Cal and Christa DeMercurio
Join Chef Cal and Christa for another insightful episode of “Cooking like a Pro,” where they dive into eggplant recipes, kitchen safety tips, and sauce making basics. Stay tuned for lively discussion and practical cooking advice to enhance your kitchen skills.
- Eggplant preparation methods
- Importance of oil temperature and its impact on cooking
- Insights into various sauces and their modifications
- Food safety practices to avoid cross-contamination
- Chef Cal’s nostalgic culinary stories with Lobster Tales
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Timestamp Overview
00:00 Discussing cooking challenges, especially with eggplant.
03:48 Proper deep frying can be surprisingly healthy.
06:28 Oil smoke point: temperature where oil smokes.
10:01 Chef Cal on KCNR: Eggplant parmesan tips and call-ins.
14:46 Don’t put hot food in the fridge.
18:03 Use vinegar to disinfect; dispose if bad.
22:03 Chef Cowell shares food insights, promotes organic eating.
25:38 Omit carrots from light-colored soups; use leeks.
28:13 Whisk roux into sauce to thicken it.
31:53 Reduce sauce, strain, add aromatics, cook down.
35:41 Cooking: fun, ceiling spaghetti test, al dente perfection.
38:06 Teaching detailed cooking processes to avoid confusion.
42:00 Kindergartners played for White House Chef tribute.
44:33 Food fosters memories and enjoyment throughout life.
46:08 See you next week on cooking podcast.
Transcript
Cal:
Hey, food fans, welcome to cooking like a pro with Chef Cal and me misses Chef. His wife Christa Demercerio. 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 eggplant and cooking it three different ways. Kitchen safety, making sauces and Chef reminiscences about chasing live lobsters. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.
Cal:
Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to cooking like a pro here at KCNR. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. We appreciate you taking the time out of here. Well, could be drive time, you know, I know we’re here live at five, but there’s other ways to listen to the show. But those that are out there, please just accept our appreciation for listening. I’m not quite solo tonight. I got my, I got my beautiful wife, Christa.
Cal:
But you’ve found Chef Cal d Mercurio again at cooking like a pro. And my wife has an engagement, but I think she’s going to join us on the phone.
Christa:
I think I’m here. Can you hear me?
Cal:
There she is. That’s my beautiful wife.
Christa:
Remote.
Cal:
All right. Live remote for her. So anyway, you know, we, last week I was talking with our special guest and I got, I ran down a rabbit hole and didn’t get back to something that I wanted to talk about. And that’s eggplant. And kind of one of the main reasons is that I try to pick these things that people have challenges with an eggplant is, you know, I mean, you can ask somebody that eats beef if you like steak or do you like chicken. But sometimes seafood is a big one and most of the time it’s because they just haven’t had good seafood. I would venture to say all of the time it’s because of that. But, well, the same thing with eggplant.
Cal:
The people that are generally turned off by it and that like vegetables, it’s just not prepared the right way. You know, eggplant is typically described as being, you know, soggy or mushy or, or those sort of things. But. But my wife Christa made some eggplant and I made some eggplant in several different ways, you know, within the last couple days. And I really enjoyed the one that Christa did. It was much more complicated than the one I did. I just did the simple breading. One, two, three.
Cal:
Which, of course is dry, wet, dry. So flour, lightly powder with flour. After slicing it, I did put some in salt water. I didn’t see that it made a difference. I tried it both ways. You know, I don’t like the idea of adding salt because salt is there for one reason, which is to extract flavor. When you extract flavor, you’re kind of doing the opposite of what you want, which is keep all the flavor in. And now if it’s extracting bitterness, then, you know, I could see that.
Cal:
But then maybe, you know, I would look at the seasonality of it. Is it at the beginning of the season as it developed, that the flavor that you want out of the eggplant, or is it older? Is it already spongy inside? So I did that there. So I did the flour. The egg mix with just a little bit of water or milk works, and then just in panko, and then just fry it at the right temperature. This is the key. It must be fried when whatever you’re cooking, eggplant, fish, veal, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re cooking, if you’re cooking it in a pan, it needs to begin searing. And when it first hits, because if it doesn’t, then it’s.
Cal:
You’re just soaking up oil. And this is kind of why deep frying method has gotten such a bad rap over the years, when deep frying correctly is actually really healthy, because everything is locked in. But if you’re not, you know, if you throw in five pounds of french fries and it has, the deep fryer has to recover its temperature. It’s just going to be soaking for a while. So anyway, when it comes to sauteing, in this case, just a quick fry on one side, fry on the other, and did a little kind of a ragu. But I’m going to talk about a variety of ways we can do eggplant, but I need my wife to explain what she did because it was quite a bit more complicated.
Christa:
I think first you need to talk about when you are talking about frying, you didn’t deep fry it. This was a shallow fry. You just had a little bit of oil in there. It wasn’t sitting there soaking in it. The breadcrumbs weren’t getting soggy. They were very crisp. And I did not grow up with eggplant. And I’ve always had.
