Cal and Christa DeMercurio
In this episode of Cooking Like a Pro, Chef Cal and Christa dive into a variety of culinary topics, from creamy sauces to breakfast for dinner. Join them as they share their passion for cooking and offer tips and insights for home cooks.
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– Learn how to make a creamy sauce using cream and vinegar without breaking the sauce
– Discover the innovative cooking style of the late chef Charlie Trotter
– Explore the characteristics and flavor profile of the white wine varietal Viognier
– Get tips on selecting ripe melons at farmers markets and the benefits of buying local
– Find out how to make a impressive halibut dish with pie pastry and a mushroom duxelle
Insights
Breakfast for Dinner: “You’ve always got pancake mix on hand. You’ve always got eggs on hand. So you can throw together breakfast for dinner just about any night.”
Cooking Insights: “I didn’t know that you would do cream and vinegar in a sauce and that vinegar because you think of tartar sauce. Tartar sauce is a creamy sauce with acid in it. And it’s the same similar taste profile.”
Timestamp Overview
00:00 Ways to contact, exciting updates, farmers market.
06:03 Tracking system for food, country, type.
07:01 Buy locally grown produce for freshness.
11:53 Unfamiliar with eggos, 60s, breakfast for dinner.
16:10 Pumpkin spice latte waffles, biscuits, omelets, French toast.
18:05 Delicious modell English muffin perfect for Eggs Benedict.
20:10 Prefer white vinegar for perfect poached eggs.
24:06 Pop’s favorite song remembered by daughter Paula.
27:20 Clarified butter enhances flavor and prevents burning.
30:07 Convenience products save time in cooking.
34:26 Chef Trotter broke culinary rules, experimented with flavors.
38:31 Grapes, wines, varietals, blending, white wine production.
41:31 Teach to savor food, enjoy flavors fully.
45:03 Recommend tasting wine samples at restaurants for education.
47:14 Free wine guide and culinary tools available.
Transcript
Christa:
Hey, food fans, welcome to cooking like a pro with Chef Cal and me. Misses chef, his wife, Christa DeMercurio. We’re dishing out culinary intuition, insights and imagination to spice up your meals and make cooking more fun. On today’s episode, my chef, husband and I discuss sweet melons, breakfast for dinner, an amazing halibut dish, and enjoying a glass of viognier. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.
Cal:
Hello, folks, and welcome to cooking like a pro. We’re here with Chef Cal and my wife Christa Mrs chef. She goes by sometimes.
Christa:
Hello.
Cal:
Yeah, but you found cooking like a pro. We appreciate you tuning in. You found us here at 1460 AM again every Wednesday, talking about food. We’d love. If you’d like to join us, if you have a question, you’d like to join us. We’re also at 96.5 fm, and the number down here local is 530-605-4567 that’s 605-4567. And also, how else can they get us? How can they send us a question.
Christa:
Hon, they can do that on a webpage. You can pull it up on your phone or on your laptop. It is cookinglikeapropodcast.net.
Cal:
There you go. So you don’t even have to get on the air if you don’t want to.
Christa:
No.
Cal:
Yeah. Okay.
Christa:
But they can leave us a voice message. They can send us a text message if they’re on their phone.
Cal:
All right, well, so a variety of ways to get ahold of us, folks, but we’ve got some wonderful things to talk about for the next hour. So let’s dive right in or jump right in front of the stove, so to speak. Our fresh update that we’ve been starting with for each of our show shows so far. Actually, we’re starting our second month here. So you went down to the, to the farmers market? I didn’t get a chance to go. I was. I don’t know where I was, but I was somewhere else.
Christa:
Yeah.
Cal:
And what’d you find down there, hun?
Christa:
I found melons. Melons this week and some really nice ones I found in Ambrosia. And something I’ve never heard of before is a Charlynne.
Cal:
Charlynne. Charlynne was excellent.
Christa:
That was just like our son says, like cotton candy and marshmallow melon.
Cal:
Yeah. I don’t think he’s ever eaten melon. No, not like that.
Christa:
Not like that. That is so sweet.
Cal:
He’s kind of at that age, you know, where he’s 15. And like I say, isaac, trust me. Do you. I say, do you trust your dad? Then taste this. Okay? Because he’s kind of at a place where he needs to either say yes or no. And he’s been saying yes. He’s actually really been trying a lot. His, his menu is increasing, so to.
Christa:
Speak, but his palate pulled up the sweetness.
Cal:
It was like sugar.
Christa:
Yeah, it was like eating cotton candy.
Cal:
Yeah, a lot of those are, a lot of the different melons out there have. Have a lot of. A lot of sugar to them. There’s a cantaloupe and honeydew, which are lower in sugar, but then your watermelon is quite a bit higher in sugar. So you might want to check with your, if you have a diabetes or concern with sugar, then watermelon. You might want to just check before you pound a whole melon or something. But melons are great. They’re high in fiber, vitamins, a circumental, just nutrients, nutrients, antioxidants, too.
Christa:
And they’re very refreshing, especially in the.
Cal:
Summertime this time of year. I’ve used them for chilled soups before, which, remember, we made the gazpacho about a few weeks back, which is a great soup for the summertime.
Christa:
You can make a watermelon gazpacho.
Cal:
Yeah, you can use. In fact, there’s cucumber in the gazpacho that I make as well. So you can make a variety of different ones. But the challenge with taking a melon and turning it into a soup is it’s, you have to really differentiate it from being dessert because it can just be too sweet. So you have to add some acid to it, some sort of vinegar, and then maybe even some sort of a spice. Cloves, nutmeg, those kind of.
Christa:
I had addiction in high school. There was a local shop that made watermelon milkshakes.
