Live Cooking Class with Rick Bayless! October ‘22

hello everyone and welcome to another one of our cook alongs if you haven't done this before um I'm going to try to go um at a speed that everybody can keep up with me but I apologize if I'm moving quicker than you the first thing that we do in these cook alongs is to talk about all the equipment and the um the ingredients that you need just to make sure that everybody's got it so we're going to be making a fall version of a tomatillo sauce with either chicken or pork I'm going to be doing chicken tonight um and the ingredients that we need are the fresh tomatillos of course if yours have the husk on them go ahead and peel that husk off now because we don't want that to be on there I'm going to leave that one on there and come back and do that in just a second we need a couple of uh big poblano peppers a couple of apples I've got some honey crisps here four cloves of garlic and a red onion you need some kind of herb I gave you a choice of four different things I've got a whole big bunch of episodes here but I've also got some fresh Sage you could use cilantro for this you could use basil for this would be good as well I've got my boneless skinless chicken thighs over here I'm trying to make it something we can get through really easily so that's why I've chosen this or you'll have your pork tenderloins now for the accompaniment that we're going to make to go with it we're going to be working with white sweet potato so I've got a couple of white sweet potatoes here the um the crema the Mexican Crema or you could use sour cream for that some butter of course we'll need a pan to cook those potatoes in a skillet to finish this all in but what you're looking at right here is a half sheet pan that I have covered with foil that is not absolutely necessary at all the soap foil will just make things a little bit easier when it comes to cleaning up so this last of the tomatillos that's on here has the stickiest of the the little husk on the outside of it um and you know it's got such a sticky husk on it that I'm just gonna rinse it off because it was really sticky there and not all of it came off now our next thing that we're going to talk about for building this tray that's going to go oh I didn't say the most important thing if you haven't turned your Broiler on you're a little bit behind I've got my burglar on I've had it on for a little bit and the rack in the oven is at the very highest place you could do this probably no I don't think you could get a one of those a half sheep hand in most kind of uh the little small toaster like oven so let's say oven oven okay so I'm gonna split my uh my poblanos in half and I'm doing it in a the way that they usually grow fear really flat so you want to do it across that narrow side so that you have as much space as possible here to roast this other one is going to be a little bit more Awkward you know when I look at the poblanos in the farmer's market or in the Mexican grocery store any grocery store I always choose the ones that are the absolute flattest because some of them will be kind of contorted looking and those are super hard to roast so I can get those guys all on there and then I've got my four cloves of garlic with the peels still on them I'm going to throw those onto the sheet as well and next thing I'll do is the onion so I've got this as a sort of largest Red Onion it weighs about eight ounces you'll notice that I always put weights on things because it the the truth of the matter is that good cooking is really all about proportion so if I don't tell you what my proportion is yours could come out really different than mine therefore I always give you that so for me a large onion is eight ounces but I will say that the large onions have grown and grown and grown now you can get these jumbo onions that look bigger than soft balls okay I'm going to cut this into four slices which will each one be about a half an inch in diameter I'm cutting them across the equator that part of it and I'm going to lay those guys out because we're going to roast those with everything else and now the last thing that we're going to work with here is the um is the Apple I've got these honey crisps honey crisps are pretty big cut them in quarters first that'll be our first thing to do here maybe you have a special way that you like to work with apples my preferred way that I've done since I was a kid is to hold a paring knife in my in my hand and go into the Apple cutting out the core like that and then just come on the back side of it and start doing the peeling of the outside of it and in this particular recipe you know lots of times I think I want to leave peels on things because I think they give you a really nice flavor and a lot of times I like the texture that they give but in this case for this particular dish the peel would really be noticeable and it would not enhance anything about the experience so I'm cutting all the peel off of it I know some people have special devices that they use for doing the peeling of the apples but I use a paring knife maybe you've never seen a paring knife that's quite like this one here this is a bird's beak one and they're inexpensive this one is a really nice version of it I got tired of of running through the cheap ones so I bought a nice bird's beak one um but this one is easy to to actually put a nice Edge on as well so I know that some of you would probably be doing some of this stuff with a peeler but that really slows me down so