Kenji's Cooking Show | Spanish Tortilla

hey everyone uh this is kenji it's a little late at night but i'm gonna make breakfast for tomorrow um i have these yukon gold you've probably seen these even gold potatoes sitting on my uh counter for the last few weeks um they're starting to get a little bit soft and we're actually starting to sprout a little so i'm gonna use them tonight um i'm probably gonna have to peel off more than i really want to these because they're you know if they've been exposed to the sun so it's starting to get a little bit greenish um and you want to get rid of that green bit because it's poisonous um but what we're gonna make is a uh spanish style tortilla so that's you know i got the potato onion and egg omelet um i learned this technique um when i was uh working in boston when i worked with ken oranger at a toro we would make uh like a half dozen of these per night um very big ones and like a 14 inch non nonstick skillet um and serve them room temperature which is i think the best way to eat them um in spain like at a tapas bar you might find them uh in boca deal like in a sandwich um i think they're great cold uh served not cold uh room temperature and so they're perfect for making the night before so you can eat them at room temperature the next morning i'm gonna start by heating up a good good good good amount of nice olive oil so this is one of those situations where you might have just seen if you're on watching my channel and you've probably seen adam margucci's channel where he just came up with a video talking about frying in olive oil um there's a couple things i think he missed in that video one of them is that well first of all i've never thought about the health aspect of it per se but the main reason i don't always fry in olive oil is because i don't always want olive oil flavor um and olive oil flavor is pretty distinct even one even when you cook it and a lot of that flavor dissipates you're still going to taste it so it doesn't always work in every dish the other thing i think he missed was that well he did his taste test but he only did it by himself you know you can't blame given the current situation but he only did it by himself um and i think if he had done it with a larger panel of tasters he would have found that most people do find especially the like the really nice uh extra versions that i already have a lot of those sort of bitter um flavors bitter spicy flavors to begin with um they do require a more cute bitterness um as they cook and that can sometimes be unpleasant not all olive oils do it but um some of them at least that's what i found in my taste tests which happened to be oh actually i don't know if i've done any double blind but i've certainly done blind to taste test panels of people all right so we're just slicing up those potatoes um quarter inch slices uh you see my in the middle of repairing my repairing my uh cabinet doors oh by the way check this out like that no more i don't even know where spoonie went but no more spoon the cabinet's just closed by itself now all right so we got our potatoes here good amount of olive oil um this is probably actually more potato than i'll need so whatever i don't use i'll save um i'd like to drop them in the oil like a few bits at a time just so that the oil gets in between them and they don't stick to each other because i hate it when when you're trying to like slice fried potatoes and they kind of end up stacked together and sandwiched you know um actually you know what i'm gonna do this the easier way where's my towel i'm gonna do it this way this away you can also actually um microwave the potatoes to pre-cook them the texture doesn't come out quite the same in the finished dish because you so you'll see when we when we cook these potatoes you kind of fry them until they get like a mini sort of like a little bit of a shell so similar to if you've ever made double cooked french fries you know traditional french fries um similar to that and similar to the first fry in that where they're not crispy per se but they do get a kind of light golden um crust on the outside [Music] all right how much potato that's that's a reasonable amount of potato what you want in this dish is a reasonable amount of potato and an unreasonable amount of olive oil it should be really like way more olive oil than you think it's supposed to be because that's kind of the magic of this dish and what gives the eggs their flavor if you're not familiar with it is so so i mean you know you'll see it'll be like a kind of thick omelette made of potatoes and onions uh and eggs i had this kind of half onion hanging out not looking great but we'll see how let's see how he looks when we peel let's turn down a little i think he'll be just fine just peel off some of those outer layers maybe not two just fine let's say from here on in we're good [Applause] um and here's this other i'll half onion that my so my wife likes to cut onions um split them first before she cuts them orbitally as opposed to pull the pole which um i find well i find difficult to do to use onions that way um but you know she i