This is most your radio from Pierre Axe, I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. Is it possible to become better at tasting? That means to enjoy dinner, wine, and your favorite dessert, even more. Today, we'll share secrets from competitive tasters and explore why palettes are so complicated, at least according to pro-taster and bourbon expert Logan Haynes. I compare palettes a lot of times to colorblind people.
And so if somebody looks at a painting of an ocean that is desensitized to blue and green colors, they may look at that painting and go, it's just kind of boring. But somebody that is more sensitive to those blue and green colors can look at that painting and go, wow, you know, that is the most beautiful painting that I've ever seen in my life. And palettes are very similar. Later in the show, lessons in how to taste.
The first time joined by barbecue expert Meathead to learn his tips for grilling the summer from his most trusted tools to his favorite techniques. Hey Meathead, welcome back to Mostridge. Oh, it's always fun to talk to you Chris. It's fun to talk to you. So let's start here. I think I know the answer, but what's the one grilling tool you really can't live without? The most important tool you can have cooking both indoors and outdoors is a good digital thermometer.
This is 2023. If you've got a dial thermometer in your kitchen drawer that you rely on, put it in your driveway and back your car over it. It's a worthless piece of junk. It's a technology from the 1800s. It takes 30 seconds to read. It's not accurate. Contemporary rapid read or if you want to call them instant read thermometers will give you a precision temperature in under five seconds for under 30 bucks. Okay. Here's another topic. I think grill grates so the food doesn't stick.
Now I come from the school of oil at to death like 12 times before you put the food on. I think you may be, you know, oil the food not the grates as I remember. But I find that with let's say fish like skin side down salmon, chicken skin side down, I still run into trouble with that. Especially if I don't leave it long enough to release. Any thoughts about that? Fish and chicken are the bane of every backyard cook. They're just going to stick to the great no matter what you do.
You can put 10 W at 30 on those grates and it's still going to stick. I prefer to oil the food. The food's coming out of the fridge at 38 degrees. So when you oil the food, the oil is cooler and it stays cooler longer so it doesn't crack. When you oil the grates, not only cracks, it smokes. And the flavor of burning smoking oil is not appetizing. So I prefer to oil the food and don't worry, it's not going to raise your caloric level that much. Most of it will end up dripping off anyhow.
Do you clean your grill after grilling? Leave the heat on high and really clean it before you turn everything off or do you just clean it before you use it the next time? I do in theory, but the problem is is I drink wine. And I'm sitting at the dinner table and I'm having a conversation. And so the grill is still on out there and there goes a $20 tank of gas. But I do fire it up before I cook. I get it really as hot as humanly possible. Scrape it down then.
Try to get carbon as well as grease off. A lot of guys think, okay, I got this wonderful smoke coming out of my grill. It's grease. You don't want grease smoke on your food. So you've got to scrape it down. Is there a reliable device to twist onto your propane tank that shows you how much you have left? No. There are devices that you can put between the hose and the tank. But it measures the pressure and the pressure is the same until the thing is almost empty.
There is a device that I'm playing with now. I just got it in two weeks ago. It's a little magnet that sticks to the side of the propane tank. When you turn on the tank and you start cooking, the temperature in the tank starts to change. So it will locate where the temperature differential is. That's cool. It will show you the level of fill on the tank. That the key there is always have a backup tank on hand. And we all know that because we've had times and we didn't have a backup tank on.
What about crazy gadgets? When everybody who likes back-yard cooking gets sucked into some of this stuff. Are there any gadgets that are just not so gadgets? Yeah. My all-time favorite is there's like a Wumba that has wire brushes on it. And you put it on your grill and you close the lid and it bumbles around. It bangs into the wall and it's supposed to brush your grill clean. It doesn't really quite do it.
It's just hysterical because every newspaper and magazine has given this thing publicity because it looks cool and it sounds cool. Not my favorite. It doesn't work all that great. I just, you know, you've got to scrape them down by hand. And for me, a really good quality wire bristle brush is still the best way to go.
So another thing that I think is interesting is that people load up massive amount of coal if it's a charcoal grill and they cook some steaks on it, some burgers and the things hot for another hour. So do you often, like when you're done with a meat, for example, just always throw some vegetables on it or onions or other things you can use later just to make use of the heat or you just shut down the grill.
Absolutely. Yeah. Throw an egg plant on there and when it, you know, just char the heck out of the exterior and you've got this marvelous soft. You make your Boba GNU shout of that. You can throw some onions on there and you know, even cold charred onions are delicious. You throw chicken on there. Cold chicken is delicious. So yeah, or, I mean, you can douse the coals. It doesn't hurt them at all.
You can dump water on them just as long as you let them dry out thoroughly before you use them again. Do you have any tricks? I mean, let's assume you get into trouble. Let's assume you went in to grab a beer. You come back out, flames, the chickens burning. Do you have some ways of fixing disasters when you're grilling or at least mitigating them? I have a big stack of carry out menus in my kitchen drawer. There you go.
