Cal and Christa DeMercurio
Hey Food Fans! Join Chef Cal and Christa DeMercurio on another insightful episode of Cooking Like a Pro, where they delve into culinary techniques, trends, and the art of flavors. Tune in for tips that will elevate your cooking game at home.
- Learn the essentials of making beef stock from scratch.
- Discover the differences between pickling and fermenting, and their health benefits.
- Gain insights on enhancing flavor through aroma and presentation.
- Understand the fundamentals of proper vegetable preparation to avoid bitterness or undercooking.
Don’t miss these expert tips and more on “Cooking Like a Pro”!
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Timestamp Overview
00:00 Asian seasonings: high sodium balanced by sugar.
03:42 Fermentation provides probiotics, nutrients; watch sodium levels.
08:25 Create bread boat, brush with butter, brown.
11:39 Developed taste skills through work and experience.
15:53 Oceanic aroma or strong fishy smell assessed.
17:34 Reminded of past wine tasting aroma seminars.
19:49 Brussels sprout trend: crispy outside, undercooked inside.
24:23 Create sister sauces by enhancing mother sauces.
27:29 Stock is flavored broth with various proteins.
31:51 Egg whites form raft to clarify consommé.
32:41 Spoonful delivers concentrated flavor; dying culinary art.
37:22 Success in subtle, expertly crafted flavor foundations.
40:13 Eating: Task-focused or enjoyable, communal experience?
42:53 Success depends on guest-friendly reservation policies.
Transcripts
Christa DeMercurio:
Hey food fans. Welcome to Cooking Like a Pro with Chef cal and me, Mrs. 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 how aroma is part of flavor hospitality that accommodates. And I get schooled in how to make a beef stock from scratch. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.
Chef Cal:
Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to Cooking Like a Pro with Chef Cal and my beautiful wife, Mrs. Chef.
Christa DeMercurio:
Good evening.
Chef Cal:
Well, you’re back.
Christa DeMercurio:
I’m back again.
Chef Cal:
You’re back. We had a Charlieu and Kathy last week and this week you’re back. So I’m. It’s always great to have you sitting across and so hey, we’re talking about food here again with Cooking Like a Pro. And we were, we were working on a variety of things. Something my, my Mrs. Chef has been working on for a while is this, this booklet, I guess you called it a booklet.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, it’s gonna be an ebook.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And it’s like everything you want to know about vegetables. I mean it’s, it’s deep. Is he also really good, good stuff on. We’ve been working on it together. She. I don’t know how many pages this.
Christa DeMercurio:
Is, but we’re about 30 pages right now.
Chef Cal:
30 pages. And this will be available, I think for purchase. But we’ll, we’ll figure that out and I think it should be available in the next.
Christa DeMercurio:
Right now you can go to culinary yours.net and there’s a pop up where you can get onto the list. So you’ll be notified as soon as it’s available there.
Chef Cal:
You also just go to cookinglikeapropodcast.net and.
Christa DeMercurio:
That will take you. Or you can just go to culinaryorknet.
Chef Cal:
That’s our main place to go, folks. There are, there are nooks and crannies.
Christa DeMercurio:
All roads the same place.
Chef Cal:
So anyway, going with, going with vegetables, one of the things that I am just a huge fan of, we’re going to be talking about pickles. Pickles. Pickling. Pickling. Food versus fermenting it. I’ve. Well, first off it’s low calorie, it’s very high flavor. These items that are pickled, you do have to be careful because it kind of falls.
Chef Cal:
What I put into that Asian understanding of how I see seasonings, things being seasoned in Asian or Pan Asian areas, which is they overemphasize sodium. So because of that the o way overemphasize sugar to balance out for the fact that you don’t know that it’s so salty. And you can grab just an Asian vinaigrette off the shelf and look at the label, you probably won’t ever use it again. But usually it’s like three part sugar, one part salt. So there’s a lot of salt, but then the sugar kind of helps balance that out. But anyway, that’s kind of one of the things that goes along with when you’re pickling something. So obviously you don’t want eat pickles every day, but pickled vegetables of all sorts, and I mean from kimchi to sauerkraut. I’m a sauerkraut fan.
Christa DeMercurio:
How about not particularly.
Chef Cal:
What are your pickles? I know you like pickles. Your dad made the best.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yes.
Chef Cal:
Bread and butter pickles in the world.
Christa DeMercurio:
There’s a difference between true sauerkraut and quick kraut. You know, quick sauerkraut being a vinegar based pickled item and sauerkraut that is naturally fermented with salt and thyme and bacteria, it’s a little different.
Chef Cal:
And that’s when you get to that fermentation which is, well, better as far as the health benefit because you got probiotics coming in, you’ve got a capture of vitamins, minerals. I actually went through and found the high sodium is really the thing you want to make sure that you’re careful of. But again, we talked about the salt sugar combo. But I mean the blood sugar, it helps stabilize. You know, nothing grows in vinegar. That’s kind of the way I always used to look at. Nothing grows in vinegar. So how can be bad?
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, well, that’s the pickling that, you know, the fermented foods, we don’t consume very many of those in the United States like other countries do. And that’s. You’ve heard a lot about gut bacteria lately, gut health. And because we don’t eat a lot of fermented foods, that’s one of the things that’s harming our system. So trying to do the kimchi and the natural sour kraut and you know, I love kombucha and that is naturally fermented black tea and I love kombucha. So that’s the way I get it.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, it’s again, I mean, well, some of the things that I noticed was that I. This was. This has been decades ago, but I was watching the Tour de France and they were eating the, the bike bicyclists If. I said. If I pronounced that right. We’re eating pickle bars, like. Like protein bars, but made out of pickles. And it’s for.
