WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: We're talking about developing a recipe!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I am Mark Scarbrough, and I am, yes, back on this podcast. My leg is officially out of a cast. It's out of a splint. Well, that was a long time before the cast. It's Out even of the walking boot, I am just now in an ankle brace and actually walking around. So I am back on the podcast with Bruce and I'm glad to be here. In this episode of our podcast, we're going to do what we always do.

this week.

Oh, maybe we're going to come. Up with a recipe. Well, not really, but we're going to talk about how we come up with recipes. This is how we work at heart and how we work to put together things to make recipes for the many books that we have written. 36 about to publish the 37th, and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

our one minute cooking tips. Use great butter for your bread. Use standard store brand butter for baking.

Oh. See how

fast that was?

Uh, I have no notes. No, no notes. Perfect. No, yes. I, I, by the way, I should tell you that, um, I do love great butter for bread. And if you don't know and live in the U. S. or in Canada, you can get really great butter like Kerrygold at Costco. You don't have to buy a lot of it. But. It is cheap, and you can freeze the pieces that you don't use, which is what I do. Butter is

very freezable. People don't know that.

So I stock up at Costco for great butter, and then we just watch store sales for just standard butter for baking.

And there's often 15, 20 pounds of it in our freezer when they Put it on sale.

Yep, exactly. And, um, yes, of course, I use unsalted butter. There you go.

Um,

you should have to use it for baking. And I even put it on my bread. Although, I will admit that I salt the butter sometimes at night on a piece of bread.

Better that you should choose how much salt goes on and the kind of salt, then let the butter manufacturer do it for you.

So see, we didn't do it in a minute. There you are. OK, before we get to the next segment of our podcast, let me say that we do have a newsletter. It hasn't come out in almost two months because, well, the broken leg. But it's now going to start coming out again. If you want to sign up for that newsletter, you have to go to our website, either cookingwithbruceandmark. com or just bruceandmark. com. There's a form there to fill out.

Today we are going to talk about how we develop a recipe and rather than say the process for a book, I'm going to make it easier. Because when the book, it gets really complicated because it has to fit into certain parameters and it has to fit in a certain place. Place in the book and what's the recipes on either side of it and there were so many Restrictions placed on me in the kitchen.

I just say that we have written a lot of books recently that you know They've appeared in Target and that they're they're generated toward instant pots and air fryers and Bruce's Constant complaint here that he's not voicing is my problem, the writer's problem, which I'm always saying to him, can I get this ingredient at Walmart? Can I get this ingredient at the Target Superstore? And he freaks out because of course you really can't get preserved Asian black beans at your local Walmart. So, uh.

let's talk about how we decide what we're going to serve at a dinner party. And then, how do I actually create a dish? Because, if you know anything about me at this point, you know I don't use recipes when I cook for fun. Right. When I cook for friends, when I make dinner for us, I don't use recipes. I just, I know the techniques. I know how things work. I'm a professional at this. So how do I create something?

a lot. I mean, I can't even, I couldn't even, I mean, we, we've way past the 20. So I couldn't even come up with a number there of how many

braises there are. Well, we didn't invent braises. No. No. And we didn't invent pan roasted chicken thighs or pasta sauces or sheet cakes or even puddings. No.

Just to say, can I just stop and say? A lot of people don't know this, but do you know that you can't copyright a recipe? You can't. You can't. You can't copyright the ingredient list of a recipe, so if we come up with, let's say, pan roasted chicken thighs with parsnips and chickpeas, I don't know, I'm making this up, we come up with that, the ingredient list for that cannot be copyrighted, nor can the title.

So basically, If you think about every recipe that you've seen in a magazine, that you've seen in a cookbook, that you've eaten in a restaurant, it's all a variation on a theme,

right? Mostly. Yeah, I mean, if you go really high end with the molecular stuff, it's not Then they start

creating some new things. Sure, somebody did create the idea of vinegar gel bubbles. Someone did create the idea of foam. Let's do a milk foam, let's do a bacon fat foam. But now that we're doing those things at home, we're just doing variations on that theme, right? Well, I

don't know how many people are making baked foam at home, but okay, sure, yeah.

All it takes is maltodextrin. That is all it takes. And a hand blender, or you know, a stick blender.

