Cal and Christa DeMercurio
Join Chef Cal and Mrs. Chef as they share their unforgettable 18th wedding anniversary trip to Monterey Bay in California. Discover culinary delights, unique finds, and memorable dining experiences in this detailed podcast.
- Staying at the Victorian Inn Hotel, appreciating its boutique experience
- Enjoying a meal at The Salty Seal English pub featuring the CoLoSo Band
- Visited an olive oil bar with over 70 types of oils and balsamic vinegars
- Sipping on wine while overlooking the Monterey Bay
- Experiencing a memorable meal at The Sardine Factory, highlighting dishes and dramatic presentations
The Victorian Inn Hotel
Leese-Fitch Wines
CoLoSo Band
Salty Seal Brewpub
Monterey Bay Restaurant Supply
Malinka European Mini Market
Monterey’s Tasty Olive Bar
A Taste of Monterey 🎥 Webcam
🌟 The Sardine Factory 🌟
Garlic World
Granzella’s Restaurant
🔉Listen ⤵️
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Timestamp Overview
00:00 Cozy boutique, great breakfast, perfect celebratory escape.
04:39 Travel is tiring, appreciated diverse social interactions.
07:35 Dehydrated potatoes enhance crispness for breaded foods.
11:23 Expert chef discusses waffle iron secrets.
13:24 Cluttered shed with boutique, innovative items.
16:01 Thin, worn knife can be restored, reused.
18:59 Pits enhance flavor; curing removes bitterness.
24:57 White plates enhance food presentation and creativity.
26:27 Experiment with simple, quality oils; avoid seed oils.
30:15 Tennessee’s friendliness contrasts with California’s rush.
33:16 Winemakers blend wines to achieve desired taste.
37:20 Enjoying a spectacular chilled seafood platter.
40:52 Authentic soup evokes childhood pineapple memories.
43:13 Skylit room, gold framing, fountain centerpiece.
44:41 Visit Sardine Factory; go afterward to Garlic World.
Transcript
Chef Cal:
Hey, food fans, welcome to cooking like a pro with Chef Cal and me Mrs Chef, his wife, Christa DeMercurio. We’re dishing out culinary intuition, insights and imagination to spice up your meals and make cooking more fun. On today’s episode, my Chef husband and I discuss a very popular food and wine destination, Monterey Bay. What do Chef foodies do for their 18th anniversary? You’re about to find out. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.
Chef Cal:
Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. You have found us, Chef Cal and Mrs Chef Christa. Yeah. You have found us on cooking like a pro. So today we were going to take a trip back into time with you. Okay. So it’s kind of like we used to do something at my first restaurant, Dean Mercurio’s. We called it skip the trip.
Chef Cal:
So basically you were like, we’d go somewhere, but without going there, we would provide all of those kind of meals and meal choices for you. So what we’re going to save you about, I don’t know, maybe a ten hour, twelve hour round trip because I took my, my bride down to Monterey this last with our wedding anniversary was. Happy anniversary again. Yep. Was 18 years on the 18th or was 18th year, and that was on this past Monday. So we just figured out a way to work it in and took off down to Monterey. There’s a couple things that I wanted to do down there. We’ll be going over those.
Chef Cal:
But just a wonderful trip. A wonderful trip. I love to go out and venture especially into places where the, there are areas where you get a lot of traffic from other places around the world.
Chef Cal:
Very much so.
Chef Cal:
And I thought that that’s always cool, me and Chris, to have this game we play where we hear people talking, try to figure out where they’re from, and then just ask them and see who’s right, see who’s closest. You know, it sounds european to me.
Chef Cal:
You know that I won the first Bethenne.
Chef Cal:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
Germany. We met a couple from Germany.
Chef Cal:
Yep, yep. Yeah. Yeah.
Chef Cal:
There was also a family from Australia, another couple from France.
Chef Cal:
Yeah.
Chef Cal:
The entire world was in Monterey.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Well, we happen to be at a place called the Victorian Inn Hotel that a friend of mine owns.
Chef Cal:
Little boutique hotel.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, a little, small boutique. I don’t know how many rooms, but it was real nice. Had like a little wine and cheese breakfast area for a continental breakfast, which everything was very nice. But it was, it was nice really being treated just, you know, it’s kind of the reason, you know, on our anniversaries our birthdays roll around. And nothing against restaurants, of course, obviously, in the area. But, you know, sometimes, especially as a Chef, you just don’t want to cook on that one day. And, I mean, I love to cook, especially. I love to cook, definitely on holidays and stuff when we bring families together, but sometimes you just want to take a break, and if you’re not, you know, and a lot of people leave the area.
Chef Cal:
That’s why we used to tell them to skip the trip. And we will do all, you know, food from Australia for you.
Chef Cal:
We’re going to give you the details. If you do not want to skip the trip, if you want to go, we can tell you where to go. And I found it so fascinating. I have not experienced this in 20 years, showing up to the hotel, you check in, and then you have a wine and cheese reception. I have only had that once. Another time, it was at the Victorian Inn in Ferndale 20 years ago. Have you ever experienced that? You’ve traveled way more than I have. Yeah.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. It’s a general thing that they’ll have, like, a kind of, like, during happy hour, they’ll just have some cheese. And it was actually, it was really nice. They had a beautiful smoked gouda. They had a really sharp, nice, sharp cheddar variety of crackers and, and also some fruit that was available there. And it was just nice to just sit and relax.
