WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: We're talking condiments!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein and this is the podcast cooking with Bruce and Mark. And I'm Mark Scarborough. And together with Bruce, we have written three dozen cookbooks, written and published three dozen cookbooks. I guess some people just write cookbooks without publishing them, but we've written three dozen cookbooks are working on our 37th cookbook. Even as we speak coming near the Deadline to that. We'll tell you much more about that ahead, but we've got a packed podcast in this episode.

We're going to talk about a one minute cooking tip as we always do. We want to talk about something that is near and dear to our hearts. You'll be shocked by this, but it's condiments. And then we're going to tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip. When cooking meat on top of the stove, think high heat. When cooking meat in the oven, think low heat. Now, I, but, uh Barbera kafka be damned, it's low heat in the oven. Okay, but you don't mean you're gonna put a strip steak in at 300 degrees Fahrenheit. You mean long braising cuts, right? If you have a leg of lamb, Don't put it in at 400 degrees. Put it in at 300 degrees.

It'll take a long time, but you'll have a juicier piece of meat with less contraction of the meat. Okay, can I just go backwards and say I know why you're saying this. You're saying this because we have a friend who shoves everything into a food processor. 500 degree oven for five minutes. And that includes briskets. That includes leg of lamb prime rib. Yeah. Everything has the same. And you're responding to that with this. So what you're saying is that in tougher cooking pieces.

of meat in the oven go lower, but in quick cooking meats on the stovetop go higher. I am saying that, but you know what? Even on tender meats like prime rib, you'll do better at 275 degrees over the course of four or five hours than 375 degrees in half that time. Well, that is true. You'll have juicier meat. The meat doesn't contract as much, so it's not as tough, and it's just so much better, but on stovetop. People seem to be afraid of high heat, don't they? Yes, they do.

It's a common trope in recipe writing that every copywriter takes. When you say high heat, they take it and change it to medium high heat. Even the copy editors, not even the consumer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's the copywriter, but the copy editor changes it. It's really common. People are afraid of high heat. I'm not quite sure why. You have these big ass gas stoves. So you might as well crank those things up. You bought them for it. Yeah. So just let's do it.

Sear your steaks over really high heat, but do your roast in a slower oven. In general. That's right. Okay. Before we get to the next segment of this podcast, let me say that as you probably know, we are an unsupported podcast. We don't have any sponsors because we choose not to have any sponsors. We prefer the freedom of being able to say anything and everything we want. including comments about your stove. So, um, it'd be great if you could help us out and rate this podcast.

If you could write a review on any platform you're on, if it allows it, that would be terrific. I think practically Apple is the only one, maybe audible that still allows written reviews. But if you can write a review, that would be great. It helps us out in the analytics. And by the way, I think most kids have no clue who Barbara Kafka is, but we're moving on. to the next part of our podcast, which is all about condiments.

We are the condiment kings. Look in our fridge and it's 95 percent condiments. Really, it's really absurd. Maybe there's some milk in there somewhere, but it's mostly condiments. It's just really ridiculous. Um, we are, we do have a lot of condiments and we do use a lot of condiments in cooking. We just wanted to talk about, about condiments that you might want to keep around your kitchen that we have. And of course the way to start off is to talk about ketchup.

Now I'm sure most people have the standard ketchup in their refrigerator. somewhere. Is that a U. S. thing, cat sop? Like, seriously, do other, uh, in the U. K. or in Australia, do people say C A T S U P, cat sop? Or is it just in the United States that that's how ketchup is spelled? I actually don't know. But it's spelled ketchup, Heinz. Ketchup is K E T. I know. Now, when I was growing up, Del Monte, Katsup was Katsup, and my grandparents, my mother's parents had Del Monte Katsup.

That's the kind they like, and my grandfather put it on everything from green beans to pizza because it didn't have enough sauce for him. Now my other grandmother had Heinz ketchup and Ketchup on pizza? Why not? No, why? Now, here's the thing.

My other grandmother had Heinz ketchup, And while she didn't use it very often, and you've heard us talk about this on this podcast before her delicacy that she gave me as a child was squeezing ketchup on cooked egg noodles and stirring in melted cream cheese. That was her idea, I guess, of penne alla vodka. I don't know. Oh, you're right. Yeah, that's exactly what that is, is penne a la vodka. Yeah. In fact, just with that pronunciation, penne a la vodka.