I mean, yeah, yeah, I mean, if chicken is going to burn, it's almost always the skin. And you can pull skin off chicken and it's darn good without the skin. And what I will often do is I will grill that skin separately. And I'll take those cracklings because they get crunchy like potato chips and I'll leave the sprinkler on a salad or in a sandwich. Those things are great. Finally, you are adventurous, griller. Like I talked to a guy in London who has a Middle Eastern restaurant.
He was talking about he's grilled over whale burrows, any container he can find. Do you ever do that sort of crazy stuff? Well, I have because I want to see if it works and I experiment with it. But unfortunately or fortunately, I have just about every kind of grill you can imagine. Yeah, I've dug a hole in the beach. You know, I've played with a garbage can, but you know, there are just so many nice cooking devices out there.
And even the cheap ones that are under a hundred bucks, once you understand the concepts, the physics and the chemistry involved, you can make them all work. I think that understanding what's going on under the hood is really crucial. Meadhead, thank you. Now I know what I'm doing right, doing wrong, mostly the latter. I'll call you every summer just to get a checkup. Thanks. Oh, Christopher, thank you very much for having me on. It's always fun to talk to you.
That was meadhead, founder of amazing ribs.com, also author of The Science of Great barbecue and grilling. Now it's time to answer your cooking questions with my co-host, Sarah Moulton. Sarah's, of course, the star of Sarah's weeknight meals on public television, also author of home cooking, one on one. So Chris, I have a question for you before we take any calls. What is your absolute favorite way to eat or cook with tomatoes?
If it's a good tomato, then you just slice it and put sea salt on and eat it out of hand. But if it's not, then you've got to go into remedial tomatoes one on one. Yeah, with some other flavorful ingredients. I wouldn't say it's tragic, because there are other things and there were so much worse. But in terms of the culinary world, what's happened to tomatoes is just... I agree with you. They're just tasteless. I just remembered when you were talking about salt and eating out of hand.
When I was a kid, my favorite way to eat tomatoes was on white bread with mayonnaise, and then I was like, oh, thinly sliced. But that's actually quite tasty. Yeah, really good. I might have to revisit that this summer if I could find some... That's very old school. If I can find some good tomatoes. That's when you have a yellow no pad with little stubby pencil. It's like... You have to have the whole 1950s thing. Yeah. Alright, let's take a call. Welcome to Milk Street, who's calling?
Hi, this is Deb Lieben. How are you? I'm very good. Thank you. How can we help you? I'm so excited to talk to you guys. Thank you for the opportunity. 29 years ago, I invested in a stand mixer, put it on my kitchen counter and said goodbye to my hand mixer. I'm a big fan of cooking shows, and I see chefs use both a stand mixer and a hand mixer. And I can't figure out why.
My question is whether there's a time when I actually should be using a hand mixer instead of a stand mixer, and do I need to reinvest in one? That's a great question. Actually, I've been thinking about this a lot recently. A stand mixer obviously can do bread dough, although I do pizza dough in a food processor, actually. And I also like to do bread by hand, or really thick, you know, like a cookie dough or something that's really thick is going to be tough with a hand mixer.
Stand mixer has problems. It's hard to add ingredients at some mass to the mixing whisk or the paddle doesn't get to the very bottom of the bowl. You know, it's not shaped exactly right. So you end up with some stuff at the bottom, which is not great. And you also can't really see the texture. It's easy to monitor, let's say egg whites in a bowl with a hand mixer, hand electric one. So if you're going to do a lot of bread or a lot of very stiff doughs, like cookie doughs, yeah, a stand mixer.
But boy, if you're going to do everything else, I'd like a hand mixer because you can really see what's going on. Try to do two egg whites in a stand mixer. Good luck, you know, it's just not going to work. So it's a conundrum. If you're willing to knead your bread by hand, then you're really left with maybe, you know, a stiff cookie dough is a little problematic. But you know, I think you could get away with a hand mixer with the exception of bread. What do you think, Sarah? I agree.
As a matter of fact, really, it's impossible to do just two egg whites in a stand mixer because of that gap between the bottom of the whisk and the bottom of the bowl. So the egg white that's there is not getting agitated the way it should. So I never use a stand mixer unless I have, oh, I don't know, at least four egg whites. Well, with a stand mixer, you got to stop the machine. You got to lift the head up. Then sometimes you have to take the whisk off.
You have to whisk it and hold it up and see what's going on. So with a hand mixer, that takes a nanosecond. Yeah, you just turned it upside down. But you're going to check those egg whites four or five times in the last minute, right? And so it is a little, I guess I didn't realize how upset I was about my stand mixer. Well, I know, but it does. I need to get a divorce for my stand mixer. No, no, but it does do the strong jobs. You do need it for bread or for really stiff cookie doughs.
