Cal and Christa DeMercurio
Gobble, gobble! Christa DeMercurio and Chef Cal here, and guess what? We’re back with another juicy episode of the “Cooking Like a Pro” podcast on Culinarily Yours, just in time for Thanksgiving! If you’re looking to up your turkey game and master those side dishes, this one’s for you.
🦃 5 Keys You’ll Learn in This Episode 🦃
Master the Art of Gravy and Sauce
Dive into techniques for thickening gravy with roux, whitewash, or a simple fix using Wondra. Plus, Chef Cal’s tips on balancing gravy consistency are total game-changers!
Fluffy (Not Gluey) Mashed Potatoes
Learn why overmixing is a no-go and how warm cream and butter can make all the difference for those perfect, dreamy spuds.
Stuffing vs. Dressing
Understand why dressing might be a safer and more controlled choice compared to stuffing your turkey, and get pro tips on bread selection.
Crispy, Moist Turkey Mastery
Whether roasting, barbecuing, or spatchcocking, get the lowdown on cooking times, temperatures, and techniques to achieve a perfect turkey every time. #howtocookaturkey
Wine Pairing Wisdom
Discover Chef Cal’s recommendations for Thanksgiving wines and why a good Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc might be your best friends this holiday.
🍂 PRO TIP from the Episode 🌟
Pouring pan dripping through colander with ice cubes can be used to help coagulate and separate the fat before making gravy.
🔉Listen ⤵️
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Timestamp Overview
00:00 Welcome. Truth in Menu laws.
05:43 Chicken marinated in clam juice tastes like abalone.
08:16 Ambiance matters.
10:00 Strategies for cooking multiple turkeys efficiently.
14:25 Fresh vs frozen turkey
18:57 Use poultry seasoning for Thanksgiving dishes.
19:56 Try Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc with turkey.
24:41 Use bone broth from turkey drippings, gelatinous.
26:46 Various methods to separate fat, including using ice.
29:34 Over-whipped potatoes become sticky and gluey.
32:22 Use broth, thicken with mashed potato flakes.
36:40 Keep Thanksgiving dishes warm; prep in advance.
40:52 Never refrigerate hot food; promotes bacteria growth.
41:36 Make dressing patties; cook like pancakes.
Transcript
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 a little bit about truth and menu laws. And we’re getting ready for Thanksgiving, answering home cook’s most asked questions. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.
Chef Cal:
All right, welcome, welcome, welcome to Cooking Like a Pro. You have found us Chef Cal and Mrs. Chef Christa. You know, we have to just real quickly give a shout out to John. John Elias Casolary for that just that rock and intro that we have. Oh, it’s great, huh? I just almost.
Christa DeMercurio:
It sounds like national news.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. On top of it. Yeah, yeah. Go online. You can find them. Hey. Anyway, welcome to Cooking Like a Pro. You found us.
Chef Cal:
We are going to be talking about Thanksgiving, so. So we got a bunch of Thanksgiving stuff to cover because we’ve got two.
Christa DeMercurio:
Weeks to get ready. Yeah.
Chef Cal:
If you. Well, now’s the time to prep. Yes.
Christa DeMercurio:
You can’t wait till the week of. You can’t wait till the day before. You got to get it going now.
Chef Cal:
Well, that’s what makes the. Well, first off, there’s good and bad anxiety. You know, the bad anxiety is stressing out that you’re going to get it done. The good anxiety is just being excited about it. Right. So I think that that’s what we want to look at, and we want you to be prepared, folks. So, again, if you have any questions on Thanksgiving food or anything related to the industry, again, give us a holler or send us a question. But before we get into Thanksgiving, this has been on my heart.
Chef Cal:
Heart’s wrong word. It’s been on my mind. Okay. Been on my mind about something that I used to hear all the time when I was growing, coming up in the business called truth and menu laws. Truth and menu law. So basically, you can’t lie on your menu. You know, you can’t exaggerate. You can’t do.
Chef Cal:
You know, you have to be truthful and to represent. Now you know where I’m going with this, right?
Christa DeMercurio:
I’m thinking. I know, but I’m not sure. I was.
Chef Cal:
So after. After the show last week, me and my. My adorable wife went and had a meal here in town someplace. And then I’ve always gone there for the same thing. The Asiago, the Cajun Asiago burger. And I just never thought about It. I’ve always gone there for it. You know, I hadn’t been there in a while.
Chef Cal:
I guess their menu just changed and without naming the place. But I’ll tell you the reason I got the Cajun Asiago burger was because it was a half pound burger, which 16 ounces in a pound, half a pound, 8 ounces. And I ended up getting like a quarter. Well, half of that. So like four ounce burger patty. And I may ask for it medium. Well, they asked. It’s one of the things I think they don’t.
Chef Cal:
You know, if I was a server, I don’t. I think I would not ask a guest how they wanted something cooked unless they knew the cook could do it. So I. Medium rare or medium. It comes out well done, of course. And. But it’s so small. I was like.
Chef Cal:
And so I look on the menu and they had just taken the weight off of it.
Christa DeMercurio:
They had changed it, but it was.
Chef Cal:
Still $22 for hamburger. And I mean, you know, hamburger is not 12 bucks a pound. So, you know, if it’s. Whatever it is, eight, nine bucks a pound, maybe at the most for 80, 20, you know, beef to fat ratio.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well. But thankfully my salad was to order. My salad was beautiful. I tried to share it with you because you were disappointed with your burger.
Chef Cal:
Well, yeah. Anyway, I don’t know, you know. Yeah. And again. And that’s why I got the truth and menu loss. Because when you order something, you expect. So you’re driving down the freeway. I remember, you know, a couple years I was corporate Chef for Black Bear Diner.
