The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e17 Episode Script
Techniques: From the Kitchen of Edward Lee
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This episode on The Mind of a Chef finds chef Edward Lee in the kitchen creating some of his favorite dishes.
Kentucky fried quail.
I love playing with the idea of highbrow, lowbrow cuisine.
And this is as simple as it gets.
Edamame hummus.
It's just a fresher sort of green flavor.
Texturally and flavor wise it's going to be different.
And shows us the best way to spike your sweet tea.
You move to a new town in the south and you don't have any friends you just make a batch of this, sit on your front porch.
You'll have friends really, really fast.
Enter, The Mind of a Chef.
All curious chefs are fascinated by their surroundings.
That is intense.
They don't teach you this in cooking school.
This is a recipe that I learned from a dude in Kentucky.
Actually I just call it breakfast.
Because it's just stuff that's leftover from the dinner party the night before.
And you kinda take it up, put it in a blender and mix it all together.
But it's really just a Buttermilk Cornbread-Sorghum milkshake.
So, we're gonna start with cornbread.
And what I can do is make sure that you have some kinda old, leftover cornbread.
This is a great way to use it up.
And I'm just gonna kinda put two little small babies fistfuls in there.
The cornbread should be a little bit stale.
It's better stale when you're making this.
All right, and then I've got my home-made buttermilk ice cream.
And depending on the consistency that you like your milkshake I like mine pretty thick.
Just gonna add a little bit of ice cream.
And then sorghum.
Mm, it's nice.
What makes sorghum so special is that it has a really wonderful, nutty kind of smokey umami flavor.
Very, very different from molasses and much more intense than honey.
I find like sorghum is somewhere between the burnt flavor of molasses and a light kind of floral hints of honey.
So, it's aggressive without being tuned in your face.
And, you know, this is such a simple thing.
It's just three ingredients really.
The ice cream, the sorghum and the cornbread, so You wanna make sure that every ingredient is made with care.
Or you make sure you get good sorghum.
Now we got some extra buttermilk on the side but I just wanna see what's gonna happen with this.
Ooh! All right, I don't wanna kill it too much.
This is already looking really nice.
So I also make sure that the ice cream is a little bit temperable temperature.
Um, this is really nice.
I'm just gonna go right with the glass.
It's gonna give an extra thick milkshake.
You got the flex of cornbread in there.
Sorghum is gonna sweeten it.
And go all the way to the top.
And then I'm gonna actually finish it off with a little more sorghum right on the top of it.
That's it.
And this is a nice thick milkshake.
Serve it with a spoon.
And that's breakfast.
Cornbread buttermilk sorghum milkshake.
This is a bar snack.
But it's a really, really good bar snack.
Rendered bacon and we're kinda gonna candy the bacon with cashews.
Add some spice to it and it's just an addictive bar snack that you will just go back to and reach for again and again.
I like to make this with some really good quality bacon.
So here we have some applewood smoked.
And this goes with pretty much any cocktail.
If you're gonna have as you would have in my house just some straight Bourbon on the rocks.
There's nothing better than a little bit of bacon candy that goes with that.
The first thing I'm gonna do is render the bacon fat out.
Depending on the bacon that you use, though, some will be fattier than the others, so, just go by instinct.
Don't worry about the recipe too much.
Just kinda cook instinctually.
The whole tradition is your salty bar nuts is gonna make you thirsty and makes you drink more.
The idea was, well, instead of adding salt why don't we add salt to the in the form of bacon Right? Because bacon's salty.
So, that's how it all started and, you know, the brain starts to go make one step further and say, "Whoa, why don't we add curry to spice.
" We serve a lot of Bourbon in our bar so I wanted to do something that really paired nicely with Bourbon.
Look at that, that's a lot of fat coming out of there.
Beautiful, beautiful, so This is what I do.
It's very simple.
I'm gonna take this pan out, collect my fat drippings and I'm gonna keep about two teaspoons worth.
So I wanna keep a little bit of fat in there.
Maybe a little bit more.
Go away, go away.
All right.
I'm going to now very quickly add sugar.
I want this sugar just to melt.
The extra caramelization part is gonna happen in the oven.
I got my cayenne pepper, I got my curry.
Now I'm going to add my cashews.
And a little bit of salt.
Actually a lot of salt.
Little bit of fresh pepper.
We left that bacon fat in the pan that's now what we're using to coat all the cashews and everything.
If it looks a little bit dry to you as this one does you can actually come back and add just a touch more of bacon fat.
And that's why you don't throw it away, by the way.
Preserve it.
All right, now this is ready to pop into our oven.
I got my pan.
It's lined with parchment paper.
And I'm gonna take this and any little sort of drippings you had in the pan too.
I'm just gonna spread that evenly.
And we're gonna stick this in the oven.
About 350 degrees for about 12 minutes.
And it should get nice and crunchy, crispy.
And I'm actually gonna set a timer on this one.
Okay, there we go.
Okay, so check it out.
Ooh, looks good, looks good.
The bacon is nice and crispy.
You see the cashews have gotten nice and toasted up too.
This is gonna cool off a little bit.
And then we're gonna just pretty much serve it.