Cal:
Oh, no, that sounds good.
Christa:
Oh, I was addicted to them every single week. I had to go get one.
Cal:
Sounds like. It sounds like a good one. Ought to try that. I know that well, when I date myself back to. Oh, when was this? This must have been the late seventies. No, no, no. This was in the early eighties, and I was running cross country at the local college, local JC here. And we used to, the coach just sent us out on runs, and we’d run 20 miles and we’d come back, you know, however many hours later it was.
Cal:
But we’d come back through this one particular field because we’d come back down the highway on 299, and we had to run across this field, and it had a crenshaws, two different types of melon. But we would stop, literally, and just break the melon open and eat it.
Christa:
Is a crenshaw an orange melon? I’m not real familiar with that one.
Cal:
Yeah, yeah, it can be. It’s orange, kind of like a cantaloupe. It’s. It’s part of that. You know, they’re all part of the gourd family. It’s actually part of what we call a musk melonen. But they’re dry field harvested. There’s a galea out there as well.
Cal:
Again, there’s a lot of hybrids that they’re making where they’ll take one varietal and another varietal and kind of do whatever they do.
Christa:
That’s why I think the Charlin was a hybrid, like an ambrosia.
Cal:
And they’re lab coats, and they just come up with. Come up with something. Something cool. But, yeah, they’re great. One thing that I wanted to mention is there’s this label. There’s this little sticky tag, if you’ll notice, when you get an apple or you get a melon, and it’s actually called a pli tag, it stands for positive lot identification. And what. That’s the purpose of that.
Cal:
It tells you a couple of different things. But if there is a breakout of some sort of a bacteria, bacterial disease of some sort or something wrong, e. Coli, they need to be able to track it back to where it was picked. So with whatever’s picked in this particular lot gets this particular sticker on that, and the sticker is going to have that. It’s going to also say what country it’s from. It’ll usually say the brand and it will say the type. I know that I have a tag sit in front of me here because it was from. I had an apple today, and it was a Fuji.
Cal:
Fuji’s? Yeah. Fuji is my best. That’s my favorite apple.
Christa:
That’s my favorite for just eating, you.
Cal:
Know, not for cooking. Doesn’t really work good for cooking. Doesn’t hold up like a granny Smith or some, you know, but. But a fuji is my favorite. Just grab an apple and eat it. But anyway, so the supplier has to have these tags on there. So if you look at the tag, most people just pick it off and throw it away. There is helpful information on that, especially if you want to see where it’s coming from.
Cal:
Because again, if it’s on your tomato and it says it’s from, you know, Mexico or Canada or somewhere that where it takes a long time to get here. That means it had to be picked before it was completely ripe because it’s going to ripen through the process of traveling here. So, you know, you generally want to get something that’s fairly close. You know, if they get your strawberries and they say, you know, Driscoll, well, you know, Driscoll’s not that far away. You know, you just on the other side of Gilroy down there and that kind of in the. Down towards another side of the bay. But, you know, so if you’re getting strawberries from there, certainly the ones that are coming from grown around here, they.
Christa:
Don’T need a sticker.
Cal:
Yeah, well, they don’t need a sticker. I don’t even know if that. If they have a Shasta county sticker. I don’t think they have a Shasta county sticker.
Christa:
Yeah, we actually had somebody come up from down around the Sacramento area. They drove 2 hours to get their produce up here. Still close.
Cal:
Yeah, yeah, still close. And. But this is the time of year where the farmer markets are out there. Farmers markets are just a great place to go because what I love about that is talking to the growers, talking to the people that are picking it, talking to the people that are harvesting it, you know, from the field. And you can get additional information. And there’s just some things, you know, you need to know. Like we’ve had a lot of, for example, dry weather here, hot, hot, dry weather. But, for example, if it.
Cal:
If we get rain, then, you know, you’re gonna have to be careful with your lettuce, because lettuce grows straight up when you’re talking about, like, something like a romaine lettuce, a leaf lettuce, green lettuce, or a green leaf, red leaf. Those grow straight up, and they’re harvested that way. So because they’re standing up when it rains, you can get dirt in there. And then anytime you can get bugs in there. So you want to make sure that you clean that really well. And there’s actually a. I did a video on that YouTube video. Is that up yet? Nope.
Christa:
The one where you were shaking the water out?
Cal:
Yes. Yeah.
Christa:
All over the floor.
Cal:
Well, yeah, but that’s. Well, I mean, you got to get it. You want on the floor. You want it in your salad.
Christa:
Okay.
Cal:
You know. You know, then you’re. Salad dressing ends up at the bottom of your plate. You want your lettuce to be cold and crisp. So is that up yet, or are we still editing that okay, well, we’ll get that. We’ll get that done and up to you. Because how you clean your lettuces is also very, very important. But again, melons, perfect time of the year.
Cal:
Some great varieties out there. Take a look. How to tell when a, when a melon is ripe, especially your melons, like your ambrosias and youre a, your cantaloupe, your honeydews. What you want to do is the end of the, of the melon that is furthest away from where it, it is picked from, from where the stem would have been. It needs to be able to depress that. You need to be able to push that in. It should not be soft, but you should be able to depress it a.
Christa:
Little bit, kind of like you would in avocado. Just a little bit of give to it. It can move, but not stiff.
Cal:
Little bit of give. And then you should, then you can smell it, and it should smell sweet. Whatever the flavor of the, the melon is inside, you should be able to smell that from that end, too. So when you bring it home and.
Christa:
Sit on the table, wow. You should smell that clear across the room.
Cal:
All about melons and even watermelons. So we appreciate you tuning in here again. This is Cooking Like a Pro, Chef Cal and my beautiful wife, Christa. We’ll be back in just a moment.
