate the technique for you, because you might find it useful. Fresh water is extremely abundant in the eastern United States. Far more of it falls out of the sky than we could use. It is a fully renewable resource that is recycled into the environment when it goes down the drain. My use of it here is completely unrelated to the fact that other people in other places don't have enough fresh water. My use does not deprive them of it. These are unrelated conditions. The energy used to pump the water to my house and filter it afterward is de minimis compared to the resources used to raise, pack, transport and cook the meat. If you're that concerned about the environment, don't eat meat.
Q: Why did you demonstrate techniques in this video that you've already demonstrated in other videos?
A: While I appreciate my regular viewers very much, I also try to make each video work for someone who has never seen anything I've done before. You never know what's going to go viral, or what's going to have a "long tail" and be a resource to people for dozens of Thanksgivings to come. Everything you put on the internet needs to be self-contained. I have ignored this rule many times, and lived to regret it.
Q: Why do you throw away all of the solids you strain out of your gravy?
A: Because they've already contributed a lot to the gravy, and the traditional gravy texture I'm after is smooth. It's what I grew up with, and holiday meals are primarily about memory and tradition. It's a little wasteful, but this is a special occasion meal.
Q: Why didn't you use white wine in your gravy?
A: Because I want my turkey gravy to taste like turkey. A little bit of wine might be nice, but I wouldn't want it to overwhelm anything. Also, again, for me it's more about tradition than trying to make the best thing I can make.
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Q: Why not just combine a stock cube with the gelatin and tomato paste and a little water and call it a day?
A: Way too salty. A bouillon cube is concentrated animal protein — everything that dangerous bacteria could want. Knorr et al make those products shelf-stable by filling them with more salt than any bacteria could handle. I think even the low-sodium kinds would be too salty for your sauce — this recipe is far more concentrated than all the soups and stews and such for which stock cubes normally work great. Plus, those things taste like stock cubes. Your demi-glace would taste like those seasoning packets from instant ramen, or something. That's similar to the taste I got when I tried this with beef broth, or with lower-quality chicken broth (which I suspect is often made from a concentrate not unlike the stock cube). Only when I did this with a really high-quality chicken stock did I get a taste like real meat. But, do what you can with what you have.
Q: What other kinds of gelatin are there if I don't eat pig?
A: I should have mentioned fish gelatin, which is widely available. A lot of Kosher gelatin is made from fish parts. I've seen some halal gelatins that say they're made of cow, probably hides.
Q: Is there a vegan option?
A: You can certainly make a delicious, concentrated stock by boiling dried mushrooms for awhile, straining and then reducing. The trick is replicated the sticky texture of the gelatin. I've done some experiments with xanthan gum and agar agar, and they all had the consistency of fresh snot when reduced to a glaze. There are certainly recipes for vegan demi-glace out there — the ones I've seen don't look promising to me. I do wonder if there's a way to combine pectin, agar, etc, and get the right texture through a composite effect. Will be working on it.
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Q: What if I don't eat bacon?
A: A phenomenal replacement for bacon in almost any recipe is duck prosciutto. I see that it's available at several halal and kosher stores online. Great stuff.
Q: What if I don't want to use wine?
A: I normally recommend replacing it with water/stock spiked with balsamic vinegar (about 1 part vinegar to 6 parts water/stock). That might make this particular dish taste weirdly Italian instead of French, but is that necessarily a bad thing? You could also use a cup of purple grape juice spiked with maybe a teaspoon of vinegar (any vinegar). Grape juice could be a little too sweet, so maybe start with less than a cup and add some more at the end to taste. You'll def need the vinegar, regardless, but my recipe calls for some vinegar at the end anyway.
Q: Isn't coq au vin traditionally dependent on the fond you get from browning the chicken, browning the bacon, browning the mushrooms, and browning the onions?
A: Yep, but as I said, this is a streamlined version that takes less time and dirties fewer dishes. I think using dried mushrooms more than makes up for the lack of mushroom fond — dried mushrooms are extremely strong. And like I said about the onions, by the time they got covered in sauce, I think they tasted virtually the same as if you'd browned them in a pan. But if you want to try it the traditional way, go for it!
Q: Wait, is your new kitchen done already?
A: Nope, I shot four weeks worth of recipes before the demolition.
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Hello! I see some Spanish-speaking folks taking issue with my saying that "tortilla just means little cake." As far as I can see, that absolutely is the etymology of the word. Here's what the OED says (not free): https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/203676?redirectedFrom=tortilla#eid Here's what the Royal Spanish Academy says (not English): https://dle.rae.es/tortilla And here's what Wiktionary has to say: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tortilla#Spanish If you're thrown by "cake," note that the English word "cake" is generally used these days to describe a sweet baked good, but its broader (and historical) meaning is basically any mass that's cooked into a solid form.
I see some other folks advising me to cook the interior less. Indeed, I'd love it to be runnier, but I've obviously gotta work on my flipping game before I can pull that off! I also see lots of comments saying "In Spain, we always do it this way," and then I see lots of comments saying, "In Spain, we always do [the exact opposite of what the first guy said]." I find this amusing! But legit, thanks for the tips, especially on flipping techniques.
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Q: You said the green that can form on the outside of potatoes when exposed to too much light is a toxin called solanine. Isn't that just harmless chlorophyll?
A: Potatoes that are turning green do generally contain elevated levels of the glycoalkaloid poison solanine, which develops naturally in potatoes when exposed to light. It is dangerous, and you do want to avoid eating it. However, I was wrong in the video when I said the green itself is solanine. The green itself is chlorophyll, which is harmless. I apologize for the error, but it's also important to note that this is a distinction without a practical difference for us cooks/eaters. The development of chlorophyll and solanine in potatoes is strongly correlated — if there's a lot of chlorophyll, that's an indication that there's a lot of solanine. The solanine is concentrated near the surface of the potato (along with the chlorophyll), therefore peeling the potato until you don't see green anymore is a pretty good way of protecting yourself. The wikipedia article on this appears well-cited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine
Q: Isn't the green stuff cyanide?
A: As far as I can tell, that's a (persistent) myth. The problem is solanine, not cyanide.
Q: What if I want my roast well done, rather than medium?
A: Maybe 160 F / 70 C, but I really don't recommend roasting eye of round past medium. It will get super tough. You've probably had eye of round cooked all the way through before in the form of deli-sliced roast beef, but they're using a deli slicer — that gets it impossibly thin (which helps tenderization) and I suspect they might also use a long, wet cooking method to further break down connective tissue. For roasting, even slow roasting, I would urge cooking this no more than medium, and if you don't like pink beef, cook a more tender cut instead.
Q: Is $6.99 a pound really that cheap for a beef roast?
A: A standing rib roast (which is the standard cut for a big celebratory beef roast) would cost twice as much, so yes, I think so. Also, I bought this meat at Publix, which is not the cheapest grocery store (as I mentioned in the video). I go to Publix a lot because, from what I can gather, they treat their employees better than comparable grocery stores, and the environment is really nice — perhaps as a result of that good treatment.
Q: What if I don't want to use mushrooms?
A: I think the recipe could work if you simply skipped the dried mushroom powder, but you could compensate for the umami you're giving up by adding some soy sauce or Worcestershire sauce to taste. Just be careful about salt, since both are very salty.
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Q: Does Wonder Bread contain alcohol because it's so heavily processed? What about real bread?
A: Other than that 1926 study (of which I would be skeptical), Garland and I weren't able to find any research where they tested the alcohol content of bread from a normal bakery or home oven. However, we both think it's likely that homemade bread has just as much alcohol, or perhaps even more. Certainly I know with my long-fermented pizza dough, the beer-like smell of that knocks me down sometimes (in a good way).
Q: Would you feed any of this food to your kids?
A: I have no trouble feeding a long-cooked alcohol dish to my kids. The amount of alcohol they're getting is, again, probably less than they're getting from the bread in their peanut butter sandwiches. I probably wouldn't give them those cherries jubilee, but even that might be too cautious.
Q: What about uncooked alcohol dishes, like tiramisu soaked in Marsala?
A: You gotta figure raw alcohol is raw alcohol, regardless of whether you consume it from a glass or soaked into a ladyfinger. However, the quantities you're consuming from something like that are probably still very small, and it would be pretty easy to work out that math if you're worried. Just divide the quantity of alcohol in the recipe by the number of servings.
Q: You understand I'm not able to pick and choose how I interpret my religion's law against alcoholic beverages, right?
A: Honestly, I prob don't know enough about your religion to have an opinion on that. I tried to provide you with facts to inform your own opinions. I very deliberately couched that last bit of theological interpretation in highly personal terms — that's how I might think about the issue. But you're obviously capable of figuring out that kind of stuff for yourself.
Q: Are you only gonna do videos about booze?
A: Nah, got lots of other cool topics planned. I'm just making an effort to answer common questions as they come up, and this is a question that came up a lot in responses to prior videos.
Q: Why do you keep roasting Gordon Ramsay?
A: I respect all of that guy's accomplishments, but the fact remains he rose to fame by turning workplace sadism into entertainment, going all the way back to "Boiling Point." I find few things more loathsome than somebody punching down, and that guy punches down like nobody else. Whether it's real or an act doesn't really matter to me; he's a role model for authority figures around the world.
Q: Do you know your camera has a dead pixel?
A: Yep, sorry about that. I have a big YouTube check coming this week. Planing to use that to buy a new camera and a fancy lens.
Q: Why did you say "ethyl alcohol" instead of "ethanol"?
A: Yes, I know "ethanol" is now the preferred scientific name for the specific kind of alcohol that we drink. I didn't want to take time out in this video to explain the term. For American audiences, they know "ethanol" as a gasoline additive. If I didn't explain it, they'd think, "Wait, what, he's putting gas in his food?" I reckon most Americans don't realize they're literally filling up their tanks with highly-subsidized corn hooch because politicians want to win the Iowa caucuses.
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I absolutely did not diss my grandmother's cooking. All people should strive to improve upon the work of prior generations; that is precisely what our ancestors expect of us. I absolutely did, however, diss Gordon Ramsay. He may be an accomplished chef, he may be a lovely guy in-person, but he has made a career out of turning workplace sadism into entertainment, punching down, and confusing home cooks with ridiculous, often empirically false claims about how food should be prepared. He also has some weird verbal tics that he falls back on, lazily, all the time when he's cooking on TV, one of which is to refer to tomato paste as having a "taint taste." Yes, taint can mean impure, but the proper grammar would then be "tainted taste." He's trying to use it as an adjective even though it's not. The only way the syntax of his sentence works is if you take "taint" to be an attributive noun, which makes it sound like he's describing the taste of a body part, which I think is funny.
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Q: Why is your roux gritty? Are you just a dummy who doesn't know how to make béchamel?
A: I may indeed be a dummy, but I know how to make béchamel just fine. It's pretty smooth in the pan, but does not retain that smoothness after being baked in a recipe like this, no matter how you make it. You may think your roux-based sauce is smooth, but all things are relative, and I'm pretty sure that if you tried this sauce, you would find it to be smoother. There's a reason sodium citrate and related salts have been used as ingredients in processed cheese and cheese sauces for a century — it results in an unnaturally gooey, velvety texture (hence Velveeta).
Q: Did you steal my idea about using the sodium citrate?
A: I appreciate the dozen or so people who commented on my previous video ( https://youtu.be/9iP1QXFWYkA ) recommending I try sodium citrate. I had heard of it before, but had never given it a try until last week. I think I first heard the idea from Heston Blumenthal years ago. I believe in giving credit where it's due, so I tried to track down whomever might have first promoted its use for homemade mac & cheese, and I could not trace the origin of the idea to any one individual. It seems to be something that's been around for a while. I thought about hat-tipping to the commenters on last week's video, but I generally don't like it when YouTubers mention their comments in their videos. I think it's too meta, too navel-gazing, too ephemeral. If a specific individual gives me a novel idea, I will absolutely credit them (and probably invite them to appear in the video), but that was not the case here. I nonetheless hereby thank everybody who commented last week!
Q: Are you an alcoholic with that white wine?
A: No, and that's still not funny. Alcoholism is no joke. Also, I am nowhere close to an alcoholic. I have my share of issues, but that ain't one of them. Also, dividing one cup of wine across eight adult portions of food is maybe the least effective way of getting drunk imaginable. I think white wine is a really good ingredient for many foods, for reasons I listed here: https://youtu.be/JbY8BtcchjU
Q: Do I have to use the white wine?
A: I thought the video was pretty clear that any water-based liquid can work (including water), and my dad's tried-and-true recipe just uses all milk, which would be great. The wine gave the finished a subtle fruity note (reminiscent of fondue) that I liked, but it was not essential. You could maybe throw in a dash of white balsamic vinegar, which I think is a good substitute for white wine in much lesser quantities.
Q: Is the wine going to throw off the chemistry, or curdle the milk?
A: I doubt it. Wine just isn't THAT acidic, and this is proportionally a pretty small quantity. Maybe that quantity of wine would curdle the milk if you just left it sitting around for a while, but once you put in the cheese and the sodium citrate, there's no way. The fat alone from the cheese would be enough to prevent the curdling reaction, I think. And I'm guessing the stabilizing effect of the sodium citrate is also helping, but I don't know enough about the chemistry of that to be sure. Regardless, the sauce does not curdle. There are plenty of classic recipes that combine wine with cheese/dairy, the most obvious being fondue. You can also put wine in a classic béchamel (which I do all the time) — either the starch or the fat (or both?) from the roux prevent curdling.
Q: Was your addition of wine or mustard the reason you needed less sodium citrate?
A: I don't think so, in part because I didn't use them during my first attempt — I simply made my dad's recipe but with cheddar + sodium citrate instead of American cheese. I think the reason I needed to change the proportions is because this is a long-baked version of mac & cheese, whereas the recipe I initially cribbed from was basically a stovetop mac & cheese that was briefly finished in the oven.
Q: Is this paid promotion for the company that made the sodium citrate?
A: No, I will always clearly disclose paid sponsorships, as you will see in next week's recipe video. You'll laugh at my reasons for choosing this particular "organic" brand of sodium citrate — I thought it might ease the minds of people who are irrationally worried about demonstrably safe food additives. That labeling is, of course, ridiculous, considering that sodium citrate is an inorganic salt.
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Q: Do you realize that "scampi" in other countries refers to different dishes and, indeed, different sea creatures?
A: Yes. Words have different meanings in different places. As I said, this is what scampi generally means in the United States — shrimp with garlic and butter.
Q: Couldn't you save the shrimp shells for stock?
A: Yes, you could. Good for you if you want to do that!
Q: Isn't it dangerous to thaw meat in warm water?
A: That matters when you're dealing with something bigger, like a turkey, that is gonna take hours to thaw. Shrimp thaws in minutes, so you don't have to worry about it being in the bacterial danger zone for a long time.
Q: Why did you break the pasta?
A: For the reason I said in the video — it makes it easier to eat. I think it's annoying to have to twirl very long strands around my fork. I find it easier to get the quantity of pasta that I actually want to eat in a single bite if I break it in half. Eat yours how you want to eat it, but honestly, I think it's pretty weird if this is something that makes you angry.
Q: What can I do to keep the beurre blanc from breaking if I don't have xanthan gum?
A: Honestly, yours might not break. People have pasta with beurre blanc all the time. But on a couple of occasions, mine has broken the second I mixed in the hot pasta. I suppose you could try cooling the pasta down a little bit to be safe. But honestly, xanthan gum is widely available these days, it's cheap, it has so many uses in the kitchen, and I think it really improves this sauce. Highly recommended.
Q: I get that you like to leave the external starch coat on the rice because you like clumpy rice, but aren't you supposed to rinse rice to get off dirt and arsenic and stuff?
A: I dunno, I'm not really worried about dirt, if there is any. Arsenic is a bigger problem with brown rice than it is with white, and in general I'm not convinced it's a big problem at all unless you eat a ton of rice, which I don't. I have a rice and arsenic video in the works. Talking to scientists.
Q: Does this mean you're off your diet?
A: No. I don't think people only want to watch videos about fish and cauliflower rice for the next two months, so I'm continuing to make videos about food that I think you'll like!
Q: Are you flexing on your dad by saying you tried to "advance" his recipe?
A: No. Our parents want us to make things better and to surpass their achievements, or at least try to. That's the whole point.
Q: Won't the cheese overwhelm the subtle flavor of the shrimp?
A: If you get some color on your shrimp, the flavor is not subtle. But if you don't want cheese, don't put it on!
Q: Aren't celery leaves toxic?
A: There's a mildly toxic compound in celery, and I've read that it's particularly concentrated in the leaves, but that's a concern for workers who are getting constant exposure on their skin all day long, etc. I've not seen any scientist say it's a problem for eaters. But you can use parsley if you don't like celery flavor.
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***NOTE: I would ask folks watching this video to be mindful of which arguments I'm making, versus which arguments I'm merely relaying to you. Most of this video consists of me and Dr. Mihm explaining other people's arguments, not making our own.
Q: Why do you hate the metric system??
A: I don't! I think it's great! Watch the whole video! Even if it wasn't great, I would still be all for my country adopting metric, purely in the service of getting us all on a single global standard.
Q: Dr. Mihm says the U.S. was the biggest economy in the world by the 1870s. Some other sources say it wasn't until the 1920s. What gives?
A: You can calculate the size of an economy lots of different ways, and you'll get slightly different results. But Dr. Mihm is hardly the only scholar to say this happened in the late 19th century, rather than the early 20th. I believe he's going by gross domestic product adjusted for purchasing power (GDP-PPP).
Q: Is this really a cooking video?
A: I've decided that, going forward, this channel will be dedicated to food topics and immediately food-adjacent topics. I would consider this a food-adjacent topic. I will likely start a second channel in the next year or so dedicated to things that have nothing to do with food. I hope you'll subscribe!
