¶ Intro / Opening
Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast Cooking with
Bruce and Mark. And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, we have written 37 Cookbooks. We've got a new one out this summer, cold Canning. It's out in about a month from when this podcast drops. Of course, you may be listening to this podcast completely beyond the moment that it drops, but it's out in July of 2025. It's a book called Cold Canning, all about canning small batches, two or three jars of your favorite preserves. Chutneys. Conserve. Salsa.
Salsa, macha, chili, crisp barbecue, sauces, ketchups. Oh my gosh. It goes on and on and on. I think there's even recipes sitting there for doga. I think there's mm-hmm.
Hot fudge sauce. There's hot dessert sauces.
It's insane. What's in that book. 425 recipes. You can check it out where. Ever. You can find books bookshop.com, amazon.com, all those kind of places. There's even a link to buy that book in the player for this podcast. Or you can go to our website, Bruce and mark.com, or cooking with Bruce and mar.com. Okay, onto the podcast. We've got a one minute cooking tip, as is traditional. We're gonna talk about. Some food substitutions, some that you may know and some that you may not.
This is in the making of food. What can you swap around? Mm-hmm. One for the other, and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.
¶ Our one-minute cooking tip: substitute other liquids for water in many boiled or braised dishes.
Our one minute cooking tip. Avoid cooking with water if you can. Water can dilute the flavors of your food that's being cooked. So instead of using water, try using stock chicken stock, beef stock, vegetable stock, or broth wine. Wine adds extra flavored judicious beer, for example.
Okay, I'm gonna stop. Yeah, well, go ahead. No, you're gonna say. For example, by the, like
you're cooking rice and you're gonna cook it in water. Oh, okay. Try putting chicken broth a vegetable broth. Instead, it goes from a bland side edition to something really flavorful.
Yeah. And that, that was what I was gonna say. I didn't even know about. I, I know this is ridiculous, but I didn't even know about cooking rice in broth until Bruce. Did it. And I, I, I was dumbfounded. Why didn't I think of this? So you can cook in all kinds of things without using water. Now sometimes water is necessary. Mm-hmm. In a dish because sometimes you want a really pure flavor. And I noticed that a lot of Asian dishes particularly will. Add water to the dish.
Yep. Because they wanna keep the chilies really present. They don't wanna muddy them up mm-hmm. With other flavors. Or they wanna keep the spices really present. But again, if you're gonna make a soup, let's say with chicken, let's say, you know, chicken soup, right? With, uh, chicken thighs, I don't know, in some root vegetables. This is the kind of thing I make. I never make that with water. I. Always make that with chicken broth, it just adds, I start with canned broth.
It adds to the flavor. It just makes it deeper, more complex. If I'm making any kind of a stew and the original recipe said add water, oh, I'm always gonna add maybe some water, but also broth. I'm gonna add some wine, maybe a bottle of beer. You're going for liquid and liquids have flavor, so add flavor to your food.
Right. And just to say one more thing before we go on this. We're talking about cooking, not baking in this instance. So this is not part of the substitutions. No. That are ahead. Alright, so before we get to the substitutions ahead, let me say one more word about our new book, cold Canning. If you are interested in preserving the best of this season, if you're interested in putting it up, but you do not wanna make enough to survive the apocalypse, instead, you'd like.
To make, uh, two or three jars of strawberry jam out of those strawberries you find fresh at the market. We have got the answers for you in cold canning. If you wanna make two or three jars of a fabulous chili crisp, oh my gosh, Bruce has so many crazy chili crisp that he created for that book. Some with cranberries and walnut, some with Nori dried seaweed. Uh, sheets, so, which make them a very briny chili ghost as well as the classics.
If you wanna do that, check out our book, cold CADing, wherever books are sold
¶ Food substitutions: easy swaps to make sure you can create a recipe.
this summer. Okay, onto the question of food substitutions.
Have you ever given someone a recipe and then they responded to you like a few days later and said, oh, your recipe's terrible, it didn't work. And you say, well, why didn't it work? And they're like, well, you know, I don't like chicken, so I use tofu and I don't like tomatoes, so I just left them out. Right, right. Because then it's not. The dish anymore.
