Cal and Christa DeMercurio
Join us in this episode as we dive into the essentials of food safety, organic certifications, and practical cooking tips. Discover how to make healthy food choices while minimizing waste and experimenting in the kitchen.
- Importance of knowing your food sources and contamination concerns
- Practical advice for reducing food waste and maintaining produce quality
- Tips for safe crock pot usage
- Creative cooking experimentation
- Successful way to learning wine varietals
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Timestamp Overview
00:00 Food excites me; maintain quality produce decisions.
03:46 Control moisture and temperature to prevent bacteria growth.
09:00 Parents worked; dinner needed to be ready.
12:56 Slow down and check labels in supermarkets.
15:50 Concern: Contamination types – biological, chemical, bacterial.
17:25 Buying organic ensures highest quality, healthiest food.
21:08 Nut butters are cost-efficient, healthy alternatives.
24:31 Seeking advice on deeper coffee roasting techniques.
27:21 Preferences vary; natural ingredients tend to be favored.
30:53 Trust food suppliers to ensure proper temperatures.
33:03 Whipped cream made by hand, not whisked in.
38:23 Explore wines by reading bottle labels.
41:50 Wine tasting with friends is a rewarding experience.
45:27 Ask to sample wines at restaurants and breweries.
46:19 Preserve, ask server, avoid oxidation, ensure tip.
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 storing your vegetables, what’s in our food, chocolate and price points on wine. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.
Cal:
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Cooking Like a Pro with Chef Cal and Mrs Chef.
Christa:
I am back.
Cal:
Misses Chef Christa is here. She doesn’t have to call in. That’s nice. We appreciate that. But you have found us here at KCNR 1460 AM and 96.5 FM. I think if you’d like to call in, we do have that option available. Christina would love to patch your call through. If you’d like to reach out to her, our number down here is 530-605-4567 and you can actually, if you’d rather type, see, I’d rather talk and my wife would rather type, okay, because she’s technology and I’m a caveman.
Cal:
So you can also type something in and send it to cookinglikeapropodcast.net. Again, Cooking Like a Pro p[odcast.net. so things to talk about today, we are. I said, I say we. I didn’t actually ask my wife if she is excited. I am.
Christa:
I’m just excited to be back. Not on the phone.
Cal:
Oh, well, so I’m excited. But, you know, food kind of excites me. I’m that kind of a guy. Been doing it for long enough. If you’re going to be good at something, you might as bee good at least one thing. But I wanted to start off talking because we’ve been talking about produce ups and downs and everything for a while during our first segment. And one of the key factors, and this is something that goes into all, or should rather should go into all produce decisions, is that the maintenance of it, the maintaining of this product that you’re getting, we’ve talked about, you know, wanting to get the quality, you know, go to the farmer’s market. They have the big farmers market down behind city hall in Cypress every Saturday.
Cal:
What time does that start?
Christa:
Hun 730.
Cal:
Okay, 730. I don’t get up that early on Saturdays, but she does. But so, you know, get some good quality. Get something that’s in season. Obviously, if it’s there, it’s going to be of both of those things that we want season in high quality, you know, no bruising nothing soft on the outside when you, you know, also see, when I started, we didn’t have the Internet. In fact, we didn’t have computers, I don’t think, in 62.
Christa:
But did you have a dial up phone?
Cal:
Yeah, you probably did. It may have been. It may have been, but now you can just, you can look things up and it’s so easy to sit there and do it if you’re not sure, if you’re not sure about, you know, what the quality is to that you need to be looking for. Of course, everything is available on the Internet. And the second thing we know is not everything on the Internet is true, but the shelf life, of course, would be something else to look at, you know, with quality, temperature, moisture. But temperature, moisture are also big concerns for shelf life. There’s, I can’t think of any fruit or vegetable that you want to keep wet, period. I don’t know.
Cal:
Can you, hon, think of, I mean.
Christa:
Not so much wet as a little bit of just air moisture. Humidity?
Cal:
Yeah, well, humidity because maybe in the crisper, I don’t know, in the fridge, but I know that it’s. Moisture is, you know, moisture is where bacteria grows. So getting just to the bacteria question, but, you know, your refrigerator is at 40. Your food’s supposed to be hotter than 140, so you want to keep it out of 40 to 140, which, of course, is what we call the danger zone. So you don’t want it, your, any of your products to sit in that, especially leftovers. A lot of people make that mistake. Condensation, my wife’s heard me bring that up more than once. But then also the temperature, I mean, know whether it’s something that sits out, you know, tree fruit.
Cal:
Bananas are also another one that give off ethylene gas. So something else to be aware of for things that are sitting out, because ethylene gas will cause fruit, it will cause whatever is around it. That ethylene gas, that’s a compound that will cause them to ripen faster. So if you don’t want to ripen faster, stay away from it. Because you put an avocado, if you want an avocado that’s not ripe, ripe overnight, just stick it in a paper bag that can still breathe and throw a banana in there.
Christa:
Well, the thing to think about with food is it’s a living organism and it continues to grow and then into decay. And what do you use for growth? You need light, you need water. And those two things, if you have light and water present, that’s going to continue the breakdown even quicker. Because it’s continuing the growth pattern.