Q: Why did you get political at the end there? Isn't this a cooking channel?
A: I have no desire to shoehorn politics into this channel. I don't think that's what you come here for, and I have no desire to needlessly alienate some viewers. But sometimes food and food-adjacent topics intersect directly with politics, and there's no intellectually honest way to avoid talking about it. Metric adoption is a political issue.
Q: Did you get new glasses?
A: No, I found my old glasses! It would seem a child stuck them into a low shelf. They've been missing for a year.
Q: Why did you show a picture of the Mexican flag when discussing the Spanish language, rather than the Spanish flag?
A: Because I was discussing the Spanish that I learned in high school, which was Mexican Spanish. Strikes me as pretty logical for U.S. schools to favor Mexican Spanish dialects!
Q: Why are you so confident that globalization is, on balance, a good thing?
A: Globalization has done many things, many of them terrible. I could talk about how it has probably lifted literally billions of people out of extreme poverty, etc, but for me it's pretty simple: Literally anything is better than WWIII, and economic interdependence of the world's great powers has made WWIII a lot less likely.
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Q: Do you realize that induction is also really popular in Europe?
A: Yes. I mentioned that it's pretty rare here in the U.S., but popular lots of other places, and mentioned China by name because it's the biggest example.
Q: Do you realize that map of China you showed includes Taiwan?
A: I do now! Didn't before! Whoops! Sorry to those who were offended. And if you were made happy by that, then, great, I guess?
Q: What do you mean induction might not be more efficient than resistance coil?
A: See sources cited in the description. There's research indicating that induction is more efficient with small pans, but less efficient with large pans. But people dispute those findings, for reasons that go over my head. Very technical stuff.
Q: Why do some people hear the whine from induction stoves while some people don't?
A: I imagine it's pretty complicated, but one reason might be that upper-frequency sensitivity varies a lot from person to person. Generally speaking, the older a person is, the less upper-frequency sensitivity they have. I routinely play tones around 16k for my students that make them wince, yet I can't hear them at all. I don't have any particular hearing damage, I'm just 15 years older than them.
Q: Do all induction stoves make that much noise?
A: No, I think you can find ones that are quieter, and it's only a really big issue when you're using high power.
Q: Did you know there are induction stoves made to fit woks?
A: No! Neat!
Q: Is aluminum really cheaper than steel?
A: Not by weight, but weight isn't the relevant metric here. Nobody makes aluminum pans that are just as heavy as their steel counterparts — to do that would require making an absurdly thick aluminum pan. Aluminum pans are lighter, and are generally cheaper than stainless steel, though there are always exceptions.
Q: Why is induction so rare in the U.S. when it's been common in Asia and Europe for years?
A: I tried to find market research on that question and didn't find anything. I have a theory, which I will offer for your consideration. Maybe it's an indication of how the U.S. is (or was) more technologically advanced, not less. In the U.S., resistance coil stoves became popular many decades ago, probably ahead of the rest of the world. In places like India and China, they basically skipped resistance coil — their economies didn't reach levels of development comparable to the U.S. until induction was already on the market, so they basically went straight from gas (or charcoal) to induction. They skipped coil. Thoughts?
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Q: Why did you call it "sodium chloride" instead of calling it salt?
A: Because I was drawing a connection between salt and MSG — pointing out that they both contain sodium, and can both be used to season food. I also think that sometimes people avoid MSG because it has a scary chemical name, and I was pointing out that normal salt has a chemical name too. There are, nonetheless, some legitimate concerns about MSG, which I discuss here: https://youtu.be/E-POAKKH5IM Also, some people below are "correcting" me, saying that the salt in the video is iodized table salt — and that is not true. It's Morton kosher salt, which is not iodized.
Q: Why did you bother making your own stock when you have previously said you don't?
A: In those videos I was talking about chicken stock, which I usually don't make time to make myself. This is a veggie stock, which is much easier to make. Even then, I don't make this stock every time I make this risotto, as I said in the video. You certainly don't have to make it.
Q: Didn't you say in your previous risotto video that continuous stirring is unnecessary? https://youtu.be/GbgyJ5YOD0E
A: Yes, and I cooked the risotto in this video in exactly the same way. I add most of the stock at the beginning and just let it cook. Then I start adding the remaining stock in small doses, stirring constantly. I don't do this because it supposedly makes the risotto more creamy (I think that's a myth), but rather I add the stock in small doses purely because I have no idea how much more stock the rice is going to absorb, and I don't want to put in too much. The reason I stir continuously at that stage is to keep the rice from sticking to the bottom of the pan and to make sure it cooks evenly, which are things you need to worry about when there isn't much free liquid in the pan.
Q: Aren't you supposed to add hot stock to risotto?
A: I've made risotto many times with hot stock and with room-temperature stock, and I've never noticed a difference in the texture or the cooking time. Maybe it makes a difference when you're making a huge batch of risotto in a commercial context? When you're just making a couple portions in a pan, the pan heats up the stock real fast when you pour it in, especially if you're using a wide pan, which is why I prefer a wide pan for risotto.
Q: Why did you say "risottos" instead of "risotti"?
A: It's quite common for English speakers to use the s plural with Italian loan words. Certainly when I went to music school, I met a few Americans who said "tempi" instead of "tempos," and yeah, I always thought they sounded a little pompous. But this is an issue upon which reasonable people can disagree.
Q: Did you know about this method for cooking mushrooms in water, allowing you to brown them without dehydrating them and also causing them to soak up less oil? https://youtu.be/XLPLCmwBLBY
A: I didn't! Interesting! I have to say, though, this strikes me as a solution to something that I don't consider to be a problem. I think one of the things that makes cooked mushrooms so delicious is that you've driven off the water and replaced it with delicious fat.
Q: Is trimming the stems or taking them out entirely an American thing?
A: I have no idea if it's an American thing. It's pretty common for people to trim the ends off the stem because the ends are often a little decomposed and/or have dirt on them. With bigger mushrooms, sometimes people don't like the tougher, stringier texture of the stem, so they take it out. I usually don't take the stems out entirely, unless I'm making this recipe.
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Q: Did you steal the opening shot from Joshua Weissman?
A: Joshua is awesome, but I’m sure he would acknowledge we both stole that shot from Alton Brown, who probably stole it from someone else. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
Q: Why are you doing a Thanksgiving video almost a month before (American) Thanksgiving?
A: Because I have three Thanksgiving-themed videos planned, and I think it'll be more helpful to you if I run them now, instead of right before Thanksgiving, when you will likely have already made your plans.
Q: Why are you doing this two weeks after Canadian Thanksgiving?
A: Sorey buddy, you can't please everyone, eh? I promise I'll do a Kraft Dinner vid later.
Q: Why wouldn't you just buy a fresh turkey?
A: You could, but there are a few reasons people often do frozen. 1) Frozen is usually a lot cheaper, at least in the U.S.; 2) If you wait until right before Thanksgiving, the markets are often out of fresh turkeys; 3) Frozen is often your only option if you want a specialty breed, or an unusual size; 4) Some people think frozen birds are of a more reliable quality; 5) If you want turkey some other time of the year, frozen might be your only option. If you're an athlete doing meal prep for a high-protein diet, I think buying a frozen turkey is a great, cheap option.
Q: Why wouldn't you just speed-thaw the turkey under running water?
A: You could, but a bird this size would take about 8 hours to thaw with that method, which I will nonetheless demonstrate next week. Also, I think this is simpler. Just one step. Throw it in the oven.
Q: Why didn't you put white wine in your gravy?
A: Because I want my gravy to taste like normal roast turkey gravy. Thanksgiving dinner is more about tradition and memory to me, and to lots of people, I think. I'm not necessarily trying to make the best thing I can make. I'm trying to make something pretty good that reminds me of what I grew up with, and to do it in a reasonably low-stress way.
Q: Why didn't you put more seasoning on your turkey?
A: Because I'm demonstrating a basic cooking method. You can flavor your turkey how ever you want to flavor it. Also I want my turkey to taste like turkey, primarily. But you do you.
Q: What was that plastic thing on the turkey's legs and why didn't you take it off before you cooked it?
A: It's there to hold the legs in place and to make it easier to lift the turkey. It's designed to be in the oven.
Q: Isn't there probably some plastic in the paper giblet packet?
A: I would guess silicon.
Q: Didn't you just do a video about how plastics are messing with our hormones and we shouldn't get them hot?
A: Yes. This isn't that much plastic, and I doubt you eat turkey very frequently. Also, we balance lots of factors when we make choices in life.
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Hey all, given the charged nature of some of this material, I'm going to try to keep out of the comments more than usual. I do want to address a few quick things. First, I am informed that cow burps, not cow farts, are the chief source of bovine greenhouse gas emissions: https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/33/which-is-a-bigger-methane-source-cow-belching-or-cow-flatulence/ I should have known that. Perhaps I was seduced by the inherent humor of "cow farts" as a pair of words. Sorry! Second, I called Justus von Liebig "von Lieburg." Sorry! That's the kind of thing a script supervisor saves you from on a traditional TV shoot. Third, I feel like I went too hard on Joe Rogan. I have mixed feelings about him, but I think his show is probably a net good in the world. He gets people to think about science and big ideas, and that's great. I also like that he gives a platform to people with minority opinions. My problem is that I think he rarely give his audience the tools they'd need to understand why the dominant scientific opinion is what it is, and why most experts don't believe the fringe opinion being voiced. I think part of that is just the nature of the format. As someone who produced unscripted talk shows for years, I think the unscripted talk format is inherently bad at presenting scientific controversies to a general audience. None of us get it right every time (hence "von Lieburg" and "cow farts"), but I think a scripted format allows us to give such subjects more of the care they need. One thing I also do is send my video drafts to all of the scientists I interview, prior to publication. They often spot mistakes they or I made, and we can fix them before you see it.
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Q: Is Elaine Khosrova's book "Butter: A Rich History" really good, and would it make a great gift item for the food-lover in my life?
A: Absolutely! #NotAnAd https://www.workman.com/products/butter-2 I also believe the Kindle version is on sale. Elaine is good people. You should buy her book.
Q: Aren't there some things in the world of baking that absolutely require unsalted butter?
A: Sure. I have a recipe for sweet cornbread where I heavily butter the pan before pouring in the batter; if you use salted butter, the crust ends up way too salty, IMHO. It's also conceivable that salted butter could mess with the chemistry of certain highly-sensitive pastries, but I would imagine that'd be pretty rare. Even sweets need salt, and I'm having trouble thinking of any batters or breads or cakes in which you would add the fat and the salt at radically different points in the process, though I'm sure something like that must exist.
Q: Isn't it dangerous to eat raw batters?
A: Yes. There's a risk of e. coli, not just from the eggs, but also from the flour. For a healthy person such as myself, I think the risk is pretty minimal, but I am absolutely taking a chance when I taste raw batters for seasoning (or when I eat an entire batch of raw cookie dough because whoops). We take risks in life. Your own risks are your own choice. But, I'll point out that if you wanted to taste a cake batter or something for seasoning, you could almost instantaneously cook a drop of it in a hot pan or in the microwave. Just be aware that temperature also affects our salt perception, so cool it down to comfortable eating temperature before you taste.
Q: Does this mean it's dangerous to leave butter on the counter all the time? My mom does that and we're not dead yet.
A: Surely it depends on a lot of factors, but in general, butter is gonna start to taste gross long before it starts to be dangerous. Rancidity, in and of itself, is not dangerous. It's just yucky.
Q: Why is your phone at 2%?
A: My kids play games on my phone. By the end of the day, it's pretty dead. You'll note I was shooting that stuff at 12:30 at night.
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Q: What if I just swigged straight casein, or some other molecule that has been shown to bind with capsaicin?
A: The available evidence would suggest this isn't just about washing the capsaicin out of your mouth. Once your TRPV1 receptor (the heat pain sensor that you have all over your body) has been triggered, it's gonna relay a pain sensation to your brain for a while, even if you wash the capsaicin away immediately. It's like if you touch a hot stove, you're gonna keep feeling the burn long after you take your hand away. But, like with capsaicin, you're gonne get temporary relief if you run your hand under cold water.
Q: Can capsaicin make, er, other sensitive tissues of my body burn?
A: Sure can — you have TRPV1 receptors in lots of places, especially in your eyes and nose, which is why pepper spray works.
Q: Would milk also work best with black pepper, or wasabi?
A: Not sure. Those ingredients also trigger the same receptor, and they are chemically related to capsaicin, but they're not the same thing, and there is not as much of this kind of research about them.
Q: You just made a video about how eating super spicy food doesn't make you tough, and yet you just ate a raw habanero? https://youtu.be/gstyp2ZgZ1s
A: Do you think that shot made me look tough? I don't think it made me look tough! I was really suffering there! I did it for science. Also, the real chili-heads were certainly not impressed, given that habaneros are still pretty far down on the Scoville scale compared to, say, ghost peppers.
Q: Are all of your videos going to be about chilis now?
A: No. I came across this study while I was researching last Monday's video. I tried to fit it into that video, but that video was already too long, so I decided to split it out into its own video.
Q: Did you suddenly get a different camera or a bigger kitchen?
A: Thanks to your viewership and my sponsors, I have been able to make a number of expensive equipment upgrades lately, including a full-frame camera body. This is my first video with that body. If you don't know what that means, it essentially makes the camera look more zoomed out. Part of the reason my channel evolved its EXTREME CLOSE-UP aesthetic is that my kitchen is very small, and with a cheap crop-sensor camera body, it was often physically impossible for me to get the camera any further away from things and still get the depth-of-field I was after. The new body is giving me a lot more options.
Q: Are you just trying to get on Hot Ones?
A: Not for $10 million could you get me to do that show. (The show is great, I just don't want to eat that stuff. Though I probably actually would do it for $10 million. Call me.)
Q: Did you mix a whole Kool-Aid packet into one glass of water?
A: No, I just poured in a little bit.
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Q: If the meat + sauce ended up being too salty, why not just season each component a little less?
A: Sure, that could work, but I don't think there's any point in seasoning the meat. Whether you season the meat or the sauce, there will be salt on the surface (and ONLY on the surface) of the meat in the final dish, and I think it's easier to taste and make a judgment about seasoning if you just season the sauce. Plus it skips a step.
Q: What if I brined or dry-brined the meat?
A: That's an entirely different story. Brining or curing for sufficient time will pull water out of the meat via osmosis, which will then, if given time, be reabsorbed. In that case, the inside would be seasoned, not just the outside. If you want to do that, great. Brining (arguably) improves texture, too. Just remember to under-season the sauce.
Q: Doesn't seasoning the outside of the meat develop "layers of flavor"?
A: I challenge you to a taste test. We will make this dish two ways — one where we season the meat and the sauce, and one where we just season the sauce. We'll weigh the salt to make sure the total salt in both versions of the dish is identical. I will bet you real American dollars that you won't be able to tell the difference in the two versions. They will both have seasoning on the surface of the meat, and only on the surface of the meat. Your tongue can't tell the difference in how the seasoning got there.
Q: Does this mean I should never season meat?
A: Not at all. This argument is confined to this type of dish — one where every bite will be coated in sauce. My "season the board, not the steak" video is also an argument that is confined to that specific dish — steak with board dressing.
Q: Why does every elite chef in the world disagree with you (just some guy in his kitchen with a camera) on this?
A: They don't! There are many elite chefs who advocate seasoning at the end of cooking whenever possible, including MPW. That said, there are many who believe in that "layers of flavor" crap. There are many very accomplished chefs who could kick my ass in the kitchen who nonetheless believe some pretty spurious chef dogma that's been passed down to them. As I said in an earlier video, experienced practitioners tend to know what works — they tend to have less of a handle on WHY it works.
Q: Why not season the meat, season the sauce, then return the meat to the pan, stir it around, taste again, and then add any additional salt if needed?
A: That seems like more work to me, and wouldn't serve any purpose. Also, trying to dissolve more salt evenly into the pan would be a lot harder with four big pieces of chicken sloshing around in the pan.
Q: If I don't season the meat, and only season the sauce until it's perfect, won't it be a little under-seasoned by the time it's diluted by the chicken?
A: Yeah, I wish I'd been a little clearer about that. I would advocate seasoning this sauce until it's a hair too salty. This is a basic plank of sauce-making, I think. Sauces should always be a little too strong in every respect — too sweet, too salty, too acidic, etc — because they're going to be diluted by the rest of the food. But I don't think it matters much in this case, because the chicken pieces are so thin. If the sauce tastes pretty good to you, I think the final dish is gonna taste pretty good to you. Over-seasoning the sauce is more important when you're saucing really big chunks of things.
Q: Doesn't salting the surface of the meat enhance browning?
A: I have never seen persuasive evidence to back up that claim. If you have some, I'd love to see it. Truly.
Q: But I've been seasoning both the meat and the sauce my entire life and my food is great. What gives?
A: I don't doubt your food is great. But I think one reason why it's great is that, consciously or not, you've developed the ability to compensate for the problem I'm discussing. This video is aimed at novices, and I think only seasoning the sauce is a safer, easier option for novices.
Q: Why not dredge the chicken pieces in flour? Wouldn't that enhance browning and provide thickening without the use of a slurry?
A: That's a classic technique for a reason. It works. But I still don't really like it. I think when the floured surface of the meat dissolves in the sauce, the resulting texture is slimy. But lots of people love it. I recently featured a recipe by my friend Ben Harrison (beer chicken stew) where he floured his chicken, people have been loving that recipe. You do you.
Q: Can I use some oil other than olive oil?
A: Certainly. I just like olive oil.