So you can cool it off here in your pan.
Or you can actually just lift the whole thing up.
Take just a little more of that bacon fat away.
And just kinda shake it into your bowl.
And actually like to serve this just a touch warm.
And there you go, Candied bacon cashew and curry bar snack And it's perfect with a cold beer.
Today we're making, uh, Edamame Hummus which is a dish that we use as a side dish for like a beef short ribs.
But you can also serve it like you would hummus.
Really simple to make.
Basically it's tahini added with instead of chick peas were using edamame.
I'm gonna start as you would hummus and, uh, pick off a couple cloves of garlic.
I'm just gonna smash those guys a little bit.
The whole tradition of sort of edamame eating edamame is an Asian cuisine.
Obviously it's-it's very prevalent.
So I just wanted to make something that was very hummus like but when it's just a fresher sort of green flavor.
So I'm gonna just do a little bit of shallot.
This is gonna be a kind of a nice, fine dish.
So I don't want, uh, too many big chunks of shallot in there.
Very good, so, I'm gonna turn the heat on.
A little bit of olive oil goes in the pan.
So really all I'm doing is sweating the garlic and shallots just to soften it up a bit.
You see I got a lot of olive oil in there but I'm gonna need all that olive oil to coat this beautiful edamame.
This all goes into the pans about two cups worth of edamame.
All right, so basically everything else is the same ingredients that you would use in a normal hummus.
Proportions are different.
So we've got some cumin.
I like to use lots of it.
More the merrier.
Uh, soy sauce which probably is it doesn't go into a traditional hummus.
But here it works really nicely and of course tahini.
And make sure you stir it up before you put it in here because it's usually separates and tahini is just a sesame paste that's been pureed.
I don't wanna push out that sort of edamame flavors, so.
Just gonna add a little bit of tahini to it.
About a couple of tablespoons.
You have to add some water and the last ingredient is lemon juice four cups worth.
So we're just gonna bring this up to a boil, let it simmer for about five, six, seven minutes.
Basically you want the edamame to be soft enough that it'll puree the texture should be nice and crumbly.
So you can try to take your edamame and push it with the back of a spoon or it'll kinda break up into mush.
That's when you know it's done.
Also you see it's kind of lost that-that vibrant green color but it's still pretty green.
So it's ready to puree and all of it is just gonna go right into the processor.
So, when you puree this, uh, nice think about hummus, you know, you kinda wanna I don't want it too smooth I want a little bit of texture and I want a little bit granular, a little bit crumbly, but kinda like a hummus, you know, spoon-able.
I'm actually gonna start by pulsing in a couple of times.
Then let her rip.
All right, that should be good.
Pop that open, perfect.
I'm gonna serve it in a bowl like that and I'm gonna finish it off with a little bit more olive oil over the top.
A little sea salt.
Okay.
And, um, I'm gonna serve it just like that with a little bit of bread sticks and celery and baked carrots what not.
Texturally and flavor-wise it's gonna be very different than hummus.
It's just slightly elevated, slightly more creative version of hummus.
Right, we are making Bourbon sweet tea.
Great to drink in the morning, on the afternoon porch in the evenings, late night, Sundays.
It's a perfect sumer drink.
So we're gonna use this wonderful, fancy tea kettle.
I measured out the water that I wanted to put in the pitcher.
So, I'm gonna pour that in here.
Then I'm going to take my tea.
I'm gonna put it in my little tea basket.
It's black tea loosely.
And then let's set this baby.
Black tea.
I don't do anything medium or mild.
So we're gonna set it on strong.
Hit tea and that's it.
So we don't have to worry about, it's done.
Uh, I'm gonna go ahead and make the other part of it.
So we got our pitcher filled with some ice.
I'm just gonna add some citrus to this.
Any kind of citrus is good.
In the height of summer when peaches are nice and ripe I'll throw some peaches in there and make it a peach ice tea.
Sometimes, uh, I'll throw some mint in there.
And it'll become a mint ice tea.
By all means kinda mess around with it.
But this is definitely a Southern tradition.
And the thing with sweet tea it's gotta be sweet.
You know, we're not talk it's not sweetened tea.
It's like sweet.
It's got the your teeth have to almost hurt.
I'm gonna take a little bit of this guy I'm gonna put this guy here.
I'm gonna do also a little bit of lime garnish just to give it more color.
That's all ready to go.
See what's happening with our tea.
Basket is lowering.
Done.
Thank you, Mr.
Brewmaster.
We got our tea now, we're gonna make it into sweet tea.
So we're gonna add our Bourbon to it.
For this recipe we're adding so much tea and sugar and citrus to it.
Um, you know, I wouldn't use a cheap bourbon but also I wouldn't use an expensive bourbon, This is our simple syrup.
One to one proportion.
Sugar, water, uh, we boiled it and let it cool down to room temperature.
So that goes into it.
All right.
Make sure to add that first.
And then we're gonna add the hot tea right into all that.
Because it's warm it's gonna go and mix into it.
And it's gonna sort of warm up the citrus a little bit.
Okay.
Take just a wooden spoon, just get in there and mix it up.
Give it a bit of a stir.