I'm just using my knife for it okay now we didn't talk much about the different kinds of apples that you could choose for a dish like this but this um this one is honey crisps you're probably like me falling in love with them I I really do love them I hate the fact that I love them so much and I was at the Farmers Market on Sunday morning and I was thinking about all these wonderful different varieties of apples a lot of the heirloom apples and such like that and so I was thinking about what other things I would recommend if you go to your farmer's market if you live in an area that's an apple growing area Northern spies would be really good in something like this but the the um the mootsus the Fuji apples those cultivars that come from Japan those are really good in this anything that's going to hold its shape so a lot of people would immediately go to the Granny Smith Granny Smiths are certainly decent apples they hold their shape they've got a nice acid in this dish we've got tomatillos and they need a lot they have a lot of acid so we don't need a lot of acid for this so I would choose something that's a little on the sweeter side then that okay now I'm going to cut them into about half inch slices so I'm going to say three or four per Apple quarter here um let's see go this way I think three is probably the right amount for these guys but the honey crisp has got that I know it's a fairly recent cultivar that came out of Minnesota but it's just got such a beautiful sweet and tart balance to it there okay now we're kind of I hope I didn't blast through it too fast for you actually being in a professional kitchen for most of my life you learn how to take tasks that for lots of people would be it would take a really long time and actually get them done much faster and it's just all about a matter of just practice practice practice on those things okay I think I'm about to get them all on here I got a few pieces that I'm going to have to kind of throw into another section up here but we can just do that and so my idea was to make this sort of like those sheet pan things that are very popular right now so this is my version of something where you're cooking lots of it but not the chicken we're gonna finish it all in a pan so we're going to roast all of this stuff slide it right into your oven and I'm going to set my timer so I've got my my rack at the very highest level there set it on the highest broil and I'm going to set my timer here for six minutes so it'll make a really loud sound so that I don't I keep the the sound on on the timer like something that I cannot ignore so um that's what you'll be hearing but that's my sort of normal thing because I get you know you can imagine that I'm a guy that's always trying to do about three things at once so if I don't have my timer set on something that's really really loud there then I will just ignore it now let's go over here to these guys let's do the rest of our prep here so it's white sweet potatoes probably a lot of you have never even tackled white sweet potatoes um you think they're orange and there's a few varieties of orange some of which like the beauregards and such from the south are very highly prized they're not my favorites my favorite sort of this original sweet potato that comes out of Mexico and thank goodness they're readily available I don't know about where you live but in Chicago you can find these white sweet potatoes in almost every grocery store certainly places like a whole foods that has sort of specialty vegetables and such but they now you can find it at everyday grocery stores and there's the purple variety purple flesh variety and then there is the one that's sort of purple I'm not sure I would call this very purple it looks more red on the outside right now so there's that variety of of ones that are white on the inside and our first things in this I will say is something that I do with a peeler you will see immediately that we are exposing that white flesh as we take this this has kind of got a thin peel now if you haven't had this before um hopefully I will awaken your tastes to my favorite sweet potato uh flavor the there's a word in Spanish when something is sort of like just too sweet it's and um that is what I think of the orange sweet potatoes they're just almost too sweet for me so this is going to give us a light and I will say slightly floral flavor but whatever I put white sweet potato in I just absolutely love it so we just have to peel it um I'm not a knit when I'm peeling stuff like this to get every little bit of it off I don't think little bits of the skin are going to hurt us but if we left all of the skin on we'd have kind of a mess on our hands because we wouldn't be able to mash this and we're going to make basically mashed potatoes but with the white sweet potatoes okay these guys are put into my we have I think I've shown this before but we keep chickens and the chickens are gonna love this they will eat this stuff up by tomorrow okay so now we want to to make um well we went basically one inch pieces out of this these are fairly hard so I'm gonna cut this one into three chunks like that and then cut the chunks down the middle and these don't have to be I want them too different why because the cooking we want them to cook in the cooking we want them to cook at the same rate okay there's one of them cut up see if I can get this went even more evenly done yes 36 61 as could you use regular potatoes for this preparation um this if you use regular