Chef Cal:
For leg cramps, you know, so there’s something else that. What was that look for? Oh, I’m serious.
Christa DeMercurio:
No, pickles.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, pickles help you with your leg cramps, your muscle cramps. Well, we did vitamins. Acknowledge. Lot of minerals.
Christa DeMercurio:
You will sit and drink pickle juice. I’ve seen you do that. Just take the pickle juice and just drink it.
Chef Cal:
Well, there’s a little bad about drinking just straight vinegar, too. It’s really no different.
Christa DeMercurio:
Pickle juice, Apple cider vinegar, pickle juice.
Chef Cal:
I think if I’m going to do shots, I’m going to do pickle juice before I do red wine vinegar straight to my throat. The acid reflex just. But really, you talked about gut health and. And the. We mentioned probiotics, but also antioxidants. So they’re, you know, they fight off inflammation. So it’s a great thing to do. And you can pickle anything.
Chef Cal:
I mean, if you can fit it in a pickling jar, however your jar.
Christa DeMercurio:
Is, well, it’s a preservative technique. So, you know, when you get things in a season that won’t carry over the next season, how do you preserve it? And pickling was one of the best ways to do that.
Chef Cal:
You’re basically. You’re canning with vinegar.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, yeah.
Chef Cal:
And. And again. And then you’re adding, you know, shelf life by, you know, I could probably say years, but I would definitely say, you know, I would do it more of a seasonal thing. Like. Like, I know that you or I should. My wife, she. She labels everything. There’s a date on everything.
Chef Cal:
And I’m not just talking about the refrigerator and the coverage, but, I mean, I’m surprised. Don’t walk in. There’s a date on the toothpaste. I mean, she’s. She’s got this thing about labeling, and it’s great.
Christa DeMercurio:
I can’t remember anything.
Chef Cal:
Oh, is that what. Okay. All right. Well, we all fall into that category as we’re getting older.
Christa DeMercurio:
But I think, oh, yeah, I’ll remember next week that I made this. No. Two days later, I can’t remember. I made it.
Chef Cal:
Oh, you know what? I wanted to mention Bonhomie. There was a real big. That was a sandwich that kind of. Kind of almost seems like it fizzled out. But, boy, when that thing is made right? You know, I like the char siu, and I like to make my own char siu. Char Sioux is brined pork, and it has that good old red dye number 40 in it. That stuff will kill you if nothing else does. But then you have to.
Chef Cal:
Generally, it can be pork or it can actually be ground almost like a pate. But then after that, it’s pickled vegetables, you know, radishes, you know, a little bit of just about everything that could go in there, I think.
Christa DeMercurio:
Radishes, Cucumbers.
Chef Cal:
Cucumbers, of course. Yes. Yeah. So, but a bonhomie is just. It’s a Vietnamese sandwich. And really the actual bonhomie, the word means bread. Okay. So it’s really more about the bread than it’s just putting stuff in between the bread.
Chef Cal:
And again, usually some sort of a pork in some fashion of. Or another char Siu is pork. So that’s just one of the things we do. But you want a firm bread, because if you’re going to do a bonhomie, it’s kind of a real moist, you know, sandwich because it’s got marinated everything in it. So everything’s got that moisture content. So I get a. Get a good bread, a French bread. Slice that in half and then kind of press down that middle dough, like, let’s say, think of it as like you’re looking at a baked potato.
Chef Cal:
And you press. Press that down in the middle because you want to make kind of like a boat shape. And you make that boat shape. And actually, you know, oil and water don’t mix. So what I would do would be take that bread, press it down to make the bottom more of a boat. You can do the same thing with the top. Brush that with a little bit of melted butter, and then brown that in the oven. Because water and oil won’t mix, so the moisture from the vegetables won’t go into the bread because of the oil that was baked onto the exterior.
Chef Cal:
So that’s always a good way of kind of, you know, making sure you don’t have a soggy sandwich. Like a French dip, right? Yeah, like the old Hofbrau. Did you ever go to Hofbrau?
Christa DeMercurio:
I have never been to. I may have been the one German.
Chef Cal:
Just, you know, you take the bread and just slap it in the. In the juice and the grease, and then you pile a bunch of. A bunch of generally pork, but, you know, roast beef, turkey. I used to love the one in the old. In the old mall that we. We had here.
Christa DeMercurio:
Isn’t that where you would put sauerkraut on your sandwich? That’s usually a German dish, right?
Chef Cal:
Oh, yeah. Germans put they’ll put sauerkraut on just about anything. Wiener schnitzel. Yeah, I had that when I was over there. So we’re going to go ahead and take a quick break. We appreciate you joining us here at Cooking Like a Pro. And we will be back in just a moment. All right, welcome back to Cooking Like a Pro with your host and hostess, Chef Cal and Mrs.
Chef Cal:
Chef Christa. And, hey, we. Pickles. That was a good discussion. I like that. You know, I was coming across something today about aroma. And one of the things that I, you know, especially that I bought you that book from a lady that I had talked to. What was her name again?
Christa DeMercurio:
Barb Stuckey.
Chef Cal:
What’s the name of her book?
Christa DeMercurio:
The book is called Taste. Taste what you’re missing.