Cal:
I can guarantee that you’re gonna have a ball learning how to do the watermelon craw. Well, we gotta hunt a gallon. We read one way, biggest watermelons on the fine. If you sift the summer, put a bath, don’t drive, do the watermelon crawl.
Christa:
Hey, food fans, let’s talk about making food so good, you’ll want to stick a fork in it. Whether you’re looking to impress your family or simply enjoy your time in the kitchen, we’ve got you covered with tips, tricks, and tempting morsels of culinary wisdom. You can even contact us with your cooking questions and get expert answers. You don’t want to miss out on the delicious details right here on cooking like a pro podcast.
Cal:
Waffles. Yeah, we like waffles. Do you like pancakes? Yeah, we like pancakes. Do you like french toast? Yeah, we like french toast. Can’t wait to get a mouse. Waffles.
Cal:
Oh, boy. Waffles. I’m ready for this. I’m excited about this next segment.
Christa:
Okay. Eggo waffles or belgian waffles?
Cal:
Oh, don’t say eggo waffles. Not on a chef show. Come on. You know, I think my dad’s father actually invented eggo waffles. Because I remember going back to Colorado just decades and decades ago. We were real, real small. And I remember today we’re gonna have waffles. And he grabbed them out of the freezer already made and put them in the toaster When you buy through any affiliate links on our site (i.e. Amazon), we may earn an affiliate commission. Happy shopping!.
Cal:
Never seen it before. So I’m sure this is way before they invented eggos because this was like in the, I don’t know, mid late sixties or something. But anyway, anyway, getting to our topic for the. For the be block, here is a breakfast for dinner. Now, the thing about breakfast for dinner, and I don’t know how many people out there enjoy this. I was talking to my, my mom and dad because we, we had breakfast for dinner a lot. And I asked dad, I said, you know, where’d this come from? It’s a generational thing or something. Because just out of curiosity, he says, no, I like breakfast.
Cal:
I asked mom, and she goes, no, your dad likes breakfast. Okay, so we have breakfast for dinner. And I remember I was working in a. I had a location here. It was about four years ago. It was an independent living facility. And we had about 80, I think, residents and just my brother’s wife’s dad, Jack. I remember he said, hey, can we have breakfast for dinner? So I said, sure.
Cal:
What do you want? He goes, I want an omelet. So I started an omelette. So these are people in the age category of 80, give or take. Some higher, a few, maybe a little bit lower. And I’ll tell you, everybody, I mean, out of 80 people, I’d make like 78 waffles. It was just crazy how many people of that generation, which is the generation, you know, just prior to me and mine, just left breakfast for dinner. So I don’t know if any. Hey, if you’re out there and you have any insights on where breakfast for dinner came from, maybe give us a.
Cal:
Give us a call down here.
Christa:
Comfort food. I mean, you know, having IHOP available at, you know, 6:00, 7:00, midnight. When you’re rolling through a town, it’s a comfort.
Cal:
And I agree, because those are when Denny’s and IHOP, these restaurants that have been around for quite a while, they’re pretty much along thoroughfares, you know, you’ll see them, you know, down. Like, you know, I five all the way down. And you’re right, they were open 24 hours. And you could, you know, people just pop in. And so breakfast was on the menu. And I always thought that that was a. What was a cool thing. But I don’t know.
Cal:
It just maybe it’s just because it’s unique but salty and sweet. Right? Bacon, waffles, syrup, pancakes, convenience.
Christa:
I mean, we do that a lot. It’s like, hey, what do you want for dinner? We haven’t been shopping recently. You’ve always, well, we always have bacon on hand. We’ve always got sausage in the freezer on hand. You’ve always got pancake mix on hand. You’ve always got eggs on hand. So you can throw together breakfast for dinner just about any nice.
Cal:
Sweetheart, sweethearts, everybody has bacon on hand. Everybody has bacon always on hand. Yeah. Our 15 year old would literally not eat, I don’t think if it, if it was for bacon.
Christa:
Everything’s better with bacon.
Cal:
Plus, we have our chickens. Our chickens, they’re, boy, I tell you, we get some great, great, great eggs. Just, there’s more yolk than there is white. These things are just luscious. So, matter of fact, when you whisk them up, they almost come out like almost orange. Almost orange.
Christa:
They have a lot of color to them.
Cal:
Anyway, let’s get to our topic on breakfast for dinner. Variety of things. Waffles. Real good. And again, if you make waffle batter, pancake batter, you can make it the day before, you can have it for breakfast and then maybe two days later have it for dinner. All you’re going to want to do is as that flour tightens it up, you’re going to want to add a little bit more water to it and just loosen it up a little bit. Get it to that consistency that it was when you first made it.
Christa:
What’s the difference between waffle batter and pancake batter? Is it more eggs in a waffle battery a little different about it?
Cal:
Well, in a waffle batter, you’re always going to have oil because you don’t want it, want it to stick in pancake batter. You don’t always have that. But, you know, eggs are going to help expand it a little bit. It really depends on the mix. These days, most of the mixes are just add water to them, you know, so, but any kind of flavoring, any kind of spice, any kind of seasoning that you might want to add, I know that chicken waffles is a real big thing. Some actual corp franchisees and some holidays are coming.
Christa:
Pumpkin spice latte waffles.
Cal:
Pumpkin spice latte waffles. I have to write that one down. But biscuits and gravy, I mentioned omelets earlier. French toast again, I mentioned, but again, it’s that combination of sweet and salty that I did that we really crave a lot. Generally, I think most health professionals would probably say lunch should be your bigger meal of the day. Some say breakfast because you’re starting after basically a period of fasting after, you know, you’ve been sleeping. But, yeah, I don’t know that I’d eat a, you know, a waffle or a big stack of, you know, pancakes before I went to bed because I just sit there. But, you know.
