Samin Nosrat Throwback: The Salt Fat Acid Heat Interview

relationships, and we want to hear your stories. Do you spend all your time scrolling through reservation apps while your partner couldn't care less? Or maybe you dump your date for being a picky eater? Or maybe one of you loves to eat out and the other doesn't. So to share your story, please leave us a voicemail. The number 617-249-3167-1 more time. 617-249-3167. Or send us a voicemail to [email protected].

Hey Christopher Kimball here. For today's special episode, we're releasing one of our first

shows ever. This is our 2017 episode with Sami Nazarat, about a first book, salt, fat, acid heat, which is now considered a classic. Please give it a listen and look out this Friday for a brand new Milk Street radio. Now, please enjoy the show. This is Milk Street Radio from PRX, I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. What I've noticed is cooking sort of makes you a beginner every time,

which I love, you know, and so any time I get cocky and I'm like, "Oh, I've done this a hundred times. I don't need to pay attention." That's the time when I burn it. Or that's the time when the law grows off the fire. That with Sami Nazarat, she's author of Salt, fat, acid heat, the four elements of good cooking. It's an excellent guide to how cooking works. It's also cooking science for cooks who don't like science. I'll be speaking to her later in the

show. But first is time to head into the kitchen at Milk Street to check in with Raina Javari

about this week's recipe. Raina, how are you? Hi Chris. We're doing a Tuesday night supper. We run this as a column in the magazine, which means not too many ingredients fairly simple. You can do it in half an hour less. And we're starting with a skirt steak and a trip to Tuscany. So, Chris, this is a Tuesday night recipe. We don't have a lot of time. So, to get started,

we're going to do a few things. We're going to make a spice mix of ground fennel, salt, and black pepper. Rub the steak with that. And then we're going to cook the steak to medium-rare,

“which is essential to this salad. It's about three minutes on one side, two minutes on the other.”

And we want to make sure that we cut the steak in half so that it fits in the pan and gets a nice

sear. We're going to set that aside and then move on to our dressing.

So, so far we have a pan seared steak. Nothing new about that. But you're making a little salad out of it with pepper-dos. So, what are pepper-dos? So, Chris, pepper-dos are a brand name of a type of pepper that comes from South Africa. They're a little sweet, a little spicy, just like we like it. They're usually found pickled in brine near the olive section in good grocery stores. Or you can also find them online. And we like to add them to dishes because they're really

breaking up flavors. And for this dish, we're making a simple vinegarette with olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, and the pepper-dos. And then we're going to use half this vinegarette to dress the greens, and the other half to deglaze the pan. And what you get is a really rich, flavorful pan sauce that marries the flavor of the meat and the peppery arugula. So, since this is a Tuesday night supper, this is like half an hour right?

Yep, under 30 minutes. And to serve it, we're going to slice the meat against the green, and arrange the slices over the arugula. And then, for each serving, we're going to put a little bit of warm pan sauce and top it which shapes Parmesan. That's it. Sounds pretty good.

“You have to make it for me though. Thank you, Reina. You're welcome.”

You can find all of our recipes at Milk Street Radio.com. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. I'm your host Christopher Kimball. You can find podcasts over show on iTunes, Stitcher, and Tune in. Now, let's take some of your cooking questions with my co-host Sarah Martin. She's star of Sarah's Week Night Meals and author of Home Cooking 101.

Okay, Sarah, you're ready for a new batch of questions? I sure am. Welcome to Milk Street Radio, who's calling? This is Mara from Brookline, Massachusetts. Brookline, I worked in Brookline for 20 years. Yeah. And I'm around the corner from there. You're. You'll live in the post office right in the corner.

Right near the, absolutely. So, how can we help you? Well, one of my favorite weeknight dishes for the family is chicken and rice soup that I make in the pressure cooker. And the chicken is moist. The rice tends to be water logs and too coffee because it's quite a bit of chicken broth.

So, I'm trying to figure out how to better make the rice so it's firmer.

“Well, I would add the rice at the end right before you serve. That's what I would do.”

If you look at the back of the boxes, they often say two parts of water, one part rice, which is much to much water. For years, we use other ratios that are smaller, but we find that three parts of rice to four parts of water. So, a cup and a half of rice, two cups of water,

so. Then I take it off the heat. I put a towel, kitchen towel over the top between the top and the

pan and let it sit another 10 minutes and then fluff it. And that'll do it. The secret is

don't use too much water, but you'll get really separate grains. But let me ask you question, were you trying to do it all in the pressure cooker at one time? I was trying to do it that way. So, I'd have it like turn it on and go. And walk away. I have a feeling that they may be asking too much. That's not going to work. Yeah. You could use a rice cooker for 20 bucks. You can buy an electric

rice cooker and they do a good job. Yeah, they're supposed to be great. I'm rice in period. I can't. I think my problem is because I have electric stove and you can't really control the heat the way you want to. I agree with Chris, I think maybe you're asking your pressure cooker too much. It's not even, they matter rice. It's the pressure, it's everything that's in there. You're cooking two different things that cook at two different temperatures

for two different amounts of time. I'm going to be really annoying now, which is so unusual.