Chef Cal:
Taste what you’re missing. Yeah, I’ve not read all of it, but it’s a really cool book. And one of the things that first points out is, and I don’t think we consciously think about this, but what we taste, 90% of it, is actually what we’re smelling. Only 10% is what we’re tasting. That’s the breakdown that they have now. So we know what we’ve talked before about taste buds. We know our taste buds around 60 years old, they’ll quit replicating. Also, as you get older, there’s other things that.
Chef Cal:
Into. Play medication is the first thing I think about how that affects. Affects your. Your ability to taste and your ability to smell. And I know that that was how I found out that I had. Covid was a couple.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah. He stopped tasting. Yeah. You were. Kept adding salt and. Kept adding salt. Kept adding salt. And I took a taste and I about fell over.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Yeah. Christian and our son Isaac both just spit it out. And I’m like, I. And that’s. That’s what it took for me to realize that I, you know, I was working a lot of hours and all that, so I was getting tired anyway. But that was losing. And as a, you know, as a.
Chef Cal:
As a Chef, losing your ability to be able to taste and smell is like.
Christa DeMercurio:
It’s what you’re.
Chef Cal:
It’s like a pianist losing their hands. Yeah. Or their fingers. Yeah. Or maybe just some of their. Well, because. Yeah, I couldn’t taste. And it took a while.
Chef Cal:
I can’t remember exactly.
Christa DeMercurio:
It took several months.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, it took several months. And it kind of came back without me really noticing because I was working, you know, all the time also. And I kind of got used to having other people taste things because I can make something and look at it and know what I put in there and know whether it tastes good or not. I mean, I’ve been doing it long enough where that I think I can generally. And that’s a Chef’s job. It’s not for me to get food to taste how I want it to be. It’s how I want to get food to a palatability of what the guest is going to enjoy. You know, for example, I like food that’s a little spicier, where you don’t.
Chef Cal:
I mean, we fight over the fresh pepper boy. She sees the fresh pepper shaker come out, and I’m afraid I’m going to get hit with it.
Christa DeMercurio:
No, I can’t do it. Can’t do it. But aroma is a key factor into whether something is done, whether it’s roasted. You know, you can put a cake in the oven and 30, 45 minutes and you won’t smell. All of a sudden you start smelling it, then you know it’s almost done. Or, you know, when it’s almost burned. Right. You’re out in the other room and all of a sudden smoke alarm is going off and you’re smelling something burning.
Christa DeMercurio:
So it’s a trigger to what process your food is going through.
Chef Cal:
Well, you know, sulfuric vegetables are very much that way. And I add something in the booklet when I was looking at it today that you’re making available here shortly. And it was. I don’t know, I had to do with. With smelling something, you know, and not being able to taste. I think it’s just, you know, first off, you’re getting it up close to your nose. Right. So that’s a part of it.
Chef Cal:
So I was looking at some stuff we know that we. Since I’m going down a different rabbit trail anyway, that we can get sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. Umami is also what we call savory. Some kind of like a mushroom flavor or an earthy, meaty meat.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, beef.
Chef Cal:
That kind of. So there’s a variety of things that we. That we can taste. But when it comes to practicing, I know that for me, I believe, going through my time in the wine industry, both connected with, you know, as a Chef and having wines on a restaurant wine list and stuff, but also a couple years of running a winery, completely running a winery down in Napa Valley. It was just learning vineyard management, how the grapes grow and all of this stuff. And then it learning the. Once you start practicing on the aroma, especially if you’re writing a wine list, because you go through. If I go through 100 bottles to get a 10 bottle list.
Chef Cal:
But you go through and it’s that smell. What am I picking up? Because, you know, it doesn’t matter what you taste because if it smells bad, you know your mind’s already going to be made up before it gets in your mouth.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well, and our aroma is something that we lose when we’re sick. So when you’re sick, things don’t tend to taste good. Right. So you tend to, you know, just, you don’t want to eat. And also I’ve learned that taste buds, when we were kids, we were taught, you know, sweets on one side of the tongue, salties on another side of the tongue. Something’s at the tip of your tongue. That’s actually incorrect. It’s actually incorrect.
Chef Cal:
I know where my spice is. I know that much.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah. A lot of that’s in the back of throat. But they have found that our taste buds are actually intermixed throughout over the entire tongue. And if one area of your tongue dies, basically that other areas of your tongue will pick up those traits to make up for it. It’s actually pretty amazing what it does.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. I don’t think I want to YouTube a video on, you know, different parts of the tongue.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well, that. But that’s what this book is talking about is what we taste is so much more than what we think is just putting something in our mouth and chewing and swallowing. There’s so much more involved.
Chef Cal:
And, you know, we haven’t even talked about, you know, the very, the very first thing, you know, the very first thing is your sight. You see it. You know, I bring you, I bring my wife in, she’s sitting at the table and I bring her this beautiful piece of salmon. It just looks great on the plate. It’s got your vegetables with it and maybe a nice starch or a grain of some sort. And she looks at it. So that’s that first effect that you have before you can even smell it. Right.
Chef Cal:
And then you get the aroma. Does it smell like, you know, the ocean? Is it like oceanic? Got that. Or does it smell strong like salmon with the Omega 3 with all the fats in there can have a stronger, stronger smell to it. And then they took the bloodline off the bottom. That’s another important component because the bloodline on the bottom of the fish is that dark pieces down there. If you don’t trim that off, you’re really going to have a much stronger flavored fish. And I don’t care whether it’s sea bass or halibut or there’s always going to be that bloodline which is next to the skin, but. And then after that, you still haven’t tasted it yet.