I, I, I taught a friend, this is long, long, long ago. I was in my early twenties and I taught a friend how to make pie crust. 'cause I was always making pie. My grandmother was a baker. You were the king of pie crust. Thank you. You make
the best pie crust. Thank you. I
make a very crisp, short crus. It's very thin and, uh, I have a whole technique to do this, but that's a whole nother matter. So anyway, um, I make a, a podcast and I was bringing pies to places and this woman wanted to take. The pies to work. So I went over to her apartment and I taught her how to make a pie crust. I, we rolled them out, we worked on it. We showed her the tips and the tricks and all this stuff, and I think we even made a pie. But that's not what she was gonna do.
She was gonna then, you know, I don't know, keep them, I ran a pig out on it in bed. I don't know, but I'm in bed. Nice. Why not? She was gonna make a few pies, two or three pies to take to work down the road. So. Comes the day when the pies are to be made. She makes the pie she takes to work. She calls me, she says, your recipe's terrible. The pies don't work. Okay? Here's what happened.
She took the flour for the pie crust and she didn't have any more flour in her apartment, and so I'm not lying to you. She substituted cordon starch because, and when I said, why, because she said it's white. I thought white substituted for white. I don't know where she came up with this idea. Of course, it just made a gloppy. Horrible gelatinous mess on the bottom of the pie. And of course they were all ruined. Duh. So you can't substitute corn starch or corn flour?
No. For all purpose or plain flour? No. Mm-hmm. Baking is a science. Yeah. And in fact, most substitutions in baking are difficult. Mm-hmm. To say the least. I mean,
let me, let me counter that with saying that there are many recipes and baking that are forgiving. When it comes to ingredient swaps, especially muffins and quick breads, you know, they, they are, they're not very fussy things. You could,
well though, quick breads collapse easily. If they get too heavy, they
can, but sometimes they're still okay to eat. I mean, tweaked cookies and bars, you know, they, they come out okay. They may have a slightly different texture if you use. You know, granulated sugar with molasses instead place of brown sugar. I mean, they might be crunchier, they might be sweeter, but the results are usually delicious and most people won't notice maybe until you start to substitute things like dairy and eggs, and there are certain ways to go about that.
Yeah. Okay. So let me just say, before we talk about that, let me just say that in baking, here's the problem. There is an algorithmic ratio between acidity. I know this is crazy, but between acidity and some of the ingredients. That lemon cakes and brownies and cookies. So there's an algorithmic relationship there, and the minute you start to change that, the rise is going to change. And that, by the way, the acidic content is brought about partly by sugars, which function as acidic compound.
Compounds inside of baked products. Mm-hmm. It's a complicated formula to say the least. So while yes, of course you can substitute pecans for walnuts. Mm-hmm. Or yes, of course you can substitute dried cranberries for raisins or Yes, of course you can substitute the the almond extract for vanilla extract. Yep. You can't necessarily just throw chocolate chips into a batter. Nope. You can't. You can't necessarily do it because it's gonna change that. Acidity algorithm. Mm-hmm.
Because there's sugar in chocolate chips.
Isn't it funny that sugar is both a liquid in recipes? Yeah. And it adds acid. It's really an interesting, very interesting ingredient. So if you're
a baker, you know that sugar actually is treated as a liquid and baking recipes,
right? I wanna start with the easy things, right? So these here are things that you can just swap. So we make this really easy sour cream. Yogurt creme fresh. Virtually interchangeable. Yes, virtually. However, when we're talking about yogurt now, we are pretty much talking about Greek yogurt. 'cause that's almost the only kind you could find in the store. Yeah. And Greek yogurt has the same texture as creme fresh and sour cream.
While regular yogurt may be a little too loose, so you can substitute Greek yogurt for creme fresh or sour cream, just make sure you're doing plain. Unflavored unsweetened yogurt.
Right. And you can thin yogurt out plain Greek yogurt out with a little water. Mm-hmm. And it can then become a buttermilk substitute. Mm-hmm. When you thin it out, just add enough water, whisking it in until it has the consistency of thickened buttermilk. And it will mostly work in most recipes, but you can't. Go the other way. You can't use buttermilk in the place of yogurt too wet in a recipe. It's
too, it's too wet and you're gonna have too liquidy about it. You can't. Mm-hmm. You can't say, well, okay, I'll add more flour to thicken it up, because then your ratio that Mark talked about is. All wrong.
Now eggs are really tricky. Mm-hmm. In any kind of baking, they're tricky because they add both protein and they add all kinds of structural components. Mm-hmm. From the albumin of the white of the egg. So they're tricky all ways around. They are. You can sometimes use the pasteurized egg white substitutes, and there are now vegan plant. Egg substitutes that are horrible, like for scrambled eggs, and some of these will indeed work in simpler baking recipes. Mm-hmm.