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Some updates since I made this video: 1) I no longer score the thighs. It's just unnecessary. They cook very well down there on the surface of the pan. I do still score the legs. Scoring them makes them come out very crispy and delicious. 2) The particular chicken you see in this video is a hair overcooked, for my taste. I'm feeding small kids in my house, so I tend to play it safe with meat temperatures. I pulled this at 160 degrees (in the white meat) and then let it coast to 165. If I was just cooking for myself and other healthy adults, I would pull it at 155 and let it coast to 160. 3) If you want to know how I do my gravy, here you go. If there's lots of juice in the pan with the fat, I separate out the fat with a gravy separator. But more often, since I roast at such a high temperature, most of the juice is evaporated and I don't have to separate anything. I whisk enough flour into the fat to make a roux the texture of a thick paste, and I cook that on the stovetop for a few minutes until it starts to smell nutty. I take like half of the roux out and hold it in reserve (I usually have more than I need at this stage) and then whisk in boxed chicken stock and boil it until I like the texture and flavor. If I separated out any roasting juices, I would add them back when I add the stock. I also add the onion, garlic and lemon from inside the chicken when I put in the stock. If it's too thin, or if I just want a larger quantity of gravy, I add more roux. If it's too thick, just add more stock, etc. Remember that the gravy will thicken as it cools, so it should look a little too thin when you're cooking it. When it's about done, I squeeze in the half lemon from inside the chicken (though that makes the gravy very lemony, so don't do it if you won't like that flavor). If I have company over, I strain the gravy through a sieve. If not, I just pull out the big chunks of onion and garlic and such with my tongs. At this point, there's usually a lot of resting juices accumulated in the plate where I've been resting the hot chicken, so I pour those into the gravy. I grind in a bunch of pepper and maybe throw in some sage, and that's it.
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Q: Why did you season your steak and not your cutting board, like you did in this video? https://youtu.be/02tRxM_1VsE
A: I try to only demonstrate or test one unusual technique at a time. This is a basic tenet of experimentation. You change one variable at a time. If you do two different things at once, you might not be sure which variable caused which result. I just didn't want to muddy the water or ignite people's passions by distracting them with the whole board sauce thing. One weird technique at a time. Also, I don't cook things the same way every time. I like steak lots of ways.
Q: Would sous vide do a better job?
A: Maybe, ask Guga! I, like most people, don't have an immersion circulator. But most people have an oven and a pan. Certainly sous vide would do it faster, but faster isn't always better. The very long, slow cooking seems to tenderize the steak. Kenji speculates this is the result of enzymatic action that is activated by the low oven temperature: https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/03/how-to-reverse-sear-best-way-to-cook-steak.html
Q: Did you seriously just leave your sink water trickling for half an hour to thaw that steak?
A: Yes. It was maybe a toilet flush worth of water. Fresh water is not scarce where I live. This is an ecologically insignificant amount of water, especially considering that it takes almost 2,000 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef. If you want to do something good for the environment, eat less meat. I've been lowering my meat intake quite a lot for that reason. Barely trickling cool water is the best way to speed-thaw meat, for reasons discussed here: https://youtu.be/X0ahKON2vNY
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Q: What exactly is "European-style butter"?
A: It's cultured butter, made with bacterial cultures that create lactic acid and give the butter a slightly sour taste. Very tasty. If you're European and have never heard of "European-style butter," I'm not surprised. You would naturally just call it butter. But in the U.S. and U.K., uncultured butter is much more common, therefore cultured butters are often marketed as "European-style." In the U.S., you can find it sold right next to the regular butter, but sometimes I've seen grocery stores put it with the cheese. That brand I used, Plugra, is really good, and they had it at Kroger.
Q: What exactly is Wondra?
A: Good question! The ingredient list just tells us that it's wheat flour. I've read many articles that claim it is wheat flour that has been steamed, dried and ground. That would be a form of physical pre-gelatinization. But, annoyingly, none of those articles SOURCE that claim, and I have never seen it attributed to the people who would actually know, i.e. the manufacturer (General Mills). I would think that if the starch really had been pre-gelatinized, then it would thicken liquids at room temperature, which it does not. Also, I would think U.S. food labeling regulations would require them to list "modified starch" on the ingredient list. So, honestly, I don't know what it is. I have been corresponding with the media relations folks at General Mills, and have not gotten an answer from them. I wouldn't be scared by it — it's been around for decades. I think it's probably just wheat flour that's been treated by some kind of simple physical process, otherwise the ingredient label wouldn't be so mundane. Many excellent chefs are a fan of it — Eric Ripert famously dredges fish with Wondra before pan-frying it. It has a bunch of interesting properties that I would love to cover in a video.
Q: Does your sauce look that way because your cider curdled your milk?
A: No. The giant grains of Wondra always make for a slightly grainy-looking texture, it's just not as visually-apparent in a darker-colored sauce. And again, I think the effect is purely cosmetic. Yes, acid curdles dairy, but only in sufficient strength/concentration. You can pour a little wine or cider into milk, no problem. Try it if you don't believe me!
Q: Could I thicken with a cornstarch slurry or something similar?
A: Absolutely. Starch thickener alternatives will be the subject of Monday's video.
Q: Is that an ant on your carrots?
A: Apparently, yes. This is the magical time of year in the American South when billions of ants come trying to find a warmer place to live.
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Q: How do garden tomatoes compare to canned tomatoes?
A: I want to research this topic properly and do a separate video on canned tomatoes. But certainly I think good-quality canned or cartoned tomatoes are far superior to grocery store tomatoes for most purposes. I would imagine that the tomato varieties grown for the can have better flavor, because they don't need to be bred to survive the trip from farm to consumer in their raw state. Top-level brands might also only use tomatoes grown outside and harvested in season, as opposed to tomatoes grown year-round in hot houses.
Q: So what's better for sauce-making — garden tomatoes or good canned tomatoes?
A: You'll just have to wait for Thursday's recipe video...
Q: What do you mean your garden tomatoes are salty enough because of your soil?
A: I was just guessing that maybe my soil has something to do with it. I live on the coastal plain — the ground here was recently ocean floor. But it could be any number of other factors, like the varieties I'm growing, how much rain I get, I honestly don't know. I only know that all tomatoes do contain some amount of salt naturally, and my tomatoes usually taste salty enough for me, for the purposes of eating raw. When I cook with them, I salt them.
Q: How do you grow tomatoes?
A: It's too late in the season for me to do that video. Next spring, I promise!
Q: Why do your tomato plants look kinda rough?
A: Because it's the end of my season, and because I don't spend much time caring for them. I buy seedlings from the store, plant them in cages, cover them in netting, and then leave them be. I don't weed. I don't prune. Sometimes I water if it hasn't rained in a while. But I'm a very busy person and I can't be bothered with fussy gardening. I get them going, and whatever harvest I get, I get. Also, it's hot AF here.
Q: Are you bothered by the comment memes?
A: Not at all. Memes = clicks = money. Also occasionally I see one that I think is funny.
Q: Why haven't you done Q+As on your other recent videos?
A: I've been on vacation! Did I miss anything?
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Q: What if I don't like sourdough? Can I use a method like this to make dough that isn't sour?
A: Not really, no. That's why yeast harvested from breweries (and later dried commercial yeast) was such a big advancement for baking. It allowed the development of yeast-risen "sweet" breads — sweet meaning not sour, in this context. (You can actually make fantastic desserts with sourdough.) If you're having trouble finding commercial yeast but you want to make yeast bread that isn't sourdough, there are some other options. I've heard it's possible to grow some yeast from an unfiltered beer. Never tried that, but sounds interesting! You can also get a small amount of commercial dried yeast reproducing in a little wet dough (or other mixture of carbs and water) and keep it going in the fridge for some duration of time. I've heard of people doing that, but I imagine that it would eventually become a sourdough starter, since bacteria are gonna get going in there eventually. That last part is a guess.
Q: Can I cook with the starter I discard every day?
A: Absolutely, there are lots of "discard" recipes on the internet. It's popular to make pancakes with it. However, be aware that in that first 1-2 weeks when you're getting your starter going, your discard might taste and smell terrible, and it might not have much rising power. In a mature starter, the acid-producing bacteria have "defeated" all the other bacteria and undesirable fungi. (Yeast are acid tolerant, that's why they work so well with these bacteria.) If I had cooked that nasty pink 3-day-old starter I showed you in the vid, it probably would have tasted like foot rot, because it was filled with undesirable microbes.
Q: Does it really have to be unchlorinated water? Does it have to be unbleached flour? Does it have to be X, Y, Z?
A: As I said in the vid, we don't really know. People have successfully made starters with just about anything, but we don't know what works best, or even what you might define as "best." The folks at NC State recommend unchlorinated simply because it's so easy to obtain, but it might not even be necessary. (Be aware that some cities use chloramine to sterilize their water, and that won't just go "poof" if you leave your water out for a day, like chlorine will.) Regarding bleached flour, people have absolutely made good starters with bleached flour. Maybe the bleaching process kills some of the beneficial microbes in the flour that help get your starter going? This is one of the question the folks at the Dunn Lab are trying to answer with their current citizen science project. Remember, if you gather some data for them, I'll thank you in a vid: http://robdunnlab.com/projects/wildsourdough/
Q: Didn't you say in this old video that you think sourdough starters are too much work? https://youtu.be/o4ABOKdHEUs
A: Yes. You can make a sourdough-like product by simply making a dough with commercial yeast and letting it sit in the fridge for a week. I'm a fan of that. And it may literally be sourdough. I'm not sure, but the folks at the Dunn Lab have some ideas about how we might use science to determine exactly what's going on in my old fridge dough. Stay tuned. But yes, a sourdough starter is too much work for me. As I said in the vid, the only reason I'm interested it now is because of the COVID yeast shortage. Also I try to make videos about things that might be interesting to you, even if they're not terribly interesting to me.
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Q: Wait, yellow and blue make gray? I thought they make green!
Q: Wait, yellow and blue are complementary colors? I thought it was blue and orange!
A: The answer to both of these questions is the same. This video is about light/screens, not pigment. Light is additive, pigment is subtractive. The rules are different. In subtractive color mixing (like blending paints), blue and yellow make green. In additive color mixing (like blending colors on an LCD screen), blending blue and yellow will get you something on the grayscale, depending (I think) on brightness and shade. That's literally what I show you at 2:43 — I made a blue matte and a yellow matte, set their opacity to 50 percent, and then overlaid them. The result is gray. (Or, grayish, because the footage of me shining through is throwing it off, and also because I don't think the shades of yellow and blue I picked were perfectly complementary.) Blue and yellow are considered complementary in the additive RGB color model, while blue and orange are considered complementary in the subtractive CMY model (or RYB). You could argue that I should have explained this distinction in the video, and you could be right. When you make videos like this, you have to make judgment calls about which levels of nuance deserve the run time. If you don't make those calls, the video will end up 10 hours long.
Q: Did you edit your footage wrong at 1:40? It looks like the light is going cooler at 5500ºK and warmer at 2700ºK. Isn't that backwards?!
A: Nope, I didn't edit the footage wrong. You're seeing what really happened. Here's what I THINK is going on, and I would appreciate if someone more knowledgeable could weigh in. As I mentioned in the video, incandescent (i.e. really hot) objects actually emit blue light at higher temperatures than yellow or orange light. So, there is a context in which people use "color temperature" to describe actual thermal temperature. This is referred to as "black body radiation" — the colors emitted by a theoretical, idealized black object at certain very high temperatures, given in degrees Kelvin. That color temperature scale is, essentially, the inverse of the color temperature scale often used by filmmakers and lighting designers. In the world of normal human experience, blue is the color of ice (or the moon) and yellow/orange is the color of fire (or the sun), so we use Kelvin to signify that subjective experience of color we all have. This cheap Chinese light I'm using is, I'm guessing, labeled with actual color temperature (i.e. black body radiation), not color temperature in the art school sense of the term. But I'm honestly not sure!
Q: Are you sure that movies these days tend to be blue? Didn't you just pick two examples that were snow scenes?
A: In retrospect, those were bad examples, for that very reason. But I am hardly the first person to observe that blue punctuated with orange is a very popular color scheme in Hollywood these days. It's literally the first tip offered by this Adobe guide for "cinematic" color grading: https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/cinematic-color-grading-in-adobe-photoshop-pt-1/ This is hardly my area of expertise, but one theory for the origin of this trend I've read is that digital effects are easier to render in this scheme, for reasons I didn't understand when I read that article.
Q: Are you sure that movies in the early 2000s were green? Didn't The Matrix use green for the specific purpose of creating a distinct environment for the matrix as opposed to the real world, which was more blue?
A: Yes, that's absolutely why The Matrix did that, but I think that movie was so huge and influential that a lot of filmmakers then imitated that green color scheme to make things look high-tech. Where I remember seeing it most was in the music videos of the time: https://youtu.be/A48VUvB6kWE [EDIT] Oh yeah, and Fight Club. Fight Club is super green.
Q: Are you sure this whole "steak looks overdone in natural light thing" is really a thing?
A: Here's a comment from BlizKrieg that I previously had pinned here: "I'm a server in a restaraunt and I have this problem all the damn time. I work at a Racing and Card Club in FLORIDA. A very sunny place with very large windows to look at the grehounds racing outside. Now in the kitchen we can see how our prime rib is cooked perfectly rare to med rare. But then we take it into the dining room with so much natural light and say it's way overcooked. I always knew it was the lighting, but then the customers looked at me like I was stupid/wrong."
Q: Is natural light always "cool"?
A: No. This is one of those layers of nuance I decided to leave out. But certainly the color of sunlight is affected by atmospheric conditions and by time of day. In dusty air or at dawn/dusk, for example, sunlight can be warmer. That's one reason why photographers and filmmakers love to shoot around sunrise and sunset — they call it "golden hour."
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Use promo code RAGUSEA15 for $15 off your first Trip! Thanks to Turo for sponsoring this video.
Q: RED WINE? Why didn't you cook with white wine?
A: As I said in the video, I actually do braise beef in white wine sometimes, even though it's not "traditional." However, I think there's two reasons why red works really well in this recipe. One, we're using a proportionally small amount. Sauces made primarily of red wine tend to be too strong and a little bitter, IMHO. But in this sauce, the quantity of wine is small compared to the tomatoes. Two, as I said in the video, I am a big fan of the combination of red wine and tomatoes.
Q: What kind of red wine should I use?
A: I think anything reasonably dry (i.e. not sweet) would be fine. I think I used cabernet? Again, its proportionally such a small quantity, and it gets cooked for so long, I don't think you're gonna taste the differences between different grape varieties.
Q: Could you cook this entirely on the stovetop?
A: Absolutely. Just get all the ingredients in and then reduce the heat to a simmer. Stir it every now and then, scraping the bottom — just to make sure it doesn't burn. It might take a little longer, and you won't get the same roasted flavor and texture, but it'll still be great.
Q: Could you avoid that burned ring of sauce around the edge of the pot by just scraping down the sides every now and then?
A: Certainly, and if you want to do that, awesome. I just want to throw the pot in the oven and forget about it for a few hours.
Q: Could you use a masher for the potatoes instead of a ricer?
A: A masher used on baked potato flesh produces an unpleasant texture, IMHO. The flesh is just too stiff — it comes out super lumpy. I say either go for a really rustic texture and just kinda crush up the flesh with a fork, or get a ricer. Or just boil your potatoes instead of baking them.
Q: Could you leave the skins on the potatoes?
A: The skins of Russet and similar floury baking potatoes are super gross in mash, IMHO. They have this terrible slimy texture when wet. If you're making mash with waxier varieties — usually the ones with red or yellow skins — I think you can leave the skins on. Though, I will say I've never tried to pass potato skin through a ricer. Perhaps someone here has?
Q: Why did you pronounce "Worcestershire sauce" that way?
A: As far as I'm aware, that's generally how my fellow Americans pronounce it. This is a word with highly variable pronunciations. I have heard Brits pronounce it all kinds of ways. MPW just says WUH-ster — two syllables only.
Q: How would you clean all that burnt-on goo off the pan?
A: Enameled cast iron is a pretty easy surface to clean. Just soak it in warm soapy water for a bit and then go at it with an abrasive sponge. Stuff doesn't stick to the enamel as bad as it would to bare cast iron or stainless steel.
Q: Do you realize that you just showed your house number to the world?
A: Yes. My location is hardly a secret. I'm in the phone book. I'm a homeowner. My address is an easily googleable matter of public record. This is not unusual.
Q: Why do you say it isn't necessary to season the meat before browning it?
A: Because you're going to season the sauce, and ever single bite of meat is going to be completely covered in that very viscous sauce. Any seasoning you put on the exterior would immediately dissolve into the braising liquid anyway.
Q: Could you make this in a slow cooker?
A: I suppose, but I don't see the point. Slow cookers can't brown anything, so flavor is always really bland, IMHO. I know sometimes people brown the meat in a pan and then transfer it to the slow cooker, but that seems like some Rube Goldberg shit right there. If you have an electric stovetop, slow cookers have literally no reason to exist. Just get a (much more versatile) dutch oven. The only reason I can think someone might want a slow cooker is if you have a gas stovetop and you're worried about leaving an open flame going in your house while you're not there.
Q: Is there a substitute for the wine? Is it safe for children to eat this?
A: As I said in the video, you could replace the wine with beef stock (or water). I might use a little extra balsamic vinegar at the end to compensate. And yes, it's safe for kids to eat something with this amount of long-cooked wine it it. A dish like this probably has less alcohol in it than bread: https://youtu.be/nxqAGbJ3bSA
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Q: Why isn't there any actual cooking in this video?
A: I'm starting a new release schedule. I will continue to do a recipe video on Thursdays. In addition, I'll now be doing a video on Mondays that'll be on the topic of food/cooking but not a recipe.
Q: Why are you wearing a t-shirt that says Hicksville? Are you from there?