Chef Cal:
And now you’re going to check the texture. Is this salmon flake apart or is it hard? Is it texture tough? And they’re very like. So it’s almost like taste is not least important, but it’s last, the actual flavor.
Christa DeMercurio:
But before all that, the ambiance of the room affects taste. You know, sitting on the coast overlooking the Monterey Bay, things are going to taste different than if you’re, you know, in the back room. You know, dark.
Chef Cal:
And ambiance is critical to a lot of things. I mean, if you have a conversation, you’re having a good time, you’re much less likely to, you know, be sitting there just nitpicking at whatever’s in front.
Christa DeMercurio:
Is there beautiful music that makes you feel relaxed, or is it really loud and noisy? You know, rock music that’s irritating you? There’s so many things that affect taste, but aroma is one of the primary.
Chef Cal:
Rock music is irritating.
Christa DeMercurio:
Depends upon how loud it is.
Chef Cal:
It’s not all I got out of what you said, but. But, you know, and, but one. One of the things that, that I was reminded of today when I was get. When I was prepping was, remember we used to do those aroma seminars, and they were for wine tasting, and you would get a variety of wines. I say got five white wines, white, five, 10 glasses, five white, five red. Maybe just an ounce or two of wine in each one. And then each one is just enhanced with either just a drop of extract or maybe a little bit of, say, pineapple juice or a little drop of vanilla. And then you go through and it’s blind.
Chef Cal:
So you put it on a piece of masking tape, put it on the bottom of the glass, and then you just do this as a group. It’s a fun, fun little training thing to do. But. But once you’re able to pick up the aroma, it makes the taste component so much easier.
Christa DeMercurio:
And here’s something else I learned. Whenever you see all natural flavors on a label, it’s actually aroma that’s been added. So if you read, you know, something that’s peach flavored and it says all natural flavors, it has a peach aroma, especially in, like a soft drink, when you pop off the top and you can smell the peaches, it’s from an aroma elixir that they’ve added.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And they’ve added some extract or flavor, you know, from something. I remember earlier when I lost my thought of train. It was broccoli. That’s why I could walk into a restaurant and tell you if the broccoli is overcooked. But sulfuric vegetables are so obvious. And I just remember over the decades of doing this, walking in the kitchen saying, hey, pull the broccoli out of the oven or pull the broccoli out of the steamer.
Christa DeMercurio:
Cauliflower, brussels sprouts, turnips, that kind.
Chef Cal:
You know, I see something on Brussels spring sprouts the other day too. And it was one of the things that we’ll get up. We’ll get a video on it. Matter of fact, we did. We got, we have one. I did one, but we, it’s, it’s not up yet. We’ll have to get that one up because if you don’t know how to prep brussels sprouts, you will ruin them. You, you have, you have to understand, it’s like a little baby cabbage.
Chef Cal:
And that center is a hard core. So you have to put like a, you know, a little. Basically it’s just a. And then a cut, like a plus shape cut on that core side going in about a half an inch or you know, maybe, you know, a third of the way into the vegetable to.
Christa DeMercurio:
Allow the water to get up inside of it to cook it.
Chef Cal:
Or you’re literally the outside of the brussels sprout is falling off and into the boiling water, wherever it is, or the deep fryer and the inside still undercooked. And that’s what I noticed with. They got this little trend you see of people fried brussels sprouts. You know, it’s been around for a while. Yeah. And you seem like when you see these things pop up, then you see them everywhere. You know, remember, it’s either a trend or a fad, folks. A fad will fade away.
Chef Cal:
That is soft serve yogurt. Okay. I mean, I don’t even know if you can find that. At one point, it seemed like there was one in every corner. So I don’t know, maybe that’s just me, but that, that’s kind of a big part of it. And, but if it’s a trend, like, you know, eating healthy and those things are going to continue on, you know. So we talked earlier about like a bonhomie sandwich. You see it everywhere.
Chef Cal:
Now you don’t see it at all. Or, you know, you, chicken wings will be here forever. But you know, Brussels sprouts, I don’t know. But you got to do them, right? Most time I get them in a restaurant. I’m disappointed yeah.
Christa DeMercurio:
And a lot of people have said when you’ve made their Brussels sprouts, like, going, I have never liked Brussels sprouts before in my life because usually because they’re bitter, because they’re not cooked all the way through.
Chef Cal:
Well, that’s one of the vegetables that were. Prep is. Is, like, vital some things, you know, you can get away with a little leeway. You don’t have to peel the fiber off the outside of your celery. You know, I mean, if you don’t want to. I do. I don’t want to floss while I’m trying to eat my vegetables. But.
Chef Cal:
But, yeah, I think that, you know, Brussels sprouts, you can. You can definitely do those where they’re just. They’re just almost inedible. But who wants a raw vegetable in the center? And they think they look good, and, you know, they’re all crispy and brown, but they’re not cooked all the way. It’s the prep. It’s all in the prep.
Christa DeMercurio:
But going back to aroma, you made a cauliflower last week where we par. Cooked it in the microwave and got it cooked all the way through, then took it and popped it into the toaster When you buy through any affiliate links on our site (i.e. Amazon), we may earn an affiliate commission. Happy shopping! oven to get that caramelized brown flavor. Changed the flavor of that cauliflower with.