It's more of a workhorse. I don't want to say you need both, but if you have both, they have different uses. I mean, I have a stand mixer. I'm not going to get rid of it. It's like part of the family now. Well, do you do a lot of egg whites? I do. I make a sponge cake and it uses like six or eight egg whites kind of thing. But you're right.
You do have to lift it up, put it down, and then when you're mixing a cake, sometimes like the bottom doesn't get mixed up, I hadn't really thought of all those things. There is a trick, though, I use, I finish egg whites by hand. In other words, I'll get close, take the bowl out, take the whisk off, and whisk the egg whites using the whisk from the stand mixer in my right hand. And that way you have total control over getting it just right.
I think the real question you're asking is, is it worth it to go out and it's not just the money, it's like you got to go store it somewhere. And my answer is, you know, stick with the stand mixer. Yeah. It's a little annoying, but do you really want another box under the counter somewhere you have to drag it out? Yeah. It's a counter space issue, right? Yeah. It does take up a lot of counter space. Anyway, I would just stick with the stand mixer. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Thank you so much.
This has been so much fun. Take care. Take care. Take care. Welcome to Milk Street, who's calling. Hi, this is JJ from Cleveland, Georgia. Hi JJ. How can we help you today? Every year my dad has a big garden with all kinds of vegetables that we can and pickle and ferment. And I was looking at the corn the other day and I noticed how big the leaves are. And it just made me think about cooking with banana leaves. And I was wondering, you know, is there a way to use the leaves?
We've used the husks in the past to make like tamales, but what would be the flavor profile of like corn leaves? And how would you go about cooking with them? I imagine you could use them pretty much the same way you use banana leaves to wrap things in and to cook them. They're fairly large these leaves. Yeah, there are some of them are going to like three feet long and they're probably six to eight inches wide. Yeah, I don't think the leaves are as wide as the banana leaf.
So I don't know if wrapping in them is going to be very practical. I mean, the husk of the corn itself that would work. I think the leaves are fairly narrow as you said six inches maybe or less. Right. I'm not quite sure how you'd wrap effectively in that. Okay. But it's a good question. It is an excellent question because I mean, you know, like everybody throws out carotops, well, carotops are great in soup and stuff. So you're right to be thinking this way because we waste way too much food.
So you asked this question because someone's got a big corn field? Well, no, it's just my dad has this big garden and I just saw it and was thinking about the waste. I was thinking that we eat the corn. We use the husk for tamales and then could we use these and I just thought about banana leaves. I think I would scratch this off your eco friendly to-do list. Okay. If flowers under and just let it fertilize. Plow it under, it's being recycled. That way. Yeah, recycling. Yeah. Okay. All right.
Thanks, JJ. We'll call you very much. Okay. That's a bite. This is a most jade radio. Give us a call anytime. The number is 855-426-9843. One more time. 855-426-9843. Or simply email us at questions at millstreetradio.com. Welcome to millstreet, who's calling. This is Brad Fortenberry from Northwest Arkansas. So how can we help you? Honestly, I was listening to the show. I heard you mention about your strong opinions on old-fashioned and figured that I would call in with my martini question.
I can't seem to get my dirty martini right. I'm pretty new to the at-home bartending and it just always tastes better to craft cocktail bar or at my local watering hole. And it was one of you had any advice for me. Well, let's start with your recipe. What are you doing? Two ounces of gin, depending on the bottle available. And ounce of olive juice and a half ounce of dry vermouth and normally a dash or two of orange bitters.
I think one thing you'd want to think about is the amount of olive brine here. I mean, if you're having two ounces of alcohol, I think you'd want to start with like a quarter ounce, maybe half an ounce. How much vermouth are you using? Half ounce. You might want to bring that to both of them down to quarter ounce to start. You then stir it and strain it or you shake it. So I've sparing strength. Yeah. I'm a shake kind of guy, but anyway. Well, I have two questions.
One is when you like it better at your local watering hole. What is it that you like better? Typically, you know, the salt of the brine that my bartender uses just seems to bring out the botanicals and the gin a little bit more. Maybe you should ask your bar what olives they use. But I have another question. You start out by saying the gin, whatever gin. Is it really whatever gin? Not whatever gin. I typically will use aviation or hindricks.
I try to use quality gin to pump pouring, you know, a spirit forward cocktail. What you don't want to do, I mean, the botanicals and gin are subtle and you want to taste them. Something else that goes into this cocktail has to be take a back seat. Well, it's just a little hint of some other things, but with that much brine or that much vermouth, you're just going to blow the subtlety of the gin out of the water, which is going to ruin the culture. Right. And also vermouth is a little bit sweet.
So I agree with what Chris said to cut back on the other two things, but I would ask your bar what olives they use because that brine could be very important. Okay. Yeah. That's a great place to start. I love it. All right, Brad. Okay. Well, thank you all and I'll call you soon. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. This is Bill St. Radio coming up how to taste. That's after the break. Hey, Chris Kimble here asking for a favor. There's something you can do to help us out.