know better than to try and correct her when it comes to cooking things because she she likes to do it the way she does it when she cooks good food so i don't complain actually i don't complain because i used to complain that i learned not to that's the reason why i'm complaining i'm not going to go too fast because i don't want to wake everyone up this knife um i just bought it yesterday um from a local knife shop called the perfect edge it's um it's my first shun knife actually i've never owned a shin before for some they've always felt a little kind of overpriced to me for what they are um but uh this knife was 50 off um so it seemed like too good a deal to pass up um i never really i don't really own any knives like this this one is um a dual steel damascus um where both layers of steel come all the way to the edge um and so the idea i guess is that um two different hardnesses i and as you grind it down it creates these kind of micro serrations um i don't know if you can kind of see them there but it um it creates these micro serrations naturally as you sharpen the knife so it has some of the benefits of a serrated knife which is that you know it slices into things a little more easily than a uh and a perfectly straight knife um but you don't you know unlike a serrated unlike a true serrated knife which you can't really sharpen all that easily you can sharpen this one just like a regular knife i think that's part of the idea [Applause] a knife expert expert could tell you more so if i was going to make this dish just to eat it by myself tonight um i would do it the quick and easy super super quick and easy way which is to um it's a trick that jose andres uh uses in his book where you make it out of potato chips so like literally you take a bag of potato chips open it up fry some onions in olive oil take your potato chips open up the bag and then combine the onions olive oil and potato chips with your egg mixture um and then fry it in a skillet and that's that's that um actually you know instead of fresh onions i wonder if it would work with funyuns if given you're already using potato chips i wonder if onions would work in fact i'm going to try that i promise i'll put the video up sometime salt and vinegar chips is what i what i use when i'm well what i use when i'm when i'm eating potato chips and also what i use when i'm cooking a dish like this the quick and easy spinach tortilla typically you would see this dish served with some alioli which is a garlic and olive oil sauce made in the mortar and pestle which i'll make another batch of but i actually had this batch that i made that unfortunately when you put olive oil put allioli in the um in the fridge the uh the olive oil breaks out because the fat crystals are too large because it crystallizes and that breaks the emulsion um but this was at one point in alioli that i made in the mortar and pestle so nothing but garlic garlic well now seasoned black pepper and salt and olive oil all right i'm gonna i'm gonna snap my fingers and speed this up um the next time you see me i will have um the potatoes will have been cooked just to the point where they're stirring mostly softened and just starting to get like a little crust to them ready um so i also just realized i cut way too many onions there i don't know what i was thinking i guess i'm used to making much bigger batches of this stuff um but there's there's enough space that's killer but i think i can slide whatever onions i need in there um and then just save the rest for i'll make something with them tomorrow oh you know what i'll make tomorrow i'll make um for lunch i will make you don by the way just to annoy people i'm gonna eat with that spoon later um because i know exactly how clean my sinks are because i just disinfected them to people who complain about me using utensils from places that they shouldn't have been used first of all my house my rules um more importantly like you have no clue how i maintain my kitchen you don't know whether my screen is sink or not can i clean the sink or not my sink is cleaner out i don't even know whether my sink is clean or not who are you to tell me all right we're gonna now break some eggs [Applause] this one looks like a job for four eggs i'll say four eggs that's what i'll say it's probably overkill i'm probably gonna regret that last egg you always regret the last egg right season it salt good pinch of pepper is there such thing as a bad sorry a good pinch of kosher salt um is there such thing as a bad pinch of kosher salt oh here's my favorite whisk it's a nice little whippy guy from oxo look at how easily that risks so the trick here the trick i found to getting really nice texture on this thing um is that you take your hot potato onion and oil mixture and dump it straight into your eggs and i want to make sure those potatoes are cooked through by the way it doesn't matter if they're breaking up at all makes zero difference there you go you dump a strain into your eggs almost done a couple of slightly hard pieces um and the act of dumping it in there starts them cooking a little bit so that when you get it back