Christa:
Very many times I have had it. It’s been very soggy, very oily. Just not to its best. Yeah, not something I want to eat. So I did. I tried this week. We also didn’t talk about, you did the bob ganache that you talked about. After this, I did a confit, which is c o n s I t, confit.
Christa:
And confit is usually done with duck. Correct. It’s a preservation technique.
Cal:
Yeah, it’s the idea of cooking something down. Yeah.
Christa:
So what I did is I was using a preservation technique. This is kind of an ancient tradition of cooking where you preserve it, you either preserve in vinegar, usually, or preserve in oil. And I preserve it in oil. I went with the canola oil and I used chinese eggplant. Chinese eggplant is known to be a lot more tender. It’s the long ones. And I simply split it. Yeah.
Christa:
And then I did a cross hatching on it and stricken a little salt and let it dry a little bit to pull out any excess water, excess bitterness. And then I cover it in oil. It was a canola oil. And everybody’s probably going to freak out because it’s oil. But this is an old preservation technique. It doesn’t soak it in. What it does is it creates kind of a cocoon for it to just soften and cook and to preserve. And I put it in a 350 degree oven for an hour.
Christa:
So it was really simple.
Cal:
I think what people need to understand on that also is that it’s the seed oils that you really want to stay away from. The seed oils have been processed, the vegetable oils processed, but seed oil is certainly the worst on the list. And then again, you go up to.
Christa:
So this wasn’t reaching the smoke point because of the very high smoke point oil. And we were cooking a very low temperature at 300, it didn’t even come close to breaking down.
Cal:
And one thing on just, I’m going to interrupt you real quick is just in case people didn’t know what the smoke point is. It’s just that, the point is simply just the point where the oil smokes. When the oil gets up around 400 for a little bit over 400 degrees, or it gets really dirty for maybe overuse or something, it will begin to kind of get a light smoke coming off of it. And when it gets to that point, you definitely want to stop. You want to stop. You want to throw that oil away. We highly recommend when you’re cooking this way, that you strain those oils to get any of those loose particles out, because those particles keep cooking. So, okay, so we have this vat of oil with the eggplant.
Cal:
And then. But you put something else in there.
Christa:
I went to Costco, I got the big packet of the already peeled garlic cloves, and I just put in handfuls of them so that it roasted in a garlic olive oil or, excuse me, garlic oil. And now I also have a quantity of garlic preserved garlic that I can have anytime ready on hand to use.
Cal:
In other dishes, and a bunch of garlic oil also.
Christa:
Yes. So we got three things. We got clumsy eggplant, we got clumsy garlic, and we got garlic oil to use. So three things came out of one cooking process.
Cal:
Yeah. One of the things that we used to do a lot at all our different restaurants that me and Christa had is we would add some turmeric to that. Turmeric is going to add a little bit of spice, so it is going to adjust it there, but it’s going to give it this just amazingly beautiful caramelization. Well, more of a yellowish color. And it’s great for garlic oil. If you’ve ever seen, been to a restaurant, you’ve seen anything dripped on the plate that was yellow, that was garlic oil. That had turmeric in it. Turmeric, of course, is the only thing that they add to mustard seeds and water or vinegar, rather, when they crush it in order to make mustard.
Cal:
So that’s. That adds that bright. But it’s an indian spice and it’s used in. I know we didn’t want to go off a rabbit trail here, but I mean, I know that you use it and it’s kind of like, you know, cumin or cumin. There’s a lot of these different, you know, spices. I know me and Sadie talked about it. Yeah, they really have a real, you know, healing property to them.
Christa:
Now, real quick, how did you make that baba ganache? That was the third thing we made with eggplant.
Cal:
Yeah, that was roasted. So we had one eggplant that was a little less firm than the other, so I just simply cut it in half. I rubbed it down with some garlic. Garlic and oil, a little bit of secret salt. You know, salt and pepper’s fine. And roasted it off for 45 minutes and then let it cool overnight. And then you just scrape the inside of it out and it really comes out almost like a hummus kind of a texture, but not coarse. Yeah.
Cal:
More creamy. And then it’s just garlic, lemon juice, and a little bit of cumin. And there you got baba ganache. Baba ganache has been a favorite of mine ever since I first had it back in the, in the eighties. I went to a food and wine pairing, actually, and had it. So that was great.
Christa:
Did you mention the tahini? You seasoned it with tahini also?
Cal:
Oh, yeah, the tahini. I’m looking at my words there it is. Tahini. Yeah, tahini. Tahini, again, is just gonna be those toasted sesame seeds which have been ground up and with a little bit of oil in them. And so it’s actually just a great flavoring if you. If you want to add that nutty, nutty texture and components. So anyway, Chef Cal, we’re coming up against the first break and we are cooking like a pro.