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For full details visit MaidenCookware.com slash Milk Street one more time MaidenCookware.com slash Milk Street. This is Milk Street radio. I'm your host Christopher Kimble. Right now we're exploring how to taste. First with Daniel Horvath who removed all flavor from his life for six months. So diet was basically chicken in rice. Sometimes Daniel ate salad. But we know vinegar just a little bit of olive oil. He gave up condiments and seasoning.
I didn't put any salt, I didn't put any pepper and spices. Daniel didn't eat peanuts or pretzels or potato chips. He didn't drink any cocktails or wine. I didn't have any beer. I was Daniel's diet for six months while he trained for the 2019 World Cup Tasters Championship. In each round, Tasters must identify one cup of three, which is different than the others. Sometimes the outliers from the same region, but just a different farm.
Sometimes it's the exact same coffee brewed with different water. The only way to win is to develop a super sense of taste. And for Daniel, he swears by his special diet. You feel flavors at the intensity they never felt before and you smell things at the intensity they never smelled before. Was incredible how accurate I was in terms of smells or taste. It was unbelievable. Daniel won that championship in Berlin in 2019.
Since then, he launched a coffee roasting business called Sumo Coffee Roasters. And this month Daniel says he'll resume his training diet and all to hopefully win the next World Cup Tasters Championship. So the question is how can you become a better taster? I'm joined now by Mandy Neglich, author of How to Taste. She's here to teach us how to enjoy the flavors we love in a whole new way and no crazy diet required. Mandy, welcome to Milk Street. I think so much I'm excited to be here.
I think we all want to become better at tasting. So let's start at the beginning. You write about the distant sniff, so what is the distant sniff? Something that's pretty amazing about our noses is they are just so sensitive. They're constantly sensing for danger for us and also for deliciousness. But if you just dive your nose right into say a glass of wine or a beer, you're potentially going to blind yourself to certain compounds.
For example, if a whiskey was super smokey and you dove your nose in there right away, you might completely blind yourself to that smoke and not even notice that as a flavor on it. So what you want to do with the distant sniff is start about six inches away and really see if you can smell anything. Certain things, you won't be able to smell anything at all, but a really smoky whiskey, you might already be getting that note coming out. Now you go in for a closer sniff or you go right to tasting.
So we're going to do a moving sniff first, which is kind of like a drive-by sniff. You're going to move the glass close to your nose and then move it back away again. All we're trying to do is keep ourselves from accidentally going blind to certain compounds. When we get our short sniff, which is you finally get a chance to hang out with the glass under your nose, get some real aroma for maybe a second or two, and then we'll move into the long sniff. Does this relate in any way to the home cook?
In other words, is it important if I'm pouring a glass of wine to start with a far-away sniff to really fully enjoy the experience or is this merely a professional technique? I think it's really important to fully enjoy the experience. It's something you can do in a split second. We're not going to be holding your wine glass out for many minutes at the sixth-inch distance, but you're kind of discovering the aroma.
It also gives you a chance to connect with your memories that you might have for different flavors and really make sure it's a full journey that you're enjoying, whatever you're enjoying, instead of just quick sniff and throwing it in your mouth. So I must admit, I have a little voice inside me that's going, I don't know art, but I know what I'd like.
And so you're saying, I think, most people don't get enough enjoyment out of food and drink because they don't take the time to really consider the subtleties of the taste and the aroma. So you're really plumping for taking more time with your food and your drink so that you enjoy it more. Is that the non-professional side of this book? Exactly, I think it's all about we're eating every day and it's something that we're just totally missing out on the way that it colors our life.
Speaking of art, we all know how to look at art. We learn our colors when we're young. We learn even musical notes when we're young. We learn about listening, but we don't ever really learn about taste and what's going into it and how it kind of colors our life. Okay, so let's get to the science of taste. First of all, what is the palate? Is it just the tongue? Does that include the mouth, the throat, everything else?
Oh, yeah, we have taste buds and taste receptors all over our throat, all down our digestive tract actually. So it's definitely more than just your tongue, even in the roof of your mouth, your cheek, things like that. You'll definitely still be picking up flavors. So why does scientists constantly try to expand, you know, sweet sour salty bitter umami and now we're going into lots of other possible things? Why is this still a moving target?
Yeah, I think it's there looking to unlock the mechanism. One of the scientists I talked to for the book, she's trying to define starch as a flavor, but we really need to see that exact reaction between something bonding with a flavor compound and that going to the brain. So I think defining that path is difficult. I, you know, laud them very much. People who are looking into things like carbonation, having a flavor, starch, having a flavor, fat, having a flavor.
But they really want that mechanism that the five basic taste have for any of them to kind of join the club as a true basic taste. And how do you verify, it's like verifying a new star in galaxy, how would you verify that starch, for example, is yet another kind of taste receptor? How would you prove that?
