Cal and Christa DeMercurio
Join Chef Cal and Christa on this week’s episode of Cooking Like a Pro as they kick off their first one-on-one radio show broadcast.
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Join Chef Cal and Christa on this week’s episode of Cooking Like a Pro as they delve into culinary tips and techniques to enhance your cooking skills. This podcast is packed with valuable insights and practical advice for both novice and experienced cooks.
✨DOWNLOAD BBQ SAUCE CHEAT SHEET with 10 RECIPES ✨
✔️ Explore tips for enhancing store-bought barbecue sauces, including a ginger barbecue sauce recipe for seafood.
✔️ Learn about the key to removing the bloodline from salmon and the importance of fresh, non-fishy fish.
✔️ Discover how to pair fruit-based barbecue sauces with proteins like chicken, pork, and sea bass.
✔️ Get tips on handling and preserving fresh produce, including the best way to store blueberries.
✔️ Hear about Cal’s memories of his grandpa’s BBQ sauce and the significance of food in bringing people together.
Don’t miss out on these cooking hacks and join Chef Cal and Christa next week for more culinary wisdom!
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LIVE ON RADIO Wednesdays from 5-6 pm PT
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Find the DeMercurio’s
👨🍳 Chef Cal www.chefcal.net
👩🍳 Christa www.mrschef.net
together at www.culinarilyyours.net
podcast page www.cookinglikeapropodcast.net
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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 are kicking off our first ever one on one broadcast together and we will be discussing blueberries, master chefs and giving for store bought barbecue sauce a flavor boost. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.
Cal:
Culinarily Yours, this is Chef Cal here on KCNR 1460 AM and 96.5 FM on your dial, your talk radio. And we are so excited. I’m here with my lovely wife, Christa. Yeah, we have a live call and radio cooking show, so we’ll give you the phone number a few times and you can stick it in your phone if you’d like to call. We are a cooking show where you can, you can call and ask cooking questions. If you don’t, we’re just going to talk about it, but we’d love to have your input on any questions you might have. We’ll do our best to help set you straight. If there’s a problem, the number down here is the local number and it’s 6054 567-605-4567 it’s a little bit far from me without my glasses.
Christa:
And if you are not in the local area, that is a 530 area code.
Cal:
Oh, yep. I guess if you’re listening from far away. So anyway, we’re excited about being here and it’s again, this is something we’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. It’s kind of doubling off as our launch of our website along with our radio show and along with the podcast because you will be able to eventually get this as well. You’ll be able to see us as we’re talking. Can’t really cook in here. I don’t think the fire department’s going to allow us to do that. But as far as about the show, the show really needs to be for us in order for it to be what we would like it to be.
Cal:
It needs to be listener driven. We need to have participation of people. That’s the funnest part is being able to share ideas and tricks and tips and thoughts. And so again, we just really look forward to getting your calls. If you have any cooking related. I mean, it’s cooking related questions. It has to be cooking related questions. Well, it could be cooking, it could be restaurant, it could be industry you know, anything along those lines.
Christa:
Anything to do with food.
Cal:
Anything to do with food. So. And what this is, is this is part of this little conglomerate that me and my wife have been working on for quite some time, and I’m going to let her go ahead and talk about the other components that this show’s offering out there. As far as the website and other things like that.
Christa:
Well, this is a project we have been working on since, what, 2018? 2019?
Cal:
Long time ago.
Christa:
It’s been a while. So now we are got the train on the tracks, and we’re starting to get some momentum and head out the station. We have a blog that we started back in 2018. It is now blossoming into a radio show, which will also become a podcast. If you go to our website, which is www.culinarilyyours.net, it will take you everywhere that we are, which is Instagram, YouTube. Those are my two favorites.
Cal:
Facebook, LinkedIn. Now, I have to apologize for something here, because the word culinary did recently become an actual word, but it’s never been a word of, and in all of my competing and the restaurants that I’ve had, I’ve always signed my menus. We do large events. You might sign 100 menus, 200 menus, you know, 50 menus, 500 menus, and I would sign it culinarily yours, chef Cal. Culinarily yours, Chef Cal. We signed bottles of wine. We didn’t sign any, you know, any body parts, but we signed everything else. And I didn’t know that it wasn’t ily.
Cal:
I just went to Central Valley, and so I didn’t know it was Ilydev. But culinarily is a word now? I don’t know. It was added to the lexicon, I guess, this year.
Christa:
No, the last couple of years.
Cal:
Has it been there for a few.
Christa:
People that have been using it, but we’re taking over that domain.
Cal:
Well, I’m not the only one that can’t spell. I’m glad to hear that. So I want you to let us know, what can they find if they go to the website and then maybe also to YouTube?
Christa:
Well, they can find the links that go to all of our social medias. We can find a few blog posts, the stories of everything that you were teaching me in my budding culinary professional career. And we’re starting to add recipes.
