4 Levels of Chowder: Amateur to Food Scientist | Epicurious

hi i'm sharif and i'm a level one chef i'm julie and i'm a level two chef i'm frank i'm a chef instructor at the institute of culinary education and i've been a professional chef for 25 years the main ingredient in my chowder is corn this is for people who love corn and chowder i love corn on the cob so why not combine the two and let's make a nice creamy corn chowder i'm going to make clam chowder however i'm going to make a kind of clam chowder i've never made before called manhattan clam chowder let's find out how to make manhattan clam chowder today we're going to make a crab chowder with homemade crackers and i think that it's a perfect seafood to put in chowder crab is kind of sweet and it has this great flakiness to it that is perfect for this soup [Music] okay so now we are going to peel this corn i don't peel corn often first thing we need to do is prepare our fresh clams and i've had them soaking in a bowl of water there's a lot of grit and sand and we want to get all of that out takes a minute or two and i'm talking jamaican minutes so maybe 20 25 minutes not surprisingly for my crab chowder the main ingredient is crabs and the crabs i have in front of me are fresh crabs and i'm gonna use these for my stock in order to get the best crab you have to buy them a lot and you have to kill them and clean them yourself because if they're dead when you get them you don't know how long they've been dead and they're not good to eat these crabs are actually sacrificial crabs they're not really big and they don't have a ton of meat on them but i am going to use them to flavor my stock and a stock is a flavor base for soups of all types right let's cut this corn up okay it's not that hard a little more work than canned corn but you want your chowder to be perfect i'm gonna save these we're gonna use these later on voila and look at all this mess down in here aside from the crabs and the crab shells i have some jumbo lump crab meat and the jumbo lump is what's gonna be the texture in the soup and basically the main body of the soup right so we're gonna do next is chop up all of our crabs so we can get a lot of surface area and get as much flavor as we can out of these crabs and now i'm gonna get started on my other ingredients we are gonna get this stuff diced and chopped up when i make stock and this is going to drive a lot of people crazy you can put skins in stock people are going to clutch their pearls about this but this is how i was taught and i went to a decent school same thing with the garlic we're just going to kind of give that a whack and for the celery as well now let's cut the vegetables for the garnish and basically the stuff that's going to float around in the soup all right we'll start with the celery on your ribs of celery sometimes strings would hang from your mouth celery and the thyme is gonna add some nice flavor to it just a regular joe nice onion we're gonna dice up i don't know if there's a special way this should be cut up but i'm just doing it to my liking at the end of the day a chowder is kind of a rustic soup anyway so it's not perfect don't worry about it you know i've always got to have some kind of pepper but today it's not scotch bonnet so we're going to cut the stems off our flat leaf parsley but we're going to roughly chop our parsley our potatoes so we gotta peel these not chowder without potatoes whether it's red or white i have a red potato here we want starchy potatoes that's what cooking is right preference and with potatoes for this right there'll be some chunks that are a little bit larger and some that a little smaller and the smaller ones will kind of melt away and give our soup some thick like thickening powder because traditionally chowder is thickened with potatoes and crackers right in half in half in half and then down look at that perfect i wanted to have a little garlic background still going to give this a very rough chop and next we're going to do the bacon i like maple you can use smoked whatever kind of bacon is good for you and i'm just going to cut this into something that i like to call lardone which are just big kind of thick chunks of bacon just like that so that's what i'm looking for it's time to start cooking finally all right it's time to start cooking i have my corn cobs here in the pot i'm going to add in my chicken stock now and allow them to infuse into the corn cobs first thing we want to do with our stock is to get our crabs in there and we're going to put a little fat in there first just to start we got our clarified butter it has a nice buttery flavor but it doesn't have any of the components in it that make butter burn at high temperatures once our butter is melted we're going to add our crab but i don't really want to brown anything here i'm just going to sweat it out and sweating is cooking without color and once our shells start to turn color i'm going to add the onions and the garlic and the celery my crabs and my vegetables are all sweated out and i'm going to deglaze with some dry sherry and what that's going to do is it's going to stop the crabs from cooking on the bottom and when we deglaze we want to cook all the alcohol out and usually that means you're going to cook the sherry down by half so we wait for that and i'm gonna boil corn cobs with the chicken stock for about 10 minutes because it's corn chowder after all isn't it and you see i didn't chop up tomatoes i'm using diced canned tomatoes as opposed to fresh tomatoes because they've been sitting and packed and diced in their own juice and it gives us the flavor punch that fresh tomatoes just really can't do i don't smell any more alcohol it's time to add the water and usually you want to start with about six quarts of water our stock has started to simmer we'll add our herbs a little bit of thyme uh this is a big bay leaf i'm gonna only put about half of it in and a nice kind of bunch of parsley our crab stock has been cooking for about 35-40 minutes i'm gonna give it a taste this is how we determine everything in the kitchen we taste nice it has a really nice crab flavor and we're just gonna pour it and that's it that's our stock the first thing we're going to do is release some grease as i call it by using our bacon i'm going to put a little bit of my