But yes, um, it, it, it, it, It is variations on a theme, but that doesn't mean there's not originality out there. And in fact, originality comes inside of the form. And let me just say before Bruce is going to talk, I think about a trifle,

right? No, I'm talking about dessert. How do we think about it? Okay. So

before we talk about that, let me just say that variations within a form is a long artistic tradition. I mean, let's face it. There are 5, 000 landscape paintings. There are hundreds of tragedies. Shakespeare wrote many. tragedies. And inside that form is where the creativity takes place. So you paint a landscape or I'm currently teaching a class on Henry James and Paul Cezanne. And Cezanne painted, gosh, literally Hundreds of still life paintings of fruit and particularly apples on tables

falling off tables. Yes, they should be falling off the tables. Somehow they're not. It's

this whole problem of perspective. Anyway, but you know, he says, I didn't invent still life. Instead, he's taking this very storied form of art and he's being creative inside of it. That's a. same thing we do in recipes. We take a storied technique, a braise, or here we come, a trifle, and then we become creative inside out.

The art comes when those variations are pitch perfect, balanced flavors, balanced textures. And it's a way to look at something old that hasn't been looked at this way before. I, I would love to think that I am to food what Cezanne was to art. Oh! I don't know that I'm ever going to reach that, but

I strive. You're almost as crabby as he was sometimes. But I

strive for it. Well, and I don't, I, well, he took a lot, he did a lot of paintings of his wife. I don't know that, how does that translate to what I, well, I've made a lot of meals for you.

Okay, sure. Okay. I still don't. really want to be Hortense Cezanne, but okay, go on. So

we're going to have a dinner party. This is all hypothetical here. We're going to have a dinner party and it's a thought experiment that I want to make a dessert and I have in mind the idea of a trifle. So Mark, why don't you explain what a classic trifle is? Well,

uh, uh, cause classic trifle is a cake of some sort, often lady fingers, which is a cookie cake, but a cake of some form that's usually soaked in some kind of distilled spirit, and that's usually a brown spirit. Brandy, whiskey, it's usually a brown distilled spirit of some sort.

Okay, so one of the things that I don't like, and I know Mark's not crazy about, is booze soaked cake. I don't like Babazo rum. I don't like those things. So I know that we're going to do Can I say why?

Sure. Because I think it destroys the crumb. Because I think cake is all about the textural crumb, and when you soak the cake in booze, you get a kind of gummy consistency, and I just don't like it. It's not my favorite thing. And thus, oh, don't kill me. I really don't like tiramisu. It's okay. Listen, if I come to your house and you make tiramisu, I'm going to eat it because of course I'm a pig and eat everything. But I, I, it's not my favorite thing.

the same thing goes for those British drizzle cakes where like a pound cake or a tea cake comes out of the oven and they. pour over a syrup. The same thing. There are Greek semolina cakes where honey syrup goes over them. I don't like it.

It's okay to me if it doesn't soak all the way through. Like we have a cake in and we're way off topic here. We have a cake in the vegetarian dinner parties book that is a vegan chocolate ginger cake and we pour a whiskey syrup over the top of it. But that whiskey syrup doesn't soak very far into that. It's a Bundt cake actually into that Bundt cake. And so it, it, It ke it keeps the cake still with its own texture. It does. And that I, that's my problem. Mm-hmm.

want, and you know, the French Patisserie do the same thing. Most of those classic French cakes, like the uh, casis buttercream cakes and the grandma Monet cakes. They brush each Genoise layer with liquor before they put the buttercream in it. I know they do it. It keeps it fresher, longer. It keeps it moisture. Don't like it. So in this dessert, It's

like that. It soaks you up. Okay. Yeah, it's when it soaks through brushing it. Okay,

but soaking through, mm, mm, mm, mm. Okay, so we know we're not going to be adding that component to my layered dessert. Now I do have to decide up front, am I going to make this in a big bowl and serve it out in scoops, or am I going to be a little fancier and make it in individual portions.

So

let me

stop. and say, Let me just stop you right there. So when you think about a recipe in order to create it, and this goes for cookbooks or just for dinner parties, you think almost first about how it's served, which is really, that's the first thing you brought up after we Transcribed on about soaked cake. You talked about how it's served.

Absolutely. That will impact how I cook it. That will impact how I do it. If I'm going to be plating something, I'm more likely to say, cut the pork belly into cubes before I braise them in Asian spices because I could plate beautiful pieces as opposed to braising a whole chunk and cutting it up because it won't look as nice on a plate.