Cal:
Oh, and english muffins. Yesterday, I took a quick trip down to Napa Valley, California, and picked up, I went by Modell and picked up my wife’s favorite english muffins with focaccia bread.
Christa:
Focaccia?
Cal:
Yeah, it’s, it’s these, these muffins. Or, in fact, they, they’re, they’re so good, they, they limit the amount you.
Christa:
Can actually buy, and they ship them.
Cal:
Around the world, and they’re, they’re, they’re light, they’re airy, they’re fluffy. They, you know, they have the cornmeal kind of a crust on them when they, when they bake them off in those pans. And, and it’s just the method of the way that they cook them. And I know you’ve made english muffins before.
Christa:
I have gotten their recipe, and I’ve made the model bakery muff muffins on the.
Cal:
So I call it Modell. You call it model? I think Modell sounds.
Christa:
Modell sounds french.
Cal:
It sounds french. Yeah.
Christa:
But they named it, like, you know, a model t, a model a. It was, it was old. They found a coin in the wall of the bakery when they took it over and found out that’s what it was called, was originally called the model bakery.
Cal:
Really? Model. Okay. All right. Well, model. Model, either one. They only had the one up at the north tip of the, of the valley, and now they have another one down in Napa City itself, which is right there.
Christa:
And they have a cookbook.
Cal:
Yep.
Christa:
You can make all of their stuff.
Cal:
Yeah. So anyway, so modell english muffin again, if you want to do a eggs benedict, you can’t go wrong. You need a really good muffin, something with lots of nooks and crannies to get that, that crisp and that butteriness in there. Of course, traditionally would be canadian bacon, which is just, you know, the cured back kind of. If it was a, a beef, it would be kind of that filet mignon piece of the bat or the back strap. Some might call it on a deer, but it’s off the pork, so it’s that same loin that same boneless loin with the bone taken off of it. But then that’s cured and smoked, and that’s where we get our canadian bacon.
Christa:
It’s funny. It is not actually called canadian bacon in Canada. Our canadian friends said it’s called back bacon. They don’t have canadian bacon.
Cal:
It comes from the back.
Christa:
Yeah.
Cal:
Well, do they have american bacon?
Christa:
They might have american bacon for the best.
Cal:
Dear friends in Edmonton. Edmonton, yeah, Canada. And then a nice poached egg on there and some nice hollandaise sauce. And, you know, hollandaise sauce is one of the five mother sauces. It’s the most challenging problem, you know, to make because there’s, you know, it can be broken. There’s a few different things that can, can happen to it. But, you know, they also have a. Nor the normal.
Christa:
Yeah, that is my go to.
Cal:
Yeah, they’re a great company. I know a lot of the chefs that work in the, you know, in their lab coats and such in there and their own chemist type, but, yeah, it’s. They make a great little mix. Poaching an egg. Poaching egg. Simple. You, right, you want to bring your water. I’ve literally taught thousands and thousands about how to poach eggs, because it’s, you know, cooks just basically, they come in, in the morning, they put their water on there.
Cal:
They turn it on. They just boil. It looks like you’re boiling. Poaching eggs and boiling milk or something. No, you want that water to just be simmering. Bring your water up to a simmer, and you just have to have some acid in there. These days, they use vinegar. Distilled white vinegar is fine.
Cal:
Some vinegars are too strong. I wouldn’t use a red wine vinegar, just a white vinegar. In the old days, we actually used to use pickle juice. Yeah. So we’d have a, we’d get our water come up to a simmer, we’d add some pickle juice. Then you crack your eggs in there, and then you set your timer for three minutes. And then at three minutes on the nose, you go ahead and use a slotted spoon, and you take that out, let that water drip off of it, and there you go. That’s the perfect, perfect poached egg.
Cal:
Three minutes.
Christa:
I think you taught me. You bring up to a boil, then you switch it off for just a moment while you put the egg in, so you don’t have that heavy agitation. Then turn it back on.
Cal:
You’re talking about boiled eggs.
Christa:
Boiled eggs. I thought you did that for poaching.
Cal:
No, hard boiled eggs. You do do that because you don’t want the egg. You want the egg to start cook before the shell cracks because you don’t want to have that leakage coming from there. But no, you just keep it on simmer the whole time. You’re poaching eggs three minutes and you’re set again, hollandaise on that variety of different ways to do it. It is, of course, one of the more traditional breakfasts that you see. But it’s great.
Christa:
What kind of riffs can you do on an eggs Benedict? I know some people try to do different things to it. Use different proteins.
Cal:
Yeah, you could do a different protein on it. I wouldn’t call it, you know, eggs Benedict. Of course, you know, eggs Benedict Arnold. You know, I imagine it came from somewhere around there. I didn’t google it, but, but no, you can change the protein. If you wanted to do something like a thin grilled, you do want it thin because you want, it’s a knife and fork breakfast, but you still want to, you know, want it to be fairly thin. So you could use just something easy to cut. Pounded out thin chicken would be fine.
Cal:
One thing that’s real popular is using steamed spinach. So you steam some spinach and dry it real well if you’re going to use a muffin. But most of the time when they do it, eggs florentine.
Christa:
It’s called florentine.
Cal:
Yeah. They don’t, they just put the spinach down. They’ll put the egg in it, and then that can actually get hollandaise or it can get a cream sauce.
Christa:
What if you did like, a corned beef instead of corned beef hatch and.
