The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Meatloaf

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

Kenji and Deb have history with meatloaf that goes way, way back, to summer camp in the 80s. It was not love at first taste, but Deb has a moment of clarity and achieves meatloaf enlightenment. Kenji and Deb chew over “meat batter”, how many Meat Loaf references in one podcast episode constitutes audio malpractice, and if parents who send their teenage children to the store for one ingredient are monsters.  Recipes Mentioned: Deb’s Turkey Meatloaf for Skeptics (from Smitten Kitchen Keepers)  Kenji’s Classic Meatloaf (excerpted from The Food Lab, courtesy of Serious Eats)

I'm excited to tell you that one of our favorite Radiotopia siblings, Ear Hustle, is back with a new season. Ear Hustle is a show about life inside prison, but it's not your typical prison podcast. Co-hosts Nigel Poore and Erlon Woods have recently been spending time at four California prisons and have a season's worth of funny, surprising, and unforgettable stories to share. In a recent episode, they were able to visit a groundbreaking prison hospice, where they spoke to men who are grappling with the reality of dying inside prison. Also coming up this season are stories about the objects people keep inside their prison cells, complicated mom-daughter relationships in prison, and incarcerated people who wonder whether they've become too comfortable behind bars.

and incarcerated people who wonder whether they've become too comfortable behind bars. Stories about life on the inside told by those who live it. Find Ear Hustle wherever you get your podcasts. So my very serious question is, how many meatloaf music references could I make before you guys cut off my mic stream and my video screen and take my name off this podcast? I don't know why, but growing up at summer camp, we listened to an absolutely reprehensible amount of Meatloaf. Some of my earliest Meatloaf memories were also from summer camp. Okay, so it wasn't like a completely unusual thing.

I didn't know why we were listening to this. Shouldn't we have been listening to Madonna? It was the 80s. Do you have a favorite Meatloaf song? I mean, Paradise by the Dashboard Light. My dad would do that on karaoke. We had a karaoke machine growing up and we would do that. Yeah.

All eight minutes and 20 seconds. Because I did that at a birthday party last year. All eight minutes and 27 seconds of it. And I did not once need to read the words from the screen. And I think I scared my friends a little bit. Paradise by the Dashboard Lights is one of those karaoke songs that has a partner involved, right? There's like the blue text and the red text. I brought one person in at one point, one of my best friends. To help you with the male vocals or the female vocals, were you on Meatloaf the whole time? I think on that, I was on the female, but then I

went back to the Meatloaf part. There was a little bit of wine involved, but I did not miss a beat. Including the sports announcer. Including the sports announcer. Apparently Meatloaf was a lifelong Yankees fan. Plus one, I guess. Or however you see it. So I'm going to see how many Meatloaf music references I can sneak in.

From PRX's Radiotopia, this is 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, and 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 recipe 57 times in our quest for the perfect version. And on this show, we're going to share our techniques and ingredients so that you can figure out what works best for you. This week, we're talking about meatloaf. That's next on The Recipe, so stick around. I have always felt fundamentally that meatloaf has a PR problem. I feel like it's just a loaf of meat. Like nothing about that makes my heart or stomach palpitate with hunger. It does not sound

like something you would eat by choice, but I didn't grow up eating meatloaf. It wasn't a thing that we had on the table. And it wasn't unlike something that I haven't grown up with that I was very curious about as an adult. I was deeply uncurious about it as an adult. And it actually took a reader on my side. And I went all the way back in the archives to find this comment last night because I'm weird and I love being able to read final comments. But basically, it was 2009. And I shared this recipe that was adapted from an old, I think it was a gourmet recipe for these baked chicken meatballs. They've got bits of pancetta and then there's a little bit of Parmesan and parsley. And it's almost like an Italian-ish chicken meatloaf. And I had said that I found it really interesting that

I really liked meatballs, even though I'm really not into meatloaf. And someone's, Deb, meatloaf is just a giant meatball. I thought I didn't like meatloaf either. And I was like, really? And that was just like light bulbs going on. So how about you, Kenji? How did you come to meatloaf in your life? Did you grow up with it? We definitely had meatloaf like at the school cafeteria.