Cal:
And you’ve got us here on KCNR, 1460 AM radio and 96.5 FM. Back in this moment. Well, welcome back to cooking like a pro with Chef Cal. I’m excited that you are listening again. If you ever want to call in, ask a cooking question, you’re able to do that at 503 605-4567 again, that’s 530-605-4567 you know, I still didn’t get through egg, my eggplant. So I’m going to talk a little bit about that just so I can finish the topic so I can move on to something else. But I think one of the things when you do the eggplant parmesan is that you need to have a really crisp eggplant. And then you also can’t just cover it or mat it.
Cal:
We might call in french cuisine where you just completely coated in a. In a sauce because you want it to be crisp and it’s not going to be crisp. It’s got a bunch of sauce soaking on top of it. But anyway, there’s a variety of eggplants that are out there. We did both a baby patio eggplant. I thought that was really cool. They’re small eggplants, about the size of your thumb. And they grow like tomatoes, very prolific.
Cal:
And you can just give yourself a little eggplant bush, you know, a plant on the back of your patio or something, and have some eggplant, fresh eggplant to deal with. Also the grate on pizza. I also used to eggplant and make a lasagna, like a vegetable lasagna. So it would be a vegetarian dish, using eggplant in place of the pasta. So that’s another thing that you can use it for. And also just barbecuing. Just season it up with some garlic and, you know, some seasoning salt or whatever, a little bit of oil. And then just, you know, brush it down and clean your barbecue like we have in our barbecue cheat sheet.
Cal:
Remember, you can get that. And if you go to culinarily yours. And again, that’s our website. It’s got all kinds of free tools, including everything you need to know about barbecue. So there’s a sheet for that. But again, a lot of times I’ll slice it, season it, like I mentioned, and then grill it and then roll it with, like, goat cheese or something in front of it or, excuse me, inside of it. It’s great for a gluten free dish. A little bit of fresh basil in there, balsamic syrup.
Cal:
I almost treat it like you do, like a grilled portobello, where you can take, and you actually make a hamburger out of your portobello. Of course, it’s, you know, it’s got great protein, 7 grams of protein, good fiber, you know, medium carbs. It’s only 4.8. And so, you know, there’s lots of different things you can do. If you’re greek, you can make some moussica. I know that. That was something. Anytime we did a greek dinner at the restaurant, we’re featuring our baklava and our moussaka, then that was something.
Cal:
We used it. It’s kind of a beef eggplant cheese casserole, I guess, would be the best way to describe it. And again, ratatouille, you can’t leave out ratatouille, right? Ratatouille can be chunks and serve more of a chunky style, which I would call serve cold. Could be almost a dip hot. It would be served kind of as a ragu, kind of like the side vegetable for something else. And of course, you know, gratitude. One of the greatest movies ever in the history of movies. But anyway, I wanted to talk a little bit about food safety.
Cal:
And this is just, food safety is not going to be dry and boring. I’m not going to put on a lab coat to do this, but it’s a food safety. And there’s certain things I think you can look at to help make sure that you’re getting the length of the shelf life of your food. You’re not throwing something away in two or three days where it could have been good for four or five days simply because it wasn’t cooled down in the proper way. And you really want, all your hot foods are going to be, you know, above 140. And the danger zone, or when bacteria starts growing, is between 40 and 140. So your cold food has to stay below 40 and your hot food stays above 140. So 40 and 140.
Cal:
And so you just want to kind of stay along that. So when you start to cool it down, you want to get it from above 140 down to 40 as soon as possible. Sometimes that’s spreading it out on a pan. If it’s a sauce or a soup. Maybe you’re just throwing some ice cubes in there and stirring those around. That will break. That would get it down really quickly. And you also don’t want to take something that’s hot.
Cal:
Just think, okay, I’ll put this in the fridge to cool it down because it will. But remember, that refrigerator is running around 36, 38, maybe even 40 degrees, depending on how cold you like it. But it’s running somewhere in the, in the forties degrees or just a little bit less than that, where bacteria is not going to grow. And then all of a sudden you’re putting something hot in there, especially if it’s hot and steaming. So that just raises the temperature of the refrigerator. So everything is up in the danger zone and it’s not going to be very long. But, you know, the reality is if you have, you know, perishable items, you know, things that are bound items like bound salads, you know, the macaroni salad, potato salad, you know, things that have protein in them that could, you know, you know, they wouldn’t just. They need to be kept below 40.
Cal:
So anyway, so do that there. Cool them down. A variety of ways to do that. And the other thing just kind of to kind of keep in mind is cross contamination. Because when you. There are basically three different ways that things can become contaminated. Again, I’m trying to make this as non textbook as possible, but the three different ways would be biological, chemical or physical. And to break those down, biological means somebody, you know, sneezes in it or they got a cut on their hand or there’s been a, a transfer there.