Yes. No, you need the Yiddish accent to do it right. She called it lunch, but She called it lunch. I would call it torture. Okay, great. Um, that's just fantastic. But there's so much more than tomato ketchup out there. Uh, yes, there is. And let me just also say, we probably said this on the podcast before, but my mother raised me so that if you put ketchup on a hamburger, she would roll her eyes at you and say, I raised you better than that. Yeah, no ketchup belongs in a hamburger big time.

Cause my mother believed that. Mustard was the only known, my mother from a German immigrant family believed that mustard was the only known condiment for hot dogs, hamburgers, all that kind of stuff. I put ketchup on everything. I would often, if we didn't have like French onion dip in the house, I would just take a bowl of ketchup and dip potato chips in it. Right. But that's just like french fries.

Okay, but there are more ketchups than just what we all know from, you know, fast food and American, uh, hamburger joints and Canadian hamburger joints and all that kind of stuff. There are other kinds of ketchup, including banana ketchup, which is actually one of our favorites. It's a Filipino ketchup. Condiment. It's kind of like a ketchup. And here's the thing. It's actually brown in color naturally, but they diet red to match North American ketchup. But it's actually banana.

Ketchup is made from bananas, sugar, vinegar and lots of spices. It's really delicious. If you're a banana lover, you need to search out some banana ketchup. You may actually find find some that's not dyed red, and it'll be sort of, as Mark said, a brownish yellow. It may even look a little like mustard in the jar, but it's a flowing, smooth, sweet and sour sauce. It's really special. It's like the base sauce of Filipino spaghetti, which is cooked spaghetti with hot dogs and ground meat in it.

And this banana ketchup and then some other things to it. You can find a billion recipes online for Filipino spaghetti. The way you just described it, I might be into it, but I know that the other things include shredded Velveeta cheese. Yeah, it does. It does. I see what I like about banana ketchup is that it tastes like real bananas. Now I am a fan of. I'm a big fan of fake banana flavor, like you are.

Bonomo banana flavored Turkish taffy was my go to food as a child, but this doesn't taste like that. This is a real banana. Yeah, I know. So why are we talking about artificial bananas? I don't know. It's very sweet. So there are other ketchups too. There's, believe it or not, Ketchup. Mushroom ketchup, not as sweet. Actually, you know, mushroom ketchup is a really old condiment. I mean, you can find it in, uh, pre colonial U. S. British colony cookbooks. It's essentially like a steak sauce.

Think about a steak sauce, but chunkier with mushrooms in it and earthier. And a little thicker. funky or two because of the mushrooms grew wild. They still do. And so, you know, early, no, they don't think are wild nowhere in the entire world now, but you know, early people here, early colonists, uh, harvested them and salted the old timey. Okay. And then you squeeze out all that liquid after you soak them in salt and you boil that liquid with vinegar and spices.

And as Mark said, you end up with a steak saucy kind of thing. These days, if you buy bottled mushroom ketchup, you're going to have a very thin steak sauce quality, but if you look at recipes online, they're gonna run the range from loose, wet, to thick purees, so it's a matter of what you like. Okay, let's move on. Let's move on. Enough about ketchup. Seriously. Enough about that. And let's move on to something else that's always in our fridge, which are chutneys.

And we have a lot of chutneys. Couldn't live without chutney. And, um, of course we have major grays, which is that heavily dark spiced mango chutney. But there are many different kinds of chutneys. Uh, let me just give Give a shout out to one of our favorite jam makers, Nervous Nelly, N E L L I E. You can find her online. She's a jam maker up off the coast of Maine. Nervous Nelly's Jams and Jellies. And she makes a hot tomato chutney that is quite delicious. It's so fabulous.

And it has inspired me over the years to make other spicy chutneys. And there's another one, Beth's Farmhouse Kitchen. She makes. jams and jellies and chutneys. And we first discovered her at the Union Square Farmer's Market on 14th Street when we lived in Manhattan. She made a hot plum chutney that was actually also inspired me to start making these things. And the best thing about her, she put a book out a few years ago with all the recipes for all of her products.

