Podcasts

025. What is Seacuterie? Are you roasting Prime Rib or Ham for Christmas?

Hey Foodie Fam,

Christmas is coming! Prime Rib or Ham? Seacuterie for appetizers? We’ve got an exciting new episode of “Cooking Like a Pro” ready just in time for Christmas! 🎄 Join our hosts, Christa DeMercurio and Chef Cal, as they dive into celebrating old, and starting new, holiday traditions.

🦐 Seacuterie Secrets: Level up your holiday gatherings with an impressive seacuterie board. We’re talking smoked fish, poached shrimp, oysters, and all the trimmings! And if you missed it, check out Episode 

🍬Candy-Coated Truth: Uncover the hidden truths about artificial dyes like Red #40, Yellow #5 and #6, and Blue #1, and their potential health impacts.

🐄 Prime Cuts & Pro Selections: Chef Cal spills the tea on choosing the best cuts of meat for your holiday feast, from identifying marbling to making sense of different beef grades like Angus, Wagyu, and Prime.

🫔Get Creative with your Christmas Spread: explore traditional options like prime ribs and ham, or surprise your family with Italian lasagna and Mexican tamales.

🍅 Fun Fact from the Episode: Did you know the “57” in Heinz 57 doesn’t refer to the number of ingredients? It’s actually based on the founders’ lucky numbers! 🍀 A little branding magic for you! Check out this article from the Today Show .

🔉Listen ⤵️

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Timestamp Overview

00:00 Excited for holidays, discussing SEAcuterie.

06:07 Natural ingredients are healthier than artificial coloring.

07:57 Avoid high fructose corn syrup and red dye.

11:46 Read condiment labels; choose healthier alternatives carefully.

15:31 Beets stain easily; cook, peel, season, enjoy.

16:26 More expensive due to complex production process.

19:24 Oven sear, cook to desired internal temperature.

22:54 Thin-sliced spiral ham dries out easily.

28:24 Prefer dry rub over marinade for roasts.

31:39 Slice meat across the grain for tenderness.

34:29 Chips smoked with fruitwood for mild flavor.

37:57 Trust the butcher for perfect roast beef.

Transcript

Christa DeMercurio:
Hey, food fans. Welcome to Cooking Like a Pro with Chef Cal and me, Mrs. Chef his wife, Christa DeMercurio. We’re dishing out culinary intuition, insights and imagination to spice up your meals and make cooking more fun. On today’s episode, my chef husband and I discuss sea couterie boards and transitioning our holiday menus from Turkey on Thanksgiving now to prime rib and ham for Christmas. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.

Chef Cal:
Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to Cooking Like a Pro. You have found us Chef Cal with my beautiful wife, Mrs. Chef Christa.

Christa DeMercurio:
Good evening.

Chef Cal:
Hello. And we are just excited again to be here. The holidays are here. They’re, they are amongst us. And last week I mentioned something and this is all going to be mostly holiday kind of a stuff. Except there’s one thing that’s bugging me, I’m going to talk about, but as far as the holiday and people bringing food, you’re going to other people’s houses, you’re bringing things like, you know, maybe relish trays or meat and cheese platters. When you put those in a combination together with crackers, a lot of times they’ll use the term charcuterie for that, but it’s just really just food that can sit out and it’s a finger food. You know, people can kind of, kind of munch.

Chef Cal:
We used to use the term graze.

Christa DeMercurio:
Well, they have grazing tables now, or they will do a charcuterie across an entire table. It’s called a grazing table.

Chef Cal:
Grazing table. Yeah. It’s like a cow. You’re grazing, you’re grazing here. But anyway, Secretary sea coutery was something that I’d mentioned the word term last week, so I wanted to follow up on that. And basically, it’s just kind of imagine the same thing with a charcuterie platter, except instead of your, your dried meats, you’re going to have, you know, a variety of fish. You can have smoked fish, you know, poached shrimp, fresh oysters. If, you know, if you have seafood that needs to be iced, then have some, you know, crushed ice you can put down, keep it nice and cool.

Chef Cal:
Caviar is a good thing. I was. Matter of fact, we actually had something real similar to this security down in Monterey for anniversary of couple few weeks ago.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, they have these sea couterie towers and trying to remember what they called it down in Monterey.

Chef Cal:
And I loved it because we, and we did this once at one of my restaurants where we use a lot of the dry Ice, so it creates that smoke. So when they deliver this, you know, platter of, you know, chilled seafoods, or you’ve just got this wonderful, wonderful presentation with the, with the fog coming out.

Christa DeMercurio:
And, you know, we actually have that picture online. It is the cover picture of our Monterey trip. We did a special Monterey.

Chef Cal:
We’ll go to podcast Culinarily Yours and check it out yourself. Another thing is tuna tartare. It’s a great, great dish that we’ve done a lot of. And it’s really simple. You just. But you want to get high grade. Well, anything that you’re doing for these charcuterie platters, you really want to be high grade.

Christa DeMercurio:
Okay, so first off, tuna. We’re not talking tuna from a can.