Chef Cal:
Some Himalayan salt and a little bit of. A little bit of a. Not cracked pepper, but cracked pepper and a little bit of butter, and. Oh, boy, it was delicious. So anyway. Hey. Okay. I’m.
Chef Cal:
Well, I’m hungry. We didn’t eat before we came here, and hopefully you’re hungry too, folks. And we’re gonna take a quick break here cooking like a pro Chef Cal. And Mrs. Chef, Christa will be back in just a moment. All right. Well, welcome back. Welcome back.
Chef Cal:
Well, we had some fun this week, me and my wife. I was trained through a French apprenticeship program. I have to kind of set this up a little bit because I was trained that way. We were. I was trained. This was. Geez, when did I. I graduated it in.
Chef Cal:
It was three years, and I graduated in 81. Okay. So I started right in high school. So it was. It’s a French apprenticeship program, which means everything is made from scratch. You know, it’s all. It’s made from what a Chef would describe as the bible of cooking, which would be Escoffier. You know, the French get, you know, credit for quite a few things, mainly because they were the first ones to write stuff down.
Chef Cal:
I think they. They documented it better. And Escoffier there was, you know, no one, you know, like him, you know, as the master, he actually wrote the menu for the Titanic.
Christa DeMercurio:
Really?
Chef Cal:
Yeah, yeah. All 17 courses. And that’s not why the boat sank, but, boy, they had a heck of a meal. And we. We’ve actually had some fun with that over the years where we’ve done events at our restaurants on the. On the what? The 100th anniversary was the 100th anniversary. Yeah. And then we did it, you know, a year or two later on that same anniversary, maybe the 102nd or something.
Chef Cal:
But that, I mean, it was, you know, very French, quite. Quite a meal. And again, I think it was at least 15, 16, 17 courses. But anyway, the point I wanted to get to is making things from. From scratch. What. What we really, I think, desire to do with. With this project with culinary yours, with cooking Like a pro podcast and all of these things is try to release you from what I.
Chef Cal:
Something my. My wife had. I don’t know if you heard it or if you came up with it was the original thought, but the. The tyranny of recipes. You know, get away from. Learn how to make something from scratch, because then you can. You have all this opportunity to go any direction you want, and you can say something as simple as making tomato sauce. So there’s five mother sauces or main sauces made sauces.
Chef Cal:
But you take tomato sauce and then you add, you know, brown sugar, vinegar and mustard to it. And now you have barbecue sauce. So, you know, you take this mother sauce, you add ingredients to it, and you make it a secondary sauce or what we call a sister sauce. So mother sauce, main sauce, sister sauce, and the sister sauce to just go on for chapters and chapters. Chapters in a scoffier. But when you can make something from scratch, it’s really going to open you up to be able to be so much more creative and be able to come up with so many ideas. And that’s what my mind does when I think of things. So.
Chef Cal:
So we did this process. So I want to have Christa kind of walk you through her take on it, because this is the first time that I think you’ve probably witnessed a brown stock from scratch.
Christa DeMercurio:
All right, so for all of you that don’t know what a stock is, it is. Okay, you guys think of the box or the can at the store that says beef broth or chicken broth, or you can get a base. Chicken base, Beef base. And you flavor some water.
Chef Cal:
The only stock I invest in is beef stock. Beef stock. Okay, well, there we go.
Christa DeMercurio:
Not the beef stock that Moves. It’s the stock that comes from.
Chef Cal:
It would have been a. It would have been a good investment there, Ben. It been a very good investment because, yeah, beef. Beef is nothing but go through the roof.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay. We’re not talking about the stock market.
Chef Cal:
Okay. Okay. So. But we. So we had the bones, so we started the beef.
Christa DeMercurio:
So you. What type of bones were they? The shank.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, they take the shank, and you want them to be cut in. In about two to two and a half inch pieces, because what you’re after is the bone marrow. The bone marrow inside is where the flavor comes from. So the bone has to be cut in order to have access to that. So, yeah, you started off with the bone.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay, so first off, you preheated the oven, because we’re going to be going into the oven. And then you took a pan and you browned off the bones.
Chef Cal:
The bones.
Christa DeMercurio:
And then you.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, basically from that, I just went ahead and added some tomato paste there. And then we roasted it out in the oven for about. For an hour.
Christa DeMercurio:
With the bouquet gourni.
Chef Cal:
Yeah.
Christa DeMercurio:
And then also with the mirepoix.
Chef Cal:
Those went in the pot. Both of those went in the pot. So we roast the bones. So they get that brown flavored that we want, that beef brown look and beef flavor we want. We always add tomato. That’s one of the mistakes I see so many people make and Chefs make, where they don’t add tomato product to their beef dishes. And you have to, because if you don’t, you’ve got a plain, flat, brown, ugly sauce. It’s probably defined more as a gravy.
Chef Cal:
Yes.
Christa DeMercurio:
Depth of flavor.
Chef Cal:
You need tomato to add the acid, but more so to give it that amber. That amber.
Christa DeMercurio:
Because it also caramelizes.
Chef Cal:
Yep.
Christa DeMercurio:
So anyway, that pan, hot, browned, went into the oven to roast. Was that about 400 degrees?
Chef Cal:
Yeah, 400 degrees for an hour.
Christa DeMercurio:
About an hour. And then you took that out, and then you started to add the mirepoix.
Chef Cal:
And the bouquet garni.
Christa DeMercurio:
And the bouquet garni.