I think my fondest memories of meatloaf are from summer camp. On meatloaf days, we actually had a very good cook at our summer camp. We would listen to meatloaf and then go eat meatloaf. His name was Glenn. He was a wonderful cook, but yeah, my, my memories of meatloaf are from summer camp. Mainly we had it at home occasionally, you know, like sometimes we would get TV dinners that would, that you could get with like sliced meatloaf in them. Yeah. I know you were an ingredient family, so you probably did not have TV dinners growing up, but we had TV dinners. I know, they really ruined everything. As a once a month treat, TV dinners. And those would either come with meatloaf or with Salisbury steak, which is essentially another shape of meatloaf.

It's another point on the ball-to-loaf spectrum. The ball-to-loaf spectrum. So it didn't sound appealing to me and I didn't really understand why you would eat it, but I love meatballs. And so for me, so that was probably like 2009. And then when I wrote my first cookbook, when it came out in 2012, I did indeed have a meatloaf recipe in there, but I was still a little bit of a meatloaf skeptic. And I called them meat loaves and they were really just large meatballs. So they're basically just individual meatloaves. And for some reason, having them round, even just like bigger than a regular meatball size, made it okay for me. Was this before baking meatloaves in like a muffin tin

craze happened or around the same time? It's interesting because in that same comment section from 2009, I saw a lot of comments around that time for a brand muffin recipe of mine that was not very well photographed at the time, which was stuff you could get away with on a blog in 2009. And there were a lot of references to, I guess, a Rachel Ray meatloaf muffin. And maybe some people had mistaken what it was based on the photo. So yeah, I think based on that, those comments, I read that yes, meatloaf muffins were a thing. There's this great Weird History food channel on YouTube, and they had a great episode on meatloaf. So I want to give credit to that because that was the jumping off point. Oh, what was the weirdest, most interesting bit of meatloaf. So I want to give credit to that because that was the jumping off point. Oh, what was the weirdest, most interesting bit of meatloaf history? The weirdest meatloaves are definitely coming out of either Roman era where they're like also like

doing like stuffed mice dishes or the horrific things Americans did to food in the like 50s and 60s, I'd say. Maybe the 70s. Oh, I had a cookbook called, it's called 365 Days of Hamburger. Oh, yes. I read about that book. Oh yeah. I had this book at home. I should have dug it out. But yeah, that one has quite a bunch of meatloaf recipes in there, including one, there was one that included bananas. Wow. It was like a layer of bananas at the top top or there's some kind of chopped bananas inside it I saw a version that was like

little scoops like meatloaf baked into peach halves yum I saw one that was entirely baked around a head of cauliflower

so like you slice into it and you get that cauliflower and I don't know about you Kenji and your family but we have a

don't yuck my yum rule at the table so I'm gonna try to hold on to that for this podcast. But I just want you to know that right now it's a struggle. So it's a whole head of cauliflower wrapped in ground meat. Yeah. It's like a scotch egg, but with a head of cauliflower instead of a boiled egg. It's an even less ass for a scotch egg.

I was going to say that apparently the very first idea of mixing meat with tenderizing fillings traces back to the 4th or 5th century AD. There's this Roman cookbook. I'm going to say it wrong. Apicus? A-P-I-C-I? Apicius. Apicius. Apicius. My goodness, Dad, you should read those words. Apicius. And there's a recipe for patties made of chopped meat, bread, and wine. But I think it doesn't necessarily show up in the U.S. till later. I would say there's scrapple, which is a very early iteration of it, but it's a little, it's quite different. But what it has in common

is that it's got this ground meat and a binder. I'm pretty sure that in the U.S., at least meatloaf comes mainly from the Pennsylvania Dutch. It was like a later take on Hamburg steaks. I think that makes sense. Like German influence. Yes, it was Kruppel, I think. It's like an early meatloaf. There were certain things that happened over the years. I loved this little tidbit. This guy, Karl Dres, who also invented the bicycle, invented the meat grinder in 1840s.