Chef Cal:
Kind of when they were not the infancy, but it was, you know, starting to take off. Yeah. Over a decade ago. Anyway, so the thing that we. One of the things we did was we. I was responsible for putting together the food that they would take a picture of that they would put on the billboards on the side of the freeway, you know, and how many times do you look at that? And again, you could look at. On the menu at Denny’s. Who.
Chef Cal:
To be honest, I mean, they.
Christa DeMercurio:
Denny’s even still around?
Chef Cal:
I think so. But. But they invented the whole idea of having pictures on their menu because they were on, you know, corridors.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah. Denny’s, an ihop.
Chef Cal:
So people could just point at it and then, you know, and not have to really know the. The language or the whatever and know that they were supposed to get something that kind of looked like that, but they’re supposed to actually get something that looks just like that. So I think it should be principled, you know, when you order something and you look on the menu and you read it and it has this just wonderful, amazing, you know, it’s drizzled with this and napped with that and presented this way and has. And then you get it and. And it’s just, I don’t know, disappointment.
Christa DeMercurio:
So I had this question for you a few days ago when I’m watching the Burger King commercial, the flame broiled Whopper. And I’m like going, do they really look like that? Are they really flame broiled? Do you really have the grill marks like that?
Chef Cal:
I don’t think they could get with the truth of menu laws. I think they would have to be flame broiled. But, you know, I still don’t think they, they don’t look like that. And again, I think that it’s, you know, when you’re talking about truth and menu laws, you know, it just can’t be misleading. That, that’s. But I have never heard of anybody actually being, you know, prosecuted for. Well, okay, I’m sorry, I have, I have.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well, there is a law. Yeah, I mean, it is.
Chef Cal:
Well, you know, I don’t know. I can’t remember if I ever told you this one, but there was this restaurant down in the city in San Francisco, and I have this, this recipe and it’s a great recipe. You know, scratch this down or think about it and put it in your memory, but lock it in there. But you pound out chicken breast super thin with a mallet that has, you know, indentions on it. So. So you’re breaking it up. Break the skin up good. Then you marinate it for 72 hours in clam juice, abalone, lightly bread it, and you cook this chicken and you’re in a taste like abalone.
Chef Cal:
Look, mock abalone. Well, there was this guy that was prepared, serving or selling, you know, selling it as abalone. As abalone and. Yeah, so. And that’s a, that’s a federal offense because of the cost of abalone. So I don’t know how many years he got. But anyway, so that was the only time I’d ever heard of somebody actually, you know, going to the big house for it. But when you expect something and it’s misleading, you get something else.
Chef Cal:
Because, you know, we’re looking at quality and then quantity. You know, you look at, there’s this pile of whatever it is, french fries or something. From price to the. Just the identification and things like point of origin comes into play with, you know, oysters, clams, you know, like, where were they actually harvested?
Christa DeMercurio:
Like a Maine lobster, but you know.
Chef Cal:
Well, I hope. Yeah, it better be. Well, cold water. I still prefer Australian, but we can talk about that. But you know, merchandising, but just the principles of it, you know, it’s really the five principles of just a menu would be balance, the nutrition, the variety, and then really just the beauty. We call it the aesthetics. Right. So I like the appreciation of the beauty of it.
Chef Cal:
And to me, so much of that comes down to ambience. And I think that’s one of the main reasons people go out. They want to get away from the house. But unfortunately they end up so often being disappointed and accepting that. Right. Oh, it’s okay. Maybe it wasn’t quite what I wanted. Well, gosh darn it, you’re paying for it to be right.
Chef Cal:
You know, I mean, hard earned cash, you know, it’s not just falling off the trees.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well, it’s hard to just get up and go somewhere else and drive across town. You gotta try make those decisions before you get there and you go online and see, you know, what do they offer, what do they, what do you, what are your expectations? And if your expectations are set, you would hope that your expectations are met.
Chef Cal:
And think about the ambiance where I mean, when we were a couple of weeks ago for anniversary, we’re sitting there in that, that restaurant overlooking the ocean with the seals running and jumping around. I mean, the food could have been terrible and it still would have been a good experience. Maybe not fantastic like it was because the food was good, but the ambience is a big thing. So anyway, we’re going to have to take quick break because we just ran through that one. But we’ll be right back. And we are talking about turkeys. Cooking like a pro. Welcome back, welcome back.
Chef Cal:
Cooking Like a Pro podcast Chef Cal and Mrs. Chef Christa. And we so Thanksgiving, we didn’t make it. So we, we kind of thought we went and we posted. We actually requested and or asked on how you do that on the Internet. But the like the top 20 questions that people have for Thanksgiving. So the most asked Thanksgiving question. So I’ll let you start, Christa.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well, the first one we answered last week and actually I didn’t know this either. How much turkey do I need per person?
Chef Cal:
You know, they say a couple different things. Some people say, you know, a pound and a quarter, some say a pound and a half because the car you’re only actually eating maybe 6 to 8 ounces of actual weighted protein. But you know, you’ve got a carcass and Again, remember, that carcass will quit growing larger when it gets around 24 pounds. So if you get a turkey that’s, let’s say 26 or 28 or 30, that last 2, 4, 6 pounds are going to yield all protein, all beef. Well, all beef. In this case, all poultry. But yeah.
Christa DeMercurio:
So the quick math, you’re gonna do a 24 pound turkey that’s gonna serve 12 people.
Chef Cal:
There you go.