Chef Cal:
And after driving for five and a half hours.
Chef Cal:
Yes. And have a glass of wine. And they had a nice white and ice red that were there. This les Fitch. Fitch FItc from Sonoma and. Real nice. And again, it’s just like, you get there, you carry all your stuff up. We’ve all been there before, and it’s like, okay, we’re here now you got to start making decisions.
Chef Cal:
You have the expense of everything, including taking time away and travel, and, and you’re just kind of weary from the road. So, yeah, the little, you know, happy hour area was, was nice. And again, as we started off speaking about the, the people, they were just, I don’t, didn’t hear England. English seemed like a second language. It was. It was really cool, and I always enjoy that. And I have found that more often than not, in fact, very seldom do people really have a problem. Just kind of, yeah, we’re from here.
Chef Cal:
And the next thing you know, you know, you’ve got, you know, two new friends, and you’re exchanging business cards.
Chef Cal:
We did talk to a couple american couples. They were celebrating their, like, 36th wedding anniversary. One of them was from Hayward, just right up the road, like, okay, you’re a local.
Chef Cal:
But anyway, we have a lot of fun, especially when you run into people and they’ll ask you where you’re from and you say, you know, northern California. Most. For most people, northern California is like. Like, you know, San Francisco. San Francisco is considered northern California.
Chef Cal:
We’re way northern.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. I generally tell people we’re right on the border, right by a place called Oregon. But I definitely really enjoyed it. And then afterwards, we skedaddled off to a place, found a place with. I don’t know what kind of music I thought it was. We were going to place with jazz, but that wasn’t jazz music. That was something that I couldn’t understand.
Chef Cal:
English pub. But they had a traveling band that was in from Hawaii. They do kind of an island reggae vibe. They’re called colo so band. And they were in town on a tour up and down the west coast.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Colos. C o l o s o. Collection of lone Sol. What is that word?
Chef Cal:
Soldiers.
Chef Cal:
Soldiers. Okay.
Chef Cal:
Soldiers. It’s soldier.
Chef Cal:
Like a soldier, but spelled with a weird. Okay, well, they were the great. They were great. They’re one of those bands that were. They were all kind of mimicking each other. And they had horn, their steps, you know, back, left, right, left, right. And then they were. Yeah, they were fun.
Chef Cal:
And we kind of caught a little bit of the tail end of it, but a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. I got a souvenir hat, so. And the. The salty, salty seal. That’s what it was. A brew pub we went to had a really nice pork belly. I always enjoy pork belly when I see it.
Chef Cal:
This was a sticky bourbon.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Yeah. You almost taste more of the sauce than the pork on something like that. But. But it was good. It was good. It was served with these things called puzzle potatoes. So it’s kind of like pieces of, like, spelling.
Chef Cal:
It was like spelling your name in Alphabet soup or something.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. So they called them tater tots, but I looked them up. I found them online. And they’re called a puzzle potato. They’re, like, in Z’s and L’s. They’re like little puzzle pieces you’re supposed to stack, but they’re not ground like a tater tot you would think of kind of loosely. And they weren’t as fine ground as, like, a mashed potato. They were somewhere in between.
Chef Cal:
Well, they’re nice and crisp, and I think that’s what you need. Kind of similar to what you would find on a, like a tater tot. Breading, something like that. We used to bread those, and sometimes you can bread them. You know, one actually really nice thing to bread potatoes with, if you’re making, like, potato pancakes or you could even be making crab cakes or something like that. But it is just literally just the dehydrated potatoes. Just get a dehydrated potato. And we’ve talked about the method of breading before, where you go from dry, wet, dry, dry, meaning generally like a flour, something fine to wet, egg wash, buttermilk, whatever.
Chef Cal:
That’s going to be for your second. It’s going to make it moist, then making sure you coat it well so it doesn’t fall apart. And we did that with the eggplant the other day was me showing my wife how to do eggplant. And she likes it. Now, she had never had it other than a mushy before. And then the. And then the last breading is dry. And the thing about the potatoes is they’re very similar to the panko in kind of their shape.
Chef Cal:
Potato buds.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And the great thing about that is when you’re frying and you want to fry quick, you want to have something where your protein isn’t just, you know, basting down, soaking in the oil. You want it to be a little bit, you know, have a little bit of air in there. So when you fry it, you get something that’s crisp. That’s the whole idea about.
Chef Cal:
And I gotta say, they dropped that order of appetizers so fast, it was at our table, I think, in just like, two minutes.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And then, of course, fish and chips. I mean, you’re on the ocean. Can’t really.
Chef Cal:
Yep. They have a beer battered cod. Uh huh. We had wedged potatoes with that.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. So that was good. You should drink a heavier beer. Yeah. She’s more of. Not the beer tester.
Chef Cal:
You brought me a tester for a porter, and it was excellent in my. It’s called a black prince porter and has kind of a lot of chocolate notes to it.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Again, I’m more, you know, a little ipa and in there. But. But Chris says she’ll go if there’s a dark beer or it has some sweeter components to it, she’ll go for that, too. So, anyway, we’re going to go ahead and take a quick break, and then we’ll be coming right back again. Cooking like a pro. Chef Cal. Chef, Miss Chef Christa, back to just a moment.
Chef Cal:
Welcome back. Welcome back. Cooking like a pro again with Chef Cal and Mrs Chef. And we are. We are recounting what was just actually just a couple of days ago.
Chef Cal:
We just got back yesterday afternoon.
