- [Babish] This episode is
brought to you by Cash App. When your personal finances connect you to your funds and the stuff that matters, that's money and that's Cash App. You know what else is money? Sundaes so big you gotta
eat them with a big spoon, ice cream without a machine, and custom novelty pizza box makers. Download Cash App from the App Store or Google Play store
today to add your cash tag to the 80 million and counting. - Did anyone order me a plain cheese? - Oh yeah, we did. But if you want any, somebody's gonna have to barf
it all up 'cause it's gone. - Bless this highly nutritious
microwavable macaroni and cheese dinner and the people
who sold it on sale, amen. Guys, I'm eating junk
and watching rubbish. You better come out and stop me. - [Babish] Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back to Binging with Babish where this week we're taking a look at the foods from "Home Alone," for which you might notice
I'm championing a blender. I wanted to make these recipes as easy and family friendly as possible and the blender represents
numerous opportunities for shortcuts and even improvements in all three of these recipes. First up, for the pizza, maybe the most obvious
one, a quick pizza sauce. 14-ounce can of San Marzano tomatoes, two cloves of garlic, half a teaspoon of dried basil, one teaspoon of dried oregano, and a generous pinch of kosher salt. Blend on a medium speed
for 15 to 30 seconds until smooth with a little bit of texture. From here, you could cook
this for about 30 minutes if you wanted to mellow out the flavors, but I like my pizza sauce to
do the cooking in the oven. Next up, the dough, and
you might be surprised to see me with a package of
store-bought pizza dough, because if you're anything
like me for your entire life, you've labored under the delusion that store-bought pizza dough is awful. To explain why, I'm going
to perform a recreation of how I would make pizza
dough back in high school, in other words by following the horribly incorrect
directions on the bag. First, we're gonna roll out the cold dough into a vaguely pizza-like shape, maybe spray down a cooking sheet with nonstick spray if
you're an overachiever, abandon the traditional
circular shape of the pizza for a more rectangular, I-need-to-make-it-fit-on-the-tray
kinda shape, give it a smear down with
some jarred pizza sauce and a generous sprinkling of pregrated low-moisture mozzarella, part skim for health. Then into a preheated 400
degree Fahrenheit oven, this guy goes for an
indeterminate amount of time until the cheese is deeply browned and the crust is pale and flabby. Now at this point, if
the crust wasn't glued to the bottom of the tray,
it would look like this, then it gets subdivided
into more manageable pieces by virtue of a wheeled blade, and then depending on
hunger levels, eaten. And this would end up tasting
exactly like school pizza. That is to say not pizza at all. So I would go on to make two assumptions: store-bought pizza crust is bad and I'm bad at making pizza. Now, while the directions on the back of the bag might be horrible, if you look at the ingredients, you'll see that it's just flour, salt, water, yeast and sugar. The same stuff you'd use at home. Then once you buy it,
you can refrigerate it for up to five days to cold ferment it and improve its flavor. Once you're ready to make a pie, we're gonna pretend that we
just made this dough ourselves, stretching it into a taught
ball for proofing and shaping. Each of these bags of dough is
one pound or about 450 grams, which is a solid weight for a
big ole 14 to 16-inch pizza. Once everybody's balled up, I'm placing them in a generously
flour covered container for anywhere from one
to two hours depending on the temperature of your kitchen until grown in size by about 50%. Then to roll it out, I'm gonna use the technique
I learned from Mark Iacono. That is to roll it in two directions, leaving a sort of hump in
the center of the dough, then rotate the dough 90 degrees and roll out the hump into an even circle. But rolling is really only a
good start for pizza dough. Ideally, you want it to be stretched. So once we get it out into
a relatively even round, it's time to start passing
it knuckle over knuckle, gently stretching it ever wider and trying to keep it even throughout. There might be a slight
bump around the outside where the crust is gonna go, but for the most part, the crust is gonna rise
of its own volition. Once stretched out as
thin as humanly possible, we're placing it on a
generously floured pizza peel, applying a thin veneer of sauce, there's nothing I can't stand
more than an oversauced pizza, and a generous sprinkling of freshly grated low-moisture
full fat mozzarella. Now you can max out your oven
with a pizza stone in it, preheating it for a
full hour before baking. But this being a New
York-style pizza, it prefers a comparatively sweltering
700 degrees Fahrenheit, much more easily and safely achieved in an Ooni pizza oven. After anywhere from five to seven minutes, with several rotations to ensure even crust and cheese
browning, you should end up with a really solid New
York-style pizza made out of a dough that I thought
was inherently horrible, but like most things in life, just requires a little
love to be its best self. Now, while making pizza in the rain might not have been very fun, the cold and humidity made
for a perfect environment for recreating the
irrepressible Rob Schneider's steamy pizza reveal in "Home Alone 2." Mr. McCallister, let me present you with your very own cheese pizza. (cameraman laughs) Did it steam? - [Cameraman] Yeah! - Oh shit! - [Cameraman] There was a big plume. - That's just like the movie. Now, I definitely over-cheesed this guy. I had added more cheese before
pulling it out of the oven and paid for it when I
tried to retrieve a slice. Bottom was beautifully blistered, the crust had a nice chew to it. Overall, it's a surprisingly great way to make pizza last minute. Now, before we get off
the subject of pizza, even though it's never
mentioned in "Home Alone," I wanna see how this dough performed in the lesser known Chicago-style
thin crust bar pizza. The most popular toppings for
which include pickled chilies and cooked Italian sausage. Top all that up with mozzarella, cook to a similar state of completion, and then seemingly defying
law, science and logic, this round pizza is not
cut into triangular slices but rather into little bitty squares, which at first seems annoying but makes it much more
conducive to party consumption and caters to guests that