If you move to a new town in the south and you don't have any friends just make a batch of this, sit on your front porch.
You'll have friends really, really fast.
Taste that.
Oh, good that's delicious.
Can go ahead and serve a couple of these out.
And this is how in the South, anyway, this is how you start an evening.
With one of these.
A couple of appetizers and some good conversation and that's how you start a dinner.
Bourbon sweet tea.
Okay, so this is a buttermilk whipped cream.
It's a beautiful version of whipped cream.
It's gonna have a little tartness from the buttermilk and it just makes it really nice especially when you have kind of a unctuous heavy dessert like a pecan pot and I hope for everyone out there if you have never made whipped cream from scratch it's, uh, one of those things that is so simple but the texture and the airiness and the final result is so beautiful that-that you'll make it again and again and again.
And you will never ever ever use whipped cream from the can.
So, we're starting with heavy cream.
I'm gonna put into the mixer.
And then we're going to do powdered sugar.
It's really important to make sure that powdered sugar and the cream get a little bit mixed up first.
So, just gonna turn it on just to incorporate that sugar.
I'm not aerating the cream.
And it's actually a great thing to take this mixture now and put it in the fridge for about an hour to let it kinda soak in together.
And it actually makes a really nice, a beautiful whipped cream.
It's started slowly you don't want to whip it up too fast.
Or it's gonna splash all over you.
So, basically I like to sit there and watch it.
It's very zen for me.
I can just zone out and-and get into the whipped cream.
As it aerates it's gonna slowly start to thicken.
Each stage that it thickens, you can kinda turn the motor up a little bit.
Until you get more of a thickened cream.
Buttermilk on its own will not whip up, and that's why we need the-the texture, the sturdiness of the heavy cream.
To get that sort of create the structure of the heavy cream first then we add the butter cream to it.
All right, so, right about now it's kind of whipped cream but it's not really.
It's still pretty soft and loose so at this point I'm going to add my buttermilk.
Make sure you get a really nice culture buttermilk.
Um, if you've got a farmers market near you and someone's making home-made butter, even better.
And now we can go pretty much all the way up.
And then at this point it's what stage of whipped cream you want.
Some people like their whipped cream a little looser and some people like it really tight.
At this point I'll check it.
I'm just checking the-the peaks and seeing how stable it is.
I don't want it weeping.
I don't want it too great either.
I want a nice kinda smooth whipped cream.
It looks good right? Looks good.
All right, I've got a little slice of good old pecan pie.
Sometimes I say pee-can people get mad at me.
But I grew up in New York so I say pecan.
Everyone says pecan.
Okay.
So that's the whipped cream.
It's nice and light it's not too thick.
And then we're gonna do a little, uh, fancy quenelle.
I just take a little bit of warm water on your spoon and that's your pecan pie with buttermilk whipped cream.
I'm making a yellow zucchini or yellow squash soup chilled with a little bit of thyme and some cured strawberries.
And I think people feel like chilled soups are something that's kind of difficult to make or something to eat at restaurants.
But this is a really simple recipe as you can see it's only five ingredients.
I only make this in summer when yellow zucchini's are at the height of their ripeness and they're just beautiful and nice and tight.
Turn this up to about medium heat.
Nice extra virgin olive oil.
We don't want to caramelize our veggies.
It's a summer soup, it's supposed to be really light and clean.
So any of that sort of nuttiness or that browning caramelization just gonna sort of get in the way.
I got about two pounds of yellow squash that have been cut up.
I'm just gonna add that to the pot.
Fresh thyme teaspoon or two worth.
You're probably only cooking this for about two, three minutes.
And the next thing we're gonna add is going to be our vegetable stock.
And this is gonna go for about 10, 12 minutes.
So the zucchini gets soft enough so that we can puree it.
And at this point, you're not gonna worry about it, caramelization.
She's got all that liquid in there, so, really at this point you can sort of forget about it.
So while this is kinda going I'm going to do a neat little thing with some strawberries.
Whenever yellow squash is in season, so are strawberries.
So it's a natural pairing.
When I first did it with strawberries, the strawberries were almost too acidic too tart.
It almost tasted like dessert.
So, one of the things that we did was we cured them in a salt sugar mix.
Basically has the same effect as if you were to cure anything.
If you're curing meat or curing salmon.
We're gonna pull the water out of the strawberries and it's going to serve intensify the flavor.
After about an hour which is about the amount of time it's gonna take you to boil, puree and chill this out.
These will be perfectly ready to go.
Okay, let's, uh, check this guy.
So this is ready to go.
Zucchini's already falling apart just from, uh, moving around with a wooden spoon.
I'm gonna finish it with a little sour cream.
And that's it, it's ready to blend.
I'm just gonna use an immersion blender.
We're just gonna blitz this.
I'm gonna start this on low first.
Once I got a little bit of a button I'm gonna kinda start building it up in speed.
So I wanna get all the big chunks out, but if it's a little texture that's nice.
All right.
Mm.
Lovely.
It's gonna need a little bit of salt and pepper.
Because it's a chilled soup we're gonna add salt now.
Once it chills up it's actually gonna mute the salt flavor a little bit.
So you're gonna have to adjust it one more time.