Cal:
Yeah, well, we’ve got. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of stuff that’s on there. And I think that the Instagram is something I don’t do anything with, and neither do I do anything with Facebook. So don’t try to reach me on those things.
Christa:
That’s where you’ll reach me.
Cal:
Yeah. And we actually, I do have, we have some YouTube videos. We have a lot of things in production right now that just need a few more snippets before we can get them out there. But if you go ahead and Google now, don’t do this if you’re driving, but you can actually not go to Google, but YouTube and put in cream of seven onion soup and I will pop up. There I am in the atmosphere of the Internet and all of technology.
Christa:
Or if you just go to our website, it’ll be right there. It’ll take you to the YouTube video.
Cal:
Well, and again, we do need to. There’s probably some housekeeping. That’s most of it. But the other part of this is I do cook for a living. And in my family, they were all hunters. So you either killed things or you cooked them. I was the worst shot, so I became the cook. Ended up in the kitchen at nine years old.
Cal:
I’ll make this quick cooking with mom and grandma, making things like squirrel stew, rabbit, venison, rattlesnake, anything that they could kill, we cooked. And then my budding career started at nine years old. But I’ll tell you that it was for my family, having to have that family background where everybody cooks. I was just the only one that did it professionally for quite a while. And until my brother Ben, who’s an excellent chef, we both worked in numerous places in this town. I’ve owned several, well, four restaurants and opened quite a few. And as the show progresses over the years here, we’ll be able to tell you all about those as well.
Christa:
My background is I just love food and playing around the kitchen. I started out with better homes and gardens, looking through all the beautiful, colorful pages.
Cal:
Well, see, and I still use a checkbook. Okay. And Christa is like advanced technology algorithm. I mean, I don’t even know what she’s doing when she’s doing it. So she takes care of all of those things, all the techie stuff, and keeps me sounding good and looking good. So that’s kind of. So again, that’s kind of what we want to do. You know, we’ve talked about.
Cal:
We’re going to have, just coming up here at the, after the first break, a fresh update so we can update people on what’s fresh, but not just what’s fresh. Because one of the things about getting fresh food is that if you just buy a product and you take it home, put it in your fridge. And you use that product, you’re going to get x number of days out of that. One day, two days, three days. Blueberries, great example. Okay. They mild you very easily. You’ll get, you pull those out of the, you buy them, pull them out of the fridge, stick them back in the fridge.
Cal:
Pull them out, stick them back in. And what you’ve got is you’ve got something that’s mildewing because of the moisture. What you want to do is rinse those blueberries off. So instead of getting two days off of them, you rinse them off, dry them very well, just gently put them on a paper towel. And now you’ve got, you know, four or five days out of that and you’re not throwing it away.
Christa:
So it’s a closed container or a breathable container with like a paper towel.
Cal:
Well, that’s a lot of things that people. Great question, although you know that. But there’s two things. One is, yes, you want your food to be able to breathe. There’s very few things you want completely sealed. Tighten. There are some things like sealed meal or maybe something to marinade or you want to force a marinade into the protein faster. But no, for the most part, you want your items to breathe.
Christa:
Now, if you want to learn more about berries, you have a question for us. You can give us a call at.
Cal:
530-605-4567 lots of fun things coming up. Another thing is to date things. Everything in our refrigerator is dated. All you need is a little, some painters tape and a little sharpie and write the date on it because things get pushed in the back. And before you know it, that beautiful chicken marsal you made ten days later is turned into a science experiment and it’s back in the corner and you’re just going to end up tossing. Plus, now you’ve contaminated some things also in your, in your box, and cross contamination, not to cut you off, sweetie, but cross contamination is something that we’re really going to talk a lot about on this show because, you know, you don’t want to have food poison at home. There’s not a lot of things you need to be aware of, but there’s a few critical ones. And we will work on those.
Christa:
And I was just going to add, if you don’t have painters tape, masking tape works really good.
Cal:
Yeah, well, we got masking tape all over our house, so. But anyway, keeping your place organized, keeping your kitchen organized, keeping your fridge organized. Yeah, our kitchen. If you go to YouTube and you see the videos, you can see our kitchen there. And there’s quite a few things there. Like I said, I’ve got about four restaurants stacked in various places on my house and our house and on our property as well. So again, we will be going over. That’s going to be called our fresh update.
Cal:
You’ll be able to get that once a week with everything and then also how to treat those things. And r1, quick thing I would say, as we come to the end here is get yourself some strawberries and get yourself some field grown strawberries and store strawberries, try them side by side and really start to learn the difference in that flavor. It’s really going to take you a long way. What do you think?
Christa:
I think I would rather have blueberries.
Cal:
Blueberries. Blueberries.
Christa:
I love blueberries. And they’re on sale right now.