I know, really. Really, you've never done it. How refreshing. There are these pottery cookers

from Japan. This is really annoying. But they have an inner cover and outer cover. You rinse the rice, put it into the pot with some water, let it sit for a few minutes, then put it right on the stove top with an inner and outer cover. The inner cover has two holes. The outer cover is one small hole. Put the heat on and just when it starts to steam, you turn the heat off, steam's for a couple minutes, turn the heat off and let it sit.

And it makes amazing rice. I mean, it's much better than a rice cooker or the saucepan method. So if you're crazy about rice, those are really wonderful things. But it's a little more work. But a rice cooker for 25 bucks, like the National Rice Cookers 5. All right. All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate all these ideas. Thank you. All right. Take care. Okay. Bye bye.

Welcome to Milk Street Radio, who's calling? Hello. Hi. Oh, nice to talk to you. Nice to talk to you. Who am I talking to? You're talking to Cynthia from Fairlano, Ohio. Hi, Cynthia. How are you? Okay. Listen. I wanted to tell you. Our local paper had a little story about you last week

with a really flattering, nice color picture of you in your bow tie. I've never had a flattering picture.

Maybe you could cut that out. Oh, I didn't even say I recognized you.

“Okay. That's why I wear the bow tie. Otherwise, people have no idea.”

Right. So how can we help you? Well, my grandmother came over to this country, Italy, when she was a little girl. And she ended up making all of our holiday dinners. We always went to her house. She made all kinds of Italian food, but never had anything written down. So I asked her to come over to our house and make whatever she wanted that day and I'd write down the recipes. And I have those recipes still. That's what I used when I cooked myself.

She made pizza this way. She would take a tall water glass, put granulated yeast in, put a little bit of sugar, warm water, let it rise to the top of the glass, then take it and pour it into a bowl of plain white flour. Now, it's that question. Is it good to put the wet into the dry or the dry into the wet? She always poured the wet into the dry and I do too. Is there a reason? Is that a why? So do I. Now, Sarah, can you explain why we do with that one? Well, here's

what I do, as I make a well in the center of the dry. First of all, you mix up the dry really well before you do it. If there's anything else in there like salt, there should be. Right. And then you make a well and then you gradually mix the water into the surrounding flour.

“And I think you end up with less lumps and it's easier to mix the whole thing, Chris, would you agree?”

Yeah, except that I probably would do it. She did. I use a food processor for pizza down there. Oh, no, no. I'm sorry. That's not, that's not old world. Oh, really. Oh, please. Yeah. So, well, good. There you go. Great. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Bye. This is Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio. If you'd like your cooking question answered, just call us at 1-8554-Boty. That's 855-426-9843. You can also email us anytime at questions

at MilkStreetRadio.com. Welcome to Milk Street, who's going? I'm Adele and I'm calling from Atlanta. Adele, how are you? I'm pretty good. How are you doing? I'm good. How can we help you? I have a question for you about soaking beans. I was looking for a little bit of guidance on whether or not I should soak dried beans before I cook them. On equivocally, yes. I tried the quick soak method when you bring them to a boil. I'll take them off the heatlet. I'm sick. It just doesn't work.

It doesn't work because they don't get as tender, right? And they're not as evenly cooked and be sure to salt the water. Salting makes a huge difference both for flavor and even cooking. So salt the soaking water. The soaking water. And salt the cooking water, but salt the soaking water to begin with. Have you ever used baking soda for the soak? Baking soda when you cook them, put a little baking soda in. It does work, but I find if you salt the soaking water and then salt

“the cooking water that's all you need to do. Also, it flavors the bean, which is really important,”

but doesn't it also tenderize the skin? What's salt? Yes. Yeah, the outer layer of the bean

which means that water gets in and you have more even cooking. When beans blow out,

there's uneven cooking and the outside just explodes. So salting gives you even penetration of the water and even cooking. Right. Okay. Yeah. For years, we were told not to salt the beans and not to add acid. And the acid part is correct. You don't want to add acid till the beans are just about done because that will retard their cooking. But the salt is a good thing. I'll cross the board and really flavors them nicely. It's sort of like when you add salt to pasta cooking,

liquid or rice cooking, liquid or potato cooking, liquid. It deeply flavors the item. Actually, we just tested that. Did you guess how many tablespoons per gallon? I'm scared.

“Cosher salt. I'm scared. Well, kosher we know is very coarse. What would you use?”

A for gallon? Oh, no. I'd use kosher. But how much would you use? What is it supposed to be? A tablespoon per six cups? Is that about right? We found that four tablespoons wasn't enough. Six tablespoons of kosher salt per gallon. Oh, you know, the government would get after this way too much sodium. Just another mark against me. Yeah. So yeah, go ahead and soak and soak overnight if you can. Oh, overnight. Oh, yeah. Is it possible to soak them too long? Yes, I would soak them