Chef Cal:
It seems like a little further back than that. But anyway, on our anniversary, were down in, in Monterey. Just a beautiful place. Been there a number of times. We will get to the Peace Savers Jones, which is the reason why I went down there as we move along here.
Chef Cal:
But we woke up to sunshine and perfect weather with a heat wave.
Chef Cal:
Oh, yeah. He was like 72.
Chef Cal:
It was gorgeous.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, coming back wasn’t a lot of fun, you know, because you’re driving with your air conditioning and then you open the.
Chef Cal:
It’s 104.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Or anyway, it was warm. But anyway, getting up in the morning again, just a wonderful, beautiful place. I love these places where they have, you know, a continental breakfast. You can get up in the morning. You don’t have to search for something, you know, a place. You can just get a nice, you know, nice, beautiful cup of coffee or actually coffee in your room as well. Beautiful suite.
Chef Cal:
Beautiful suite. It was three, three stories. And your Monterey’s pretty much, the whole thing’s on hillsides, so we had a beautiful view of the ocean as well, and got up. They had an omelette station and some sausage and, you know, that kind of stuff. Make your own waffle. Make your own waffle. Which I did get to show a lot of.
Chef Cal:
You showed a lot of people how to make waffles.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, they, well, again, it was by far more people from other countries. And I happen to know a lot about waffles, waffle makers, matter of fact, as much as the people that make them, because I did actually work with the people that make waffle irons when I was corporate Chef for a local, well, a local restaurant used to be local. Now it’s spread out as a black bear diner. And it’s to know that it’s weird, a wall fire has these secret buttons on it that you can’t tell where they are. And you do that because cooks will come in and say, oh, the waffles aren’t cooking fast enough. They’ll turn it up and then they’ll start burying. So they’ll turn them down. There’s a way of being able to lock a wolf iron into not being able to change the time.
Chef Cal:
So that’s the only reason that I knew so much about it, you know. So I was kind of giving a tutorial to several people in there. As they’re clicked, you just fill the batter in the cup, you put it on there, you flip it over. But it, you know, first again, it’s for someone that’s never seen it and done it, you have to kind of, you know, it’s like. It’s like bringing ice cream to natives down in the Amazon. You know, that’s one of my first.
Chef Cal:
Wedding presents from you, was one of those waffle irons, the belgian ones, that you close and you rotate. I had never seen one before, and that was one of your. Your presents to me.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, so it was. But it was a great breakfast. And leaving there, we actually, of course, where else would we go? As you know, budding Chefs or whatever you want to.
Chef Cal:
Well, first off, we had to go find you a tie. That’s why we headed out to find you tie, because we’ve packed everything except that. So we went shopping.
Chef Cal:
Pack a tie. I have to have a tie to go to the restaurant I was going.
Chef Cal:
To on the way to the tie shop.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, we have. We seen a sign, of course, restaurant supplies. Restaurant supplies. But it was more of a, like a boutique. But then it also opened up to literally being something where you’d go if you were going to open up a restaurant.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, it was two floors, multiple rooms.
Chef Cal:
It looked just like my shed at home. I mean, it was just stuff all. There’s stacks of stuff everywhere. But the front of it was very boutique and has some really cool stuff that had, you know, I’ve often thought that I should invent some things that make things easier in the kitchen. I’ve thought about that for forever now, for decades. Never really went through with it and did it. I did some of that for. In other areas just before myself, but never having to go out and get something trademarked and go from there.
Chef Cal:
But, man, there’s a gadget for everything. I did kind of give up looking around thinking, I don’t know that there’s any. Not that they always work. Matter of fact, I’ve got. We’ve got tons of things that we bought in the past. Little kitchen gadgets says, oh, this is a perfect thing for cutting your avocado.
Chef Cal:
You know, I did buy you one from the goodwill the other day, and we’re going to see if it works. It was a pomegranate.
Chef Cal:
Pomegranates are almost ready. We must have about 300 pomegranates that.
Chef Cal:
I did not see one down at the restaurant supplies. But what did you find?
Chef Cal:
Yeah, well, we found a bunch of stuff. I mean, that. I mean, I’m lucky we were in a hurry because I would have filled up a grocery cart. But we really just did get a couple things. One well, both of them personal. The gnocchi board, of course, as an Italian, you always have to have a gnocchi board. That was nice. And then Chef Charlie Trotter, who left us too early a number of years ago, there was a cookbook there, and.
Chef Cal:
One of the few that you don’t have. And it’s not even a. Being sold anymore.
Chef Cal:
No. And it’s. And it’s not. It’s. But it’s the only book I have of his that he didn’t sign for me. You know, that. And so, you know, I set out on the. On a little patio that we had overlooking the ocean while Christa was taking a little nap and.
Chef Cal:
And got a chance to go through it. And. And it’s. It’s just reminiscing. I. I look at cookbooks generally. I look for the picture. I look at.
Chef Cal:
I look at. I like to look at the pictures. And as I’m writing a cookbook, I’m saying, well, there’s an awful. You know, there’s an awful lot there besides the pictures, but it was a great book, so I really enjoyed that. And actually found a used knife, too.
Chef Cal:
As you were checking out, I went towards the back of the store. She goes, you know, there’s more rooms, right? And I went, just let me come back and turn the lights on, like for you.
Chef Cal:
More rooms.
Chef Cal:
She just kept turning on lights and turning on lights, and they kept going back, and they kept going up.