So that's it I'm just gonna let that cool down to room temperature.
And, um, pop it in the fridge once the sort of steam stops.
All right.
And it's nice and cold, it's actually thickened up a little bit.
To about a ladle of half, I want to add these huge strawberries, just a little bit of fresh thyme, do a little bit of olive oil to drizzle.
A little bit of fresh cracked pepper and we're gonna finish with a little bit of sea salt.
Perfect.
There it is our summer in a bowl, yellow squash soup cured strawberries, thyme.
We're making Kentucky fried quail today.
This is my version of fried quail.
We're gonna get a little crazy with the spices here.
This is schezwan peppercorns.
It's so spicy.
It has almost a sort of, a numbing kind of effect on your tongue.
It's-it's really cool.
And take about a tablespoons worth and throw it into some mortar and pestle.
And we're just gonna grind it up.
In Chinese cuisine you would see this kind of peppers a lot with poultry, quail, chicken, duck.
It's so aromatic.
That's pretty good now.
To this were actually gonna add a little bit of salt and five-spice.
And we're going to mix that up.
Actually this is a great salt to use in-in so many things.
I call it simply a fragrant salt.
And first I'm gonna do is just kind of spray this salt all over the quail.
You wanna make sure to get a nice, good amount.
Make sure you get underneath the wings, too.
It's more inspired by probably street food than it is sort of a fancy restaurant dish.
I love playing with the idea of sort of highbrow lowbrow cuisine.
And I think normally you see quail in a restaurant it's usually a pretty fancy dish.
It's usually, you know, of French-inspired and this is as simple as it gets.
Let's see how many I can fit in here.
I think I might be able to fit all four into this little basket.
Look at that, perfect.
I've got this on pretty high.
I've got this at about 375 degrees.
You're gonna anywhere from like four to six minutes.
In the meantime I'm also gonna make a little bit of a soy dipping sauce.
I've got a little bit of soy sauce.
I've actually already added a little bit of sugar to it.
And I'm just going to squeeze some fresh lime juice.
Okay.
That's my soy dipping sauce.
All right, let's check these little guys and see how they're doing'.
All right.
Perfect, perfect, perfect.
So you can tell that the skin is nice and crispy star and you can see how the meat's pulling away from the bone here on the skin.
It's revealing the bone on the leg.
And kind of peek a little bit in here.
There's no red and we're pretty much done.
That was it pretty quick.
And you can actually take a little bit of more fragrance salt and serve it with the ponzu.
And there you have it and I'll even show you how to eat one.
Can rip a tail dip it in ponzu.
Fantastic.
Fried quail little soy dipping sauce and fragrance salt.
We're gonna eat the rest of these.
This is a really cool recipe.
Basically it's a grill t-bone steak, uh, but we're gonna do a little Asian rub on it.
It starts with lemongrass as our aromatic and then we kinda punch it up with tons of garlic, a little bit of habanero pepper.
It's a quick marinade so it's not like we're gonna sit here for-for hours and hours.
Starts with lemongrass uh, if you guys don't know lemongrass it's a beautiful aromatic root What I do is I just kind of peel off a little bit of the skin and you get this really nice tender root that becomes our base.
When we chop it up, we gonna do like about three or four of these.
You get that, right there.
But it's pretty fibrous and woody so you wanna puree it.
So the lemongrass goes into the blender and we've got some garlic.
It looks like a lot of garlic than it is but trust me it's gonna taste wonderful.
Depending on how hot you like your food you can do half of the habanero or whole.
I'm gonna do like one and a half.
This is the juice of one orange and one lemon.
This goes right in there.
A little bit of soy sauce and a little bit of sesame oil which again is really fragrant and a little goes a long way.
All I need to do is blitz this on high.
Wonderful.
Mm, it's very strong.
Very powerful stuff.
so, I've got my marinade.
I've got my steaks in a shallow bowl.
I'm just gonna salt it.
I love a T-bone for this it's such a rich piece of meat.
It's kind of a decadent piece of steak you don't eat it everyday.
But for a recipe like this, it's just a really nice piece of meat to have.
Treat yourself every once in a while.
All right.
Uh, I'm gonna take my marinade and I'm just gonna put I don't need a lot.
It's really powerful stuff I'm gonna pour a little bit of that, flip it over, catch it on all sides.
I'm actually gonna hold back just a little bit of the marinade so that I can use it later, uh, it's kind of a sauce.
But in the meantime this just kinda sits in here and that's it.
I'm gonna let this rest for about 20 minutes.
I'm gonna set up my grill top and we'll be ready to make some steaks.
I'm going to put this on a nice sear about 440.
And gonna open this guy up.
I'm gonna sear 'em on the grill side here.
Mm, smells great.
So probably just cook it a few minutes on each side.
Hit this back over.
And by cooking it from both sides too you're gonna cook it real fast.
And I know this is supposed to be a panini press but it makes a great steak press as well.
Check back that.
We're pretty much ready to go.
Just gonna lay it down there.
Beautiful.
This is the leftover marinade.
You can serve it on the side but I like to just go ahead and spoon a little bit right on top.
T-bone steak grilled seared little bit of lemongrass habanero marinade.
