The Mind of a Chef (2012) s02e05 Episode Script
Preserve
In this episode, Chef Sean Brock discusses the role of preservation in Southern cuisine from basic canning of tomatoes, to fermenting benne seeds.
It's the idea of getting more flavor on the plate without adding more ingredients.
Chef Jeremiah Langhorne makes scallops with country ham.
You can't help it it's undeniable.
Country ham will make you so happy.
Chef Lisa Donovan makes pie with preserves.
Yeah, I don't know why everyone's so damn scared of it.
I'm terrified of it.
And Harold McGee brings the science.
Enter the mind of a chef.
I remember as a kid walking through my grandmother's basement and seeing walls and walls and walls of mason jars.
And I remember, like, looking at some of them, and it looked like a science experiment.
When you walk around McCrady's in the wine cellar and all these little hidden little areas, it's exactly like walking through my grandmother's basement.
There's all these different little nooks and crannies where we have things aging and curing and drying and preserving all over the place.
That's just how I cook, you know? That's that's how I'll always cook.
Something that I grew up eating, flavors I was used to, techniques that my grandmother taught me, then taking them a step further in a more modern way.
Preservation is simply a way of life.
You learn all these techniques that got you through a winter, but you fall in love with them, and you expect to eat them, and you get used to eating them, and they just become part of your meal all the time.
So we're here in our little mini R&D center with Josh Frantoni, who heads it up.
He's really expanded it into something that I'd never be able to.
This section over here, things are fermenting, things are going to vinegar.
For instance, here, is some whey that's a byproduct of cheese making, and we're just fermenting it.
So you just add a little salt to this? Yep, exactly.
Basically it's got a two percent salt.
It'll go, it'll add a little funk, a little richness.
It's starting to smell like blue cheese already.
What else we have? Some chilis here, fermenting for charcuterie.
A strawberry vinegar.
And this one here is really cool.
This is probably the biggest vinegar project we've ever done.
This is sorghum.
Wow.
It's got an amazing aroma coming out of it, too.
Essentially, you take sorghum, add water, allow it to naturally turn into alcohol, and then you allow that to oxidize.
So vinegar is essentially oxidized booze.
Yep.
It really is that simple.
We've added a little extra mother and just additionally jump started it.
We keep saving, because we have so many vinegar projects going.
I know some of them started with the mother that was your grandmother's mother.
The original mother of all these vinegars started with my grandmother's vinegar mother that was 40 years old.
If you've ever seen vinegar being made, you'll know that the most important part of the vinegar making process is the vinegar mother.
Because it holds the acetobacters.
And that's what forms acetic acid, which is essentially vinegar.
These mothers are these cellulose blobs that look like some prehistoric sea creature.
When I was a little kid I was terrified of it, because it's this liquid underneath the sink, and it looks like these jellyfish floating around.
And she told me the story.
She was like, "You know, this is something that I've had "for years and years and years passed down, "and if you take care of the mother, and if you "respect it and keep it in a safe place, "it'll last you for eternity.
You can pass that down.
" You can preserve foods by adding a couple of materials that are not normally in contact with it.
Salt and sugar are the most common.
They have similar sorts of effects.
They act to essentially take away water from cells and from the microbes.
They prevent those cells and microbes from getting access to the water that they need.
And they do that by binding it.
The ions of salt and sugar molecules are very good at latching on to water and not letting go.
So if you take a look at microbes under the microscope, they normally look nice and plump.
They're full of water, they're very happy, growing and dividing very quickly.
The moment that you put them in a situation with lots of salt or lots of sugar, the water inside them gets sucked out of them, and they shrink.
And that shrinkage shows that the machinery inside is not working anymore.
So even though you may not actually kill the microbes, you've stopped them from growing, and that's all that matters when you're preserving foods.
So we're in the kitchen here at McCrady's with Jeremiah Langhorne, the Chef de Cuisine here, and we're going to do a dish based on probably one of my favorite things in the entire world, country ham.
I have this weird thing where everything's my favorite.
But this I've used as a pillow before.
Like, I've taken naps on country hams.
Like, this smell that you get is just amazing, don't you think? You just, like, rub it here like this.