Cal:
The second way is chemical. You know, making sure if you’re using bleach, I would prefer to use vinegar. I would use vine. Any place you can use bleach, you can use vinegar. At least I have not found a place where you can’t. And you’re not going to vinegar. Why? Maybe at raising the acid level, but it dissipates probably as quickly as bleach. But then you don’t have the chemical.
Cal:
And that’s the second way of cross contamination occurs. Then, of course, physical. I remember once we did it at this event, it was in southern California, and it was an event like 750 people, and we’re going through it and the salads were made and the salads went out. And one of the salad gals that was prepping the salads came over and she had these Lee press on nails back when they had those, and she had this one. It must have been like an inch. They were all like an inch long and she was missing one. And it was the salad that had been tossed, like with the dressing. So, lord and behold, half hour after salads, or 20 minutes after salads went out, here comes this salad back with a lee press on nail in it.
Cal:
They didn’t get upset and they understood. But you do have to be careful of that. That’s why anytime someone cuts themselves gloves. We use gloves a lot these days, especially, even more so since COVID I’ll be honest, I was taught by probably what I would say the top sanitation and safety expert in the United States. He was amazing, and he was a very big advocate of not wearing gloves. And his reasoning, which I agree with, is that people have a glove on and they kind of forget and they’ll cross contaminate without really thinking about it. At least if you don’t have gloves on, you wash your hands in between grabbing the raw chicken and going over and grabbing the celery. So cross contamination is a big thing.
Cal:
But again, vinegar as a cleaning solution, especially your cutting surfaces, your knives, all these things, you want to make sure that you keep those completely free of any bacteria. If you think about temperature, really, bacteria starts dying right around that 150 temperature. So if there’s any bacteria in it, you bring it up above 155, 160 for a matter of just a few minutes. And if there was any bacteria that’s going to kill it. But if it tastes bad, then throw it out, because that’s the ultimate indicator, okay, it tastes bad. Boiling it isn’t going to make it taste any better. Okay? Might kill some of the bacteria, but you’re better off just tossing it when you get, when you get to that point, other things, you know, keeping your fingernails clean. I’m obsessed with keeping my fingernails clean, and I don’t know why.
Cal:
Well, I know why that is, because I always have. But I mean, I clean my fingernails all day long because, you know, you get in things and you get stuff underneath your nails and I, you know, having your proper cleaners to be able to do that big thing. Allergies is another big thing we should just touch on real quickly. Nuts is a big one. You know, I was looking that up. Over 30,000 people a year, this is in the United States, 30,000 people a year go to the ER with because of nut allergies. So it’s not just the nuts that were prepared there. Remember, you’re also.
Cal:
It’s what, you know, nuts are airborne, you know, and if you’re in a place where you were, you know, making peanut butter sandwiches, and all of a sudden you started making something else that was nut free or needed to be nut free. It’s. That’s not going to happen, okay? You’ve already been cross contaminated just because it’s a, it’s an airborne thing. So people that are allergic to peanuts and other nuts are definitely allergic very often, you know, I always keep epi pens around and things like that to be safe. But it’s just something, it’s just, you want to be careful. You want to just be careful when you’re working with nuts. You know, biological, you know, foods need the same thing we need. So bacteria needs that same thing, rather.
Cal:
So a pathogen that’s growing needs food. It needs, you know, low acid, high acid. Of course, vinegar would trumpet temperature is a bad thing for it. So we want to get the temperature up there to kill it, you know, time and how it needs oxygen to breathe and then also needs moisture. So just, you know, keep your food, some stored properly, use fresh items. I always say if I wouldn’t eat it, I won’t send it out, you know, in a restaurant. So there’s those things and then also things like, you know, gluten intolerant or, you know, other intolerances. Lactose.
Cal:
I’m actually lactose intolerant of, which is very unfortunate simply because I haven’t had a bowl of cereal since I was probably eight. And I love the idea of cereal and ice cold milk. And I know there’s other milks out there, but it just seems like cheating. I don’t know. But anyway, gluten intolerance is a big thing. Got to be real, real careful of the gluten for people that are celiac or even don’t even have to be all the way celiac. And even if it’s just their idea of eating more healthy, you know, that’s fine as well. But between the gluten and lactose, which is the dairy intolerance, you just want to be careful, you know, when people ask for that, make sure that you have workarounds for them, you know, whether it’s a different type of cracker that’s made out of rice instead of wheat and those kind of things.
Cal:
So. So anyway, we’re coming up to the break at the bottom here. You’ve reached Chef Cal. You’ve got me on here at KCNR, cooking like a pro can reach us at cookinglike a pro podcast.net. be back right after the break. Welcome back. Welcome back. This is cooking like a pro.
