Cal and Christa DeMercurio
Join Chef Cal and Christa as they dive into a variety of culinary topics, focusing on flavor enhancement and cooking techniques. This episode touches on everything from seasonal ingredients to mindful eating, providing valuable insights for home chefs.
- How to preserve and use concentrated roast drippings, or “liquid gold”
- Seasonal delights: a taste test of three different pluots
- Tips on deep frying: maintaining oil temperature and seasoning timing
- The importance of mindful eating and portion control
Stay tuned for practical tips and fun kitchen experiments in this episode of “Cooking Like a Pro”!
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Timestamp Overview
00:00 Sour flavors enhance sweet and sour dishes.
03:15 Growth conditions affect flavor and sweetness significantly.
07:51 Recommend cooking stone fruits into chutney or compote.
11:32 Use candy thermometer; oil at 375°F works.
14:42 Golden color makes fish and chips appealing.
16:26 Avoid overcooking; high temp causes off flavors.
22:09 Small courses enhance sensory experience and variety.
23:50 Fondue fosters community, conversation, and culinary variety.
29:00 Natural flavor preferable, sodium enhances unnaturally, chicken ice.
31:50 Boil leftover chicken for natural, flavorful broth.
34:12 Food shortages similar to post-WWII and COVID.
37:47 Cook sausage, add flour, milk: perfect gravy.
40:18 Eating better prevents disease; healthcare treats symptoms.
44:12 Eat slower for natural appetite suppression effect.
Transcript
Christa:
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 pluots from the farmer’s market. Better ways to fry, capturing roasted chicken flavor and food fads versus trends. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.
Chef Cal:
Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, hello. You have found us. We are cooking like a pro here at KCNR. That’s both 90 414 60 rather AM and 96.5 FM. And we’d love it if you’d like to join us. We do have a guest right off the bat because my wife had some other things she had to do, so she called in. So she’s going to be with us through the front of the show here as we’ve been beginning. This is chef Cal, my wife, Christa DeMercurio.
Christa:
Hello, hello, hello, hello.
Chef Cal:
Hey, there she is. There she is. All right. Well, we were, we’ve always been talking about, about what’s in season, you know, what’s out there. What do you find in the farmers market? Also, it’s nice to find items that are unique because they end up having, they add more of a unique flavor. Now remember, our taste buds taste a variety of things, so you don’t want to just skip them over. But one of those things that our tongues are trained or trained might be the wrong word. They just do it.
Chef Cal:
They pick up sour and sour is an interesting flavor combination or flavor profile that a lot of people kind of stay away from. But, you know, if you’re having sweet and sour chicken or sweet and sour shrimp or something like that, or you’re having a sweet and sour soup, so that’s just a really nice component for it to have. But the reason I kind of brought up sour was that I stopped by the fruit stand and I picked up some pluats and me and my wife tried those. And what were your thoughts, honey?
Christa:
Well, there were three different colors. One was a lighter red, one was a darker red, and one was a purple. And all three of them were completely different. One was much like a sweet tart, very sweet and sour, puckery, not so much sweet, but very pungent. The second one, the purple one, was very sweet, approachable. That was definitely my favorite.
Chef Cal:
Definitely my favorite. That was the only one that really seemed to have sugar content. And all three of these again were picked and received from the same farmer. And then what did you think about the last one?
Christa:
The last one just really had no flavor. It was super mild, really wasn’t sweet or tart in my thoughts.
Chef Cal:
And I think that that’s one of the things that everything has a variance to it. I mean, where it’s grown because of just the geographical thoughts of, is it a hot, is it cold? If it’s too hot, remember, things will generally, when they develop and the flavor develops, it’s going to develop too fast. So maybe in something like a pluat where you want it to develop slower, so you end up having something that has more sugar as opposed to just the natural sour that comes with it. It’s a great idea to just consider that. Also, when you check them, these are all fairly firm. So it’s always nice to let your tree fruit, well, not your apples, of course, but your peaches. We did have a couple beautiful peaches, but they do need to have a little bit of softness to them because that’s when they are ripe. That’s when you’re going to get that true natural flavor, and you’re going to get the natural sugar that comes out of it as well.
Christa:
You got to find out what I just did. So I’m getting ready to go to a meeting at the high school, pick up Isaac, and I’m prepping a chicken sandwich for him. And he loves to have pepper jack cheese on his chicken sandwich.
Chef Cal:
Yes, he does.