Puts a smile on your face, you know? And all the Southern ladies come running.
Yeah.
Sweet, smoky, beautiful smell.
See what happens? It's undeniable.
Country ham will make you so happy if you eat a slice of it.
It'll make you make all kinds of bad decisions.
But this is something that we take very, very, very seriously here.
Like, this is something that you grow up eating your whole life for breakfast in the morning.
Oh my God, yeah.
And country ham is one of those things that is extremely simple.
It requires two things salt and time.
So you came up with a cool dish utilizing this wonderful country ham with some fantastic scallops.
These are Calico Scallops Carolina Calico Scallops.
You know, they're really sweet and delicious, so I just want to make sure they really kind of shine on their own.
Prepare them very simply.
Just lightly seared.
Show you a little trick I learned in the army.
Country ham fat adds a nice flavor, that sweetness.
The smokiness of the country ham fat with the sweetness of the scallop, really incredible combination.
Really makes me happy.
Serving them with a little bit of a charred Kohlrabi Purée.
After they're seared on one side, and they start to get golden brown, kind of roll them all around.
Make sure they're nice and warm.
Still, I mean, you see how little we actually cook them.
There's still nice, soft texture.
The garnish on this dish, or the top component, is going to be a little salad of fresh grated Kohlrabi, some dragon's tongue pole beans, which are a really cool heirloom pole bean, and we're going to finish it with some shaved country ham as well.
Plating is very, very important here.
If there's 15 bites, how do you want that guest to experience that dish in those 15 bites? Once I start thinking about dishes like that, everything changed for me with the way you plate something.
You know, because it's very easy when you're a young chef to come and look at a dish and think about the ingredients and just say, "Okay, well, this really cool, "and this is really good, and this is great, so I'll just put these things together, and that's it," you know? And then it looks really cool plated this way.
Yeah, exactly.
You can't think about that.
The plating has to be natural, and you have to keep the guest in mind.
How are they going to experience this? The anatomy of the perfect bite.
I'm here with Lisa Donovan, our incredibly talented pastry chef at Husk.
And today we're going to make little hand pies with some of this fantastic fruit preserves.
We have strawberry rhubarb, and we have peach.
We just got our first peaches of the season.
So what's great about this is you take something at its peak, something that's perfect.
You capture that essence in this.
I think why a lot of people have a bad idea of preserved food is because a lot of the preserved food is just made with whatever.
Like, they take a really good peach, and they just drown it in sugar.
Oh, it's the worst! And then all you have is the sugar and a couple of peaches in the jar, and it destroys the peach.
Yeah, and you don't get that flavor.
So, yeah.
So your technique is super, super low, five to seven hours.
Yeah, kind of low and slow.
I don't like to add a lot of sugar.
So I let them go sometimes for a couple of days.
I just keep putting it back on the stove, and let it pull its own sugar out.
Smells like the fruit cup from elementary school.
Perfect! That's completely what I was aiming for.
It does.
That's a fantastic smell.
So, we're going to move on to the pie crust.
Don't be scared.
Thank God for you, because the pies would be terrible here if I made them.
It's just about keeping things cold, man.
That's it.
Don't make it sound so easy.
I've tried to make pie crust a million times.
Okay, there is one thing.
People chop up their butter too small.
See how big that chunk is? Like, put some big chunks of butter in there and just smear butter into flour.
That's what you're looking for.
You're looking for little buttery, floury leaves.
And if that butter is cold when it's mixed into your flower, what it's going to do is it's going to do this really beautiful almost like a puff pastry striation of layers, and it's just That's the first thing I noticed about your pie crust it was almost like puff pastry.
Yeah.
It was just, like, layers.
Really, like, I can't stress enough it's less about this and more about cold, and giving it extreme temperatures.
So what are your ratios of water to flour to butter? Quite honestly, like, butter to flour, it's about two to one.
With the water, I just add a little, and I go.
It doesn't take a whole lot when this much butter is in here.
That was, like hardly like any water.
That was hardly any water.
It was mostly butter.
Well, that's where I'd screw it up.
And so if you did it right, you should see some pretty little baby flakes of butter in there.
Beautiful.
So that's it.