Cal:
Well, strawberries, you can get them all over. We grow them everywhere. But see the strawberries, you have to understand the strawberries. Where we’re getting the driscolls, those are down in Driscoll. That’s in the valley on the other side of Gilroy. I’ve driven through it many times, you know, so those have to be packed, cleaned, packed, sealed and clam shells and then brought up here. And all that time that it takes for them to come up, there’s the challenge of it getting damaged. It’s going to continue to ripen as well.
Cal:
So those are all just things that you have to be very much aware of.
Christa:
And I love the blueberries from the Oregon coast from that time we went on that trip to Oregon and stopped at that farmer’s market. Those blueberries were amazing. Amazing.
Cal:
Yeah. Yeah. There’s something about being on the coast, so especially when it’s 100, whatever it’s going to be. So it’s a. It’s going to be warm and it’s going to be hot. Coming up. So we’re going to go ahead and take a quick break and we’ll be right back after that.
Christa:
Hey, food fans, let’s talk about making food so good you’ll want to stick a fork in it. Whether you’re looking to impress your family or simply enjoy your time in the kitchen, we’ve got you covered with tips, tricks, and tempting morsels of culinary wisdom. You can even contact us with your cooking questions and get expert answers. You don’t want to miss out on the delicious details right here on cooking like a pro podcast.
Christa:
When I found you.
Cal:
I think we might need to find a little more room in here in case we want to dance. Yeah. What is that is that fats domino. The fats domino does that. All right, Blueberry Hill. So I want to finish up on blueberries, and there are flavor combinations that we just come across as chefs again. I’ve been doing this for four and a half decades, and there are just certain things that I’ve done that work. An example of that would be that soup, the cream of seven onion soup.
Cal:
People hear seven onions, and they’re thinking, I can’t eat that many onions. That’s too, going to be too strong. I will guarantee you this would be one of the sweetest soups you’ve ever had. Just a beautiful combination because you’re using seven different onions, and they all have different, you know, heat profiles, the cap quesum, and, you know, you have. You can name seven. Okay, Christa, I’m going to put you on spot. Name seven onions.
Christa:
Red, white, green, leek, shallot, garlic, yellow.
Cal:
Yeah, there she goes. Good job. All right. Very good for that.
Christa:
So what do I get?
Cal:
Yeah, so you get to keep talking. But anyway, yeah, so there’s a lot of things that we want to think about when we make these flavor combinations. And one of the things that we’ll do, especially in food and wine pairing. And, Chris, to remind me, I do want you to talk about that wine tasting freebie that we have there as well. But one thing that I found that was a really good match early on in my career was duck and blueberries. And I tell you, I just take, and we take that duck breast, and you cut most of the fat off. You leave yourself. About half the top is exposed with fat, because, remember, it’s very thick fat on the duck.
Cal:
And then you sear that until that gets nice and crisp, and you render that fat. And then you flip it over, you hit it with some grand meignet. We hit it with a little bit of raspberry sauce and then some blueberries as well. And, oh, that was, that was definitely one of my most favorite dishes. If people requested it.
Christa:
Just fresh berries or do you puree them? Cook them down into a sauce?
Cal:
No, just throw them in there. They’ll cook down fast enough. And also, we did that sometimes by taking the duck breast. And remember, it’s a sweet sauce, so you want to counterbalance sweet with heat. So we would go ahead and we would take the duck, and we would roll it sometimes in occasion seasoning. And that was a real nice item as well. And then if you want to go on, go online to culinaryours dot.net, you can get all the information you want you can pull up my resume and read all about me, and it’ll probably put you to sleep. So read it late at night.
Christa:
And there’s actually a blueberry story on there with me trying to make a blueberry sauce. And I had to learn a new technique with a new thing called a chinois.
Cal:
Oh, yeah, gotta have a chinois. Can’t do it without chinois. There are all kinds of tools and things that we use. But when I was 16, I started competing. When I started competing, I was hit the red line here in Redding. Actually, we could back up. I was just a couple of doors down where Bruce Brown had Maxwell’s, and his dad would be up there greeting the door. And I just knew that he was the chef for the people in this area.
Cal:
There was a restaurant called Doc’s, and I just knew he was the chef. And I went up to his. You know, I’m a 16 year old kid. I’m scared. It’s dark. I knew I wanted to be a chef for a long time. I walk in the and down this really dark aisle way or alleyway kind of behind the. Was that squire room? No, not square room.
Cal:
But anyway, over in that area where vintage is, where I had a restaurant there called Pesce Pasta. Anyway, I walked in the door and I opened it up, and the chef’s in there just slinging pans and doing all this fun stuff. And I was just mesmerized. And I said, chef, if I’ll wash your dishes for free if you let me watch you cook. And that was kind of how it started. And Bruce did a lot to take me under his wing. He showed me some dishes that I would continue to use for decades. One off the top of my head, I think of was a halibut duxelles.
