The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Mailbag Part 1

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

After putting out our first batch of episodes, we put out a call to our listeners — any questions? You sure did. Thanks to listeners from around the world who heeded our call, we bring you our first mailbag episode. Kenji and Deb debunk the 30-minute recipe, contemplate tiers of butter, go down the soup dumpling rabbit hole, and much more.

The Moth Podcast shares incredible true stories told live, and we've got a new episode all about food and memory that we think you'll really enjoy. And as I shared the last batch of fudge, the tears turned to smiles. Someone remarked, Nana's catering her own Shiva. How food brings us back to the people we love. The episode's available right now. Subscribe to the Moth Podcast to make sure you hear it. I always like a good mailbag episode.

You like a good mailbag episode? I love a good mailbag episode. I like listening to them, I like recording them. I feel like it's a win for everyone. I like it when the questions are kind of random and funny. So we'll see if we can find a little bit of everything. From PRX's Radiotopia, welcome to The Recipe with Kenji and Deb,

where we help you discover your own perfect recipes. Kenji is the author of The Food Lab and The Walk and a columnist for The New York Times. And Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen. She's also the author of three best-selling cookbooks. We're both professional home cooks, which means that we can and will make the same dish 57 times in our quest for the perfect recipe.

And on this show, we'll share our techniques and ingredients so that you can figure out what works best for you. This week, we're talking about your letters. That's what's coming up on the recipe, so stay with us. Out of like a few dozen, something funny that came up, there were different voicemails on one topic from different people in different places. Hi, Kenji. Hi, Deb. This is Jenna House from Ohio, though I am an Oregon native. I'm calling

because I just finished listening to your pancake episode and I have a burning question about reheating pancake leftovers, which is, have you ever tried toasting them as in putting the pancakes in a toaster and pushing the lever down. This is how I have only seen them reheat as a child and every time somebody like from outside comes into my home and watches me do this with pancakes or waffles which are even more delicious reheated this way. I'm like wow that's so's so genius, I've never seen this. But I really wanna know how it compares to other methods that you've tried reheating with. Hey, this is Matthew from Brooklyn.

Just wanted to let you both know we love your show, but you're sleeping on the best way to reheat a pancake, and that is in the toaster. You have to adjust, you know, your settings are gonna adjust, you know, your settings are going to be whatever you like. So we've been reheating pancakes in the toaster for years. Crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. Forget the microwave. Leave the pan in the drawer. Kenji, have you ever reheated your pancakes that way before? My first experience with this was going to a friend's house. This was

like a very fancy friend. It was very fancy kids who get fancy pancakes in the morning. They get blueberry pancakes, but the fancy pancakes they get are like our toaster pancakes, which I'd never seen before. That's the thing, right? You can just go and buy frozen pancakes in the... No idea. Like you can buy like Whole Foods frozen pancakes and stick them in the toaster just like you would I go waffles, which I had never seen before, but it kind of made sense I guess. And so after that I did go home and try it with homemade pancakes. It works fine.

They come out different from fresh, you know? Honestly, I feel that when you're reheating foods in general, usually the best way to reheat a food is via the method that it was cooked with in the first place. Like that's the best, as far as like, if you're going for quality of a flavor goes. And so like a pancake, I find it's easiest to reheat it. Just like put a nonstick skillet

and just throw the pancake in there and just like heat it up on both sides and it comes out quick and easy. But if you're doing a bunch, I guess the toaster works out. They come out like a little drier and crunchier in my experience. But I don't know, have you tried it? I haven't tried it.

I don't have one of those upright toaster ovens. I don't think I have space for it in my Manhattan apartment, but we have one of those flat ones. But I love reheating things in the toaster. We have a convection oven toaster, one of those Breville ovens. So I feel like it's a really nice way

to restore the crisp on food. I feel like you can kind of blast it at high heat. You know, the pancake was already like a moderate toasty color and I would spit it back in the pan. I feel like it could go over, but I don't know. Maybe if I get a vertical toaster oven, I will see the light here. We often do have leftover pancakes as well,

so that's a good idea. I do love leftover pancakes. I actually love leftover pancakes if it's really good, like cold from the fridge, the way other people like cold pizza from the fridge. I feel like you like smear a little bit of like plain yogurt on or put on some sliced fruit. I think it's a really nice snack.