And then you just wrap it up, and put it in the fridge, and you just let it chill for at least 30 minutes, and then you can pull it out and fill it with whatever you want.
And so we're going to do hand pies.
So why do you think pies are such an important part of Southern culture? I tell you what nothing makes people happier than pie.
I agree, everybody loves pie.
I don't know what it is.
I have no idea.
You bring someone a pie, done.
Especially if it's a totally badass pie.
You are invited to all of their weddings, baby showers, forever and ever and ever.
Just want a little egg wash to seal it up.
I guess we'll do peach.
It's like condensed peach.
All right.
We're just going to seal her up.
And a quick little glaze.
Egg wash.
How worried should you be about air in there? Not so worried, because you always just come at it like this.
Yep.
And, that's going to let that steam from the fruit and the dough Mm-hmm.
Now we just do a little sugar, and that's it.
And then let it hang out and get cold again, and then we'll stick it in the oven.
Put them in there nice and cold at 375 for about 15 minutes.
Awesome.
You could get rich off these things, Lisa.
I'm going to try.
Is it hot? It's a little hot.
Can you handle it? Ah! I can handle it.
All right, cheers, then.
Cheers.
I got peach.
Ah! They're so hot! They're so worth it, though.
Mmm! Yeah? It doesn't get any better.
I love it when you shake your head.
Canning is a modern way of preserving foods, which is to just wipe out the microbes that are in the food.
Kill them all, and then put the food in some kind of container that will protect it forever from the microbes that are floating around us all the time.
The one thing you have to worry about when it comes to canning, though, is botulism bacteria, because they actually love to grow in an enclosed container like that with no air, and they have seedlike spores that survive boiling temperatures, which means you can't just boil the food and figure that you're going to be able to get rid of all the botulism bacteria.
And so what you do is you put the food in a container like a can or a jar, and heat that food at super higher temperatures.
You have to use a pressure cooker to heat the food to more like 240 or 250 degrees instead of 212.
You do that long enough to kill those spores and then seal the cans and jars, and the food will be safe and preserved.
Preserving food is a really fantastic way to eat through the winter, but also to capture something at its peak.
You grow something beautiful, you preserve it, you put it away, then you can eat it all year long.
This technique is really, really fast and efficient.
It's called the hot pack and hold method.
With this technique we have to go above 180 degrees Fahrenheit, and our pH needs to be lower than 4.
6.
We'll take the natural liquid and test the pH.
Sometimes tomatoes are acidic enough that you don't have to do anything.
But if the pH isn't low enough, then you add lemon juice to acidulate it.
4.
8, so we need to add a little bit of lemon juice, make sure that our pH is below 4.
6.
So now all we have to do is bring this up on the stove until the internal temperature of a tomato exceeds 180 Fahrenheit or 82.
2 degrees Celsius.
It's ready to take off the stove and go right into the jar.
The jar has been sterilized by boiling it.
A new lid, which is very important, because you can't reuse these, because the seal, after it gets hot, would only seal once.
I turn it upside down, and that puts all the pressure and the heat on the seal.
So what's great about this is once this cools, it'll last you for years.
And that allows you to enjoy the taste of summer when it's snowing outside.
I don't even know what the hell's up here.
Sometimes I'm scared to look at what's on the tray.
See, this is very cool.
This idea of drying a vegetable, concentrating its flavor, and, it's just, like, intense, like, super crazy beet flavored.
What I was thinking this would also be good for is if we make a beet vinegar, then we can go back Refortify? And refortify it with this intense flavor, because that just smells like a beet reduction.
It smells like the most intense beet.
That earthiness is really intense about it.
Up here in the cellar, it's a perfect temperature to do this kind of thing.
McGEE: Happily, preservation doesn't just mean keeping a food forever.
It also means generating delicious flavors that didn't exist in the original food.
And that's where fermentation really shines.
That's the intentional cultivation of helpful microbes to prevent the spoilage microbes from growing.
And there are a couple of different ways you can do that.
The simplest is by taking a batch of the previous food that you've preserved and adding its microbes to the fresh food that you want to preserve.
Those microbes that are preserving the food are also at the very same time generating all kinds of wonderful aromas that didn't exist before.