Cal:
That would get a little bit of nutmeg on, too. Yeah, you can do. Yeah. Well, corned beef. I mean, you know me, I love corned beef and hash. And a poached egg is something that’s, that’s kind of the best egg for it. So. Yeah.
Cal:
And then, but as far as the sauce, again, you can be creative. Huevos rancheros is kind of a take on that as well.
Christa:
No, I’ve actually never had that. What’s my favorite?
Cal:
The red sauce and the poached egg. And again, that can, can get a variety of things on it, but that, that would be more of a red sauce. You could even do that on, like, a carne, not carna sabeta, like a polo. The, what’s the green pork?
Christa:
I can’t think of it right now because she put me on the spot. Okay, it’s fair day, but I’m like.
Cal:
Yeah, chili verde versus. But so, yes, you can. You know, that’s the thing about cooking, is just be creative, enjoy it, have fun. There’s these hard rules. Just kind of start with, then after that, it’s all flexible. So this is, again, cooking like a pro. We’ll be back in just a moment. Let’s take a quick break at the bottom of the hour.
Cal:
Thanks for listening.
Cal:
And I said, what about breakfast is Tiffany? She said, I think I remember the film, and I recall our face. We both kind of liked it. And I said, wow. That’s the one thing we got. I don’t want french fried potatoes, red, ripe tomatoes. I’m never satisfied. I want the rim frenzy with the r’s, and they wish a fault on the side. I don’t want pork chops, bacon that won’t awaken my appetite inside.
Cal:
I want the brown, frantic songs with the odd.
Cal:
Oh, there you go. Frim fram sauce.
Christa:
She said she didn’t want bacon. Why would she want bacon?
Cal:
I’m not sure, but that one’s going out. That went out to you, Jack. Paula, his daughter, said that was one of pop’s favorite songs. So anyway, but, yeah, so I made a dish for my wife the other day, and this is a dish that has a history to it. It will be in the cookbook, and we’ll be talking more and more about. About that in the coming days, weeks, months, and hopefully not too much longer than that. But this is a dish that when I very first started and I had met, I came up to a chef, and I was 16, and I mentioned this, I think one of our first shows that I just went in the back of his kitchen. He’s in there banging pots and pans around.
Cal:
And I said, chef, I’d like to wash your dishes for free if you let me just watch you cook. And that kind of started this friendship, and, you know, that was way before child protective services. And, I mean, you could get away with those things, you know, I suppose. I don’t know. Used to be a lot different. But anyway, I volunteered and I really enjoyed it, and we, we really hit it off. And I came in there for dinner, a real special meal that I asked him to prepare for me. I just said, here.
Cal:
I think I gave him a. That was a lot of money. I would have been, you know, 82 or something, super early eighties. And I said, here’s a got caviar. I got all kinds of things that, as a kid I never had before. Remember, I’m born and not born, but pretty much raised since I was born up here in the north state.
Christa:
And we don’t have that kind of food up here today.
Cal:
Not a whole lot of exotic things. Well, you know, Dean McKerrows, we. We were blessed to be able to do that for. For a long time. But anyway, so this dish that he made me and you just take a long filet. Remember, when we talk about seafood, it’s fillette, two elves. We talk about beef. It’s one l filet.
Cal:
So fillet. So we’re talking about a filet of a halibut, about 7oz, which is really good size.
Christa:
I mean, it’s a chunk of fish.
Cal:
Yeah, yeah. And we just kind of put a cut, maybe a one and a half inch cut at the end, and we kind of spread open one end of the fish just a couple of inches, and we cover it with puff pastry and it. And so we can make it in the shape of a fish. So we take the halibut, and the very first thing we do is we make a mushroom duck cell. Now, I was trained. I went through a french apprenticeship program. We always call it a duck cell. I heard it on some food show of some sort the other day, called it duck cells or something different, but I’m calling it duck cell.
Cal:
Okay, Duxelle. And really what it is, it’s mushrooms cooked down to a paste. So you’re just gonna start off with a little bit of butter. Remember, when you’re cooking with butter, it always helps if you’re going to saute it, which is cooking over high heat in a hot saute pan. You want to what we call clarify it. So you want to melt the butter down, and then you want to take the salt that comes to the top of the butter and then the milk solids, which go to the bottom, and you want to discard those. You can actually use the top salt. That’s good.
Cal:
We used to throw it on our vegetables because it’s just salty butter, but anyway, it tastes great. So we use that clarified butter because the clarified without the milk or the dairy in it is going to have a much higher burning point. So you’re going to be able to get it hotter without it burning. So you want to get your oil medium hot. You want to throw in some garlic, you want to throw in some shallots, maybe one part garlic, two part shallots. When I say a part, in this case, if it was a teaspoon of garlic, then that was considered one part, then two part shallot would be two teaspoons. So if it was a tablespoon in one part, two parts would be two tablespoons. So we still throw that in the pan.
Cal:
Let that just start to cook up. Do not let it brown. Never let your garlic brown. Once your garlic browns, throw it out, start over.
Christa:
So are you doing like a sweating method? Just trying to get it to trickle?
Cal:
No, no, we’re not sweating. It’s a high temp. So we’re going to go ahead and saute it. Then we’re going to throw in our mushrooms and we’re going to chop those up. You can slice them and then, you know, use a little chopper. If you have a little, you know, if you’re in a saute pan, you might want to use something made out of wood or something made out of high temperature, you know.
Christa:
Well, the chopper that you can get on our, through our website on Amazon is the one that we use all the time.
Cal:
That thing’s amazing. The chop, anything is that pampered, chef, what is that?