Cal:
Yeah. And again, we just, we want to keep, we don’t want to get bacteria any place to hang out. And then flavor, of course, the natural sugar. You want that natural sugar to expand in there. So that’s something you want to look at. Where is this at? I know that a lot of people, when their bananas get those, those little, those little spots on them, remember what those are called?
Christa:
Sugar spots.
Cal:
Sugar spots, yes. And why are they called sugar spots?
Christa:
Because they have turned into sugar.
Cal:
Turned into sugar.
Christa:
But to me, they taste like alcohol. I do not like brown bananas. I like a hint of green on mine.
Cal:
I am not a shoe. I like my bananas sweet. But let’s go ahead and go to the phone lines. We have David online, too. David, welcome to the show.
David:
Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I had a similar question. You may have already answered it, but I didn’t catch it. If I leave my crock pot on, how long can I, like, let’s say I have pot roast in there, how long can I keep it on warm before it kind of gets bacteria?
Cal:
Well, you have to hold it above 140, David, and that’s a great question. I appreciate it, because again, bacteria starts growing between the 40 and the 140. And that’s why refrigerators are generally around 38. Should be much warmer than that. But definitely at 140 is the temperature that your product needs to be kept at. And warm will keep it, should keep it well above 140, if you’re concerned. Check the temperature. But the basic rule of keeping anything around 70 degrees is no more than 2 hours.
Cal:
So again, I’m not a scientist, but you don’t want foods in the danger zone more than 4 hours. They consider that 70 right in the middle of it. So you’re basically going to want to make sure that it’s not in that area any more than that. But if the crock pot is, has, you know, automatically shuts off at the time set, and then, you know, it, it has a lid on it. So it’s probably going to be, be well over 140 for quite some time. What do you have anything in particular that you like cooking in the pot? Dave?
David:
So I threw in like, like some chuck roast, for instance, and I left it on warm. And I was wondering, like, can I leave it on warm for a whole day?
Cal:
No, no, no. You definitely. Yeah, definitely want to leave it on warm because you wanted to cook to start with. Correct. So once you cook it. Okay, is your question whether you want to, is the crock pot a good way to heat food up?
David:
No, just to keep it so I don’t have to put it in the fridge and then reheat it. Can I just keep it on warm?
Cal:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Christa:
Just.
Cal:
Just make sure it’s above 140 degrees. You have a. If you have a. Don’t have an indirect or a direct, rather, you know, temperature gauge, then, you know, I’d get one. And just make sure that you keep it above that. But, yeah, it doesn’t take long to warm up. There might be better ways to do that because a crock pot is not.
David:
Best practice, I’m sure.
Cal:
Yeah, probably not the crock pot. Okay. You bet. Thanks, Dave. Appreciate you calling in. Yeah, crock pots are one of those things that are just fantastic. And again, we appreciate Dave listening and calling in as well. And the thing about the crock pot is that was where I started, you know, as little Chef cow at nine years old, coming home from school and having that little post it note from mom on the.
Cal:
On the refrigerator. I’ve mentioned that before, and it was, you know, turn off the crock pot, put the casserole in the oven, get the water ready for the vegetables, or toss the salad or whatever that was.
Christa:
Well, the crockpot was the original. Set it and forget it because you could literally leave the house and it would cook for you while you were gone.
Cal:
Yeah, well, in our house as well, there was, you know, mom and dad both worked, so it was something that could be done, and it would be, you know, ready when we were. When everybody got home and you wouldn’t have to worry about, well, you know, you didn’t have a nine year old kid that wanted to be a Chef, so that. That changed it, too. But. And the last thing on this I wanted to touch with real quickly before we go to the break is the. Is the texture. So again, you want things to be firm. You know, you don’t want to be soft.
Cal:
Remember that you want them to be able to last the most. Anything you get at a farmer’s market should have an easy week plus on it. The only maybe item that might not would be your berries. But as long as you keep your berries dry, store them wrapped up, you know, in a container with a paper towel, and they’ll be fine. So. Oh, and if we need people to follow us, how do we. How do they follow us?
Christa:
They can follow us through the podcast, the cooking, like a pro podcast, which is on Apple, Spotify, YouTube. And the place I’d like to hang out is Instagram. That’s where you’re going.
Cal:
To find hanging out with all that. Okay, well, see, I didn’t know that, so I had to ask her. I don’t even know if I’m following us. We probably ought to check that out. All right, folks, we’ll be back in just a moment, all right? A little prim fram bringing you back to Cooking Like a Pro again. Chef Cowell, my misses Chef Christa sitting across from me, and we are talking about food again. If you’d like to join us, the number here, 530-605-4567 and we are Casey in our 1460 am and 96.5 FM. And, of course, Cooking Like a Pro podcast.
Cal:
You know, I did something I probably shouldn’t have done. When was this? Sometime between now and last Wednesday. My son, my 14 year old son.
Christa:
1815.
Cal:
How old is he now? He’s 1515. Okay.
Christa:
He’s almost sixties. He’s almost driving.