Christa DeMercurio:
12 pound turkey, about six people.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Well, you know, one of the things that I also wanted to bring up about that and somebody asked me this question yesterday and it’s like, I’ve got 35 people coming over. What do I do? You know, I got two turkeys in my oven, only going to hold one turkey. Well, first off, going back to Demacheros, we cook 40 turkeys a day. Me and Antonio would get there at 2 in the morning. Again, Dean Mercurials restaurant maybe chime in if you had a chance to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner back at D. Mercurials. But we would cook, you know, just a ton of turkeys and you got all this dark meat and all this white meat.
Chef Cal:
Well, one of the things that they do a lot now is they’ll do one whole turkey. So you have the dark meat, which just like Mom. I was talking to mom today and she’s like dark meat. I’m dark meat. Me and mom are both dark meat. I prefer legs and size.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, I’m starting to like dark, but I still prefer white.
Chef Cal:
But white, the people just cook it too much and it’s good if it’s not. That’s why we have gravy. Right? I mean, you know, I’m making mean gravy, folks. I mean, yeah, you can put my gravy on a shoe and it’s. Anyway, so I’m a dark meat guy, but you know, but then again, what I was going to say was just cook some breasts. Just buy some, some just turkey breasts. So maybe one whole turkey and that’s going to get you, you know, 10 or 12 people. And then, you know, get two or three or four just breasts.
Chef Cal:
They have them seasoned. They can get them anywhere now and just roast those off slowly. And the thing about it is, is you want to pull it out when it’s, when it’s right around 155. Because first off, it’s turkey. So you’re cooking at a lower temperature. Right. You’re not cooking it at 350 or 400 degrees. You’re cooking it down at three and a quarter.
Chef Cal:
So that that’s what I would do. I would just get some breasts. You can let them go to their 155, pull them out. They’re cooking nice and slow. They carry over, cook same way beef does lamb. Anything else. And then you’ve got this beautiful moist. There’s nothing better than moist turkey.
Chef Cal:
And most time you don’t get that.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah. Use a lot. Well, because a lot of people don’t know how to do it. And that’s gonna be one of our questions. How to make it moist. That’s. That’s a little further down the list.
Chef Cal:
Well, you know, another thing is how long it takes to thaw one out. People don’t understand this. And I know we’ve probably all watched the videos or the YouTube videos of somebody dropping a frozen turkey into a hot oil. Yeah. Into a deep fried turkey. So. And deep fried turkey is great if you’re going to deep fry your turkey. I think we did it at four to five minutes per pound.
Chef Cal:
Maybe it was three to four minutes per pound. But, you know, you can always Google that. But boy, it’s just. Because the thing about deep fried is it locks everything in. There’s, you know, oil and water don’t mix, so there’s no place for the juice and the flavor to go. So you just get this super moist thing. But here’s the key. In Thanksgiving, if you’re going to deep fry a turkey, get yourself three or four chickens.
Chef Cal:
Just, you know, like three pounders, three and a half pounders, and deep fry those after the turkey, they go in literally 12 to 15 minutes. You’ve got this beautiful cooked chicken with all the flavor inside because you have the oil, you’ve already heated it up, you’re probably not going to use it again. And the price of oil is through the roof. Yeah.
Christa DeMercurio:
So you’re saying after you do your turkey, utilize that oil further to cook more chickens.
Chef Cal:
Use that hot oil, cook some chickens.
Christa DeMercurio:
And then cool them down, and then bag them up, freeze them for future applications.
Chef Cal:
Bag them up, freeze them, or just use them the next day. But, you know, you cook them in just. Oh, that’s best chicken I’ve ever had. Just deep fry the whole thing. So. But they take a long time. Well, yeah, you know, take advantage of the oil, but they do take a long time to thaw. I mean, literally like four or five days.
Chef Cal:
You know, if it’s frozen solid first, I’ll take it out. I take it out of the packaging or at least make a hole where the air in the refrigerator can get to the center cavity, because that’s what’s going to stay frozen. And then you just dump the moisture out of that and just let it thaw. I’d give it the better part of a week.
Christa DeMercurio:
Now we’re talking a true frozen turkey. And we were just talking about this. The difference between a fresh and a frozen turkey. A true frozen Turkey is like 0 degrees and below it is hard as a rock.
Chef Cal:
Cold, bold bowling turkey you can bowl with.
Christa DeMercurio:
A fresh turkey is transported and stored between 26 and 28 degrees. So technically, it’s under freezing. And they can be a little icy, not completely thawed, but they are because they’re more. They’re considered a fresh. This is the. That’s the legal temperature is 26, 28 degrees for fresh.
Chef Cal:
I think that if I got a fresh turkey, I would expect it to be thawed out. I’m just spit balling here. But if I get fresh turkey, I get fresh anything. I’m not expecting it to be frozen. Now, that’s not saying that fresh and frozen, you know, one is better than the other. To be honest, seafood is better frozen quite often than fresh. If you’re getting seafood that’s literally froze on the ship, you know, when they get your halibut or your salmon, whatever it is, they get your cod out in the ocean, they go ahead and process it and freeze it there. It’s literally hours old compared to something that they catch that’s fresh.
Chef Cal:
But you know, it’s 24 hours old by time. You.
Christa DeMercurio:
How long have they. You know, how long have these turkeys been handled? When was their expiration date, so to speak? When did they become Thanksgiving dinner? That’s gonna make a difference?
Chef Cal:
I don’t know. We got a lot. We got turkeys running around our property. I. So we. We will have fresh turkey and. And we have to have chickens running around.