May 10 hours, maybe 12 hours. But after that, I'd rinse and drain and put them covered in a refrigerator. If you can't cook them right away, they'll start getting a little gnarly if you a little sunk too long yeah. And also if it's warm in your house, they can start to ferment. And you don't want that. No. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, our pleasure. Thanks for coming. Okay. Take care. Bye bye. It was a ring to a military radio. I'm Christopher Kimball. After the break, I speak with some

mean nose rat, author of salt fat acid heat, the four elements of good cooking. This is our glass of the American life. Do you know our show? Okay, we're the way I'm going to tell you about it. We make stories. Old fashion stories that hopefully pull you into the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations, and then you just want to find out what is going to happen and cannot stop listening. That's right. I'm talking

about stories to make you misappointments and ignore your loved ones. This American life, every week, wherever you get your podcast. This is Military Radio. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. I've read a lot of food science books beginning of course with Harold McGee's on food and cooking, which I suppose is the Bible of cooking science. You know, many are too scientific while others are nothing more than really cook books and

disguise. So when I flip through the pages of Semine Nussrads' new book, salt fat acid heat, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a convivial book about the science of cooking written in the vernacular. I started by asking Semine about the rumor that she taught Michael Pollan how to cook. Yeah, I mean, he already knew the basics. He was like, you know, in his 50s when I met him. So he already had been cooking for a lot of decades, but I definitely helped

him brush up on his skills. Your book, salt fat acid heat, at first, which I love, by the way,

at first reminded me of lots of books like Great Consous Elements of Taste or Mark Bittman did a book on mixing and matching different things. And it's one of these books where it's not just a cookbook. You actually are talking about the techniques of cooking and it's dense. I mean,

“you have to take, it's like, it's like going to school and getting a textbook. There's an element”

of that to it. So here's my question. What's your evidence that you can teach people to cook without starting with recipes? Is that something you think is really possible without Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of practice? Wow, you just got straight to the heart of it. You know, I think practice is implicit in it. So I don't think you will ever just immediately be able to use salt fat acid and heat or any sort of shorthand to end get to cooking. I think cooking

it comes with time and with practice. But I definitely think that these are the four sort of points on a compass that will lead anyone to good cooking and to good food. And I, you know, in the

beginning, I was a lot bolder when I first started teaching this and when I first started having

the classes and I really did believe that you could do it without a recipe. But as I started teaching people and cooking schools and going into elementary schools and just meeting various people,

“I realized that they needed recipes and so now I think of them more as the training wheels for people”

and, you know, getting familiar with recipes is a great way to learn the basic steps in a kitchen or the steps of how to navigate yourself through all sorts of different kinds of cooking.

talk about why did they end up that way? Well, why is Maldon salt that particular shape?

Yeah, the main thing that determines the shape and the size of a salt crystal is the paste at which the water evaporates and whether or not anything is done to it once the crystal has been formed. So for example, thinking about, you know, in the states, the two main brands of kosher salt are diamond crystal and Mortons, which comes in a blue box. And they are entirely different in in every way, in how salty they are, in how much salt per tablespoon there is by weight. And so

if you're following a recipe and it says when tablespoon kosher salt and you use the Mortons,

“you're actually using, I think, almost twice as much salt. So understanding that the way that”

those two kinds of salt have been treated to create different textures and densities will help you follow recipes better or eventually get to a point where you're so comfortable with your salt that you can just use your palette to guide you there. So the diamond crystal is actually rolled through rollers that makes it flat and hence it's a lot lighter and flaky and in some ways resembles the mountain salt from the mountain sea in England a lot more because that's also

in a flake format which is light and hollow and crunchy and much less salty per tablespoon. So how does salt, you know, everyone understands that salt enhances flavor in some way. But what you said in the book was sometimes, for example, it reduces bitterness, not by reducing bitterness directly but by enhancing other flavors such as sweetness. So

“how does salt work to enhance aromatic compounds or balance flavors?”

I'm not a scientist. I'm a cook who has struggled to understand the science so my translations of these interregular English might make some scientists shutter. But you know, I like to think of it in terms of almost like salt unlocking flavors for us. And so when a lot of times it works with aromatic molecules and as you know, you know, most of taste is aroma. So that's like when we're stuffed up with a cold, we can't taste food very much. I would say the vast majority of our

experience of taste is actually through smell which means that when we have a deeper, more intimate

experience with an aromatic molecule, our experience of flavor than is also more powerful.

So what salt often does is either by initiating osmosis and getting some water out of a food and making the percentage of aromatic molecules in a food higher, then we get sort of a more intense experience of that flavor. Here's a quote from the book. By disrupting a protein, salt prevents the coil that's the protein coil from shrinking when heated. So the water molecules remain bound and the piece of meat remains moist. So put that into English?

Basically for me, the way that I see that happening is, you know, we can just forget about the coils and just think about a piece of chicken. So for me, an example of something I do in my class is all the time is I'll season some chickens with salt in advance and then I'll season some chickens with salt right before I throw them in the oven. And then I do a side-by-side roasting of the two and when we pull them out and we butcher them, you can see not only are the chickens that have been salted in

advance, more deeply flavorful and more evenly flavorful, not just to salt down the outside and blend in the middle. But also when I stick my knife in to butcher the legs off, the ones that have been salted in advance, the meat is so tender and falling off the bone that it really almost just falls off, the legs almost fall off. I have your chart in front of me. I thought a lot of chicken eating. That was the best page in the book and just for the list of it. It was a very crisp