She probably wanted to retire from the farmer's market. Um, let's just say that, uh, if you don't know this about chutneys, and this is something that's really interesting if you want to get into chutneys. They're great on rice, of course, with curries and all that kind of stuff. But there's a million other applications for them. You can put them into all kinds of mayonnaise based salads, whether it's tuna salad, chicken salad, pasta salad.

If it's a mayonnaise based salad, you can put them in there as a little bit of flavoring. You can add them, of course, as a topping to hot dogs, hamburgers. They're great in sandwiches. I like turkey clubs with a little mayonnaise and chutney in them. You know, there's a lot of different ways that you can use this, but let me just say this. Commercial chutneys, most mainline commercial chutneys sold in North America are just too sweet.

They are exceptionally sweet, so much so that they're sticky like jam. If you look for smaller producers like Nervous Nelly's and this, uh, woman that was at the farmer's market, Beth's Farm Kitchen Chutneys, if you look for things like that, you're going to find less sweet chutneys than if you go with, let's say the Stonewall Kitchen brand, the big, huge national brands. Those get so sweet that I can't tell the difference between jam and those chutneys.

Yeah, or the really common Patek's mango chutney, which is not a major grade, but just a mango. It's not, doesn't have all the extra spices. It's just basically mango and sugar. It's more sugar than mango, and it's really just overpowering. So we prefer them to be a little more sour, a little less sweet.

Sweet, which is why we like to make our own with the problem with getting really sweet is that a chutney is a really big blend of spices and flavors, and when you get them up to sweet, you lose all that spice layering in it. And that's what's really sad. And also you can kind of kill off some of the heat in it with too much sweet. So it's the way you experience it. And if you find smaller producers, they're more likely to make. a much richer and deeper and more complex chutney.

And also, let me say that we make regular trips and we live pretty rurally. So this is a big trip, but we make regular trips to an East Indian market. And there are two that I know of. Well, one East Indian market, and then we also go to a Middle Eastern market that's, oh, maybe an hour and 15 minutes from our house. We go there maybe twice a year. But the range of chutneys available in these places is astounding. It is, you can find coconut chutneys and cilantro chutneys. and cilantro chutneys.

I wonder what my Yiddish grandmother would have done with chutney. Would she have tried mixing that with cream cheese and noodles and called that lunch? And we should say that too, when we're talking about chutney, just for a second, although we've banged on way too long about this, is that what we're talking about mostly here is a UK version of chutney. And that is the sweet, sour, spicy condiment. But there are a lot of completely dry chutneys out there.

Well, I shouldn't say completely, but fairly dry powdery chutneys out there in traditional Indian cooking. Yeah. I find that the sort of dry ones, the ones that are more spices and coconut than sugar and syrup tend to be Southern India. They tend to be from Sri Lanka and they have a lot of like toasted coconut based curries and those are really, really good.

Different and delicious and let me tell you another condiment that we love and that you may not know and be familiar with but I didn't even know about this and I grew up in Texas and it is a Mexican condiment But it never crossed the Rio Grande into Texas, unfortunately when I was a kid, but now I know about it and that is salsa Salsa Macha is a Veracruz chili sauce, but it has blown out into thousands of various types. It's like a Mexican chili crisp, if you know what that means.

But it is way complex in its flavors, right? It's got nuts in it. Chili crisp. We've talked about chili crisp a lot on this Gan Ma. So most people I think are familiar with that ground up chilies and spices and oil, but garlic and garlic. But you take that now, the, the Mexican version salsa matcha, it's not just the chilies, it's also. Nuts, as you just said, and a lot of dried fruit. And instead of using ground chili powder, here's the way you do it.

You take oil in a pan, and you fry up your nuts, you fry up your garlic, you tear your dried chilies into pieces, and one by one, these things all get fried in the oil and removed, right? So you're only putting one ingredient at a time. Then, You put all that stuff in a bowl with a little vinegar, the oil you use to fry it, let it cool, and you put the whole thing in a food processor. And it's chunky. It's really amazing. In fact, we opened a couple salsamanchas the other night. Bruce made mole.