I cut mine into fingers and then use and then bring them as snacks for the kids after school. Like if they eat pancakes in the morning and don't finish them, they get little pancake fingers as after school snacks. It's a good kid's snack. I've actually brought them on airplanes before. Oh good, yeah.

It's a good airplane snack. Yeah. Yeah. Megan from California wanted to ask. Hi, this is Megan from California wanted to ask... Hi, this is Megan from California. I'm loving your show. I just listened to the tomato soup episode. One nostalgic tomato soup that keeps coming to mind is like a little bit less cream based,

but a tomato soup with almost like little pieces of rice in it. And I, it's like this nostalgia memory. And I tried to do it myself by grinding up rice in my Vitamix and then adding it to my tomato soup that I made. But of course, even though it looked like nothing, it like basically turned it into a tomato soup risotto, which my husband and I didn't hate, but it wasn't the desired effect. I basically turned it into a tomato soup risotto,

which my husband and I didn't hate, but it wasn't the desired effect. So anyway, that came to mind when I saw your episode, I thought, oh, I wonder if they'll mention anything like that, but I didn't hear it. But that's all right, but that's something that made me think of a recipe that I've recently made and keep up the great work. I'm loving your show.

Thank you, thank you, bye bye. I don't know about you when you did your last tomato soup recipe, but when I did my weeknight tomato soup recipe, for the last few years, I ran it as just a basic weeknight tomato soup, you would eat with grilled cheese. But as I worked on it for the last few years,

I've been using it as a foundation for any other kind of tomato soup I like. And I've made it as a tomato rice soup. I've also made a version which I love that I haven't shared yet, which is it uses some chorizo and then some potatoes and chickpeas and you can do some potatoes, bravas thing topping. It's really good.

But for that, you could just use leftover rice and reheat it in there, or you could maybe, you would definitely wanna amp up the liquid quite a bit. Yeah, I use mine as the base for like a quick and sort of like a cheaty like chicken tikka masala. Oh yeah, that would be really good. I love how you can change the flavor profile and just use the recipe. And I agree that for a tomato rice soup that the cream is not mandatory there.

She says she has this nostalgia memory about rice that's sort of semi ground up almost, you know, I think it's like it almost gets like a congee like texture, right? Where the rice grains like are a little bit smaller and almost it's almost like a porridge type texture. I think it's what you would call a what you would call a pap. I've never heard of it. I think a pap is like a soft food for like convalescence and people without teeth. And for me when I'm really tired and had a long day. Like the classic one would be like, like Papa El Parmador, you know? Like it's an Italian like tomato and bread soup,

where it's just like, has a kinda, it's not a soup texture, it's not like a custard, like a bread pudding texture, but it's just a bread and tomato mush, right? Like a porridge almost. That's a pap. So I'm gonna bring in something that's not related to soup, but as soon as she mentioned having a tomato rice soup, I was thinking of rice stuffed tomatoes, which are a summer dish

that I love so much. And you take peak season tomatoes and you cut the core out, you kind of chop up all the inside, you run it through a food mill, you basically make a basic sauce with it and then you start with some onion and garlic. I usually use a risotto, a short grain starchy rice, and you start cooking it on the stove and then you finish it inside the tomatoes. And then what, you roast it in the tomatoes? Like directly in the tomatoes?

Then you bake it inside the tomatoes and it cooks the rest of the way. But what I love is it's just the cleanest tomato rice flavor. I do put some Parmesan breadcrumbs on top, but you really don't even need to. It's just the peak tomato, the rice cooked really soft. It gets really plump in there and it's just,

it's so good with summer tomatoes. Could you add burrata to it, do you think? You could add burrata to it, but I'm telling you, it's a gorgeous thing that doesn't need burrata. And when it's 99 degrees outside, it's really nice to have it taste kind of unheavy while still being a cooked food. That sounds really- It's so good.

You should make it. I feel like if you're craving that flavor profile, you will also get it from there. If I'm going with tomato and rice, it's pretty like 90% of the time, if I'm combining tomato and rice, it's gonna be in the form of like Chinese scrambled eggs with tomatoes on a bowl of rice.