Cal:
He cooked in a french technique, and I went through a french apprenticeship, so it worked out well. But when I made the Olympic team for, for cooking in competitions, I progressed up. And in my early thirties, I made the cooking Olympics are held in Europe every four years, and you can look all that stuff up as well. I was blessed enough to be in the right place at the right time and won an Olympic gold medal and two silver Olympic gold medals at the world cooking Olympics over a 15 year period. But when I made that team, there was chef Raymond Hofmeister, third master chef in the world. There’s only 62 master chefs in the world. People call me a master chef. I said, no way.
Cal:
No way, man. There’s just. If you understood what a master chef has to do. I’d love to do it. I love to take the test, but it’s five. Well, now it was 5000. It’s probably $10,000.
Christa:
The show MasterChef are not true master chefs.
Cal:
No, no. It’s way, way more about cooking and techniques. But chef Hofmeister made this yogurt terrine for us, and it was one of the most delicate desserts. He made it in a terrine, which is an inverted long dish, stainless steel. And it had grapes and apples. There’s a variety of fruit in it. And then it had the raspberry yogurt and then some gelatin, and there’s some liqueur in there. And it was just delectable.
Cal:
So that’s something very good to do with your. With your blueberries as well.
Christa:
Well, back to blueberries. What color is a blueberry?
Cal:
It’s not blue.
Christa:
Well, let’s say it’s blue.
Cal:
Okay.
Christa:
Okay, so purple if I want to do red, white, and blue, because it’s 4 July tomorrow. What can I make with strawberries and blueberries and something white?
Cal:
Pancakes.
Christa:
Pancakes.
Cal:
Yep. On flight pancakes. Start off with pancakes. You’re good the rest of the day.
Christa:
Okay.
Cal:
So you don’t have to worry about doing anything for, you know, your red, white, and blue for, you know, for lunch or your burgers or something like that.
Christa:
So whipped cream would be your white. Well, then, okay, so if that’s in the whipped cream, can we do a strawberry shortcake and add blueberries to it?
Cal:
Of course, yeah, of course.
Christa:
Well, that’s.
Cal:
That’s, you know, and that’s the key to this. This entire show, is that you can do anything. People say, can you freeze that? I say, I don’t know. Can it fit in the freezer? You know, that’s kind of the way it is. You can do whatever you want. And that’s the whole key, is to give you the techniques. And that’s where I’ve been blessed to have worked with some of the best in the world. I’m saying that, and it’s true to form, it’s true to heart.
Cal:
I’ll talk about these amazing european gentlemen throughout the course of this entire show as we go on for years, because these were the people that mentored me and the people that took me under their wing, and they each had their own little. Their own little thing that they offered to it. But, yeah, pancakes, that’s where you got, you know, red, white, and blue right off the top. You’re set to go.
Christa:
Okay, last thing if I want to do a red, white and blue strawberry shortcake. Is there anything else I can add just for a little more oomph? A garnish?
Cal:
Well, usually you use powdered sugar. I think you’d be careful with chocolate chips. You have kids, you know, would like chuck chips, but then they’re going to alter the flavor a little bit.
Christa:
What about a raspberry drizzle?
Cal:
You know, I think I would get some red, white and blue sprinkles, the cake sprinkles and put them in the batter. How about that?
Christa:
Okay. There you go.
Cal:
There you go. And you got it. So, yeah, so anyway, that’s what this show’s about. It’s about just coming up and, you know, developing things off the top of your head. People will ask me all the time in my restaurants in the past, say, how’d you make that? I’m like, oh, man. I really just kind of walked in, open the door. You know, it’s kind of going back to the cream of seven onion soup. I just looked in the counter and looked in the fridge and looked in the walk in, and I had all these onions.
Cal:
I said, okay, Dean Mercurials was one of those. We opened in 1989, and it was a restaurant that served soup and salad. There’s no other restaurants that serve soup and salad other than an asian restaurant, a chinese restaurant. No one does that. And it broke my heart when, you know, around 2007, no, 2000, 920, ten, where everything went a la carte. And the next thing you know, people are getting kind of ripped off. We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk in detail about what you can do when you go out to a restaurant and how to.
Cal:
You can break down that cost and be able to understand the value you’re getting. For example, me and Christa, we eat half a meal each. So we just might have an appetizer and then we split a dinner.
Christa:
Yeah, I can’t eat soup and salad and a meal and dessert.
Cal:
Yeah. You know, so. So for right now, it was something that’s just one of the many things that we do to help that out. So we’ll talk about recipe development, but you have to learn more about flavor profiles and what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. And outside of that, we’ll go ahead and take another break at the bottom of the hour. And we’re excited about being here, folks. We appreciate you tuning in. And again, if you have any questions.
Cal:
60545.
Christa:
Hey, food fans, let’s talk about making food. So good. You’ll want to stick a fork in it. Whether you’re looking to impress your family or simply enjoy your time in the kitchen, we’ve got you covered with tips, tricks, and tempting morsels of culinary wisdom. You can even contact us with your cooking questions and get expert answers. You don’t want to miss out on the delicious details right here on cooking like a pro podcast.