“chemical kind of page. Yeah, well, that's why I like it. Let's talk about pepper, which is”

just drives me insane. Everyone says salt and pepper is if they're equivalent, which they're not. And you point out in other cultures, you know, people might have a shaker of cumin and maraco or chili powder and turkey or zitar, the spice blend in the middle east or sugar and Thailand or fresh chilies and lime and lousy. So the idea that peppers this ubiquitous thing in cooking is just

nonsense. It's a spice that should be used when it's appropriate, right? I 100% agree. I always say salt and

pepper need a divorce. Yes. So to me, they're just their weak, you know, in general in the states, we sort of are cooking has more or less sort of descended from Western European cooking where pepper is really commonly used. And so I think people just sort of take it for granted because they're grandma or their mother put pepper in everything that they should put pepper in everything, but it's a

would put, I don't know, lime leaves and everything. Right. So so I try to be conscious about when

“I use it and I try to encourage other people to start thinking about it in that way too. I think you did”

it. We were talking about olive oil and I know someone was making tomato sauce to shape anise, right? There was a contest. Analis was obviously tasting and she could tell pretty quickly if the oil was a little bit off. That begs a question which is the very best extra virgin oils. You don't really should use them in cooking, right? Is that just to put on something before you serve it? Or if you're making a tomato sauce with a couple tablespoons of olive oil, would you use a very expensive

olive oil for that even though it's being heated? I wouldn't use a very expensive. I do agree that the very best olive oils are the beautiful, newly pressed ones that are so vibrant and almost neon green with all of the, you know, everything that's in there. Those ones do suffer with cooking, but that's not to say that good olive oil shouldn't be used in all cooking. You know, like, I think one of the interesting things that I learned was that Americans just because out of habit, essentially we have a

“taste, we prefer the taste of rancid olive oil because that's what we're nostalgic for. Because”

all of the olive oil producing countries save the good stuff and send the bad stuff over here and get and we can't discriminate. So it's more about learning how to discriminate and, you know, one of my favorite olive oils that's really not that expensive. It is extra virgin, but it's not the highest quality. Is the like Costco organic olive oil which tests really well on the independent analysis done here in California every year and it's super clean and I use that sort of for my

everyday cooking and then I save the good oils for grizzling on top and for vinaigrettes.

How does fat carry flavor? I mean, I've heard that a million times, I've actually talked about it many

times. Do you understand how that works? I don't. Back to the idea of aroma, giving us the most powerful experience of taste and flavor, it's all about the aromatic molecules. And I like to

“imagine them almost like clinging to fat. And so the easiest way, I think, to imagine that or”

experience it is to slice up a couple cloves of garlic and have two pans and one pan has a few tablespoons of water and one pan has a few tablespoons of oil and you can simmer some garlic in the water and sizzle a little bit in the oil. And then if you dip your finger in the water, it kind of just tastes like watery garlic you think. But if you dip your finger in the oil, it's aromatic and flavorful and garlic flavor is really penetrated throughout. So it's a carrier,

to me, that word carry couldn't be better. It really is a carrier of flavor. And when you put anything that has a lot of aromatic molecules, in fact, the flavors will be distributed and sort of travel throughout the food much more powerfully. So another question I've had is the idea that gluten, like a higher gluten flour, like bread flour, actually produces a area of love sometimes, right? Because you get a stretch of your gluten, it allows more rise in the bread. And then when

you talk about gluten when it comes to cakes or biscuits, you don't want to develop the gluten because they become tough. So when bread baking, sometimes gluten is a good thing because it allows the bread to rise and actually become area in less dense. But in a cake, gluten or a pie pastry, gluten is sort of the enemy. How do you reconcile those two things? Well, so I used to talk exactly in the terms that you just spoken of like gluten is good in bread

and bad in tender pastries. So I before I really understood how gluten worked and what it was, what we were after in cooking, it was easier for me to divide it into this black and white thing of like, we want it here and we don't want it here. But when I started to do a little bit of homework and

understand, and I started, well, ultimately I had to come down to it, it came down to the point where

once I had to describe it to other people, I realized that that wasn't true. And I kept going to my friends who are these great bakers over at Tartine Bakery and San Francisco. And I would bring them these charts and I'd be like, is this true that like pies is on one end of the gluten spectrum and bread is on the other. And every time they were, they said no, because there's very rarely that very strict division. And even in a pie, you do need some gluten to get everything to come together and to create

flakes. So they're sort of a sweet spot in the middle, which is why we don't use cake flour to make pie. We use cake flour only for the most tender delicate cakes and sometimes for biscuits. But when you want flakes, or if you want all of the layers in a puff pastry, it's about a sweet spot, it's a middle place where there is a little bit of kneading. There is some gluten that has to be

a long time to understand. Well, you're being very gentle with me, but that was a great answer. You know, this term, you mommy's been around a long time. Last five or ten years, everyone's talking about it. Have we gone overboard here? You know, it's a meaty flavor, originally,

“was discovered, corn and quote by a Japanese scientist. Are we too enthralled with you, mommy?”