Cal:
He does live with us. I dog. Yeah. So, you know, say, Chris. Chris also takes care of the numbers. But anyway, it was. He’s become an expert in top ramen. The kids.
Cal:
Just a top ramen. Not, you know, so if we do it well, you know, throw in some fresh vegetables and some lemon grass and ginger and, you know, some edamame and snow peas or what, you know, whatever it is that we’ll put in. But he’s back there doing the mad scientist routine. I noticed it was going into, you know, what actually was over the weekend, and he was making this thing. It was a spicy japanese shin. Shin. Shin, which is, you know, japanese for spicy. So some shin noodles.
Cal:
And I said, so he’s doing the mad scientist thing. He’s got the ginger out, he’s got some poultry base. He’s got a variety of things. And I look at the back of the package, and again, this is where I made my mistake. There are. And we’re talking about processed foods, or maybe we should say, maybe the correct term is overdeveloped processed foods. There are 50 ingredients in this package, 550 ingredients in one. What is this? Like, I don’t know, 4.2 ounce container of.
Cal:
I don’t even know if you should call this food. Cause I’m not sure how much in it falls into the category of food.
Christa:
The dehydrated vegetables, too.
Cal:
Yeah, dehydrated vegetables. Okay. So they would be the ones with. No. No minerals and vitamins, and they’re for color and nutrients in there. Wow. Anyway, you know, it just really got me thinking, and I believe that one of the things that, as, you know, we always seem to be in a hurry. Remember, we can go back to the adage that we said that over here in America, we eat to live.
Cal:
We’re just in such a hurry. And one of the things that needs to happen, I really, truly believe, is the process of slowing down a little bit. And part of that process of slowing down is slowing down in the supermarket. You know, I mean, there’s a label for everything. Even that little sticker on your watermelon tells you something or your bell pepper or your carrot, you know, where did it come from? If it came from far away, then, you know, it’s, you know, I don’t, I don’t order my sushi at a gas station. You know, I mean, I want to get it from people that deal with products that are in their, their height of flavor. And generally that’s going to be where you get the better deal on cost as well. But you want to go to the professionals, the people that do that, and taking a look at the labels, what’s going to, going to help you with that? Look at that date quite often, look at the date for the expiration when it expires, and after that it’s all on you.
Cal:
So take a look at the date. Take that time. If you don’t know the ingredients, again, look them up. I’m not going to look up the shin japanese noodles. I did taste the broth. I enjoyed it. I don’t know how good it is for me. I can’t imagine.
Cal:
And I don’t think one spoonful is going to kill me. But look up the ingredients. That’s the thing about cell phones is we can just look up things and you have all that information and access. Right? Fingertips.
Christa:
Well, in looking at the package of the shin ramen, yes, it has 50 ingredients. And when we couldn’t get it, at some point we went to try and make it on our own. Really, it’s just a chili garlic paste is all it is. But they do have a lot of additives to make it shelf stable. And that’s where he got into his mad scientist routine this week was like, okay, if I throw out the packet, the little additional seasoning packet, can I do this on my own? And he did. We did the chicken base, we did garlic.
Cal:
I didn’t know he threw out the packet.
Christa:
You threw out the packet. And he declared, I am not using the packet again because he went into mad scientist mode and he actually successfully made his own sauce packet with just spices.
Cal:
Well, he did good. He did good. Yeah. So I got bypassed on the fact that he was doing his food science thing.
Christa:
Well, he did do packets. He did one that was the regular shin. And then he went back and made his own the next day.
Cal:
Well, chip off the old block. Chip off the old black block. But anyway, yacht, see what’s in there. Look it up. Know what you’re eating. I mean, you are what you eat, right? We are what we eat. So it’s a good thing to make sure that, you know, you know, what you’re putting into your body, you know, the garbage in, garbage out kind of a thing to be. So anyway, take your time on that.
Cal:
Take your time. Also, one of the things that really concerns me, and we could obviously do an entire shows, multiple shows on just this, and that’s just contamination that’s everywhere. So we don’t want to put any of our own contamination on something. Okay? There are basically three different types of contamination. Biological, okay, I’ve got a cold and I sneeze on somebody chemical. I spill bleach in your chicken noodle soup or bacteria. And all of these are things that we should be concerned about. But now, not only do we have to be concerned about cross contamination ourselves, you know, using, cutting chicken and then cutting, you know, celery on the same board, something like that.
Cal:
But there’s the cross contamination of everything else. There’s cross contamination in the water sources, in the air quality, but one of the big ones. And we’re going to have to figure out a way to get this back, folks, and that’s the soil. The soil has so much contamination in it, and then, and it’s just getting more and more run down. You know, I think they’ve been able to attack, you know, things like roundup easy enough, but there’s a lot of stuff out there. So just be, you know, buy from reputable sources, buy foods that are fresh.
Christa:
Well, and to be certified organic, the ground has to have not had any synthetic fertilizers in the last three years. So it can’t be something that’s done even just this one season. It takes several years to kind of get it back to where it needs to be and get conditioned, get back to a healthy, stable environment.
