How to Make Real Guacamole; Kenji's Cooking Show

everyone is Kenji I'm gonna make some guacamole ready welcome Molly yes welcome Olli this is one of the first things I ever learned to make on it but I make it a lot differently now than I did when I was a kid so when I was younger what I would do is I would take some onions I would dice them up I would take some tomatoes I would dice them up then I would take some avocado and I'd mash it with a fork and then I'd fold in the onions and tomatoes as well as sometimes some cilantro and usually some lime juice and that's that's what I called the guacamole now that is not really guacamole that is more like avocado mashed avocado mixed with a few other ingredients on guacamole the name comes from well guaca-- from aguacate which is a avvocato in Spanish and then Molay which is 2 2 pound so like you'll see then the roots for you know like mole a sauce is a sauce that's made out of pounded ingredients that are all pounded together you'll see carne Malita which is meat that is pounded until it's until it's a ground up so you know can we give me ground it can be pounded but anyway anyway it means something that's been pounded inside this thing which is a molcajete you can use a mortar and pestle also but I like using them up ahead they just because it has a nicer easier shape for me to use a nice big work Bowl it might sound like a silly thing to say that you need a molcajete to make guacamole I mean I guess you don't really need it but there is a huge huge difference between guacamole that's made in a molcajete versus guacamole that's made with hand chopped ingredients or even ingredients in a food processor so when you pound your aromatics which by the way in this case are just onion Serrano chili and cilantro and you want to rinse all this first onions Laura Serrano chili and cilantro with a big pinch of salt those are your base aromatics you know you can add garlic if you want although you know traditionally it doesn't have garlic in it you could add garlic if you wanted you get Tomatoes if you want I like keeping it real sort of pure and simple so just these three ingredients onions chilies cilantro as my garden is my flavoring for the avocado sometimes I'll add some lemon juice in fact usually I'm sorry usually I'll add some lime juice as well I'm not sure I'll add it today though I might just go I might just go straight up partly because partly because I don't think I have any limes today but oh yeah so the difference between chopping a vegetable and pounding a vegetable is like so the metaphor I like to use is if you think of a vegetable is like a shipyard where you have all these shipping containers and each one of them is full of sort of aromatic vegetable juices so each one is full of onions or chiles and cilantro whatever so when you chop vegetables even if you do it with a even if you do it with a food processor blade what you're kind of doing is you're you might be you might be separating some of the layers of shipping containers some of them you might be cleaving open and releasing some of those internal you know some of the vegetables and the aromatic things out of them but most of the cells most of those shipping containers are actually going to stay intact now when you pound something in a mortar and pestle like this or in a molcajete what you're doing it's sort of like it's sort of like when like Godzilla comes to shore and he starts just pounding on sink stepping on things just crushing those containers and so you end up actually releasing a lot more of aromatic compounds than you do with a knife or even with a food processor and if you taste this side by side side by side with guacamole made with any nitro food processor I mean the difference is is really striking it's a very very clear difference the modern pestle or motor hesitate one of mine the most essential tools in my kitchen I use it in almost every day I would use this for making hmm I use it for crushing garlic or ginger from stir fries or for curries I use it for making pesto I use it for making salsas Thai curry pastes I use a crushing crushing spices I find it much easier to crush spices in a mortar and pestle than in a spice grinder even an electric spice grinder mainly because like normally you need like a few tablespoons of spices to effectively make a electric spice grinder work and in a molcajete or in a mortar pestle you can do as little as you'd like and you can grind it as fine or smooth as like sorry as poor as fine as you like all right so that's about what we're looking for you keep going a little bit but this is good enough for me so pretty pretty pasty if you don't have a molcajete what I would recommend actually is taking your aromatics and throwing them in the freezer for until they're frozen you know for like maybe 10 15 minutes put them on a tray therm in the freezer before incorporating them into your guacamole and the reason you do that is that freezing will also sort of ruptured cells so in most cases that's not a good not a good thing but if you're going to be kind of pounding everything to oblivion anyway or grinding it all to oblivion then it doesn't really matter that you're sort of losing structural integrity and it actually helps release flavor better that's a good trick for your pesto also throw your basil