I believe they're looking at trying to trace it within like the nerve responses that are going from the tongue to the brain, starch hits tongue, reaction in brain is always consistently starch. But I know that's what was holding umami back, for example. They really wanted that like very specific pathway. And once that was proven, it got to join the club. I like the fact that the part of the brain where this is processed has to do with emotion.
And I find that connection between aroma or taste in emotion. That's why it's so powerful. Right. It's like a time traveling. Right. Now, I know that it's true for everybody. If I get a whiff of something in aroma or a taste, if I'm eating or drinking something, it can jolt you into the way back machine, right? It brings up a very strong memory sometimes. It's really interesting. Yeah. And something you can do is actually go out of your way to try to create those memories.
When I was practicing for my Ciceroan exam, which has a tasting component, I was trying to memorize the flavors of all these different beers so I could taste them blind. And I was traveling in Europe and I was trying to sit on the back porch of this brewery and like be like, this is a Belgian dark strong. I will always remember this smell. It tasted it look around me. And it's worked quite well. I can taste that exact same beer and time travel back to being in the hillsides in Belgium.
You know, think of something taste to try to create that memory and it's amazing how it really will work. Let's just take up some examples about color. Coffee served in a red painted coffee shop is sweeter than coffee served in one painted green. The nila yogurt dyed pink with flavorless food coloring, taste of strawberry for more than 80% of the participants. So color and your environment have a huge impact on your experience of flavor. Absolutely.
We're being affected by things around us all the time. There's a reason that so many ice cream shops are painted pink or have pink in their logo. They're trying to give you that little extra sweetness just through your environment. Your cone might taste a little less sweet when you get out into the outside world with more colors. But all of our senses are coming together and tasting what we're feeling, what we're seeing, smelling, obviously tasting to create our flavor experience in that moment.
So the rumor is that a dog's nose is 100 million times more sensitive than ours. I think most people would say humans, their sense of sight is really critical, right? But their sense of smell is really underdeveloped compared to most other mammals. So is this a latent skill that can be and needs to be developed through training or does anyone have a pretty useful nose even when they're born?
Our noses are much more useful than we give them credit for the distance between our sense of smell and the dogs are constantly getting smaller as science learns more about what we actually smell. But it is absolutely there to be developed.
It's something that you can get better at quite quickly, you know, just smelling the same thing maybe every morning if you're smelling your spice racks, smelling a few spices, it's amazing how quickly you'll be able to say, oh, that's a regino in this sauce or something like all spice or a snuff ming. It's just that we have that lack of connection. That's what the whole book is about. We're tasting and eating things all the time, but we're not really thinking about what actually is this.
And I think the minute you start doing that, science shows it that your brain starts to change. Instead of just saying, oh, this wine smells like wine or smells like grapes, you start to be able to have access to that vocabulary much more quickly because you've practiced it, you've smelled it before. And that olfactory bulb is growing with every time you're practicing. Terroir, you say it's a thing, but it's not what you think it is. So what really is terroir?
I think people associate it so deeply with wine and the weather, but terroir is everywhere all around us. There's a great study that I cited about people tasting cheese and the scientists just had them group the cheeses with what they thought were similar. And these are farms that were just a few acres apart, very close, few miles.
And people were actually able to group the cheese that was made exactly the same way, just with different milks from different farms, by what farms they were coming from. So we're constantly, if you're focused and tasting, we're constantly tasting those little aspects that are different. And we also talk about mewaf, which is the teihuah of water. So things like oysters that are soaking up the particles around them in the water. That's also a way that teihuah affects us.
So it's a thing we can definitely taste it. It's every single thing we're tasting all the time is affected by it. So just as a last thought, what's your advice to people in terms of finding the pleasure and eating and drinking by taking the time to taste and smell? Yeah, I mean, first I would definitely say the seven step tasting method that's outlined in the book is a great way. Your coffee is the perfect thing in the morning to do all those different sniffs we talked about.
And so I think get people around you involved. The most fun thing for me, we love to go out and order drinks for other people and say, what do you think is in this taste it? Do you like it? Surprise them. And really strain your brain with flavor. What are you tasting? What are you ordering? What is surprising you? I think it's amazing how quickly you'll start to notice different flavors. And then get excited.
You know, I went to this very trendy restaurant in Boston recently and was an Italian restaurant and I couldn't believe the soap in the bathroom smelled like Yuzu. So I came back to my table and my hands were just smelling of Yuzu and it's just such something that I noticed, it was such a odd contrast to Italian food, but without paying attention to aroma and flavor, it's something I would have never picked up.
And you know, it's a chance for people to have maybe a more Italian smelling, hands-opened the bathroom with their Italian restaurant if we really pay attention to the way that aroma is constantly coloring our lives and making them more enjoyable and interesting. Well, maybe they should have had a Malfi lemon soap. Yeah, a burger morn or something. Very, a burger morn. Yeah. Mandy, it's been a pleasure and thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much. It was great.