So our next call is from Aaron, who has another comment about tomato soup. Hello Kenji and Deb, I just listened to your podcast about tomato soup. Frying in butter, yes. You make tomato soup dumplings and then you fry them up like a pot sticker. So you have the tomato soup, you're frying it in butter,

you get the texture outside of the fried dumpling skin. Even if you wanna go crazy, you can top it with some cheese at the end and grill it. So yeah, I think you could do it. All right, let me know. Yeah, all right. So it's not clear to me whether Aaron actually made these or whether this is just some crazy idea he has. But the idea of taking like a liquid and putting it inside a dumpling, I think, is a great one. So clearly it's, there's precedence right for that in China with soup dumplings. And there are a form of soup dumplings you find in Shanghai, Shengzhen Bao. And so you could definitely do something like that. If you take like a

dumpling wrapper, you make like a tomato soup, I would say you would add a little bit of gelatin to it so that you could set it into like a jello mold almost, you know, and then cut out like a cube of that and put it inside a dumpling wrapper, seal it, boil it, fry it, and then it will liquefy inside. and then you would get a liquid tomato soup dumpling. I think it's a good idea. I think some chef should do that at a restaurant where they have like, you know, where they can pay someone to do all that labor and serve it as a bar snack. I've always thought the gelatin portion of the soup dumpling is to me the most brilliant

part. This idea of like, you know, how how are you gonna fill a dumpling with soup? Well, you're gonna, when it's cold, the gelatin is set, and as you heat it up, it's liquid, and it's just this brilliant way to. But I'm like, it's not that much work, because that's somebody who's never made them, and it probably never will,

because why would I when I can get such good ones? Well, it's really not that much. No, I mean, I used to work at a restaurant where we made liquid soup dumplings of various kinds. Like there was always like some kind of liquid soup dumpling is one of those restaurants, you know? And it's not that much work if you're doing it in bulk. You know, you get a sheet tray, right?

And so you make your soup, you add your gelatin, you get a sheet tray, you grease it a little bit and you put some parchment in it and then you pour the soup in until it's about a half inch thick. Then you chill that whole thing and then you can just like run a knife through it and cut it into little cubes, you know?

And so then you have all these little cubes of like solidified soup that then you can then sort of in this assembly line style wrap them into dumpling wrappers. It's really not that much work. It's about as much work as making a normal dumpling, I guess. I think it's a good idea. I think you should do it and report back on how it tastes.

I think it would taste good. I would eat it for sure and find a server. The one thing you have to be careful about with soup dumplings like that is that there's always at least one person, like you would give them, you would tell them, hey, like, put this thing in your mouth whole and just bite it. There's always someone who would try and like bite it

in half and then they get a soup explosion all over their shirt. Yeah, I'm not very good at eating them. Are you good at eating them neatly? Cause I make a huge mess. Well, the Chinese style ones, yes. Well, it's my daughter's, one of my daughter's favorite foods that we go out and eat them a lot so we have a bit of practice but um I don't think there's like a dainty way to eat them right?

They're probably no but I'm certainly not a dainty eater. I'm usually doing it with like the chopstick and then the large soup spoon to kind of collect it. Yeah and then you like kind of nibble a hole and suck. Yeah but you're also trying, I'm always trying to put a little bit of the sauce in there too. Oh the vinegar? Yeah there's any kind I'm always trying Yeah, but you're also trying, I'm always trying to put a little bit of the sauce in there too. Oh, the vinegar? Yeah, if there's any kind, I'm always trying to, so you're trying to open it, but not empty it, and then put the stuff, it's usually on my chin.

It's a production, it's a production. It's usually on my chin, but it's so good. I have been going to M Shanghai and Williamsburg for like 23 years. I have tried soup dumplings from everywhere. They are to me the best by miles. When I lived in New York, we used to go, we did a taste test of like, I think in Manhattan,

the best ones were at Shanghai Cafe on Mott Street. I don't think M Shanghai is famous for these. It's just like what my friends and I always ordered there, but I think they're perfect. I've had them so many places and they're perfect there every time. I also always get the vegetable wontons and the peanut sauce, which are so good. All right, we'll go there next time.

That and a beer is the perfect meal for me. See you later, I'm going to get dinner. Coming up after the break on the recipe, we have more of your letters and voicemails. Welcome back to The Recipe with Deb and Kenji. Hey guys, I'm Kurt Peterson. I was thinking about baking stuff and I was thinking, I wonder if the taste difference of Kerrygold butter would actually make a difference when you bake. I can definitely taste it when I just put it on something,

but that might be kind of interesting, like if you did a blind taste test, could you tell? Love the podcast, guys. Hope you do a book eventually someday too with them all, and cheers, thank you. Kenji, I feel like you've done some research on this. Tell us, walk us through your research. Yeah.