Chef Cal:
And there’s a whole other floor section and this and that. And.
Chef Cal:
But then they had a used section for a lot of older used equipment. Yes.
Chef Cal:
And they had a Chef knife on there. I’m. It’s actually a. Like a butcher’s knife.
Chef Cal:
It was a fillet knife, right?
Chef Cal:
Yes. Yeah. And it was just really thin. It was really worn down. And I have one myself. I had one that broke a number of years ago. But you work a knife down and you get it super, super thin, and I don’t know why they don’t just sell them that way, but this is one that I can clean up, sharpen up, give it a little bleach, and, you know, probably it’s. I’m sure it’s got a couple of decades on it.
Chef Cal:
It’s. I don’t know. It was more of a personal thing, I guess, than anything, but, yeah, that was fun. And we went to a european market, which was right across the street, and that was fun because very few things were in there that were actually in.
Chef Cal:
English, except the nutella. The nutella was.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, nutella. Yeah, well, Nutella, the word probably isn’t, but yeah, but yeah, we got a variety of things. I wanted to find something from Romania, because I have a dear friend, some dear friends that I’d gone there with a couple of times decades ago, and it was. They had a few romanian things. We got that. We got some.
Chef Cal:
You got the Romania zakuzka, which is a roasted red pepper relish with eggplant, tomatoes, and onions.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And then pickled red peppers. Kind of similar to what I was looking for, a peppa dew. And they didn’t have peppa dews. I like it. But this is similar to their version of a pepper with a sweet pickled. Yeah. You got some.
Chef Cal:
Some lemon candies. I think you got some plums from Poland.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Poland makes chocolate covered plums. Apparently, it’s becoming their specialty. It was designed by an australian Chef that moved to Poland, and because they have these really specialty plums in one of their regions, he developed these chocolate covered plums. And it’s coming on the culinary scene as kind of the new thing to try.
Chef Cal:
There’s a lot of new things to try. I’ll see when I try one. Maybe we’ll talk about that next week. But we haven’t got a chance to try those yet. But we did go to a taste of Monterey. I would definitely recommend that we’ve gone there maybe a couple. A decade and a half ago, when Isaac was very small, it was fun. It was set right out on the water.
Chef Cal:
I mean, almost like, well, you were over the water, and we just sit there and watch the sea seals kind of, you know, meander around and play around out in the seaweed. I mean, there were. There had been a hundred of them and seagulls flying over.
Chef Cal:
And guess what? If you want to see that view, you go to their website. They have the webcam, and you can see exactly where we were sitting, exactly what we were looking at.
Chef Cal:
Well, there you go.
Chef Cal:
Taste of Monterey. Just click on the webcam.
Chef Cal:
And this was in the early afternoon. We didn’t want to, you know, ruin our dinner, but we wanted to get back and maybe get a little bit of rest before for dinner that night. So we sat there and we just had a couple of appetizers. Those were very nice. Enjoyed that with some almonds, some warm.
Chef Cal:
Spiced almonds with brown sugar, cayenne and thyme, and then some olives with, still had the pits in them with some fennel and citrus.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, everything’s better with, with the pits in it. You get more flavor that way. And they also, would they cure, because when you cure olives, you, you soak them in a lye solution. And it can sometimes be a lye brine. Usually the brine, when we always did it was afterwards. But that’s just a tenderize. And to get the actual olive ripe from the exterior of the olive all the way to the actual pit, and you want to get soft and you want to remove the bitterness. To take an olive and eat it off the tree would be, it wouldn’t be anything fun about it, put it that way.
Chef Cal:
So you got to get them soft and you got to get them pliable where they’ll, they’ll take that brine, they’ll take that flavoring, if you want to add garlic or anything along those lines. And. But, yeah, I thought that was. I enjoyed that.
Chef Cal:
And we had, we each had a different flight. I had a white flight, you had a red flight.
Chef Cal:
Yes, we had a flight of wines. I always like to try things. Of course, I’m much more of a tryer. And we had a flight real nice. The flights had these nice little round little pieces of paper, maybe three by six, and they had a little circle in each one with the wine glass sitting on there. And then it gave you the name of the wine and then some of the tasty notes and you could write some notes on yourself. So those are nice. I’ve seen those a couple times up in Napa.
Chef Cal:
Not very often, but it’s a great little trick, especially when you’re tasting wines and you say, oh, I like this one. Then you can make a note. So, you know, going back, if you see that somewhere or you go into a restaurant on a menu or you see that, a store, it’s like, oh, yeah, I’ve had that and I like that.
Chef Cal:
And now I have the piece of paper showing everything that we got.
Chef Cal:
So. So, yeah, so we enjoyed that. And then also, we also had the debris. So it was a triple cream.
Chef Cal:
I forgot about that.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, I didn’t think. I don’t, I don’t know if it was a triple cream. It said it was triple cream, but it, it seemed more like a double to me. You know, the creamier, you got a breath and you got a double cream, triple cream. And when, as you get creamier, it gets creamier. And a triple cream is almost to the point where it’s, it’s not peanut butter, but it’s close as far as its consistency. It’s just really soft and, and will run when you, when you slice it. You can’t put it cut a little slice in it, it will just, you.
Chef Cal:
Know, and then with the brie, they had the roasted candied garlic.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, they had the roasted garlic on there and just some crostini with a little raspberry.
Chef Cal:
It was a triple berry, I think. Yeah.