Remember, the more complex the recipe gets, the less chance you have of making any substitution. So if you're gonna make just a pan up. Brownies, a standard pan of brownies off the recipe on the back of a package of chocolate chips. You're probably okay substituting a plant-based egg substitute for what it calls for eggs in the recipe.
But if you're gonna wake one of, I don't know, Rose Levy barren baums cakes or Amy's breads cakes, or some fabulous baker's giant three tier wedding cake don't make substitutions. No,
I wanna say that. Phil Corey, the, uh, the baker used to be head baker at Herod's in London. He wrote a book, A New Way to Bake, and he's been on this podcast and he and I had a whole conversation
and gave us a quote for Cole Can, he gave
us a quote for Cole Canning, and he has this idea and he said that, you know, eggs and baking are really just moisture. That was his thing. Mm-hmm. And so he started substituting other forms of moisture for the egg. Sometimes it was nut milk, sometimes it was, um, a. A fruit puree, like an applesauce. And the thing is, in those recipes, he was doing like a fudgy brownie or a cookie. You might be able to get away with that, right?
But as Mark said, if you're doing a dish where the egg is the centerpiece, where there's a custard, where there's a meringue. Where there's a buttercream, no, then you have to have a real
egg. Most people don't know that there's eggs in some buttercream. That's a whole other subject matter that we can talk about sometime, but, um, that, that's one kind of buttercream. But let's say that, uh, when Phil Cory substituted nut milks like walnut milk, pecan milk, almond milk for eggs, nuts have proteins. Mm-hmm. So there you go. You've got the protein coming back into the product itself.
And he was, he wasn't looking for lift either. Eggs often give lift. And in those recipes, he wasn't looking for a lift. Right? So you have to be really careful. Okay,
so that's um, some baking bit, but let's talk about some more general protein and acid and urban butter and milk and all those kind of substitutes that are more for general cooking. Okay. 'cause baking is its own thing. It is. So let's talk about protein. Alright?
Right. Something savory. I'm making dinner, I'm doing a stir fry. I wanna roast some kind of protein, a recipe calls for. Chicken breast. Can I substitute chicken thigh? Sure. Can I substitute Turkey thigh? Sure. Can I substitute, you know, finely shredded up pork tenderloin or even a tender cut of beef? You can, in most circumstances, substitute proteins without. Any issues, right?
Uh, mostly there's an old rule, land for land, water for water, okay? So don't put shrimp where there was chicken thighs. Don't put chicken thighs where there was shrimp. That's a rule. That's kind of an old rule, and that's because most things in water cook. In minutes, seconds. Oh. Especially if it's a hot pan in seconds, but in minutes. So, uh, don't make those substitutions. But as Bruce is saying here, for stews and casseroles, most things are okay. You have to watch the fat content.
Mm-hmm. Because remember, if you're gonna substitute, let's say. Diced up chuck for diced up chicken breast. You're gonna release a lot more fat into that stew, so be careful. And
your cooking time. Yeah. Chuck will take, even in small dice, may take you 35 minutes where the chicken, the diced up chicken breast is only gonna take maybe 10 minutes. So you have to watch your cooking times. Yeah. Now if it's ground, if you're doing a casserole with ground beef or with ground Turkey or ground chicken, those substitutions are almost. Perfect. You don't really have to worry about the recipe not coming out.
As Mark said, the fat content might be different, might taste a little grier a little heavier if you use fatty ground pork as opposed to chicken, but it should work for you.
So let's talk about balsamic vinegar, because balsamic vinegar was once upon a time, an incredibly esoteric. Product. Mm-hmm. It was the real thing aged in Italy. Nobody in North America could find it for any reason back way in the day in the eighties, let's say. Oh, I should tell you a story about that before we get to the beam vinegar. Lemme tell you this.
I first started learning to cook in grad school in Madison, Wisconsin, and I was following recipes in Bon Appit and a recipe called for olive oil. This is, let's say 1985. Oh yeah. In Madison, Wisconsin. There was no olive oil in any supermarket, and when I asked one of the butchers, where's the olive oil? And I had never cooked with olive oil at this point, he pointed me to the drug section to rubbing oil, which yes, if. You looked on the label, it did say olive oil on it.