So a number of years ago, this was just before the pandemic, actually. Like I, um, I did a major taste test. So I got the folks at Tartine bakery, a wonderful bakery in San Francisco. I got the folks at Tartine to bake a bunch of things. So including shortbread cookies, brioche and laminated pastries. So three different uses of butter, three different types of pastries that are heavily buttered. And I had to make them out of three different types of butter. So there was a European style high butterfat butter.

So something like with 83% butterfat, which is sort of like what a lot of pastry chefs would consider sort of the gold standard for pastry butter. I had to make it with a standard American butter, a standard American butter at 81%. And then I also had to make it with a fancy sort of cultured local butter that was also high in butterfat, 83%, to see if you could taste the difference

between a cultured butter and a plain butter. So they didn't know what butters they were getting. However, obviously they noticed differences when they were handling them. The bakers said that the two that were higher in fat are much easier to handle. You know, they roll out more smoothly, they're easier to do,

especially for things like laminated pastries. In the actual taste tests, there was actually surprisingly little difference that tasters could taste in most of the applications. Laminated pastries came out a little bit puffier with the better butter, with the higher fat butter. So the ones with the higher amount of water were a little bit sort of denser and a little bit greasier, but very slightly.

It wasn't like a major thing. So what I found in my tasting, my testing basically is that if you're going to be doing laminated pastry and you are having trouble with American style butters, you know, a European style butter is going to be easier to handle. It's going to be more malleable. As far as the actual flavor of everything at the end goes, you can do fine with American butter with lower fat butter, but it will make a slight difference if you use the fattier stuff.

Deb, you tell me about your experience, because I'm not a baker, I'm doing this based like, it's all on, I'm just reporting data that I collected. So you have actual experience with all this, so you tell me. Well, I would definitely agree with that. I haven't done a lot of lemonade pastries, but I do know how the butter works.

And the truth is that when you have something like a higher butter fat, a European style butter out at room temperature, it's gonna feel more like clay. Not dry to the touch, but it's not mushy. American style butter at room temperature or even a little warmer if it's gone a little further, it feels wetter and that's just the higher water content. So it makes sense that when you're trying

to make a malleable pastry, that it'll show up. That said, I bake with American butter 90% of the time, maybe even 98% of the time. I'm really only gonna use the higher butter fat butter when it is a very butter-centric dish and you're gonna taste it. As soon as there's two other flavors in there, even one other, I very rarely can tell the difference.

I also like to just develop recipes with American style butter, because I want to assume that's what everybody's using at home. And I want the recipes to work for them. If I'm using a fancier butter, I'm gonna have a different result, different kind of cookie spread,

different kind of cake richness. Do you keep different types of butter at home? I do. So I'm a big fan of, this is a big, this is like a good pantry shopping philosophy, but I'm a very big fan of having two levels of ingredients at home. I really like to have a very good, a favorite, beloved, you know, imported salted butter that we would use for toast or something where you're going to really taste it. And then I use like a workhorse every day, you know,

sticks of butter in a box for baking. We use spreadable, the Lando Lake spreadable, you know, the butter and oil blend. Oh my goodness. Is that a nostalgia thing for you? It's partly nostalgia, yeah. So like for me, toast is like, my favorite toast is shokupan, like Japanese, like thick sliced shokupan.

You know, like three quarter inch thick sliced shokupan, toasted golden brown with like Lando Lakes or you know, country crock, like Landa lakes or, you know, country crock, like spreadable spreadable butter blend stuff that is like slightly salty, but like spread straight out of the fridge and kind of melts and turns a little bit greasy. That's what I would have at my grandmother's house. And so I like it now. It's the margarine component in there. Yeah. I have this one French butter that I always buy. I love it so much. And we use that for

buttering toast and we use that for just any place where it's going to really show up. I don't use it for baking. There's only a couple like short breads I make where I really use. I'm going to say it wrong, but it's Isigny Saint-Maire. I love their butter so much. It's so well packaged too. I-S-I-G-N-Y.