A: My dad is from Hicksville, New York. I grew up going there a lot to visit my grandma, and a pizza place there called Raimo's is how I got my love of NY-style pizza. But none of that is why I am wearing that shirt. My best friend, Meg, got that shirt made for me after we made a stupid podcast together where we made fun of every Billy Joel album, in order. It's called "We Didn't Start the Podcast," and you can find it anywhere you get podcasts. Billy Joel is also from Hicksville (he went to high school with my dad) and there's a funny old photo of him wearing a Hicksville t-shirt that looks just like the one Meg made for me.
Q: What do you teach at Mercer?
A: Journalism. A few of my students are in these comments saying very sweet things that I can't read all the way through because I'm afraid of feelings.
Q: What do you mean you're a "local celebrity"?
A: I meant that as a self-effacing joke. But, yes, one of the reasons Saralyn invited me to cook in her restaurant is that I'm a bit of a public figure here in Macon, Georgia. I hosted morning radio on the local NPR station for a couple years, and I still substitute-host a statewide talk show on Georgia Public Broadcasting called "On Second Thought." I also do stories for the local TV station WMAZ and the local newspaper.
Q: Are you actually 37, as implied by the Monty Python clip?
A: Yes.
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Q: If I like YA fiction and/or romantic comedies, and/or I know someone who does, should I buy your wife's latest novel, which came out today?
A: You sure should! At your local independent bookseller, or Barnes & Noble, or Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Than-Best-Lauren-Morrill/dp/0374306192
Q: Didn't you just upload a video yesterday?
A: Yes, this is a special bonus recipe I did to support Lauren and her book launch. Hope you like it!
Q: Didn't you just say that deep frying is bad?
A: Yes. I think I addressed this pretty directly in the video. The proximity of these two videos is not an accident!
Q: Where is the oven fry recipe you promised?
A: Coming on my normal recipe release day, which is Thursday!
Q: Could I dispense the batter into the oil with a piping bag?
A: Maybe you'd have better luck, but I've tried that many times and it went badly. Either the batter came out with too much force, or it didn't come out in an unbroken stream, or I couldn't get a wide enough flow. I'm sure other things could work beyond a funnel, but I can guarantee that a funnel works, and it's a very cheap piece of plastic that is useful to have around anyway.
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Q: What British person calls fond "sediment"?
A: Well, there's Marco Pierre White (https://youtu.be/vrkkYLxui-g at 3:02), Marco Pierre White (https://youtu.be/ha_dxfr772A at 3:27) and Marco Pierre White (https://youtu.be/BYAhGk1AiAs at 4:06). I've certainly heard Michel Roux Jr., Marcus Wareing and Gordon Ramsay say it. Quick google searches of recipes in the BBC and the Guardian show the term coming up often. If you're British, I don't need to tell you that your country has many regional dialects, and maybe people don't call it sediment where you're from. But it absolutely is a thing, and it is not a feature of American English at all. We call it fond. Or the brown stuff at the bottom of the pan.
Q: Can I make this with chicken?
A: Absolutely! This basic technique will work with any tender cut of meat. Just make sure you cook the chicken to 160 F pre-rest.
Q: Do I have to use wine?
A: Absolutely not! Fruit juice works great in pan sauces. Cider would be amazing. You can even just use water, though I might spike it with some vinegar.
Q: Is it dangerous to eat pink pork?
A: If you live in a country where pork tapeworm is a big risk, then yeah. But in the U.S. and Europe, it's quite safe. More info on that in my previous video: https://youtu.be/cL9RyGqwcbA
Q: Why did you season the outside of that chop when you don't season the outside of your steak?
A: That whole "season the board, not the steak" thing is for making that specific dish — steak with board dressing. There's no point in seasoning the outside of the steak there, because you're going to toss the pieces in the board sauce, which will evenly coat each piece in seasoning. For this particular presentation, I'm just drizzling the sauce on top of the pieces, not evenly coating each one, so I want to make sure I've got a well-seasoned crust.
Q: Can you really not make a pan sauce with steak?
A: You totally can. Steak Diane is a classic. But I do think you might need to settle for less color on the sear than you'd normally want, to make sure you don't burn the fond. Or, do it with a really thick steak, which you'd normally cook more slowly anyway.
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Q: Why are you always talking about "the Brits"?
A: A few reasons. I am a long-time connoisseur of British cooking shows, in particular some old ones. (I'm binging "Floyd on Fish" at the moment.) I've also traveled through the U.K. quite a bit, and am an avid English/Scottish history buff. I'm interested and amused by the differences in our dialects, in particular as they relate to food. Also, the U.K. is (distant) second to the U.S. in the list of countries where my clicks originate, so I try to take care of that audience. I still feel guilty for how confused so many of you were by my broiler cookies video. But mostly I just do it now because it's become a running joke, and I love running jokes.
Q: I live in the U.K. and have never heard of "gravy browning." What are you talking about?
A: Gravy browning is a real thing, and (in the Anglophone world, at least) it is almost exclusively a British thing. Google "gravy browning" — all of the hits will be for British recipes and websites. Y'all own this one. But just because it's a British thing doesn't mean all of you use it. Most Americans don't say "y'all," and yet it remains a feature of American English, because pretty much only Americans say it. My sense is gravy browning is a very old-fashioned ingredient and is now quite passé. Maybe your grandmother used it. People who still cook like your grandmother did (i.e. Marco Pierre White) still use it. It's a common sight in the vintage BBC/ITV/Channel4 cooking shows I like to watch.
Q: Why didn't you talk about using butter/cream, egg yolks, gelatin or any of the other non-starch means of thickening sauces?
A: As the title indicates, this video is about alternative starches, not starch alternatives. While xanthan gum and agar are not technically starches, they are polysaccharides (like starch), so I figured I'd include them on that basis. Certainly there are lots of great ways to thicken sauces without starch, but this video was about starch, and being that it ballooned to almost 15 minutes long, I think I had enough to cover within those constraints! Also, I suppose I adhere to the more narrow definition of "gravy," which states that it is a sauce made of a meat-originating liquid thickened with starch, and gravy is on my mind because of the holidays.
Q: You said the texture of the xanthan gum sauce was the "same" after you heated it, but it looked thicker after you heated it. What's up with that?
A: Yeah, I should have been clearer about that. By "same," I was trying to say that the sauce didn't thin out when the sauce got hot, which is what starch-thickened sauces usually do. The sauce got a little thicker over that time because xanthan gum takes a few minutes to reach its maximum thickness. It was still actively thickening as I was doing the experiment. In my head, I was purely checking to see if it would thin when it got hot.
Q: Why didn't you pronounce words like "yuca" and "agar" they way we do in my country?
A: Pronunciation is a highly variable thing. Lots of people pronounce those two words the way that I did in the video. I have a pretty standard northeastern U.S. accent (though I currently live in the southeast), and I generally try to keep to that accent/dialect. I think when you start trying to imitate other people's accents in an effort to sound "authentic," you usually just sound like a douchebag (or, in my case, even more of a douchebag).
Q: Did you get a new camera?
A: A new lens — a macro. Where has it been all my life? Amazing. The only hitch I've run into is some pronounced focus breathing, but I actually like that — makes shots more dynamic. Non-sponsored link: https://www.adorama.com/car3518.html?gclid=CjwKCAiAws7uBRAkEiwAMlbZjkbDJvGQeFILY1H6AqW85FS1YrHnxtB-S8f1KaXlHlJe7wVKUJ-pWhoCJmgQAvD_BwE
Q: Why did you say "reputedly" so many times in this video?
A: I suppose a few reasons. I wanted to make it clear that these claims about how these starches behave are not things I have personally observed, and some of them are things that (to my knowledge) have not been scientifically investigated. They are simply things people say about the ingredients. In my original script, I varied my language more, using various synonyms. But I don't have any kind of teleprompter set-up; I memorize a couple lines of my script at a time, deliver them to camera, then repeat with the next few lines, and as a result the wording doesn't always come out perfect. I was particularly rushed making this video, so there are a few blemishes on it, "reputedly" being one of them.
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Q: I loved/hated the music, where did it come from?
A: I'm grateful/sorry! I wrote it for the video (I'm a composer-turned-journalist-turned-internet-cook, yes my life has been weird, no I'm not complaining). I put it on my Soundcloud if you want to hear it again: https://soundcloud.com/aragusea/young-grove-old-grove
Q: This was different ... are you going to do more videos like this?
A: I dunno! The success of the channel has made it such that I don't need every video to be a hit, so yeah, I think on weeks when I don't have a sponsor, I'm going to use the opportunity to take some creative risks, at least whenever I have an idea for a creative risk to take. This video is not performing very well so far in terms of views, which is perfectly fine with me. However, if you liked it and want me to make more things like it, please share it with your friends!
Q: Sooo you're doing a pecan pie recipe on Thursday, right?
A: No, actually! I'm not a big pie person. However Thursday's recipe will be super autumnal, as this video was.
Q: Why did you pronounce it puh-KAHN when most people in Georgia say PEE-kan?
A: Because I'm from Pennsylvania, I just live down here. I generally think the better way to show people respect for their culture is to not try to affect their accent; let them be the ones who talk how they talk.
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Q: What do you mean grass-fed beef is "arguably" better for the environment?
A: There's a lot of debate about whether more "natural" agricultural practices really are better for the environment on balance. "Natural" methods usually aren't as productive, and therefore more land and other resources may be needed to create an equivalent amount of food. Here's a good write-up on the pros and cons of grass-fed beef: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/is-grass-fed-beef-really-better-for-you-the-animal-and-the-planet/2015/02/23/92733524-b6d1-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html
Q: Doesn't this waste a lot of water?
A: I would say it "uses" water, and I don't think it uses that much, relatively speaking. You just need a trickle to keep the water moving. You easily use as much water washing your hands or cleaning a dish. It just isn't much in the scheme of things.
Q: Yeah, BUT DOESN'T THIS WASTE A LOT OF WATER?
A: If you're that concerned about sustainability, don't eat beef. Meat is horrible for the environment. Don't delude yourself into feeling virtuous. It takes 1,910 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969717332527
Q: Don't bacteria create toxins that can survive cooking temperatures?
A: [EDIT: Attempting a more measured response to this one.] Yes, that is absolutely true. As I said, counter thawing is not considered a best practice, safety-wise. For myself, as a healthy person, I wouldn't have been too scared to eat the two-hour counter-thawed steak. It takes time for bacteria to multiply and go through enough life cycles to produce toxins in dangerous concentrations. A lot of the finest restaurants in the world make it a practice to let their meat come up to room temperature before cooking it. But hey, you could pull the short straw and get a steak that was already highly contaminated, and the counter thaw would make it worse. There's always risk. But the consensus among experts seems to be that fridge thawing and cool water thawing are safer bets.
Q: What do you mean grass-fed beef is healthier for me?
A: The big thing is the type of fats you're getting. Grass-fed beef has more Omega-3s, grain-fed has more saturated fat: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/expert-answers/grass-fed-beef/faq-20058059
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Download Digit for free here: https://pixly.go2cloud.org/SH1V8 Comment below with what you're using Digit to save for! Thanks to Digit for sponsoring the video.
Q: Is it unsafe to use non-food-grade metal for the S-hook?
A: I'm not sure. The hook doesn't actually touch any part of the chicken you're going to eat, so I'm not that worried about it. Although, I suppose it's possible that you could have some wire that's coated in something that might melt down onto the chicken. Certainly something to think about.
Q: Do you really have to dry cure the chicken?
A: Nah, and I'm honestly not sure if I prefer it. I tend to think dry-curing or dry-brining or whatever is overrated. But it definitely gives you a crispier skin. If you want really crispy skin, there's lots of other things you could try too. I'm sure I'll get to that in a future video, but basically you want to do what the peking duck chefs do.
Q: Do you really have to oil the chicken?
A: No. I honestly can't decide which way I like best. The oil gets you a browner skin. No oil gets you crispier skin. At least, in my experiments that's what happened.
Q: Are those really the chicken's knees?
A: No, I suppose they're technically the chicken's ankles. What looks like the chicken's lower leg is actually its foot, because it walks on its toes.
Q: Does the lemon inside the chicken actually do anything?
A: It definitely gets you a subtle lemon flavor in the breast meat, but it's not a huge deal and you could skip it.
Q: Shouldn't you season the inside of the chicken?
A: I don't think that really does anything. There's so much connective tissue and bone between the cavity and the meat, I don't think the salt could really penetrate though that. When I've done it, I've noticed no difference. But maybe you might? The lemon is a different matter, because it creates aromas that actually go through the chicken during cooking.
Q: Does the chicken pick up weird smells in the fridge?
A: Never that I've noticed. It just doesn't have that much fat (which is what absorbs smells) and its own flavor is very strong.
Q: Couldn't you make gravy in the pan that had the potatoes in it?
A: Yeah, there's probably some good flavor left in that pan, and the bits of potato left in it would thicken the gravy for you. But, by the time you got the gravy done, the potatoes wouldn't be crispy anymore, and they don't reheat well. Maybe if you could make the gravy super fast it'd work.
Q: What do you mean I'll have to experiment with my oven temperature?
A: You want a temperature that's going to get you brown-but-not-burned skin by the time the interior meat is cooked, and I just think that depends on so many factors. If you're using convection, some convection settings actually lie to you about the temperature — they reduce the temperature you enter by like 30 degrees F to compensate for the fact that convection is more efficient at transferring heat. It depends on how well-ventilated your oven is — the steam from the potatoes could slow the cooking of the skin, etc. It's all just really complicated. I usually start these at 425 F, but a few times I upped the heat toward the end because the skin wasn't getting as brown as I wanted.
Q: Is it safe to keep the raw chicken uncovered in the fridge?
A: I can't find any research literature on the subject, but dry-brining raw poultry in the fridge is a very common practice, and I'm not concerned about it. Just make sure that the bird is in a tray that will catch the drippings, and give it enough space in the fridge so that you don't accidentally touch any food to it. Fridge temperatures inhibit microbial activity. Yes some food pathogens can go airborne, but the experts I've talked to have said that's a risk when you do something to aeresolize the bugs — like splashing a lot of water on the chicken to wash it off. The dry-curing process does the things I said in the video — it dries out the skin (which will make it crispier), and it seasons the interior of the meat. You could absolutely skip it if you don't want to do it, but this is a very common practice, and I can't find any documented case of someone getting sick from it.
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Q: Wait, is that a butcher's knot or a surgeon's knot?
A: It's a surgeon's knot! Sorry! I see online that I'm not the only person to refer to the knot I demonstrated here as a butcher's knot, but clearly the much more common name is a surgeon's knot, and what most people call a butcher's knot is an entirely different knot — a kind of slipknot, actually. My mistake! Sorry!
Q: What is a "jus"?
A: It's literally just the French word for juice. I don't know how the French use the word, but in an English-speaking culinary context, "jus" usually refers to a meaty sauce that has not been thickened, and therefore has a watery, or juicy consistency. I would use the English word "juice" to refer to a sauce that actually is, literally, just meat juice. But if you ever see "jus" on a menu or in a recipe, it almost never means just juices, simply because a well-rested roast doesn't leak out that much juice. The jus has to be augmented with something, like water, stock, wine, etc. Some French folks seem puzzled by my pronunciation — FWIW, that's the only way I've ever heard an English-speaking cook pronounce it. Come to think of it, that's also how I've heard French-speaking cooks pronounce it, like Raymond Blanc at 4:54 — https://vimeo.com/143125474
Q: Why not just squeeze the lemon into the jus?
A: You could absolutely do that, but I, as ever, am a fan of heterogeneity on the plate. I also think giving people a half roast lemon to squeeze or not to squeeze gives them control over how much acid they want.
Q: That's the difference between this and porchetta?
A: It's certainly similar, but porchetta is traditionally made with a whole suckling pig, skin on, that has been de-boned. When people use an adult pig, I think they usually use the pork belly, which is a very different cut from the loin. I think porchetta is usually slow cooked, to render the fat and soften the meat. This roast is done with a lean and tender cut, so it's roasted hot and fast.
Q: What could I use instead of fennel?
A: Oh, a million things. Another onion. Some celery. Some carrots. Anything.
Q: Should you have seasoned the interior of the pork loin before you put in the stuffing and rolled it up?
A: You could certainly do that, but I know from experience that cheap grocery store sausage like that is incredibly salty. The finished dish did not lack for salt at all. But your sausage might be different, so just taste it before you roll it in the loin and make a judgment.
Q: Could I make this with pork tenderloin instead of loin?
A: Absolutely, but it would be way smaller, and this recipe would give you way too much stuffing. Maybe try it with two tenderloins? In the U.S., pork tenderloins are often sold in pairs, anyway.
Q: What if I don't want it to be pink at all inside/
A: I would think roasting it to 145 F / 63 C and then resting it a long time would probably get rid of any pink, but it's hard to predict, because the exact amount of carryover cooking you're going to get depends on a lot of factors, such as the precise dimensions of your roast. If you want to be really safe, maybe go to 150 F / 66 C, but I think that'd be some pretty dry pork loin.
Q: Could I do this with something other than pork?
A: Certainly you can make pinwheel roasts like this with all kinds of meat, but I think the recipe would need to be changed in many respects. I'll try to come up with another one for you. But, if you really wanted to duplicate this exact recipe with another meat, I think your best bet would be a de-boned turkey breast with turkey sausage.