I 100% agree with you on that. You know, my friend, Cal, Peter Noah, who was one of my teachers at

Japanese, he is very clever with words, and he always calls it "too mommy." So, and often,

my experience of that has also happened with ramen. And part of it is, you know, just because something good, more of it doesn't make it better. So, I think it's great. It's a great sort of secret weapon for home cooks to understand and be able to identify where what ingredients have umami and how to work that into food, or that sometimes when you taste something and it falls flat, it's because it needs a little bacon, or a little ketchup, or a little Parmesan cheese, but

maybe adding ketchup and bacon and Parmesan cheese and mushrooms and anchovies. Maybe a little too much. You know, thank you very much. Real marks. I was interviewing someone a few months ago, meathead, gold one as he likes to call himself. Oh, yeah. Famous grilling book did very well last year. And he said grill marks are a disaster, and I said, "Oh, he said, "Well, what about all the gray meat in between the grill marks?" He said. So, talk about grill marks. Meathead's my new best friend

for saying that, you know? That's exactly what I always say is, if you're getting grill marks,

then all of this other flavor of the potential is being lost on all of the rest of it. So, I really learned this lesson by watching actually Alice Waters grill um, quails and sausages, and she was just, I remember I was really young cook and I had no idea. I was always so afraid of the open fire and the grill, and this woman, like as a small as a hummingbird, just standing there, and she just was restless, moving everything around, making sure that everything got evenly

browned on all the sides. And it was a very big aha moment for me to understand that it had so little to do with getting that perfect. I think it's like 45 degree angle by 45 degree angle mark. You know, then you're missing out on all the rest of the thing. The cross hatches are pointless. Time for philosophy here. So, um, in Vietnam, I gather, there's a term referring to the right

“intent for a Buddhist for coming into cook food. You have to cook food with a right intent.”

There's a mindfulness to it. You're obviously very smart and you love to cook. Do you have a philosophy of cooking that might be similar to any of those or eat a free? Yeah, I have yet to come up with the perfect sort of language for it. For a while, I used to call it the three peas, you know, presence, patience, and practice. And so, if you could sort of have those things every time you come to the kitchen that, um, that it would, that, you know, what you make will be great. And it's more

about a mindset of like being okay with mistakes and really just being fully present to which I think in this day and age is really hard with the phone and all the things and people running around and stuff like that and everything sort of working against us from being, to be really present with our cooking. But what I've noticed is cooking sort of makes you a beginner every time, which I love, you know, and so any time I get cocky and I'm like, oh, I've done this a hundred times.

I don't need to pay attention. That's the time when I burn it or that's the time when the log rolls off the fire. Have you seen this at work when you've cooked with other people or watch other people cooking? Have you seen that moment where cooking somehow gets into their soul, you know, it's sort of a transformative moment? Yeah, I think for me, one of the most powerful moments was working with Michael Pollin, who is so analytical and so in his mind. He's so intelligent

and exists so much in his mind. And I am all heart and like body, you know? And so we're a funny pair and I would show up and every time we cooked for the first like several weeks, almost everything we made started with onions or mirrored paw or some sort of vegetable base. And so he, they got the hang of that pretty quickly and then they started doing that before I even got there and I think over time he started to realize that this time taking doing this

thing that he had always viewed as this druggery of like cooking, peeling and sizing and cooking

“onions or these things that seem so boring and sort of like the thing you have to get through”

to get to the fancy part of cooking, they started to understand how that really investing that time and energy makes everything taste better. And I watched him transform and what was so amazing

science really seriously and philosophy really seriously. I saw him sort of turn into a fuzzy heart man who came around and really understood that cooking is about humanity and it's about being together with people and that the time that we spend doing it is not time wasted, it's time we'll spend. That was some mean rush, he's author of salt fat acid heat, the four elements of good cooking. Now as once dumb enough to stand up at a technology conference about 20 years ago and to argue

that the promise of the internet to provide unlimited information was flawed because humans only need so much data to live the good life. Now I'm very glad that nobody posted a video at moment on YouTube but I did have a point too much information can be a liability when pursuing the creative arts such as cooking. For example I don't need to understand us Moses or the diffusion coefficient to successfully pride a turkey. But if I don't know that table salt is in fact

twice as salty as many kosher salts by volume, well that would not only be useful it would

actually be critical and that's the problem with information. How do you know what you really need to know?

You're listening to Mastery Radio I'm Christopher Kimball. After the break more of your cooking questions with my co-host Sarah Moulton she's star of Sarah's weeknight meals as well as author of Home Cooking 101. This is Mastery Radio I'm Christopher Kimball. Right now we're going to take some calls of my co-host Sarah Moulton Sarah are you ready? I am so ready. Welcome to Milk Street who's calling. This is Rainah Hill from Tadnika, Tennessee. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for taking

my call. My pleasure. How can we help you? Well I have two teenage daughters and a husband who are

“crazy for trouble fries and of course to make a great trouble fry you have to make a great”

french fry and I can't seem to perfect that crispy, shoot, string, french fry at home so it's hoping you could help me out. Okay a few things. The traditional method is two fries, 325 degree oil, peanut oil, two rounds of time. Two rounds of frying. That two long french fries. Yes. Right. Good point. Fry them to the really lightly color, take them out, let them drain for 10 minutes, heat the oil to 375 and finish them off. I've gone to a lot of places who have good

fries and ask them why theirs is 10 times better than mine. Well they have a fry later, first of all,

which helps. A lot of people have told me they use potato starch on the outside of the fries and that seems to work. There's another method we did years ago which is based on Joel Robashon. And oddly enough you put all the fries in room temperature oil in a Dutch oven, turn it on to medium high and you cook it for 20 to 25 minutes and then take them out. It's one fry not too. And the interesting thing about that is the uptake of oil into the potatoes is less. When you

cool down the fries between the first and second fry, it's the cooling down where all the oil gets absorbed. If you put a french fry into oil, the oil won't go into the potato because it's full