Chef Cal:
No, I mean, that could be used in some sorts.

Christa DeMercurio:
But you’re talking tuna tartare.

Chef Cal:
You’re talking fresh, raw tuna.

Christa DeMercurio:
But it has to be a certain grade.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, you just want to get a grade A. You want to get something that you trust. One of the best ways to get tuna, I’ll tell you folks, is to get it already frozen. Because when it’s frozen, then it’s very likely it was frozen on the ship, portioned and frozen on the ship. So it’s going to be, you know, less. Less time out of the water up to the frozen point, and you can get it. They do add some coloring to it if you’ve seen the.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah, it’s usually kind of a red.

Chef Cal:
Color, but there’s a lot of things you can do. And I know it’s just a great start. And I’ve been blessed to have gone to the French Laundry in Napa. When you walk into the restaurant at French Laundry, the first thing they do is they bring you up a glass of champagne and you’re still standing there. I mean, you know, you haven’t sat down yet. And they even suggest you want to walk around the rose garden or you can take a break anytime you want. And as you can see, the kitchen, the whole kitchen’s all windows. But he makes this little salmon coronet.

Chef Cal:
So he hands you this little. Basically it’s two bite, maybe even one for me, but it’s called a moose bouche. So it’s just really the one bite French something to just kind of tickle your tongue.

Christa DeMercurio:
Is that the one he does? The little twill that he turns into a cone?

Chef Cal:
Turns him into a cone. And this cornet is a small, little. Looks like a little baby ice cream cone. Maybe an inch and a half high little cone. It’s nice and crisp. And it’s filled with a mixture of raw and salmon with beautiful olive oil, a little bit of lemon juice and, and some chives. And you just take one bite and underneath it is a. Was it a creme fraiche with shallots and.

Chef Cal:
Oh, it’s just. You could sit there and think, man, I could eat, you know, 40 of these. But anyway, that’s how you start off. You want to, you know, tempt the palate, get people ready for the experience.

Christa DeMercurio:
Well, so if someone wants to do a secretary board for holiday party coming up, what would they do? Where would they go? What would they grab?

Chef Cal:
Well, you know, things like, you know, everything first off would be cooked except for maybe oysters. So you’d have the shrimp and maybe smoked salmon if you want caviar or tunas. Sardines is another good one. And then just you’d have your accompaniments for seafood, which would be lemon capers, maybe some cheeses. But olives, crackers, wontons, you know, different relishes and spreads. And people just make like little, little bite sized, little thing. Marinate vegetables is always nice. Something with acid to kind of cleanse the palate.

Christa DeMercurio:
I learned something new. A mignonette sauce.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, mignonette, very nice. This is kind of a vinegar sauce. A little touch. Red wine and shallots. Yeah, yeah. And that goes great, especially on oysters. But anyway, we’re going to go ahead and take a quick break, but you know, yes, charcuterie, something you can try, something you can play with. And we are going to be back in just a moment.

Chef Cal:
All right. Welcome back to Cook Cooking Like a Pro again, chef Kao and Mrs. Chef Christa here. I’ve been wanting to talk about this because it’s been on my heart and I’ve researched some of this lately. But knowing that food coloring can be bad for you, and one of the things that you’ll notice when you dig into this is that when you go to a country that doesn’t have all the regulations that we have here, and what they’ll do is they’ll take like carrots and use that for, for the orange color. Or perhaps they’ll take, you know, beet juice and use that. So they are turmeric. So they’ll use natural ingredients to do that.

Chef Cal:
Well, unfortunately, in the United States, there’s a variety of things that you’ll find in a variety of products. And I guess the whole point, folks, is just, you know, listen, read the label. You know, if you need to listen to, you know, instructions on things on you know, maybe more details on the dangers. Go ahead and do that. But you need to read the label, see what’s on there. And I, I generally go by the fact that if I can’t pronounce it, you know, I’m not going to eat it.

Christa DeMercurio:
I actually sent you a text. Did you read that I sent you.

Chef Cal:
Yes, I did. Yes, I did.

Christa DeMercurio:
What things. Things are packaged. What the ingredients were in them about 25, 30 years ago. And now the ingredients that are in is a totally different.

Chef Cal:
I think Cheerios had four ingredients and then now it has 20 or something. But, but between. For a variety of reasons. One is the main word that we’re looking here at here is processed. So as these foods you process so many things get added to them and might be anything from filling agents to preservatives. It goes coloring agents and that kind of thing.

Christa DeMercurio:
They’ll go from cane sugar to high.

Chef Cal:
Fructose corn syrup, which is really, that’s the one thing folks you really just want to stay away from. I know that ketchup is a big condiment, but, you know, high fructose corn syrup is really, it’s not good for you in any way. You know, I mean, even if you were to try to do fructose or something or some other type of sugar substitute. But when it comes to the colors, red dye number 40 is the main one that gets, that gets the wrap because you know, the adverse effects on especially children activity and on their attendance. And it’s been linked to ADHD and it’s been linked in, I believe, even, even look, we’ll look at something like autism. I was talking to my mom and dad. I said, did you know anyone who’s autistic when you’re a kid? No, you know, I don’t even know anyone had, you know, that was allergic to anything. So something has happened.