Christa DeMercurio:
What about thawing it in a brine? Do you. If you’re going to brine it, do you saw it before or can you thaw it in the brine?
Chef Cal:
Saw it before, thought before. You want. Because you want the brine to infiltrate, expand into the protein itself. You’ve got the skin. So the brine is. The one thing about the brine is you can shove that carcass or that cavity of the carcass full of herbs and citrus and garlic and all that, and then it just helps expand that flavor throughout there. But brine is really just a saline solution. It’s just a salt solution that you put that in.
Chef Cal:
You can have some spices if you Want. Most people don’t, but it’s just really a way of getting more flavor into it. A lot of the chicken that you buy these days has actually been injected with saline solution. So that’s why you might have chicken that already has flavor in the sense of salt.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay. So timing wise, we’re two weeks out from Thanksgiving. We buy our turkey tomorrow. Exactly two weeks out. How long to thaw and then how long to brine? So what is our prep time before putting in the bird in the oven?
Chef Cal:
You know, I would. Well, it’s going to take. Again, you got your three to four, maybe five days to thaw, depending on your fridge, but give it around four days, give or take. And then take. Of course, it’s out of the packaging. Then put it in your brine, and I’d give it 72 hours in your brine. You can go as long as you want. The longer it’s in the brine, the more flavor that’s going to be, you know, seeped in into the.
Chef Cal:
To the protein itself.
Christa DeMercurio:
Do you rinse a brine after you take it out?
Chef Cal:
Oh, you rinse a turkey. Yeah, you rinse the turkey. Because a brine is, you know, a little bit overly salty, and generally they are. And then you want to go ahead and rinse it off before you cook it and, you know.
Christa DeMercurio:
And then do you rinse it before you brine it?
Chef Cal:
No, no, no. I mean, take it out of the package. Well, if you killed it. Yeah.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well, no, I’m saying out of package from the freezer section. You open the bag, you. Now would you throw like a towel or something? Because you don’t want it completely exposed to the air circling.
Chef Cal:
Well, you never want anything exposed to air. Right. I mean, air is. That’s certainly, you know, one of the more negative things that you can have because you know, the air is going to suck the moisture out of it.
Christa DeMercurio:
So when you were saying to open it up, just take a little. Just open up just a little section for that air to get to the inner cavity, you said, yeah, we’ll take it completely.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Wind thawing. Yes. And then when you’re brining, and you obviously want to take it completely out, and then. So now you got this turkey. It’s been brined or not brined. And now we want to oil it. Right.
Chef Cal:
Very important that it’s oiled. You can baste it. And to be honest, a lot of times I’ll see people. People, they’ll season the turkey skin. Well, again, oil and water don’t mix the Skin, which is fat, fatty, is going to keep the seasoning from going into the meat. So when we, like when we butter our. Like we talked about, compound butter, that.
Christa DeMercurio:
Was exactly what I was gonna bring up.
Chef Cal:
Take your compound butters, and you want to lift the skin up on the turkey and then shove it underneath the skin. And now that skin is gonna add all that moisture and protection from, you know, it oxidizing before you cook it, and then protect it from the heat while it’s cooking, you know, and you’re gonna end up with something that’s just moist and juicy and tender. But if you season the outside of something and it’s covered with fat, don’t expect that flavor to seep into it.
Christa DeMercurio:
So what kind of a compound butter would you suggest to put underneath the skin for turkey?
Chef Cal:
Oh, well, turkey. Here’s the one. This is, to be honest, this is the only seasoning you need. Okay. I’ll put it this way. You’re on a desert island, all you got is a turkey in an oven, and you want to cook it. Okay. You only have one seasoning.
Chef Cal:
Okay. For Thanksgiving, poultry seasoning, first off, it’s in the name, right? Because it’s poultry. But you use that for your dressing. You can use that for, of course, for your gravy. And I would just take, like, a poultry seasoning butter with some fresh thyme and garlic chopped up in it and just, you know, stick that underneath the skin and let it go. But again, it’s that basting of that oil that you want. You want that all the way through the cooking process. So again, if you have any questions, give us a holler over here.
Chef Cal:
But we are talking here at Cooking Like a Pro podcast about turkey, and I guess we’ll do it next week. And Thanksgiving’s coming up, folks. Gotta be ready. So back in just a moment here. Thanks for tuning in. Cooking Like a Pro. Welcome back to Cooking Like a Pro podcast. We appreciate you tuning in.
Chef Cal:
And, you know, with Odino, coming back in with the wine thing, it just got me thinking, you know, what wine do you serve with turkey?
Christa DeMercurio:
You know, probably a Chardonnay, maybe.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, a Chardonnay. You could do that with a buttery if you wanted to do a similar pairing. If you want to do a contrast, maybe something with a little more acid to help cut the fattiness. Everything in the meal is fatty, you know? Yeah. So, yeah, Sauvignon Blanc, one of your favorites, Bourme Blanc. So anyway, turkey, turkey, turkey. Best way to cook a turkey, generally roasting, but, you know, you’re kind of not real limited. I mean, there’s a lot, I mean, barbecue cook on the barbecue.
Chef Cal:
Actually, dad’s gonna cook one this week or next Thanksgiving this year with barrels. You know, cooking in the barrel. It’s a 55 gallon drum. So then you get that smoky flavor because all the fat drips off of the protein, the bird and goes and creates a smoke that comes up and. Oh, oh, oh, don’t get me started.
Christa DeMercurio:
Now, I want to know, have you ever spatchcocked a turkey?