And the acidity that they give gives a wonderful freshness to pickled and preserved foods.
Another way to do it is essentially to give the good microbes an advantage over those spoilage microbes by changing the chemical conditions on the surface of the food.
So what you can do is sprinkle some salt on the food.
The salt will bring moisture out of the food, because it attracts water to itself.
That means that the food's juices begin to come out of the food and begin to feed the desirable microbes, the friendly ones, so that they again get a head start over the spoilage microbes.
So it's only natural that we take all the things that are natural to this kitchen and to this cuisine and put them through the miso process.
So you start with Some sort of a grain is the base.
We'll take the aspergillus oryzae, and we'll inoculate farro, rice over a 48 hour period.
Then we apply salt.
At this point, they're, like, covered.
They're covered with this mold.
And salt actually kills the Aspergillus.
What's left behind is the enzymes that they've created.
The enzymes are breaking down proteins and starches, and that's what's creating those flavors.
And then from there, we've been learning that we can really branch out.
And we have, into A ton of different misos.
Yeah.
So then it goes in here and gets weighed down, and sits here at 43 Celsius for depends on what it is.
Depends on what sweetness level we want, what savory level we want, what salinity level we want, how much funk we want.
This is one of my favorite ones.
This one's made with Benne.
And Benne's one of my favorite plants.
It came from Africa in 1800.
Is this one rice or wheat base? Carolina Gold rice grits with benne seeds and salt and aspergillus oryzae.
That's it.
It takes on a Nutella, peanut butter flavor through that fermentation.
This one's a 33-day banana.
We've done some fun stuff with that.
I like this one.
Yeah.
This one has got some interesting flavors.
So weird.
Just the strangest flavor.
But that miso, it's natural instinct to want to have more of it, because it makes you want more by the way it activates specific parts of your tongue.
That's why I love about misos, and that's why they're so valuable.
Some rich depthness that people are only accustomed to with a grilled piece of meat or something of that nature.
This is a dish that has been on the menu for a while here at McCrady's.
And it's a dish that I created to really celebrate the work of two of my great friends, Adam Music and Glen Roberts.
We have Adam's pork belly and beautiful farro from Glen.
Some gorgeous chanterelles that grow wild all over Charleston.
And a new thing that we've done with this dish that's really exciting is adding this miso aspect, the fermented and preserved farro and benne.
And what I like about that is you're actually taking something that's already incredibly wonderful, this farro, and adding a new level of flavor.
You're adding this umami, you're adding this savoriness that echoes the farro and the benne.
Some wild ramp puree.
This component of the dish really represents pig food, which was kind of funny.
I was dumping the pig feed into the feeder one day, and I realized how delicious it smelled.
And then I really stopped and thought about what it was.
And it was just a bunch of the same grains that we cook with at the restaurant.
That day I tasted the pigs' food, and was very impressed with the flavors.
It was really nice.
The rest of the dish is really all the other things that grow around where the pigs live things that they might eat, things that are a part of their lives.
So, like, this sumac, the first time I drove around with Adam at his farm, he starts cursing at this plant that's growing everywhere.
"That sumac is driving me nuts.
" It was a problem for him.
Now it's something that really makes this dish.
Sumac is very sour, so it balances a lot of these flavors.
These are blueberries that grow on a really old rice plantation here.
I preserved them with vinegar that's flavored with eucalyptus.
Spending time in the field with the pigs I would constantly smell this eucalyptus.
There's something amazing about serving pig food and food found around a pig field to someone in a beautiful refined dish.
But we usually tell that story after they eat it.
I've always been a collector.
I love collecting things.
And to me that fulfilled by strings of fish collars, salting, baby tuna treated as katsuobushi, and carrots buried in sand.
If you have this vast collection of stuff everywhere, you have a bigger pantry.
I think the best chefs have the biggest pantries, the biggest possibilities.
So when you're creating a dish and it's kind of missing something, and you can't put your finger on it, and then your brain goes through the rabbit hole of the restaurant, and you start thinking about all these things you have tucked away, and all these projects and experiments everywhere, and you say, "Ooh! "We have that fish sauce on the roof that's been up there for a year and a half.
" And it makes its way into the dish, and it fills that little gap that that dish needed.