and your garlic into the freezer for 10 15 minutes before if you don't have that is if you're not going to make it traditionally in a mortar and pestle if you're making it a food processor throw it into the the freezer for 10 15 minutes before you found it same with same with a sort of Thai curry paste your chilies all of your fresh and fresh aromatics throw them in the freezer for a little bit all right these of course the other secret to good welcome all day is having good avocados and the trick the real trick to getting good avocados well first of all is to live in California or mint Co that helps but what I do is so you want to find avocados that you know they give a little bit on the outside when you squeeze them but they're not militia and they certainly don't feel like there's any sort of loose skin like the flesh is start to pull away from the skin you don't want that the trick that I find generally works is if there's a pile of avocados and maybe people will hate you at the supermarket for doing this but if there's a pile of avocados go for the ones like in the second or third third layer from the top don't don't grab the top avocados because avocados as with most vegetables they ripen their ripening is triggered by the concentration of ethylene gas which is a gas that the avocados produced themselves but it triggers ripening in them so the avocados that are on lower layers of the produce bin that ethylene gas is more concentrated around them because it doesn't have as many sort of avenues of escape we can't just fly off up into the air above them so they tend to go right faster so if you have been in front of you of avocados and the ones on top all seem pretty hard dig around underneath and you'll probably find that the ones underneath are actually ripe of course you can also just by hard avocados and and ripen them yourself as with as with apples bananas tomatoes the more sealed off they are the faster they're gonna wrap ripen again because of that concentration of ethylene gas so if you put your avocados in a bowl pile them all together they'll ripen faster than if you keep them sort of individually loose they'll also faster room temperature then then in the fridge so if your avocado if you have a whole bunch of avocados like I generally do and you don't think you're gonna eat them soon and they're starting to get ripe just throw em in the fridge and they'll that will extend their life for at least a few days all right so we are almost done actually know what maybe I don't have the line mail throw a little bit there a touch of lemon juice in there and any citrus is really fine mm-hmm and of course you don't this is a very sort of traditional simple walk emolia but you don't have to be sort of real prescriptivists about it um you know like you go look at like Rick Bayless his books on unwelcome well they here's I think he's a book on that's just about guacamole and cocktails cocktails or salsa own cocktails maybe but he has a whole bunch of wacky guacamole variations in there like apples or radish different kinds of types of fruits and that is totally cool to do no one's gonna stop you all right now comes the fun part just mash it all together as for getting your guacamole to stay green first of all putting the seed in there as a lot of people claim doesn't make any difference this has been pretty thoroughly tested by quite a few people including myself the seed doesn't make a difference adding extra acid actually a small amount of acid will actually make it brown a little bit faster so lemon juice or lime juice doesn't really prevent it from browning it actually increases sprouting a little bit the real things that'll keep it from browning are keeping it cold because all those reactions that the oxidation that makes it turn brown it goes slower at colder temperatures so you can chill this molcajete if you want and serve it right out of here that's one thing you can do and then the other is if you're gonna store your avocado sorry you don't finish it all in one go which I think you should well you can do is take a plastic wrap and push it right down on the surface and kind of press out all of the air so it's exposure to air that's gonna cause it to a I start to turn color what I like to do sometimes with my welcome Olie a little queso fresco do just a little crumble of it right over the top a little bit of sit Chum sit good girl yeah come on you want some one doesn't people ask my head on feet I'm one of them usually he's not really that much of a food motivated dog so he doesn't always want it I'm also he broke his like a few years ago that's why he limps he going on and no my finger did not just touch his mouth cuz I know people are gonna say something about that I don't care I give my dog kisses anyway get some good chips [Applause] treat all right sure you eat this and I'm gonna go share some with my daughter who's watching finding Dory for the 89th time this quarantine [Music] damn good Mach moly is hard to beat I'm sorry good whack Amole I'm moly alright I will see you later

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 875,146

Rating: 4.9237528 out of 5

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Id: 7KjWFcIi4_8

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020

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