Cal:
Oh, you just can’t go wrong with the cheeseburger. There’s so many things you can do with that. And we’ll talk a little bit about barbecue. And continuing on, I want to touch on, on mother sauce, but first, I want to reach out to Lynn Mosers. Thank you for listening back in Texas. You guys keep safe back there with all the weather challenges. And then, of course, Judy and Cynthia, we appreciate you listening here locally. So thanks much for tuning in.
Cal:
And we’re excited about this opportunity to be a part of this kind of the startup of this podcast and this radio show. But I want to just give you a background on barbecue sauce real quickly. And it comes from a mother sauce. So we all have, well, most of us have five fingers on a hand. Okay. Those five fingers represent five mother sauces. Each mother sauce is a different color when you make that sauce. That is the basis mother sauce, that everything else is made from.
Cal:
Five mother sauces. Five colors. Okay, we have blonde, yellow, blonde is volute, yellow is hollandaise, brown is demi if reduced by half. Cream sauce is white. And then our last one is red. And that’s a tomato sauce. And so what we do is we take a tomato sauce. We take our onions and our garlic and our tomatoes, we throw in our pot and cook them down, and we blend it up and we puree it.
Cal:
Now we have this tomato sauce, little salt, little pepper. Take it whatever direction you want. Chili flakes always helps. Also, when you’re using tomato, a little bit of sugar. Sugar helps get rid of the acid from the tomato. So a little bit of sugar might sound weird. Just do it. You’ll enjoy it.
Cal:
But anyway, so we take that red sauce, that mother sauce, that’s red, which is tomato, and we’re going to add mainly three items to it, vinegar, brown sugar and mustard. Vinegar, brown sugar, and mustard. It can be any kind of vinegar. I use red wine vinegar.
Christa:
Oh, you made one with balsamic one time. That was fantastic.
Cal:
Almost any kind of mustard and I, and brown sugar. And now you have barbecue sauce. And barbecue sauce is a sister sauce, so it is a derivative of the mother sauce. The mother sauce is red. The derivative of that is called a sister sauce or a secondary sauce. So that’s where we’re ending up right now. Okay, so we made it all the way to barbecue sauces. Now, those of you that are involved, in fact, Christa, why don’t you go ahead and explain what it is that they need to do to get all this information.
Cal:
Because for the next 1520 minutes, the remainder of the show, probably we’re going to be talking about what it is. You can go online to our website and you can get these for free.
Christa:
All right. So if www.culinaryyours.net is a bit difficult to type into your search bar, go ahead and type in misses. Chef.net or chefcal.net dot. All roads lead to the same place. And we have a cheat sheet for making very cool boosted barbecue sauces. And they’re going to be using a store bought sauce. It’s not from scratch, but you’re going to be doing a little extra to it to give a little bit more flavor.
Cal:
I like that. So we have this barbecue sauce. We’re going down the aisle. Everybody has their favorite one. I kind of lean towards a sweet baby raise. I think they’ve really done a great job. There was one here a friend of mine was making in decades ago and it was fan what was the best one I’d had. But he kind of disappeared, so I don’t know where he went.
Cal:
But anyway, the sweet baby rays. Cattleman’s masterpiece. Casey, kinders. I mean, kinders.
Christa:
And get at Costco. That’s pretty good.
Cal:
I mean, but there’s, there’s so many of them. There’s a breathra of those. Okay. And I was driving here, I was thinking, I want to find a place to use the word breathora. So there I did it and it made sense. So we have all these sauces. And then to these sauces, which are already pre made barbecue sauces, we’re gonna make these. And then these will become secondary sauces off of that sister.
Cal:
So I don’t know. What’s that? A half sister cousin something? I don’t know. The French don’t go that far back.
Christa:
Twice removed.
Cal:
Twice removed. They got mother and then they got the sister sauce. And what you’ll get, and I’m gonna walk through a couple of these, is taking any sauce that you have that’s hanging out. And we’re going to add in this case, we’re going to start off with a teaspoon of fresh minced ginger to the sauce. And we’re just going to heat it through. And we’ll have a ginger barbecue sauce. And I would use that ginger paste, that ginger paste that comes in a little tube that you can get in the produce chilled produce section. Those bases are pretty nice at Walmart.
Christa:
That’s where I get them.
Cal:
You know, Walmart. They, I know that they have, we have about seven or eight of them. Some of them, some of them cilantro.
Christa:
There’s ginger, cilantro.
Cal:
I like the basil. Doesn’t really blend very well, but they just come out like toothpaste. And so you can say, I need a teaspoon, I need a tablespoon. Boom, there you go. And then just heat that up. And then you kind of think about the flavor profile. So what’s the flavor profile of this ginger sauce? Well, ginger’s got a temperature to it. It’s got a little bite to it.