“of starch molecules in water. You have to get some of that water out of the potato before the oil”

goes in and that tends to happen during the cooling down period. So they were about 30% less oil uptake with that method. Now what they fabulous fries, they were very good fries. Recently I was reading your old colleague Kenji Lopez Alt and he soaks the fries in vinegar water and that really seems to help. The knee fry them at a really high temperature too. 400 degrees. Yeah, that was higher. He does the two fry for 50 seconds and then he cools them

for about 30 minutes and he said then it's really good. If you really cool them and freeze them before the second fry. I did read that. Yeah, so you know you might want to check out his method. It's the food lab. Yeah, the food lab book. I want to see soaks the fries in the vinegar water. I actually cooked them. I'm sorry. I said so. He cooked them until they were fully tender but not fallen apart and they're about a quarter to three each of them in thick. So that is not very long.

“I think one of the reasons there's a two-fry process with french fries is you want to make”

sure they get cooked on the inside as well as the outside. And the troubles if you just do one high heat or high-ish heat and throw them in and cook them from start to finish, they don't cook

properly in the middle. But whenever you cook potatoes otherwise in water you always start them

in cold water. So I wonder starting them in well room temp oil has the same effect of cooking them all the way through. How do you recommend dressing up to get the trouble flavor without adding a lot of extra oil? Just use truffle salt. Well that's one and the another one is there's a

give these suggestions a try. I appreciate it. Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Take care. Bye bye.

This is Christopher Kimball's Milk Street radio. If you'd like your cooking questions answered, give us a ring 1-855-4-BOTI that's 855-426-984-3. You can also email us at [email protected].

“You can find our shows and iTunes stichor and tune in. Welcome to Milk Street, who's calling?”

Hi, this is Jared. How are you? I'm doing well. It's an honor to talk to you guys. That's an honor to talk to you. So I'm getting married in August. Congratulations. Thank you. My fiance is kind of a picky eater but I want to try and get her to branch out more. I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions on cookbooks for kids and like getting kids to eat new food. How old is your fiance? She's not a kid. Okay. I should have practiced that.

She knows that she has the thickness of a kid when it comes to food and will only like a hamburger with pickles and mustard and nothing else. Are you doing the cooking or she's doing it?

I definitely will be. My first thought is I for kids and we didn't make kids food for the kids.

We just made food. Maybe she just hasn't had a lot of experience with different foods and she might be surprised. I wouldn't assume that she's only going to like hamburger and mashed potatoes. Forever. Something else you can do is I call them bridge recipes. Take a pasta. You know, when you use an unusual pasta with it, take a steak. Every society almost has a steak. Every culture has a steak with different spices or seasonings. There's a Korean steak, there's a Japanese

steak. Do fried chicken. They do it in South Korea. They do it in Japan. They do it all over the world. So do a chicken soup. You can do a Mexican chicken soup, a Moroccan chicken soup, a Sichuan chicken soup. So take something that's familiar and just have a variation on the theme. That's really a good way to get people to take one step. I wouldn't make hot stone pot or something totally different. But chicken soup, every culture has chicken soup and just make one that's a little more interesting

“and sort of edge away from the basic. That's what I would do. Now, he did ask about cookbooks.”

Katie Workman has a good cookbook for cooking with kids and it has nothing to do about tricking the kids. It's just good simple recipes. But see, the trouble with good simple recipes and they are good simple recipes is that's not going to expand to horizon, which it seems like is what you want to do. Is she open to trying new things? I'm pretty sure. I mean, this is totally self-promotional, but we're coming out with our cookbook this fall. No street.

And we have a lot of bridge recipes there. So you might be able to pick up a few things that if you want to step out a little. And also, I do think traveling. So I'm not saying you can spring to go to Paris or Rome or anything like that, but even take her to Charleston, take her to Chicago. Oh, we might be moving there. Charleston's a great food town and there's

“wonderful southern food and there's also other kinds of food there as well. And just try to”

gently coax her to try something new. Yeah, thank you. And I hope you do move to Charleston. That's such a beautiful place. Oh, I'm really hoping for my fingers across. Yes, thank you all very much. Thank you. Thanks. Hello, who do we have on the phone? Hi, this is Cheryl Wong. Hi, Cheryl. Where are you calling from? Dexter, Michigan. How can we help you? My husband and I are new time

duck owners. We have time duck. Wow, he's that way. That way, that's the first person someone's

called and said, wait, we're new time duck owners. Yeah, that's good. That's the first, okay. They started laying towards the end of this winter and now we're getting about 10 eggs a day. Oh my goodness. And so, I've been trying to boil the eggs and they're really hard to peel. Do you have any suggestions for getting that silkier texture? And then the second question is if you have any suggestions for big things to do with a lot of eggs. Well, I say invite huge crowds of people over