That dish ultimately becomes better, and I become happy with it, because I'm a hoarder.
There, I said it.
It's the idea of getting more flavor on the plate without adding more ingredients.
Chef Jeremiah Langhorne makes scallops with country ham.
You can't help it it's undeniable.
Country ham will make you so happy.
Chef Lisa Donovan makes pie with preserves.
Yeah, I don't know why everyone's so damn scared of it.
I'm terrified of it.
And Harold McGee brings the science.
Enter the mind of a chef.
I remember as a kid walking through my grandmother's basement and seeing walls and walls and walls of mason jars.
And I remember, like, looking at some of them, and it looked like a science experiment.
When you walk around McCrady's in the wine cellar and all these little hidden little areas, it's exactly like walking through my grandmother's basement.
There's all these different little nooks and crannies where we have things aging and curing and drying and preserving all over the place.
That's just how I cook, you know? That's that's how I'll always cook.
Something that I grew up eating, flavors I was used to, techniques that my grandmother taught me, then taking them a step further in a more modern way.
Preservation is simply a way of life.
You learn all these techniques that got you through a winter, but you fall in love with them, and you expect to eat them, and you get used to eating them, and they just become part of your meal all the time.
So we're here in our little mini R&D center with Josh Frantoni, who heads it up.
He's really expanded it into something that I'd never be able to.
This section over here, things are fermenting, things are going to vinegar.
For instance, here, is some whey that's a byproduct of cheese making, and we're just fermenting it.
So you just add a little salt to this? Yep, exactly.
Basically it's got a two percent salt.
It'll go, it'll add a little funk, a little richness.
It's starting to smell like blue cheese already.
What else we have? Some chilis here, fermenting for charcuterie.
A strawberry vinegar.
And this one here is really cool.
This is probably the biggest vinegar project we've ever done.
This is sorghum.
Wow.
It's got an amazing aroma coming out of it, too.
Essentially, you take sorghum, add water, allow it to naturally turn into alcohol, and then you allow that to oxidize.
So vinegar is essentially oxidized booze.
Yep.
It really is that simple.
We've added a little extra mother and just additionally jump started it.
We keep saving, because we have so many vinegar projects going.
I know some of them started with the mother that was your grandmother's mother.
The original mother of all these vinegars started with my grandmother's vinegar mother that was 40 years old.
If you've ever seen vinegar being made, you'll know that the most important part of the vinegar making process is the vinegar mother.
Because it holds the acetobacters.
And that's what forms acetic acid, which is essentially vinegar.
These mothers are these cellulose blobs that look like some prehistoric sea creature.
When I was a little kid I was terrified of it, because it's this liquid underneath the sink, and it looks like these jellyfish floating around.
And she told me the story.
She was like, "You know, this is something that I've had "for years and years and years passed down, "and if you take care of the mother, and if you "respect it and keep it in a safe place, "it'll last you for eternity.
You can pass that down.
" You can preserve foods by adding a couple of materials that are not normally in contact with it.
Salt and sugar are the most common.
They have similar sorts of effects.
They act to essentially take away water from cells and from the microbes.
They prevent those cells and microbes from getting access to the water that they need.
And they do that by binding it.
The ions of salt and sugar molecules are very good at latching on to water and not letting go.
So if you take a look at microbes under the microscope, they normally look nice and plump.
They're full of water, they're very happy, growing and dividing very quickly.
The moment that you put them in a situation with lots of salt or lots of sugar, the water inside them gets sucked out of them, and they shrink.
And that shrinkage shows that the machinery inside is not working anymore.
So even though you may not actually kill the microbes, you've stopped them from growing, and that's all that matters when you're preserving foods.
So we're in the kitchen here at McCrady's with Jeremiah Langhorne, the Chef de Cuisine here, and we're going to do a dish based on probably one of my favorite things in the entire world, country ham.
I have this weird thing where everything's my favorite.
But this I've used as a pillow before.
Like, I've taken naps on country hams.
Like, this smell that you get is just amazing, don't you think? You just, like, rub it here like this.
Puts a smile on your face, you know? And all the Southern ladies come running.
Yeah.
Sweet, smoky, beautiful smell.