Chef Cal:
No. Well, maybe. I don’t know. I’ve done everything, you know, I mean, we made turducken and I mean, it’s been, you know, I can’t remember if I had breakfast, but I’ve done a lot over the decades.
Christa DeMercurio:
And, well, like when you spatch pocket chicken, but spatch turkey, you gotta have a lot of room to spread it out.
Chef Cal:
Well, that’s when you want a barbecue and you’d want that to be the only thing that you’re cooking because first off, you spatch cocktail, it’s going to be. It’s flat. And we used to actually do something similar to that with a game hen. One of my restaurants called Old School, actually now called Cheesecakes. Go down and visit Cheesecakes. Say hi to Joshua and April and little Lucas. Get a chance to go down there. My son, his wife and my grandson.
Chef Cal:
But you can. What we did at that restaurant was we took. We eviscerated, which is taking the bones out of the cavity. So you had a game hen, which. Just the leg and the thigh bone and then you roasted that off and it was. But it cooked so fast simply because, you know, it was a half a game hen first off, but it was flattened out and it would cook good and you could just barbecue it. I mean, it was just. Most things you can’t.
Chef Cal:
You can’t barbecue something that’s going to take an hour. It’s just going to be charred.
Christa DeMercurio:
Does it cook more evenly when you spatchcock it? When you’re not having that big old cavity to deal with, you’re opening it completely up and flattening it out.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, I think that’s kind of the reason. Save time and also add flavor. You know, the cooking process adds flavor whether you’re barbecuing, whether you’re searing it, whether you’re. I mean, unless you’re boiling it, you know, generally it’s going to make it, you know, add something.
Christa DeMercurio:
Now is that breast down or breast up when you do that?
Chef Cal:
Both. Start with always Start with breast down. Start with anything that’s not going to stick down first. So you always start with the skin side down. I don’t care what that is. If the skin is not on it, start with the side that the skin would have been on it. But deep frying, again, we’ve done that before. We talked about that earlier.
Chef Cal:
Oh, here’s one. How do I avoid lumps in my gravy? Well, okay, there’s three different ways. Well, okay, there’s three main ways of thickening up your gravy. One would be called a whitewash, which is just, you know, milk and flour. And then one would be called a slurry, which is cornstarch and water. And then the last one, of course, is a roux, which is butter and flourish. So the flouring component, of course, is the gluten. That’s going to thicken it up.
Chef Cal:
If you’re doing a gravy, you want to cook some of that stickiness out. So you want to make. Just make a roux. It’s the only thickener that’s going to actually add any flavor.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well, the difference between cornstarch and flour is there’s a different texture.
Chef Cal:
Oh, yeah.
Christa DeMercurio:
It’s a little more clear with the cornstarch as opposed to the flour.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. But I’d say whisk. Whisk fast. You know, when you’re. When you’re dumping your thickening agent in, whisk really quickly and dump the. If it’s a slurry and it’s cornstarch and water, dump it right into the. Was that a vortex, you know, of the whisk? And just allow it to get mixed up, because once it turns to a lump, pretty hard to get rid of it.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah. Don’t just take the whole thing. Just dump it in.
Chef Cal:
Well, yeah, but I mean, I would. Yeah, a little bit of time. There you go. But I would use a roux, you know, equal parts flour and butter. Melt your butter, add your flour, let it cook separately in a little pan. So you’ve cooked out some of that starch, some of that glutinous, and then just add that, and now you’re actually adding flavor back to it. Plus, it’s not going to get that sticky thing. So, you know, whisk quickly, whisk constantly would be what I’d say.
Christa DeMercurio:
Now, the type of gravy I grew up with is we didn’t do roux. We didn’t do a slurry. There is a product called wondra, and wondra is par cooked and it’s very finely ground, so you can actually add it straight without doing a slurry or a roux. It’s a different technique. It’s a different. But it’s a very specific product that is made for making gravy.
Chef Cal:
Gravy making 101.
Christa DeMercurio:
And that’s what I grew up with. I never had anything else other than wonder in my gravy.
Chef Cal:
And then what is it that you use for the gravy? I mean, you use the stock that came off the drippings from the pan, and with the turkey, okay. That’s where you get your. Your what? This day, one of the things I hear, and I’ve seen it out there, it’s been out for a period of time, not real long, but it’s becoming more popular. That’s bone broth, and that’s what that is. That’s. That’s all that was a collagen. Marrow, bone marrow. I mean, everything that is gluten, that is gelatinous, that is formed when you.
Chef Cal:
When it cools down. That’s that true natural flavor. And actually, in the. In the Chef business, we always called that. Do you remember?
Christa DeMercurio:
I’m blinking right now.
Chef Cal:
Liquid gold. Ah, there you go. Yeah, take it, save it, put it in an ice cube tray, let it freeze, put cubes in a little bag. And anytime you’re making something with that turkey, fish, beef, whatever that broth was, that bone broth or that gelatinous flavor.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay, so you take the turkey out, okay? It’s done. It’s golden. It’s hit temp. It’s hit 155. Now it needs to rest. In the meantime, you need to get those drippings. So how do you work that timing and get the fat off the drippings? And then if you don’t have enough drippings to make your gravy, then what do you do?
Chef Cal:
Well, you can use a variety of bases that are out there. Turkey base, some things like that turkey gravy, maybe a packaged item to help, you know, kind of tighten it up a little bit, add a little more flavor. But no, I think that you generally are going to get, you know, enough. I mean, well, here’s. Here’s the challenge. The challenge is gravy. You don’t look at it like a sauce. A sauce.