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Hey y'all, some commenters here are raising some minor factual questions with some stuff in the vid. When I get time, I'll research each one and try to say something about it here. [EDIT: Specifics at the end of this post.] For now, I want to say that nothing like this will ever be perfect, but here's what I do to make sure I'm bringing you accurate content. At minimum, I always give prior review of the video to the experts who appear in it. This is something traditional news outlets consider unethical, or at least unwise — it gives sources the opportunity to exert undue influence over the piece. I think that's generally a stupid rule when applied to expert sources, so I give all my experts prior review, and they often catch problems, which I fix before the vid ever goes live. In addition to that, when dealing with topics that are particularly controversial or fraught, I generally recruit a third-party fact-checker who is not in the video, and is therefore more impartial. In this case, an Ivy League food safety expert not in the video was kind enough to put a fourth set of eyes on this and give me some feedback. I also, of course, checked everything I said here against the statements we have from FDA, CDC, EFSA, WHO, etc. Again, nothing will ever be perfect, but I want you to know that a lot of people who research this stuff for a living have signed off on this vid, and therefore I feel comfortable that it's the right practical advice for us right now. Stay safe. [EDIT, specifics will now follow.] Folks have pointed out that I tangled the virus terminology a bit. "SARS-CoV-2" is the name of the virus, "coronavirus" is the type of virus, and "COVID-19" is the disease it causes. Also, I said that SARS-CoV-2 and the common cold are both coronaviruses. Some cold viruses are coronaviruses, but not all.
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Q: Haven't we known for a long time that dietary fat is a steroid precursor? How is this new?
A: Theory and practice don't always align, which is why it's important to do empirical research looking at large groups of human subjects to see what actually happens in real life. This is, as far as the authors know, the first study that actually did that with regard to low-fat diets and T.
Q: Are you getting jacked or fat?
A: Both! Well, I actually think my body fat is a little lower than it was a few months ago, but I certainly haven't been leaning out as much as I could, and I notice my face getting puffy, which could be the result of a few things. It's been pretty tough to pursue this career while having my young children home from school all the time because of COVID, and I've definitely been doing some stress-eating/drinking. I've been pretty big (muscle-wise) in the past, so it's pretty easy to get it back quickly. Getting lean is harder, especially as you get older. I'm not trying to be a fitness model here — just trying to stay reasonably healthy and strong, and to help you do the same.
Q: Isn't behind-the-neck press dangerous?
A: There's a good thread below unfolding on this topic. The research literature I've seen does not, in my opinion, support the conventional wisdom that behind-the-neck press is very dangerous and should never be performed. There is evidence that it puts extra stress on the rotator cuff, so I certainly never lift very heavy when I do it, and I would think it's the kind of exercise that should be done with particular caution, if it should be done at all. You'll note that I did my heavy set in front of the neck. I do behind-the-neck sometimes because I get a stretch out of it that feels good. But I am hardly an expert in exercise physiology, and you should go consult one if you're curious about this. All I was doing was shooting b-roll.
Q: Isn't it best to see a doctor instead of doing your own diagnostic tests?
A: It is my non-expert opinion that seeing a doctor is best. But there are many health experts who argue that the best diagnostic test is the one you're actually going to take, and if you're embarrassed or scared to see a doctor (which many people are, especially here in the U.S.), at-home testing is a good option. Also, nothing is stopping you from doing at-home testing AND seeing your doctor. I did my research before accepting this sponsorship; LetsGetChecked is a legit company with legit backers and collaborators, and legit doctors to help you understand your results. I feel good about promoting them. Especially when it comes to things like STIs, good god, just get yourself tested in whatever way you're actually going to do.
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So naturally there's going to be a lot of talk about how this recipe deviates from carbonara you might see in Rome. All fair enough, and I tried to note all of my deviations from the traditional recipe along the way. I neglected to say that garlic and herbs generally aren't traditional, but in my mind, those are optional flavor additions you can make to any pasta, if you want them. "Well, why did you call it carbonara then if it's not the traditional recipe?" Because I think carbonara is pasta in a sauce consisting of rendered cured pork fat, hard cheese and a little pasta water emulsified with egg yolks. What I show in this video meets that basic definition. It also has some added vegetables (because who among us really needs to be eating all that pasta?) some extra flavorings (the garlic and herbs) and a tiny splash of milk for color. There are recipes on the internet that stray much farther from the original. As I mentioned in the video, a whole crap load of cream is the norm among plenty of Italian-American cooks. In my view, a lot of cream does change the recipe fundamentally — it becomes a cream-based sauce, instead of an egg-based sauce. I kept mine egg-based. I'm sure if I had made this and called it something other than carbonara, I would have gotten plenty of commenters saying, "So . . . carbonara?"
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Q: Isn't it bad to use a honing steel on blades made out of particularly hard steel?
A: Yes. I made this video to speak to people who have the mass-market knives that are typical in the western countries where my audience is concentrated. As I understand it, there are high-end traditional Asian-style knives made out of very hard steel on which a honing steel (and probably a pull-through sharpener) would do more harm than good by breaking off the brittle edge. But the makers of all of the low-to-mid-market Asian-style knives that I can think of, like Shun and Calphalon (the maker of my knife), do recommend the use of honing steels with their products. You could argue I should have made this distinction in the video, but I figure if you're hardcore enough to own a very hard steel knife, then this video isn't for you anyway.
Q: Why didn't Wurstner use water on her whetstone?
A: Asian-style whetstones use water. Western-style whetstones use oil. I'm sure that's an over-simplification, but that's the gist of it.
Q: Why didn't you talk about the ceramic mug technique?
A: Indeed, it's possible to sharpen a knife on many household ceramics, including the bottom of a mug or plate. I've tried it; I felt I got a very uneven result, and it also seemed a little hazardous. I really think a high-quality manual pull-through, suited to the style of knife you have, is pretty effective, fool-proof, and cheap. I consider that the entry-level option. But if you want to try the mug method, there are many youtube tutorials.
Q: Why didn't you mention that X type of pull-through sharpener is awful?
A: Indeed, such sharpeners are highly variable in quality, but this is not a video about the merits of different sharpeners on the market. It's about the basic four methods that I would consider using. Once you've picked one, you'll need to do some more homework to pick the right tool for you. There are many great reviews online of different sharpeners — as I mentioned, America's Test Kitchen did some typically exhaustive testing, and the models I use are the ones they recommend. They've worked great for me.
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Hey everybody, two corrections to make on this vid: 1) When I said "pink peppercorns" I meant red peppercorns, which is what you see in the video. The product marketed as pink peppercorn is generally from a different species; 2) The apple was a bad choice of visual aid for talking about basic fruit anatomy, since the apple is actually a more complicated case. Plenty of bio folks have posted good explanations below. Sorry! Oh, and one more thing — no, I'm not offering any kind of sweepstakes. Somebody is running the same scam on my channel as they're doing on a million other channels right now where an account with my name and picture replies to you and says you've won something, send your private info to collect your winnings, etc. All you have to do is click on the user ID to see that it's not actually me. Note the lack of a check mark, no subscribers, etc. Same scam is all over YouTube right now, so beware.
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Q: How do restaurants warm their plates?
A: So many different ways! In no particular order, here are methods I've either heard about from friends in the industry or observed first-hand: stacking them on top of the oven or near some other hot thing in the kitchen; simply relying on the extreme heat of the entire kitchen to keep them warm; simply relying on the fact that they will likely pass through a crazy-hot commercial dishwasher shortly before they're used again; keeping them near the warming lights on the pass; putting them under the warming lights on the pass; finishing foods under the broiler, right on the serving plate; keeping them under the steam table; keeping them in a dedicated warming drawer. I'm sure pro cooks will chime in with some additional techniques they've used or observed!
Q: What about the plate-warming cycle on the dishwasher? Wouldn't that be perfect for warming a bunch of plates before a big dinner?
A: I suppose, but here's what I wonder: When, in the entire history of cooking for a lot of people, has the dishwasher been empty and available right before dinner?
Q: Did you really need to get an MIT professor to answer such a basic question?
A: Well, probably not, and I admit it was a bit of a flex on my part. But honestly, I think common questions encountered by lots of people in their everyday lives deserve the very best answers from the very best experts. That's what I will try to deliver to you on this channel. (Also, Dr. Ross was very gracious and did not seem at all put out of her way to answer this question.)
Q: Would my other idea about how to get water on a plate prior to microwaving it work to keep the microwave from heating itself?
A: I don't know, I'm thinking yes?
Q: When are you going to get back to cooking?
A: I'm still doing a recipe video every Thursday! All that's changed is I'm now also doing some other food topic video most Mondays.
Q: Does that roast chicken w/ gravy footage indicate what you may be cooking on Thursday?
A: Maybe...
Q: Are you really wearing a StoryBots shirt?
A: 1) HOW HAS NO ONE ACTUALLY ASKED ME THAT YET; 2) YES! Lauren made StoryBots costumes for the whole family last Halloween, and when the StoryBots people saw us on Instagram, they sent us a free shirt. It's way too big for either of the kids. StoryBots are the best.
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Well, I suppose beef fat is a saturated fat, and is therefore very resistant to oxidation. That's why processed, shelf-stable foods are made with shortening, palm oil and other saturated fats. Nonetheless, there are other break-down processes that occur, so yeah, you probably don't want to be eating Dyer's every day. Regarding frying in olive oil, I've done it many times. It's delicious, but it does taste like olive oil, whereas peanut oil has a much more neutral flavor. As I said at the end of the video, one perfectly legitimate reason to not cook with olive oil is if you don't want your food to taste like olive oil.
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@aadithyagulyani for the recipe videos, it depends a lot on the recipe. for a simple thing like this, it was only a couple hours of shooting time, maybe an hour of writing/narrating time, 5-6 hours of editing, and then another 1-2 hours doing the thumbnail/captions/description/tags/etc. But that's not including the entire weekend I spent making 10 batches of creme brulee to develop and refine the recipe. I wasn't cooking the entire time — most of that time was spent just being at home and playing with my kids, but I always had an eye on the custards. For more complex recipes, it can take a lot longer. and if the video has a sponsor, producing the ads tacks on at least a couple more hours to the process. the sciency monday videos are getting to be much more time-consuming than the recipes. it's absolutely a full-time job, but one that I have a blast doing, and for which I am increasingly well-paid, so no complaints here!
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Zach Arbogast No worries. This is actually a really illustrative example of the fundamental genre distinction between journalism and entertainment, IMHO. Journalism can be entertaining, and entertainment can be informative. But the primary goal of journalism should be to inform, and therefore it should generally avoid narrative structures that may be more entertaining, but that also bury the most important information deep within the story. If you were going to write Empire Strikes Back as a news story, the lead sentence would be, "Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father, Vader says." That sure isn't as entertaining, but it better serves the goal of informing people, if informing people is your primary goal. BTW, I'm not saying that what I'm doing here is purely journalism. I'm not really sure what I'm doing, from a genre perspective. Edutainment, as KRS-One used to say?
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@lionelhutz4046 Because the YouTube partner program alone does not generate enough income for a YouTuber of my size who also has a family to support. Even if it did, I would still want to open up additional revenue streams to diversify my income. If all your money comes from YouTube directly, you are vulnerable to changes in policy, demonetization, fluctuations in the ad marketplace, and other things that could suddenly and dramatically reduce your income. If I was 22 and single, I would take the risk. But I'm a grown-ass man with little kids and a mortgage, and I have to be responsible. I appreciate you offering to send money directly — I might open a Patreon program at some point in 2020, when I have time to offer really good patron benefits. As it stands, I feel weird asking people for simple donations when I'm making such a healthy living with this stuff via good ol' fashioned commerce. And even if I got a really robust Patreon program going, I'd still probably do at least some in-video advertising — again, for the sake of diversification. I really am sensitive to your position, and I understand your frustration, but this is why I do it the way I do it.
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@Swiggity Swooty I am aware of the numerous tricks. I'm surprised that you seem to have ignored or not comprehended the entire point of the video, which is that there's no need to use tricks. There's no need to buy the stuff at all, let alone use special methods to keep it dry. Brown sugar = white sugar + molasses, in varying proportions. Everyone already has white sugar. If you just buy molasses instead of brown sugar, you can control the molasses-to-sugar ratio yourself (instead of buying multiple kinds of brown sugar to comport with your recipe) and you don't have to do anything special to store either ingredient. Plus you can use molasses for other things, like ginger bread, pumpkin pie, shoofly pie, baked beans, barbecue sauce, etc.
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@f3z087 Right now, my income from the YoutTube partner program (the ads they place before and after my videos) and my income from the in-video sponsorships (when I talk about how great a product or service is for a minute) is roughly equal. The partner program is steadier — it plateaued a couple months ago and has been holding really steady, in a good way. The sponsorships are unpredictable. Sometimes we have a big month, sometimes less so. (By "we," I mean me and my awesome Scottish-Canadian agent, Colin, who more than earns his cut.) I try to look at the sponsorship money as a bonus. I decided I could safely quit my job when the partner program money, minus the income I get from random viral hits, became enough to live on by itself, and I hit that point at the beginning of the summer. The sponsorship money is amazing, but I also know that it can test your patience, and mine too — every sponsorship I do adds many hours of production time to my schedule, because I'm not just pressing play on someone else's ad. I have to produce a unique, persuasive ad by myself, every time. I feel like I'm moving toward a better balance with that stuff. And hey, it all beats pumping gas for a living — something I know from experience.
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Hi, Ben. I confess, I now realize I confused the distinction between an emulsifier vs a thickener and an emulsion vs a similar colloid. What I meant to say is that something like lecithin is an emulsifier, and starch is not, even if starch can thicken a sauce to the point where it can hold dispersed oil droplets. To your other disagreement, I feel like you're quibbling. Yes, if you jam a stick blender in there and apply a lot of shear force, you're gonna bash the oil into sufficiently tiny droplets. However, I was using a whisk, and with a whisk, there simply wasn't enough other stuff in there. If you add enough oil to the system, eventually you'll reach a point where even a shear mixer won't be able to get the job done, no?
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Kwiene Makeda I have no idea why you presume that myoglobin was in a more advanced state of decomposition than the rest of the bird. I can think of no reason why it would be. I was emptying the package straight into my roasting pan precisely because I wanted to capture the purge so that it would be part of my gravy. That amount of purge is very common in meat that has been frozen and thawed, and most turkeys sold in the U.S. are frozen at some point in the supply chain. This is really not hard to figure out — people in the most developed countries are generally the least likely to wash their meat, because their meat is quite likely to already be clean. The highly developed countries that do wash their meat are countries that developed more recently. Within highly developed countries, the people most likely to wash meat are either recent immigrants or poor, or are the children/grandchildren of people who were recent immigrants and/or poor. If you're privileged enough to get clean, fresh meat, and your parents/grandparents were privileged enough to get clean/fresh meat, you likely don't wash your meat, because you don't have to. That's what all the available research indicates. Rich people in rich countries are not dirtier. We wash our hands and brush our teeth and take daily showers just like you do. If anything, we're probably too clean. Bathing every day is bad for your skin. A growing volume of research is supporting "the hygiene hypothesis," that type-1 diabetes, food allergies and auto-immune diseases may be on the rise in the West in-part because excessive hygiene is causing problems in children's immune system development. The fact that an Islamic writer found Vikings to be dirty a millennia ago isn't really relevant to anything we're discussing. Have you been to Sweden? It's a pretty clean place.
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If there's lots of juice in the pan with the fat, I separate out the fat with a gravy separator. But more often, since I roast at such a high temperature, most of the juice is evaporated and I don't have to separate it. I whisk enough flour into the fat to make a roux the texture of a thick paste, and I cook that on the stovetop for a few minutes until it starts to smell nutty. I take like half of the roux out and hold it in reserve (I usually have more than I need at this stage) and then whisk in boxed chicken stock and boil it until I like the texture and flavor. If I separated out any roasting juices, I would add them back when I add the stock. I also add the onion, garlic and lemon from inside the chicken when I put in the stock. If it's too thin, or if I just want a larger quantity of gravy, I add more roux. If it's too thick, just add more stock, etc. When it's about done, I squeeze in the half lemon from inside the chicken (though that makes the gravy very lemony, so don't do it if you won't like that flavor). If I have company over, I strain the gravy through a sieve. If not, I just pull out the big chunks of onion and garlic and such with my tongs. At this point, there's usually a lot of resting juices accumulated in the plate where I've been resting the hot chicken, so I pour those into the gravy. I grind in a bunch of pepper and maybe some sage, and that's it.
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@jaxontrimble2553 For the 51st time, I'm not saying I think everyone has to have children. I said I think most (MOST, not all) people end up being better people if they experience being responsible for another human's basic welfare by midlife, assuming they are minimally qualified to meet such a responsibility. Yes, parenthood is the most obvious way to do his. But so is caring for a much younger or otherwise more vulnerable person who is not your child. So is elder care. If global population trends hold, we are headed into a world where there will be fewer young people to take care of, and I think that's good for longterm human species survival, but probably bad for individual human development. The act of caring for someone else generally makes you a better person, in my opinion. Fortunately, declining birth rates have another demographic effect — they result in proportionally more old people, and fewer young people to take care of them. So if there are no babies to take care of, then take care of old people, if you can. If you lack the capacity to take care of other people, then I think, by definition, you are not a basically functioning adult. That's no moral judgment on my part. Lots of wonderful people lack the capacity to care for anyone else. I take care of several wonderful people who are incapable of taking care of themselves, let alone anyone else — this is why they need me to take care of them. If you have the capacity to take care of someone else, but you lack the inclination, and you don't take on any comparable responsibility, then there's a word for that — selfish. And that's a moral judgment on my part. I actually think it's great for young adults to be selfish, within reason. Young adults need time to use their powers of adulthood to establish their place in the order of things, and also to have fun — because if no one is having fun, then there's no point to life, IMHO. But once you're pushing 30, 35, I think it's time to start taking care of other people if you can, which is what J.P. asked me about in the first place.