for starts. I'm going to tell you my favorite way to cook hard boiled eggs, chicken eggs. And I'm hoping that it will translate to duck eggs. This is Sarah's favorite question. This is my favorite question. She got all, she's all excited. I did. Well, I ended up working with Julia Child because of a hard boiled egg. So I have a real, you know, love of hard boiled eggs. Anyway, the way I used to cook them is the way Julia used to cook them, which is you start the eggs

and cold water. You bring it up to a boil. You remove the pan from the heat and you let it sit. She let it sit for 15 minutes. Now I do it like till 10. And then you get them right out of the hot water and right into ice water. Then somebody turned me on to a better way to cook hard boiled eggs, which is to steam them. Now, I have one of those fold-out steamers and I put it in a pot and you put

And then you bring that up to a full boil with lid on and then you turn it down to a medium boil,

“take off the lid and very carefully. I use my hands, but you should use this spoon.”

Then you put the eggs in, you put the lid back on, you steam it at a medium steam. Again, I do it 10 minutes because I like a little translucency in my egg yolks, but if you want them cooked through you take it 12 minutes. Now, if duck eggs are bigger, so you've got an idea how long it

takes to cook them. So you cook them for the same amount of time, you would have boiled them basically.

Maybe slightly less. And then again, get them right out of the pan and into ice and water and let them cool completely. And then crack them a bit, let them sit a few more minutes in the water. So the water seems underneath. So if you have put the eggs in cold water, let them cool down completely, then you take them out on what rove them on the counter with your hand to crack the, okay. That makes sense. Yeah, and then put it back into the water. Yeah, just so that the water seems

“to, but it's ice and water, not just cold water, ice and water. Okay. And I think that should work,”

but I really would love for you to tell us now. Chris, I'm going to throw it to you ideas, big ideas for using many eggs. No, I don't have any ideas. You could make a gigantic frittata for dinner.

You could. Yeah. A Spanish tortilla with the potatoes and the olive oil would be terrific. Yeah.

Yeah, it makes a great fast tortilla. Yeah, that would be my favorite thing to do with it. Okay. All right, do a report back. Let us know how it goes. I will. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. This is Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio. If you'd like your cooking questions answer, give us a ring 1-855-4-BOTI that's 855-426-984-3. You can also email us at [email protected]. You can find our shows and iTunes, Stitcher, and Tune In.

This week's most street basic is pasta at the ready. If you have leftover pasta, simply oil it well with extra virgin olive oil and then refrigerate. The next day or two,

“if you want to use it, simply heat a large cast iron skillet over medium-high heat and add the pasta.”

Stir only occasionally to allow the pasta to brown and crisp up in spots. This works with any stellar pasta, including Asian wheat noodles. Now you can dust it with grated Parmesan and top with a softly set fridayg for a quick meal. This is most street radio. I'm Christopher Kimball. Right now, Dan Pashman of the Sparkful podcast is here to talk about the future burgers or rather the burgers of the future,

which apparently involve bloody vegetables. Dan, how are you? Good Chris, how are you doing? I just have a feeling you're going to just take a totally different tack this week. Well, I do like to keep you on your toes, Chris, and summer-time grilling season is coming, and it's time for us to talk about burgers. Okay. I don't know about you, Chris, but I have certainly in recent years made it effort to eat less meat. I'm still an omnivore, but I try to

eat less meat than I used to. Have you made a similar transition? I love meat. I do end up using it more as a flavoring than as the main thing on the plate, so a little bit less. Yeah. Anyway, I don't need to remind folks that humans in general eat a lot more meat than we used to a couple hundred years ago, and there's a lot more of us on the planet. You got to put 13 pounds of food into a cow to get one pound of food for us out of it. The whole thing is just not exactly

sustainable. So as much as I love meat, I'm trying to cut back. And burgers are a really interesting frontier in the effort to reduce our meat consumption. So the first entry level step that you can try that I've been experimenting with is what people call a blended burger. And that is when you take some non-meat components and mix them with your ground beef. For instance, I had wanted a place in New York made by chef Jahangir Metta, his restaurant graffiti, and he does a blended

burger. It's about 25% mushrooms and other herbs and spices, 75% ground beef. And he season's it with cumin and coriander, garlic and onion. Almost the way you might see isn't like a lamb kabob. And

it is fantastic. You would never know that it was 25% vegetables. And it does have a different flavor

because of all those spices, different flavor from a sort of traditional old-fashioned American burger. But it's you're using less meat and it's got a much more complex flavor profile. And there's a million other kinds of things you could add in to your blended burger. Have you ever tried that? Yeah, but then blended burger. I've never heard of that. I like the name and I actually like the concept, I like that. So it's sort of like a cough to seasonings with mushrooms. Right. I think

of it kind of like the hybrid car of burgers. You know, it's like it's using some gas, but some electric. So it's not using as much gas. And it costs twice as much to buy. Yeah, exactly. The next step

being poured into research right now for two different types of burgers. One is a truly vegetarian burger that can pass for beef. That looks like raw meat that sizzles when you put it in the pan. That caramelizes on the outside and stays pink on the inside that has all of the different components of a beef burger, but yet is a hundred percent vegetarian. And I've actually got out and sampled some of these. One is called the Beyond Burger. Maybe I come in a called Beyond

Meat Bill Gates as an investor. Yeah, I'm putting a lot of money into this. And there's another one called the Impossible Burger, which is at a few select restaurants in New York and San Francisco.