Chef Cal:
And what has happened is two things. One is that people that there are. There. There are people in the, in the back recesses of the corner and boardrooms that are trying to make food flat, just more addictive, and that’s what’s caused the obesity crisis. And that’s why we now have. Well, we’ve always had pharmaceuticals kind of, there’s that.

Christa DeMercurio:
And they’re trying to make them cheaper and they’re trying to make them last on the shelf longer. And real food does not do that.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, red dye number 40 cannot be considered safe. You know, it’s a. And again, you have to ask the question, why is it different? Why is it. Why is it Banned in other areas of the world.

Christa DeMercurio:
Okay. Other countries don’t know.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. And then yellow number five and six, you know, has been. It’s been connected to asthma symptoms. So it’s another thing to think about. Blue, number one is, you know, causes hyperactivity. And you think about these kids and they’re eating, you know, these. You know, these. I don’t want to do brand names for the most part.

Chef Cal:
But. But the. You know, there’s these items that are snack items that become real popular, and they’re eating them, and they’re just. They’re just destroying their brains while they’re doing it.

Christa DeMercurio:
Well, they use a citric acid, which is. Okay. They use that to kind of give you that. I want more addictive taste because you want to drink something with it and eat more and drink more. But then they add the colors for visibility and visual appeal.

Chef Cal:
And again, using dyes and things like that. And blue. And blue’s interest. Interesting, because, you know, blue, like I mentioned, neurotoxicity, hyperactivity, and also allergic reactions. But. But blue is something. Switching back to culinary is a color that you never used in food when we were competing. You would never use blue because there’s no blue food.

Chef Cal:
Well, there’s. Yeah, there’s no natural way to make a blue color. You know, even blueberries are purple. Right. I mean, there’s no way to make a natural blue color. You know, if something’s blue, you probably want to eat it. It’s not appetizing. You want to stay away from it.

Chef Cal:
So that’s kind of fake. So you just look at these things, read the labels and find out when you get into candies and sodas, you’re really going to get hit with these things, things like M&Ms. And Skittles, Doritos, Cheetos, almost all of your sodas, whether it’s Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, even things like Gatorade that, you know, they kind of, you know, come out with this facade that. That they’re actually a healthier item. But they still, you know, you gotta look at the ingredients. So maybe it has electrolytes, but does it have, you know, yellow number six in it? You know, something that’s gonna, you know, maybe cause a challenge.

Christa DeMercurio:
Well, here’s a fascinating one. Cheese. Cheese is not yellow.

Chef Cal:
No, they had dye cheese. Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s why they have white cheddar. And then they add coloring to it, and you have what we call regular cheddar cheese. It’s kind of got that, you know, American cheese. Color to it.

Chef Cal:
But you know, there’s, I think condiments is another area. So we don’t talk about the colors of things and what’s in the food. That’s one thing I think we really need to look at as we try to live healthier lives and make, you know, more healthy choices. But just look at the labels because even cancer, organ damage, fertility, genetic defects, I mean there’s a lot of things that have been linked in, into these things. And the thing is that there are alternatives, but these alternatives are going to cost a little more money. Well, I’d rather pay a little bit more for something that’s not going to kill me, you know, or damage me or cause me to, you know, to have, have concerns. And so while I’m going through these things, I’m looking at condiments, you know, and different things that make healthy choices instead. Things like hummus, guacamole, yogurt, plain yogurt, Greek, plain Greek yogurt.

Chef Cal:
When you start getting into other things that are added to it. And another thing I look at was balsamic. We do a balsamic reduction, just dip strawberries in it. And that’s like mind boggling. I don’t know when you first got a chance to try that, but I do know that you have an affinity for it.

Christa DeMercurio:
We were first together, we did balsamic.

Chef Cal:
Strawberries a couple decades ago.

Christa DeMercurio:
A couple decades ago, yeah.

Chef Cal:
It’s just such a great, great combination, you know. So I’m looking at condiments. I come across Heinz 57. And just as a, as a point of interest, I guess I always thought Heinz 57 meant that there were like 57 ingredients or spices in it. But it’s not, it’s the two people that invented it. It was a man and a woman and her favorite, her lucky number was five and his lucky number was seven. Yeah, I always saw 57 ingredients. Yeah, now there can be a lot of ingredients.

Chef Cal:
I mean, I picked up, I was waiting for something to be done in an appointment today and had some, some snack things laying over there. So I went and looked. And these are a little small cheese cracker and there’s 27 ingredients in it. 27. And but you know what, I looked up here, the actual coloring ingredients are turmeric and something that’s called a N N a T T O.