in the pan you don't really have to kind of do that thing which you normally do wear an omelette where you kind of have to scramble it around so that the outside doesn't overcook before the inside's done because it's kind of all cooking relatively fast um and so uh your eggs brown on the outside and are nice and custardy on the inside without really having to worry about it too much it just kind of happens there's just ever so slightly too much oil in here i think i'm just worried that i'm going to overfill the pan overflow the pan so i'm going to about a little bit but i think there's probably about i don't know a third of a cup of oil in here at least maybe a half cup all right onions are soft potatoes can you see them so you can see how they're um how the potatoes are just starting to get that little golden crust on them i don't know if you can see that but i can see it i'm hoping you can see it too all right so now we here's what we do we just go dump make sure there's nothing sticking to the bottom of that pan because if something's sticking now then the eggs are going to stick when they go back in all right [Music] heat it up add a little bit of the oil back all right now we're gonna fold this mixture oh yeah i can already tell there's slightly too much egg says i did the same damn thing with my carbonara the other day huh i can just call this show kenji with too many eggs all right not quite hot enough yet i want the egg to really kind of sizzle as it hits there so this is not not not not not a delicate french omelette this is a hearty browned spanish omelette i'm gonna taste it yeah seasoning is good if you want you can also add a little butter in here if you like that butter flavor okay there you go so it sizzles as soon as it as soon as it hits the pan you see how it kind of bubbles up around the edges like that that's exactly what you're looking for that's a sign that um it's bubbling up and it's hopefully means that it's not going to stick never really works you know of course especially because it's on video um i don't know if i will have posted my pizza video um yet by the time you watch this one but if you've seen my pizza video you know that things never work out how they're supposed to work when you're doing uh when you're shooting a video oh here's a trick um so some people inverted this all right so some people first of all they finish the finish this in the oven um and that is totally fine to do you can you can pop it in an oven um and let it cook so it cooks on top of the bottom um the issue i find is when you do that you don't really get like the sort of dense custardy texture that um that well that i like um you get sort of a more kind of poofy frittata-like texture so some people when they flip what they'll do is they'll put a plate over the top flip it over and then slide it back in what i find easiest to do is actually use a pot lid like this because it has no rim at all so first of all you put it here and let it um let it sit there for a second just so that the uh the top of this thing will start to cook let me just i'm just going to poke it a teeny bit to see how how firm we're getting okay so we're still way too wet but that's okay we'll get there all right i'm gonna pop the heat heat down just a tiny bit to make sure that uh we're not gonna burn that outside before the top is done um so this top there will help the top start at the top of the uh of the omelets start to uh the tortilla sorry the top of the tortillas start to set a little bit um so that becomes easier to flip um but we used that that cleo which if i was a baker i would have here because i thought it was brilliant was a the turntable from a cake decorating stand which is a flat metal disc with a a metal spindle sticking down um underneath it and so you you know cake makers use it by placing it on the base and then you you sort of rotate the kit allows you to rotate the cake around evenly so that you can apply a nice layer of frosting or do nice decorations etc um the way it works with the spanish tortilla is that you can put it upside down if it's right over the top of the thing and then you flip it and then you slide it back in the pan and because it has no it's completely flat and no lip at all makes that action really really easy um and the other trick i learned which i'll show you in a second um is that you you flip it a few times not just once you flip it over and over and over especially right before the end because that helps kind of shape it and it makes the [Music] um it makes it sort of it gives you that sort of really nice perfectly round um those round edges which is uh what you're looking for or what i'm looking for again all right so we're looking good now and give it a little where'd my thin spatula so you want to take one of these guys you can also just use a knife um like a butter knife and make sure that your edges are free all right this is looking great now i take a second cloth this is a two cloth job because the pot handle can get hot i'm gonna go over the sink here just in case you're ready now we do a little bit of this and we slide it right back in