So it was like a rubbing oil, medicinal rubbing oil. At the time I did not buy it and did not make the recipe 'cause it grossed me out.
Medicinal, I'm thinking rubbing a lot of uses there.
Uh, of gross. Okay. Anyways, so Paul lemme, vinegar back then would've never been found. Now it's everywhere. And in fact now there are cheap replicants Oh gosh. Of the real Italian stuff. But it's one of these things that's become also cliche in recipes. And a lot of people still don't have BIC in their pantry. So what can they do?
They can use white wine or red wine vinegar, and for each tablespoon, throw half a teaspoon of honey or brown sugar or molasses in the recipe, and that'll give you that sweetness. But here's my take on other acids. They're almost all interchangeable. I do not think you are going to ruin a soup by changing the. Cider vinegar To malt vinegar? Yeah. Or, and Or changing the rice vinegar to black vinegar. No, you can interchange almost any vinegar. As long as it's not flavored.
You can get away with it.
Yeah, you can. When it comes to herbs, of course, substitutes are easy because herbs are mostly a personal preference. Yes, I know. So this rack of lamb calls for a breadcrumb coating with thyme. So you don't like thyme, you prefer, I don't know, basil, or you prefer parsley? Mostly this is all gonna come out. Okay, so long as you do fresh for fresh, dried for dried. Mm mm That's a real big kicker there in substitutions with herbs. Remember that dried herbs have more stamina.
They can last longer, and they often have to take longer to cook in order to produce the real essences that have been desiccated inside the herbs. Absolute.
Yeah, let's talk about butter. Butter's a huge thing when it comes to cooking. A lot of people don't realize that when you're going to a saute pan and you're gonna throw onions in or garlic in, fat is Fat is fat, it is. And you could melt butter, you could throw in olive oil, you could put canola oil. You could put peanut oil. It doesn't. Really matter. So if someone says to you they don't like butter or eat dairy, don't worry about it. Just don't use it. Use a different fat.
And here's the thing, when Bruce says Fat is Fat is fat, and this is not about making any substitution, but let's just say, just remember that all liquid fat has 120 calories per tablespoon or 15 milliliters. So it is the same amount of calories. If you use corn oil, if you use olive oil, if you use avocado oil, if you use pecan oil, it's. All the same amount of calories.
So remember, not only can they be interchangeable in the pan, they in fact are interchangeable in terms of how much weight you, uh, want to put on or lose. The only one that's different here is butter. And butter has a slightly lower calorie content. Mm-hmm. And that's because of the water. That is in butter. Yeah,
there's about a 15% moisture content in butter, so that's 15% less fat than other things, which is why it's fewer calories. Also, why you can't necessarily just do a one for one butter for oil sub when you're. Baking.
Nope.
But there are so many butter substitutions on the market now, um, that you can go into the supermarket and you can see in the dairy section there are, you know, it used to just be the, I can't believe it's not butter, but now there's like earth balance and Right. These things come in sticks and they are not just. Oils. They also have a little moisture and they act like butter in baking, so you can substitute those for butter. In baking, we like to use coconut oil.
Now coconut oil is solid at room temperature, so it looks and acts like butter. It doesn't have that moisture content. So sometimes if my batterers seem a little dry, I do add a tablespoon or so of water to just loosen them up a bit. But butter substitutions are easier than you think. Yeah, let's say
that. Bruce makes lemon curd with coconut oil. Mm-hmm. Not butter. And I know that sounds weird, but it gives it this little, uh, coconuty aftertaste. And it is a really beautiful substitution for butter. I mean, it's great. Butter's great in lemon curd, but so is coconut oil. Yep. And you can figure out these substitutions, liquid oil for liquid oil, or as Bruce says, the various butter substitutes or even coconut oil for butter in most cases.
Again, the more complicated the recipe, the fewer substitutions you. Ever want to make in it, right? So for example, if you're gonna go out and look at recipes from now, I'm gonna name some things like Milk Street or Better Homes and Gardens. Most of the time you can make substitutions with confidence in those recipes because those tend to be simpler recipes. But if you're cooking from, let's say, an Otto Lange cookbook, then no, most of the time you wanna go exactly what.
Otto Lange requires for the recipe because these are much more complicated, much fussier recipes, and they're gonna fall or stand based on the exact ratios that the chef has worked out. So again, if you're looking at a chef driven book. Be very careful about any substitutions, which brings us to our last one. Mm-hmm. Which is milk.