Christa DeMercurio:
That was almond.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. And so that, so that’s, you know. Well, the fact is that it’s natural, you know, So I looked at, you know, some of the hot condiments, tabasco is always going to be your. Your best bet when you start getting into things like sriracha samboli. When you get into these spicy chili sauces and garlic sauces. And most amazing, you just have to be careful with heartburn. You have to make sure you don’t overindulge. Because I’ll be honest, you know, I overindulged last night, man.

Chef Cal:
I woke up with this tummy achievement I had. I got the sambo leak out. And. And when you get these flavors that are addictive and you put too much on and you think about it. But capcaicin, it can irritate the. It irritates the line of your lining of your stomach. So if your stomach is, you know, tough enough, I guess, or has been abused enough, or has been, you know, I don’t know, you’ve eaten it enough where he. Where you can handle it, then, you know.

Christa DeMercurio:
Let’s go back to some of the things that they use for coloring. So we’ve talked about turmeric for yellow, carrots for orange. The annatto, which I just looked up is actually a spice.

Chef Cal:
Yeah.

Christa DeMercurio:
Also called the ashiote.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. It comes from the asiotic tree. And then you also have beets.

Christa DeMercurio:
Beets.

Chef Cal:
Beets are really easy to color. I mean, they color everything anyway. You know, they color your hands. They color. In fact, the one way to do beets study the. Is you want to boil them whole until they’re tender, fork tender, or like a toothpick tender. And then you pull them out and then just, you know, with a pair of gloves, just peel the outside off, and then you’re ready with a perfect product. All you gotta do is cut out however you want and roast them, saute them, reheat them however you want, season them however you want.

Christa DeMercurio:
Just make sure you wear gloves.

Chef Cal:
One thing I love beets, so I am a really big beet fan.

Christa DeMercurio:
I love roasted beets.

Chef Cal:
Those baby roasted ones are multicolored. Those are nice.

Christa DeMercurio:
So if we’re looking at the labels and things do have coloring in them, we’re finding more and more that some products are coming out that are considered natural. But what’s interesting is they have less ingredients, they’re more expensive.

Chef Cal:
Well, they’re always going to generally be more expensive because there’s more in the process. Because the reason they’re using cheap stuff is because it is a much easier process. They’re just, you know, you don’t need as many people because you’re using cheaper stuff. But yeah, again, it goes back to looking at the label. And I again, as I started off for this segment, I. If I don’t understand, if I don’t recognize it, then I’m not going to eat it. Or at the very least, I’m going to look it up. And, you know, now, when I first started as a chef, we didn’t have computers, let alone cell phones, but now we have this, you know, computer in our hand that you can literally sit.

Chef Cal:
That literally sit there in grocery store, look at the back of the label, you know, make sure you get. You give yourself a little more time when you go in the store, but look back at the label and say, okay, I don’t know what that is, so take a look at it.

Christa DeMercurio:
If you have to Google it, you probably shouldn’t be eating it, though.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. And what is that, that one approved thing I was talking to you about?

Christa DeMercurio:
Oh, Bobby approved.

Chef Cal:
Bobby approved. Yeah. You can actually take a pitch. Yes. And I was unfamiliar with that, and my friend Rob showed me that. So it’s, it’s a Bobby approved meaning that it’s what healthy.

Christa DeMercurio:
So Bobby Parish is on Instagram and he analyzes all products and to make sure that they don’t have any of these negative after effect ingredients.

Chef Cal:
I want that job.

Christa DeMercurio:
And so he’s now got an app, and you can scan just about anything and find out if it’s Bobby approved or not. If it’s not approved, then it’s got something in it that’s either been modified, colored, et cetera. And if it is Bobby approved, then it’s healthy for you and not considered something dangerous. Bobbi Parish, she’s on Instagram, so.

Chef Cal:
All right, we’re back at the bottom of another quick break, cooking like a pro. We’ll be back in just a moment. All right, welcome back. All right, so we talked about Thanksgiving, and one of the things with Christmas is it’s almost kind of a duplicate when it comes to the meal and the menu. You wait all year. Yeah. For Thanksgiving and Christmas. So you wait all year, you finally get turkey, and then boom, you know, you get it right, you know, when the leftovers are just being finished off.

Chef Cal:
So. So there are a lot of other things people do. I think prime rib is something that’s always a nice touch. Some people are, you know, a little bit, you know, scared of getting a roast that might cost that much. I generally like to get my roast with the bone on it. Remember, prime rib has 12 bones, but you can get like a six bone roast, a seven bone roast. They’ll cut it however you Know thick, you want it, but it’s 12 bones all the way across. And it’s just something that is very traditional.

Chef Cal:
It’s something you can do a nice dry rub on. They got a, what’s. What we call the 500 rule. We cook prime rib really fast, you know, and then slow it down. So start a fast and slow it down. But it’s about five minutes per pound if you’re cooking it really fast. But I usually sear my prime rib for maybe 15 minutes so it’s seasoned. It’s got a dry rub on it.