Chef Cal:
You might use 2 ounces of sauce because it just goes over the entree, the beef, the fish, the whatever. But for turkey, I mean, you want gravy over everything, right? Your gravy needs to cover the mashed potatoes and seep into the. Into the dressing or stuffing, and then the. I mean, it’s just. Yeah, you know, you want.
Christa DeMercurio:
How long does it. How long after you pull it from the oven, do you let it rest? And when can you. When can get the fat off of that. Those drippings, do you let it rest for now?
Chef Cal:
Couple different ways to do. You can just pour it into a container that’s fairly narrow. The fat will always come to the top, and you can just use the back end of a ladle to scoop that out. That’s the easiest way. One other way. Also, this is a little. I don’t know if you really do this at home, but I used to do is take a colander and fill the colander and put the colander in a pot. Put the colander inside a pot, and then fill the colander full of ice cubes or crushed ice.
Chef Cal:
And then just dump the stock or your broth over top of that, and all the fat instantly adheres and coagulates to the ice. So now you have a broth with no fat in it.
Christa DeMercurio:
Then you just lift up the colander and just pull it all out.
Chef Cal:
Toss that out, and then you got your broth underneath in the pan. Then just go and tighten that up.
Christa DeMercurio:
That’s interesting.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, it’s good flavor, but it’s true natural flavor. And again, that’s what we’re talking about, being able to capture that. You don’t want to go into the. To the dish room. Now, as far as stuffing, okay, there’s. There’s the whole stuffing or dressing. I’m more of a dressing person because I can control the dressing. I can control how it’s cooking.
Chef Cal:
I control if I. If I want a little brown on top once it’s stuffed in there. And. And as I think I mentioned last week, don’t ever stuff a large bird with a warm dressing. Never do that. You’re asking for sickness. You know, it’s just, you don’t. You don’t want to get the inside of poultry up to a temperature in the danger zone, which is where bacteria, you know, multiplies quickly, which is anywhere between 40 and 140, give or take, depending on who you listen to.
Chef Cal:
But, yeah, stuffing, Dressing. Stuffing is going to get more flavor because it’s cooking inside the cavity of the bird. So.
Christa DeMercurio:
But it’s so wet and dark, and I just. It’s.
Chef Cal:
Well, if it’s too wet, maybe they just added too much stock to it, you know, but it’s just basically celery, onions, and bread. I’d Get a good bread. I get a nice sourdough and again, some poultry seasoning. Go out and get the poultry seasoning, folks. You’re gonna need it. It would make everything taste like Thanksgiving.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay, fresh bread. Making your own croutons, so to speak, as opposed to the bread cubes that are dried at the store in the bag. What do you use to do your stuffing?
Chef Cal:
Oh, again, yeah, I’d get a good bread and then dry it. You know, we save our bread. I mean, the heels and the end pieces that nobody ever seems to want to eat. Although you like to heal.
Christa DeMercurio:
I do like it. Especially sourdough.
Chef Cal:
But just you take those, you freeze them, and then, you know, once a year, you make dressing. You pull them out of the freezer and dice them up and. And go from there. But sides, all kinds of sides. Mashed potatoes. How to keep your mashed potatoes from coming. Like glue.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay, I never experienced this, so I don’t understand the question. What do you mean by gluey potatoes?
Chef Cal:
When you over mix and over whip a potato, that gluten comes out and you end up with something that you can either. Well, you do a couple things with it. You can put up wallpaper, and I think you can probably lay a foundation of bricks or something. It’s literally so sticky and gluey. So you just want to get a really good potato, drain it really well. And I like to cook my potatoes, you know, boil them off slowly but whole. Because when you dice them up and then you boil them, you’ve got all that surface area from. You take a potato, this is the size of your hand, and now you’ve diced it up, and it’s massively expands the surface area.
Chef Cal:
And then you boil that. Now you what the problem you have is now there’s more water in your potatoes. So just drain them well and let them. Let them sit and drain. Drain naturally. And then when you whip them up, just don’t over mix them. I also like lumpy but mashed potatoes.
Christa DeMercurio:
And I do not.
Chef Cal:
And I also like mashed potatoes with the skin on.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well, okay, so you’re getting into a difference between a russet and then a. Like a Yukon gold or a red potato. So growing up, I only had russets. We always peeled them, boiled them, drained them. And then for me, I was the mashed potato person. I was always on that. I always. I used a blender or not a blender, but a hand mixer.
Christa DeMercurio:
A hand blender.
Chef Cal:
Like used to make whipped cream or something.
Christa DeMercurio:
Exactly. And. But don’t add your milk. Your Cream your butter until you have fluffed them first. Once you add that, you’re done. You’re locked in. You’ve got lumps. So I always blend or mix them.
Chef Cal:
First, you know, and another key point that you just brought up is that that cream and butter that you’re adding needs to be brought up to temperature, don’t. You don’t want to add it cold. The last thing you want to do is drop the temperature of your potatoes.
Christa DeMercurio:
So have your melted butter.
Chef Cal:
Melted butter warmed up. Cream, you know, and then your salt, garlic and white pepper. And see, or as we call here, your secret salt.
Christa DeMercurio:
And you can add it as you go as you’re blending so that you don’t get too much, too little. You can, you can feel it. If you’re using a hand blender like I used to, you can feel the texture kind of going through into your hand of how stiff or how thin it is.
Chef Cal:
Exactly. So you ought to be careful with over whipping your potatoes. Get some good seasoning, use good butter, use good cream, and your mashed potatoes will be fine. All right. Cooking like a pro. Taking a quick. Another quick break. We’ll be back in just a moment.
Chef Cal:
Welcome back. Welcome back. Ooh. This is my last segment. This show goes by way too fast. So. Okay. Other questions.