Cal:
Well, and so another reason to buy organic, we always, we always say buying organic is a great way to go. You know, sometimes it’s a little bit more, you know, you pay a couple bucks, but what is it that you want? I mean, I think that you want the, you know, the highest quality but most healthy food. I mean, healthy has to be first. I don’t you know, the quality could be the, you know, the highest. It could. You know, you could imagine.
Christa:
Did you.
Cal:
But if it’s not healthy, you’re in trouble.
Christa:
Did you know that you can tell by the price code that it’s organic or if it’s not?
Cal:
Yes, I do. I don’t. I can’t recall. What? What? Okay, is it a number? Is it a number?
Christa:
Okay, so real quick, you know the little price sticker? It’s got the price lookup code on it. Every single thing has got its own designation. If it has four digits, then it is conventionally grown, and it can very much have pesticides. And then if it’s a five digit code that starts with a nine, it is organic. It is certified organic. And if it’s a five digit code with an eight in front of it, don’t touch it. It is gmo, genetically modified.
Cal:
Oh, yeah. You want to stay away from that. Well, good to know. Pop that in your, you know, just take your cell phones, go into wherever it is you put your. Your passwords, you know, and. And pop that in there. Good information. I like that.
Cal:
It’s a.
Christa:
And not everything has to be organic. Things that have a nice, hard, protective skin on them that protect the inside flesh from being contaminated, those don’t have to be organic.
Cal:
Yep. That’s a good point. Good point. They’re protected from outside sources, largely. Maybe not water, but a lot of other things. But anyway, these are these things. When we start getting food that’s out of flush with being natural, you might be wondering why. Maybe you’re having headaches or maybe you’re having nausea or something like that, very well could be the food we’re getting.
Cal:
And when you stop to think about fast food and what needs to be done to get food to be okay in a can or be okay in a freezer, be okay just fresh sitting in a produce department or wrapped in plastic in the chicken meat department.
Christa:
Well, and there’s a funny case story that a friend of ours that for years thought she could not have gluten. She couldn’t have any bread, any wheat, rye, barley, anything like that. And then she found out, actually, that she doesn’t have that intolerance. Or intolerance was anything that was not organic. When she started eating organic breads, she was able to eat gluten again. So that was a pretty interesting find.
Cal:
Yep. And I was thinking about something. You know, when you go in the store and you walk by those things and they have the ground up, seems like they’ve made a like a peanut butter out of about every nut out there. So I guess it’s like walnut butter, almond butter. I don’t know.
Christa:
Yeah, because they have the natural oils in them.
Cal:
Yeah. Yeah. But, well, all nuts have, you know, quite a bit of oil. But I think that if you’re grinding something up like that and you take and look at, I don’t know if you’ve got some organic peanut butter, maybe that’s all that’s in there is, you know, oil added to the, to the ground peanuts. And I don’t know if there’s a modifier or anything, but that’s got to be the freshest way to go.
Christa:
Yeah. There’s the ones usually in your health section. There’s usually a health section in your grocery store that you can get the pure, fresh ground butters like that. Nut butters.
Cal:
Nut butters. Nut butters. Nut butters. Yeah. Well, you know, hey, they make a good candy bar, too. But I think that if you just look for ways of being able to purchase, you know, foods that are going to be better for you and you might say, well, you know, then they’re going to cost more and I’m on a budget. Well, we all know about that. But one of the things about it is that, you know, you can curve off a lot of that price when you figure that, you know, the average household throws away between 25 and 30% of just the products that it purchases for consumption, things that aren’t completely eaten, things that go into the leftover category, things that stay in the leftover category and then get thrown in the garbage.
Christa:
Well, if you talk about vegetables, I try not to buy anything more than three days out because if I can’t use it within three days, it’s probably not going to get used, you know.
Cal:
And again, it’s okay to use your freezer, but a refrigerator is not a hospital. Okay. And I’ll repeat that. A refrigerator is not a hospital. If you put something in a refrigerator, it’s not going to get better. It’s going to stay where it’s at. So don’t think, yeah, so don’t think that you’re going to be able to throw it in there, but throw it in there, buy yourself some time, pull it out, throw it in some soup or something down the road. That works as well.
Cal:
But anyway, we’re going to take a break here at the bottom of the hour. You are with Chef Cal and Christa Cooking Like a Pro. We appreciate you joining us here at KC and R 1460 am. Welcome back. Welcome back to Cooking Like a Pro. Again, we appreciate you taking your valuable time to listen to us while you’re driving around or hanging out. Wherever you’re hanging out. You probably guessed by the little jingle leading in.
Cal:
And we talked a little bit about chocolate. I told my wife to. I think it was yesterday, I said, I want to talk about chocolate. I just don’t know. Well, you know, we talk about whatever it is we want, but, you know, I mean, it’s a great thing. I mean, I imagine at some point in history, I would. I haven’t looked this up or googled it, but I bet I could guarantee that it was used as currency.
Christa:
Who would have thought that this little dark brown thing would actually taste good if you added sugar to it? Because on its own, it is not fun to eat straight.