Chef Cal:
Topping on it, which is nice. Anytime you’re going to go with a bere, you’re going to have something that has, you know, brie, especially with the rind. It has a little bit of a, you know, bite or perhaps pungency to it. So it’s always nice to have something, something sweet. In fact, it reminds me of an appetizer I put together decades ago, and I’ve used it throughout my whole culinary career, which is the raspberry melba sauce with the roasted garlic and the brie cheese on the crostini. So a lot of good, a lot of fun, great flavors, and we enjoyed it.
Chef Cal:
So we’ll, so we didn’t have lunch. We just had nuts and olives and brie and wine just to tie us over before we prepared for dinner.
Chef Cal:
Yep. And we’ll be talking about dinner when we get back. Again, this is cooking like a pro. Back in just a moment. Welcome back. Welcome back. You found us and we’re still here cooking like a pro. And, you know, you can also go to cookinglikeapropodcast.net if you’d like to write a question in.
Chef Cal:
Or you can go straight to our website, website, culinaryyours.net dot. Yep, we got Chef Cal and Mrs Chef Christa here and talking about our anniversary a couple of days ago down in the Monterey Bay area. Large, large area. Large. I brought my binoculars so I could kind of watch the boats and stuff from the, while Chris was napping. That was so, that was my joy. That and going over my new Charlie Trotter book I found. But we did do something that, we did a lot of things.
Chef Cal:
A lot of things. But that was very interesting. I would highly recommend this. If you go down there, plan on taking some time to do this. And it was. I thought we were going to go try. I thought we were actually tasting olives. It was a, it was olive oil, though.
Chef Cal:
It was Monterey’s tasty olive. It said it was called an olive bar. So I just assumed we were eating olives. So I walked in there and we weren’t. We were tasting olive oils. And I mean, a lot.
Chef Cal:
I did not stop to count over 70. I looked online. Have over 70.
Chef Cal:
Over 70. And then, and then the other thing I seen on the other side were these large casks and with aged balsamic vinegars in them.
Chef Cal:
So I went to the olive oil, and he told me to pick out my portion, and then he went left and went up to pick out the vinegar, because you can get little tasting portions, little bottles that they can nicely wrap up in little boxes, and then tissue paper, some little gift boxes you can take home with different flavors.
Chef Cal:
And the thing that I thought was interesting, and they were all interesting, it was, again, like trying to pick out your favorite child or something when you’re going through and you’re trying all these different flavors. And similar to when we went through the restaurant supply place that had all these very interesting looking plates, one of the things that they trained us when we were competing was that you wanted a. You didn’t want a plate. You never had any color on the plate. You never had any designs that were color on the plate. Sometimes maybe a light, an interesting shape, perhaps, but everything you wanted to have bone white. And, you know, the whiter it is, the more china, the more bone is in it. So that’s the.
Chef Cal:
That’s why you pay more for it, because plates are white as opposed to the eggshell. But we really look at the plate as being a canvas that you’re doing your artistry on. So you don’t want the plate itself to take away from the food, but you also don’t want to clutter the whole idea of the food up with a bunch of things off to the side, even though they may seem like they. They match. But anyway, so when I was looking at the plates, and the same thing when I was tasting these oils and tasting these aged balsamic vinegars, all I can do is think of foods that how I would use them. That’s how my brain automatically goes to that, you know? So I’m saying, oh, boy. Roasted cod, and I would drizzle this, you know, and on and on. So that’s kind of how I look at it.
Chef Cal:
I just poured each one and dipped my finger in it and tasted each one to see how it tasted.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And I said, Christa, I said, we’ll each pick four. I can only narrow mine down to five.
Chef Cal:
All right. So I went in the infused. Now, I didn’t realize this. There was fused olive oil and infused fused olive oil, and they do fuse. So when they’re doing the first crush for an extra virgin, the flavor will be fused in at the same time and crushed at the same time. But most of the ones we got were an infused, which is after it’s crushed these flavors are added. And I went with a Madagascar black pepper, a smoked olive wood, tuscan herb and cayenne.
Chef Cal:
And again, oils that, these aren’t the kind of oils that you would generally, that I would generally use in making, you know, a dressing that was overly complicated with more than one or two, maybe three ingredients at the most. Anything more than that, you might as well just go with the vegetable oil. Again, we do want to stay away from seed oils just because of all the things that are added into it. But no, there were some great oils that I think we’re going to have a lot of fun, a lot of fun experimenting with these. And if you’ve ever seen the process of making wine where grapes are placed in a large container with staves, wood around it, and then they just keep cranking it down, cranking it down, cranking it down. Unless you’ve got your fair maidens with their shoes off jumping up and down. And this is how they can extract the juice from the grapes to make wine. Well, similar with olive oil.
Chef Cal:
You can’t do it by jumping up and down on them. But they can put those in a press and then they just spin that and they spin that and they just press it. And when you, they press it and they don’t, there’s no heat involved in it. It’s a simple press that’s called a cold press, and that’s an extra, extra virgin. You know, you’re not, you’re not getting any impurities in something like that because it’s such a light press. And then they’ll press it some more and they’ll get a different quality of product out of it. And then they’ll do a final press on it, which, that final press, usually if you buy something that says the word pomace oil, that means that’s where you’re getting down to that. And they have what’s called the, I think it’s called a mask.