Please give to your PBS station.
This episode on The Mind of a Chef finds chef Edward Lee in the kitchen creating some of his favorite dishes.
Kentucky fried quail.
I love playing with the idea of highbrow, lowbrow cuisine.
And this is as simple as it gets.
Edamame hummus.
It's just a fresher sort of green flavor.
Texturally and flavor wise it's going to be different.
And shows us the best way to spike your sweet tea.
You move to a new town in the south and you don't have any friends you just make a batch of this, sit on your front porch.
You'll have friends really, really fast.
Enter, The Mind of a Chef.
All curious chefs are fascinated by their surroundings.
That is intense.
They don't teach you this in cooking school.
This is a recipe that I learned from a dude in Kentucky.
Actually I just call it breakfast.
Because it's just stuff that's leftover from the dinner party the night before.
And you kinda take it up, put it in a blender and mix it all together.
But it's really just a Buttermilk Cornbread-Sorghum milkshake.
So, we're gonna start with cornbread.
And what I can do is make sure that you have some kinda old, leftover cornbread.
This is a great way to use it up.
And I'm just gonna kinda put two little small babies fistfuls in there.
The cornbread should be a little bit stale.
It's better stale when you're making this.
All right, and then I've got my home-made buttermilk ice cream.
And depending on the consistency that you like your milkshake I like mine pretty thick.
Just gonna add a little bit of ice cream.
And then sorghum.
Mm, it's nice.
What makes sorghum so special is that it has a really wonderful, nutty kind of smokey umami flavor.
Very, very different from molasses and much more intense than honey.
I find like sorghum is somewhere between the burnt flavor of molasses and a light kind of floral hints of honey.
So, it's aggressive without being tuned in your face.
And, you know, this is such a simple thing.
It's just three ingredients really.
The ice cream, the sorghum and the cornbread, so You wanna make sure that every ingredient is made with care.
Or you make sure you get good sorghum.
Now we got some extra buttermilk on the side but I just wanna see what's gonna happen with this.
Ooh! All right, I don't wanna kill it too much.
This is already looking really nice.
So I also make sure that the ice cream is a little bit temperable temperature.
Um, this is really nice.
I'm just gonna go right with the glass.
It's gonna give an extra thick milkshake.
You got the flex of cornbread in there.
Sorghum is gonna sweeten it.
And go all the way to the top.
And then I'm gonna actually finish it off with a little more sorghum right on the top of it.
That's it.
And this is a nice thick milkshake.
Serve it with a spoon.
And that's breakfast.
Cornbread buttermilk sorghum milkshake.
This is a bar snack.
But it's a really, really good bar snack.
Rendered bacon and we're kinda gonna candy the bacon with cashews.
Add some spice to it and it's just an addictive bar snack that you will just go back to and reach for again and again.
I like to make this with some really good quality bacon.
So here we have some applewood smoked.
And this goes with pretty much any cocktail.
If you're gonna have as you would have in my house just some straight Bourbon on the rocks.
There's nothing better than a little bit of bacon candy that goes with that.
The first thing I'm gonna do is render the bacon fat out.
Depending on the bacon that you use, though, some will be fattier than the others, so, just go by instinct.
Don't worry about the recipe too much.
Just kinda cook instinctually.
The whole tradition is your salty bar nuts is gonna make you thirsty and makes you drink more.
The idea was, well, instead of adding salt why don't we add salt to the in the form of bacon Right? Because bacon's salty.
So, that's how it all started and, you know, the brain starts to go make one step further and say, "Whoa, why don't we add curry to spice.
" We serve a lot of Bourbon in our bar so I wanted to do something that really paired nicely with Bourbon.
Look at that, that's a lot of fat coming out of there.
Beautiful, beautiful, so This is what I do.
It's very simple.
I'm gonna take this pan out, collect my fat drippings and I'm gonna keep about two teaspoons worth.
So I wanna keep a little bit of fat in there.
Maybe a little bit more.
Go away, go away.
All right.
I'm going to now very quickly add sugar.
I want this sugar just to melt.
The extra caramelization part is gonna happen in the oven.
I got my cayenne pepper, I got my curry.
Now I'm going to add my cashews.
And a little bit of salt.
Actually a lot of salt.
Little bit of fresh pepper.
We left that bacon fat in the pan that's now what we're using to coat all the cashews and everything.
If it looks a little bit dry to you as this one does you can actually come back and add just a touch more of bacon fat.
And that's why you don't throw it away, by the way.
Preserve it.
All right, now this is ready to pop into our oven.
I got my pan.
It's lined with parchment paper.
And I'm gonna take this and any little sort of drippings you had in the pan too.
I'm just gonna spread that evenly.
And we're gonna stick this in the oven.
About 350 degrees for about 12 minutes.
And it should get nice and crunchy, crispy.
And I'm actually gonna set a timer on this one.
Okay, there we go.
Okay, so check it out.
Ooh, looks good, looks good.
The bacon is nice and crispy.
You see the cashews have gotten nice and toasted up too.
This is gonna cool off a little bit.
And then we're gonna just pretty much serve it.
So you can cool it off here in your pan.