Christa:
No, that, well, that’s where we first got it. They were the first ones come out with it. Now there’s lots of knockoffs at Farberware is who makes it. Now you can get on Amazon. So if you go to culinaryyours.net and click on our shop, you will find the Farberware chopper that we’re talking about that we use to chop up the mushrooms.
Cal:
Yeah. And there is nothing better that I found. If I’m doing like ground beef, ground sausage, and I want to chop something up in the pan, it’s just, it’s great.
Christa:
It’s like $8.
Cal:
It’s really heavy. A heavy plastic material of some sort, maybe silicone or something, but it chops it up. Great. So we’ve sauteed this up and the mushrooms are now tender. We’re going to let that keep going and then we’re going to go ahead and add some cream to that. And basically what we’re making is we’re making, making a paste. All right? So, you know, you’re not adding a whole lot of cream, maybe a quarter cup, half cup, depending on how many mushrooms you’re using. But then we cook this down and it turns into a paste.
Cal:
Once you add the cream, let it boil till it starts to simmer down. And then go ahead and just reduce the temperature until the cream is completely, you know, folded in to the mushrooms. And then go ahead and shut that off and set that aside. And then what we do is we take this mushroom duxel, this mushroom paste, and this happens to be what you use when you make a beef Wellington, also a traditional French beef Wellington also has mushroom duxel on it as well. But this duxel goes on the halibut, and then the halibut’s covered with pastry.
Christa:
Was that a pie dough that you used or a phyllo dough? What type of did you use?
Cal:
Yeah, that was just a pie dough. Just go.
Christa:
It’s like a Pillsbury pie dough that you rolled out.
Cal:
Exactly. Exactly. So you know, you can make your own, of course, if you want to spend the time on that again, I think that what we look at when we talk about this, and we’ve talked about it before, is these Convenience products. These things are saving you time. That’s a big, big part of the whole process of cooking. Not everyone has time to maybe make this from scratch or that from scratch. So maybe you start off with a product that’s maybe a frozen product or maybe even a canned product. On canned stuff, you really don’t want to stay away from.
Christa:
It depends upon the product.
Cal:
Well, stay away from your vegetables. I mean, canning, when you can something, you pretty much destroy the vitamin and minerals. Okay. So you always want to go with fresh when it comes to your vegetables and most of your fruits as well, when available. But, hey, if you’re in the middle.
Christa:
Winter and you need to keep it.
Cal:
Till next year and you want cherries, you’re probably planning on getting some canned ones.
Christa:
But anyway, you got this big whole piece, this filet of halibut. Just white fish.
Cal:
Yeah. And then we just went 400 degrees, a little bit hot. You want that pastry to brown. When the fish to cook all the way through, you don’t want the fish to fish to come out dry. You don’t want the pastry to get undercooked or overcooked. So it’s a matter of just practicing with it. Usually takes ten to twelve minutes how.
Christa:
Long it was done, because I missed that part. Did you do a temperature gauge? Did you do it by touch?
Cal:
I just wanted. I knew it’d be done. I’ve made this dish a lot. So then that’s kind of like when you get used to cooking something and you know that that’s done by looking at it. I knew that the fish would be done because it was almost an inch thick. So I knew that by the time the pastry was. Was nicely brown, the fish would be cooked.
Christa:
And it’s a little more that the color of the fish changes a little bit, right?
Cal:
Yeah. It’s no longer opaque. It’s no longer translucent.
Christa:
Okay.
Cal:
It will become a solid. And in the case for halibut, it would become a solid white. Then we serve that with a burblanc, a bur blanc. Bur meaning butter. Butter and blanc meaning white. White. Yeah. So it’s a white butter sauce, a white butter french sauce where you’ll take usually equal parts cream and vinegar.
Cal:
And you can use your garlic and your shallots, but you’re going to take your cream and vinegar and you’re just going to boil that and you’re just going to continuously boil it. Now if you boil milk, it’s going to break or will curl. But with cream, with heavy cream, 40% it won’t. And it will just reduce and reduce. It would just become this nice lush, lush flavor. To one cup of cream and to one cup of vinegar I added 4oz or a quarter pound of butter. And then your garlic, shallots, salt, white pepper. Just a beautiful sauce.
Cal:
And the thing is, this dish is so creamy that it really needs something.
Christa:
To cut through it.
Cal:
Exactly.
Christa:
And that’s. I was surprised. I didn’t know that you would do cream and vinegar in a sauce and that vinegar because you think of tartar sauce. Tartar sauce is a creamy sauce with acid in it. And it’s the same similar taste profile.
Cal:
You know, if you’re making your own tartar sauce, instead of just using a regular vinegar, use a malt. Malt vinegar. Because malt vinegar is something that. Yeah, I’ve always. That’s how I’ve always done it and. Or for decades anyway. And it’s just, you know, malt vinegar goes great with fish and chips and that’s kind of generally what you’re going to dip that in. And then I.
Cal:
And I also wanted to mention something that popped in my head the other day. I was going through my thousand cookbooks at home and again, I started collecting books way before there was this thing called Internet. But Charlie Trotter, and just amazing gentleman, died way too young. You can actually go. If you want to know the heart that I have for cooking, you can go online and search Charlie Trotter ACF keynote address Charlie Trotter ACF keynote address and it’s just, it’s him talking. He’s given the keynote address to the American Culinary Federation. This was a while back. He passed away maybe probably been about ten years.
Christa:
About ten years now.
Cal:
Yeah. But just amazing, man. His restaurant was in Chicago and this guy was, was a genius. He was actually a anthropologist. And he just decided to become a chef.
Christa:
Very well learned.