Christa DeMercurio:
And a quick sear.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. And then you. That’s that 500 degree oven is going to get a quick sear and then turn it down and just let it go to an internal temperature. Whatever it is that you want, you know, you want medium. It’s, you know, it’s. It’s 130, 135, you know, 125 is rare and 130 medium rare. And you know, you start getting up to medium well, and then well done is 160, which, you know, not gonna have a whole lot of flavor, to be honest. I’d probably drive, you know, buy it up, you know, just a, A pot roast or something, or maybe like a round and cook it if you’re going to cook it that done.

Chef Cal:
But in Europe, they used a lot of flying animals. I know that roasted goose. Is that. What’s that Christmas carol where they, they get the roasted goose. Is that Ebenezer?

Christa DeMercurio:
Yes.

Chef Cal:
Is that scrooge? Okay. Yeah, yeah, they, they get the fatted goose. Ham has always been a favorite for mine.

Christa DeMercurio:
So ask a question.

Chef Cal:
Of course you can.

Christa DeMercurio:
What is the difference between a crown rib roast and a prime rib? Is it the crown rib? The one thing the little, the little white hats.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, a crown. What they do with the crown is they’ll take the ribs, they’ll do a slice in between each rib. And a crown just means that, like it, they want to look like a crown.

Christa DeMercurio:
Is it the same cut?

Chef Cal:
So, yeah, same piece. And they roll it like rack of lamb is something that they crown a lot because it’s just much easier to crown. But you have to cut it. And I think the more you cut it, the more opportunity to lose moisture, juice, flavor, all that kind of stuff.

Christa DeMercurio:
And then you gotta put the little paper hats, you know.

Chef Cal:
Little paper hats? Yeah, we used that when, when I started out in the business, we used to use little, little paper hats on our, on our roasts like that, you know, especially with lamb. And they kind of, you know, so you can grab the bone and you can grab the little paper chef hat on the bone so you don’t get your hands, you know, greasy or dirty or anything like that. But, but yeah, Black Forest was fun. I, I got a chance to go there and see some pretty cool things.

Christa DeMercurio:
And Black Forest ham here.

Chef Cal:
Yeah.

Christa DeMercurio:
What’s the difference between a regular ham and a Black Forest ham?

Chef Cal:
Well, well, well, if you go back in history, the, the Black Forest ham had a, has a. Well, it always has a dark coating on it. Now a lot of times that coating is seasonings and spices, and I would check to see what that is. Originally it was. They used beer. No, no, it wasn’t beer. I’m sorry. It was blood.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. So they put beef blood on the outside of the ham. It would cook it. It would actually give it a fairly distinctive flavor. But the, but the ham these days, if you say Black Forest ham, chances are did not come from Black Forest. Probably came from, I don’t know, Virginia or something like that. And, but it’s not going to have that black coating on the outside. You need to look at the label and see what that is.

Chef Cal:
Most of the time it’s spices.

Christa DeMercurio:
Speaking of ham, what’s your thoughts on these spiral sliced hams? So basically, they’re already spiral sliced before you heat it up?

Chef Cal:
Well, if you think about it. Yeah. And you’re right in heating it up because you don’t have to cook it. It’s already been brined, which means it’s already been cured. Black Forest ham is dry cured. Most other hams are wet cured. They’re in a brine, a liquid bath. Well, then there’s honey ham, which would have a honey additive to it to get the flavor.

Chef Cal:
But when they do the spiral ham, the thing about that is it’s already cut. So it’s just much easier than getting a ham with a big old bone in it that you have to kind of work around. So spiral ham sometimes will have a bone as well, but they just slice it mechanically. And it’s super thin.

Christa DeMercurio:
It doesn’t dry it out.

Chef Cal:
Well, see, that’s the thing. I don’t like my. I’m not a real fan of spiral ham because it can dry it out because the slices are so thin. Remember, ham, you want to cook slowly and you just want to bring it up to heat. And heat. Hot is like 144, 145 degrees all you want. It is hot. You don’t need to get it to 160, you know, I mean, Unless the ham’s discoloring or something, which you wouldn’t need it anyway.

Chef Cal:
Let’s try to, you know, kill bacteria. But no, you want ham just to get hot and keep it nice and moist. That’s why I like this nice thick ham. Remember in the old days, they used to have the canned hamster, you know, just. Always just. Just super tender. You know, a lot of times they’ll. They’ll smoke those.

Chef Cal:
A variety of different woods. I’ll talk a little bit more about that in the. In the last segment. But other things, if you want to get, you know, different. I mean, because you just had turkey for Thanksgiving and you want to try something different. How about an Italian. Having an Italian Christmas meal? You know, like lasagna. Bolognese would be what they would go with.

Chef Cal:
You know, Bolognese is, you know, it’s got the cream and it’s got the pepper flakes, and it’s got the sausage in it, and it’s just great. Bolognese is one of my favorites. Depending on. I mean, you can use it with penne pasta. You could do any kind of pasta. In this case, generally, the Italians would celebrate with a lasagna. And then how about Mexican? What did we just do?

Christa DeMercurio:
Tamales.

Chef Cal:
Tamales. Tamales. Lots of tamales.

Christa DeMercurio:
And I had a venison tamale that was fantastic.