might not like crust. And with its flavorful toppings and much more reasonable amount of cheese, it's the one that we ended
up eating the most of. So as I always say, enjoy
your pizza how you like it. Anybody who judges you should take a long hard look in the mirror and ponder why they're
judging people for pizza. Anyway, next up, we're
going into mac and cheese, and you might be wondering, how exactly are they going to incorporate a blender
into mac and cheese? And the answer lies in full
proofing the cheese sauce. So into the jar of a blender, in this order we are adding
three large egg yolks, a teaspoon of spicy or Dijon mustard, an optional quarter
teaspoon of cayenne pepper, and 12 ounces of grated cheese, eight ounces of which is going
into the jar of the blender. The rest we're reserving for
extra cheesiness at the end. Now, over on the stovetop, we're adding four cups of whole milk to a large saucepan or deep saute pan, covering, bringing to a simmer, promptly overboiling, scorching
the milk and making a mess, cleaning up, starting over,
and doing better next time. Once it's at a bare simmer, we're adding one pound of elbow macaroni or the short quick cooking
pasta of your choice, cooking it to a state of near completion. That is about one minute shy of done, then draining the pasta, reserving the cooking milk
in a large spouted container, returning the pasta to the pot, and heading over to the blender while the milk is still plenty hot. Then with the blender
running on medium-high speed, we're gonna slowly stream
that hot milk into the sauce, melting the cheese, tempering the eggs, and emulsifying everything
together for about 30 seconds into a super smooth, comparatively
effortless cheese sauce, which we can add straight
back to the cooked pasta, give it a stir. Then for a little extra cheesy meltiness, you can add that four ounces
of reserved shredded cheddar. Give it a cursory mix to
distribute it throughout the pasta, cover and let rest for five minutes. What results is a mac
and cheese reminiscent of the microwave stuff from your childhood with vastly improved flavors and textures from the fresh, whole ingredients. Make sure to season to taste
with kosher salt and dig in. Now this stuff looks and tastes fantastic, but it does set up in about 10 minutes. If your sauce solidifies,
hit it with a little splash of water and a little bit of heat, and it will come right back to life. Emulsifying in the blender makes the sauce nearly unbreakable, despite just being milk, cheese and eggs. Next and last is ice cream. And as it turns out, the
blender is the easiest way to make no-churn ice cream
that I've ever tried. I'm starting with about
two cups of whole milk, one cup of which I'm
gonna add to the blender along with 130 grams of granulated sugar, 3/4 of a teaspoon of kosher salt, and half a teaspoon of xanthan gum, a thickener readily available
at most grocery stores. Then we're gonna blend
this mixture together for two minutes on high speed to ensure complete dissolution
of the xanthan gum, a notoriously clumpy compound. Once the two minutes are up, you're gonna see that the
mixture is slightly thickened. Now we're gonna pour it into a bowl along with the remaining
one cup of whole milk, two cups of heavy cream, and a tablespoon of vanilla paste or a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Whisk this until combined,
and believe it or not, this is your finished vanilla custard. Now, at this point, if you
have an ice cream churner, you can churn it, but like I said, this
is a no-churn ice cream. The trick here is to
first freeze your custard into blender manageable pieces. So I'm pouring it into an ice cube tray. Now, Kevin's sundae was both chocolate and vanilla ice cream. So I'm gonna take half this custard, add it back to the blender,
add 25 grams of cocoa powder, blend, and that's all there is to that. Fill up an ice cube tray
same as the vanilla, and then these guys are headed into the freezer until
completely solidified, at least four hours. Now, if you just freeze ice cream custard like this without churning it, it's gonna turn into
a block of, well, ice. So here's where we're
gonna rely on the blender to smoothen and creamify our ice cream, adding the custard cubes
back to the blender and blending on high speed. Now, an alarming noise from my blender taught me very quickly that you can't blend this
straight out of the freezer. After freezing overnight,
they need to soften up at room temperature
for about half an hour. Then with the help of a
blender stuffing stick, they can be liquified, breaking down to the consistency of soft serve in about 30 seconds. Now, this mixture can be spread evenly in a freezer safe container,
covered and frozen, again, for at least four
hours, ideally overnight. Same procedure with the
chocolate, as you might imagine, and then four hours later, we've got the creamiest,
easiest, no-churniest ice cream, entirely homemade, fully customizable, and requiring no special
ice cream making equipment. So to make Kevin's sundae, alls we gotta do is pile
a whole bunch of vanilla and chocolate ice cream in a bowl, load it up with spray cream, maraschino cherries, and
chocolate-style syrup. Then all there is left to do is get the big
ole sundae eating spoon, cue up "Angels with Filthy Souls," which growing up I
thought was a real movie, and remember what it was
like being left home alone for the first time. Hope you guys try out
these recipes for yourself. I hope you have a wonderful
holiday with no need for Rube Goldberg style
traps to foil home invaders. Thanks again to Cash App. That's money, that's Cash App. Download Cash App from the App Store or Google Play store
today to add your cash tag to the 80 million and counting. (upbeat music)
That Chicago one was more of a double-dough/pan style than the tavern style it seemed like he was trying for. Tavern style has a thin, crisp crust, which makes the square/party cut more manageable.
I was quite shocked that the real Macaulay Culkin didn't show up at the end.
oh babby, that's not a Chicago style tavern pizza
The crust should be cracker-like and crunchy, and there is absolutely no pickled banana peppers. Use giardiniera, its a completely different thing
Has this subreddit died? There are so few comments for a brand new video!
A large cheese pizza, just for me ❤️
The blender mac and cheese is on the to-make list.
Fun episode! I'm definitely trying the ice cream and mac n' cheese recipes.
Keep the change, ya filthy animal.
Missed opportunity for a Simplisafe ad spot on this episode.