And I would say that that's the difference between you, a trained chef, and the rest of us. And that is, I would dare say most of us don't think about what the final product will look like on a plate. And so, your ability to see that in advance is what gives you a slightly different perspective on all of this than most of us have. It

does. And if you've watched the TV show, uh, Bear, about the restaurant No. You could, if you remember through that, every time they were coming up new dishes, what were they doing? They were sketching, right? It was always before the ingredient list came a sketch of a plate and what is this going to look like? And I think as a trained chef, I was taught to think about how it's going to be presented.

Right. Because it is, this is really unfair to say, but food is spectacle. It is theater. Yeah. If you're doing it, not on a Wednesday night for yourself in front of the TV, but I mean, if you're going to really go all out as we're going to go all out with a trifle, it is spectacular. Okay. So let's go back to the trifle. Okay.

So I'm going to be doing this in individual bowls and I'll leave it at that. So now let's take apart the trifle. Mark said the first thing that is in there is a cake. So I need to have some kind of cake and I'm thinking about all of the sponge cakes and all the pound cakes and all the things that are in. other books that we've done, Ladyfingers. Like, I know we have a beautiful Victoria type sponge in our ultimate cookbook, but I looked at that recipe and it's so full of eggs.

Yeah. I may make an exception for Trace Litchis, only because, you know, I'm a dairy fiend and it is so much milk and all of that poured over the cake that I kind of like it. But anyway, go ahead. So

I keep thinking, where am I going to get a really good cake to start with? And the Amy's Bakery Cookbook, the sweeter side of Amy's, has one of the best yellow cake layer cakes for birthday cake we've ever tasted. They do. too rich and sweet for this. So I'm going to play with it. I'm going to try it. I'm going to use it with a little less sugar, a little less butter. I'll probably separate the eggs so I could beat the white separately and lighten it up a bit.

Wow. And see, most of us could never imagine all of those transformations to get to the cake that you want, because it's too complicated. We just want to be given a recipe and be told what to

do. Well, if this comes out great, you'll have a recipe that'll go into one of our books or a newsletter or something like that. Okay. So

now the question comes up about the custard. So. You have to have some kind of custard, and it doesn't have to be vanilla, although it traditionally is, but you have to have some kind of cream, um, that's, you can have creme diplomat. You want to explain what that is? Creme

diplomat is one of my favorite. Basically, it's creme pat, which is creme patisserie, which is a very, very thick Pastry cream. You probably have watched

the British baking show. And so you probably know all about creme pot. And if you

fold whipped cream into that, you have creme diplomat, which is so lovely. It's whipped cream plus creme pot. And if you do some gelatin into that, then you end up with a whole other thing. And you become, yeah, you get all sorts of interesting cremes. You can get a scent on a ray cream. And

you know, my mom, my mom made. Trifles when I was a kid and, uh, she just used, I'm going to tell you vanilla pudding. Not only did she use vanilla pudding, she made vanilla pudding out of a box. She didn't use the instant no cook vanilla pudding, but she just made the boxed vanilla pudding. And that's what she put between layers. And we use pound cake. That's what mom is pound cake. And vanilla pudding, and then I'll tell you later what she also did to that.

So once I perfect that cake, and I actually may have to make it once or twice the week before the dinner party to make sure I get it right.

And again, no one else is doing that. Go on. And

I'm thinking I am going to go vanilla with the cream and I'm thinking creme diplomat is Just the texture I'm going to want, which is my creme pat with whipped cream. So now I have to figure out what the flavor profile is. Do I want to use peaches? Do I want to use berries? Do I want to use coffee? Do I want to make this a salted caramel? Do I want to make it a chocolate chip? Mint trifle?

Uh, let's see, you could make, like, apple pie filling and add nuts to it and cinnamon and cardamom. You could add ginger to things, uh, to create a ginger blueberry filling. And don't forget curds, lemon curd, grapefruit curd. These are all possible fruit mixtures. Curds are a little harder because they are a consistency very similar to the cream. So it gets harder. You get. Uh, not enough, uh, textural difference between the two, but it's not unthinkable to do it.

And I'm thinking summer pudding. I love summer pudding. It's not the middle of summer now. I mean, I just love it. And yes, you use white bread when you build a summer pudding.