Chef Cal:
We’re not going to. We’ll have. We have like two more shows before Thanksgiving.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, we might have to do.
Chef Cal:
We might actually get. We might actually get through some. Most of these, but gravy, too. Thicker, thin. That’s a. A good one. Because if it’s too thick, then just a little more stock. That’s all you gotta do is it’s easy.
Chef Cal:
You know, all you gotta do is you can use water, for that matter, but, you know, use flavored water. Use like a broth, whether it’s poultry stock or. Or turkey stock. But if it’s too thin, one of the tricks that I’ve done, especially since potatoes are part of the meal, is you can tighten it up with just a little bit of mashed potato flakes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve saved a thin soup by having, you know, mashed potato pearls or mashed potato flakes handy. You also want to keep a bag handy. And same with your mashed potatoes. Let’s say you add too much cream and butter or for some reason you don’t drain them long enough.
Chef Cal:
But anyway, they come out. Whether you want them a little bit thicker, there’s too much. Like you don’t need much. Just a little bit Just to bring it up to temp to get nice and fluffy.
Christa DeMercurio:
Now, if they, if they’re thin on flavor, what would you do? They’re too watery.
Chef Cal:
Well, the mashed potatoes is going to help first off the flavor. But, but it’s again, a secret. Salt. You know, I. Salt and some more chicken base and white pepper. Well, you chicken for the stock. I don’t think you’d have that problem with potatoes unless you got a really. Again, I don’t make mashed potatoes out of russet.
Chef Cal:
They’re just not a good starch content potato to make mashed potatoes. That’s why you, that’s why you bake those. But here’s another one real quick. Keeping the skin from browning. One of the things, the best, easiest and best thing to do is just cover your turkey with foil. You cover with foil and it protects the skin from burning. And then just take that foil off about 45 minutes before you’re done and boom, there you go.
Christa DeMercurio:
So start with it uncovered or covered? Uncovered or covered first?
Chef Cal:
No, no, I’m sorry. Covered.
Christa DeMercurio:
Start covered. And then you want to uncover it in the last half hour?
Chef Cal:
No, I’d give at least 45 minutes. Yeah, at least. I mean, last thing you want is chewy skin.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay, so then how long do you actually, you know, we didn’t talk about that. How long do you cook a turkey?
Chef Cal:
Depends on the size, depends on the oven, depends on variety of things. If it’s trust, which is tying the legs together like they do with game hen, and then that closes the cavity a little bit, that’s going to add some cooking time to it. But it’s a lot of how many times you open the oven. I can’t tell you how many times people just messed up a recipe because they keep opening the oven to look at it. Just let it cook.
Christa DeMercurio:
So the more closed up it is, the more stuffing that’s in it, the bigger the bird. All of that stuff is going to affect the total cooking time.
Chef Cal:
And what they have is they have the little pop outs and you can actually buy the pop outs for the temperature for a turkey. You stick those little things in there and they’ll pop out when they get to 160.
Christa DeMercurio:
But you said pull at 155, and a lot of times they don’t work. There’s been so many times they have not popped.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, you know, I don’t, I’m not saying it’s fail proof. I don’t even know who invented it. They’re probably rich.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay, so if you’re going to stick a thermometer instant read in it. Where are you going to put it?
Chef Cal:
You want to do it, the dark meat? We want to do it down by the thigh.
Christa DeMercurio:
So you want to go.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, and that’s what not to, not to catch up. But that’s where the foil really helps out because it helps to cook a little more evenly. But anyway, go ahead.
Christa DeMercurio:
So you’re going to protect the breasts with the foil.
Chef Cal:
Exactly. Keep them from overcooking.
Christa DeMercurio:
And then you’re going to check down by the thigh.
Chef Cal:
Yep, right by the thigh. Right by that bone. The bone. Where the leg bone goes. The leg bones attached to the thigh bone. Yep, right there. Get your, get your instant read thermometer right there and you’ll be, you’ll be all set.
Christa DeMercurio:
And you also said the temperature of the oven should be 325.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, 325 is a good temperature. You don’t want to go too fast. You don’t want to go to, you know, get too many, you know, molecules jamming in there. So I wouldn’t. Yeah, three, three and a quarters is fine. Again, it depends on the oven, the size. So that, that’s why when you say how long it takes, it really is just going to come down to the temperature gauge because that’s going to tell you what the actual temperature.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay. Another question is convection ovens.
Chef Cal:
A convection oven. If you have a convection oven versus a conventional oven, a convection oven just simply means there’s a fan in it. And I would cook it. If you had foil on it, you’re probably okay cooking with the convection on. But when I take that foil off, I would cook it conventional without the fan on because it’s going to make.
Christa DeMercurio:
It brown even more.
Chef Cal:
It’s going to make the heat circulate. That’s why you use the convection oven for making, you know, baking things. So they, they brown all the way.
Christa DeMercurio:
And usually you have to drop the temperature like 25, 50 degrees when you turn on convection. Most recipes.
Chef Cal:
Well, it’s going to speed it up, the cooking. Yeah, yeah. Heat fan, you know, activity is definitely going to heat that up. You know, this is probably a question that I know this is a Thanksgiving question, but I get this one all the time. This is probably the number one question that I would say I get that people ask me is how do you get all the food together at once? And normal dinner, it’s probably not that tough. You just keep it in a warm spot, keep it by the back of the oven, or keep it in A warm oven, if you have a warming drawer, that’s a great way to do it. But for Thanksgiving, you’ve got, like, eight things that all need to be hot at the same time. So getting them, prepping them ahead of time, cooking them, bringing them up to temperature, last minute, covering them with maybe some plastic or something to keep them warm, keep them in a warm spot.