Venison mole. Mm, from, uh, from, uh, yeah. piece of medicine that a friend gave us. And, uh, it was, you know, the dark mole, a Negro and in the rice below it, I actually mixed salsa matcha into that rice. And let me say that my bowl was flaming. It was really hot, but it is so I love salsa matcha more than I can say. Okay. Here's the thing about. Buying salsa matcha. I have never bought one that hasn't been so hot. It's taking my head off.

But when you make it yourself, you can choose the level of heat you want to put in from your chili. So we have made salsa matchas from Morita chilies, which are kind of spicy and a little smoky. And I made one the other day, a cranberry walnut salsa matcha that used guajillo. Chili's and dried cranberries. And I don't know what it was about my guajillos. They were so mild. So this salsa matcha was fruity and sweet. And oh, gosh, it was good. Yeah, it was. It was not hot enough for my taste.

I will confess that I have become a fan of extremely hot food. And so I I probably go way beyond the North American palette at this point in what I like, but it was good and it was really flavorful and I love all the fruit and nuts that make up salsa macha. If you are in, uh, especially a larger urban area and can get to a large supermarket or if you are lucky enough to live anywhere near a Latin American or Hispanic supermarket, you will find a vast array of salsa machas.

salsas, matchas, I guess. I don't know. I don't know how to make that a plural. Um, and you can find all kinds of ways to up the food with the contents that you have in your fridge. Before we get to the last segment of this podcast, let me say that we do have a newsletter. It comes out, I don't know, about every two weeks, maybe twice a month. It often includes recipes that are. Cooked on this podcast or that appear on our tick tock channel, cooking with Bruce and Mark.

If you want to be on tick tock or are there, please look for us on tick tock. We have videos having, which we're making recipes. Each one of us eating alternate weeks, uh, check out the tick tock channel there and check out the newsletter on our website. You can sign up right on the splash page of the website and we will not collect or sell your Name or email address at any time.

All right, finally as is typical our last segment What is making us happy in food this week for me? It's a Calabrian tomato passata. Oh, I have been obsessed recently with mooty You know the high end Italian jarred tomato passata and trust me This is an ingredient that makes a huge difference. Go on. It really does. But we were having dinner at a friend's last week, and she made a beautiful Moroccan dinner for us.

And we were talking about tomatoes, and we were talking about mouti, and she said, I have something you have to try. And she pulled out of her pantry a bottle of a Calabrian, and it said right on the label, Guaranteed 100 percent Calabrian tomatoes. It did. It did. And this passata was a little less expensive acidic than the mooty. And I last night I used just in case somebody doesn't know what's Posada. Posada is a tomato puree.

And I used it last night to make a shrimp fra diavolo with spicy chilies and this tomato puree and I threw some sweet vermouth in it and some anchovies and lots of capers and oh, it was so yummy. And in fact, what Spain is happy and food this week is that same dish, but I want to talk for a minute about how you serve that dish because you made it on this really high fiber pasta, and it's not whole grain pasta is high fiber pasta.

And I find that that pasta that you use is the closest to more standard pasta of any high fiber pasta out there. What is that? It's called good food. Wheat. That is the brand name, and they are using a form of durum wheat that somehow has like four times the fiber of other wheat. It had eight grams of fiber per serving, which is a lot for pasta. Yeah, it's a lot for pasta.

And, you know, if you're trying to watch your carbs and you're trying to increase your fiber in order to help balance your carbs and all that kind of stuff, this pasta is really amazing. And what's the brand again? Good. We are not supported by them. We have no relationship with them. But I can just say I highly recommend this pasta over just standard white pasta, because it has very much the same texture. It's just got a lot more fiber to it. I will warn you, it's expensive.

So you're going to spend three and a half dollars for a box of pasta, as opposed to 99 cents for standard pasta on sale. So it's not cheap. And expensive, but if you can afford it, you should try it because it's really delicious and really actually better for you. Yeah, it is. And, and, uh, it's, it's really a fantastic find. Okay. So that's our podcast for this week. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for making time for us in the podcast landscape.

We appreciate it that you have chosen to listen to Cooking with Bruce and Mark. And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food. So tell us what's making you happy in food this week at our Facebook Book group cooking with Bruce and Mark because we want to know what's going on in food in your life as we share ours here with you on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.