Chef Cal:
I don’t know what we did. We did tamales for a long time. I think we did like 160 or something. But, yeah, you know, get a good masa, you know, which is just your dried corn. And it’s different than, like, corn meal. Okay. It’s ground a little finer than cornmeal, and then it gets soaked in kind of a lime water, and then it gets dried a second time. So the masa is going to have a little.

Chef Cal:
A little bit of flavor to it. But when I do my masa, I usually add lard. And then instead when it says add water, just add poultry stock or chicken stock or maybe whatever stock of the flavor tamale. You’re going to do pork, use pork stock. But it’s just going to bring more flavor in. Is one of the challenges with tamales when you get them is it’s. It’s just all masa. I know ours looks like.

Chef Cal:
Like ours look like burritos. They might fall in the burrito category.

Christa DeMercurio:
Now, if you don’t want to make masa, a lot of times you can find a traditional Mexican restaurant or market that actually makes the masa that you can just go buy and pick it up.

Chef Cal:
That’s where I got mine this year. I got mine there. I didn’t have time to make it. I just ordered it, picked up 30 pounds, figure, you know, that’s gonna be enough to make a couple hundred tamales. We had different flavors or different stuffings, I should say. We had pork and we had something we did for vegetarian with just Ortega chilies.

Christa DeMercurio:
And then something new we did this year is we steamed them in my new instapot.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, that’s the way to do it. And just make sure you’re hitting steam there. And. Yeah, it just. It came out and 30 minutes. 30 minutes.

Christa DeMercurio:
30 minutes steam from. Well, 30 minutes is the cook time. You know, instant pots are not instant. There is a heat up time and there is a cool down time. And then there in the middle is the timing that they actually cook. So it was probably more like they were in there for an hour.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. But they’re a quarter of the time or even less of something like a crock pot.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah.

Chef Cal:
Because they’re, you know, they’re pressurized and boy, they just came out great. And that’s the biggest challenge I have with tamales, other than the fact that they might have too much masa in them. I like to have some filling, but it’s that they just, they take a long time. Steam.

Christa DeMercurio:
Yeah. So I want to throw out to you. I didn’t grow up having Christmas dinner. We would always celebrate on Christmas Eve and we would always do the charcuterie platters, the vegetable platters, but we would have probably a minestrone and a stew or a chili. So your chili minestrone was very popular then. Christmas Day would be more of a brunch. We wouldn’t do Christmas dinner because in the morning, get up, open presents, have brunch, and then Christmas was over at that point.

Chef Cal:
Bacon and pancakes. I love it.

Christa DeMercurio:
Or eggs Benedict.

Chef Cal:
Yes. You know, it’s a great time to experiment. It’s a great time to try something a little different. You know, again, there’s a lot of things that are out there. Just, you know, research it, make sure you cook it, the amount of time that it needs to be cooked and, and enjoy, you know, and even if you’re going with prime ribs, do the potatoes and the gravy, you know, stuffing. I mean, even cranberry sauce for that matter.

Christa DeMercurio:
You know, Waldorf salad.

Chef Cal:
Waldorf.

Christa DeMercurio:
That’s what I think of when I think Christmas.

Chef Cal:
Waldorf salad. Apples, walnuts.

Christa DeMercurio:
Apples, walnut, celery.

Chef Cal:
Celery. Kind of a mayonnaise based salad. It’s Bound.

Christa DeMercurio:
But you put a little honey in the mayonnaise, a little rice vinegar, a little honey.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. It was a great salad, though. We got and actually invented at the, at the Waldorf Astoria over there. Where’s that?

Christa DeMercurio:
That is New York.

Chef Cal:
Must be New York. But anyway, so Christmas coming up. You know, enjoy yourself, have a merry Christmas, have a wonderful time with family. That’s what, that’s really what the key is, is being able to spend some time with the family. Just being reminded of memories and creating new ones.

Christa DeMercurio:
And one more thing I could throw out you Chinese food. Just go out for Chinese.

Chef Cal:
A lot of people do Chinese.

Christa DeMercurio:
Chinese on Christmas.

Chef Cal:
All right. It can be a little bit of a, of a tradition there as well. But, but anyway, so we’ll be back to talk a little bit about beef in this last section. So hang on for that. And Cooking Like a Pro is going to be back in just a moment. Welcome back. Thanks for hanging out with us today. We’re cooking like a pro.

Chef Cal:
We got one more segment here. We want to talk about beef. Beef. Let me just talk about prime rib. Other roasts you can do, but the seasoning, when you season them, what I’m recommending is doing for large roasts is doing a dry rub. I really don’t like marinades or anything that’s wet because it’s going to keep the roast from, from browning and getting that golden sear on the outside. So I always add it and you can add it, you know, an hour ahead. I don’t know that I necessarily do, you know, like overnight or anything.

Chef Cal:
Especially if they’re salt in it.

Christa DeMercurio:
Because remember salt about that, not a lot of salt.