Chef Cal:
And so there’s only four ingredients on any stock. And again, as my wife said, stock is. It’s just broth. It’s just flavored broth. It can be fish, beef, chicken, veal, which is white beef, oyster, clam shells, shrimp, if you ever get shrimp. Actually, Mom. But I forgot I had that conversation with mom last night that she got these shrimp brought over to her, and they still had the heads on them, you know, so like kind of like a crawfish when you. You Eat a steamed crawfish, you eat the tail, and then you suck the head.
Chef Cal:
Well, the heads are generally used for your stock, and that’s what mom did. I’m so impressed with her. She made it. So she saved the shells, made a stock, and then made a chowder out of it.
Christa DeMercurio:
Very nice.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. See, I don’t. I don’t know where that rubbed off on her, but, boy, she figured it out. I was so impressed. Like, I even told her that.
Christa DeMercurio:
So anyway, so we took the brown bones. Actually, it’s not we. I was behind the camera.
Chef Cal:
Everything’s in the pot.
Christa DeMercurio:
You did. Everything is now in the pot. You’ve added about a gallon of water. And then did you add red wine to it also?
Chef Cal:
We deglazed it. We deglazed the pan with the bones in it. And that got all the last of those little scrap pieces in there. All this went in the pot. Your vegetables, which is your carrots, onion, and celery, your bouquet garni, which is your aromatics, and then parsley, bay leaf, and thyme. Anyway, so all that went in the pot, and then it went for an hour. It reduced by about a half, and we ended up with about a half a gallon.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah. So I didn’t forget it and then cool it down. And then the next stage will be to take that and turn it into a sauce. So right now it’s gone.
Chef Cal:
All you gotta do is. All you gotta do is tighten it up. Now it’s already been reduced by half, which the French word for half is demi. Demi. Yeah. And it’s been reduced by half. So now it’s just going to need to be tightened up with the roux, and you can thicken up a sauce with the roux, which is equal parts butter and flour. But how many different flavor colors of roux are there?
Christa DeMercurio:
There is. Well, first there is the uncooked, which is the beurme. Then when you do cook it, you’ve got white, which is barely cooked. Blonde, which is kind of cooked, and brown, which is the darker cooked.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, yeah. The. The blonde roux will start to get a little nutty in aroma, and you’ll know. And what you’re doing at this point, when you cook the roux, which is again, the flour and butter mixture is. You’re trying to cook the starch flavor out of it. You don’t want to taste that. You know, that tongue stuck to your roof of your mouth. Aspirin kind of.
Chef Cal:
You know, you don’t want that flavor. So that. That. That’s the starch. And so the starch has to cook out. So in a brown sauce, you’d use a brown roux. In a blonde sauce, you use a blonde roux. In a white sauce or a cream sauce, also the French know as bechamel, you would use a white roux.
Chef Cal:
So the color of the roux matches the sauce. And again, it’s really quite simple. It’s those four ingredients. It’s always going to be the main flavor of the item, the protein. Beef bones, chicken bones, fish bones. So you got the main protein, you’ve got your bouquet garni, your aromatics, your mirepoix, your vegetables. And the last thing is water, you know, and we always were told in our apprenticeship to always start your stocks with cold water. And I’ve seen.
Chef Cal:
Noticed in the sense then I’ve seen some things where they’ll take the bones, throw them in a pot, bring it up to a temperature, a heat. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know if it. All the way to a boil, and then take off those impurities, strain it, and then start over with that. And to me, you’re just losing flavor. You’re just throwing flavor down. You can get those impurities out. I mean, from.
Chef Cal:
I don’t care if you have to use a coffee filter or if you have to use cheesecloth or, you know, get yourself a chinois, but come up with.
Christa DeMercurio:
Capture the flavor first before you strain it.
Chef Cal:
Yes, yeah, yeah. But if you. Those impurities are still going to have flavor. So. And there’s also what we call a raft. So the raft would be the same thing one more time. You take the bouquet garnier, you take the mirepoix. And in the case of beef, we would take some meat and we slice it up, chop it up super fine, almost a hamburger, but not quite ground, just chopped.
Chef Cal:
You mix that together with egg whites, and then you put that on the top of your simmering stock. And if you had a pot that was glass, you could. You could see the particles in the sauce as it simmers go up and down and up and down and up and down from the bottom of the pot to the top of the pot, the bottom. And when they go to the top, they’ll. This mixture of beef, egg whites and vegetables and aromatics will form what we call a raft. And they’ll adhere to that. So by far, it’s the best way to purify it. And then you carefully take that off and this is how you make a consume.
Christa DeMercurio:
It’s consummate yeah.
Chef Cal:
If you want to go to the point of the consummate. The thing is, people, I can’t remember the last time I seen a consummate.
Christa DeMercurio:
It sounds way too complicated, but it’s the purest of flavors. Right?
Chef Cal:
But if you take a spoonful of something that looks like a lightly off colored water, and you just feel like someone just stuffed an entire Dungeness crab in your mouth, you know, I mean, or, you know, an entire garden of tomatoes, I mean, because the flavor is just that concentrated. And again, it’s so much that this is a dying art. As I’m writing this book and I’m going through and I’m thinking about all the Chefs that I’ve known that have since passed. And that’s why, you know, I really should thank my wife for allowing us to go down to Monterey, because being able to talk to the Burke Catino, one of just the, you know, there’s not a whole lot of master Chefs in the world, and this is 85 years old. And I know you got a chance to just kind of sit off the. From on the side and watch, but we had about a 45 minute discussion. And so I don’t know how enthralled you were, but I was very emotional.