Cal:
Yes, yes. Well, just plain, you know, chocolate liqueur, that final product that you actually eventually get to. You’re right. It’s bitter because it has no sweetness. But remember, it comes from the cocoa tree, and these are pods, and these pods contain beans, of course. And those beans we have to harvest, actually, I like this idea because they harvest it with a machete. That sound like fun.
Christa:
Just harvesting sounds like Indiana Jones.
Cal:
This machete sounds fun. Yeah, I mean, I got some pretty good sized knives. I don’t really get to, you know, use them in kind of in that swinging fashion, but. But then they have to go through the fermentation process, the drying process, then the roasting process. And when you get to that point, then you have your. Your cocoa beans, which my. My wife eats them like m and m’s, but those are covered with. No, no, there’s espresso beans covered by.
Christa:
Chocolate, which are espresso beans done just like cocoa beans. It sounds like the same process from.
Cal:
Harvesting, roasting a deeper roast. We need to get. Hey, if there’s a coffee expert out there or coffee guru, give us a call down here. 530-605-4567 yeah, I would imagine it’s just got to be a much bigger, heavier roast. But then that’s what you pretty much end up. You’re pretty much down to how much you want to grind it. You know, if you grind it all the way down to a powder, of course, you have cocoa powder, which we use in our baking, and quite a variety of flavoring applications, but mostly african countries, so it has to travel a little bit. Mostly.
Cal:
Actually, the west african countries is where you’re going to find your. Your chocolate plantations, and that’s where it’s going to come and it also takes a while. It takes takes five years to grow, really. It’s similar to, oh, what was I thinking of the other day that we had. It’s been a long time since we’ve had it, but it was the. On our sushi, the green stuff.
Christa:
Wasabi.
Cal:
Wasabi. Remember we had that fresh wasabi? Yeah. It takes like at least five years just to grow these little wasabis in a. They were scraping them on the, on the fresh sushi. That was delicious. That was delicious.
Christa:
Anyway, back to chocolate.
Cal:
Back to chocolate. So it takes a while to grow. But, you know, chocolate’s also good for you. It’s not just because, you know, you hear of people sometimes just saying, oh, I just gotta have a chocolate bar. And I’m. I don’t, you know, I’m just not a sexist show. It’s just that it seems to be one of the things that you hear, you know, at least I hear females in my life say, hey, this is.
Christa:
Good for the mind.
Cal:
I need some chocolate. I need some chocolate. And it’s actually, it releases serotonin.
Christa:
Yes.
Cal:
Yep. Which is, you know, compound that relaxes you. So maybe chocolate before you. I don’t know. I don’t know how well I get it. Depend on how sweet. Now, you like chocolate. That’s, you know, that’s kind of, I would say semi sweet.
Cal:
I.
Christa:
Dark chocolate person. High cocoa, low sugar, low butter.
Cal:
So you can get most anything out there. Most things run, you know, we’ll start off at like 80% where it’s really too bitter. You have to do it. Some kind of cooking application. I think you start getting close to 60, then, you know, it can be, I think, quite often that’s where you find some of these chocolates that are really nice. And they’ll start to flavor those with maybe sea salt or some kind of. Maybe a liqueur, something like that.
Christa:
Yeah, that’s kind of, I think, the semi sweet milk chocolate down that area. But yeah, I’m an 80, 90% gal. I like it dark.
Cal:
Okay.
Christa:
It’s all about the chocolate, not about the sugar.
Cal:
Well, I don’t know if I can agree with that, but, you know. Well, we’ll agree to disagree. That’s, you know, chocolate liqueur is. It’s pretty rough. But, you know, if you’re, if you’re a chocolate connoisseur and you’re really getting into, it’s kind of like wine or anything else, you know, you partake in what it is that you like. Right. And I think that when it comes to any ingredient, whether it’s chocolate or anything else, you know, that hopefully, the more you enjoy it, the deeper and more you go towards its natural setting, you know, the natural, you know, product that something doesn’t have a bunch of things added to it, because your chocolate is going to have, you know, going to have your sugar, it’s going to have vanilla. Of course, we can add milk.
Cal:
And then you got your milk chocolate. You know, I see those little chocolates with the alcohol in them. Those are good almonds, you know, raspberries. Well, sea salt’s good because sea salt, you know, salt’s a flavor enhancer. So it’s just gonna make your, you know, your chocolate taste more like what it is. So I don’t know that I’d use, you know, sea salt on a Hershey bar because it’s just gonna make it taste like wax, probably more so. But, I mean, I put celtic salt in my coffee. You know, I use black rifle coffee in the morning, and I just put a little sprinkle of salt in there, and I just try that, folks.
Cal:
Brings out a great flavor.
Christa:
Well, salt does two things.
Cal:
Pulls out a little bit.
Christa:
Yeah. Salt enhances the intrinsic flavor of the item. And if there’s bitterness, it counters bitterness, it smooths it out.
Cal:
So there you go. You can try that. And then as far as melting chocolate, double boiler. Double boilers are great. So you talk about a pan with water in it and a separate pan on top of it. Just cover that top pan. You don’t want any water to get into your chocolate. Water will seize chocolate up, and you’ll end up with something you really don’t want to see.