Christa:
I’m standing here prepping it, and I put the pepper jack cheese down. I need to bite the corners off this cheese to make it round to fit the bun. And then right next to it, is that pluot. Okay, I’ll have a little pepper jack cheese. Then I’ll have a little pluot. And it was an amazing combination. You had the creaminess from the cheese, you had the tanginess from the apricot, and then you had the sweetness from the plum. You had the spiciness back in the cheese.
Christa:
Like, this is like cheese and wine pairing.
Chef Cal:
Well, you know that people that don’t know Isaac is our son. He’s 15 years old. As long as you didn’t put the plu out of on his sandwich, he is a typical teenager. I think it just depends. You know, one of the things about just enjoying the food industry and enjoying the foods that we have before us is being able to try them. And that’s one of the things that needs to happen, is you have to really kind of be open minded to try it. And of course, things were a little different in my day. You pretty much ate whatever was on your plate and you were happy about it because that’s what we had for dinner and you were thankful for that.
Chef Cal:
And I remember, you know, being told at the table, you know, eat your food. The kids are starving in Sudan. And personally, I’m not even sure where Sudan is. I’ll be honest. If I guessed, I think it was in Africa, but apparently there were kids starving there, which is, of course, a tragedy. But that was just one of the things that they used to say. But it was clean your plate and to do that, you need to be able to willing to try more things. And like, like you said, what would be the chances that you would find a pepper jack cheese and match it with a pluot is probably like one in, you know, several hundred, if not more than that, that you would even try it.
Chef Cal:
And the fact is to have the.
Christa:
Ingredients sitting in front of you makes you try it. I didn’t even think about it. I just grabbed it and just took a bite and went, huh. That worked.
Chef Cal:
Well, the thing is, folks, if we invited you over to our kitchen, we have a very large thick, about three inch thick, maybe 24 by 24 inch square cutting board. But it’s a big, thick cutting board. And you want a thick cutting board because if you’re going to pound something out, you want to make sure you pound it without destroying it. So you need that weight, that heavy bottom on the bottom. You need the heaviness. One of the things that we do quite often is we’ll cut fruit and it just kind of stays there. You know, it just kind of stays on the cutting board. And as we walk through, we’ll maybe try another little bit more.
Chef Cal:
It’s one of the things that fruit, if you can take fruit and maybe kind of think of it as candy, I mean, the nutritional value that you will add to your life by allowing those vitamins and minerals and nutrients as opposed to stopping and picking up a peanut m and m or something. Nothing is peanut m and Ms. I enjoy those as well. But I know earlier in the week you had those figs sitting out. Those dried were the prunes or figs dates, okay? They all look the same when they’re all wrinkled like that. And those were delicious. But it was such a nice, sweet taste and contrast. If you would have just grabbed a, you know, a Hershey kiss or some jelly bellies.
Chef Cal:
So, you know, hey, that would be something that I would recommend. And if you get a chance on the Pluto’s remember that they’re a cross between apricot and plum. I should say plum and apricot, but they are stone fruit. Remember, stone fruit is just simply a fruit that has a seed or a pit in the middle. They work great. When you have something that’s has this amount of acid in it, it’s great to cook it down, because then you can add something sweet and you can get a grate, either a chutney or a compote. In french cooking, we used to do a lot of this. The only real difference that we had was the compote is, well, let’s say the chutney would generally have some maybe middle eastern spices in it, you know, some cumin and these kind of.
Chef Cal:
Maybe paprika. But both of them are very similar. You can use any kind of fruit with them. But the compote, we would serve warm where the chutney, we would serve cold. And that was really the only difference that we did.
Christa:
And if I had time this week, I wanted to try and make a galette, which is just a very rustic pie, where it’s not any pie tin or a tart tin. You lay it on a sheet pan When you buy through any affiliate links on our site (i.e. Amazon), we may earn an affiliate commission. Happy shopping!, put your fruit in the middle, you just kind of tuck the pie crust edges up around it, and pop that in the oven. I definitely want to give that a try.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, you know, and that’s one of the things that is you can find ingredients and then find an application, a cooking application that matches that. Again, jams and jellies are great places to use your food that your fruit, rather, that has that higher acid. So that’s always a good thing to do. But pluots are right smack in the middle. Well, maybe towards the end. They’re generally harvest between May and September, and it’s good to get something that has a, you know, a little bit of softness to it. They’re great for your immunity system. One of the great things for that.
Chef Cal:
And then all you need to do is make some jam and jelly is, you know, a little sugar and some pectin. And, you know, pectin is just that natural sweetener that you have in jams and jellies. And again, people get a little confused on jams and jellies, but generally speaking, a jam is going to have fruit in it. All right? So there’d be fruit and sugars where your jelly won’t. So that’s just something to bear in mind. Actually, that’s backwards. Jelly’s not fruit. Jelly’s got fruit jams don’t.