Cal:
Yeah. And he just wanted to make food taste good. So, I mean, so he broke a lot of different things. For example, if he might take a halibut dish and cook it by poaching it in veal stock, which of course is a white beef stock, which you really wouldn’t do as a french chef or even american chef for that matter. But he experimented on these things because he, first off, you got like, you know, french laundry and Thomas Keller does down in Napa Valley in Yountville is he got the, they get the best ingredients and then you just let the ingredients speak for themselves. But I remember once we had a nine course meal there with three dear friends of mine, Dennis, one, who’s no longer with us, he was a local chef here, but we had a nine course meal. And then chef Trotter threw in a course in between each course. So we ate for 5 hours.
Cal:
We had 18 courses. And remember, a course is only like three bites, you know, and it’s just this amazing array of flavors. And, and you have this, and you take these, these three bites of this food course of whatever it is, and you just have this, this sense of sadness because it’s all gone. And until the next course comes and then you forgot all about that one. Maybe like when you’re young and you get a new, you know, significant other or something.
Christa:
It took me 5 hours. It would take 5 hours to get through that much food because you know me, I’m not a big eater. So a couple bites and I’m full.
Cal:
Oh, well, it was, you know, and also very, very expensive. But, you know, you only go around once and it was always a lot of fun.
Christa:
But what’s really cool about Charlie Trotter now is you can get his videos. They’re starting to post them from the kitchen sessions online.
Cal:
Well, that’s always a good thing. So cooking like a pro. We’ll be back in just a moment. You found us at KCNR. That’s 1460 am. Back tomorrow.
Cal:
They have starved in their eyes on this lovely side by side with your loved one when the world seems to.
Cal:
Shine like you’ve had too much wine that’s a. Bells will ring tingling, tingling and you’ll sing. Oh, there you go. Thank you, Dino. Dino. You know martin? Yes. Gosh, people even know that name anymore. And there the generations to come.
Cal:
No, I don’t know. I mentioned the word. I mentioned Frank Sinatra to someone that was, they were only like 15 years younger than me. Never heard of them. But anyway, this is our wine segment that we’re going to be talking about some wines we’ve been talking about and taking different varietals, so each, each week to talk about. And this week we picked a white varietal that’s been just a favorite of mine as well as my wife’s ever since this first kind of came. Well, before it came on the scene. You didn’t really even see it anywhere.
Cal:
When we first. I’m sure we were the first restaurant in the north state to have it. Back in 070809, when we had Rivers restaurant.
Christa:
The first time I ever had it, we were staying in Napa. And then next door was this winery called Der Yush. And I’d never had viognier before, and I fell in love with it.
Cal:
Viognier. Viognier. It’s just, I like it because it’s in between the Chardonnays of the nineties, where they were real buttery and a lot of malolactic fermentation going on to get that lactate flavor. And then a lot of. They’d seen a lot of barrel time, so they had a lot of that toastiness. So they were all. A lot of the Chardonnays were just coming out kind of very, very similar. And then on the other side of that, you had your, you know, your other whites that were on the sweeter side.
Cal:
Your geverse caminers, your Rieslings. I probably put some of your blushes in that category as well. And then you had a little bit drier wines, like with your Sauvignon blancs. And there’s a variety of other ones that are in there. But viognier, again, started out as kind of a blending grape, and it just became its own, its own thing there, where people just started doing it as a standalone varietal. So when I say varietal, varietal is the type of grape, and again, the law in California is. It’s different a little bit everywhere, but depending on the percentage of that varietal that needs to be in there, because if it’s used, if you have, like, let’s say you have chardonnay, Sauvignon blanc, and Villnier, and you want to make a blend, and there’s not a certain percentage of any one of those three, then it would be just a white wine. White.
Cal:
Yeah, white wine. And the Appalachian would actually say the Appalachian as where the grapes were grown.
Christa:
California.
Cal:
Exactly. Topic, California. So viognier, again, a wonderful wine. It’s got a lot of crisp, but when you start off, you get a lot of fruit. Some of the things you’ll normally see, would be some, like, tangerine flavors, mango, even a honeysuckle. And I think that when you take a, you know, a wine and you’re, and you’re tasting it and you want to get those flavors again, remember, the first thing to do is take a small sip and draw some air over that so it completely coats your entire tongue because you want to pick up all those flavors. And your tongue picks up different flavors in different places on your tongue. Right.
Cal:
We have sweet, salty, bitter, sour and sour. And then, of course, the new one.
Christa:
Ooh, mommy.
Cal:
You know, I don’t even like to call it new anymore. It’s been around for so long.
Christa:
Yeah.
Cal:
You, mommy. Yeah. Not you, daddy. Right. You, mommy. You, mommy. Poor joke problem. I don’t know.
Cal:
It wasn’t bad. I don’t know. Well, anyway, it was off the top of it. I didn’t write that down.
Christa:
It’s the meaty, buttery flavor. It’s almost more of a texture.
Cal:
Almost. Yeah. So it’s that flavor that you get that is basically considered like a meat flavor. You know, you get it from char broil or char grilled. Like barbecued mushrooms have a lot of umami, tomatoes, barbecued. Where’s a couple of the things? Not fennel, because you get a little bit too much spice, all that. But generally mushrooms. Mushrooms are in bell peppers.
Cal:
Those give that real meaty and almost kind of describe it, kind of an earthy flavor. But anyway, getting back to Viognier again, you’re going to get a lot of those light fruit flavors. So you really want to practice. And we’re going to be doing, and it’s going to be a while. We’ll let you know well in advance. But we are going to be doing a tasting seminar online. We’ll be doing that through culinary yours. It’ll be off of our cooking like a pro podcast, but we’ll be doing this during online in a zoom format.