Cal:
This is Chef Cowell just sharing an hour of food with you. We appreciate you listening. And be sure to turn on and turn your friends on to it, too, if they’d like to like to listen, if they’re interested in food. Again, we cover a little bit of pretty much anything that is food related, restaurant related, industry related, that kind of thing. And I do want to mention, I was working last night with an organic pasta. This. I guess this would be a shout out to Trader Joe’s, but when we’re talking about things that have not been overly processed, things that don’t have a bunch of additives in there, when you have a, you know, a meal of some sort and you look on it, and not only are there four or five things you can’t pronounce, you don’t even know what they’re in there for. And they’re just added to the other 15 ingredients that are in there.
Cal:
But this pasta here was a fuseli. It’s just the round. It’s. You see a lot in pasta salads. Fuselli, buca pasta. This was a macaroni product that was from Italy, imported into Trader Joe’s. And it was just two ingredients. That’s it.
Cal:
Just semolina and water. And it was organic, so it was grown correctly. So it was organic durum wheat, which. Durum wheat just means it’s a little less ground. So it’s not ground so much. And the more you grind something, the more you’re just taking something out of it. You just. That just has the kind of the best way to look at it.
Cal:
And then so along with the organic semolina, it just was water, and it came out great. I really enjoyed it. My son enjoyed it. I actually made a Mac and cheese on it. So don’t get me wrong, I know it’s organic. I wasn’t going healthy. I was going Mac and cheese. But anyway, hey, shout out to them.
Cal:
You can get a lot of things, I think, that, you know, from whatever your stores are there, and I’m not going to sit here and prompt any particular stores and, you know, unless they became sponsor. But, you know, you really want to get away from plastic. And I know that I talked about it with Chef Sadie last week. It’s just all this stuff that’s wrapped in plastic. It gets into the food. So just bear that in mind when you go, of course, farmer markets. Farmers markets are one place or places where things are just, you know, presented in, you know, bushel, black bushel baskets. You know, that’s one way, one way to look at it.
Cal:
But I did want to talk a little bit about sauces. Sauces are so easy. And you can modify them to go gluten free. You can modify them to go low calorie. You can modify them to be just as rich and thick as you want. You just have to learn them. And once you learn them and get those down, remember I went through a french apprenticeship program. So we were taught everything from scratch.
Cal:
But then you see all of these different items, convenience products, things that have just been invented since back in the day. Stocks is a great example. We used to cook a chicken stock, and you take the chicken feed and roast it with vegetables and throw them in the pot, and that sucker could go for 8 hours. Unfortunately, sometimes it almost became like a garbage can. You got some leftover tomatoes, but you got to remember, celery becomes bitter when you cook too long and so do other sulfuric thing. So, you know, your, your stockpot is not a garbage can. Okay? You want your mirepoix again, your carrots, onion, celery. You want your bouquet garni, your parsley, bay leaf and thyme.
Cal:
You might change that carrot out if you’re making something light colored. Let’s say you’re gonna make a cream of chicken soup. If you want to make a nice creamy chicken soup and add some rice to it or something, you’re not gonna want that carrot pigmentation in there. I mean, you put carrots in it, but don’t use them in the stock because then your whole, because you want it to be a lighter color, especially, let’s say you’re going to do a cream of mushroom soup. Then I probably omit the carrots and just replace that with equal amount of leek. So that would be the way the French would do it. That’s the way I do it. And that’s the way that works.
Cal:
So your mushroom soup doesn’t look, you know, maybe as dark as it could. You know, most of these are vegetable soups, are cream soups. So the cream is going to, going to lighten them up as well. But when we walk down the sauces, remember, there’s always five. There’s only five you need to worry about. And they all go by color. Okay. I, you know, my wife’s not on the phone, so I don’t know if this is on our website.
Cal:
If it isn’t it, we’ll get it on there because I think that that’s where I pulled it from. But she just labeled it sauce pedigree. So you’ve got your five sauces. Again, just take your hand, and if you still got five fingers, each hand is a sauce. So we got bicolor white, brown, red, yellow, blonde. Again, white, brown, red, yellow, blonde. So now let’s walk through these because, you know, you’re aware of these. You see these almost daily in your, in your meals and you’re eating, especially if you go out to, a white sauce is just a white roux.
Cal:
It’s usually half milk or cream, but I would use milk. Why spend the extra money on cream? You can always finish things off with cream, you know, to get that creamy coating over your mouth. But don’t spend the money, you know, too early on this. So it’s half milk and half poultry stock. So half milk, half poultry stalks. We talked about our cream soups can fall into this category as well, but they also fall under one of the other ones, I’ll mention in a second. So you have a white roof, which is, your roos are just, there’s three different types of roux, white, blonde and brown. The roux coincide with the sauces.
Cal:
White roux, white sauce, blonde roux, blonde sauce, brown roux, brown sauce. So that’s pretty simple math on that one. So white, brown and blonde. So you cook the roux. You cook, you melt your butter, add your flour, mix it up. It’s not cooked. It’s just mixed. It looks like play doh.