potatoes for this preparation you just are making mashed potatoes but yeah absolutely you could make it but I'm encouraging everybody to use my favorite of the potatoes and there as we know a lot of health benefits with sweet potatoes but the interesting thing is that that orange sweet potato that we think of as the only sweet potato that's a fairly new thing on the on the market um and I know you'll say oh no it's been here all my life but I'm talking in terms of the history of sweet potatoes okay so now I've got all of that done I'm going to get some water in a pan here I want to have enough so that I can cover the sweet potatoes by about an inch or so and then I'll put that over a high heat and start bringing that to a boil I think that should about do it there I'm just going to put it at the back of the stove here and okay now salting the water remember that what you're doing is to try to make salty water so that it some of the salt will get into the the sweet potatoes so it's not just a pinch of salt in this if you put a small amount of salt in this water you won't taste anything in the potatoes so it actually has to be salty I want it to come to a boil fairly quick so I'm going to put the top on it there and leave it over high heat and we will come back to this here and that I am just right on time so now we can look in this oven and see what we have foreign okay so here's what I'm looking at I'm starting to get some color on these guys but not quite enough I'm getting a little bit of color over here these are blistering nicely but they're still not where I need them to be I'm going to put them in and most of this stuff I'm just going to roast on that first side if they were really dark I would say I would flip them all over but that's my timing let's look at them again in another six minutes here so I'm going to set that timer for another six minutes and then we'll come back to them and look at them we may take a peek even before that so let's start talking about the Browning of the chicken here so I'm going to put our big Skillet I have a 12 inch Skillet here so let's talk about 12-inch Skillets because I know a lot of people would consider that to be the biggest Skillet known to man and it kinda is I mean you can get 14 inch Skillets and 16 inch Skillets but that would only be for use in in restaurants or something but the reason I love 12-inch Skillets especially a cast iron 12-inch Skillet is because it allows you to keep everything spread out maybe you have browned some ground beef before and you've got a pound of ground beef and you've got a 10 inch skillet well what you end up with is just stewing the meat in there because you can't spread it out enough if you were to Brown a pound of ground beef in a 12 inch Skillet like this you could spread it all out so that you could get it nicely browned now browned always equals flavor that what that thing that's called the my yard reaction that's where you find all the flavor and a lot of people ask what's the difference between what the way we cook in a restaurant and the way people cook at home I always say heat is one of them but in that heat part of it is like I just set this over a high flame and a lot of people would never do that but I've got this over High flame but I can also spread everything else as I can get brown so when I say heat is important it's because it gives you that my yard reaction it gives you that browned flavor that we all consider really good and a lot of people at home are just afraid of doing that or they don't have a 12-inch Skillet a 12 inch cast iron skillet they are not expensive as as cooking equipment goes they're the best deal out there I encourage you Lodge makes one lots of people make one but you can get the pre-seasoned ones you just have to treat it well okay I've had this one for 40 years now and it's still my go-to thing I I love it now I am going to talk about the meat that I have chosen here which is the um the boneless skinless chicken thighs now if you're one of those people that always says no can only have chicken breasts because it's leaner I will give you the fact that it's leaner it can be really good I don't care for it unless it's been brined and then cooked perfectly okay chicken thighs are very forgiving they will allow you to be able to cook them a lot longer than you could a chicken breast and they don't have to be brined to be really good so I'm sprinkling the some salt over these guys and now I'm going to flip them over kind of open them up you can see where the bone was in them and then sprinkle them with a little bit more salt here okay now I'm going to just rinse my hands off here and start to Brown them you notice here that I'm using this the technique that I like a lot which is to heat my heavy pan first and then I'm going to add the fat to it olive oil vegetable oil fresh rendered pork lard which will give you the richest and roundest flavor or second to that would be to grab here's some rendered Bacon Fat because I always keep the Bacon fat and so I'm going to put this enough of that fat in into this pan to coat the bottom of it nice I don't know if you keep baking fat but I love bacon and so I always keep the fat now I'm going to turn it down because I've heated my pan up some so I'm gonna now I've got enough to coat the bottom of the pan nicely here and I'm going to start laying this seasoned chicken in there it should you should hear the nice sizzle when it goes in nice so Chloe D wants to know if they're pork tenderloin no no