Cal:
And it’s going to be teaching people how to taste, teaching how to pick flavors up. I mean, for us, you know, again, if you’re just, if you look at food as fuel, like we do most of the time in America, where you’re just eating to sustain you to the next thing that you have to do, well, that’s great and dandy, but remember, you’re missing a lot, you know, and again, we’ve mentioned this, and we’ll probably mention it every time we do this show, but, you know, and you want to eat and you want to enjoy it. You go around once, why not enjoy it? Why not why just have something, you know, that’s quick, that’s going to be, you know, good for you or nutritious for you. It’s just going to be something. Well, I guess it could be. But again, why not enjoy the flavors and especially the flavors of the season?
Christa:
Now, Viognier is a white, so you would serve a little bit cooler, more cold. Is that something comes straight out the fridge?
Cal:
Yeah, it would come out of the fridge, but you’d want to warm it up. You wouldn’t want it. Refrigerator temperature, which is, you know, 40, 42, you know, somewhere in that area, depending.
Christa:
50, 58.
Cal:
Yeah, 55, I think 55 is good on that there. And then you start because, remember, cellar temperature, I think it’s 60 or 62 degrees in France. And your wines were stored in because they want them to age slower. They want them to take all that time. Because remember, those grapes are continuing to develop in there. And there’s tannin, which is continuing to work through the process of being able to allow the wine to become more fruity and more luscious. But with the viognier, one of the chicken, pork kind of, think of it, white wine with white meats, red wine with red meats. But that all goes out the window, folks, you know, if you don’t like it.
Cal:
So drink what you like. That’s number one. Drink what you like. But with the viogniers. Yeah. Usually a chicken, pork, veal, if you’re doing that, any of your fish, and especially shellfish, because shellfish has that, what I like to call an oceanic kind of flavor to it. It’s almost kind of mineral or metallic, you might want to say. So I do this clams dish, and it’s steamed clams, and I do it in a garlic nectar.
Cal:
So it’s like a tightened up garlic broth. Tighten it up with a little bit of cornstarch with tarragon and garlic, and you steam your clams, toss that in there and, you know, because you’ve got this rich, you know, delicious, succulent shellfish dish, and then you got this great wine to help balance those flavors out. So when I say shellfish, remember, shellfish are broken up into two categories, right? You have shellfish, which are crustaceans and shellfish, which are mollusks. A crustacean is a shellfish that has more than, more than two shells. So a crustacean is lobster, crab, shrimp. Those items where a mollusk is one or two shells. So one or two shells would be your clams, would be your oysters, there’d be your scallops scallop has two shells. Scargo falls in that category.
Cal:
So again, you have mollusks, crustaceans, but all that falls under the heading of shellfish. And again, a viognier is just a great, great dish to help cut through that. That butteriness of the dish right in the middle.
Christa:
It’s just a little bit sweet, just a little bit acidic, a little bit floral, a little bit fruity. It’s very mild.
Cal:
Yeah. I would recommend, if you go to a restaurant and they have a wine by the glass list, if they have the viognier, just tell me you want to taste the sample. Just tell me why. A little taste. They’ll give you an ounce or two to try and swirl that around to put it over your tongue, draw some air over it and see what you think. Because, you know, as a restaurateur, the one thing I’ve always wanted to do after doing this for well over, you know, 40 years, close to 50 in cooking, but owning restaurants is, I want to educate my patrons and my guests that come in, you want to educate them because the next time, you know, if they have white Zinfandel, the next time they come in, maybe they’re having a riesling, and then maybe you bring them up to a geverse diminutor, and before you know it, they’re having a chardonnay, and then they. Maybe they move up to a viogniere. A viognier can be a variety of different variety, spectrum of pricing.
Cal:
But you’re generally going to want a viognier that’s no more than two or three years old. It’s a varietal that’s made to drink. They don’t really make those to lay down or. It’s just a term we use for.
Christa:
Now, I would have put it with the dish that we had earlier this week. We took that Charlin Mellon, we talked about the top of the hour, and then we had those salty pork ribs. That would have been beautiful with the viognier because you’ve got the saltiness in the pork, you’ve got a little bit of sweet in the viognier, and you’ve got the melon fruit that’s going to bring out the fruit and the wine itself, to me, that would have been a perfect pairing.
Cal:
I remember to grab some. I have to grab a bottle of Viognier. Well, tonight, the way home, got commitments. But hey, again, so we’ll be going to talk about wines. You have questions about wines or food and wine pairing, please let us know. Again, you can go to the podcast cooking. Like again, cookinglikeapropodcast.net. send us a question if you’d like.
Cal:
We appreciate you folks listening. And again, we like to cover at least one wine. And this schedule of how we do these is going to be very, very flexible as we continue to move on and as we just, you know, but as we continue to go through, feel the fresh updates, always kind of nice. And then having, you know, some give it out, some recipes and then the viogniere.
Christa:
And if you want to free wine guide, you can go to culinaryyours.net, our main website. And there is a free wine guide on there.
Cal:
Yeah, there is a free wine guide, culinarilyyours.net and you can just download that. The variety of things on there. Theres a great little couple tools, one for writing a nice grocery list and a variety of things that my beautiful wife Christa has put together. So go there. And again, hope you enjoy it folks. But again, this is something that’s a passion of ours. It’s something that I’ve always enjoyed. Been doing it since I was a child.
Cal:
And my wife, who is IBM by marriage. Okay, so that’s kind of, you know, you put that together and here you go, you got chef town. Christa DeMercurio.
Christa:
Thank you so much for spending time with us. Until next time, we hope you’ll be cooking up a storm in the kitchen. So we’ll be with you again next week with food, flavor and fun right here on Cooking Like a Pro podcast.