Christa:
Yeah, they’re more, they’re more strained, more refined.
Chef Cal:
There you go. So we’re going to go and take a break, but thanks for calling in, sweetheart. I appreciate that you are at cooking like a pro. 1460 am. Be back in just a moment. Welcome back. You found me. I’m chef Cow and we are cooking like a pro here at KCNR.
Chef Cal:
That’s 1460 Am and 96.5 FM. You can always text in a question to cookinglike a pro podcast.net dot now, you know, I wanted to talk about something that there’s a lot of misconception about this idea, this method of cookery. And it’s a deep frying. I think deep, deep frying has a bad name to it because things that are deep fried will kind of generally come out on the greasy side or the oily side. And that just simply means that it wasn’t done properly. And so I’m going to walk through this and it’s important for a variety of things that you want to, want to think about. But the temperature, you need a temperature gauge. And I would suggest the best temperature gauge to get is going to be a candy thermometer.
Chef Cal:
Because a candy thermometer will give you the temperature at the very tip, right down at the very bottom of it. And you can very easily just connect it to the side of your pan. So you’ve got this candy thermometer in there and then you just oil starts getting warm. And once your oil gets up to 375, then you are ready to cook. If you go much less than 375 degrees and this is all fahrenheit, what you’ll end up with is you’ll end up with oil that’s not hot enough to cook right away. And then you have your food, which ends up absorbing oil, as opposed to having the oil stay on the outside and having the oil actually do what you’re trying to do, which is cook. Now, we use an airless fryer at home, which works great. One of the challenges with air is trying to get something that’s brown or that’s golden.
Chef Cal:
And the problem with that is when you go back to palatability, where you look at something and your question is, do I want to eat this? And you want to eat it. So you want it to be, you know, nice and golden brown. There’s a variety of ways of coating this food. When you put it in there, let’s say it’s fish and you want to turn it into fish and chips, then I would recommend a batter. You can find any number of beer batters out there, which are really nice. They, you get that malt flavor also. And then, but some, you can also use something that’s breaded. Again, we go back into that breading process we’ve talked about with flour, egg, and then panko, shake that off.
Chef Cal:
Make sure, make sure on the egg process, when you put it in the egg that you really rub that egg on. Good, because the egg is the only thing that’s going to hold on your breading. And then generally, in my case, I’ll use a panko. And then, of course, tempura. Now, tempura batter, there’s really only three things that you need. You, to be honest, you only need two, but I’m going to give you three because the third one is going to make it really help with the appearance of it. And what you have is you have just club soda, soda water. Soda water and flour.
Chef Cal:
You’ll get a really airy, airy texture because of that carbonation that’s in the club soda. But what you have, and you may have gone to an asian restaurant before and had something that was deep fried and was very light in color. And that’s because there’s nothing in this batter that you’ve made as this tempura batter to allow the food to, you know, become golden brown. Some butter, you could add some butter. Butter, of course, browns when you, when you fry it as well. And, but what I recommend is just getting a little bit of yellow food coloring and you put just a couple of drops in there. And again, we, we stay away from red food coloring. We’re not a big proponent of food coloring, but what this does is this will allow that food that’s already going to have that crunch and that flavor to it.
Chef Cal:
It’s going to allow it to have that color. And that golden color is really what you want when you go out to a restaurant or you go out wherever or you’re doing it at home and you’re cooking fish and chips, again, the chips being the potatoes and whatever variety you have them in or however you have them cut. But the fish itself is going to have that beautiful gold color, and that’s what’s going to make it nice and palatable. You know, I mean, you don’t want your french fries white. Well, you don’t want your fish and chips that have been cooked white either. And this is an important thing, regardless of what it is that you’re, when you’re deep frying is when you season it, when you add the flavor and you want to do it as soon as it comes out of the fryer, because the food’s going to still have some moisture on it. That moisture from the oil as it just cooks off and as it dries and you want to season it while it’s still got a little bit of moisture on there. So the seasoning sticks.
Chef Cal:
If you try to salt something that’s dry, you’ll notice that seasoning will not stay on it. Another way of doing this would be seasoning. Let’s say in this case, we’re still talking about fish and chips. So maybe taking your cod, which you want to start off with a good firm fish, but maybe taking your cod and season it before you put it in your flour, or you can season your flour or you can season your batter. So there’s a variety of ways of doing it, but a lot of people will season their batters and their breadings before they actually, you know, dredge something. And that dredge just simply means coating. And when we dredge something, then we end up kind of getting that, that flavor that’s in there as too. But it’s surprising that, you know, deep frying foods is a real high as long as you do it CORRECTLY.