Christa DeMercurio:
It was very sweet. He’s so passionate about the art and the craft and the hospitality of food service.
Chef Cal:
That’s it. And it’s just old school. It’s just. It needs to be right. That’s how I was trained. You know, we don’t. We may, okay, we can’t obtain perfection, but as long as it’s perfect, I’m okay. Right? Meaning let’s, let’s get it as best as we can.
Chef Cal:
Because that’s what it’s about. It’s about family, it’s about flavor, it’s about community. It’s about enjoying yourself, you know, around the table. And it’s about the. Those relationships and memories which are created, folks. And I think that that’s, that’s why we’re really onto this into this project.
Christa DeMercurio:
But anyway, speaking of sauces, as I’m doing the vegetable booklet, I’m also writing a 30 page sauce and spice booklet. So that will also be coming up soon.
Chef Cal:
I’ve only looked at that one once.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, that’s not over.
Chef Cal:
Vegetables out first. Anyway, we’ll be back in just a moment. Again, you’re with Chef Cal and Ms. Chef Christa. Cooking like a pro. Back in just a moment. Oh, we were down one song, so we’re just coming in hot. The wheels are on the ground.
Chef Cal:
We’re good. Hey, I just wanted to quickly say it’s National Liqueur Day. I don’t know if I’m saying that right.
Christa DeMercurio:
LI Q U E U R L.
Chef Cal:
CURE yo all right, well, I have to pour myself some grand me here.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay. And speaking of days, there is International Chefs Day coming up on Sunday.
Chef Cal:
Really?
Christa DeMercurio:
So celebrate your Chefs on Sunday.
Chef Cal:
Do I have to cook? Okay, yeah, so you do that when you go into a restaurant. Maybe let the server know, you know, hey, it’s National Chef’s Day. Tell the Chef that we said hello, or tell the Chef that we appreciate it because, you know, it. It’s hard work. I did it for a long time and my, my body took a pretty good beating.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well, we were over with speaking with Charlo and Kathy the other night that we interviewed last week, and they had got there at 6 o’clock in the morning and they were there till 9 o’clock that night. So that tells you how long and hard restaurants work is when you get.
Chef Cal:
Those, those, those family restaurants.
Christa DeMercurio:
Family restaurants.
Chef Cal:
And, and just finishing up on the, on the last block that we had the, the. When talking about, you know, flavors and the tyranny, getting away from the tyranny of recipes, you know, being, you know, it’s. You start with recipes, you know, start with recipes and then make them your own. But you do that by learning how to cook from scratch. So if I needed to tie a bow on that one.
Christa DeMercurio:
And we talk about that in the booklet.
Chef Cal:
Oh, yes.
Christa DeMercurio:
Learning how to mystery box cook quite.
Chef Cal:
A bit, you know, and one of the things on flavor also, since we were on the, the topic, the being able to taste, being mindful of what you taste, think about what you’re eating, think about what you put in your mouth. You don’t have to stop and moan and close your eyes. I mean, I’ve done that, but I mean, at the dinner table, I mean, in like a really nice restaurant. And I didn’t moan real loud, but that was okay.
Christa DeMercurio:
I got to brag about one more thing.
Chef Cal:
Okay.
Christa DeMercurio:
Our very. For my very first tomato, the first one in successfully grown in 12 years. Oh, yes, A full size beef steak.
Chef Cal:
Oh. Came off the vine yesterday like a mortgage lifter.
Christa DeMercurio:
It was beautiful and we had a beautiful blt. And that tomato was so friendly.
Chef Cal:
It was center of the, it was center stage actually on the sandwich. I’d almost say that the tomato might have even overpowered. Well, we, we don’t. You, you don’t use a bitter lettuce on, on a blt.
Christa DeMercurio:
Anyway, it was beautiful. It was shiny, it was red.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Nice toasted potato bread, people.
Christa DeMercurio:
I am so proud that we have our first full grown tomato that actually made it through the summer. Made it through deer season. Yeah, we were able to enjoy it.
Chef Cal:
I took pictures of it. So we’ll have to put that one up. We’ll put that up on the site.
Christa DeMercurio:
We’ll get that one up on Instagram.
Chef Cal:
You can take a look at it. But anyway, on background flavors, being able to taste, being able to pick things up, and one of the things that I think has really been able to allow me to be successful over the decades was early on learning that there’s a background flavor that has to be built. Okay. So it may be seasonings in there that the average person is not even going to taste. But they’re going to say, yes, I like it. They’re going to start, stop and analyze it. But they’re going to say, yeah, that was a great broccoli and cheddar soup. But maybe they didn’t realize that we took the stalks and boiled them down to get a broccoli broth.
Chef Cal:
Just instead of just starting with water, you’re starting with broccoli broth. So you got even more flavor. And then maybe use the sharp cheddar instead of just a regular. But maybe they’re not even noticed. They’re just saying, wow, that’s a really nice broccoli cheddar soup.
Christa DeMercurio:
And if you took the time to roast your garlic and use it instead of just a raw garlic, that’s another depth of flavor.
Chef Cal:
But the background flavor that I ended up coming to in, oh, this was 89 when we started D Mercurios. And that was what we call secret salt. And it’s just two parts salt, one part white pepper, one part granulated garlic. But that went in to about everything that I made except for dessert. And sometimes, I mean, I made white pepper ice cream. I mean, crab ice cream. We do, you know, sometimes you venture off and shove some savory over into the, into the sweet category. But it always had this background flavor of this light seasoning.