I tried that one. I found that both of the burgers I was blown away first of all by how good they

were. They're not at the point that I would mistake them for a beef burger, but certainly closer to beef than anything I've ever had in the veggie burger realm. That's for sure. Yeah, are these

“the burgers that are grown essentially laboratories or these actually vegetarian burgers?”

Now, these are actually vegetarian that they're made mostly with plant proteins and often fermented wheat, which gives it a certain kind of funk. I will say that they have the coloring of the burger and the texture down really well. You get a very nice crispy caramelization on the exterior of the burger. It doesn't have beefy flavor, but you know, if you want the kind of burger that's going to have a nice burger sauce or ketchup and mustard and you're going to put pickles and

cheese and lettuce and tomato on it and put it on a big bun, you know, the kind of burger where a finely crafted burger might get lost anyway, you're going to have a great experience. If you want something where the meat is on display, you know, it's still not quite there, but still very promising. And I actually want to do an experimental where I take the ground beef from the beyond burger and mix it with real beef to make a blended burger. And that I think could be huge. That's

so like you. You got your play dough out and you're going to mix the colors. Exactly. But the

“real front here that I think is the most amazing is Petri dish meat lab grown meat. And this the”

best way that I can describe the way it works is like Chris, did you ever get tech when you're a kid you ever have strep throat? Yes. Remember they would stick those swabs down your throat and they'd rub it in that red Petri dish and it's something grows. It means you have strep. Yes, I do remember that one works well. Well, the base of the way this works is that they, I mean, I'm simplifying the process a little bit, but it is not so far off from essentially swapping a live

cow rubbing it in a Petri dish and then a burger grows. Yeah, a burger grows. I actually spoke to one of these guys a year ago, a 20,000 per se pound for beef and 7,000 dollars a pound for chicken, which I think they're doing. So yeah, I mean, look, the price point is high. I'll grant you that.

Thank you. It's not there yet. But the idea of it is amazing. I mean, they had the first live

taste test of one in London in 2013. Back then, they could only grow the muscle, not the the fat. Now they're working on getting the fat in there and combined in the fat, but the reports on that word that it did have a very beefy flavor. And so if you combine that beefy flavor with the

“textural components that we're seeing in the veggie burgers of the future, I think that's very,”

it's very promising. Well, this goes under the category of things like self-driving cars, the mission to Mars, you know, things that either will 10 years from now will go, why didn't I think of that? Or what a dumb idea that was. Yeah, woodau, I think that's actually interesting. The blended one, I think is very interesting, because that's it's sort of like, as you said, it's like the hybrid car. It's available technology and it solves a good part of the problem now.

That's right. I mean, and if you think about if you're having a barbecue, if you're making 10 or 15 burgers, you're buying several pounds of meat, if you can use 25% less beef in those burgers, and if everybody were to do that, it would have a real, a real positive impact, and make some delicious burgers. I have a question for you. Please. You're a crusader for the

a name, right? You're just, hold on a second, I just need to revise my Twitter profile,

and I need to order some new business cards, but yes, go on. You're talking about saving the world, you're talking about the use of energy resources, you're talking about the future. Is this the new Dan Pashman we should look forward to in the rest of this year? Well, Chris, I think that, in all my work, in one way or another, I am trying to spread the love of deliciousness. And, you know, if the planet can last a few more years, then that's going

to be, you know, a few hundred more good meals for us. Spread the love of deliciousness. That's almost a t-shirt. Almost. Well, Dan Pashman, thank you for spreading the love. Here at Milksree. Thank you, Chris, take care. That was Dan Pashman, host of the Sportful Podcast. You know, my interview with

as a currency, the cause of war, and also the foundation for empire. Today, salt still retains

“its magical properties. Salt and coffee reduces bitterness, salt, and a brine improves the”

ability of proteins to retain water during cooking. And, of course, soaking beans and salt helps

them to cook evenly. My favorite use of salt is throwing it over my love shoulder, which

“blinds the devil who is always lurking behind me. So, when you ask someone to pass the salt,”

you get history and magic, not just seasoning.

Thanks for listening to Milksree Radio. You can listen to our weekly shows and iTunes,

“Stitcher Tune in Spotify, also on our very own website MilksreeRadio.com. We'll be back next week.”

Christopher Kimber's Milksree Radio is produced by Milksree in association with WGBH, executive producers, Melissa Baldino, and Stephanie Stender, producer, Amy Padula, production assistant, Carly Helmut Talk. Senior Audio Engineer, Douglas Sugar. Senior Audio Editor, Melissa Allison, with help from Vicky Merrick and Sidney Lewis. Audio mixing by Jay Allison Ediglantic, a public media, production help Debbie Padak. Theme music by Tubaab Crew,

additional music by George Brandel Eggloft. Christopher Kimber's Milksree Radio is distributed by PRX. From PRX.