That was sort of I taste your Mandy Neglich. Her book is called How to Taste, a guide you discovering flavor and savoring life. Mandy Neglich suggests that we approach food much like art and music. As children, we're trained to know the colors of the rainbow and at least back in my day, we were also taught a bit about music, notes, melodies and chords.
Now I've always argued that cooking is not art, it's more of a craft, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't take the time to learn the language of food and experience each bite with some level of consideration. Food is fuel, food is fun, food is entertaining. But most of all, food is perhaps the most direct way of experiencing the world around us and that includes our memories, who we are and where we've come from. And that's not bad for a simple plate of pasta.
I'm Christopher Kimball, you're listening to Milk Street Radio. Now it's time to head into the kitchen with Lynn Clark to talk about this week's recipe, Turkish Rice Putting. Lynn, how are you? I'm doing well, Chris. How are you? So I was recently in Istanbul and I love it when I come across something that's familiar, you know, but it's not. It's right. It's at this sort of working person's restaurant. What they have is they have waiter service, but everything's on steam tables.
It's all prepared. So nothing's to order and they serve you within 60 seconds, right? Good. And the food's great. But for dessert, we had rice pudding. And it was rice pudding that had a sort of brulee top and then some ground nuts on top of that. But it was dead cold. It was a small ramacan that they only had about a half inch layer, an inch layer of rice pudding. So it was fairly thin.
It was just the perfect end to that meal because it had that contrast with the burnt sugar and the creamy pudding. So we came back to the most street and what happened next? So it's like rice pudding, but it's lighter, less sweet. And it has this beautiful, bitter sweet kind of caramelized top to it. It's not like a creme boulevard. It's not like something you're going to crack into, but it has that same flavor profile. So it's really kind of bitter, but sweet, but caramelized.
It has a really nice balance to the creaminess of the rice pudding. So one key thing here is there's no eggs, like you would make a custard for a rice pudding. And in this case, we're using a high starch rice, like Italian arborea rice or Japanese style short grain rice. That's going to create that creamy, velvety consistency. We cooked the rice in some water, add some milk, sugar, a little bit of corn starch, just to make it a little bit thicker.
So vanilla, or you could add rose water, which is common in Istanbul. And then we add it to some ramekins, pop it under the broiler, and let it get really deeply caramelized. So it's literally just that top layer of the rice pudding that's getting really nicely browned and adding a whole lot of complex flavor to the rice pudding. It's interesting how you make a few small changes and you end up with something quite different. And I love the fact it's not a huge bowl of rice pudding.
Right. And after I finish, like the other eight dishes they brought us, you'd have this little taste of something that's cold, slightly bitter on top, creamy on the inside, the nuts, it's excellent. Thank you very much, Lynn. Turkish rice pudding with a creme brulee top. Thank you. You're welcome. You can get the recipe for Turkish rice pudding at MilkStreetRadio.com. This is MilkStreetRadio. After the break, Adam Gopnik on Earth, an old cookbook collection, that's coming right up.
I'm Christopher Kimball and you're listening to MilkStreetRadio. Right now, my co-host, Sarah Maltini, will be answering a few more of your cooking questions. Welcome to MilkStreet. Who's calling? This is a prime shactor. Hello, where are you calling from? I'm calling from Overland Park, Kansas. How can we help you today? Well, I'm going to be kind of to show. Thanks so much for having me on. Thank you.
My question is that fast food chains, like Popeyes, are well-known for their incredibly flaky and visually rippled crunchy coating. I've experimented a lot trying to recreate this and not only do I never managed to create the flakes on the outside, but when I try to up the crunchiness by attempting an extra crispy, sickly coated Southern fried chicken, the coating separates from the chicken during cooking and becomes more of an oversized, brittle case than a coating.
How can I improve my fried chicken? Have I identified the correct gold standard in Popeyes and what are those flakes? Am I taking a college entrance exam here? That sounds very, very, very academic. Just go to Popeyes. I was planning on introducing myself as the kosher food scientist, but I think we'll explain a little bit of where I was coming from here. Oh, you're soon. Yeah. Tell us what you do.
So generally speaking, when I would make fried chicken, because I can't use buttermilk, I make something similar to buttermilk by taking nutmilk or soy milk and adding either a little bit of vinegar or a little bit of lemon juice, sometimes a little bit of mustard as well, because there's vinegar in there. And then soaking the chicken in that overnight and creating a seasoned flour that I've been dipped that chicken directly in and fry it. But when that happens, I never get that flaky coating.
So when I try to make a crunchier, thicker coating, after I dip it in the seasoned flour, I've been dipped it in egg and then vacuum the seasoned flour again. And that's when I sort of get this taste that peels away from the chicken. It's very brittle to the point where when I take it out of the fryer and put it down it just shatters. Yeah. I've got to be honest here. I've never had Popeyes, but I know people rave about it. There's a wonderful recipe.