Cal:
It’s got a little bit of, you know, a little pizzazz. It’s got a little bit of an asian flair, maybe. We’ll call it that. And so a couple, there’s two items that I really like doing this ginger barbecue sauce on. And again, this is all available to you for free when you go online. We’re just going to go over it here to kind of give you the idea of how we take a mother sauce into a sister sauce and beyond. But I use it for red snapper. It works great for red snapper because red snapper doesn’t have a lot of flavor anyway.
Cal:
Red snapper is a fish that you really is going to taste more like what you cook it in. But then you got salmon. Salmon is going to be what we call a stronger flavored fish. Fish shouldn’t be strong. Fish should be oceanic.
Christa:
But salmon is a really heavy fish for me.
Cal:
Well, and a lot of that is the people ask, I asked people this question and they, I said, you want some fish? No, we don’t like fish. Why not? Because it’s fishy. Well, if there’s fishy. If it’s fishy, there’s something wrong with it. Okay. I wouldn’t eat it either if it was fishy. And the same thing with salmon is when you take salmon off the skin, opposite side of the bones, you take whole fresh salmon. There’s this gray line.
Cal:
It’s a bloodline that goes down and follows the center of that, of that fish. You need to cut that out and nobody does, and you have to, or you’re taking this fish and making it stronger than it needs to be. I want a salmon because I also like my salmon cooked medium rare, but I’m not going to eat medium rare salmon if it’s got a bloodline in it.
Christa:
And also, it’s kind of a fatty fish, isn’t it?
Cal:
Yeah, it’s great for, great for your heart, you know, jam packed with omega three s. And so it’s a great fish for you, but it’s a little stronger. So that’s kind of why ginger would, would match up with that, because it’s a stronger sauce with a stronger fish. And then we go to raspberry, which we talked about earlier, going well with duck, also goes good with pork. And up for that, we’re just going to add a quarter cup of raspberry jam. We’re going to thin that with a little raspberry flavored liqueur. And again, it’s whatever you have in the cupboard, you don’t, and you don’t have to use these alcohols, but if you wanted to use raspberry flavored liqueur, you might want to use some chambord. You know, something a lot of people have.
Cal:
It’s just a wonderful, wonderful liqueur that would go great in this, and then maybe, and then come up with a garnish that might go on top of that. The thing about a garnish is a garnish should always tell you what is the item, what is in the item, what are the flavors in there. So if I got this really nice duck dish, and it’s got this sauce on it, and I’m looking at it, and my server brings it to me and sets it in front of me, and I’ve got dark on dark on brown. I really don’t, maybe I don’t know what it is, but I see those fresh raspberries, that tells me the raspberry tells me that there’s raspberry in the sauce. So that was the idea of it. Okay. And the man, of course, goes with raspberry. Now, the original idea, back in the day, long time ago, the French, they always put Parsley on the plate.
Cal:
You know why they put the parsley on the plate?
Christa:
To freshen your breath.
Cal:
Breath freshener. Yes. You, you ate your meal, and then the last thing you ate was your parsley. And you walked around the rest of the night with parsley in your teeth, but your breath smelled.
Christa:
You know what I used to do with parsley when I was little? We would go to Sizzler Steakhouse, and they would have the little Cal that they would stick in and say whether it was rare, medium, well done, and they put the sprig of parsley. Well, the parsley to me was a little tree, and the little Cal would go marching across my plate over the tree.
Cal:
You’re a gifted child. Gifted child. She’s a gifted child, folks.
Christa:
Memories of Sizzler girl.
Cal:
Yeah. But anyway, then we go, we go down and there’s a bunch more of them on here. We have a couple minutes. I’ll mention a couple more. But we have an orange barbecue sauce that you’re adding orange segments and grandmother and a little bit of orange zest to it. Great for chicken and pork. Those protein suggestions are also on here, too. We got a nice peach barbecue sauce, a nice apricot barbecue sauce.
Cal:
Very similar. Those. You want to really think about going on something light. So if I make a nice peach barbecue sauce with fresh or canned peaches, gosh, use fresh this time of year and a little peach liqueur maybe in this, mixing with that barbecue sauce, I’m going to put that over barbecue shrimp or barbecued sea bass. And it’s just because sea bass is such a light flavored. I mean, it’s beautifully flavored, but it’s light. You don’t want to mask it. It’s like putting ketchup on filet mignon or tartar sauce and abalone.
Cal:
Right. You just don’t do it.
Christa:
Now I want to talk about peach barbecue sauce and orange barbecue sauce because we have a story. If we go to the farmer’s market, which we’ve done several times, you did a presentation, and the first time I saw you make a barbecue sauce live, you did not use a tomato sauce base. You used peaches as the base for it, and you added bourbon to it. Now can you do that, use fruit as a base instead of tomatoes?