there we go we lost oh we lost a tiny bit that's all right so now we put it back over the heat and kind of tuck these edges in and don't worry too much if like so right now you can see this side's kind of flared out you don't really have to worry about that too much um it's all it's all going to work out in the end i promise and if you see that it's kind of like you see how this one's kind of foaming around the edges that's a sign that you have the right amount of olive oil in there you want the olive oil to like you want the thing to be basically saturated with olive oil like holding just enough oil that holding so much oil that just a tiny bit is starting to seep out around the edges and bubble like that that's a sign that you have the right amount if it's too little olive oil it'll look dry if it's too much olive oil it'll kind of look like it's swimming but just a little bubble like that is what you're after um oh you know what i got the spoon rest here i might as well use it right all right so the second side usually doesn't take as long now here's where things get fun we're gonna um get the spotlight back and now we're gonna here's where the shaping bit comes i'm not gonna bother using the second towel because it doesn't feel hot so over and in and over and in and that kind of ends up sort of tucking in those edges you see how it's getting more and more round and nice over and over all right we will uh that final side is not quite brown enough yet by the way you can you can add all kinds of mixins mix into this if you can mix in with your fixing that i'm thinking of trying to think of a pun and coming it blank anyhow someone give me a good mixing pun in the comments um you can add all kinds of mix-ins to this um so very traditional would be something like peas and roasted peppers versus red red peppers or even raw red peppers or say you could add some like chorizo that's delicious and really honestly it's like a frittata like any kind of vegetable that you want to throw in here um is going to work it's spring right now so if you wanted to do like peas and fava beans and asparagus that would be delicious green onions oh and by the way you're looking for a texture that's kind of it feels good um a texture that's kind of still just a little bit wet on the inside you know this isn't this isn't like um this isn't one of those sort of the wetter the better situations but it certainly is like moderately wet it's better better than dry that looks gorgeous to me i think i'm gonna call that i think i'm gonna call it done all right we're calling it so to serve it flip it out slide it onto your board and that is that so now i'm going to resist the temptation no i'm not i'm just going to cut a little bit out and then i'm going to resist the temptation to eat the rest because i think it's better the next morning at room temperature oh there you go so so you see that so you see how just sort of like a sort of like a good french omelet it's can you see that it's not like wet inside but it's like uh moist and very sort of like custardy almost i mean that is that is what you want that is what i want anyhow okay um i'm gonna put away i'm gonna clean up i'm gonna go to bed and wake up in the morning with my daughter um actually i'll probably wake up before her because i got a food delivery at 6 30 a.m um and uh you know what i'm gonna do in the morning i'm gonna make a real quick cheaty alioli so it's basically um well you'll see it in the morning all right good night hey everyone so it's morning um and this is ready to eat oh um so for the the sauce i'm making like a super quick oops sort of cheaty um alioli so typically this would be made with garlic and olive oil sometimes an egg yolk and it's still considered alien even if it has an egg yolk so but i'm just going to make it with a regular store-bought mayo and some of this broken alloy that i had from the fridge if you don't have broken up allele in your fridge you can just take regular olive oil i'm sorry regular mayo and whisk in some minced garlic and some fresh olive oil if you got a little bit of fresh lemon juice that's also great in there right looks like someone stole a second bite i swear i swear it wasn't me cut these into little cubes i like cutting it into cubes because then you can eat a reasonable number of them and then they come out easier than wedges and also this way i can my daughter gets a choice of whether she has triangles or squares i'm just going to try this teeny tiny triangle right now because i don't eat too much before the family wakes up oh so let's take a look at that internal texture there it's a nice tender moist the potatoes are fully cooked little bits of onion it's delicious i'm sorry i forgot to stand in front of the door while i do this yes shaba you get your little bit sit sit sit shop sit good girl there you go all right let's do one more little bite for me all right i'm gonna go wake up my daughter

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 500,560

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Id: RPYk9W9v-bI

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020