Chef Cal:
Remember, we’re talking about doing it correctly now, but it’s very high in vitamin E is something that you can get out of that. AGAin, we talked about wet, dry, wet. One thing that I’ve noticed in some of the recipes that I look at, and it says that you want, you know, you don’t want food to get to the smoking point. Well, food begins to smoke when it gets, starts getting, or oil rather gets to smoking when it starts getting up near 500 degrees. And you definitely don’t want that for two reasons. One, the smoking is going to give an off flavor in your final product, but it’s also going to brown the food before it’s cooked all the way through. So if you cooked, again, efficient chips at 375 degrees, which is your optimal flavor for your, your oil, and again, you have that, that candy thermometer or that’s in the side that’s keeping the temperature, you can take a look at that temperature when it just gets to there. And then also you don’t want to overdose, burden or overfill your deep fryer because what that does is that’s just taking items at a room temperature and dropping them down to putting them in a hot oil that drops that oil temperature down.
Chef Cal:
That oil has to do what we call recover, has to recover in temperature. And that’s when, unfortunately, sometimes things will sog up so don’t overcrowd your oil when you’re deep frying. But the thing about deep frying, again, is it completely locks in flavor. There’s no place for flavor to go. Once it’s in the fish or the batter and you put it in there, it begins cooking immediately again at that 375, 365, 75 degree. And it locks in all that flavor. There’s no place for it to go. You know, where if I was to saute this same piece of fish in a pan, what would the liquid in the pan taste like? Well, it would taste like the fish.
Chef Cal:
So there’s been a flavor transfer out of the product that you’re eating, you know, so if you do, you’re cooking a piece of fish, you want to make sure that flavor that’s in the pan is being incorporated back into the product. So, so you don’t want to smoke. You don’t want the oil to smoke. And also make sure you have a good exhaust. There’s really very few things that bother me more than walking into a restaurant and smelling their deep fryer. Well, generally, what that means, well, their hoods might not be off, which, of course, is the, the fan that pulls these things out, those exhaust fumes from your deep fryer. But you definitely want to have something that’s, that’s going to pull that exhaust out so you don’t that smell. And also, when your oil starts smoking, same thing, you start, end up, ending up with this off aroma and this off taste.
Chef Cal:
So make sure you don’t do that as well. As far as oils, peanut oil, a good oil, again, staying away from some of your nut oils. And it’s not so much the nut, it’s the refining process that it goes through in order to get it to a place where it can be utilized as a frying oil. When that happens, there’s just been a lot of things that have, that have happened that you probably prefer that they, they didn’t. But again, quite a few things. You know, crunchy is just something. I mean, everyone likes something that’s crunchy. You know, that’s why we eat potato chips, I suppose.
Chef Cal:
But, but your brain actually has a, your auditory system. Here’s that crunch. And it does send those, those pleasant thoughts of deep frying towards your, towards your brain. So again, season it when it comes out. You know, it, it’s just a great, it’s a great way to cook. And again, I wish more people did it. You don’t have to deep fry. You don’t need to heat up.
Chef Cal:
You know, two gallons of oil to deep fry. You can just have a small pot of oil. Just cook things in there just a few at a time so the oil doesn’t cool down. Make sure you got that temperature. And then when you pull it out, put it on some, some paper towels to drain any excess oil. Season it right away. And there you go. Fish and chips, can’t go wrong with that.
Chef Cal:
So anyway, we’ll be back in just a moment. You again. And we are here. You have found us cooking like a pro on KC and R 1460 am radio. Back in just a moment. Yes, I tell you, chicken fry, oh boy, you know, that’s, now I feel like I’m hungry for one. It’s drive time and hopefully folks listening are getting ready for dinner. But that’s one thing about fried chicken, you know, and as we talked about in the last section, we talked about frying.
Chef Cal:
And again, that’s what the chicken does, is it, is that you lock that flavor. But here’s something that I’m going to recommend. Consider adding more moisture to your protein before you cook it. And what I’m getting at here is a beautiful little restaurant where they do fried chicken. And it’s considered one of the, it’s considered one of the reasons to go to Napa Valley, to be honest. And it’s right behind ad hoc. It’s one of Thomas Keller, one of his little places. And ad hoc has, or I should say Thomas Keller has the french laundry, of course, french laundry, one of the most famous restaurants in the world, been, been blessed to have eaten there a few times.