So if you don't know what a summer pudding is, you take basically, uh, well, a mixing bowl. You, there are fancy molds, but you can take a mixing bowl and you line it with. What literally crust off white bread and then you fill it with a cooked down berry Not cooked down to jam consistency, but a cooked down berry mixture and you keep layering bread and this Berry filling all the way to the top.

like a bundt cake. It's a beautiful, yeah, purpley, bready pudding and, and it's not cooked, it's not baked, I mean, the jam and the berries are cooked, but, uh,

It's called summer pudding because the Fruit comes in in the summer, but also summer pudding, because you don't have to turn your oven on.

And also pudding, because pudding in the UK is dessert. I mean, what are we having for pudding tonight? You know, we could be having apple pie for pudding. I'll be grabbing ice cream. Okay, go ahead. Okay, so now I have the cake. I have my creme diplomat. I know I'm going to make a berry mixture to drizzle in there. And because the whipped cream is already in the creme diplomat, I need something else on top because I don't want to be over whipped cream on this.

There are French and Swiss and Italian.

So what's an Italian meringue? An Italian meringue is where you beat egg whites till foamy and then you cook a sugar syrup until it's at the soft ball stage, about 148 degrees Fahrenheit. And you drizzle that into the beaten. Egg whites as they're being beaten and you beat and beat and beat until it's cool and it is so Creamy and smooth and shiny.

In the end, the whole point of this exercise, and I know we went on forever about things, the whole point was to say that, look, here's the structure, a trifle. And so how do you vary up a trifle in order to create something new? That is interesting and interesting on the plate too. This is a really wild idea to individually do trifles. Nobody ever does that. Everybody always just puts it in the big bowl, but this way, I think Bruce wants to do it individually because that way you don't get.

not very nice. No,

it's not. But again, most of us don't think about that, what the end result of this thing is going to look like when we eat it. And that's because most of us are making dinner on a Wednesday night, and we're sitting in front of Netflix, or whatever, and you know, we're not really worried about what it looks like on the plate. plate. But I think that a chef's perspective is much more what it looks like on the plate. So of course, that was his primary concern.

great way to explain what we did in this new book. Yeah,

that that you have a set way to do something. There is a technique for making a Chinese chili crisp. A classic, classic Sichuan chili crisp. Right. But once you know the technique, you can start to vary it endlessly with flavor profiles and pull it way away from anything Chinese not to get too far into that book. But Bruce has a salsa macha. This is a traditional Mexican salsa made with nuts. And because you know it's chilies and nuts, right? And it's usually got a slightly sweet.

For me, it's not something I made or created, although I've been doing a lot of that recently. You know, it's Ben and Jerry's non dairy cherries, Garcia ice cream. We are in the store last night. We went out for dinner. I wanted a burger and a beer. We went out. I

just want to Stop here and say, you realize with a broken leg, I went out to dinner. My leg isn't broken anymore, but this was a big deal. This is the first time I've been at dinner in yeah, eight, eight, eight weeks.

And we had, I had, I had a burger and a beer and fries and we shared a nice salad and on the way home. We stopped at a store because I wanted ice cream and I love Ben and Jerry's non dairy ice cream. It's a, it's a cashew milk and an oat milk base and the cherries Garcia with the big chunks of cherries and chocolate. It's really good. So that's made me happy.

Well, I guess what made me happy is a being able to go out to eat because I have not been able to do that in eight weeks. I went to an actual restaurant and sat at an actual table, which I want to tell you is just crazy. I mean, I think I now.

They called it a toasted yeast vinaigrette.

Yeah, I guess they had toasted the nutritional yeast. It was so delicious. I know, I had a curry after that for my main course, and Bruce and I split the salad, and as we left the restaurant, I said, gosh, I wish I'd just ordered that salad as my meal. It was the fresh kale and the fresh cauliflower, all raw, and then with this toasted nutritional yeast, vinaigrette and dried cranberries. And it was so tasty. It was ridiculously good. It was fabulous.

And not on your butt.

Not on my butt. I've been going up and down stairs on my butt, which is really something to see and really something to do. But I came in here on my own and I'm glad to be here.

And I'm really glad you're back too, because it's more fun when we do this together. And it is more fun for you listening, I'm sure, when we are doing this together. So thank you for listening. And please subscribe so you don't miss a single episode. And let me also remind you to go to our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and there you can find links to all sorts of interesting things. And each week, the question is posted. What's making you happy in food this week?