See what happens? It's undeniable.
Country ham will make you so happy if you eat a slice of it.
It'll make you make all kinds of bad decisions.
But this is something that we take very, very, very seriously here.
Like, this is something that you grow up eating your whole life for breakfast in the morning.
Oh my God, yeah.
And country ham is one of those things that is extremely simple.
It requires two things salt and time.
So you came up with a cool dish utilizing this wonderful country ham with some fantastic scallops.
These are Calico Scallops Carolina Calico Scallops.
You know, they're really sweet and delicious, so I just want to make sure they really kind of shine on their own.
Prepare them very simply.
Just lightly seared.
Show you a little trick I learned in the army.
Country ham fat adds a nice flavor, that sweetness.
The smokiness of the country ham fat with the sweetness of the scallop, really incredible combination.
Really makes me happy.
Serving them with a little bit of a charred Kohlrabi Purée.
After they're seared on one side, and they start to get golden brown, kind of roll them all around.
Make sure they're nice and warm.
Still, I mean, you see how little we actually cook them.
There's still nice, soft texture.
The garnish on this dish, or the top component, is going to be a little salad of fresh grated Kohlrabi, some dragon's tongue pole beans, which are a really cool heirloom pole bean, and we're going to finish it with some shaved country ham as well.
Plating is very, very important here.
If there's 15 bites, how do you want that guest to experience that dish in those 15 bites? Once I start thinking about dishes like that, everything changed for me with the way you plate something.
You know, because it's very easy when you're a young chef to come and look at a dish and think about the ingredients and just say, "Okay, well, this really cool, "and this is really good, and this is great, so I'll just put these things together, and that's it," you know? And then it looks really cool plated this way.
Yeah, exactly.
You can't think about that.
The plating has to be natural, and you have to keep the guest in mind.
How are they going to experience this? The anatomy of the perfect bite.
I'm here with Lisa Donovan, our incredibly talented pastry chef at Husk.
And today we're going to make little hand pies with some of this fantastic fruit preserves.
We have strawberry rhubarb, and we have peach.
We just got our first peaches of the season.
So what's great about this is you take something at its peak, something that's perfect.
You capture that essence in this.
I think why a lot of people have a bad idea of preserved food is because a lot of the preserved food is just made with whatever.
Like, they take a really good peach, and they just drown it in sugar.
Oh, it's the worst! And then all you have is the sugar and a couple of peaches in the jar, and it destroys the peach.
Yeah, and you don't get that flavor.
So, yeah.
So your technique is super, super low, five to seven hours.
Yeah, kind of low and slow.
I don't like to add a lot of sugar.
So I let them go sometimes for a couple of days.
I just keep putting it back on the stove, and let it pull its own sugar out.
Smells like the fruit cup from elementary school.
Perfect! That's completely what I was aiming for.
It does.
That's a fantastic smell.
So, we're going to move on to the pie crust.
Don't be scared.
Thank God for you, because the pies would be terrible here if I made them.
It's just about keeping things cold, man.
That's it.
Don't make it sound so easy.
I've tried to make pie crust a million times.
Okay, there is one thing.
People chop up their butter too small.
See how big that chunk is? Like, put some big chunks of butter in there and just smear butter into flour.
That's what you're looking for.
You're looking for little buttery, floury leaves.
And if that butter is cold when it's mixed into your flower, what it's going to do is it's going to do this really beautiful almost like a puff pastry striation of layers, and it's just That's the first thing I noticed about your pie crust it was almost like puff pastry.
Yeah.
It was just, like, layers.
Really, like, I can't stress enough it's less about this and more about cold, and giving it extreme temperatures.
So what are your ratios of water to flour to butter? Quite honestly, like, butter to flour, it's about two to one.
With the water, I just add a little, and I go.
It doesn't take a whole lot when this much butter is in here.
That was, like hardly like any water.
That was hardly any water.
It was mostly butter.
Well, that's where I'd screw it up.
And so if you did it right, you should see some pretty little baby flakes of butter in there.
Beautiful.
So that's it.
And then you just wrap it up, and put it in the fridge, and you just let it chill for at least 30 minutes, and then you can pull it out and fill it with whatever you want.