Isigny. Yeah, Isigny Saint-Maire. Five years of French class. That's from Brittany, right? I believe that's Brittany. It's from Brittany, it's very good. And it's also just about what's available, but I can get it through my grocery delivery,

and I love the salt. I feel like the salt level is just right. It's not too salty. And the salt is in like, it's in little distinct crystals in that one, right? Like you get little pockets. I don't get the one with the salt crystals, actually. I don't like the interruption.

If I want that texture, I'll put it on top. But I did when we were in France, when we were in Paris in February, I brought some back with the salt crystals because I hadn't seen it here. But I actually just prefer the even saltiness. So that's the spreading butter, although it takes a couple minutes to warm up.

I usually just don't have time to wait for it to get to warm. If you put it on the toast and walk away for 30 seconds, it will be perfectly spreadable. The time that you're gonna have to take to get the cup of milk. You cut off a little pat, put it on your warm toast, walk away, and then the heat from the toast softens it

so that then you come back and spread it. Yes. Oh. Yes. Oh. And if you're really in a rush, if you have two pieces of toast, you can go put it together with the butter in the middle and walk away, you know, go get like slice your apple.

So you pre warm your butter with the toast before you spread it. That's genius. Thank you. I've never thought about this, okay. Buttering toast guys, it's gonna be my new thing. So I just wrote this article about how you should salt your scrambled eggs like 15 minutes

before you cook them, you know? Interesting. If you want them to be like the moistest and most, if you're making toast and eggs, like you come to the kitchen, get your eggs into a bowl, beat them with some salt, then set them aside while you make your toast, right? And then by the time you're toasting, your coffee's done,

then you put your eggs in the pan and you scramble them. But this workflow does not leave time for allowing butter to soften on the toast. So now I'm not sure what to do. No, you just eat the first two slices, you have a couple of sips of coffee, the first two bites of egg, and the butter is ready. The toast is warm.

Okay, all right, all right. It's got to you. And then you can gorgeously spread it all the way. Do the pre-warming like table side, the butter's at their table side. Well, you put the pad on the toast. Yeah, you can sit there with like a piece of toast with a giant pad of butter just sitting in the middle

and everyone's thinking like, what is that person doing with a giant pad of butter in the middle of their toast? And then you reveal your secret after you- They're living brilliantly is what they're doing. They're having the best toast. How much, are we doing a butter toast episode? I feel like we have a butter toast episode.

We should have a butter toast episode. We could riff on this for 45 minutes. I was gonna mention that I also do the tiers of shopping of grocery quality with things like olive oil too. I have a big can of a decent but workaday olive oil that I might use to roast vegetables or fry things. And then I always like a nice delicate, more fresh grassy fruity olive oil that you might use to drizzle

either for a salad dressing or to drizzle over a pizza when you're finished. So I'm not gonna use that really fancy stuff to fry an egg. It won't be good. It'll probably get bitter. And I'm not gonna use, and if I have something nicer, I'd rather use the nicer stuff to finish and the cheaper stuff for roasting.

I actually do three tiers of olive oil at home. Cause I got like my Costco, right? Like the, which is pretty good, right? The Costco Kirkland brand stuff. And that's my sort of, if I'm going to be sauteing something or I'm going to make a salad dressing, just like my go-to. And then I'll have like a nicer one. So it might be something from like California olive ranch

or like Sitka Hills or something, you know, like sort of a nicer one, but still one that's generally widely available. That's going to be sort of my fancier one, you know, my finishing soups or dipping stuff in. And then I usually also have like several bottles that, like when I travel, I like to, if I go to a country that has olive oil,

or if I go to like that, but you know, and I, it's like, I go to Bainbridge Island here, across the Sound here, and there's an olive oil shop, and they often have like really nice fancy olive oils. And so, yeah, so I have like a third tier of like the sort of, the olive oils that have like, not just olive oils. And so, yeah, so I have like a third tier of like the sort of the olive oils that have like a not just good flavor,

but also like a connection to a, like a nostalgic moment, olive oil, you know? You know, if you were getting your kitchen started for the first time, I say buy the workhorse one. And then when you're traveling and you're at some beautiful wine shop or the vineyard makes their own, you know, olive oil too, definitely buy it.

The only thing to remember is to use that one. It's gonna go rancid pretty quickly, so you wanna use it in a few months. I like to make it known to my friends, and I can make it known publicly right now, by the way. If you're ever gonna get me a birthday gift or Christmas gift, a bottle of olive oil, from someplace you've been, perfect gift for me.