Chef Cal:
And that’s about the best thing to do. But that is key. A warming box or a. You know, a lot of people at home, they might have. And we had warmers, of course. You know, massive warmers the size of a door. So that was never a problem. But at home, yes, you want to make sure you just bring things up at the last second.
Chef Cal:
Like, you. Like we talked about blanching. You blanch your green beans, you get them perfectly cooked, shock them by putting them in ice water, stop the cooking. You can do that the day before. And then the next day, just, you know, eight minutes before you eat, throw them in a hot pan with some butter and seasoning, bring them up to temperature, boom, you’re done.
Christa DeMercurio:
Actually, I have developed that planning sheet. It’s either in the vegetable cookbook or the sauce booklet. So maybe we should pull that out, make that a freebie.
Chef Cal:
Well, we could do that. Well, we got that vegetable guide that’s going to be coming out sometime in the. In the. In the. Not too.
Christa DeMercurio:
And I think another thing you got to pay attention to is what is overloading your kitchens. Is everything going to be in the oven? Is everything on the stovetop? Is everything going into the instant pot? You’ve got to be able to spread things out like this in the microwave. This will be in the instant pot. This will be on the cooktop. This will be out in the barbecue. So that not everything is overloading any one location in your kitchen.
Chef Cal:
Exactly, exactly. I think that’s key. You have to work within the space that you have. That’s why me and Antonio used to show up at, you know, two in the morning, start cooking turkeys. You know, Dean McCurl’s, because we cooked 40 turkeys and we only had the one oven. So you go to cook. It was a big commercial oven. You cook two turkeys at a time, but you had to start the turkeys early.
Christa DeMercurio:
Therefore, you bake your pies or whatever, dessert the day before before, because you will not have time in the oven.
Chef Cal:
Make sure, folks, that you look at your. Your pumpkin pie when you get it, because, you know, there’s a lot of pumpkin pies out there that literally don’t have any pumpkin in them.
Christa DeMercurio:
Really?
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Yeah, check it out. You can Google that. We’ll talk about next week. Okay. How about you get a vegetarian show up? Okay. Got a vegetarian showing up for Thanksgiving. What do you do? I mean, you can’t lock the door because they’re, you know, they’re your son’s spouse or something like that.
Chef Cal:
So you have to let them in. And they can’t just eat the green bean casserole with the cream of mushroom soup in it. I guess that’s, you know, Then they have the cranberry sauce, the yams, the potatoes without gravy. But, you know, there’s a lot, you know, tofu, there’s a lot of things you can do.
Christa DeMercurio:
You can actually.
Chef Cal:
Proteins, you can do.
Christa DeMercurio:
Make steaks out of mushrooms.
Chef Cal:
Mushrooms, bell peppers are all great vegetables that bring in umami and cauliflower. Savory flavor.
Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
So there’s, there’s options out there, too. But we talked about the best wine to serve, and that was the next question here. Something white. But then again, what you drink, what you drink, what you like. You drink what you like. So if you like red, then drink red with turkey. I mean, the wine police aren’t gonna, you know, show up at your house.
Christa DeMercurio:
And I mean, I would probably, if you do a red, go to a Pinot or Merlot, something’s a little more.
Chef Cal:
Pinot goes okay with poultry. I’m a red wine drinker, but, you know, I’m Italian, so, you know, it kind of wine is. Has always been a part of it. Okay, how does. How to store leftovers? First off, this is crucial. And the main thing about leftovers, folks, is cool them down quickly and safely as quick as possible. You want to get everything down to about 70 degrees within two hours of cooking it once dinner is over. So, you know, that’s probably two and a half hours.
Chef Cal:
And then you put. You put it in the fridge, but never put anything in the refrigerator hot. And if you open up the fridge the next day and you’ve got something covered, your gravy is covered with plastic and there’s condensation underneath it. Then you put it in there too hot. And that’s going to. All that’s going to do is keep that item, in this case gravy, at the improper temperature in the danger zone for bacteria growth between 40 and 140. And it’s also going to warm up the rest of the fridge. So everything else in there is going to be warm.
Christa DeMercurio:
Well, you’re going to have a lot of bulk items. Hopefully everything got eaten. But you can spread it out, put it into smaller containers.
Chef Cal:
Now you got to have leftovers. Thanksgiving is about leftovers and college football.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay, so real quick, since we’re out of time, what is your favorite leftover for turkey?
Chef Cal:
Oh, God, there’s so many. But I’ll tell you one thing, okay. I like taking the leftover dressing, and you just add a little. You can add a little bit egg to it, depending on the. How sticky it is. But the leftover dressing and making patties, and then you almost cook them like pancake. You know, just brown them like you would kind of like a locked. Same thing.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, same thing with potatoes. Bake potato pancakes, bake Dr. Dressing pancakes, a little turkey on top of their gravy. Just, you know, because you’ve got it probably enough for, you know, some days, send everybody home with some. Maybe that’s the best.
Christa DeMercurio:
Okay, so here’s my favorite, and this is something that you’re local country kitchen. I grew up with this way back in the day, 30, 40 years ago, it was a turkey hash, leftover turkey. But I use tater tots for my hash.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, hash is a term they use for pretty much anything diced up. So, yeah, if you dice up your turkey and you add some stuff to it, then you’re going to end up with, you know, with something you can call turkey hash. But anyway, this has been a great discussion of turkey.
Christa DeMercurio:
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.