And so we're going to do hand pies.
So why do you think pies are such an important part of Southern culture? I tell you what nothing makes people happier than pie.
I agree, everybody loves pie.
I don't know what it is.
I have no idea.
You bring someone a pie, done.
Especially if it's a totally badass pie.
You are invited to all of their weddings, baby showers, forever and ever and ever.
Just want a little egg wash to seal it up.
I guess we'll do peach.
It's like condensed peach.
All right.
We're just going to seal her up.
And a quick little glaze.
Egg wash.
How worried should you be about air in there? Not so worried, because you always just come at it like this.
Yep.
And, that's going to let that steam from the fruit and the dough Mm-hmm.
Now we just do a little sugar, and that's it.
And then let it hang out and get cold again, and then we'll stick it in the oven.
Put them in there nice and cold at 375 for about 15 minutes.
Awesome.
You could get rich off these things, Lisa.
I'm going to try.
Is it hot? It's a little hot.
Can you handle it? Ah! I can handle it.
All right, cheers, then.
Cheers.
I got peach.
Ah! They're so hot! They're so worth it, though.
Mmm! Yeah? It doesn't get any better.
I love it when you shake your head.
Canning is a modern way of preserving foods, which is to just wipe out the microbes that are in the food.
Kill them all, and then put the food in some kind of container that will protect it forever from the microbes that are floating around us all the time.
The one thing you have to worry about when it comes to canning, though, is botulism bacteria, because they actually love to grow in an enclosed container like that with no air, and they have seedlike spores that survive boiling temperatures, which means you can't just boil the food and figure that you're going to be able to get rid of all the botulism bacteria.
And so what you do is you put the food in a container like a can or a jar, and heat that food at super higher temperatures.
You have to use a pressure cooker to heat the food to more like 240 or 250 degrees instead of 212.
You do that long enough to kill those spores and then seal the cans and jars, and the food will be safe and preserved.
Preserving food is a really fantastic way to eat through the winter, but also to capture something at its peak.
You grow something beautiful, you preserve it, you put it away, then you can eat it all year long.
This technique is really, really fast and efficient.
It's called the hot pack and hold method.
With this technique we have to go above 180 degrees Fahrenheit, and our pH needs to be lower than 4.
6.
We'll take the natural liquid and test the pH.
Sometimes tomatoes are acidic enough that you don't have to do anything.
But if the pH isn't low enough, then you add lemon juice to acidulate it.
4.
8, so we need to add a little bit of lemon juice, make sure that our pH is below 4.
6.
So now all we have to do is bring this up on the stove until the internal temperature of a tomato exceeds 180 Fahrenheit or 82.
2 degrees Celsius.
It's ready to take off the stove and go right into the jar.
The jar has been sterilized by boiling it.
A new lid, which is very important, because you can't reuse these, because the seal, after it gets hot, would only seal once.
I turn it upside down, and that puts all the pressure and the heat on the seal.
So what's great about this is once this cools, it'll last you for years.
And that allows you to enjoy the taste of summer when it's snowing outside.
I don't even know what the hell's up here.
Sometimes I'm scared to look at what's on the tray.
See, this is very cool.
This idea of drying a vegetable, concentrating its flavor, and, it's just, like, intense, like, super crazy beet flavored.
What I was thinking this would also be good for is if we make a beet vinegar, then we can go back Refortify? And refortify it with this intense flavor, because that just smells like a beet reduction.
It smells like the most intense beet.
That earthiness is really intense about it.
Up here in the cellar, it's a perfect temperature to do this kind of thing.
McGEE: Happily, preservation doesn't just mean keeping a food forever.
It also means generating delicious flavors that didn't exist in the original food.
And that's where fermentation really shines.
That's the intentional cultivation of helpful microbes to prevent the spoilage microbes from growing.
And there are a couple of different ways you can do that.
The simplest is by taking a batch of the previous food that you've preserved and adding its microbes to the fresh food that you want to preserve.
Those microbes that are preserving the food are also at the very same time generating all kinds of wonderful aromas that didn't exist before.
And the acidity that they give gives a wonderful freshness to pickled and preserved foods.