Chef Cal:
It’s going to dehydrate. Yep. So, but, but for when it comes to like things like large meats like, you know, chuck roast and there’s a variety of your bottom round, top round. You know, the things that you know from the front of the, that’s from the back of the cow. From the front you got the chuck, which has all kinds of, of different roasts and pot roasts and variety of, you know, the blade is there. There’s a, you know, a seven bone pot roast. There’s a, any number of things that you can get. So those are those, these meats that you’re going to want to sear and then roast generally, you know, you start off searing them at a high temp and then turn them down, let them go slow.

Chef Cal:
Remember, when something cooks slow, it allows that connective tissue to melt. And when that melts, then, you know, you just have the muscle fiber. So you have something that’s tender, but you always have to do still take off the silver skin. Now, you remember the silver skin was.

Christa DeMercurio:
It’s the connective tissue. Right.

Chef Cal:
Remember we did a fillet, a tenderloin.

Christa DeMercurio:
And it’s actually kind of. It’s a white with kind of a silvery blue tint to it.

Chef Cal:
And it just coats that. It’s in between the large muscles. So you’re going to have it on, on the outside of your different muscles. And so just need to trim that off. That. That would be extremely, extremely chewy.

Christa DeMercurio:
Now, quick, quick, quick question. You talked about searing, searing in an oven versus searing in a pan.

Chef Cal:
I think it’s fine both ways. I think it’s going to get more intense. If you had a cast iron pan and you got it white hot or very hot or something, you know, a heavy bottom, heavy metal, heavy stainless steel, and just seared it in there. Because one thing the searing does also, it locks in the flavor in the sense that it. Because it is searing the outside. So it is, you know, forming a barrier so flavor and juice can’t escape, you know. And some people coat it with things. I’ve seen people coat with the strangest things.

Chef Cal:
Mustard is a very popular one.

Christa DeMercurio:
Let’s do that for lamb. So can you do that on beef?

Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, you can do anything you want. Now it’s going to come out. I don’t know. But mustard is a popular one. But the thing is, you want the dry rub to stick to it. And if the meat’s very wet, then that’s different. But I would oil your meat and then hit it with your dry rub and then oil it again because you want those seasonings to adhere to it. And another thing you don’t want to do is you don’t want to season like the top of a fat or a fat cap or even like we talked about silver skin, because those seasonings are just going to melt right off the sides.

Chef Cal:
They’re not going to, you know, infiltrate into the, into the, the meat itself.

Christa DeMercurio:
So reminder of the fat cap. Is that on the top or on the bottom?

Chef Cal:
Generally on the top. But it kind of depends on where you’re, which direction you’re looking at it. You know, most meats that will have fat, you know, on some, on one of the exteriors, but, you know, marinated again, it’s just a little more difficult to brown. You know, cook them at a low temperature, low and slow, get it nice and medium rare, slice it thin, slice it across that grain, if there’s anything that you ever learned from me, slice it across the grain. Because remember, if you slice it with the grain and you have these long stringy pieces, now you’ve got beef flavored bubble gum, right? Because it’s just chewy, you want to slice it across the grain. So look at it. It’s easy enough to tell which way the grains going and slice across the gr.

Christa DeMercurio:
Now what type of brain doesn’t always.

Chef Cal:
Stay the same throughout the life? That’s a great point, Ben. Great point. Our engineer just spoke up. But anyway, yes, you’re very right. It does change, especially on things like tri tip. It’s kind of a pretty popular thing where it’s more than one muscle. And especially your sirloins, they’re more than one muscle. Muscles go a different direction.

Chef Cal:
You just gotta be paying attention. And you know, if you’re cutting from one direction, from right to left, you might have to turn the roast. But just keep, keep an eye on it. Make sure you’re always going across the grain.

Christa DeMercurio:
Okay, back to my question. What type of knife? A slicer knife. The really long one.

Chef Cal:
Yeah, you definitely want a long knife. You want a slicer. You don’t want something that’s going to cause like, you know, that’s going to like kind of chew through it. You ever seen something like a slice of meat? Here’s your slice of meat. And looks like they used a saw. Yeah. You know, you want something very sharp. You want to make a nice sharp cut because you do.

Chef Cal:
You want to keep all that moisture because that’s the juice and that’s the flavor and you want to keep that in the meat. And if you don’t cut with something sharp, you are going to end up losing some of that.

Christa DeMercurio:
Most slicers are what, about 10 inches long? So they can get all the way across there.

Chef Cal:
Closer to 12, 10 to 12. But again, something super sharp and generally not serrated. You know, for, for meats. Serrated is a knife that you actually does have teeth on it and you’d use that for, for cutting your breads and, and stuff like that. But, but you want this crisp on the outside and you know, sometimes you want to maybe smoke it for a bit. That’s another good thing you can do. Add a little, add some chips. I, I generally don’t use chips that are harsh.

Chef Cal:
You know, it’s like mesquite can be harsh. Oak and hickory are definitely harsh. So when I cook things like I have a recipe that I do that’s smoked sea bass. And I want a really, really mild smoke on it.