Chef Cal:
I’m trying to remember back ago, or a wort. That’s that final product that’s at the very, very bottom. And that’s what they’ll infuse and use in other types of oils or applications, but not the highest quality you get from the lighter press. And then the vinegars were just amazing. I got a white peach, and these are all aged. So it’s an aged white peach, white balsamic vinegar. And then you had a sicilian lemon, white balsamic and aged coconut, white balsamic, a dark red apple and a, and.
Chef Cal:
An apricot, a Blenheim apricot, which is a special California apricot.
Chef Cal:
And these are all aged white balsamics. And they’re just, again, I mean, if you wanted to cook a real nice, high quality, you know, item and keep it simple, where you would just do a nice sear or roast or a poach on it, then this, you would just drizzle this on it and you’re done. You’re not having to make any sauce to accompany it. It’s just beautiful in a salad. Get some really nice fresh greens and just drizzle some because it’s so packed and concentrated in flavor.
Chef Cal:
I’m looking forward to just a nice crusty sourdough dipped in olive oil and vinegar. Take a couple different flavors and mix them together, and let’s see what we get.
Chef Cal:
Well, you know, they have tastings of all kind. We had talked about the, the tasting earlier with the, with the wines, but down there going to a vinegar tasting, I never done that before. I’ve done olive oil tasting, you know, many times in the past, but I had never done the vinegar. And I thought it was just really cool. Very, very nice people. They were very, very helpful. Matter of fact, everywhere we went.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, everybody was nice everywhere. So hospitable and just wanted to help and bring you things and answer questions.
Chef Cal:
I almost forgot I was in California. It was really. It was. Yeah, it was. People were that nice.
Chef Cal:
It was a different. It was a little bit different world. And it was just within a two block radius from the hotel that we spent our entire, you know, 48 hours.
Chef Cal:
Oh, and people are nice in California, too. It’s just I. A number of months ago, I took a trip back to Tennessee to walk my daughter down the aisle, and. And everyone was just so nice there. And it’s weird that when you get outside of an area where people are a little, you know, frenzy. I mean, I’d like to use the excuse, like, in California, you ask, you know, somebody, how are you doing? And they say, what do you want? You know? And I remember back in Tennessee, say, how you doing, man? You better have, you know, like I said, time to see pictures of their grandkids and 20 minutes to talk. And it was just that kind. And it was interesting because we were talking with a lot of people that spoke at least some, you know, English, of course.
Chef Cal:
And I thought that that was fun. That was fun because they appreciate the. Because they don’t, you know, they’re speaking the language in a broken fashion that people are kind of, you know, taking time to talk with them and figure out what they’re trying to say or. Anyway, yeah.
Chef Cal:
The german couple that we met, they were talking about. They came from Germany. That was very frenzied where they came from. And everybody was just so nice here and relaxed and helpful and.
Chef Cal:
Well, Germany was. That was an easy one because I’ve been there so many times. But German. Germany was. But we were able to talk about places that we were. I stayed in a south. Was a south eastern or southwestern corner down near the Rhine. It was a town called Schifferstadt.
Chef Cal:
And they were from a town that was very close to.
Chef Cal:
That wasn’t too far away. We know where you went. That’s where we live.
Chef Cal:
Then I noticed that you did have some. Some. A couple of other things here on that we passed over to now. Christa is very highly. She writes everything down. Everything. Plus, she doesn’t forget it. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t forget.
Chef Cal:
I forgot about the Brie. You remember the brie?
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Well, we missed the brie, but you had the wines here. I know you had the not too dry flight was that Dosetto Doceto Rose, and then you had a Riesling, a Nicoversch demeanor, and I didn’t get a chance to try the geverse demeanor. It was a hive and honey.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, I finished that one off. Sorry.
Chef Cal:
Okay. Yeah, so that one never made all the way to me. And then I have the. My highlight was a reserve maritage. A maritage. Just really, it’s just a blend. In the wines that are noble, there are certain wines that are considered noble. You know, your.
Chef Cal:
They come from the Bordeaux area, you know, your cabernet and wines that fall into that category.
Chef Cal:
And meritage wines have to actually be certified to have meritage on the label.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. A lot of people just think Maritaj is a word that just means blended.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, it’s not.
Chef Cal:
But. No, it’s not. There. There’s specifics about that. There’s. There’s a. But I’m. What it is, is if you have it, like, for example, my wine was 73% cabernet and then 23, 27% Merlot.
Chef Cal:
Merlot. So that the blend made 100%. But it was a blend. So a lot of times what a winemaker will do is if they come up with, they crush the grapes, they get the juice, they taste it, and then when they. Before they start putting the wine together and blending it, they know what they want it to end up being like. So if a cabernet, because of the growing season or the varietal itself, had some sort of a challenge or came out or maybe the opposite came out really nice. And they want to blend it, and they’re like, oh, wow, you know, this is a little bit hot. So let’s bring this down with some sweets.
Chef Cal:
We’re going to add some merlot in there. So it’s kind of, it’s really recipe based, you know, when you get to that point.
Chef Cal:
And what I found it interesting is that Meritoche is. Was a name that was created back in the eighties. Its merit and heritage brought together its meritage. It was an actual name. There was a contest that they put together to come up with that name.
Chef Cal:
Very good. Well, you know. Well, Christa is our.
Chef Cal:
Research.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, she’s in charge of research. So, you know, when it comes to Google, she’ll, she’ll always do research.
Chef Cal:
The seagulls fly by and what does maritage mean?