Christa:
It turns into kind of a nasty ball, doesn’t it?
Cal:
Yeah, it’s pretty much garbage at that point.
Christa:
But then can you fix it?
Cal:
You’re pretty much starting. You might be able to drizzle some water. It depends on how it broke, but I’ve always just tossed it because it just becomes a mess. It really doesn’t even melt down much any better because it just separates and it becomes this big, cloggy mess. So anyway. But, yeah, lots to do with chocolate. I remember Dean McCarrolls making chocolate mousse all the time and people just loving that.
Christa:
Well, I have in front of me something you just handed me, and it’s my gold. It’s snickers, my favorite chocolate. The snickers chocolate and caramel.
Cal:
Yeah. What else is in it?
Christa:
I think it’s a nugget, caramel, peanuts.
Cal:
All things that you can actually associate with a food product?
Christa:
I think so. I don’t want to read the label because it’s my favorite.
Cal:
Oh, you don’t want to ruin it.
Christa:
I want to ruin it. Snicker satisfies. If I get hangry, I have a snickers.
Cal:
Yeah, get back to chocolate mousse. We said I was trained through a french apprenticeship, so my training prepared me for making things from scratch. And we used to make chocolate mousse, and we would make it the french style is that you would separate your eggs. You’d whip your egg yolks in a pan over simmering water. I used to put a few drops of water in there, and then you kind of whisk that up. The egg whites are separated. Those are beet separate. And then you have your whipped cream, and then you just cook those eggs.
Cal:
You want to get those up above your. You know, your 150 degrees. I mean, by product that you’re. You know, we’ve said that a lot here. Is it byproduct that you trust? You know, I mean, if you. If you’re worried about having to get everything up to a particular zone or temperature or degree, you might want to shop somewhere else, you know, I mean, if you don’t trust, you need to trust the people we’re buying our food from. And unfortunately, that’s kind of the problem that we have now is, you know, in your. In asking that question of trusting the people that you buy your food from.
Cal:
Now, we’re not, obviously, not a political show, but, I mean, that’s like saying trust our government, right? I mean, because they are USDA. I mean, they are in charge of the food.
Christa:
I trust Ghirardelli. They’re gonna have some good chocolate.
Cal:
Yeah. Yeah. So, but anyway, so then once we’ve cooked these eggs, we’ve. We add our melted chocolate into our cooked egg yolks. And I’m gonna say cooked. I don’t mean scrambled, I mean heated. And then. And then it’s.
Cal:
The thing about it is you want it to be airy, and anytime you’re dealing with anything that you want to be airy, you’re adding air to it. You don’t want to beat air out of it. So once you’ve added something to a point where it’s peaked. Right. You know what a peak is, right.
Christa:
It’s when you take the whip out, and then you can take it and hold it up, and the little tip kind of curls over a little bit.
Cal:
Yeah. And when I was teaching, you know, a while back, one of the things I used to do is for the kids, and these were high school kids here locally that I would have them. Part of their final, their practical final in the classroom was that I give them some cream and a little bit of sugar and a stainless steel bowl and a whisk. And I’d say, okay, whisk. And they would have to whisk until they could hold the bowl over their head.
Christa:
Now, you just did this a couple days ago. You were testing yourself. You were timing yourself. Whipping cream by hand with the whisk. I think it took you at three minutes.
Cal:
Three minutes, yeah, my arm still sore. But I only did that because I hadn’t done it in a while. And I just kind of wanted to see if I could steal man up and make whipped cream from scratch. But, yeah, it came out fine. And again, that’s what is you’re adding air so you don’t want to whisk something in. So I’ve got my melted chocolate and I’ve got my egg mixture in there. If you had any rum, in this case, we would use rumenae, you would warm the rum up and it would have been added with the chocolate. But you don’t want to whip this, the whipped cream in because you’re whipping air out of it.
Cal:
And then you certainly don’t want to whip the egg whites because then you’re whipping air out of those and those are much more fragile. And then you allow this to set up and you just have a beautiful chocolate mousse. You’d be just amazed at how well it sets up. And it’s just perfect piping bag consistency.
Christa:
Well, when you add the chocolate mixture to the whipped cream mixture, don’t you have to fold it really simple?
Cal:
No, you add the chocolate to the egg yolks.
Christa:
Oh, you.
Cal:
Chocolate to the egg yolks? Yeah. So that’s why I’m saying no whipping. It’s all folding. Yeah, it’s the correct term. All folding. Fold. Well, you know, fold it like you do. Like you fold close, like you fold things.
Cal:
Spatula, real rubber spatula. And just fold it. But don’t whip it. You don’t want to whip the air back out of it because you’ve done all this work to get this beautiful, nice, slight, fluffy man. I have made enough chocolate mousse in my career to fill a couple swimming pools. I’m sure we went through it fairly rapidly at the mercurials Rousey. It was always on, and it wasn’t chocolate pudding. I have a friend of mine that he calls my chocolate mousse pudding, and he calls my.