we're going to do pork tenderloin everything is the same and just put your pork tenderloins into the pan at the same time I'm sorry I didn't talk about that I was just talking about exactly what I had in front of me I'm sorry about that but you will do the same thing here with your pork tenderloin it will take about the same amount of time to Brown it because you have less surface to work with here but you can see that my pound and a half of chicken thighs fits perfectly in a 12 inch Skillet without doing any kind of cramming them in there they just fit nicely in a single single layer okay so you would do the same thing with your pork tenderloin just keep turning it as it Browns but it probably isn't Brown yet okay now I'm finished with my chicken touching here so I will I'm gonna peek into well that was my six minutes okay so let's look at what we've got here uh nice okay I'm hoping that this is what you're getting too okay do you see that nice Brown and everything everything is gorgeously roasted here and our poblanos are beautifully roasted I'm going to slide this back over here to and now let's look at what we've got underneath here let's see if we got Browning going on we do okay you know I'm gonna let that I want them a little bit Browner than that so I'm going to let these guys stay in here um we're gonna let these cool until they're handleable we've got some water boiling for our sweet potatoes so dump them into the hot water and then I'm going to put the top back on this that's partially covered so that all as it's boiling there it doesn't boil over that's what partially covered will give you in this situation okay now we're ready to start turning that chicken I'm sure now or if you're working with the pork tenderloin you'll be on to that as well but let's see here what we've got color wise now a little bit darker beautiful oh nice now there is something that I learned very early on in my professional cooking career and it might seem sort of like excessive to you but it's something that I always do which is to grab a rimmed baking sheet and I put a rack on the top of it and I always like I keep all my rim baking sheets and the racks just right here at easy access so that I can grab it this kind of setup most people would probably just do this on a plate but when this is browned on both sides then you put it on a plate but if you put it on a rimmed baking sheet what you'll find is that you'll have less of the juices going down on the baking sheet you want those juices to stay in the meat so you'll find less of them on the baking sheet and they the end product will turn out to be just so much juicier okay do we have any general questions that anybody would like to ask while we're Browning the the other side of the chicken here we have a question about curious cleaning okay that's easy to talk about curing is not hard anymore because most of the time you will find that they come cured okay um in fact I think it's hard to find one that is not cured these days so when you get your cured one the one thing that you have to keep in mind is that when you wash it out and at the beginning you have to be kind of gentle with it um when I say gentle don't scrub it hard some people say never put detergent in it I would say after about the first six months or so you can put detergent in it okay but during that first six months or so you want to be very very careful that you as it is is building up that beautiful surface that you're not destroying it so don't scrub it don't put soap on it what I always do is to dump some soap on it take a paper towel and scrub it with the abrasiveness of the soul and then rinse it out and always dry it overheat I use this one to make dinner for my family last night and it I put it I washed it out I've like I said I've had this one for 40 years now so it's got a really good patina on it I washed it out didn't dry it set it over the burner and had my and dried it out completely there and hung it back on the wall where I treat this guy okay we are done with that I'm going to take this out I know a lot of people have all kinds of admonitions about how you're supposed to work with cast iron I don't think it's as difficult as people make it sound I'm going to turn the fire off now underneath this and let this sit for a minute we're going to make our sauce in there the part that is stuck on the bottom of this pan and you may see some on your pan is called well we use the words in French or the word in French apple and defoam and it is it refers to all the little bits of browned Chicken on the bottom here that stuff is like gold that's what's going to give this sauce such a beautiful beautiful flavor Okay so I'm cooled off to a certain degree here um so let's do this let's peel the the skin off of these guys I don't know about yours these are still pretty hot but I'm going to make them cooler just by starting to peel the skin off of them um and then they will flip them over in a minute here um and we will let's see what that looks like this is nicely roasted so sometimes when I'm talking to everybody about how to roast uh poblanos I say to roast them up under a broiler but I usually am talking about the whole ones where you would have to go in and turn them a lot actually cutting them in half and putting on a rimmed baking sheet like this is a very easy way to roast them very evenly and then you don't have to worry about flipping them around all the time and such so that might be something the other thing to keep in mind especially