whole butter in there and i'm using whole butter for the flavor here and i'm not necessarily looking for this bacon to get too brown or dark i just want to render some of the fat out i feel like it complements the crab then it adds that good flavor to it you can see that nice crispy bacon that's how you want it now what you want to do is get a nice coating of fat in which you can cook your veggies my bacon's rendered out i'm going to add my onions and celery now i know you guys can't smell this but the bacon grease with the onion and the celery it just smells so good and we haven't even we haven't even finished yet add my butter and my garlic and add my thyme now i'm gonna put in onions and mix everything don't just dump everything in at once then you're gonna mix in your celery red peppers now that you've put all of these things in here your bacon will not get hard and crispy it'll just continue to cook and release its flavors as a professional cook we tend to season throughout the process of cooking a little here a little there if you just season at the end your product is going to be salty but if you season throughout the process you get a better kind of balance of flavors it's not going to be salty i think i can add the garlic now too vegetables are sweated out i have a little more sherry it's just slowing the cooking down giving us a little more of that base flavor in our soup so the last thing we're gonna add are our diced potatoes and i'm just gonna take the potatoes out of the water drop them all in but the vegetables at the end of the day are what we're gonna thicken this soup with i'm gonna add my flour now and this is gonna help to thicken your chowder i can add my corn the main ingredient we're gonna add to the potatoes the tomatoes and of course our chicken stock i'm gonna let this simmer for about 15 minutes maybe i'll add a little salt and pepper to it remember that clam juice in the bottle we're gonna add two cups and we're going to let this now meld so that the flavors can cohere and create a beautiful resting place for our clam look at that kind of looks like the italian flag and we're going to add our stock what we're going to do now is we're going to let this come to a boil once it comes to a boil we'll lower it to a simmer and then we'll cook it until our potatoes are soft or starting to fall apart a little bit a lot of times with white soups or soups to have cream in them chefs don't like to use black pepper but it's actually traditional with a chowder to use black pepper and i like black pepper much more than i like white pepper it's thickening up pretty quickly so now i'm going to go ahead and chop up my bacon while this simmers a little longer it really completes the corn chowder all right let's take a peek i have a feeling it's almost clam time yeah now we're going to put in our fresh clams and we're simply going to drop them in unlike eggs you can put them in one basket and let this simmer again and the way we're going to know it's done is our should be open like a flower the chowder has been cooking for about 20 to 25 minutes i want the potatoes to start to fall apart there's a few pieces in there that the edges are starting to get a little rough i want some of the potatoes to stay whole but i want some of the potatoes to fall apart because what we're gonna do next is we're gonna puree about half of the soup but i'm gonna be really careful not to get any of the bacon uh classically chowder is thickened with potatoes and the crackers one thing you have to be concerned about when you have hot soup in a blender is that once you turn it on you're going to get this big blast of steam and everything will shoot everywhere so you want to start everything really slow i also put a towel on top we got a nice kind of smooth texture and this goes right back in our soup was a little dark and now it's gone a little lighter and that's what we're looking for all right this has been simmering for 15 minutes so now let's add our milk and our bacon and then we will let it simmer for another 20 minutes and then it'll be done half of the soup's pureed next thing we're going to do is lower the heat and then i'm going to add my cream i'm just going to add the cream to give this a more luxurious flavor so we're going to season this up fair amount of black pepper you got to be really sure about the salt the right amount of salt could be one little grain of salt guys i think we're ready let's see whoa our clams are open that means we're ready so i think what i'm gonna do is chop them before we put them back in the chowder just keep one or two in the shell because it makes a really nice presentation now with the crab we went to the trouble of getting really nice jumbo lump it's about a pound and a half just warm it through and i'm gonna call it done look at that crab chowder delish dump it right back in the pot a little bit of salt some pepper a bit of parsley simmer it up a little bit you can't have chowder without crackers i mean come on it just wouldn't be right i decided to go with the classic saltine cracker i love them when i was growing up they were always just called oyster crackers but now they're called soup and oyster crackers i'm gonna make my own in the food processor we have the flour the baking powder the salt the sugar both herbs italian flat leaf parsley thyme and some lard that looks pretty good to me and we're gonna take some of that cold water and pour it in until it forms a bottle okay i take this i'm gonna just put on my board i have a little bench flower in case it's sticking i'm not gonna need it a lot because i want the crackers to be flaky and kind of puffy we're going to put it in the fridge for about 20 minutes let it rest our dough is rested let's roll it out basically we're going to do is roll this out to the thickness that we want and then cut it into little round crackers so i'm looking for about a quarter of an inch fairly small and all i do is cut them and i'm going to put them onto a portrait line tray we'll get a little rise from these because it has the baking powder in there uh it also has some of that lard in there so we'll get a little puff from it which is nice crackers are cooked if you look at them they're really nice they have a little bit of browning on them they've puffed up just a little bit here's my method