Chef Cal:
All right, well, we’re gonna be back and just a moment after this final break. And we’re going to be talking about PST Rouge Jones and the purposes for the trip down there. So go ahead and say, don’t touch that dial, as they say, and cooking like a pro. Back in just a moment. What you getting out of living? Who cares for what you’ve got if you’re not having any fun? Are you having any laughs? Well, welcome back. Thank you for hanging out with us this afternoon. We appreciate this. We’re coming up on three months of doing this.
Chef Cal:
I think we are starting our fourth month.
Chef Cal:
There you go. Boy, edit just flies by, doesn’t it? Well, dinner flew by. It went. I guess I should say we went slowing enough for me.
Chef Cal:
It was 3 hours.
Chef Cal:
Is that it?
Chef Cal:
Yeah, maybe three and a half.
Chef Cal:
Well, the first 45 minutes of dinner. Again, this is Chef Cal and Mrs. Chef. And you have found us on cooking like a pro here. And so we’re talking about our trip for our anniversary down to Monterey. And the main reason for going there was to go to a restaurant that a friend of mine owns that’s been there for decades and decades. Yeah. And it’s called the sardine factory.
Chef Cal:
So if you’re into restaurants or if you’re just someone that knows about restaurants or knows about Chefs, you would know this. This gentleman, Chef Burt Coutinho’s dear friend. Yeah, he sat down, we talked for 45 minutes, and it was just an amazing, amazing experience for me to be, to be able to talk to, you know, one of my mentors because so many of them have gone on, you.
Chef Cal:
Know, 85 years old.
Chef Cal:
85 years old. Still up and up and moving great. And we still running the business.
Chef Cal:
He’s involved in everything.
Chef Cal:
We really, really had a great, great time. And just the discussion of the way things used to be. I think what’s interesting, some of the discussions of the way things have evolved, which.
Chef Cal:
Well, he’s not just a Chef. He is one of the certified master Chefs. There’s less than 70 in the entire world.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, he’s. He knows this stuff, and he’s been around forever for a long time. And anyone, again, that knows anyone would know Chef. Chef, Chef Burt is just an amazing man. We had a great meal. The sardine factory, again, world famous, world famous restaurant. They actually, we didn’t get a chance to try the abalone soup, so we have to drive down just to do that there. That’s what they’re, they call it world famous because he served that.
Chef Cal:
He made that dish for the inauguration for Ronald Reagan.
Chef Cal:
Oh, really?
Chef Cal:
I did not know that when he was elected president. And anyway, just a great dish. But the main reason we probably didn’t really get to much was the first course I wanted to try some seafood. So they have this dish called chilled seafood indulgence. And it comes out to two tiered silver platter with, you know, a couple different levels on it. And it has the dried ice underneath and then crushed ice. Then all this display of seafood, you know, wild Pacific prawns or cracked dungeness crab. They had a steamed main lobster tail on there.
Chef Cal:
Oysters, a dozen oysters. I didn’t eat all of them. I think you had one.
Chef Cal:
I had two.
Chef Cal:
Did you have two?
Chef Cal:
Okay, I had two. You finally got me to eat an oyster. The first one, I was like, I don’t know. The second one, you put a sauce on. There’s a mignonette sauce, which is a vinegar and shallot and black pepper sauce, and then a cocktail sauce. And then you put a splash of lemon, fresh lemon. And I enjoyed the second one.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And that horseradish. I’ve never been a real horseradish fan, but I. This is one of the few times I’ll eat horserash, and it’s just kind of a combination. So it’s a combination of the four different accompaniments that you’ll use on that. But those were great.
Chef Cal:
But you got to talk about, what does it do when they bring it to the table in front of you?
Chef Cal:
Depth of hot water on it says, similar to what we did at a rivers restaurant here in reading when we, when we built that up, where the U 202 is now. And it. And you put dry ice underneath. And then when you pour hot water on it, so the whole thing, it just. You get all of this smoke or this mist coming off and literally covers your table. You can see the tops of your wine glasses. That’s about it. And then it dissipates.
Chef Cal:
But it’s just a great presentation. It’s beautiful. You know, it takes you a while. It’s a real conversation piece, I guess you would call it.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. Everybody was looking at our table at that point.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. And then we were talking to the tables around us as well, and I. They were celebrating different things. Celebrating an anniversary and a birthday and a birthday. And then they brought out the sorbet. Now, sorbet is. Falls into a category that we call intermezzo. And an intermezzo is.
Chef Cal:
It’s a break you take during what, a ballet or opera.
Chef Cal:
It means in between. So mezzo is medium. It means in between.
Chef Cal:
So it gives you a break to kind of do basically sort of like what we call a mouth cleanser, you know, a palate cleanser. And this was. So this was pineapple. And it came out in a. In a lit up, an underlit swan made out of ice. So you had this basketball shape, or maybe volleyball shaped ice swan. And then in between the wings was the sorbet. And each bite of the sorbet.
Chef Cal:
Now, if you’ve had pineapple. Okay, great. You’ve had pineapple. If you’ve had pineapple that they call jet fresh, all that means is that it was jetted in. And usually that’s coming from Hawaii, but it’s still nothing like getting pineapple. Actually, in Hawaii, there isn’t any. So as far as being in a tropical place, this was the closest I’ve ever tasted to pineapple.
Chef Cal:
It was pure pineapple. It just melted. It was creamy and icy, but it just melted.