Cal:
My sauce gravy. So, yeah, we. I’m not sure. We haven’t been getting along. Well, that could be it. All right. Jeff, Cal, and my wife Christa here Cooking Like a Pro. We’ll be back.
Cal:
Just a moment. Welcome back. Welcome back to Cooking Like a Pro. That’s what we want you to do. We want you to take this show and it to be a part of your expansion into food. All things food. Food, food. Wine, breakfast, lunch, you name it.
Cal:
Dinner, dessert.
Christa:
Cooking is a mindset. That’s what I’ve learned from you. It’s something you really have to just understand and trust yourself to try and try new things.
Cal:
Well, that’s the biggest part of it, is trying. And so many people, you know, maybe they didn’t get an opportunity to try things when they were younger. You know, maybe they’re, you know, for whatever the. The growing up situation was. Perhaps they just didn’t get a chance. I mean, you know, for. For me, you know, I was eating, you know, anything fried in a tortilla and calves brains and scrambled eggs. So, you know, you know, well, I’m speaking of trying hard liver, you name it.
Christa:
So something I wanted to say real quick is I was talking to a friend earlier this week, and she said, I don’t want to try cooking things because I don’t want to throw them away because it didn’t work. So it’s keeping her from trying to do new techniques and try different ingredients. And one say is, I’m proud of our son who took a 25 cent ramen and just took some spices from our cabinet, and then he just wanted to see how the spices worked. And if it didn’t work, you know what? We were out $0.50.
Cal:
Yeah. And, you know, the chili oil you mentioned, or the garlic paste, rather, is samboli. That’s what you want. You want to get the sambolique. It’s not very expensive. It’s one of those things you can get in an asian market for maybe a third to half of what it would cost to get in a regular grocery store or a name brand grocery store. I shop a lot at asian markets. You know, if you’re in a metropolitan area, of course, you’ve got.
Cal:
You got a market for every, you know, culture and nationality that’s out there. So you have, you know, a lot more exposure, exposure to, you know, more authentic ingredients, but.
Christa:
But let yourself fail. Pick something that’s inexpensive and do just, you know, be mad scientists, see what things go together. If they don’t work, you know, you’re not out a lot of money.
Cal:
Well, you know, well, if you google it, right, even though not everything’s, you know, of course, real on the Internet, but, you know, Google it, get some ideas, you know, get stuff that other people have tried. That’s one of the things that I’m doing with my, my cookbook is having people try recipes, because just because I make it in an industrial or commercial kitchen doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be the same at home. You have different btus coming out of your stove, out of your stove, and then you’ve got different temperatures in your oven. Whether it’s regulated, I mean, there’s so many different things that can cause something to maybe not be balanced in the same way. So that’s why we practice these recipes. But it’s one thing that the recipes I. They’re going to end up being in our book. They’ve been practiced for, well, most of them for at least 40 years.
Cal:
I mean, that would be my late teens. And so. But no, so, again, you’re right. Right. Try it. Try it. And same thing with wine tasting. I know we generally talk about tasting wine towards the end of the show here.
Cal:
Not that we pop a bottle or anything like that, but I wanted to talk a little bit instead of a particular varietal or a type of wine. Varietal meaning a pinot, a cab, a chardonnay, a sauvignon blanc of the actual varietal, the name of the grape. Just trying different things. And again, we’ve talked about drinking what you like, but read the back of the bottle. It’s no different than as we talked about at the beginning of the show, about reading the package, looking at the, you know, the dates on there, when it was processed, where it was processed, how it was processed. They’re probably not going to tell you, but the rest of it, they will, you know, and this has got to be one of the best things to do when it comes to learning more about wine, hands down. Go to the wine country, you know, go to. And it’s expanded so much.
Cal:
For, for me and Christa, wine country is mostly Napa Valley because that’s where I proposed to her. And we celebrated quite a few anniversaries there. But not just Sonoma on the other side of the mountain range there. But Lodi used to be the type of Appalachian that would just grow grapes for bulk processing. Some of the kits you can get to make your own wine. We’ve done that a few times as, as groups of couples that have gotten together. But, you know, it’s. Now Lodi is just probably hundreds of vineyards down there.
Cal:
When I drive down through that area, the vineyards are everywhere and over. If you want to go back to the coast, Mendocino was a month or so ago we talked about Paso robles. I mean, go up. I mean, there’s Appalachians all around us up here.
Christa:
Well, yeah, right here in our own city.
Cal:
Someone told me there’s about 40. I haven’t counted. I probably ought to google that.
Christa:
I’m not sure. But, you know, up into the foothills, because they get the cooler climates up in the foothills, there’s a lot of up in that area.
Cal:
And then you start heading, heading north, you know, you get into Oregon. Oregon’s just a beautiful temperature to get some amazing pinot. You know, that grape that, that needs a little more growth, slow growth, I should say, because it needs, it takes on a more real good development with that. And then you’ve got, you get up into Washington and that’s where you’re getting your merlot’s.
Christa:
So, yeah, I would encourage people to do what we did back when we started our wine group is we would pick a varietal for the month. This was a monthly gathering, and every couple would bring a different bottle from a different area somewhere from Argentina. Some were from Washington, some were from California, and we would taste them one particular varietal across a bunch of different appellations to see how they differed. And that’s how we kind of got to know how each particular grape tasted.