There were other meat grinding apparatus that existed in the world, but he had the one that home cooks could use. It was portable and small and easy to get. So now you don't have to go to a butcher to pulverize meat and you have people at home doing terrific or horrific things with ground meat whenever they want. And so in the 1870s, you have the first meatloaves start to pop up all over the country. But back then it was considered breakfast or a snack. Okay. I had yours cold for breakfast this morning. Okay. So you're totally down with this. And then of course you have like industrial farming. And so you have a lot more meat in the 20th century. And then you've got the great depression in 1929 where of all these people out of work and you need to stretch meat. You need to stretch what small amounts. And that's, I mean, meatloaf was just made for this moment. Like it was just made.

You can bulk it up with grains and breads and oats and like whatever you want to stretch it with. Canned soup to make your meatloaf serve your family for very little money. And meatloaf is one of the situations where you say you're like bulking it up, you're stretching the meat out, but really it's one of these foods where the solution for the price issue, by bulking it up like this, we actually

made the food into something better anyway. You don't want a meatloaf that's made all out of meat because it ends up like a giant hamburger patty, right? It ends up drier, it ends up tougher, you can't get the seasonings in there. So meatloaf, a lot of the reason why we add things like breadcrumbs and eggs and dairy and chopped vegetables is to prevent the meat from binding to itself and getting that sort of like, you know, springy or sausage-like texture, like tougher texture. Like meatloaf should be super tender, right? But it does, I mean, it can, but you know, something like oats or cornmeal or something like this could definitely like make it drier, too. So like there's a little bit of like back and forth you need to play with because some of these I feel like meatloaf has a reputation like when it's bad of being dry.

And I think that's like due to like the kind of dry stuff used to bulk it up. I also found it really funny to read like food brands unsurprisingly wanted a piece of this meatloaf love. And so you started having recipes showing up in packaging labels, like your canister of oats had a meatloaf recipe on it, which probably explains why we often think of meatloaf having oats in it. It's not uncommon. You have the canned soup. They wanted a piece of the meatloaf, but it was probably unsurprisingly Heinz ketchup that won the meatloaf label wars by convincing people that it was the perfect glaze, sweet, sour glaze for your meatloaf label wars by convincing people that it was the perfect glaze, sweet sour glaze for your meatloaf. And that stays still today. Talk to me about your meatloaf. So I made your meatloaf yesterday. This is your meatloaf for skeptics, which is in your new book, Smitten Kitchen Keepers.

So can you tell me about that recipe? So I had mentioned that I was just a little skeptical about meatloaf, mostly because I didn't grow up with it. And unlike other things that I've been curious about that I didn't grow up with, I wasn't very curious about it. But I had done that meatloaves recipe, which is very much a classic meatloaf, but just in rounds in my first book. And with this, I had an assistant who was really nudging me. She's like, you need to do a turkey meatloaf recipe.

I'm like, but why? This is my bias. I'm making fun of myself. Like, I didn't think people ate ground turkey by choice. They ate it because it was like the better option for the earth and there's many good reasons to eat it. But I didn't think people were like, yay, turkey meatloaf. You take, I think, a kind of less popular ground meat and then you take a less popular thing like meatloaf and you put it together and I was struggling. But it was the pandemic. We were home cooking 4,700 meals a week. And I started playing

around with it. And I really liked the way it came out. And that's really directly led to the one in the book. And I basically use what I consider a tender meatball mix. Pretty simple. I always start by pulverizing the vegetables. I like to do it in the food processor, just like you, because I don't like those chunks of vegetables in mine. That's just my thing. You do saute it. But after that, it's a pretty straightforward meatball. I bake it free form because I want to get like the most, I don't know, caramelization on it, even if you don't get the nice square shape. And then I do a fake barbecue sauce glaze. Your glaze is ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, molasses, and hot sauce. Exactly.