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@therealkunr5147 NO! Listen to your parents! I absolutely do NOT exclusively eat cauliflower rice and fish! As I said in the video, I eat that, plus vegetable soup, plus frequent other meals where I eat normally with my family. I eat those no-carb meals to balance out the normal meals that I eat socially, and even then I'll only eat that way for a few weeks. Also, I am a 37-year-old man! You're a kid! You're growing! You need to eat a balanced diet! Grilled chicken and eggs are both primarily protein. You need proteins, fats and carbs (the macronutrients) plus all the micronutrients you get from fresh fruits and vegetables. If you need to get leaner, you can absolutely do that by restricting your overall caloric intake. I'd probably start by looking at refined carbs in your diet (bread, pasta, sugar, junk food), but you still need some carbs in your diet. You've got a growing body and you can really mess it up if you go on some extreme crash diet.
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@vaibhavkhinvasara9926 I'm not sure what Heston thing you're referring to. It is an empirical fact that washing mushrooms does cause them to absorb a little water — people have done a million experiments with scales to prove it, and you can easily try it yourself. The question is whether that small amount of water makes a meaningful difference. As I said in the video, I don't think it really does, for the reasons I discussed. Regarding the garlic, yes, I'm not very garlic sensitive, and I often have trouble tasting heavily cooked garlic in dishes with lots of other strong flavors. But as I said in the video, I do think mushrooms are good at absorbing garlic flavor, which I can taste. Also, since I now do this job full-time, I am increasingly trying to develop recipes with other people's tastes in mind, not just my own.
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@Brigsby Boy22 You understand there are South Asian people in the U.K., right? Lots of them, in fact. According to one plausible version of the history, a Bangladeshi chef named Ali Ahmed Aslam created the dish at his restaurant in Glasgow. That's why it's called Chicken Tikka Masala and not "the Queen's Spicy Rump." No doubt similar dishes existed in India/Pakistan before then, perhaps even dishes with the same name. It is an entirely generic name, after all. But if so many Indian folks are here complaining that this isn't how they make the dish, then maybe that's an indication that this is, in fact, a different dish, which was invented by Ali Ahmed Aslam in Glasgow in 1971, and a distinct branch of evolution grew from his recipe in the U.K. to give us the dish that is the standard today in North Indian restaurants in the West. My recipe is a totally unremarkable version of that basic recipe. And there is nothing weird about how I say ghee. That's how you say ghee with an American accent. Did you want me to fake a Punjabi accent when I said it? Do you think that would have been more respectful?
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@Brigsby Boy22 1) Sorry, what back-pedaling? Be specific; 2) Of course he got the idea from India/Pakistan. What's your point? This remains essentially the dish he created. This the "authentic" version of this dish; 3) Yes, I know, thanks. Even accounting for the 10 percent of Indians who speak English, I remain quite sure that this version of chicken tikka masala is among the most popular dishes in the English-speaking world; 4) I'm not standing for the colonizers and against the colonized. I stand against snobbery, wherever I find it. I stand for everyone eating what they enjoy, without concern for what someone else considers to be the "right" way. Just because a dish originated in your culture doesn't mean you own it. Food travels all of the world, it evolves and changes in strange and wonderful ways. This is something to be celebrated, not decried by traditionalists. The basic impulse to say, "the food you like is bad because it's different from what I'm familiar with" is some toxic bullshit, and I am absolutely here to fight against it.
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@tissuepaper9962 I apologize for overstating my case. Yes, indeed, the nitpicking can wear on a person in my situation, and when someone accuses me of carelessly putting my viewers in danger, that cuts, as it were. Sure, safety protocols aren't only about legal liability. But I do take issue with mindless adherence to them, especially when they're not backed up by research, or even by very much life experience. Shaving ice from a pan is not the same thing as chiseling wood, and experience from the latter is of limited applicability to the former. I've read enough public health research literature to know that lots of things that seem like good health/safety protocols actually end up doing more harm than good when studied scientifically. So unless I KNOW that something I'm demonstrating is particularly hazardous and there's clearly a safer way to do it, my policy is to shut up about it, do what feels natural and comfortable to me, and trust others to do the same. It seems to me that by holding the pan from the edge closer to you, you don't have nearly as strong a grip on it, and that could cause its own problems. Again, if we were doing an operation that involved more force, I would feel differently. But it simply is not the case the blades must always be directed away from you. There are many standard pairing knife techniques, for example, that involve cutting toward the thumb, and they work precisely because they are low-force movements.
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@weizenw 1) That sounds like a lovely recipe, but it can co-exist in a world with mine, which is also good; 2) Pot roast "should" be whatever the fuck tastes good to me (or you). I like tomatoey pot roast. It's what I grew up with. It's how my mom made it. Make yours with less tomato if you want. 3) Fresh garlic, to me, is totally imperceptible in a dish like this. The other flavors are too strong, and the garlic cooks for a very long time, breaking down the allicin entirely. Garlic powder stands up better to long, wet cooking. Saying that fresh garlic is always better than garlic powder is like saying that fresh mushrooms are always better than dry; 4) How the fuck would I get "more views" by using such a minor ingredient without mentioning that I did so in the headline or thumbnail? That's just silly. But if you're thinking that my channel is aimed at people who aren't expert cooks, you'd be right. If you don't need my videos, then you don't need my videos. Funny how that works. Watch something else; 5) I didn't leave the flour "raw." I cooked it in the fat until it was in danger of burning, but even that is unnecessary. Four hours in the oven is going to cook away any raw flour taste; 6) I didn't "insist" on dry — I recommended dry. Some sweet wines are VERY sweet — so much so that, once reduced, it could add an unpleasant amount of sweetness, and it could easily burn; 7) When did I ever tell people they had to buy a bottle? I told them about how much wine to use. In what container they acquire it is up to them; 8) I did add chopped celery; 9) Stock is fine if you want to use it (as I said in both the video and description), but I would not use it in this case, since my ingredients already contribute enough moisture; 10) Again, you didn't "make this better," you insufferable prick. You came up with a different recipe. And that's fine. But present it as such, and GTFO my channel with your attitude.
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@markschultze Yep, I hear the argument, and I think there's legitimacy there. I'm not entirely confident that these restrictive regs really do help the least among us — after all, who is most in need of cheap food with a long shelf life? My problem with the European attitude (apart from the pure snootiness) is how unscientific a lot of the regulation is. The U.S., for all its flaws, delegates these kinds of regulatory decisions to career professionals in the USDA, FDA, etc. In contrast, the EFSA has no authority — all they can do is advise the legislature, and the legislature often makes particularly irrational decisions driven by public sentiment. (And I think the whole PDO system is pure anti-competitive protectionism, but that's another conversation.)
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@Brigsby Boy22 You're talking as though I found some random Indian guy, got in his face and said, "HAHA, our version of this dish is better than YOURS!" I was respectful. I took great pains to be respectful in this and the previous video — to acknowledge the colonial history. I made it crystal clear at the beginning of this video that I was making the British version of the dish. I then pinned a comment to the video making clear again that I was not trying to recreate or reinvent or change any authentic Indian version of the dish. And a guy STILL felt the need to reply to my pinned comment, saying that, as an Indian, he did not approve of the dish. He said that to me, I didn't say that to him. That's why I replied the way I did. I deal with this pretty much every time I cook anything — people in the dish's distant culture of origin (usually Italians) trying to assert some ownership over my dinner. It's obnoxious, and I stand against it. Also, for you to describe this dish as the colonizer's bastardization of the dish is simply incorrect. The history is pretty clear. This dish was invented and developed by South Asians, living in the U.K., for their own restaurants.
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For anyone else observing this thread and thinking I flew off the handle for no reason, let's break this down a bit. Why did this asshole leave this comment? To be an asshole. To say something insulting. To make himself feel big by making someone else feel small. Insults are common on the internet, but why I'm mad about this one is just how profoundly off-base it is, and how it perpetuates chefy elitist notions that I think harm people who are just trying to cook dinner for their families. You can cook something great on any kind of functional stove. All the different types have their pros and cons. Restaurants traditionally prefer gas for a reason, but a lot of them are also migrating to ceramic induction for a reason (that will be the subject of Monday's video). Electric resistance coil is more popular in U.S. homes for a reason. It's cheap, lots of homes here don't have gas hook-ups, and the ceramic ones are a lot easier to clean, which is literally all I said in the video that prompted this guy to leave his shitty comment. I cleaned a bad mess on my stove, I remarked at how easy it was to clean, and said that glass-top stoves have their virtues (i.e. they're easy to clean). People cooking at home don't have to do what "chefs" do. In many cases, I think they SHOULDN'T do what chefs do. Professional chefs and people cooking at home have different needs. I'll urge you to read that Consumer Reports article I linked to. A lot of things that people assume are better about gas actually aren't better when you put them in head-to-head tests. One thing you can certainly say is that electric stoves generally put out more BTUs, which is why lots of recipes written by professional chefs using gas are often bad advice for people cooking at home on electric. I literally once saw Jamie Oliver advocate pre-heating a teflon pan on high heat for 20 minutes before searing a steak in it. If you did that on a modern electric burner, you might melt the teflon and you'd certainly incinerate your steak. the oil would probably burst into flames the second you put it in the pan. I'll say I don't blame Jamie for that so much, because he's a Brit, and gas has a much bigger chunk of the residential market share in the U.K. than it does in the U.S.
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Pavor 1) As you (should) know, coq au vin is incredibly variable, even if you restrict yourself to classic French cookbooks. Those recipes are all over the place. My version is hardly off the map. It's chicken stewed in wine, usually with some combination of onions, mushrooms and bacon. That's what the dish is. And even then, I called my version simplified coq au vin; 2) You might note elsewhere in my comments where a young Frenchman said he cried when he saw this because it made him think of home; 3) Gravy is a meaty liquid thickened with starch. There is no starch in the demi glace I made, which was mostly just Chef John's recipe (as I acknowledged). It was interesting to me that I saw you commenting elsewhere about how Chef John is a "real chef" unlike "clowns" like me, but in your exchange with me you mocked elements of that recipe that you erroneously believed were my innovation, when in fact they were Chef John's. From that, I can see your problem with me is purely personal, which is not something I think I should tolerate on my channel. Criticize the recipe if you want, but if you keep making it personal, I'm blocking you from the channel.
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@davidbennspiv Thanks! I think it's reasonable to suspect that salting meat shortly after slaughter might draw more blood out of fresh meat than older meat, especially meat that has been dry aged (as opposed to modern wet aging), though I do wonder about the impact of rigor mortis over that 72-hour timeframe. I suppose my broader question is: Does a meaningful amount of blood get removed by salting in either case? Residual blood not already removed through kosher butchering and the initial washing phase is likely to be found only in capillaries (or the interior of bones) deep within the meat, and I'm not sure how much a surface coating of salt is gonna pull out of that, especially if you're kashering a large section of an animal, as opposed to an individual serving portion. Even if the salt reaches that blood, what molecular components of the blood are actually drawn out by kashering? Even if those components are drawn out, how much of them are reabsorbed by the meat via diffusion as you let the meat sit for its minimum hour? The whole secular reason chefs dry-brine for at least an hour is to give stuff time to reabsorb — if you wanted to remove as much stuff a possible, wouldn't it be better so salt for, say, 15 minutes? How much of the effect that people perceive is actually water/salt drawing out myoglobin, and/or simply discoloring the meat, rather than actually drawing out blood? How much of the effect that people observe is simply evaporation of water? Might the historical origins of the kashering procedure be more about killing surface pathogens with salt, rather than literally drawing out blood? To be clear, I think all these questions are totally apart from the ceremonial or symbolic function of kashering. I'm only discussing the claim that kashering literally draws out the blood, of which I am broadly skeptical.
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Sigh.
0:40 — Yes, lime juice. Why should I care what's "traditional"? Lemon juice is too strong, for my taste. I want acidity, not additional flavor.
0:46 — It's uncooked at the moment, but after I lay the hot steak on it, it'll be cooked perfectly.
0:50 — My knife is sharp. Everyone chops rosemary. What do you want me to do, tear it? That would be ridiculously time consuming. It's not basil.
0:55 — Because, as I said in the video, I like the milky flavor of raw butter. Great steakhouses all over the world finish their steaks with raw butter at the end. You have no idea what "unprofessional" is.
1:26 — No, it doesn't. A little burnt pepper doesn't harm the flavor of the finished dish. A lot does.
1:34 — There's salt in the butter, and I prefer to get most of the salt in my finished dish from a finishing salt, because I like the dish to be heterogenous. Salting food WELL in advance can enhance browning if you give the salt time to bring soluble proteins to the surface, but seasoning it immediately before cooking does not, and even then, I don't care. The steak came out extremely browned.
1:54 — I crushed the garlic before putting it in, thus opening its structure, and it definitely made the butter garlicy. Had I chopped it up, it would have burned before the steak was done. You don't know what you're talking about.
1:55 — First, let's deal with this absurd mythology that mixing olive oil with butter will prevent the butter from burning. That's manifestly untrue. Butter will burn if it reaches its smoke point, regardless of what other fat it's been mixed with. The oil is not going to cool the butter down. At most, the oil would dilute the butter, thus resulting in less burned butter in the final dish, because there will simply be less butter in the final dish. Anyway, as you can plainly see, I did not "boil" the steak. It came out with a deep brown crust, so I have no idea what you think you're talking about.
2:08 — No. If I added it then, it would be brown in the final dish. I want it just barely cooked and green.
2:20 — Did you taste it? I did. It was garlicy, because I crushed the cloves before I put them in.
2:32 — I did think forward, you pedant. The rosemark comes out perfectly cooked and green using this method.
3:27 — Why would I want to? The fat protects the meat. I want crust on the surface, not on the sides.
3:26 — I have cut off a very, very thin sliver of meat. I don't care. And trimming it before cooking would have made no difference in terms of waste.
3:50 — You appear to know nothing about meat. A ribeye is already cut against the grain. If I wanted to cut it further against the grain, I would have to lay it on its side and slice is vertically, like a roast. It's literally impossible to cut a ribeye into bite-sized pieces against the grain.
4:48 — As I said, I prefer salting at the end, because I don't like uniform saltiness in the final dish. Many cooks and chefs do this. It's where the term "finishing salt" comes from.
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@ojtheaviator1795 I mean, there's 10,000 great arguments in favor of metric. This video is about the arguments against metric, weak though they may be. And FWIW, I don't think this particular argument against is entirely without merit. Dr. Mihm was talking about how the base units compare to things on the scale of a screw thread, not the height of a person. And in the kitchen, I do find grams a little weird, because they're so tiny, but a kilogram is way too big relative to most of the things I'm measuring. So I'm usually working in quantities of like 200 or 300 grams, which are slightly less convenient and intuitive numbers than 3 or 4 ounces. Again, I think it's a slim reasoning and I am totally pro-metric, but this is a video about why America hasn't fully gone metric yet, and we therefore spend more time discussing the anti-metric arguments.
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@barneyallen5377 Champ, you're not the only one who took a logic class freshman year. When I accused you of making an ad hominem, the only argument you'd articulated as to why building a recipe around a box of pasta is bad is because it's something an "idiot" would do. That is a mere syntactic reshuffling of the argument "that cooking method is bad because you're an idiot." It's an ad hominem on it's face, and I think you know that, which is why I am not amused here. You are arguing in bad faith. Likewise, I don't think you actually believe that the most celebrated Italian chefs of our era are all idiots, and yet I could produce for you a recipe by any of them that is built around a package of dried pasta. I'm sitting here googling pasta recipes and I have yet to come across a single one using dried pasta that is not built around a whole package of pasta, or half of one, or multiples of one. I'm sure such recipes exist, but for you to pretend that recipes like mine are remotely unusual or unprofessional is simply you saying shit you don't believe because you want to pick a fight with me. Yes, dried pasta keeps. But no one wants a pantry filled with mostly-empty boxes of different shapes of pasta. I think you know that, too. I don't have a problem with you disagreeing with me. But if you keep arguing in bad faith, or being rude to other commenters, I'm going to block you.
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@DrMinecraftVentures Again man, we're not talking about what language is. We're talking about what language WAS. All Spanish comes from Iberian Spanish, because of colonialism. The historical origin of the word tortilla in Iberian Spanish is "little cake" or "little bread" or something of the sort, descended from Vulgar Latin. Spaniards exported this word to their colonies, and the colonized peoples proceeded to evolve both the word and the food themselves. We now have totally different things all around the world that people call tortillas, but they all have something in common — they're relatively small things baked into relatively homogenous (and usually round) solid masses, i.e. little cakes. The contemporary meanings of tortilla across Latin America are probably closer to "little cakes" than the contemporary meaning in Spain, which is why it seems actually more Spaniards are offended by this video than Latin Americans, judging by the comments. I wish I had been clearer that I was discussing etymology rather than contemporary meaning. I thought it was obvious, given the context, but clearly I was wrong. However, I think you're superimposing a lot of stuff here that I simply didn't say or even imply. Even the RAE, which I know has a lot of problems, explicitly acknowledges the diverse meanings of tortilla across the Spanish-speaking world. The OED goes deeper into the etymology, but then you have the problem of an American guy citing an English source to talk about Spanish language. If you have another Spanish-language source on the etymology of tortilla that you'd like to refer me to, I'm wide open.
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I think the manufacturers are mostly just trying to keep you from lighting it on fire, and it you trim away the excess like I did in the video, there's no risk of that. Some parchment paper is coated in silicon, but that's pretty inert when burned, as I understand. Also bear in mind that even if your oven is like 700 F and your stone is that hot, the paper probably won't get that hot, because it'll be transferring heat into the pizza. Lastly, people have been baking pizza on parchment for a long time, and I haven't found record of anyone encountering safety issues, aside from the possibility of fire (which, again, is eliminated by trimming the excess).