Hi, my name is Jack Depew. I do not have an Instagram, but what I would really be interested in hearing is Kenji and Deb's takes on doing like weeknight meals. I'm always looking for something either store bought or something, just more tools to like make dinner easier at home. Great. Thanks. How's the show? So, you know, these questions I always find a little bit difficult because I don't know

that there's a one size fits all answer because it really depends on the kinds of food you like to make, the kinds of cooking you like to do, the kinds of tools you like. So what I would really maybe suggest is find a couple of tools that you really like to use. So whether it's like a Dutch oven or a wok or something like that, you know, for a tool that's very versatile, a skillet, a Dutch oven, a wok, maybe a sheet tray, right? And sort of try and master that tool to begin with. So like go through like a series of sheet tray dinners,

right, there's a million recipes for sheet trays dinners. All you need is one sheet tray to do them in an oven. You'll get an idea of how these things work. And once you get an idea of how a specific technique works, then it becomes a lot easier, I think, to sort of make it work into your workflow so you become much more efficient at doing it and you also sort of become more creative so you can start doing your own recipes. So what I would suggest is really if you really want to sort of free yourself in the kitchen or

become more efficient in the kitchen, focus on working on sort of one technique at a time and really sort of or one or two maybe to keep things interesting, but really master that so that it becomes second nature to you. So there's two things that take people time. One of them is preparing ingredients, some knife skills, chopping an onion, just getting everything to the point where even a 30 minute recipe, you know, when it says, when a recipe says it's 30 minutes, it's already, it's not accounting for the time that it's going to take you

to measure out and prep all the ingredients to the state that they are listed in the ingredients list. So for your recipe says 30 minutes, but it lists one chopped onion, it's not counting the time that it takes you to chop that onion. And this is because people take vastly different amounts, bit different amount of time to chop onions.

So an onion takes gonna, it's gonna take about the same amount of time to cook, no matter who cooks it, but it's gonna take a very different amount of time to chop. And so that's why recipes often don't, or always don't list the prep time for ingredients. But, so I would say if you want to make your weeknight cooking faster, practicing your knife skills and really sort of getting more efficient at that is going to be a huge time saver.

And then really focusing on individual techniques, say, you know, sauteing or braising or making a soup or doing a sheet pan dinner, something like that, where you really focus on individual techniques, say, you know, sauteing or braising or making a soup or doing a sheet pan dinner, something like that, where you really focus on one tool, one technique, and get it down pat so that you don't have to think about it very much and so that you can really just focus on the fun parts of cooking, which are, you know, the flavors and enjoying the aromas and experiences and visuals and all those things that I think make cooking fun,

rather than sort of worrying whether you've preheated the pan properly or not, like that stuff becomes second nature if you do it enough. I really love that, especially starting with a sheet pan. Because then you can buy this one thing and just use it again and again. You can make anything from sheet pan fajitas to sheet pan soup. For me, a lot of it, I always kind of, I don't know, I'm always putting on the therapist hat here, but I'm like, well, okay, so what's going on?

What are the mental blocks with making weeknight dinner? Like, is it just that you hate making a sauce? Like, you know, do you want to buy some store-bought sauces that might make that a little easier? Like, is it making a salad dress? Like, what are the hurdles? Do you hate chopping vegetables? Okay, does your grocery store sell carrots and onions pre-chopped? That kind of thing.

Like, so it's about like where, tell me where the weeknight cooking hurt you, and we can work backwards from there. When I was a cook at a fraternity house, and I had about two hours to cook dinner for 45 people every night, I used bags of frozen, pre-chopped onions. I either did that or I would run onions through the chopping disc of a food processor. Yeah. But yeah, there's no shame in using those shortcuts if time is a constriction. Yeah, figure out the part that you hate

and like work backwards from there because that's why I always get a little stuck when people talk about like a 30 minute meal or a 20 minute meal. I'm like, I don't know that it's always the time, it's the reward of it or it's the way the time is spent. It could be an hour meal, but maybe it's hands off. You could be braising meat, it could be three hours,

but it could be very easy, where you just threw a chuck roast and a can of tomatoes and a handful of garlic in, and you came up with something amazing. So I think it really has to do with like, what are the parts that you hate? Be honest about it, and don't make yourself do it. Like life is short, don't do the things you hate.