at this time of year when the farmers markets are filled with so many great different kinds of chilies and peppers is that you can fire up your grill and do the roasting on a grill where you've got a lot more space to spread everything out I use that and in fact this last Sunday the farmer's market I bought a whole bunch of extra poblanos and then I roasted them all and I don't know if you know this little trick but you can put them all individually flat in a paper in a plastic bag and put them in your freezer and that way when you want a roasted poblano another time I don't even peel them or anything just pack them in there and then once they're completely Frozen you can just fill the bag with a flat the ones you've done or you could roast them I mean you could freeze them on a sheet pan or something like that okay so we've got that part of it done we've got we're going to cut all of the the potato I mean the apples up here so I'm going to slide them all out here and then we're going to cut up the roasted red onion and we're going to cut up these poblanos yes in the chat about when to use Bacon fat or lard how would you decide and what's okay number one good Lord is not easily accessible don't buy the stuff in the grocery store that's in the little rectangular containers like the national Brands and stuff like that you want to get a good Lord from a uh a butcher or at a Mexican grocery store but again not the national Brands the stuff you would buy at the meat counter we're very lucky that in our restaurant we have the opportunity to buy lard from the guy that raises all the pigs for us so it's beautifully rendered and it's fresh rendered it's a really fresh product it's not hydrogenated that's the stuff to stay away from if you can't find good lard like that bacon dressings are your second choice there and the bacon dressings have the added let's say the added positive note of smokiness which will be very very welcome in something like this but if you've got good lard I either the dried bacon drippings of the Lord will give you the best looking Brown much better than Browning in olive oil say or in vegetable oil but all all of those are good so whatever it is that you're working with that is is going to turn out something that is really delicious now the next thing that I'm doing here is to peel the roasted garlic if your roasted garlic has spots in it that feel like they are really hard and black don't worry much about that because they will get incorporated into the sauce because we're going to do this in a blender you could easily do it in a food processor too it'll take a little bit longer to get the right consistency out of it but a food processor will work just fine in this situation the thing is in Mexico everybody uses blenders they don't really use food processors very much and so that's one of the reasons that I do what I do because it's just in keeping with what's going on there okay so now the last thing is to put the tomatillos in here with I'm going to pour all that juice in there the juice is super delicious okay so we'll get that in there and then put the top on it and we're going to make a a nice Blended sauce out of these things I'm doing it about medium speed here all right that's going to give me what I'm looking for we're doing a very chunky sauce with a smooth background here so the sauce now we're going to go is going to go back into this this pan Which hasn't cooled down very much but I want to show you something here I I want to really concentrate the flavors of the tomatillo and the garlic the roasted garlic here so I've Got My Pan that's still kind of warm because it's a cast iron pan and it holds a lot of heat but if I put that in there it's just a weak kind of Sizzle so I don't want that to I don't want such a weak Sizzle I once a sharper Sizzle so that all of this can just like cook down really quickly concentrating the flavors and bringing up the sweetness because we're actually going to Brown this puree of the tomatillo so let's see if it's going to give me a sharper Sizzle there a little bit sharper Sizzle I'm going to wait for another 30 seconds on this I again I've got this over pie heat um you might want I'm going to start it over high but I'm going to turn it down to medium high but I often will start the pan over high heat just to heat it up really really well okay so now that all goes in there and I'm going to use a wooden Implement because that's what I like to work with against the bottom of this pan you could use any kind of an implement but wood feels better against the metal to me and so I'm scooping up all the foam that's on the bottom of the the pan here and mixing it in and as you see this is cooking down quickly you add you're going to have to clean your stove at the end of this I I don't mind that um because I like what I'm getting here but we've browned that chicken and now we're cooking down this tomatillo base now I'm going to stop doing the the stirring for a minute while I come back over here to my vegetables and fruits that are going to go in here I'm going to line up these these pieces of of apple and just cut them down the the middle because that's going to give me about half inch pieces so like that let's do the same I'm I'm gonna there's a little bit of that onion skin on the outside of this piece so I want to get rid of that exterior you'll notice it right away if you've got it looks different than everything else so I've got a little bit of that on there and then for this let's just