Cal:
It is the consistency of play doh you’ve all had. We’ve all probably played with play doh. You add that to your sauce slowly, one little spoonful or teaspoon at a time, slowly whisking so you don’t get any lumps. And that’s what’s going to tighten this up. The more you cook the roux, which is flour and butter, the more you cook it, the more starch you take out of it. So the white roux is going to be very starchy. So when you add white roux to your half milk, half stock, you’re going to come up with something that needs to cook in order to get that flour taste out. That flour taste is that, you know, that kind of stick to the roof of your mouth taste.
Cal:
Maybe some consider it kind of more of an aspirin thing, but you don’t want that in your sauce. So your white sauce, which you’ve made and you’ve thicken that up, and now that’s called a bechamel. So you just learned the first one, the white sauce. White sauce, white roux, white stock with milk and stock equals mother sauce. Alright, so let’s go to the blonde one because it’s fairly similar. It’s a blonde roux. So your roux cooked a little more so it won’t have to cook as long in the sauce. That’s a good thing.
Cal:
But a lot of people will thicken with what’s called a slurry or a whitewash. Whitewash would be flour and butter. No, I’m sorry. Flour and oil. And then your slurry would be cornstarch and water. So corn starch and water. Flour and water. So that’s a slurry again.
Cal:
And a whitewash. Whitewash with flour. Slurry with cornstarch. And so those are not going to be cooked out very well. So they’re going to be cooked out while they’re in the sauce. But that is what we call a blonde roux. So it’s lightly cooked on the stovetop. We’re going to add it again, a tablespoon or so at a time.
Cal:
We’re going to add that into a white stock, which is either poultry stock, fish stock, veal stock. We’ve talked about convenience items. This is where you go to the store and you get your, your beef base, your chicken base, your, your fish base, your clam base, or whatever. Or you make your own, you know, get a bunch of clam shells and throw them in with some garlic, onions, celery, bay leaf, thyme, and let it cook down. And then you have this beautiful clam broth that you can use. So you can make it that way. If you have the product, if you have leftover lobster shells or leftover lamb bones or leftover salmon carcass or leftover beef bones or chicken bones. So we’re going to take this again.
Cal:
Go back to the blonde sauce. We’re adding a blonde roux to one of these stalks. Fish, veal or chicken. And then we got what’s called, instead of a bechamel sauce, now we got a veloute sauce. Veloute sauces are probably the number one sauce where cream soups, cream vegetable soups come from. Cream of broccoli, could be cream of cheddar, could be cream of cauliflower, cream of eggplant, cream of carrot, cream of anything under the sun, cream of zucchini. So that’s where you get your cream. And so that’s a mother sauce.
Cal:
Okay. Which you can add and make that into a soup as well. Now we’re gonna keep cooking our flour until it gets brown. We’re gonna add that into a brown stock, a beef stock, we’re gonna cook that out. The brown roux won’t take as long because that starch has been cooked out. And we have what we call a brown sauce or a espanol sauce is what the French would call it. If you take this sauce, which is still fairly thin, and you reduce it by half, then you have a demi sauce. Demi is the french word for half.
Cal:
So it’s a sauce that’s been reduced down to half, and it’s just gonna have beautiful flavor. And that’s something you want to strain through, you know, your wife’s pantyhose or a coffee strainer or, I mean, something that’s really going to cheesecloth, you know, works well as well. And then we’re going to go to tomatoes. Tomato sauce is just tomatoes. You can add your aromatics to that and let that cook down with your parsley, bay leaf, and thyme and your vegetables and your, you know, your garlic and your onions and stuff, and you cook that down. So tomatoes, plus your, your water based flavored stock, we would call a flavored vegetable stock a vegetable. What was that called? Kinkassi, I think, something like that. But anyway, so that would be your stock.
Cal:
And then you have your tomato sauce. And then your last one, we were not going to touch on much because it’s kind of off on its. It’s actually emulsified sauce. So it use clarified butter and egg yolks, and you get hollandaise. But the last thing I wanted to touch on is you got all these mother sauces, bechamel, veloute, espanol, or brown sauce, red sauce or tomato sauce, hollandaise or yellow sauce. And you add ingredients to that. And that takes a mother sauce and takes it into a sister sauce. So there is some.
Cal:
It does make sense. Okay. Once you’ve done it a few times, you’ll get that down, if you haven’t already. And for example, you have a tomato sauce, and you add, you know, brown sugar, cider vinegar, and mustard. And you have barbecue sauce, right? You add bell pepper, garlic, onions, and mushrooms. And you have italian sauce, or what we call marinara sauce. You add parmesan cheese to bechamel. You get Alfredo sauce.
Cal:
Any cheese will make it a cheese sauce. So there’s, you know, with the brown sauce, add mushrooms and marsala, white wine and garlic and shallots. You got marsala sauce. Or you can make scalpini. Take your hollandaise, add your tarragon vinegar, and you have bernays sauce. So we’re gonna take one last break here. Thanks for tuning into cooking like a pro. We will be right back on KCNR 1460 Am.