Chef Cal:
It’s one of those things where, where you eat each course and you might have 810 courses, but they might throw a few courses in. But each course, it sounds like a lot, but each course is really about three, three to four bytes. And the reason being, and I listened to the chef Keller, I’ve had a chance to meet him a couple times, but he talks about the fact that your senses can almost become overburdened if you’re eating too much of the same thing because you really don’t taste anything new. Now that’s fine. I’m eating Mac and cheese and I love the way it tastes and, you know, I’m getting that all the way through, but I’m not going to taste anything different after the third bite and maybe not even after the second bite. But one of the things he talks about is eating smaller portions of food. And the purposes again for that is that you’re trying new things. And we’ve talked about it before, where, you know, you go through life and not a whole lot of things you do more than cook and eat, or at least eat.
Chef Cal:
I mean, hopefully you get a good, you know, x number of hours of sleep. But food is something that’s out there and it’s meant to be enjoyed. And I think that trying lots of smaller things really is just, it’s a great way to go. In french cuisine, which, of course, is how I was trained. It’s called a gastronemic. It’s a gastronomic menu, gastronomy, again, the study of the stomach, but a gastroinemic, it’s a tasting menu. So you’re trying lots of different things. It’s a great thing to do when you have people coming over.
Chef Cal:
And I know that we talked about deep frying again, but to bring that up again, we just, the fondue is always just a fun thing to do because when you enjoy yourself and you can talk and you can have community and you can have all this fellowship that’s going on, and then you’re trying new things, you’re trying some vegetables, and maybe we do a couple of different batters. I’ve always tried to do maybe, you know, a light beer batter and then a tempura batter, and then you have some vegetables and some mushrooms and again, you know, variety of squash and maybe some seafood. Maybe you want to have, you know, a small cup of scallops and some shrimp, maybe some meat, maybe some teriyaki, some teriyaki, beef, pork and poultry and all kinds of things. So, so you just dip these in rather in the batter. Then they just go into the pot, and it’s a lot of fun. I don’t know if people do much of that any, you know, anymore. I used to do it a lot when I was younger because it was just fun to do. When you invite people over and you want to have that communication in that community, then you’re just kind of playing around and chatting while your food’s cooking and trying new things.
Chef Cal:
And then the key, of course, to fondue is have a whole bunch of different sauces to dip it into because that’s just the best way to do her. So anyway, fondue is a good way to go. One thing I wanted to bring up, and I know that this is something that’s really popular with just about everyone that goes to Costco. And I don’t know what the, you know, the percentages are, but a lot of people to go to Costco, grab one of those Costco roasted chickens, you know, they, they cook them by the hundreds, and you can get them at pretty much any store. You know, I try to get them that are, that are reasonable. I’ll generally get the bigger birds because the larger birds are going to generally be more moist because, remember, they’re all being cooked at the same, then they’re being held. So there’s going to be more moisture in a bird that, that maybe got up to 360 but didn’t carry over cooking to, I’m sorry, 160, but it’d carry over like, you know, 180 or something like that. But one of the things, one of the things that I see happening, and remember, we always want to, we want to capture the flavor, correct.
Chef Cal:
We don’t want to pay money for something and then miss out on, you know, anything that just do the cooking process or the thawing process or a variety of other processes. So that’s why when we free, when we’re going to cook something that’s frozen, pull it out the day before, pull it out that morning and put it in the refrigerator, allow it to thaw out slowly again. We want to maintain all of those juices. That’s the key thing. So getting back to my thoughts about this chicken, I’m sure everyone’s done it with, if you’ve bought roasted chicken, is you take that chicken out of the container and then you prep and you do something with that. Well, I can tell you that as it cooks, there is so much flavor that’s literally staying in the bottom of that bag. That bag that you toss, folks. Just lift it up, cut a little corner off, maybe with a pair of scissors, and drain all of that juice while it’s warm, I’ll tell you that.
Chef Cal:
That’s liquid gold. That’s what we call in the chef business, liquid gold, because it’s true concentrated flavor. In this case, it’s poultry, but it could be turkey. It could be any variety of things. If you make a nice roast and all those flavors go, that liquid goes to the bottom and then it gels. It’s just, that’s, that’s what you want. And if you get an opportunity to do that, and then you can actually take, and I’ve done this in the past, especially at home, where I’ll take that broth, that juice, and, and get as much flavor out of that. That the, you know, when you drain your bag and put it in a, you know, like an ice cube tray, and then just pop that tray open once it freezes, and then put those little beautiful flavored ice cubes.