Cal:
You can do anything you want. You can do anything you want. Technically, I don’t know if I call it a barbecue sauce, but yeah, I mean, I would call it a coulee, perhaps something along those lines, some kind of a fruit, but, you know, some kind of a fruit topping of some sort. But I don’t think I’d use the word, the word sauce on that, but so apricots. And we got fennel in here. Fennel, one of my favorite sauces or one of my favorite vegetables makes a great sauce. You deglaze that with a little bit of anisette and just cook that fennel till it’s nice and tender.
Christa:
Now, since that fennel is a little bit more chunky, should you use a burr mixer or an immersion blender When you buy through any affiliate links on our site (i.e. Amazon), we may earn an affiliate commission. Happy shopping!? To kind of smooth that out, or would you leave the chunks of the fennel in it?
Cal:
No, I would cook the fennel until it melts. Yeah, you want the fennel to melt. You want it to just get down to, you know, when you’ve cooked onions and they just get to the point where they just, they’re just melt. They’re just soft. And that goes great on beef. Fennel goes great on lamb. Fennel is very strong flavored. And, and then lamb’s got a, got a stronger flavor as well.
Cal:
So then we have a tequila sauce, a Carolina mustard sauce and a spicy sauce. So there’s some, some sauces for you. We’re going to come back with some tips, and we look forward to getting back in just a moment. Yes, it is hot, hot, you know, but people say, you know, if that’s what’s the adage says, if you can’t stand the heat out of the kitchen, well, it’s always hot in the kitchen. So you just learn not to complain about. There’s not much you can do about it.
Christa:
So hopefully you have air conditioning.
Cal:
Yeah.
Christa:
Outside.
Cal:
Yeah. Well, would that, that does make a little bit of a difference. But anyway, speaking of hot, hot, hot, I was talking to my friend Charlie down there at Charlie’s in Anderson, in the factory outlet stores there, and they put this, they’re running this special now. It’s a medium la posetta, and I’ve loved this thing for years. I’m glad he’s finally running it. Go down there and check it out and tell him chef Cal sent you. It’s a thin crust pizza, and it’s got a, the napolini, which is like a tomato ragu with basil. It’s got fresh garlic, blue cheese and pepper flakes and little mozzarella cheese.
Cal:
It’s a nice one. So if you’d want. And it’s not overly hot. I mean, it’s.
Christa:
No, I can handle it.
Cal:
Well, I’d say on a scale one to ten, it’s a 6.2.
Christa:
Now, should we tell them what to order on the side as a secret?
Cal:
Oh, I don’t know. What can they order on the side?
Christa:
Don’t we get the sauteed mushrooms?
Cal:
Yeah, sauteed mushrooms on the side. Sauteed in garlic. Yeah, just tell them that I said that anyway. But a couple things I wanted to chat with towards the end here is also the second thing that you’re going to be able to download on our website. It’s available now is tips for heating your barbecue, which is in the same.
Christa:
Download as the barbecue recipe.
Cal:
Yes. Yeah. So how to heat it? Remember the temperature of hot? If I’m going to eat something that’s hot and I don’t want to burn the top roof of my mouth, I don’t want to be warm. I want it. I want it to be around 144, 145 degrees. Okay. That’s right where I want it to be. So somewhere right around that area doesn’t want to be bubbling or boiling, because for one, it’s already cooked.
Cal:
And all you’re doing is blending a few ingredients in it. And with all that sugar, you got a really big good chance of potentially, you know, burning it because sugar burns. If you’re going to add any raw ingredients to your barbecue sauce, like garlic or shallots or onion, bacon, etcetera, anything like that to your sauce, you want to cook those first before you add them, and then just simmer for long enough so those flavors to meld, you know, remember, everything needs to meld. Sometimes we use the term melt. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched a chef, you know, or a cook of mine make hollandaise sauce, and he tastes it and goes, oh, that doesn’t have enough salt. And he’ll put some more salt in it, and he’ll mix it up and, oh, it doesn’t have enough salt. By the time he gets done after the third time and the salt has had a chance to melt, it’s too salty. And you throw it out and you start over.
Christa:
You can always add more later.
Cal:
So everything, everything does need to melt a little bit. And then also, when do you add your barbecue sauce? When you’re barbecuing something, especially a steak and even a vegetable, you always turn four times. You put it on the griddle. And all of the information here on how to properly prepare your griddle is here. It’s important. You scrape it with a brush, and then you wipe it to get the soot off, and then you spray it with pan coating. I’ve never seen it. It might flare up a bit.
Cal:
I’ve never seen a can blow up, and I’ve been doing it for a long time. But you want to spray it right before you put the food on there because you don’t want the food to stick. You want to start to cook immediately. So that’s one of the things that you want to do, is make sure that, you know, you cook it on the first side, flip it over, cook it on the second side. I’ll generally use. Imagine if you’re standing in front of your grill right now. And your grill is rectangular in shape. So my first two flips are going to aim towards the back left corner.