Cal:
And we. Yeah, we did that quite, quite a while. I think we ran out of varietals more than once.
Christa:
I think we just had too many cups of too much wine.
Cal:
I think we got, we got to the point where, though, it got a little crazy. I think we got up to, I don’t know, like maybe seven, 8910 couples. And everyone’s got a, you know, ball of champagne. If you’re covering champagne. So it makes it a little hard to taste. You know, your tongue does get, get tired. Well, it also gets a little bit.
Christa:
But that’s how I learned. Yeah, that’s how I learned the different varietals is doing that.
Cal:
No, it’s a great thing to do. It’s a great thing to do with a, with some friends, you know, because you get a group of, you know, three or four couples over where you can go through a, you know, a ball of wine and be able to just, you know, taste it without having to you know, feel like you’re drinking an entire glass. But there’s a lot of things about wine, I think, that scare people. You’re kind of talking about your friend that, you know, didn’t want to, you know, maybe experiment in food because you didn’t want to end up wasting something. And a lot of people do the same thing about wine, so they’ll just stick with what they know, which is what you want. You want to stick with what you like. But I think, you know, we go through this life once and experiencing as many, you know, cool joys as you can. You know, the better off I think you are.
Christa:
You’re probably pretty safe in the $15 range just for an average bottle of wine. You don’t need to go out to the 80 nineties. And, you know, the $5, that’s just, you know, why bother?
Cal:
But I think, oh, come on. No, there are wines. There are wines that fall.
Christa:
There’s some.
Cal:
Well, that. That’s where it comes down to reading the label. Okay, where did it come from? How old is it? I mean, I’m not gonna. You know, chardonnays are not meant to lay down or, you know, store is the term we use. We say lay down. They’re not. They’re melt. They’re.
Cal:
They’re produced to drink. And, you know, a lot of wines are. Probably. Most of them are. So, you know, if you have a wine that’s a, you know, a riesling, like a sweeter wine, and it’s the vintage, you know, the year was. Was produced is, you know, eight years ago, then, you know, you know, you’re looking at something, and now, you know, I mean, you can get wines, of course, it didn’t last that long. No, you can still get wines that are good that were produced during the Reagan administration if you want. I’ve had plenty.
Cal:
I’ve had a bunch of wines that are well over 20 years old. They were absolutely amazing. But that’s because they were. They were made. They were produced to be that way.
Christa:
Okay, so I got a question for you. When it gets to the shelf, does that mean it’s ready to drink at that point?
Cal:
No, because if that was the case, then you’d never have a library. You’d never have anything that you would lay down knowing the wine and knowing how well it’s made. But when you mention the price range, when you start getting up into anything that’s over 2020, $5, I would say, per bottle, then that’s a wine that’s going to be much higher. Caliber wine. Cause you can get wines in the seven, eight, you know, area 15, 1210. Anything in that area is generally going to be. Going to be fine. But what I want to mention as well is people can get intimidated by it.
Cal:
You know, am I. Am I swirling it correctly? Am I using the right glass? You know, maybe they don’t know how to open the wine. There’s a variety of things to it because it is something that’s a beverage. It has a lot of opportunity in a restaurant to be able to have a Sony or just a server that’s able to do that presentation. That’s part of what you pay for when you order a bottle of wine, is that it’s presented well. If it’s an expensive wine, a nice crystal glass is great. You know, if it’s a box wine, then I guess it’d be Styrofoam cup.
Christa:
You know, there are some, I think, isn’t that black box wine? They’re trying to make some of these box wines, actually.
Cal:
They actually are.
Christa:
Yeah. Be pretty. Pretty darn good.
Cal:
Yeah. And my mom’s happy about that.
Christa:
Yes, she does like her box wine.
Cal:
She does like her boxes. But a couple other things. You know, when you’re out in a restaurant, you’re not sure, ask to taste it. We’ve mentioned that here before. If they’ve got a wine by the glass available and you asked to try a sample, if you’re just wanting, because that’s how you learn, and you might say, no, I wouldn’t think so. I’ve never said no. And I’ve had restaurants for four decades, so, no, I think, hey, I want to try that. Could I try that? It’s kind of going into a place that’s a brewery and saying, what’s that one? Like when they got 800 beers? Okay.
Cal:
Sarcastic. They’ve got a lot of beers. And here we have to, you know, decide which one I want was obvious. So same thing with wine.
Christa:
When there are some restaurants that actually have wine on tap to where they’ve got a preservation system that they can just do a short pour for you.
Cal:
That’s really what it is because it’s the same as beer. You know, it’s oxidation. You don’t want air to get to it. So if you have a preservation system that keeps that from happening, then you’re good. Another thing is ask your server for a suggestion. Your server, you know, if they’re worth their salt, they’re going to give you a. Something that you’re going to like. Right? Why not? Because you’re the one that’s going to be tipping them with no tax on tits.
Cal:
So anyway, just ask them if they’ll match your wine to the food you’ve selected.
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.