Chef Cal:
Chicken ice cubes. Into a bag and then leave them in your, in your fridge. And maybe you have some beef broth and maybe, I mean, it’s strictly bone broth at that point. Have you got poultry? Or maybe you got some shrimp by cooking up some shrimp shells that you normally would have thrown in the garbage. And then when you go to make that dish, a dish, again, let’s say you want to make a nice pasta dish. So you’re going to use some roasted chicken and, and whatever other ingredients, garlic and shallot. And you saute off your chicken and your pasta is cooked separate and you throw your, and right before you throw your pasta in there, what if you were to reach into the, into your freezer and pull out an ice cube of strictly solid chicken flavor? Are you with me now? Are you with me? So now you’re adding all that flavor back and it’s true natural flavor. And again, there’s a lot of convenience bases that are out there that you can use.
Chef Cal:
You can use those to add flavor, but it’s not going to be that true natural flavor because almost all of those are going to have sodium. If it’s not meaning salt, if it’s not mean in the top ingredient, it’s generally going to be in the top two or three because that’s the enhancement that’s being added. What do we want? We want something that’s been enhanced and even over enhanced for a variety of reasons. I mean, for just, we’ve talked about your taste buds and, you know, they do replicate up into a, you get up into your later years, but, you know, if you burn your tongue, then those taste buds need to, of course, grow back. But there’s just a lot of things that you want to taste that true natural flavor. You’re going to enjoy it more. It’s going to have, it’s going to be much better for you and it’s going to have a much better flavor. So you throw a chicken ice cube in there and to get that flavor back in there.
Chef Cal:
And again, this is not hard to capture. This is that juice that’s going down the drain or going in the garbage can or maybe you, you know, you dump it in your puppy’s, you know, food dish, but that’s that true natural flavor that you really want to keep. So always think about that. Think about keeping your flavor. What can I do to maintain and keep this flavor? Is there anything I’m doing that’s allowing flavor to escape? I’m taking carrots and I’m boiling them in a pot. We’re going to have some carrots for dinner tonight. And those carrots are going to take at a boil. They’re going to take, depending on how they’re cut, but they’re most likely going to take anywhere between six and ten minutes.
Chef Cal:
And then you take those out, you season those and you end up dumping a bunch of carrot flavored water into your, into your sink. So maybe braising the carrots would be better. And I know in the wintertime when carrots, you know, carrots are available, of course, all year round. I’m not sure how we got on the carrots here, but one of the things that I do is in the wintertime, carrots are not as sweet. So I’ll saute up my carrots and when I go to deglaze them to get that flavor out of the pan, I’ll add seven up. And so I don’t normally, you know, I’m not a big fan of cooking with soda pop, but in this case, the seven up adds sweetness back to the carrots. Because part of that is appearance, part of that is palatability. There’s a lot of things that come into play when we’re talking about food and enjoying it as much as we can.
Chef Cal:
So that’s just one of those things that you’re going to want to try to do. But just remember that the next time you get that roasted chicken and you got. Because that beautiful roasted flavor, be sure to strain that off. You can also pull the meat off, basically the. Well, there’s meat in the four different areas. Let’s call it five. So you got the breast and then you got the wing, not much in the wings, but some. And then you got the thigh.
Chef Cal:
Right. And then you’ve got the leg. So you’ve got all these pieces, but that chicken still has flavor in it. Take that chicken and take the flavor that’s in the bottom of the, the container that it came in and dump all that in a pot, you know, and let it boil for a bit. Take it out and you have got the perfect bulk, the perfect broth of chicken flavor for a chicken sauce if you reduce it down, a chicken soup, if you want to keep it the way it is, but it’s going to have that true natural chicken flavor again. We always recommend getting a food item, trying it in its natural state and then trying it, you know, maybe something that’s been a convenience product, like maybe you’re putting up against a nice fresh chicken and noodle soup against a chicken and noodle soup that was in the can. And notice that difference. You notice that difference, and it will make a difference.
Chef Cal:
And that’s what we want to do here, is we want to get you to start to be able to pick up true natural flavors food. And we do that like we do anything else. We get better at everything because we practice. So be sure to practice out there. Don’t throw your flavor down the sink or into the. Into the dishwasher. And you’ll find that you’re going to be enjoying your foods quite a bit more. So keep that in mind.
Chef Cal:
We’re going to go into our last break. Appreciate you tuning in here to cooking like a pro. We’ll be back in just a moment. Yes. Yes. Welcome back to cooking like a pro. Born to be wild. Yes, wild.