Cal:
Welcome back to cooking like a pro. Oh, Dino, he does it so well. Boy, he was so smooth. Wasn’t hedgesthem. Man. I’m kind of wondering how many, what percentage of my audience here at cooking like a pro on KCNR actually knows who Dean Martin is. I really hope that the majority, I mean, I want younger people to listen but, you know, I mean, hey, Dino, Frank, you know, all these guys, they’re all going to come back and, you know, everything goes in a circle, right? And I think the food does too. You know, my last restaurant we did chicken and dumplings and, you know, meatloaf and, you know, pot roast and roasted game hen.
Cal:
And these are things that a large part of our, our guests had no idea what they were. So they weren’t raised with that. So that’s, that’s sad. But we’ve also talked about that in the past. But I’m working on some, some. I’m working on a cookbook. Okay. I may have mentioned that before.
Cal:
So I don’t know when it’s coming out, but we’re working on it. It seems nonstop. So there’s just a variety of things and stories that I’ve just been reminding me, reminding me of things in the past. You know, how you start remembering back and it’s like, you know, you remember those, those pleasant things and some of them, you know, not so pleasant. But it is something that I’ve, that I really enjoy. And I know that when I started, for example, I was, I was only nine years old and I was coming home and mom always had that post it note. And I think I mentioned this before, but that post it note was always on the fridge. And then she had these instructions on what to do.
Cal:
Like put the casserole in and turn the crock pot on and, you know, get some water hot for the vegetables and whatever it was. So I just enjoyed doing that. And even, you know, cooking pasta, I mean, all you had to do when you were in my house to know that we enjoyed ourselves cooking was stand in front of the stove and look up because the ceiling was covered with spaghetti because it was just how I was taught. The spaghetti is done when it sticks to the ceiling, you know, and, you know, the idea, of course, or the thought or the pert reason, I guess, is that, you know, when the starch starts coming out of the pasta, the pasta becomes more sticky and sticks to the roof, which is what you want, right? You don’t want it all inside the. I mean, you want al dente. Remember the term al dente means to the tooth. So you’re biting in and there’s a slight resistance between your teeth and then your teeth break through. So it’s not soft and mushy and it’s not hard and crunchy.
Cal:
It’s in between that. But on the fridge was kind of, you know, where it started. And then when we went on further on and then competing in the early nineties, I started competing in the early eighties, actually late seventies. I just would enter any food competition. I could find a chili cook off or it didn’t really matter, but I just competed. And then I competed for, you know, decades and then eventually got to a point where the, you know, I was able to make it to the Olympic team in 93 and then, and then work on that. And there’s just, there’s tons of stories. So that’s going to be a big part of the cookbook.
Cal:
And we got david. David on line one. David, welcome to the show. Thanks for calling into cooking like a pro.
David:
This show is incredible.
Cal:
Well, thank you.
David:
And I tell you what, being able to go back and listen to that part about the different roos and stuff, I’m going to go back to that several times. I love that this is archived. You can go back and check it all out again. It’s also archived on your website. Is that right?
Cal:
Yep. Yep. Yeah. My wife takes it the next day and archives it for the. To kind of fulfill that podcast part of what it is that we do. But, yeah, you know, I enjoy it.
David:
Incredible show. I just want to say thanks so much.
Cal:
All right, well, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you calling in. You have a wonderful day. Well, that was great. Yeah, kudos. Thanks, Dave. You made my day, you know, and that’s the thing about calling in, if you have. There is.
Cal:
I’ll tell you right now, I’ve been doing this for, you know, five decades, but I’ve been, I’ve taught my entire life as well, and everything from kindergarten all the way up to the elderly folks and everything in between, including 17 years of college and those sort of things. So there. I’ll tell you right now, there’s no such thing as a stupid question, because if there’s something that you don’t want to call because you think it’s stupid, I guarantee you there’s a bunch of other people out there wondering the same thing. And that’s why when I teach, I always teach from the basic lowest common denominator, because I don’t want to pass anybody up if I’m talking about making tomato sauce, but somebody is really uncomfortable with maybe understanding part of the process. I am going to go through that process meticulously, and this is one of the things that raises my blood pressure, and that’s watching food network. I’ve talked about this in the past where I’m looking at it and I’m just thinking, yeah, they’re not going to be able to replicate that. And I want the food to really just stand out and to be the best that it possibly can. If that dish to just have everything that, that it could have added for the enjoyment of the guests.
Cal:
And I see, I see that not happen continuously. Very seldom do I ever see it not happen. And I’m not saying that because of, you know, any type of an ego thing. I’m, you know, I’m gonna be as humble as I can. It’s just that I know there’s a better way because I’ve done it the wrong way probably more times than not. And I’m not sure how many those stories we’re going to get. But, yes, I remember the thing about competing is it allowed me, when I made the Olympic team, and again, this is 93. I competed in the 96 Olympics, the 2000 Olympics, and 2000 fur Olympics.