cut them in quarters I've stacked two of them up here yeah those would be nice pieces to go in this will all go into the sauce once we get it cooked down now about the rest of this stuff here in the poblanos um I'm going to pull all of the of the seeds out of it flipping it over pull the seed pod off I'm going to rinse that one because it's got too many seeds same thing with this one I'm just going to pull the top of it off there we go and I think I'm going to just rinse these guys off very briefly now I will tell you when I say rinse them off I don't mean anything more than just what you see me doing here which is very very quick I'm not trying to get the roasted flavor off of them I'm just getting the seeds off of them basically so I do that all very quickly and we will cut these guys up into smaller pieces here so I usually line them up like that and I again we're looking for kind of half inch squares so I'm going to cut down in half inch strips and then cut crosswise okay let's go back to our sauce because it should be ready now um you can see that it's it has really I think there's a timer going off okay that means that we have 15 minutes on our sweet potatoes but look at that you see how it's now boiled down until it's thick like tomato paste and it's really really reduced and it's darkened in color and I'm going to pour in the one cup of chicken broth now and this is the point which I'll just turn everything down Okay so I'm going to turn our rear one off because I'm going to drain those guys and we'll finish our Mash but let's get everything back in the skillet here okay so now we've got our poblanos they're going to go in our roasted onions will be next look at that I love the color of these roasted red onions and they'll add a nice sweet Counterpoint to the Natural acidity of the of the tomatillo and then of course you get the sweetness now of our roasted Apple and I'm going to stir all of that together we have no salt in this at all yet except a little bit of salt that would come from that stock that or that broth that we put in here so let's go to the Salt now so this will end up taking a little bit more than a teaspoon of salt so I'm going to put that I'm going to start with that and then um once we get it stirred in to it all I'm going to Nestle Down in here the chicken thighs those should have cooled off completely by now as well but let's just put them down in here I'm turning it way down now to just like medium low heat look how pretty that is a couple stragglers there and let's go back now to our our sweet potato mash so okay yeah just Nestle them down in there so that they'll finish their cooking nicely okay now I'm going to take just before I go to the sweet potato mash I'm going to take just a second to clean up the board here because I've got all the remnants of chopping the roasted vegetables so I want to get rid of all of that I I know a lot of people think of having uh like a maple cutting board sort of top to their countertop and then they're just afraid to use it don't be maple cutting boards are really I've had this one for 26 years here and look at what it looks like one time I sanded it but other than that one time this is just what it looks like and I cut on it constantly so don't be afraid of cutting on a maple countertop like this I know a lot of people think oh it's so pretty I don't want to do anything to it but it's a very very very hard wood and it will take whatever you can give it okay let's go top off I'm going to grab I'm going to use my top you can pour this into a colander like I wrote in the recipe or you can do this kind of a thing where you just pour the water off of it now we want to make sure these guys are soft I got a fork over here and I'll just put yeah they're very soft and just perfect and now a lot of times when I'm making mashed potatoes this is the point at which I would leave the the potatoes to let all of the steam Escape I'm not going to do that with this one I'm going to take my butter which has been sitting in a very hot place so mostly it has melted now and then I'm going to take the the the crema that I have or as I said you could use sour cream and the sour cream is really good because these are sweet so they are going it's going to I gave myself a little more than the 1 3 cup here because if I needed to add more at the end I wanted to have it at ready access and now one two the mashing so you've seen me use this for making guacamole you can also use it as a potato masher if you have never used it that way I know that's the way it was originally designed but I love mashed potatoes that are mashed with this because they have such a great great texture I like there there to be some texture if you're one of those people that likes the whipped potatoes you won't get it with an old-fashioned potato masher that you'll have to use a ricer and you could easily use a ricer on this if you wanted them to be really really smooth but I like a little texture in it so I'm going to add I'm gonna use this and not not do too much work on it think about this for your Thanksgiving table maybe half this and half white potatoes I like to throw in a parsnip too because I think they're really delicious if you have little kids that only like mashed potatoes they won't this this will be weird to them but if you've got a whole lot of adults that want to have something different the mashed white sweet potato might be it for you Thanksgiving table you can see how easily they come together though which is one of