Kenji Lopez-Alt, who's a friend of the show and a wonderful scientist. Kenji has a wonderful recipe that you can go online where he makes almost like a sort of shaggy dough to cling onto the chicken. It's important that you don't just have a wet batter that you have something dry to glue the wet batter onto it. And that you do alternating dry wet, dry wet to really build it up.
And then I think a good idea is to put it on a rack and let it sort of dry before you fry it to sort of let everything set. But let's see what Chris has to say. First of all, I would forget about this overnight thing unless you're just brining the chicken. I just brine it for two or three hours depending on the pieces you have. So that's just salt and water or you could dry brine it, kosher it and just put salt on the outside.
The recipe that Kenji did was to take the flour and then mix in some of the buttermilk mixture and seasonings with it. So you had a very shaggy top and that gave you this sort of shattering, crisp, interesting textured surface which really worked out well or you can double, you can do the eggs in the flour, the eggs in the flour twice.
But his method I think is the best method that I've seen and I totally agree letting it sit on a rack for a while, 10 or 15 minutes before frying is going to help it adhere as well. And just make sure that you get it out of the brine you fully dry it out too. I would go back to Kenji's recipe. It's probably on serious eats I would guess. You probably did it there. And the other recipe I think was a kitchen KITCHN.com. I think they also did a pop-by knockoff as well.
I'll definitely check out those recipes. Thank you. And it sounds like going for the wet should be a batter as opposed to just... Yeah. In the tray when you dredge the chicken, it looks really shaggy. You still dip it in the egg mixture but then you put it in the flour mixture but the flour mixture, you know after a while if you just use flour it gets shaggy anyway. Yeah, because you're going back like. So it's sort of like starting off with a shaggy flour.
I always sifted at that point and keep going but that's not the guy I'm shooting right on the foot there. Shaggy's good. Just like on the show. Scooby-Doby-Doo. All right. All right. Thanks. All right. Take care. This is Milk Street Radio. Sarah and I are here to answer your questions. Give us a call any time. That number is 855-426-9843 one more time. 855-426-9843 or email us at questions at MilkStreetRadio.com. Welcome to Milk Street who's calling. Hi, this is Barbara. How can we help you?
I cook and eat a lot of beans. I very much enjoy them both because they don't eat meat. But also because they're just tasty and are lots of different cuisines. In my area we have really good like Middle Eastern markets and grocery stores. There's big numbers of beans. But I was just good overwhelmed. I don't really understand good differences between categories of beans. So I need some help understanding the differences. A few things.
You want to start with the one that's most confusing or lentils, right? Little lentils as you know cook quickly and don't hold their shape. They're used in soups and purees and other things. The one that's a little confusing is the French lentils which are really quite green and they're speckled and they're small. And those hold those shape really well for salads or whatever. The brown and green ones actually cook faster like 20-25 minutes instead of 40 and they don't hold their shape as well.
White beans are really confusing. Little any beans are bigger than great northern beans but white kidney beans are the same thing as cantalini beans. Lime of beans are also butter beans I think is the same thing. But fava beans are definitely different. You know they have a starchier. Yeah and I think a better flavor. Stronger, more interesting flavor. You know there are 10,000 other kinds of beans out there. What's the place online?
Rancho Gordo. Yeah. They sell great beans and they have all the information about them. So if you like beans I would spend the money to get the good ones. My route is chickpeas lentils, chickpeas, black beans, cantalini beans. That's where I live. If you wanted to just extend one little step out where would you start with things that you're going to be familiar with that are going to give you more variety?
The classic bean used in Mexican cooking of form of pinto bean which is very agated in color. That is a great bean. I use it all the time to make Mexican beans. I would definitely put that on my list. Here's another suggestion. The bean they use in casulae which is called tarbei, T-A-R-B-A-I-S. What's great about those, those are big white beans, is that they really hold their shape and yet also absorb the flavors. Okay that's good, now let's try those.
A couple of the things, the beans we talked about, the Mexican beans, a cranberry beans. You can get pretty easily. They're kind of speckled and those are a good substitute for the classic pinto. Also if you're going to cook other than lentils, typical bean, I would put it in salted water overnight. It makes a huge difference. Two tablespoons of salt, kosher salt for two quarts of water I think. Let that sit overnight, rinse them and then cook them.
The salt will help it cook evenly, retain its shape. Season the bean. Season it. It makes a big difference. One last thing I wanted to say is I've sometimes found dried beans at the farmer's market and that's sort of fun too because then you can talk to the farmer and find out from them what they do with them. That's a good idea. Just experiment, throw caution to the winds and have fun. A good bean actually has taste to it. It's just fried like wine, like nutty or arse. Exactly.