Oh, milk. For the most part, when it comes to cooking, milk is milk. Is milk is milk. Whether it's from a cow, from a goat, from a cashew, right, from an almond. Right from an oat plant. From pea plant, from a potato plant. It is milk. It adds liquid, it adds some protein, it adds a little bit of fat, and that's what you're looking for in most recipes.
Let me add one caveat here, and the caveat is for soy milk, the deal with oat milk and almond milk is some of them have thickeners in them, or they're viscous from what they're made from, let's say cashews in cashew milk. So they're viscous from what they're made from, or they have thickeners in them, which helps. Actually as a substitute for milk, because those thickeners, I know it's a little bit of a chemical Fandango, but those chemicals work in the way that fat works in milk.
Soy milk is often not thickened, and the thinness of soy milk will sometimes work against you. Mm. Particularly in baking. Recipes. It can work bad against you. And don't forget too, that many milks and Bruce is right, milk is. Milk is milk. But many of these alternative milks are sweetened and looking, particularly at soy milk, which is often sweetened in some way. Read those labels carefully to know what you're getting. So that's hard to find.
Unsweetened oat milk or unsweetened soy milk in the us, not outside of the US, but in the us. Yep.
So when I'm doing savory dishes, I tend to go for coconut milk a lot. That goes really well when I'm, even when I'm making desserts, I can substitute coconut milk when I'm making custards and pies. And that comes out a little bit better than using some nut milks. And that's because of the high fat content in the coconut. So you do wanna pay attention to the fat content and not necessarily go for reduced fat. Or low fat milk substitutes. Right?
And, uh, I should say that, um, although many recipes called for whole milk dairy milk, now I'm speaking of dairy milk. Bruce routinely substitutes low fat for a whole milk. And if you're really worried about skim milk, and it's not gonna be as rich a. Cake. It's not gonna be as rich a batter, particularly if you're making brownies or blondies or cakes or anything like that, and you have skim milk, then just add another egg yolk.
If you add another egg yolk, it will often become much richer or, or even if you're making puddings with skimm milk, you can do that. Mm-hmm. Just add another egg yolk. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Okay. Those are our easy substitutions, I guess. Easy we bang on forever about them, but our easy substitutions, let me say that there is a way that you can follow us online. We are both on Instagram, we're both on Facebook. We are on TikTok, under the header cooking with Bruce and Mark.
We have lots of videos going up all the time on TikTok where you can follow us. If you want to find us in any of those places, look for that or look for cooking with Bruce and Mark on those various platforms. You can find us by our. Own names or under the larger header cooking with Bruce and Mark. Look for us there. Okay. As is typical, our final segment,
¶ What's making us happy in food this week? Knackwurst and fresh nectarines!
what's making us happy in food this week,
I am in love with the smoked. Kana first I'm getting from a local farm from Howling Flats. A shout out to Kelly who runs Howling Flats farm. She's been making these smoked knock first from her pigs that are so delicious. We've been eating them with our homemade sauerkraut. Kim Cheese from our book called Canning, and I am in love with them. That's what's making me happy.
They are good. And what's making me happy are nectarines. And let me tell you about this because, uh, you're gonna think that Costco supports this podcast when it doesn't.
I wish they would, but it
is that time of year when stone fruits are coming into the stores and they come into Costco too. And yes, you do have to buy a box of nectarines or a box of peaches, but I believe we talked about this, uh, last year in our podcast. But I'm gonna say it again. Costco has such a fast. Turnover of food that what is uh, brought to Costco is often riper than what is brought to the supermarkets.
And if they pick nectarines off the tree and see that they're riper, then would be held in a standard supermarket for a longer, those will be packaged, particularly for Costco. So peaches, nectarines, plums, all that kind of stuff are often better at Costco. They're close at rip. This dad, do you have to eat them more quickly? Yes you do, because they are closer to ripeness. But boy, the nectarines we got from Costco were amazing this last week. 12 nectarines don't last very long in this house.
No, because I have one for dessert almost every night. They're unbelievable. So check out the ripe. Fruit that's coming into the markets right now. It's really great. That's the podcast for this week. We certainly appreciate your being with us. Thanks for spending the time with us, and thanks for being on this food journey with us.
And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food. So go to our Facebook group, cooking with Bruce and Mark and share with us there what's making you happy in food this week. We want to know about it and when it's really fun, delicious sounding or interesting, we're gonna talk about it here on Cooking Map, Bruce and Mark.