Christa DeMercurio:
So how would you do that? Would you take like a roasting pan, start burning the chips, and then put a lid on it really quick?

Chef Cal:
Yeah, I take a small handful of chips and I’ll usually use fruit. So it’s applewood, cherry wood, peach wood off a tree. You know, it’s fairly small. I put it in a little bit of orange juice just to soften up the flavor and keep it from being a harsh smoke. And then once it comes to smoke, you just put a perforated pan over the top of it, a lid or piece of foil over. That only takes just, you know, three or four minutes. Pull it off there. And because you don’t want to over smoke it, but you’re already using a lighter pan flavored wood.

Chef Cal:
But then you can easily finish it in the oven if you need be. I mean, it’s all going to depend on how thick your sea bass is. Sea bass can be a half inch thick. It can be three inches thick. You know, it depends on how it’s. How it’s cut. But you do want to get that. Just enough smoke to get that flavor and then pull it out.

Chef Cal:
That particular dish is actually served on a. We did at the restaurant on a gorgonzola polenta. And you got a roma tomato relish over top of. Of it. And it was kind of a center of the plate presentation. It was popular.

Christa DeMercurio:
You got smoky, creamy, acidic.

Chef Cal:
Yep, just very palatable. It all comes together. But anyway, so there’s a variety of ways of being able to modify it. There’s a ton of smokers out there, a ton of pellets that you can get that have flavor additives to them, whether it’s from the. The meat product itself, trying to get, you know, better meat. Something that’s, you know, going to be rated prime as opposed to choice. Prime would be higher than choice. Anytime you get Angus, you’re better off.

Chef Cal:
Angus just has more marbling. You know, they feed the. They feed the cattle grass, so the grass fed, but then they’ll give them grains towards the end. And that’s what helps expand this marbling. So the marbling is the fat that’s on the interior of the meat. And you’ll get stuff that’s crazy. Like you start going into Wagyu, and then after that you go into Kobe. I mean, Kobe can be, you know, like six, seven hundred dollars a pound.

Chef Cal:
I mean, literally ridiculous. But it’s one of those things that, you know, you might only have once in your whole Life. But they did, they do have some, you know, again, you want to allow the meat to have fat on the inside. You can get that by two things. One, visually by looking at it and two, just from whatever it’s graded. Okay. It should be graded prime if it’s, it could be graded choice and still be fine. But look at it.

Chef Cal:
And again, you want to see, Grant, you want to see lines of fat inside the meat. Okay. Not tendons and, and ligaments and those kind of things. You want to see fat, literal fat inside there. And if you don’t know, then ask your butcher. That’s what their job is, right? They should be able to tell you. And again, if you’re doing a roast, you’re probably going to be looking at a, you know, a muscle that’s a working muscle. So a roast is going to be coming from the chuck of the animal.

Chef Cal:
Basically. Look at where the cows legs are from. The front legs straight up and the back legs straight up, front leg straight up. You go into like, you know, the shank and the brisket and then you get in mostly of it. Most of this chuck in the back, it’s all round. You know, it’s almost 30% of the actual meat you’re going to use is going to come from, from the, the sirloin. And then in the middle you got the, you know, the writing muscles. But those are going to be things that are going to be more tender, not going to have as much connective tissue.

Chef Cal:
So you can use a dry cooking method, you know, saute it, you know, pan sear it, char grill it, you know, any of those things works well. But just, you know, again you can figure out your roast and you can always just ask the butcher. I, you know, you have to trust these people that they do it for a living. Say, you know, I want to roast something and for family dinner and I got 12 people coming over. I need something that I can just roast and get a nice medium rare out of it. And they’re going to give you something that’s going to hopefully be, you know, work well. They want you to come back, right? So, so, you know, when it comes to beef again, if you get the wagyu and you go that far, you know, wagyu actually, you know, you know, wagyu stands for is Japanese and grew is cow. So wagyu just means translated Japanese cow.

Christa DeMercurio:
Interesting.

Chef Cal:
Yeah. And they train, they treat them like kings right up to the point where they eat them, you know, so you know, they’re, it’s, it’s food that’s going to have a quality of meat that’s really not going to have all the connective tissue because it’s. It doesn’t really do much. It’s kind of like the old days where we had veal. You know, where the veal was. The cows that were kept in small cages so they didn’t move much, so their meat didn’t get connective tissue because it didn’t run around. And it’d just be beautiful and tender and white, and it was.

Christa DeMercurio:
What about basting? Do you baste roasts like you do a turkey?

Chef Cal:
You can baste them with whatever the natural juices are. I’d probably do it afterwards. I don’t have to worry about basing throughout the. Throughout the product or throughout the process.

Christa DeMercurio:
You want more of a crispy outer skin, right?

Chef Cal:
Yeah. Yeah. Basin’s gonna change that.

Christa DeMercurio:
Thank you so much for spending time with us. Until next time, we hope you’ll be cooking up a storm in the kitchen. So we’ll be with you again next week with food, flavor and fun right here on Cooking Like a Pro podcast.

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