It's a good, you've got a little hot. Yeah. Barbara thank you. Very much. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Now let's hear what Adam Gocknick is thinking about this week. Adam how are you? I am very well Chris. I have a slightly poignant feeling in the center of my being though because I was just up in Canada which is you know is where I'm from.
To my parents beautiful farm up in the middle of rural Ontario and one of the things that my mother wanted to do was to give away her immense collection of recipe books and of course most of them were French many of them I had but then I saw on a shelf laid out in pristine form with all their little spiral bound recipe books attached. The foods of the world series. Oh yeah.
I did beginning in 1968 right through the early 1970s and I had this overwhelming flood of memory and association because my parents like so many of our parents subscribed to that whole series they would arrive once a month and for me truly Chris those books were the opening door into the universe of food.
You remember them they came I do I covers I have the series and I remember when they came out and that's just at the time I started cooking so I agree with you I think they did that time life series is great.
It was great cooking of India African cooking cooking of Scandinavian richly photographed conspicuously well written the French provincial one was written by the great MFK Fisher and in many ways the whole series and it's one of the reasons why I think it was foundational for people like you and me Chris was a prescient right.
There was for the first time perhaps in our thinking about food at least in America no obvious hierarchy it accepted without quarrel the notion that Indian cooking was just as good as Italian cooking that French cooking was in no way superior to the cooking of the Caribbean. Another thing that the series did which I realize now got imprinted on my gastronomic DNA was value and appreciate American cooking at its proper estimation almost for the first time.
All of those ways I realized that this extraordinary series was as I said foundational for the taste and the formation of the taste for a whole generation and yet in other ways it was fascinatingly different to look at what the vision of the foods of the world were in 1968 as opposed to what our vision would be like now. And I realized that they were produced simultaneously with the first great generation of jet travel and the emphasis throughout is on cultural history and on place.
The whole book on Vienna's Empire is very much about Vienna's Empire of course there were recipes for Goulash and Cherry Strudel and Dobishtour but the idea is that the cooking rose from the social history of those places more than a rose from what we would now call the Terroir. This is interesting you mentioned Empire because the food I think in those books and similar books recorded sort of the fancy cooking of the time or the Saturday night cooking of the time.
It wasn't what somebody was making at Tuesday night in Calabria for dinner throwing together some wild greens and some homemade pasta. This was celebration food and food that was iconic. And I think today we're looking under those classic dishes to see what people really ate at day to day. That would be my difference right? I think that's true. Street food is occasionally patronized but it is not valorized. It's not made much of.
But as I say it's also very much dependent on offering a kind of surrogate or if you like the carious travel. That's not really what we do as much when we think about food now. If we're thinking about the street food of Vietnam we want it to be authentic in some sense we want to travel to Vietnam but we expect that's something that's very much within our reach.
So the lore and lore of exoticism I think is reduced for us even though we've incorporated much more of the authentic as you say street and indigenous cuisine of the foods of the world. I love someone to do a history of the world based on the common person right? Not on the King's Queen's Empires. The Shlubs history of Shlubs history. The Shlubs history of humanity. The Shlubs exactly. Exactly. Because I think that would be so much more interesting than what they served at Top Capy right?
Or totally right. Goondole and Budapest or so on. Yes. Goondole Budapest yes. And it's quite true that 60 years ago when those books came out we still thought of traveling to the top. That was our notion of what a richly lived gastronomic life would be. It would be a series of summits as if of Everest to the top. We no longer imagine the world in quite that way. You know what else struck me about them as I read through all 27 volumes sitting in my parents' basement.
They had exactly the same vibe as the world's fair. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, my childhood. Yeah. That sense which is now dated and probably has all kinds of unfortunate post-imperial trappings. That sense of a gathering together on one island of all the festivity of the world in a single world's fair. It was a very powerful 20th century idea now for good or ill gone. Yeah. And the only thing anywhere remembers about food of the 64 world's fair were the Belgian Waffles.
Belgian Waffles. That was the Belgian Waffles. That's my time away. That's my time away. It's a small world after all. So I'm actually glad where we are today because it's much more interesting and the food I'm sorry. I think the food is better. I think every day food at the end of the day wins almost every time. I agree with you and I think that's true.
And I think we can be grateful to those folks 50 years ago, who, as I said, for the first time celebrated American food on its own terms, not as a cadet thing, just aspiring to be something else, their wonderful volumes of the Pacific Northwest and Southern cooking and all of those things. And at the same time recognize that that foundation is one that we have grown on and in some ways grown beyond. On that note, Adam, our resident philosopher on the foods of the world. Thank you.
I'm going back to turn the pages. That was Adam Gopnik, staff writer of The New Yorker, his latest book is The Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery. That's it for today. You can find all of our episodes at moustreetradio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. You can learn more about us at 177milkstreet.com. There you can become a member and get all of our recipes, access to all live stream cooking classes, free standard shipping for the Milk Street store and more.
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