i like them whole i like to dip my crackers in the soup i know some people like to crush them up whole crackers one cracker with each spoonful of chowder perfect i like to take my crackers crumble them lightly so that it absorbs some of the soup but if you don't like it that way put them on the side float them in whole it's your soup you enjoy it but i'm going to do it my way and the way i like it let's plate it up all right let's get this in a bowl so that we can taste it so i have to have my crackers on the side all we have left is the eating and make this look pretty before we demolish it you garnish with a little fresh parsley our last final touch to make things really nice is you put a clam in your bowl and that my friends is manhattan clam chowder if you put hot soup in a cold bowl it gets cold really quick so i like to warm my bowl up a little right 150 degree oven and try and get a little bit of everything in there and then you just take your crackers now however you want it i'm just going to break my crackers up a little and sprinkle them about a little bit of fresh cracked black pepper this is my corn chowder this is my manhattan clam chowder so excited and that is my chowder [Music] okay now to the most exciting part we get to taste this look at it just look at it look how beautiful it is beautiful big chunks of crab not too thick delicious see this is how chowder is supposed to be yeah i think it's amazing i think that anyone you put this in front of will be your best friend immediately try this make this at home i'm telling you you'll be thanking me chowder is a hearty soup from north america that is delicious and satiating it's typically made from seafood but it doesn't have to be let's see how each of our three chefs made theirs sharif made his grandma's sweet corn chowder corn is native to the americas and there are two main types dent corn which has an indentation and is harvested in fall is used as a grain to make corn flour and sweet corn which is the familiar golden or white vegetable that sharif used in his chowder very picky about my chowder too when corn is heated volatile sulfur molecules like dimethyl sulfide are expressed this is a flavor molecule that's also found in the aroma of cooked milk and shellfish which is why corn makes a fabulous chowder it's gotta have the right flavor julie made clam chowder with small sweet cherry stone clams clams are bi-valves with two hard shells and one hinge called the adductor muscle that controls the opening and closing of the two shelves julie's clams were live and soaked in cold salt water because they naturally siphoned out residual sand and grits still inside the shells which you don't want in your chowder who wants sand in their teeth frank made crab chowder from white jumbo lump crab meat which comes from the two large mussels that are connected to the crab's swimming legs crab meat gets its flavor from high concentrations of free amino acids particularly glycine which has a sweet taste and sugars in their muscle tissue these molecules react to form flavor molecules like pyrazines and thiols that are usually associated with roasted meats i love it love it all of our chefs used celery in their chowder celery has strings that can be tough to chew you know we don't use celery enough i don't think anymore bite it in and then these strings would hang from your mouth there are a few different types of strings deep inside the leaf which most people call stalks they're xylem which moves water and phloem which moves food through the plant tissues these strings help keep your celery crisp a third type of string is the outer skeletal strings called collincoma that are made of cellulose and pectins these interact with surrounding cell walls and stretch relatively easily without breaking almost like plastic so they're hard to chew and break down these are the ones that julie's most likely annoyed with and did you know that you actually burn more calories eating celery than there is in celery it's a little more complicated than that julie celery is very low in calories and your body does expand energy digesting and metabolizing it especially if it has strings but metabolism is complex and as soon as you add any other food with celery the calorie math equation changes so while adding celery to your diet is a good thing from a nutritional perspective you're not going to offset any calories from other foods you're eating with it i don't know science guys i just know cooking sharif served corn chowder with saltines sometimes called soda crackers because they're made with baking soda and flour they're starchy flat squares that add a nice crunch to his chowder it all works julie served her chowder with oyster crackers you may wonder why they're called oyster crackers if they're used in clam chowder there's no oyster in the cracker but the way they got their name comes from two different points of history maybe because of their shape originally they have this kind of weird maybe oyster shell shape but i'm not really sure of the reason they call them oyster crackers i don't know maybe rose does some say they got their name because they're similarly shaped like an oyster others because they were made to go with oyster stew either way people have been eating these small white starchy salty crackers for hundreds of years they're very dry so they don't get soggy very quickly when you add them to a chowder yay frank made his own delicious level 3 oyster crackers and elevated them instead of relying solely on flour baking soda water and salt he added parsley thyme and bacon fat i'm proud of myself no matter how you like your chowder with corn clams or crab we hope you'll take some tips from our three outstanding chefs

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 795,279

Keywords: 4 levels, epicurious 4 levels, chowder, chowder recipe, 4 levels of chowder, make chowder, how to make chowder, 4 levels epicurious, manhattan clam chowder, manhattan clam chowder recipe, make manhattan clam chowder, make clam chowder, corn chowder, corn chowder recipe, make corn chowder, crab chowder, make crab chowder, crab chowder recipe, chowder recipes, crab soup, crab soup recipe, chef frank proto, epicurious frank, four levels, epicurious, epi

Id: EKFde8F_jsM

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021