Cal:
Again, they started in 1900. Even the Olympics, food Olympics, always held in Europe. And they happen every four years, like the sporting Olympics. I know I tell people I won an Olympic gold medal. It comes up in conversation, and I get asked, and they first look at me like. Like what? Short. I’m five foot seven and 190 pounds. I mean, I don’t look like somebody that’s going to be breaking any records on much of anything.
Cal:
Sometimes I’ll joke and tell them the shot put. But anyway, so they are the culinary Olympics. And when I started there, it took about a quarter of a million dollars, about $250 million all three times we went. And I was in charge of most of the financing of being able to do events and raise money. So we did all kinds of events. One that stand with a lot of them. I mean, dozens of them stand out. One with Paul Pacouss.
Cal:
I mean, we’re talking about a Chef that’s so famous, he’s passed away now, but it’s so famous that as Chefs, all we need to see is his silhouette. And, you know, it’s him. But just a variety of just wonderful masters that have gone, gone before us. You know, I think of Michelle Richard. I’ve talked about him. Charlie Trotter, of course. But being able to do these events, I looked back at the one that we did. It’s called the Meadows dinner.
Cal:
And it’s for the Meadows school. It’s a school down outside of Las Vegas. And when you walk through this school, we didn’t always get to go and see what the events that we were doing and raising money for what they were. We didn’t, we weren’t a part of that very often this time. We were, they took us, all of us, Chefs, to the, to the, to the school, the Meadow school. And when you walk down the hallway, I remember there was not a place on the wall on either side of this school that wasn’t floor to ceiling certificates and awards. And these people, these kids were either the best in the state or best in the country in whatever it was, their task was. And it was just amazing.
Cal:
And we mean, the kindergarteners actually played hail to the chief or hail to the Chef, because this particular dinner, the executive Chef of the White House, Henry Holler, we lost him about four years ago, but he was, I’ve been a little longer now, but he, he was like the grand, you know, Chef, spokesperson for the event. So we were replicate, replicating dishes out of his cookbook. It’s called the White House Cookbook. Chef Hendry holler was in the White House. He spanned five different presidential administrations. Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Johnson. And I just remember being down at this event and seeing all these things, like the kids playing hail to the chief with wooden spoons, banging on pots and pans. I mean, I’m talking about cool, but this place was so big.
Cal:
I don’t know. Most people wouldn’t know this unless they went there, but the MGM grand and Treasure island are connected underneath. So this event, I needed. I was running the event. I needed a golf cart to get from place to place. It was just, there were ice carvings and smoke and dancing ladies and everything. And the meal was just top notch. I don’t even know what they were charging per person.
Cal:
Maybe $500. I can’t remember how many people it was. I mean, it was hundreds. I know that much. But it was just, it was just a blast. I remember getting this call and I’m doing whatever, and it’s like, hey, Chef, we need you down here at the loading dock. So I take jump on the golf cart. I go down the loading dock, and when they ship live shellfish, softshell crabs, lobsters from Maine, they ship them in seaweed because they ship them alive, because you need them alive.
Cal:
And so we, we get all these lobsters that I ordered, and they’re all from Maine, and the crate broke when they dropped them on the loading dock. So I’m by when I get down there, there’s lobsters everywhere. They’re crawling all over the place. And there’s a couple guys that are working there on the, on the dock and me, and we’re all just running around grabbing lobsters. They’re kind of, you know, scurrying around. You know, they don’t go real fast, but, you know, when you got a few hundred lobsters, you know, but something. But those are the kind of things that you just think about and they make the event, they make it exciting. They create what food is supposed to create, right? Food is, in my opinion, food is meant to create two things, emotion.
Cal:
And then that story that’s behind that. So those are the two things that I guess, the story behind it, we would say memories, right? So it creates these things that we’re able to look back on in life and say, wow, that was fantastic. I remember that wedding, and I remember that birthday and that anniversary and good things and bad things and just things evolve around food. And it’s just one of those central connecting points that I think that we can use. And again, it’s something you have to do all the time. Why not have fun doing it? Why not enjoy it to the fullest? And that’s something that you’re always going to hear me preach from my pulpit here or my soapbox or whatever you want to call it, because I really think that we should enjoy something that we have to do that much of. This is our one time around, right? We all have two things. We all have a purpose, and we all have an expiration date.
Cal:
So let’s get up every day and enjoy that purpose. And when that purpose comes to food, go out and search out the best product, get ideas. You know, we didn’t have Internet when I started, so you’ve got a big advantage to that these days. You just pick something up. But anyway, enjoy it. Have fun. You ever have questions, jot them down again. You can always send those to cookinglike a pro podcast.net again, cookinglikeapropropodcast.net dot.
Cal:
I will personally get back to you and answer those as well on air. And thank you so much for joining us here today at cooking like a pro.
Cal:
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.