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@iroveashe You're entitled to your own cooking philosophy, but this is mine. I don't like measuring, and I don't like having my head in a recipe. I like getting a sense of generally what the food should look, smell and feel like, and then using my senses. It takes fewer dishes, it's more pleasurable, it's more resistant to interruption (i.e. kids), and more conducive to creativity. Part of the reason I don't bother with scientific precision is that I think, within a certain threshold, all of the possible outcomes are good. I like this dough when it's a day old, I like it when it's 9 days old. It's different every step of the way, but always good. And no, I haven't thought about diastatic malt powder in place of sugar. I'm not interested in filling my kitchen with speciality ingredients unless they're going to make a big, big difference. In case of this style pizza, having low-moisture full-fat mozz makes a big difference. Regarding hydration, in my experience, the wetter the dough, the more water escapes during cooking. Yes, obviously, there will come a point where the dough is so wet that it won't crisp up in time, but I think such a dough would be so sticky and loose that you wouldn't be able to stretch it in the first place. If people want baker's percentages and such, they have J Kenji Lopez and a hundred other people. This is how I do things, and if people like it, great. When I asked for advice, I was asking to hear about what YOU do, not what you think I'm doing wrong. The former is friendly and helpful, the latter is pedantic and rude.
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@andresvalera1430 Nope, I didn't try that one, though I'm sure it's tasty. I was trying replicate the style of cake we see in those @DancingBacons videos, where you can see they're using roughly equal parts water, oil, sugar and flour, with a metric ton of eggs: https://youtu.be/uws-Cu5JDSU Certainly you can whip whole eggs to a thick, frothy consistency, especially if you add sugar. But you won't whip in NEARLY as much air. If you don't believe me, go into your kitchen and whip a couple whites to stiff peaks, then whip a couple whole eggs as far as they'll go, and observe the difference in volume.
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@N T A "dough machine"? It's called a stand mixer, and lots of people have them, because they're incredibly useful for lots of things, not just pizza. I have no idea why the fact that "it takes away all the difficulty of making pizza" would be a bad thing, even that claim were true, which I don't think it is. I absolutely did show the kneading process, and if you wan to make a video about a no-knead process, then go ahead. That's not what this was. I made a stiff dough because I knew I was going to be filming a video while making this pizza, and I didn't want the dough to stick to the peel while I futzed with my camera. I don't care about creases. If I wanted an industrially standardized product, I wouldn't make it myself.The reason I put a small amount of sugar in my dough is that I have found, through much experimentation, that it helps the crust get more brown that the relatively low temperatures possible in domestic ovens. The goal is not to do what the pros do — it's to roughly reproduce the same result using grocery-store ingredients and home equipment. Your pizza looks lovely, but it seams closer to Neapolitan-style. I'm going after that NYC utility pizza style, specifically a place I grew up eating at on Long Island called Raimo's.
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@Mrs._Honey_bee certainly a cut bone is a more “open system,” with big channels facilitating the exchange of fluid during a soak. However, I would note that the French traditional marrow preparation you mention calls for brining the meat FAR longer than the minimum soak that kashering demands, according to the source I cited. I noted that when I followed the procedure myself, lots of bright red fluid continued to ooze out of the cut bone even after I followed all the steps. A couple sincere questions I have: To what extent is the discoloration we observe by brining French marrow bones the result of salt denaturing the blood proteins or effecting some other chemical change on the blood components, rather than removing them? From a theological perspective, does it matter that the stuff inside bones isn’t technically whole blood? As I understand it, that fluid lacks plasma, which is the majority component of blood by volume. Again, personally I don’t think any of these question matter very much — they’re only relevant to the claim that kashering literally removes any residual blood in meat, which is what other folks have brought up.
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@caitlinmcguiness1787 Usually Logic, these days. It's hardly the best, but you just get so much for your money. I find the native synths to be really weirdly designed and hard to control, but given the pace at which I have to work these days, I really don't have time to do my own synthesis anyway. I'm generally buying sounds off the rack, and doing some of my "signature" tweaks to them, one of which is to use a vocal transposer effect on an instrument. I take the pitch up by and octave and the formants down by an octave (or vice versa), and it gives you this really ghostly, breathy one with a lot of weird digital blips and bloops that give a lot of variety and texture to the sound without you having to do a lot of work. I also use a vinyl emulation effect a lot to apply slight pitch modulation to tracks, giving them a warbling effect that sounds much more "analogue." Basically my whole life is about finding little high-bang-for-buck cheats for everything, in cooking or music or anything else.
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@ChristianWS. I'm not an engineer or a machinist, so I'm really not able to have an informed opinion on that subject. What I know is that a scholar who studies this stuff (Dr. Mihm) told me that this is an argument that engineers and machinists have made, and he doesn't think it's entirely without merit. I'm willing to accept that assertion, not just in deference to his expertise, but also because I can relate to it in my own experience. In the kitchen, I think grams are, objectively, a less intuitive measure than ounces. You're usually dealing with quantities like 200 or 300 grams, rather than 3 or 4 ounces, and the human brain handles small numbers better than it handles big numbers. Relative to the kinds of quantities we use in the home kitchen, grams are very small, and kilos are very big. Knowing that, it seems conceivable to me that a comparable phenomenon might exist in the context of milling a screw thread. Reminder: none of this is a legit argument against metric, IMHO. I am pro-metric, all the way.
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@chocolatezt people who "love" their knives? i love my family, i like cooking and eating, I appreciate my tools that allow me to do that, but I do not "love" them. don't know about you. as for the "just plain wrong" things, as I understand it, you are talking about a very rare class of knives that are that hard. if people are sophisticated enough to have that kind of steel, they don't need a video like this. every maker of mass-market contemporary asian-style knives that I can think of, like shun and calphalon, recommend the use of honing steels with their products. as for the pull-throughs, absolutely they can do bad things on asian knives, which is why I specified you need to get one that matches your style of knife. that chef's choice asian style pull through works great. anything else that was "just plain wrong"?
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@pistolpete8231 Of course you can make it in two hours. But my way has two advantages. 1) I make the dough at night after my kids have gone to bed (and they're not in my hair), and then I just throw it in the fridge and forget about it. I don't have to wait around for it to rise at room temperature, and I don't have to time it for two hours before I want to have dinner. I just make it, toss it in, and forget about it. Then any day over the next week, I can come home straight form work, turn on the oven and make dinner, really quick. For my lifestyle, this is far more convenient, and I doubt I'm alone. 2) I really do think the dough tastes better after a long slow rise instead of a quick rise. Also, you complained about my checking the dough to see if it had reached the windowpane stage. Of course you don't need to do that. You're probably experienced at this, so you know when the dough is done just by feel. But this video is obviously directed at newbies, and the windowpane test is a great way for them to know if they've kneaded it enough.
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Hi, everyone on this sub-thread. As other have pointed out, the clear scholarly consensus is that "tortilla" is, etymologically-speaking, a diminutive form of "torta." Torta, etymologically-speaking, means cake — a mass that's cooked into a solid. I thought it was obvious in the video that I was talking about etymology, not contemporary definitions, since I had just gotten done explaining that "tortilla" means something totally different in Spain than it means in, say, Mexico. When I said "tortilla just means little cake," I thought it was clear that I was talking about the historical derivation of the word. But apparently that wasn't obvious to folks, and that's my fault. FWIW, my references on the etymology are linked in my pinned comment above.
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@SAM-zn3ct I've been playing with that, and I think the answer is no. The issue is that if you start the pizza on the stovetop, you can use a spatula to peak under the dough and look at it. It messes up the crust a little bit in the stop where you pulled it up, but it's not terrible. In contrast, if you melt and brown the cheese first, you've created a really tight seal of cheese all the way around the rim, so you can't peak under again until you've let the pizza cool thoroughly and chiseled the cheese off the edge. Honestly, what works best is to simply be very conservative when cooking the bottom, then let the pizza cool throughly in the pan, peel it out, heat the pan back up again, then fry the bottom of the pizza a second time. Gives you an outstanding crust. But it's not exactly a "streamlined" process.
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@Laughing_Chinaman 1) It could be millions of people — the number is irrelevant if the one person you're asking to do the work (i.e. me) doesn't have the time; 2) It's not a simple matter of converting like quantities. I work primarily in volume. You work primarily in weights. Volume and weight to not have a constant relationship, particularly when it comes to easily compressed ingredients like flour. I don't know how many grams "1 cup" of flour is. I don't like to cook that way. I like to scoop out my ingredients using volume as a rough guide, and then to adjust based on how the food looks, feels, tastes, etc; 3) My recipes, like most, stem from round quantities — a 1 lb box of pasta, for example. All of the other quantities are related to that original round quantity. Your pasta doesn't come in 1 lb boxes. It comes in 500 gram boxes, which is not the same amount of pasta, and therefore all of the ensuing quantities are going to be a little off; 4) I do plan to do more to accommodate my non-U.S. audience starting in January when I have more time, but I still have not comes up with solutions to these dilemmas.
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@zaaraahmed4087 Sure. But you can easily taste the sauce before serving. You're less likely to cut into one of those pieces of chicken and taste it before serving. Therefore, the easier and more reliable way to season a dish like this, IMHO, is to just season the sauce. Give it a pinch, stir it, taste it. Give it a pinch, stir it, taste it. When it seems just a hair saltier than you'd like it, return the chicken to the pan, coat the pieces, eat.
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@staz334 There you go again, talking about what I'm "supposed" to do. I'm supposed to make this taste the way I want it to taste, which is exactly what I have done.
1) I never claimed to be making soffrito. I use red onion instead of white because it helps darken the color of the sauce, which tends to be a little too light, owing to my use of white wine instead of red. I don't use celery because my wife doesn't like it, and even when I have used it, I've never been able to taste it in the final dish. This sauce is more strongly flavored than a traditional ragu, so I think those kinds of details are inconsequential. I have tried leaving the vegetable in with my meat during searing. It is not possible to to brown the meat as much as I want it to brown it without also burning the vegetables. I know how to cook. If your vegetables are not burning, it's probably because your meat isn't getting very brown.
2) I AM NOT IN BOLOGNA! I am in Macon, Georgia, USA. Your traditions are irrelevent to me. I think pork meat is bland in this sauce, likely owing to the fact that factory-farmed American pork is bland. Beef and lamb offer much stronger flavor that I prefer. Make yours how you want using the best ingredients that are available to you where you live.
3) The flavorings are not "random." These are the flavorings I like. You use the ones you like.
4) I'm making an enormous quantity of sauce here, nearly two gallons. A bottle of wine is not that much, proportionally. I am absolutely trying to make my sauce acidic. I like acidic food generally, and it's particularly important for me to make this sauce acidic because it's going to be greatly diluted by the pasta. I like for my pasta to be very lightly dressed, so my sauces therefore need to be very strong.
5) I have made ragus with milk many times. I think milk is bland. I prefer the recipe I have devised.
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@Mr_Fairdale there’s a reason that the banks of the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile are the centers of civilization no longer. The Nile is a gigantic river and yet Cairo is starting to run out of water. There are simply better places to build large, modern cities, though some people will probably continue to live near the old cradles forever. I think Phoenix is the butt of so many jokes because it’s a particularly extreme example of the sustainability problems that all modern cities struggle with. All of its water has to be brought in by canal from rivers far away, and those rivers are starting to run dry. It was developed almost entirely in the automobile era, so it’s particularly reliant on petroleum, another liquid that has to be brought in from far away (though this will change in the EV era thanks to ample solar power resources). Because it was built during the automobile sprawl era, the building lots are all absurdly large and people want them to be green, which requires a ton of water compared to a tiny back garden or rooftop terrace in Cairo or Baghdad, etc. All that said, I was in downtown Phoenix for 48 hours for a conference once and I had a great time. Very pretty mountains in the distance.
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@Sox148 Jesus Christ, I AM NOT IN BOLOGNA, AND I AM NOT TRYING TO MAKE RAGU ALLA BOLOGNESE! How thick are you? I challenged you to make an argument as to why my recipe wouldn't taste good you literally come back with more observations about how it's not traditional, which AGAIN, I never claimed to be. Are you suffering from a head injury? I never claimed to be making soffritto. My wife doesn't like celery, so I don't put it in. Even then, when I have used it in this recipe, I have never been able to actually taste it at the end. The other flavors are too strong, so there's no point. Chopping onions and carrot in a food processor is totally inconsequential to the taste. How on earth would it affect the taste? The texture may be slightly different when the vegetables are raw, but after three hours of braising, there will be no perceivable difference. Prove me wrong in a blind taste test, prick. Now, give me one actual reason why adding vinegar is bad. One actual reason. I'm waiting.
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Well, traditionally for fish and chips, I'd use a pretty thick piece of cod, which will take maybe 7 minutes to cook? But you also have to get the oil to temperature, dip it in the batter, drop it, fish it out, drain it, season it, cool it, and I stand by my estimate for total cooking time.
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@mitchellbailey3636 You seem to be responding to a video I didn't make. The video makes it very clear that the virus can live on surfaces. No one in the video ever says the virus can't enter through the mouth. Of course respiratory disease-causing viruses can infect you through the mouth — Dr. Diez merely said they're unlikely to make you sick via ingestion. This video presents advice that is totally uncontroversial in the scientific community right now. It says that all available evidence suggests person-to-person is the dominant mode of transmission, therefore the safest way to eat right now is by getting food in a way that minimizes human contact. Interviewing experts and putting them on TV is a basic public service that journalists provide every day. I'm not sure why you think only the CDC should be giving advice, but I will paste what they say on their website, which is the same stuff this video says: "Coronaviruses are generally thought to be spread from person to person through respiratory droplets. Currently, there is no evidence to support transmission of COVID-19 associated with food. Before preparing or eating food it is important to always wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds for general food safety. Throughout the day use a tissue to cover your coughing or sneezing, and wash your hands after blowing your nose, coughing or sneezing, or going to the bathroom. It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object, like a packaging container, that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads. In general, because of poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely very low risk of spread from food products or packaging."
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I mean, you do you, but this is a very intense sauce, and i think a little goes a long way. i suppose it's also closer the Italian tradition of dressing pasta, where they prefer to lightly coat, rather than drown, the noodles. I am, obviously, NOT a stickler for tradition, but in this case, I think the tradition is good. Also, remember the sauce is only one of the flavorings on the pasta — I'm also doing cheese and olive oil. My wife only uses two cubes, FWIW.
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What a small-minded person you seem to be. Are your objections really solely based on the fact that my recipe is non-standard? I never claimed this was an authentic ragu alla bolognese. No, not red wine. I have made it with red wine, many times. White wine tastes better. There are plenty of deep, dark flavors in this already; the white wine balances them with brightness and sweetness. The chicken livers taste fucking amazing in this. Super meaty. As I said, I stole that idea from Barbara Lynch, who uses livers in her bolognese at her many highly-regarded restaurants in Boston. (If the Michelin guide rated restaurants in Boston, she would have two or three stars). Until you've tried it, fuck off with your negativity. Why you're so flummoxed by the balsamic, I honestly have no idea. Sweetness and acidity are totally standard, indeed essential, elements of sauce-making, and the vinegar simply makes the recipe more sweet and sour, which tastes really good. And no, no milk. Dairy is not typically a feature of bolognese sauce in the United States. Though, if you watched to the end, you'd know I often add cream to the sauce after I've made the initial recipe as a base. Lastly, I never claimed to be a chef; I'm an excellent home cook with a camera. In summery, get your tradition-bound, debbie-downer ass off my channel.
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@Potatobrains_ Thanks. Look, I will absolutely not claim to be the world's greatest DP. I literally started making cooking videos to practice my video skills, which were virtually non-existent a year ago. I've gotten better, but I'm still really struggling with a number of things, and matters are complicated by the fact that I'm shooting entirely solo, with just a boom and a consumer-grade camera body, and also, you know, trying to cook well while also operating the camera. I think some of my color and dynamic range issue will get better once I upgrade my body, which i'll do soon. But anyway, the steamy birds-eye view? I literally got that idea from the Channel 4 series Jamie at Home, which is the most beautifully-shot cooking show I've ever seen. I'm sure I didn't do it as well as they did it, but I ain't crazy for trying it.
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The long cold rise slows fermentation, resulting in a finer bubble structure and, I think, better flavor. It's also easier. You just make it the dough, toss it in and forget about it. After a day or two, you can just take it out and make pizza any day for the next week. If your dough isn't rising in the fridge, there are a couple possibilities. You might have your fridge set to be unusually cold. But I think more likely, you're doing something wrong as you're making your dough. Did your yeast bloom thoroughly? Meaning, when you mixed it with a little bit of warm sugar water, did it get super frothy and bubbly? If not, it was dead to begin with, or maybe you killed it by using water that was too hot. Maybe you added your salt to the water and then waited too long to add your flour. The flour dilutes the salinity of the water. If you leave the salt in the water for too long before putting in the flour, the salt can kill the yeast. Another possibility is that your yeast is alive, but you made your dough too dry (i.e. too much flour) and thus it's too stiff to allow the gas created by the yeast to stretch it out. As I wrote in the pinned comment above, I think the dough I demonstrated in this video was a bit too dry. Should be a bit stickier. Good luck!
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@zetablackstar2410 You continue to miss the point. From a historical perspective, the European solid chocolate industry arose from confectioners taking the separated cocoa solids and fat and then recombining them with sugar and other ingredients. That's still how most solid chocolate is made to this day, because it allows manufacturers to control the fat-to-solid ratio. Yes, you can make solid chocolate straight from chocolate liquor, but that's generally not how it's done, except by maybe some small artisanal producers. And even if none of that were the case, the fact would remain that cocoa solids, cocoa butter, and sugar are the three primary components of eating chocolate. The additional fact that the solids and the butter come from the same agricultural product is irrelevant. Milk and cream come from the same agricultural product too, and yet almost all ice cream recipes call for both milk and cream together, as separate ingredients, because combining them allows you to control the fat content of the ice cream, instead of simply being wedded to whatever ratio came out of the cow.