Or you can actually just lift the whole thing up.
Take just a little more of that bacon fat away.
And just kinda shake it into your bowl.
And actually like to serve this just a touch warm.
And there you go, Candied bacon cashew and curry bar snack And it's perfect with a cold beer.
Today we're making, uh, Edamame Hummus which is a dish that we use as a side dish for like a beef short ribs.
But you can also serve it like you would hummus.
Really simple to make.
Basically it's tahini added with instead of chick peas were using edamame.
I'm gonna start as you would hummus and, uh, pick off a couple cloves of garlic.
I'm just gonna smash those guys a little bit.
The whole tradition of sort of edamame eating edamame is an Asian cuisine.
Obviously it's-it's very prevalent.
So I just wanted to make something that was very hummus like but when it's just a fresher sort of green flavor.
So I'm gonna just do a little bit of shallot.
This is gonna be a kind of a nice, fine dish.
So I don't want, uh, too many big chunks of shallot in there.
Very good, so, I'm gonna turn the heat on.
A little bit of olive oil goes in the pan.
So really all I'm doing is sweating the garlic and shallots just to soften it up a bit.
You see I got a lot of olive oil in there but I'm gonna need all that olive oil to coat this beautiful edamame.
This all goes into the pans about two cups worth of edamame.
All right, so basically everything else is the same ingredients that you would use in a normal hummus.
Proportions are different.
So we've got some cumin.
I like to use lots of it.
More the merrier.
Uh, soy sauce which probably is it doesn't go into a traditional hummus.
But here it works really nicely and of course tahini.
And make sure you stir it up before you put it in here because it's usually separates and tahini is just a sesame paste that's been pureed.
I don't wanna push out that sort of edamame flavors, so.
Just gonna add a little bit of tahini to it.
About a couple of tablespoons.
You have to add some water and the last ingredient is lemon juice four cups worth.
So we're just gonna bring this up to a boil, let it simmer for about five, six, seven minutes.
Basically you want the edamame to be soft enough that it'll puree the texture should be nice and crumbly.
So you can try to take your edamame and push it with the back of a spoon or it'll kinda break up into mush.
That's when you know it's done.
Also you see it's kind of lost that-that vibrant green color but it's still pretty green.
So it's ready to puree and all of it is just gonna go right into the processor.
So, when you puree this, uh, nice think about hummus, you know, you kinda wanna I don't want it too smooth I want a little bit of texture and I want a little bit granular, a little bit crumbly, but kinda like a hummus, you know, spoon-able.
I'm actually gonna start by pulsing in a couple of times.
Then let her rip.
All right, that should be good.
Pop that open, perfect.
I'm gonna serve it in a bowl like that and I'm gonna finish it off with a little bit more olive oil over the top.
A little sea salt.
Okay.
And, um, I'm gonna serve it just like that with a little bit of bread sticks and celery and baked carrots what not.
Texturally and flavor-wise it's gonna be very different than hummus.
It's just slightly elevated, slightly more creative version of hummus.
Right, we are making Bourbon sweet tea.
Great to drink in the morning, on the afternoon porch in the evenings, late night, Sundays.
It's a perfect sumer drink.
So we're gonna use this wonderful, fancy tea kettle.
I measured out the water that I wanted to put in the pitcher.
So, I'm gonna pour that in here.
Then I'm going to take my tea.
I'm gonna put it in my little tea basket.
It's black tea loosely.
And then let's set this baby.
Black tea.
I don't do anything medium or mild.
So we're gonna set it on strong.
Hit tea and that's it.
So we don't have to worry about, it's done.
Uh, I'm gonna go ahead and make the other part of it.
So we got our pitcher filled with some ice.
I'm just gonna add some citrus to this.
Any kind of citrus is good.
In the height of summer when peaches are nice and ripe I'll throw some peaches in there and make it a peach ice tea.
Sometimes, uh, I'll throw some mint in there.
And it'll become a mint ice tea.
By all means kinda mess around with it.
But this is definitely a Southern tradition.
And the thing with sweet tea it's gotta be sweet.
You know, we're not talk it's not sweetened tea.
It's like sweet.
It's got the your teeth have to almost hurt.
I'm gonna take a little bit of this guy I'm gonna put this guy here.
I'm gonna do also a little bit of lime garnish just to give it more color.
That's all ready to go.
See what's happening with our tea.
Basket is lowering.
Done.
Thank you, Mr.
Brewmaster.
We got our tea now, we're gonna make it into sweet tea.
So we're gonna add our Bourbon to it.
For this recipe we're adding so much tea and sugar and citrus to it.
Um, you know, I wouldn't use a cheap bourbon but also I wouldn't use an expensive bourbon, This is our simple syrup.
One to one proportion.
Sugar, water, uh, we boiled it and let it cool down to room temperature.
So that goes into it.
All right.
Make sure to add that first.
And then we're gonna add the hot tea right into all that.
Because it's warm it's gonna go and mix into it.
And it's gonna sort of warm up the citrus a little bit.
Okay.
Take just a wooden spoon, just get in there and mix it up.
Give it a bit of a stir.
If you move to a new town in the south and you don't have any friends just make a batch of this, sit on your front porch.