Chef Cal:
It was always. It was all light colored. I didn’t use black pepper, use white. But everything kind of just a little.
Christa DeMercurio:
Dusting of that white pepper tastes quite a bit different than black pepper. So it gives a little bit different black ground note.
Chef Cal:
Well, it does. Well, it doesn’t have. Yeah, it doesn’t have the shell. Yeah, the shell’s been removed. That’s black pepper has the shell on it. So it’s ground up, so it’s black and white where white peppers not. That’s why white peppers expensive. But anyway, so flavor.
Chef Cal:
But anyway, those background flavors start solid. And that’s gets us back to really our discussion about stock is you’ve got all those background flavors. I’m not going to taste this thing and say, wow, you know, I’m really picking up the thyme or I’m really getting the carrots or wow, the garlic’s really coming through. No, it’s, it’s this common, this balanced combination of flavors that’s complete. And it starts with that back and then it comes forward from there.
Christa DeMercurio:
And that’s where I’m right now. The five ingredient recipes are really the rage right now. It’s another one if it’s going to be a fad or a trend. But I look at those and go, but you are missing out on so much flavor because everybody’s looking for speed, they’re looking for convenience. And really the only true way you can get a five ingredient recipe is to use premade items that you’ve mixed together five different ones. Because you’re just, you’re not going to get the density, the layer of flavor. It’s just the thought behind it coming through.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And again, do we want to enjoy it? Again, I do have one of the chapters of my book is titled Live to Eat and Eat to Live. And we’ve talked about that numerous times here on the show. But that’s. Do we just want to eat so we can get to our next task? Do we want to eat so we have energy to do whatever’s next on the list or do we want to enjoy ourselves? And that has to do with bringing in community and bringing in, you know, discussions and, you know, and having these, these again, family memories created. I mean, as an Italian family, maybe that’s, you know, I mean, your family, my family were a little different when, I mean, dinner was a little more quiet at your house than it was at my house because literally we got eight people and there’s four conversations going on. So each, there’s, there’s two people talking in four and it’s across the table and it’s.
Christa DeMercurio:
But you have multiple generations and, you know, four or five, 10 people in each generation, so there’s more people.
Chef Cal:
But that was always a lot of fun. And I did want to mention, because I know that we, we went out, we don’t really go out much. Might sound like we do because we talk about it a lot, but we went out and to A restaurant where something happened that I just, I just disagree with. I’ll just put it that way. Because there’s a reason we’re called hospitality industry. The first word hospitality coming from the word hospital, coming from the idea of taking care of people. But this restaurant we went out to and what their, their policy was was they wouldn’t let anyone sit down to. The whole group is there.
Chef Cal:
And I can understand that. Yeah.
Christa DeMercurio:
From a business standpoint, if you do turntables and we were a large party.
Chef Cal:
Coming in, you know, there are always those, you know, those circumstances where you have to consider the different, you know, you know, things that are going on. And then dad wasn’t feeling real well and standing in this big crowded little entryway waiting. So I just think, yeah, there was.
Christa DeMercurio:
A situation where we weren’t all there and we couldn’t get seated and my father in law was on oxygen.
Chef Cal:
And there’s a number, there’s a number of restaurants that do that here in town. And I know why, because I’ve had restaurants and I’ve thought about maybe this would be a policy to do. But you do, I think, I think you have to take it on an individual basis. Maybe that’s what I should say.
Christa DeMercurio:
What I say from a customer standpoint, you know, before you go, if you are going in as a large party, you know, find out what the restaurant’s policy is for getting seated.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, if they take reservations, most people don’t even do that anymore. But you know, that’s going to depend on a, you know, a restaurant and how successful they are. But yeah, you have to come up with policies that work. But I think you always have to err on the forgiveness side of, for the guest, you know, because you are there for the guest. I mean, I remember being in restaurants where, you know, you get up and go to the restroom and you come back in your. And your cloth napkins been refolded into a. Whatever the fold, you know, we have.
Christa DeMercurio:
Remember that? It was folded on my seat of my chair. It was so sweet. It was so nice to do that for me.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And those are just the type of things that really separate it. And you can find that in all.
Christa DeMercurio:
Different areas, it all just comes down to preparation. Preparation from the guest standpoint and preparation from the restaurant standpoint so that all the bases are covered. So when a situation arises, you’re able to adapt, you’re able to accommodate and that there doesn’t become, become a big brouhaha or situation and overcrowding, et cetera, et cetera.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, but we even did, you know, even something. Getting back to the details, I just thought, like, remember Demon Carroll’s? We actually offer people chilled salad forks. So you. When you. For your salad, so your salad was on, you know, ice cold salad on an ice cold plate with ice cold fork. I mean, hey, texture, temperature, it makes it salads. You wanted to be crisp, right?
Christa DeMercurio:
And I remember the Red lion, the little. The little bread things different. You have different little sticks and crackers and things on it. So if they were busy. Oh, I used to love those. I mean, I was four years old, and I remember going to the Red lion and having the crackers to keep me entertained and dealt with until service was able to happen.
Chef Cal:
Good service really stands out. So let’s just. We’ll leave it at that. All right. Good service stands out.
Christa DeMercurio:
Thank you so much for spending time 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.