the things that I just absolutely love about them okay a little taste so they got a little salt but they didn't get nearly enough salt they are like regular potatoes they want salt to bring out all of the flavors in them there and I'm gonna stir that in with a spoon that I can serve with let's see I love this stuff man it's so good okay I think I'm happy with that set that off to the side this needs another minute or so to kind of cook along there so while we're waiting for that to finish I thought it'd be fun to talk a little bit about mescala because I know everybody's interested in Mezcal these days so I pulled out some things to talk about a couple that you can easily find these days this is um one I have one two from Oaxaca here Mezcal everybody thinks about Oaxaca when they think about Mezcal but is there are many more states that can actually make mezcal and bottle it under the name Mezcal I think we may be up to 14 different states now but both of these are from Oaxaca which is the most famous for that um this is an ensemble which is means that it's a field blend of different kinds the most common of the Agave varieties that is used to make Mezcal will always be espadin in Oaxaca and this particular one which is a special bottling of Vida Mezcal can you see it better that way Vida Mezcal that was bottled juice that comes out comes up November 1st and 2nd and uh it's all s Badin this is a mixture of different kinds of agave it they don't say exactly which ones but they call it an ensemble meaning that it is bringing all of these flavors from the different parts of these different kinds of not different parts of agave but different kinds of agave I just realized I missed something here we didn't do an urban here because um so this is the episode if you haven't seen that so it's a jagged edged herb and it's pungent it gets best flavored when it simmers with something for quite a while people would put that much in a pot of beans and let it cook for a couple of three hours what I'm going to use today is some fresh Sage which goes very well with apples and the chicken and the roasted onions so I'm going to put this amount of sage in there that I just pulled out of our garden if you haven't ever grown Sage it's actually very very easy to grow um I'm gonna to um cut it up by just cutting crosswise basically this thing that is called a chiffonade so cutting crosswise very very thinly so great way to cut most herbs and then when we've run out of all of our leaves there I'm going to sprinkle this over this will make a really nice flavor without having to cook as long as the episode they would I would definitely make sure that that went in when we put in before we put the chicken in okay just Nestle that down in there it's looking good okay now it's a little drier than I want now the chicken should be done I'm going to take just a little bit of water in it just to thin out the sauce just a little bit you could put more chicken broth in there if you wanted it but I will give you a warning that too much chicken broth it will start to taste like chicken broth and you'll lose all those other wonderful flavors that are in there when you are tasting mezcal it is typical to use either the little what they call abeladora which is a little uh votive candle holder that's very standard in Mexico or something that looks a little bit like this or maybe you've seen the caballitos which are very tall and skinny the caboitos are more associated with tequila than they are with mezcal but this is probably the the shape of the most standard vessel to taste Mescal with and this is called a Copita this is a fancy Copita that's made by an artist in Oaxaca that I think is really really beautiful but this would be the shape of that okay so I'm going to start with beta which is very easily easy to find in a very affordable Mezcal and give that a little taste now when you're tasting mascara a couple things to to alert you to first thing you probably want to do is rub it over your wrist area and smell it all of the the alcohol will evaporate super fast and you can smell it and you can notice the roasted Agave notes to it if there's any smokiness to it which most of the mezcouts will have some smokiness you will get that second thing to do is give one taste and don't think about it at all just let it coat your tongue and swallow it but don't try to discern any flavors that's priming the pump okay that's going to give you the the opportunity to I'm not going to call it wet your whistle but really let your palate open up second taste um now I can taste it now I can get all those flavors this is a medium Smoky one but super rich comes from um uh San Juan Del Rio in the mountains of Oaxaca really beautiful flavor um that is easily accessible let's just call it that okay now I'm going to go on to this Ensemble I would expect it to be slightly different because it's not all espadin um I'm gonna do go through the same the same standard practice oh it's got more herbal elements that are already coming out on the nose so I'm expecting something different a little bit of priming the pump there hmm lighter all around more elegant um it's got herbal notes floral notes a little less aggressive in the smokiness of it but something that is just really elegant and delicious also quite available either the regular montelobos or the Monte Lobos Ensemble like we're doing there now lots of people ask me if you're going to make a Mezcal Margarita how do you do it if you make it like a regular Margarita