Chef Cal:
When you’ve had a well made soup and maybe a tomato soup, and every bite tastes like, you know, a whole vine of tomatoes. This actually was very authentically made. Very, very nice made. It reminded me of. My mom and dad went to Hawaii. This was a long time ago, and they had shipped me a pineapple, and I was living down south, and I put that pineapple in my apartment, and it sat there for a month. It was just like every time I walked into the house, it smelled like pineapple. It was just delicious.
Chef Cal:
Anyway, so I had lamb with a pistachio crust and had a raspberry port reduction on it. That was nicely done. And you had.
Chef Cal:
I had a macadamia nut crusted chilean sea bass with a orange ginger beurblanc sauce and then a potato terrine and some asparagus.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, it was. It was well done. It was beautiful. It was.
Chef Cal:
I picked it out before we even went. I knew exactly what I wanted before we got there.
Chef Cal:
And then they sent us out another dried ice presentation, and it was. We call them lollipops. Ice cream lollipops, cake lollipops. They call them bon bons. But it’s just a long skewer with a round bulb of ice cream, french vanilla ice cream that’s been dipped in chocolate and then refroze. So.
Chef Cal:
And then you can. You can roll it in nuts. And I think that was a butterscotch. It was caramel.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, kind of a caramel butterscotch kind of a. So you’re doing a little the butterscotch and you put in with the nuts. And it was very. It was good. Again, it was. It was a. Participate. You want.
Chef Cal:
You needed to participate.
Chef Cal:
It was very hands.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, you needed to participate. Hands on. Probably better word. Hands on. It feels good.
Chef Cal:
Even though this place has a 64 page wine list. It’s more like a book.
Chef Cal:
It’s an encyclopedia.
Chef Cal:
And this is fine dining. Don’t be intimidated by that. They do have a kids menu. They do have a bar area with.
Chef Cal:
A. I’m not bringing my kids here.
Chef Cal:
Oh, I think we got to take Isaac for the abalone soup.
Chef Cal:
Let’s wait till he gets 21.
Chef Cal:
All right. But they have different rooms. The place is kind of the Winchester mystery house. They’ve got the original restaurant, and they just kept adding to it. And we were out in the atrium.
Chef Cal:
Beautiful room. It was all skylit, the whole round ceiling, all glass, supported by, you know, looks like gold, you know, framing and. But it was really beautiful. Fountain in the center. Looked kind of like the Lorelei. If you’ve ever been on the Rhine river in south Germany or you want to look it up. The Lorelei. Wonderful tradition.
Chef Cal:
There’s a great story there. It’s actually a really good story. I had always, when I came back from there the first time in 96, I thought, wow, I got to get a name, a restaurant Lorelei, because it was just really, really cool. But it’s a cool story.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. So it was like sitting in the garden, and actually, I did not have wine with dinner. I had a mocktail.
Chef Cal:
A mocktail.
Chef Cal:
My mocktail was. Had such amazing flavor. Peach puree with grenadine and spritz in it. And I really enjoyed that.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. But sitting and talking with the Chef was. It really got to me, actually.
Chef Cal:
Yeah. We were both almost in tears.
Chef Cal:
It was very emotional, very passionate. Spend time speaking with someone that has that, that history. And the history comes out of just a love for people and a love for the profession, a love for everything restaurant. And he also owned several hotels. Well, he owned the hotel that we were staying in, the inn we were staying.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, the inns of Monterey. There’s five boutique hotels, so you get a chance.
Chef Cal:
We highly recommend the sardine factory. Tell them Chef Cal sent you from reading and just plan on enjoying yourself. And again, you don’t go there if you’re in a hurry. You go there just to, you know, well, plus, you don’t want, if you’re going to spend that kind of, that kind of money, then you definitely want to have fun. But then on the way home, we, we were down there and some said, oh, you got to go to Garlic world. So we went to Garlic world, and we got some things. Gilroy, in Gilroy, of course, the garlic capital of the world. So everything garlic.
Chef Cal:
I got some actually dehydrated garlic, which was really good.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, it’s smoked. Seasoned.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, yeah. And the one I got was barbecued. And then we had, I got some, yeah, I like spicy things. I got some spicy Cajun green olives, and those were stuffed with garlic as well. And then some spicy garlic pickles. So haven’t, haven’t tried all those yet, but I’m getting used to. Then, of course, we always like to hit Granazelli’s, you know, on the way up and back. That’s almost more traditional now because it’s gotten so expensive.
Chef Cal:
But I remember every time we took an abalone trip, we would turn at Granazelli’s there and head over to Fort Bragg and Elko. And that was just a family thing that we did up to the time where I got a restaurant, and then everybody went without me. Every year, my birthday is the end of June, which is the best, the low side of the year.
Chef Cal:
To finish off our weekend, we want the classic double decker turkey sandwich meat cut right off the breast. This wasn’t shaved deli meat. This was a real turkey breast. So we kind of ended with a classic sandwich.
Chef Cal:
Yeah, classic sandwich. The classic clubhouse sandwich that we used to hate making in the restaurant because it was just a pain. When you’re back there cooking, you have to toast three pieces of bread and cut it on an angle and stick toothpicks in it. Yeah. But cook the cook, the short order cook. So really appreciate that. But anyway, that rounds out our week and it was just a lot of fun.
Chef Cal:
So this will all be on the podcast. I will have links to all these different places if you want to put this itinerary for yourself.
Chef Cal:
Well, we appreciate you tuning in again to cooking like a pro. God bless you and yours and we will look forward to listening having you listen to us next Wednesday here at KCNR.
Chef Cal:
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.