Cal:
Then I’m going to flip again back left corner. Then my third flip is going to go to the back right, and I’m going to sauce it and then I’m going to flip it over and let that cook on that, that barbecue sauce cook into the protein. And then that’s going to be my fourth flip. So that’s the way to go. If you, if you add those sauces because they’re so thick, there’s a real good chance, again that they’re going to stick, burn, make your griddle, you know, it leaves the food on the griddle. The griddle you don’t want to. Or the grill. You want to make sure that you, you know, you keep it on the food.
Christa:
Should you sauce burgers?
Cal:
Yeah, sauce, whatever you want. Sauce, whatever you can put sauce on.
Christa:
What kind of sauce would you put on a hamburger for the 4 July?
Cal:
I don’t know. I guess they’re going to have to go download and see which one of those they might want to do just about anything. I mean, I think that, you know, burgers and, you know, I think it depends on one thing is the quality of the meat. You know, if you’re cooking pre made frozen barbecue patties, one thing, you’re getting some beautifully ground meat from a local butcher, you know, and you’re adding your bell pepper and onion and seasoning your eggs, and you’re basically making meatloaf and your panko. And then you’re cooking those Burgers. That’s an elevated burger. So maybe you might want to do something. Maybe, you know, bacon is a good one.
Cal:
But then again, bacon jam is a good one, too. You have to make a note. We have to put that bacon jam, put that bacon Jam on the, on them for them to have access to. That’s a, that’s a good one. And then the last thing on here is going to be just a heavy pan. It’s inverted. So when you get done cooking your food on your barbecue, you need a heavy pan. Sacrifice it to the, to the pan gods and throw it on there and then shut your fire off, close the lid.
Cal:
And that needs to continue to cook until the next time you use it the next day or the next week or the next month. And that’s going to burn off all those, those particles, those food particles. And then you’re going to be able to brush it and you’re going to be able to wipe the soot off. You’re going to be able to spray it and start all over.
Christa:
So how long should you leave that pan on? And is it super, super high heat?
Cal:
No, just shut, but I throw the pan on and then shut the barbecue off.
Christa:
So at the end of your cooking.
Cal:
Yeah, then you’re cooking just, and then that way, when you go to cook again, you know, turn it on, get it hot. All that, all those particles are going to be easily removed then, and then paper towels or cloth to catch the soot pan coating. We talked about tongs, high temperature spatula. If you’re going to use a spatula, sauce brushes, sauce mops are good. I like those squirt bottles. A spray bottle with water is nice for just, you know, stopping flare ups. And if you’re going to be stopping flare ups, sometimes apple cider vinegar or any regular vinegar to spray on there, it will help stop that, that flare up, but it will also help add additional, a little bit of flavor.
Christa:
And what kind of vinegar? Like an apple cider vinegar?
Cal:
Yeah, any old vinegar?
Christa:
Do white vinegar. Okay.
Cal:
Yeah. And then, and then, this was a long time ago. My grandpa, when I was just a kid, maybe again, nine or ten years old, he used to make this marinade for barrel roasted chicken barbecue. Barrel roasted chicken. And I always wanted to see it. I always wanted to see it. And, and he never wrote it down. And he died tragically in 89 when we opened up our first restaurant.
Cal:
And it really broke my heart that I never got that recipe. And then decades later, I get this book that’s, you know, the sunset, you know, book, you know, remember, they show you how to change your transmission, fix your dishwasher, and then also there’s recipes in there. And I’m looking, I’m going through this thing, and what do I find? Two pages just completely full of grandpa’s fingerprints and with the barbecue sauce. So it’s something that’s always meant, meant a lot to me here. I thought he was just, you know, off the top of his head. But anyway, it was a, it was just something that I hold dear to my heart. I see his fingerprints right there. And then as we finish up here, you know, food has the ability, I think, that brings a.
Cal:
Bring people together, bring us together. If you think about it, when do we eat food? You know, at meals, weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, funerals. You know, we gather around to laugh. We gather around sometimes to cry. We gather around to hold each other. We gather around to enjoy each other’s company. So why not make the most of it. Meals draw people together, but there’s truly so much more available.
Cal:
And that’s what we want this show to do, is to bring you to a different area, a different level, a different place where you can enjoy it even more. It’s going to help make the most out of it because our goal is to help you cook like a pro. So, you know, whether you have a large family get together or it’s just a quiet meal, we’re going to have a lot of things, a lot of information and helpful tips and tricks and hacks and all those kinds of things to be able to help you on your journey. Again, we always have the phone number if you want to put in your phone for next time. For next week, we will be here Wednesday again at 05:00. That number again, 6054 567-605-4567 and the last thing I had here was just thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. You know, God bless you.
Cal:
Stay safe with this heat we got going on.
Christa:
And I hope you’re hungry because I’m hungry now.
Cal:
Yeah, well, I’m hungry now because it’s right before dinner time. People should be heading out there, but we got lots of fun stuff in store. So just enjoy the journey and Bon appetit. And again, thank you for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you.
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.