You'll have friends really, really fast.
Taste that.
Oh, good that's delicious.
Can go ahead and serve a couple of these out.
And this is how in the South, anyway, this is how you start an evening.
With one of these.
A couple of appetizers and some good conversation and that's how you start a dinner.
Bourbon sweet tea.
Okay, so this is a buttermilk whipped cream.
It's a beautiful version of whipped cream.
It's gonna have a little tartness from the buttermilk and it just makes it really nice especially when you have kind of a unctuous heavy dessert like a pecan pot and I hope for everyone out there if you have never made whipped cream from scratch it's, uh, one of those things that is so simple but the texture and the airiness and the final result is so beautiful that-that you'll make it again and again and again.
And you will never ever ever use whipped cream from the can.
So, we're starting with heavy cream.
I'm gonna put into the mixer.
And then we're going to do powdered sugar.
It's really important to make sure that powdered sugar and the cream get a little bit mixed up first.
So, just gonna turn it on just to incorporate that sugar.
I'm not aerating the cream.
And it's actually a great thing to take this mixture now and put it in the fridge for about an hour to let it kinda soak in together.
And it actually makes a really nice, a beautiful whipped cream.
It's started slowly you don't want to whip it up too fast.
Or it's gonna splash all over you.
So, basically I like to sit there and watch it.
It's very zen for me.
I can just zone out and-and get into the whipped cream.
As it aerates it's gonna slowly start to thicken.
Each stage that it thickens, you can kinda turn the motor up a little bit.
Until you get more of a thickened cream.
Buttermilk on its own will not whip up, and that's why we need the-the texture, the sturdiness of the heavy cream.
To get that sort of create the structure of the heavy cream first then we add the butter cream to it.
All right, so, right about now it's kind of whipped cream but it's not really.
It's still pretty soft and loose so at this point I'm going to add my buttermilk.
Make sure you get a really nice culture buttermilk.
Um, if you've got a farmers market near you and someone's making home-made butter, even better.
And now we can go pretty much all the way up.
And then at this point it's what stage of whipped cream you want.
Some people like their whipped cream a little looser and some people like it really tight.
At this point I'll check it.
I'm just checking the-the peaks and seeing how stable it is.
I don't want it weeping.
I don't want it too great either.
I want a nice kinda smooth whipped cream.
It looks good right? Looks good.
All right, I've got a little slice of good old pecan pie.
Sometimes I say pee-can people get mad at me.
But I grew up in New York so I say pecan.
Everyone says pecan.
Okay.
So that's the whipped cream.
It's nice and light it's not too thick.
And then we're gonna do a little, uh, fancy quenelle.
I just take a little bit of warm water on your spoon and that's your pecan pie with buttermilk whipped cream.
I'm making a yellow zucchini or yellow squash soup chilled with a little bit of thyme and some cured strawberries.
And I think people feel like chilled soups are something that's kind of difficult to make or something to eat at restaurants.
But this is a really simple recipe as you can see it's only five ingredients.
I only make this in summer when yellow zucchini's are at the height of their ripeness and they're just beautiful and nice and tight.
Turn this up to about medium heat.
Nice extra virgin olive oil.
We don't want to caramelize our veggies.
It's a summer soup, it's supposed to be really light and clean.
So any of that sort of nuttiness or that browning caramelization just gonna sort of get in the way.
I got about two pounds of yellow squash that have been cut up.
I'm just gonna add that to the pot.
Fresh thyme teaspoon or two worth.
You're probably only cooking this for about two, three minutes.
And the next thing we're gonna add is going to be our vegetable stock.
And this is gonna go for about 10, 12 minutes.
So the zucchini gets soft enough so that we can puree it.
And at this point, you're not gonna worry about it, caramelization.
She's got all that liquid in there, so, really at this point you can sort of forget about it.
So while this is kinda going I'm going to do a neat little thing with some strawberries.
Whenever yellow squash is in season, so are strawberries.
So it's a natural pairing.
When I first did it with strawberries, the strawberries were almost too acidic too tart.
It almost tasted like dessert.
So, one of the things that we did was we cured them in a salt sugar mix.
Basically has the same effect as if you were to cure anything.
If you're curing meat or curing salmon.
We're gonna pull the water out of the strawberries and it's going to serve intensify the flavor.
After about an hour which is about the amount of time it's gonna take you to boil, puree and chill this out.
These will be perfectly ready to go.
Okay, let's, uh, check this guy.
So this is ready to go.
Zucchini's already falling apart just from, uh, moving around with a wooden spoon.
I'm gonna finish it with a little sour cream.
And that's it, it's ready to blend.
I'm just gonna use an immersion blender.
We're just gonna blitz this.
I'm gonna start this on low first.
Once I got a little bit of a button I'm gonna kinda start building it up in speed.
So I wanna get all the big chunks out, but if it's a little texture that's nice.
All right.
Mm.
Lovely.
It's gonna need a little bit of salt and pepper.
Because it's a chilled soup we're gonna add salt now.
Once it chills up it's actually gonna mute the salt flavor a little bit.
So you're gonna have to adjust it one more time.