Chef Cal:
We wanted to actually talk a little bit about, or at least I did, about wild game. I know I talked a little bit about that a couple weeks ago because I was raised on it. Again, I’ve mentioned this story where I came from, a family of hunters where you either kill things or cooked them. And I’ve mentioned this before, and I am humbled by the fact that I’m not that good of a shot. So I ended up in the kitchen where everybody else was out hunting except for me and mom and grandma. And we just had a lot of fun. I just got a chance to see some pictures of what we call Buck camp. It was a place where we used to go up hunting for everything from, again, squirrels to rabbits to rattlesnake to deer and variety of everything else.
Chef Cal:
Anything that moved was pretty much a target, turkeys and such. But anyway, I was raised on that. And then back in the forties and fifties, where people didn’t have a lot of food, especially after going out of the recession and World War Two, there was just a lot of food shortages. And because of that, because people quit making it, you could kind of almost liken it to what happened with COVID And when Covid happened and people quit going out to eat, and all of a sudden, now you’ve got these large quantities of food, but no one to buy them. It really did become a problem. I mean, I could, for example, I could get applesauce where I was working at. I was feeding independent. I was in an independent living facility, and I could feed the resident’s applesauce, but I couldn’t get it because they’d quit making the cans for, to put the applesauce in.
Chef Cal:
So anyway, it’s just, you know, things change, things change. But with our family as we get as we leave the forties and fifties and go into the sixties and seventies, which I was born in the, in the very early sixties. We ate whatever we could find, whatever that we could kill, and that’s what, so we had to learn how to do that. The French have a term for this. I’ll get to in just a second. But a lot of things that were pan fried, things that were stewed, things that were locked in flavor. Until you’ve had a good squirrel stew, you know, you’re just missing out on some of the best things in life. And rabbit as well, just very tender.
Chef Cal:
You know, people say, what’s it taste like? Well, taste not like chicken, but anyway, so there’s a lot of these products that you can use going into the garbage. We just talked about this in the last segment with your chicken broth at the bottom of that roasted chicken. And one of the things that in french cooking we use is called offal. Offal is everything that you would normally throw away. The actual word means what falls off. Okay. So you take, you clean out your animal and the stuff that falls out, that’s your opal and that’s, we ate a lot of it. Everything from your liver and onions.
Chef Cal:
And so many people, especially folks who are a little bit older, just really love a good, just liver and onions, but also the tongue. The tongue, you see that a lot, used a lot. I’ve cooked a tongue not that long ago, maybe about six months ago. You can shred it up for tacos. You can slice it thin. It’s got a little bit of a, I’d call it kind of a stronger flavor, maybe a little bit gainy flavor might be a word to use. But it was, it was delicious. Made a great sandwich.
Chef Cal:
But again, the heart, heart is a, is a great muscle. And again, just lightly flour and seasoned, fry it up. And that you’re going to get all this extra stuff that’s in the pan. That’s when you want to start making those pan gravies. And remember, we talk about a gravy is something that comes from the drippings in a pan. And then we’ve heard the word sauce. So gravy versus sauce. A sauce comes from the roasting of the bones of the animal and getting a broth with some aromatics and some vegetables and your parsley and your bay leaf and thyme, your celery, onion and carrots.
Chef Cal:
And you just end up with this beautiful broth. And then you can thicken that up and reduce it. And now you have a sauce. But if it’s something you do in a panasone. And I guess the easiest way to kind of think about it is that when you cook sausage, say you’re making biscuits and gravy, and you cook your biscuits, you cook your sausage off, and then maybe you got that grease in the bottom of the pan, add a little flour to that. Remember your roux, which we use butter and flour, but in this case, butter being the oil. And if you’re doing biscuits and gravy, then your liquid oil would be the actual fat comes off the pork, and they just add a little bit of flour to it, tighten it up, throw in some milk, a little bit of water, and there you go. You got yourself a gravy for your perfect biscuits.
Chef Cal:
And one of the things I was looking at today was some of the trends that are out there, some things we keep an eye on. This is my definition, my definition between a trend and a fad is a trend is something that’s going to kind of hang around, something that’s going to be around for a while, and where a fad is something that just fades away. I can use two words to describe a fad for you. Frozen yogurt. It wasn’t that long ago, a number of years ago, where all of a sudden, there were frozen yogurt shops popping up on every corner almost. And. And it was something that was very prevalent. You could see it all over the place.
Chef Cal:
But it didn’t take long before it to kind of, kind of fade for whatever reason it does. And so it faded away and it became a fad. You know, a trend would be something like healthy eating. Healthy eating, of course, is a. Is a trend because that’s what we want. We want to do where we find out. Remember, again, it all goes back to, you are what you eat. And we have a term that we use in the cooking industry.