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@psouza4 I never said "taint" as a body part was an adjective. The syntax of his sentence only works with "taint" being taken as a noun describing the body part. It's an attributive noun — a noun functioning as an adjective to modify the noun "taste." This is correct, because there is no adjectival form of "taint" as a body part. "Taint" meaning corrupted, on the other hand, has an adjectival form — tainted — that he would need to use if that's what he meant. I suppose you could argue that he would be using tainted as a transitive verb instead of an adjective, but either way, he has to say tainted if he's talking about corruption. I wouldn't have said anything were this not a weird, recurring thing with Gordon. I have seen several clips where he uses the same, very odd set of words to describe tomato paste. Even if he said "tainted," I think it's still pretty odd. Also, all I was doing was making a joke, which we have now run into the ground. Thanks for the compliment, and thanks for watching!
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1) I never, ever insist that someone cook food MY way; 2) These things are not in conflict in the slightest. Understanding how food works is a related but distinct pursuit from learning how to cook — that's why so many great chefs are able to cook amazing stuff and yet spout objectively false garbage about how searing seals in juices, or whatever. It's valuable to know that flour can take up different volumes depending on its state of compression, and that measuring flour by volume is therefore imprecise. It does not necessarily follow, then, that you have to weigh your flour. You can, instead, just scoop some in with a measuring cup (because you have to scoop it out with something anyway) as a starting point, and then eyeball the rest based on how the dough is looking and feeling, which is the way I prefer to cook, for reasons I have discussed at length. Rather than using gear or processes to precisely recreate someone else's recipe (which is what a lot of AB's methods are about), I prefer to learn how food works so that I can think for myself. I'm not interested in doing someone else's paint-by-numbers exercise; if I want to eat someone else's food, I'll go to a restaurant (which I do often). I want to cook with my eyes up, instead of down in a recipe or on a scale. I want to cook with my senses — putting stuff in until it looks, smells, feels and tastes the way I like it, because the recipe writer has no idea how I like it, especially when it comes to things like salt.
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@Apoz Excuse me, but you are the one who introduced nationality into this conversation, not I. "This is so minimalisticly American," you said of my food. If you're coming from a different culinary frame of reference, I'm curious to know what it is. Thanks for giving me at least some indication. Now, as far as my food is concerned, yes, for these recipes I'm posting on YouTube, I am striving for ease and simplicity. I think that's what will be most helpful to people. So I am trying to keep my ingredient lists as short as possible. It's also true that I often like "clear" food — food with just a few dominant flavors that are allowed to sing soloistically, if you will. I like complex dishes too. I cook a lot of Thai, Indian and Mexican food with tons of spices. Love it. But, for my taste, this particular dish does not need any more herbs or spices. There's plenty of pepper and salt. There's the acidity and sweetness from the wine. There's the pungency of the garlic. There's the intense umami and saltiness of the cheese (which I want to be the dominant flavor), the scent and richness of the olive oil, the acidity and umami of the tomatoes. And yes, even with all of that, I did want an herbal note too, so I put a large quantity of fresh basil from my garden into the sauce at the last minute. I wanted the basil to ring out clearly, not be muddled by other herbal flavors. Eat what you like, but don't tell me that what I like is wrong. I'm a grown man and I've been eating and drinking avidly my entire life. I have traveled internationally quite a bit. I know what I like, and I like this.
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I think that's possible. But if you're going to record on your computer, as opposed to on an external device, it makes no sense to take the sound out of the headphone jack and send it back in again via USB. You'd be converting the sound from digital to analog and back to digital again for no reason, and probably picking up a little noise along the way. You'd do much better to simply buy a piece of audio routing software that would allow you to send the sound of Google Voice (or whatever you're using) and your mic straight into your recording/editing software. If you're on a Mac, I'd recommend Loopback. The reason I like to send my sound to an external device, instead of recording straight to my computer, is for the sake of stability. Computers/programs can freeze and crash, and when that happens, you risk losing everything you recorded. Good external flash recorders are rock solid reliable. When I'm really on my game, I do both: I record straight to my drive, and also to my Zoom as a back-up. Sadly, I'm rarely that on my game!
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@serialbets It's the other way around. Daylight, most of the day, is about 6,000 Kelvin, and therefor functions as a blue filter. Do you not have an outdoor seating area in your restaurant? I've talked to people in the restaurant business who struggle with this phenomenon. The steak will look rosy pink in the interior tungsten lighting, and then when they take it outside to the customer, it suddenly looks overdone. I am not making this up. This is a documented phenomenon that is studied by food scientists. Check the Penn State study I linked in the description. Or, look at this one from Kansas state, where they found people were more likely to consider an undercooked turkey patty as being safe to eat if they viewed it under certain lights: https://jfoodprotection.org/doi/abs/10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-18-392 Or if you just want to believe your own eyes, compare my steak at 3:10 to 3:38. When I lift up the piece and move it two feet away from the window and a closer to the ring light on the camera, the color suddenly looks more red.
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@allisonmeer3425 1) I'm not interested in developing a practiced technique for shaping dough. I am not a restaurant cook. I'm not trying to be a restaurant cook. I am a home cook. My audience is home cooks. I have other things to do with my time than spend hours practicing a technique that is only useful if you're trying to produce a hundred perfectly shaped pizzas a night, which is not a thing I will ever do. I want to get the dough into the pan and get on with my life. So does my audience. If they want a professional product. they'll go to your restaurant. Home cooking and restaurant cooking are fundamentally different pursuits; 2) Those Pastene tomatoes are not pre-seasoned, and I have no idea where you got that idea. I have tasted every canned tomato product commonly available in grocery stores here and tried them for pizza sauce, and that product is far superior. You obviously haven't tried it, so you have not earned an opinion on the subject; 3) I have no idea what your complaint with the basil is. I put basil in the sauce, and the sauce tasted of fresh basil. How exactly is that a waste? 4) Those Galbani sticks contain: "milk, cultures, salt and enzymes." There are no stabilizers. There are no additives. You seem to be confusing the issue with pre-grated cheese, which usually contains starch as an anti-clumping agent and which can impede browning. This is the exact same cheese Galbani sells in block form. It's good. Instead of being a snob about it, you should be congratulating me on my resourcefulness for finding the product I needed in an unexpected form. As you can see in the video, I got even melting and excellent browning. And since when was totally even melting considered by everyone to be desirable trait? I don't like every bite of my pizza to be the same. If you like drained fresh mozz on your pizza, good for you, but it is not objectively "better." I am going for an NYC utility pizza flavor and texture. I like the snap of low moisture mozz, and I especially prefer the stronger flavor that results from the additional fermentation that happens during the high-heat drying process.
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@allisonmeer3425 1) Jesus Christ, dude. Did I ever say that NYC pizza places use cheese sticks? No. I said they generally use whole milk, low-moisture mozz. This is the best whole milk, low moisture mozz I can buy in Macon, Georgia. I can buy a block of Boar's Head from the deli, but it doesn't taste like anything. This is the better cheese. The fact that it's molded into sticks simply isn't that important. 2) I make pizza lots of ways. As you can see on my channel, I have recipes for much more traditional NYC-style pizzas. They still absolutely deviate from the way you'd do it in a professional kitchen. Know why? BECAUSE I'M NOT IN A PROFESSIONAL KITCHEN. My oven doesn't get nearly as hot and I don't have access to the same ingredients, so I have to adapt. Going back to the sauce, that Pastene can is the closest thing from a grocery store that I've ever tasted compared to Full Red, 7/11, or any of the other common canned sauce bases used by NYC utility pizza places.
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1. No, Kenji did not say it "it is equal to either salt directly before or 40 minutes prior." He said that salting at least 40 minutes prior (and ideally much earlier) will give time for the salt to extract water from the steak, mix with it, and then be reabsorbed into the tissue. Salting immediately before does NOT have the same effect, and he was very clear about that. Kenji nonetheless, in other articles, does advocate seasoning immediately in advance as opposed to afterward (when far-advance seasoning is not possible), because he thinks that does a better job of flavoring the crust. I agree with him. HOWEVER, this is an atypical recipe. I'm going to be slicing this steak thin and tossing it in a board sauce. That act would redistribute any salt on my crust throughout the liquid and all over the surface area of the slices. Therefore, in the case of this particular recipe, there is no point in seasoning immediately in advance.
2. The flaky salt I used at the end is a finishing salt. I called it a finishing salt. Kenji likes finishing salts too. It is not the kind of salt I would use to season a steak prior to cooking, and I never said it was. I would use kosher.
Absolutely nothing I said here was a mischaracterization of Kenji's work. You are wrong.
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@MegaIbro123 1) My wife doesn't like celery so I don't use it. If you like it, use it. 2) Random unnecessary aromatics? You're talking about onion and carrot, which are in the classic recipe. 3) Chicken livers are not weird. Historically, the ENTIRE POINT of a meat sauce was to make use of the random leftover scraps from an animal, organ meats including. I guarantee you that generations on nonni put livers, hearts and whatever else they could scrounge up in their sauces. The livers really enhance the flavor, especially in the absence of high-quality pork, which we generally lack in the United States. And, as I said, I didn't come up with the idea. I stole the liver trick from Barbara Lynch, a very highly-regarded chef who puts livers in the bolognese she serves at her excellent restaurant Sportello. 4) The bouillon is not strange at all, considering that many people use stock in their bolognese. Bouillon is just concentrated stock. 5) Sure, I have a heavy hand with the wine in my cooking, but also remember that this recipe makes almost two freaking gallons of sauce. It just isn't that much, proportionally. And I think the classic recipe is bland. It needs more sweet and sour, to my taste, which is what the wine and the vinegar provide. 6) Again, I'm calling this "bolognese sauce" in the Italian-American meaning of the term, which is a sauce of tomatoes and ground meat. This is a sauce of tomatoes and ground meat. The fact that it contains some minor innovations does not change that fact. A non-traditional sandwich is still a sandwich.
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@MegaIbro123 1) You continue to talk about ragú alla bolognese, which THIS IS NOT, NOR DO I CLAIM IT IS. Italians don't even call it "bolognese sauce." You call it ragú. "bolognese sauce" is what we call our damn sauce, not your sauce. 2) The fact that you're continuing to get so bent out of shape over the celery, of all things, is just absurd. I bet if I gave you a blind taste test of two sauces, one with celery and one without, you wouldn't even be able to tell the difference. The other flavors are just too strong. 3) I have cooked the meat with the veggies many times before. The vegetables absolutely do burn IF you evaporate all of the water from the meat and really fry it brown. If they don't burn, then I don't think you're browning your meat enough. 4) As long as you don't burn it, white wine absolutely will not make a sauce bitter. That is nonsense. White white contains almost no tannin. RED WHITE will make your sauce bitter if you use too much and/or over-reduce it. That's why I use white, not red. 5) Again, I will put in the amount of tomatoes I desire. The classic Italian ragú is terribly lacking in acidity, in my opinion. I like lots of tomatoes. And, AGAIN, in the U.S., what we call bolognese is a tomato-based sauce, not a milk-based sauce. So what I'm doing is absolutely traditional. We have our own traditions, and we don't need your permission to express them. 6) There absolutely is Italian-American bolognese sauce. It's what my grandmother taught to me. Fuck you for trying to erase my culture. Seriously. GTFO with that crap. 7) I AM NOT MISINFORMING ANYBODY. I stated in the video, VERY CLEARLY, that this is not the classic ragú recipe. 8) We have many excellent cooks in America. One of the reasons our cuisine is so vibrant is because we are not mindless slaves to tradition, as so many Italians are. "Because this is the way we've always done it" is, by itself, a terrible reason to do anything.
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Ah, wait, I see the issue. In the video, you see me cutting the root end off the garlic before I remove the paper. Yes, I do that, because you have to cut off the root end anyway, and doing it when the paper is still on makes the paper easier to get off. The paper clings to the root. So I cut off the root end, then smash the clove with the side of the knife to release the skin, take the skin and the root away, then chop it up. Pretty common way to chop garlic, I think.
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1) The oil keeps the dough from sticking to the bowl as it rises, and also protects the skin of the dough from drying out. It allows you to extract the ball from the bowl without deflating it. I do a long, slow rise in the fridge because is slows fermentation resulting in a finer bubble structure and, I think, better flavor. You could maybe use less oil in the bowl than I have here, but I think having a good coating of oil around the edge helps it brown at domestic oven temperatures, since oil transfers heat more efficiently than air or water.
2) In the middle of summer when I have beautiful fresh tomatoes from my garden, I do use them in my sauce. But the rest of the year, high-quality canned tomatoes will always be far superior to hot-house-grown "fresh" tomatoes available at the grocery store. Also, the aim of this particular recipe is not to make the best-quality pizza possible; it's to recreate the NYC street pizzeria pizza I grew up with and love, and that is definitionally a low-cost product that uses cheap ingredients. None of those places use fresh tomatoes because they're too expensive and labor-intensive to prepare. Lots of wonderful foods are born from poverty. I would think a Frenchman would know that.
3) As I said in the video, the correct cheese for replicating the NYC-style is whole-milk, low-moisture mozzarella. The only way you can use fresh mozz on a pizza (as in Neapolitan style) is to use far less cheese, otherwise you'll get a huge puddle of whey in the middle of your pizza. Also, mozzarella marketed in the U.S. as "low-moisture" has been dried using a high-heat drying method that causes additional fermentation, and results in a stronger flavor. Again, I would think a Frenchman would know that "fresh" is not always best in food — you have many delicious cheeses that are old and funky. As to why I don't use a grater, as I said in the video, I live in a small city in the deep south, and no grocery store near me sells whole-milk, low-moisture mozz in block form. I can, however, get these Galbani cheese sticks, and they're really very good. It's the same cheese they sell in block form. The easiest way to break them down into small pieces is to cut them with a knife. They're too small and floppy to grate.
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When someone who clearly doesn't know they're talking about accuses me of not knowing what I'm talking about, my feelings are generally unhurt. I will not use less oil in my containers. If you want me to stop doing something, you at least have to tell me why. I, in contrast, will tell you why I use lots of oil. I like to age my dough a very long time, and it gets very soft after 5 or 6 days, and lots of oil helps me get it out without deflating it. Also, the thick coating of oil I get on the outside helps the crust brown at domestic oven temperatures. That's also why I don't flour the ball before shaping; I don't want the flour to absorb the oil. Doing an initial rise before portioning is a totally unnecessary, messy step to add to the process. Unless you've tried it this way and have documented actual differences in the results, hush your mouth. I did not let the dough ball come to room temperature because I was shooting a video by myself, which added lots of time to my process, and keeping the dough cold helped keep it from sticking to the peel. Blow air under the pizza? That's absolutely absurd. The dressed pizza is far too heavy for that to have any affect. No, I do not need to rotate it halfway through cooking. This is a convection oven with a preheated stone. It's not a wood oven with a fire at one end. It is evenly hot all over. Opening the oven to turn it would let heat escape and interfere with the browning of the cheese. I don't care if you've never seen anyone take a pizza out the way I do. I have rested it on aluminum before, and that results in a soggier product, because there is no way for steam to escape out of the bottom. I live in Macon, Georgia, and no, there is no full-fat low-moisture mozz available here except for the Galbani sticks, which taste great, they're just a pain to unwrap. It IS absolutely essential for the cheese to be low moisture if the goal is to reproduce NYC street pizza. The texture and flavor are radically different, due to the extra fermentation that occurs during the drying process. I can tolerate pedantry, and I can tolerate ignorance, but I cannot tolerate ignorant pedantry. Don't step to me, son.
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This is a New York Italian-American dish, and there is a long tradition among some Italian immigrants, generally from southern Italy, of using pecorino in place of parmesan. My grandmother, in fact, referred to pecorino as parmesan; I was a teenager before I learned there was a difference. I continue to use pecorino, in part as a tribute to her, and also because I prefer it. You’ll note that I refer to the dish as “chicken parm,” not “chicken parmigiana.” The name comes from the cheese, but it has evolved in the hands of many generations of Italian-American cooks (including myself) to use other ingredients, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
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@HarryMason18 Ok, those are all fine things to do, but what I did is not "wrongggg." I have reasons for all of the things I did, and none of the things I did were unusual. Certainly "all chefs" do not do it the way you describe. There are different ways of butchering a chicken for different purposes. For fried chicken, I like leaving the wing on the breast, and I am hardly alone in that. It makes the fried breast pieces look like an actual piece of chicken instead of a brown lump. I removed the leg quarters in precisely the fashion you describe, so I don't know what your problem is there. For removing the drum from the thigh, the method you describe is my preferred method too, however it's also very easy for an in experienced person to cut themselves using that method. Since the people most likely to follow my directions are beginners, I generally try to show them the safest method. Taking the breast off the bone is highly unusual for fried chicken. Most people prefer it on the bone. It gives the chicken structure and helps it cook more evenly. If you like to butcher your chicken differently, that's fine. But your characterization of my butchery as "wrong" is, simply, wrong.
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@oszb So, Kenji's experiments make it clear that it takes far longer than the 10 minutes it takes to cook the steak for salt to penetrate the meat. His experiments showed it takes at least 40 minutes for the salt to extract water, dissolve into the water, and then be reabsorbed into the muscle. The reason he advocates for seasoning immediately prior to cooking (when long-prior salting is not an option) is because it results in a nicely seasoned crust. That's all. It doesn't penetrate the meat. if I were going to serve or eat my steak in a more conventional way (which I often do), I would season the steak before cooking. But with this particular method, even if I seasoned the crust, that seasoning would dissolve in the board sauce and be evenly distributed around the pieces during the tossing phase. There simply is no point in seasoning immediately in advance with this method. As far as the cutting board goes, I'm hardly an expert, but I figure that food safety regulators in the U.S. recommend poly boards over wooden ones for a reason — on balance, they're safer. Or so the reasoning goes. Again, not an expert.
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