I would say another approach to weeknight meals, you don't have to focus on a single technique, you can also focus on like a single cuisine, so a certain flavor profile that you're really into. Say you want to explore Thai food or Southern Indian food, whatever it is, you know, get yourself a couple of books and really dive in to a single cuisine and learn all the flavors and techniques involved in that cuisine. And that can become sort of your go-to thing that you practice and get good at.

That's great for groceries too, because maybe you're just, you know, you're kind of tightening up your your grocery list like you know oh you're doing tag cooking okay so I usually have cilantro and ginger and chilies around but you may not have to also have stuffed frizziti that week which would be nice. Another thing that I like to do is this is something that I find especially good in the winter is if you make like one big thing and usually it's like a big protein so like I might like slow roast a pork shoulder or I might like slow roast a chuck roast or I might roast a chicken you know so so you have like a bunch of one single protein and then you kind of recombine that into different meals throughout the week and you know there's a number of resources for that I think you know I have like a video series on YouTube where I show you here's how you roast a pork

shoulder now here's like different things you can do now that you have that pork shoulder I know Sirius Eats has a number of recipe collections that are sort of like that as well here's like different things you can do now that you have that pork shoulder. I know Siri Seats has a number of recipe collections that are sort of like that as well. Here's what you do with like all this pulled roast chicken meat. In fact, like almost every site is going to have what you can do with the rotisserie chicken. So if you can roast yourself a chicken, then you're going to have like chicken meat, pulled chicken meat that you can use in any number of meals. And there's going to be like a zillion recipes online you can find for stuff like that. I don't know.

Do you have resources like that on Smitten Kitchen, Deb? I don't think on that level of organizing on Smitten Kitchen. But pretty much anytime I'm calling for roast chicken, you could swap into rotisserie chicken. And that's why the comments are so helpful because somebody's always talked about how they've worked it in. Depending on the size of your family, like if it's just you and somebody else, it may not be worth it. But one of the best tips I've gotten over the years

is actually if you're going to roast one chicken, you might as well roast two. Now this is like, you know, if you've got four people in your family, but you might be, so you eat the chicken one night, and then you can use the other one for whatever else. Maybe you make chicken soup, like you're, just run the oven once. Yeah, I always say if you're gonna roast two chickens, you might as well roast four.

Okay, four. How hungry are those kids, Kenji? So, but that's not great for me personally, because I'm not a huge fan of leftovers. I get bored and restless, but I'm not normal with my cooking And so I think it's important to know that as recipe developers We may not have like I feel like my cooking at home doesn't always reflect what other people are doing because I'm either working On a specific recipe or I'm more restless about stuff

I also have more time to fuss around with different flavors where I might do a completely huge Indian meal one day and a completely huge Thai meal the next, and I can do that kind of thing. But I wouldn't recommend that to anyone else. I generally prefer not to just sort of reheat things and reserve them exactly the same way they were. I like to transform them somehow. And so I always find that to be pretty fun

for me at least, I don't know. I know not everyone's into that kind of stuff. Is that how you turn your tomato soup into Berria tacos? Grilled tomato tacos. Sure, yeah. You talk to little ones. That sounds like a good idea. You are very creative with it.

But between pot stickers, stir fries, sheet pans, soups, you can really, yeah, once you start with a protein, you can do a lot with it. And if you're vegetarian, it might start with you cook a big pot of chickpeas or your favorite bean, like pick one bean to cook that week. And then you've got everything from the bean broth. Oh, yeah, pot of beans. That's bean broth. You've got like everything else that you can use.

Bean salads, bean soups. Yeah. I could live off beans. I would be happy. Thank you for joining us. If you liked what you hear and you want to find out more about the show or if you have suggestions for upcoming episodes, you can visit us at TheRecipePodcast.com or follow us on Instagram at Kenji and Deb and shoot us a message. And we now have a phone number where you can call us. It's 202-709-7607 and you can leave us a voicemail. The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Jay Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Perry Gregory, and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions.

Edwin Ochoa is the project manager. The executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Mardovich. And Yuri Lasordo is director of network operations. Cher Delva, Apu Gotay, Emmanuel Johnson, and Mike Russo handle our social media. Thanks for listening. The recipe with Kenji and Deb is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent creator-owned listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm. supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at RadioTopia.fm.