So that's it I'm just gonna let that cool down to room temperature.
And, um, pop it in the fridge once the sort of steam stops.
All right.
And it's nice and cold, it's actually thickened up a little bit.
To about a ladle of half, I want to add these huge strawberries, just a little bit of fresh thyme, do a little bit of olive oil to drizzle.
A little bit of fresh cracked pepper and we're gonna finish with a little bit of sea salt.
Perfect.
There it is our summer in a bowl, yellow squash soup cured strawberries, thyme.
We're making Kentucky fried quail today.
This is my version of fried quail.
We're gonna get a little crazy with the spices here.
This is schezwan peppercorns.
It's so spicy.
It has almost a sort of, a numbing kind of effect on your tongue.
It's-it's really cool.
And take about a tablespoons worth and throw it into some mortar and pestle.
And we're just gonna grind it up.
In Chinese cuisine you would see this kind of peppers a lot with poultry, quail, chicken, duck.
It's so aromatic.
That's pretty good now.
To this were actually gonna add a little bit of salt and five-spice.
And we're going to mix that up.
Actually this is a great salt to use in-in so many things.
I call it simply a fragrant salt.
And first I'm gonna do is just kind of spray this salt all over the quail.
You wanna make sure to get a nice, good amount.
Make sure you get underneath the wings, too.
It's more inspired by probably street food than it is sort of a fancy restaurant dish.
I love playing with the idea of sort of highbrow lowbrow cuisine.
And I think normally you see quail in a restaurant it's usually a pretty fancy dish.
It's usually, you know, of French-inspired and this is as simple as it gets.
Let's see how many I can fit in here.
I think I might be able to fit all four into this little basket.
Look at that, perfect.
I've got this on pretty high.
I've got this at about 375 degrees.
You're gonna anywhere from like four to six minutes.
In the meantime I'm also gonna make a little bit of a soy dipping sauce.
I've got a little bit of soy sauce.
I've actually already added a little bit of sugar to it.
And I'm just going to squeeze some fresh lime juice.
Okay.
That's my soy dipping sauce.
All right, let's check these little guys and see how they're doing'.
All right.
Perfect, perfect, perfect.
So you can tell that the skin is nice and crispy star and you can see how the meat's pulling away from the bone here on the skin.
It's revealing the bone on the leg.
And kind of peek a little bit in here.
There's no red and we're pretty much done.
That was it pretty quick.
And you can actually take a little bit of more fragrance salt and serve it with the ponzu.
And there you have it and I'll even show you how to eat one.
Can rip a tail dip it in ponzu.
Fantastic.
Fried quail little soy dipping sauce and fragrance salt.
We're gonna eat the rest of these.
This is a really cool recipe.
Basically it's a grill t-bone steak, uh, but we're gonna do a little Asian rub on it.
It starts with lemongrass as our aromatic and then we kinda punch it up with tons of garlic, a little bit of habanero pepper.
It's a quick marinade so it's not like we're gonna sit here for-for hours and hours.
Starts with lemongrass uh, if you guys don't know lemongrass it's a beautiful aromatic root What I do is I just kind of peel off a little bit of the skin and you get this really nice tender root that becomes our base.
When we chop it up, we gonna do like about three or four of these.
You get that, right there.
But it's pretty fibrous and woody so you wanna puree it.
So the lemongrass goes into the blender and we've got some garlic.
It looks like a lot of garlic than it is but trust me it's gonna taste wonderful.
Depending on how hot you like your food you can do half of the habanero or whole.
I'm gonna do like one and a half.
This is the juice of one orange and one lemon.
This goes right in there.
A little bit of soy sauce and a little bit of sesame oil which again is really fragrant and a little goes a long way.
All I need to do is blitz this on high.
Wonderful.
Mm, it's very strong.
Very powerful stuff.
so, I've got my marinade.
I've got my steaks in a shallow bowl.
I'm just gonna salt it.
I love a T-bone for this it's such a rich piece of meat.
It's kind of a decadent piece of steak you don't eat it everyday.
But for a recipe like this, it's just a really nice piece of meat to have.
Treat yourself every once in a while.
All right.
Uh, I'm gonna take my marinade and I'm just gonna put I don't need a lot.
It's really powerful stuff I'm gonna pour a little bit of that, flip it over, catch it on all sides.
I'm actually gonna hold back just a little bit of the marinade so that I can use it later, uh, it's kind of a sauce.
But in the meantime this just kinda sits in here and that's it.
I'm gonna let this rest for about 20 minutes.
I'm gonna set up my grill top and we'll be ready to make some steaks.
I'm going to put this on a nice sear about 440.
And gonna open this guy up.
I'm gonna sear 'em on the grill side here.
Mm, smells great.
So probably just cook it a few minutes on each side.
Hit this back over.
And by cooking it from both sides too you're gonna cook it real fast.
And I know this is supposed to be a panini press but it makes a great steak press as well.
Check back that.
We're pretty much ready to go.
Just gonna lay it down there.
Beautiful.
This is the leftover marinade.
You can serve it on the side but I like to just go ahead and spoon a little bit right on top.
T-bone steak grilled seared little bit of lemongrass habanero marinade.