you may love it or not love it okay it may be too overpowering because tequila is lighter in all of the flavors and tends to go sweeter than Mezcal so I set out a couple things a brandy-based orange liqueur plus a little bit of brandy or if you don't have regular Brandy you could use a little bit of bourbon or another whiskey so if we're going to do it if we're going to start with a couple ounces of Mezcal we'd put a half an ounce of a brandy base Grand Marnier is the most famous Brandy based orange liqueur and a half an ounce of some kind of whiskey or brandy put it in there then about an ounce three quarters of an ounce to an ounce of fresh squeezed lime juice and here's the ringer I love these space showed bitters in there it balances against all of the richness of flavor that you find in the Monte Lobos or in the Vida mescala okay time to serve folks so my potatoes are still hot here and I'm just gonna put a nice scoop of them on our plate oh man I love those things I've already said that too many times and so I apologize for that but I do love the the flavor of them and then we'll take a piece of our chicken to go on here and a whole lot of the chunky sauce to spoon around it yes so what I like to do with the pork is to let it rest for a few minutes after we have finished the cooking and then cut it on the bias I just can't go without having some kind of a green thing here so even though we didn't cook it with this beautiful episode that I have I think a few leaves of something green in there we'll finish that off very nicely a very simple presentation but it's one that I never Tire of because man it's like having those those potatoes against the Tangy fruitiness of that sauce and then our bra browned and braised chicken thigh or if you have the whole pork tenderloin you will take it out put it on The Cutting Board like I said it's it's always best to leave it sit for a couple of minutes to reabsorb the liquid that's sort of bouncing around in it and then slice it now I like to slice it on the bias so if I have the tapering end to my left here I would slice it this way on the bias so that I could shingle out three or four slices of the pork tenderloin on the top of that this is a great thing to do with the pork tenderloin so there you have it maybe you're going to make a Mezcal Margarita to go with it and we will finish up with any more questions we might have there was a question about the technique for freezing Peppers yeah okay yeah yeah so the freezing of the peppers I'm just going to pull out a freezer bag here to show you what I meant so what I usually do is to to to roast them and I when I do a lot of them I do them on my grill like I said before and when they get all blackened and blistered on the outside I let them cool down and then I just put them into the freezer bag so I would just line them up in a single layer in here and I could usually get about eight poblanos in here and then I would lay them into the freezer just like that and then after they're frozen you can open the bag up and you could um you could break them apart and then you could just fill this bag with them you could do that with a couple of different bags and combine them all into one if you wanted to if you wanted to do it that way the other way I've done it is to put a silicone baking pad on a half size sheet pan like what we roasted on here and then lay the roasted peppers on that put those into the freezers that will fit into your freezer and then freeze them solid and then combine them all into a freezer bag and then you can just pull them out now after they defrost which won't take very long at all you can slip that roasted skin right off of them tear them open pull out the seed pod and then clean them up and use them but I almost always have those in my freezer because when I'm in a hurry and I want to make something delicious I can always know that I have those roasted poblanos or any other kind of chili to work with there more questions there was a question about size difference in tomatillos yeah that's a great question what what about these really really big tomatillos that you find all the time size really matters here and it's not the bigger the better okay the bigger ones actually have the same amount of flavor this is my honest opinion as the medium sized ones just spread over more tomatillo and unfortunately that means that if you're weighing them you're going to have less flavor coming out of those tomatillos so I don't ever choose those really really big ones and the other thing that I will say is that the small ones that have the little purple blush on them are going to give you the most concentrated and most delicious flavor no matter what you choose it's going to be good but if you want to go to Great choose the smaller ones thank you all we have cooked our dinner here and together in an hour and um I'm really really grateful that everybody joined us today I hope you learned something I hope you're enthusiastic about making this perfectly fall version of a a great tomatillo dish um something that is absolutely company worthy but also something that is not going to take you all day in the kitchen so thank you so much for joining me um we'll do another one of these before the end of the year thank you and keep cooking laughs

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 72,765

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Id: sIVArBVb_II

Length: 62min 10sec (3730 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 11 2022