Chef Cal:
It’s like garbage in, garbage out. If you’re not using the highest quality of products, rather to make something, then those, it’s not going to be as beneficial to the end product. If you’re using old onion peels versus nice onions and your celery and things like that, to maybe make some sort of broth or a sauce or. So it’s important. It’s important that you kind of think of things. And again, these trends. I know that I’m very excited about a book that I just got. It’s called good energy.
Chef Cal:
It’s by Casey and Callie, means maybe we’ll have to get them here on the show, but it’s really about avoiding disease by eating better. And it’s really, when you look at our healthcare system that’s out there, I’m going to jump on my soapbox for just a moment here. But our healthcare system is really, can be defined in many ways as a sick care system. What they’re doing is they’re just, they’re treating symptoms, but not treating the root cause. And a lot of those root causes have to do with the way that we’re treating our food. We’ve talked about the word processing. Processing is a four letter word. It’s one of those things that is almost always through the process, something is lost.
Chef Cal:
Earlier, we talked about losing flavor, where they continue to process something. And generally, when they process something, they’re also adding things to it. And what’s adding things to it doing, it’s not helping the flavor, I’ll tell you that much. Because generally they’re adding maybe extenders, some kind of a. Maybe kicking agents. They could be, you know, adding just a number of things. Well, what they’re adding is not making it better. Okay? It’s diluting the original product, whether it’s wheat, whether it’s sugar, whether it’s something else that you’re making, whether it’s a food product.
Chef Cal:
So there’s a lot of things out there that you just want to be careful. I look at the label. You know, if there are so many items on the label that, you know, it looks like an encyclopedia or you can’t pronounce them, you know, pull out your phone and maybe Google a couple of those. Stay away from your high fructose corn syrups. Those are. Those are things that just aren’t. Aren’t good for you. And you find a lot of that in your different items where, you know, sugar comes into play.
Chef Cal:
But again, you want to. You want to go with foods that are. That are natural, as natural as possible, which, of course, falls right back to organic. Organic. A lot of places have organic areas now in their. In their produce departments. You go to almost any store, they’ll have something that’s organic. Of course.
Chef Cal:
Farmers market, great place to get some things as well. But again, these challenges with our food is we’re really. We need to improve the metabolic health of America. And this is an urgent priority. It’s an urgent, natural priority, because if we don’t find a way in, a path towards optimizing our metabolic habits that affect our health system to fix those root causes, it’s not going to get better on its own, folks. Not going to get better on its own. So again, I will continue to bring you up to date as I read through my good energy book. But again, keep, you know, again, you are what you eat.
Chef Cal:
I’ve already mentioned that. Eat healthy, be healthy. All right. Some of the things I also looked when I was looking for some top concerns for restaurants. I know that we go out, we don’t really always think about what the restaurant or the business is going through. But again, there are labor shortages now. We have economic uncertainties, we have costs, operational costs. We, I’m not going to start talking about California and operational costs.
Chef Cal:
Probably the main reason I don’t have a restaurant now. One of them, you know, one of the main ones, I’m just getting older after, you know, half a century. It sounds longer to say a half a century. I mentioned that to my son the other day. I said, wow, isaac, I’m, you know, your dad’s over a half a century, and I’m actually more than that. I’m like a century and a decade plus a little bit. But again, as you get older, I think it’s even more important to be careful what you’re putting in your body. You know, you already know that you’re going to be eating less.
Chef Cal:
So wherever, perhaps a eight or ten ounce steak would feed one person each. Now, one of those grilled off and sliced and portioned for two people, more than enough food. So eating a little bit less, also eating a little bit slower. A lot of people don’t think about this, but remember, it takes about half a minute, a little less than, well, I’m not half a minute. I mean, I was going to say half an hour, but a little less than half hour, about 20 minutes or so before your stomach is going to tell your brain that you’re full. So because of that, you either want to eat really fast or you just eat slow and then know that you’ll be taking in less calories. It’s almost a way of naturally having an appetite suppressant, which a lot of those, even the drugs that they’re coming out with now, the ozempics and things like that, those really are, that’s what they are. And food inhibitors.
Chef Cal:
So they basically make you not want to eat. So you just don’t feel like eating. So, and we’re a show here that talks about eating, so we’re going to continue to talk about it. So again, you can go online to culinary yours. There’s a lot of information, a lot of free stuff you can get on there that we put together, some wine stuff, some barbecue stuff, so go to culinary yours. You can click on cooking like a pro, or you can search chef towel. You will find me. And we appreciate you tuning in.
Christa:
Thank you so much for spending time with us. Until next time, we hope you’ll be cooking up a storm in the kitchen. So we’ll be with you again next week with food, flavor and fun right here on cooking like a pro podcast.