Another way to do it is essentially to give the good microbes an advantage over those spoilage microbes by changing the chemical conditions on the surface of the food.
So what you can do is sprinkle some salt on the food.
The salt will bring moisture out of the food, because it attracts water to itself.
That means that the food's juices begin to come out of the food and begin to feed the desirable microbes, the friendly ones, so that they again get a head start over the spoilage microbes.
So it's only natural that we take all the things that are natural to this kitchen and to this cuisine and put them through the miso process.
So you start with Some sort of a grain is the base.
We'll take the aspergillus oryzae, and we'll inoculate farro, rice over a 48 hour period.
Then we apply salt.
At this point, they're, like, covered.
They're covered with this mold.
And salt actually kills the Aspergillus.
What's left behind is the enzymes that they've created.
The enzymes are breaking down proteins and starches, and that's what's creating those flavors.
And then from there, we've been learning that we can really branch out.
And we have, into A ton of different misos.
Yeah.
So then it goes in here and gets weighed down, and sits here at 43 Celsius for depends on what it is.
Depends on what sweetness level we want, what savory level we want, what salinity level we want, how much funk we want.
This is one of my favorite ones.
This one's made with Benne.
And Benne's one of my favorite plants.
It came from Africa in 1800.
Is this one rice or wheat base? Carolina Gold rice grits with benne seeds and salt and aspergillus oryzae.
That's it.
It takes on a Nutella, peanut butter flavor through that fermentation.
This one's a 33-day banana.
We've done some fun stuff with that.
I like this one.
Yeah.
This one has got some interesting flavors.
So weird.
Just the strangest flavor.
But that miso, it's natural instinct to want to have more of it, because it makes you want more by the way it activates specific parts of your tongue.
That's why I love about misos, and that's why they're so valuable.
Some rich depthness that people are only accustomed to with a grilled piece of meat or something of that nature.
This is a dish that has been on the menu for a while here at McCrady's.
And it's a dish that I created to really celebrate the work of two of my great friends, Adam Music and Glen Roberts.
We have Adam's pork belly and beautiful farro from Glen.
Some gorgeous chanterelles that grow wild all over Charleston.
And a new thing that we've done with this dish that's really exciting is adding this miso aspect, the fermented and preserved farro and benne.
And what I like about that is you're actually taking something that's already incredibly wonderful, this farro, and adding a new level of flavor.
You're adding this umami, you're adding this savoriness that echoes the farro and the benne.
Some wild ramp puree.
This component of the dish really represents pig food, which was kind of funny.
I was dumping the pig feed into the feeder one day, and I realized how delicious it smelled.
And then I really stopped and thought about what it was.
And it was just a bunch of the same grains that we cook with at the restaurant.
That day I tasted the pigs' food, and was very impressed with the flavors.
It was really nice.
The rest of the dish is really all the other things that grow around where the pigs live things that they might eat, things that are a part of their lives.
So, like, this sumac, the first time I drove around with Adam at his farm, he starts cursing at this plant that's growing everywhere.
"That sumac is driving me nuts.
" It was a problem for him.
Now it's something that really makes this dish.
Sumac is very sour, so it balances a lot of these flavors.
These are blueberries that grow on a really old rice plantation here.
I preserved them with vinegar that's flavored with eucalyptus.
Spending time in the field with the pigs I would constantly smell this eucalyptus.
There's something amazing about serving pig food and food found around a pig field to someone in a beautiful refined dish.
But we usually tell that story after they eat it.
I've always been a collector.
I love collecting things.
And to me that fulfilled by strings of fish collars, salting, baby tuna treated as katsuobushi, and carrots buried in sand.
If you have this vast collection of stuff everywhere, you have a bigger pantry.
I think the best chefs have the biggest pantries, the biggest possibilities.
So when you're creating a dish and it's kind of missing something, and you can't put your finger on it, and then your brain goes through the rabbit hole of the restaurant, and you start thinking about all these things you have tucked away, and all these projects and experiments everywhere, and you say, "Ooh! "We have that fish sauce on the roof that's been up there for a year and a half.
" And it makes its way into the dish, and it fills that little gap that that dish needed.
That dish ultimately becomes better, and I become happy with it, because I'm a hoarder.
There, I said it.