And cider vinegar, cider vinegar. Yeah. So it gives you like, it's like the base of the barbecue flavor minus the smoke or like meat drippings. So you call for Penco and you call for chicken broth, no dairy though, which is different from mine. The one thing you do in yours, which is saute the vegetables separately. And that's something that like always bugs me with meatloaf the fact that like when i was working on the recipe for my book i tested a lot with you can just fold raw vegetables in here of course you can just fold raw vegetables in here but then if you try and fold raw vegetables into meatloaf they just don't cook through because the meat is done at 165 whereas the vegetables need to cook

to 190 to soften and so when you just fold raw vegetables and they end up you end up with that kind of steamed onion flavor and like really chunky, crunchy bits. And so it just doesn't work. The one frustrating point to me is like meatloaf feels like it's this such an easy thing where you just mix everything together and bake it. But you do doing that sauteing step at the beginning actually is quite important. But anyhow, you, yeah, yours, you get your, you get most of your moisture from the breadcrumbs and the chicken broth. And so it has a really nice clean meat flavor. The thing I did was for the glaze, instead of adding a teaspoon of my favorite hot sauce, I added more like a tablespoon of my favorite hot sauce. And my favorite hot sauce is pretty hot.

What is it? Well, I have a lot of favorite hot sauces, but the one I used yesterday is called Perro Afortunado. It's a hot sauce from Lucky Dog, who are based out of the Bay Area. But I put it on and then I glazed the meatloaf and then I sliced it. And then my kids both cut off the most, like they're usually fine with spicy things. But for some reason, in the context of meatloaf, they're like, we don't want this. They both gave the meatloaf high ratings, but both of them cut off the glaze. But you hadn't fully followed the recipe.

I had not fully followed the recipe. No. How dare you? I tried to follow. I even pulled out like a measuring cup, which I usually don't. I pulled out measuring cups and measuring spoons specifically for your recipe, which I generally don't. I do use measuring cups and spoons, but that's because once I get it exactly right, I want it to be exactly that good next time. Or it's going to bother me, like why was it different? But I have issues. So that's, you're the normal cook here. One thing I noted was in your turkey meatloaf recipe, it's probably like 50% turkey and 50% like vegetables and breadcrumbs and stuff. Would you have done something different if you were

using, like with your recipe, if you were using ground beef or another kind of ground meat mixture, would you have done something different as far as your ratios or anything like that go? You know, in my first meatloaves recipe, which I said that was my first book, a lot of the stuff that went into the turkey meatloaf was stuff I had figured out working on the first one. And that one starts with two pounds of ground beef. So it's very classic. And I also do use the minced vegetables and I saute them again. And I found the same thing, which is just that it just tasted like vegetable mulch. And you really need to saute things in oil or fat so they can get sweet and caramelized tasting. Not truly dark, but like when you're doing a vegetable soup, if you don't want it to taste like boiled vegetables, you have to saute them first to get out the sweetness and draw that flavor.

I just mean for a straight up vegetable minestrone. If you just boil the vegetables, it tastes like boiled vegetables. So I think it was similar there. One thing I did, I do remember that I had switched over the years from calling for torn up bread to calling for panko breadcrumbs. And mostly because I just find that more and more people don't really have bread around or they don't have sliced bread, and everybody was asking me how much breadcrumbs to use. And so I'd rather point them to the very neutral, shredded breadcrumbs of panko, which are pretty accessible these days. To me, this points to one of the issues I come up with as a recipe developer a lot, which is that a lot of these dishes, so especially something like meatloaf,

the point of the dish is that it's an economical thing, right? And like the bread that you're using for it will be whatever bread you have leftover at home. If you have like a couple slices of leftover bread, you should be using that instead of going out and buying a container of panko breadcrumbs just to make this specific recipe, right? I completely agree. So you should be working with what you have at home, but that's not what's always going to happen. And so you have to like try and figure out these ways to balance like, okay, how can I impress on people? Like, okay, like you should make this the way it's written, but it's also kind of ridiculous to go and buy this one specific brand of bread

crumbs just to make this one specific meatloaf recipe when really meatloaf is a dish that, that should be using up like the scraps in your kitchen. It should be using up like the half carrot that you have in your fridge. And if you don't have half a carrot, then so what? I completely agree with you. And I struggle with that too, where I don't want to give people products that they have to buy

when you might just have a stale hamburger or hot dog roll, which you could also tear up. I've told people to do that. Tear up their breadcrumbs or every time you have an old baguette before it turns into concrete, shred it up, maybe freeze it. And then you've got breadcrumbs whenever you need it. I found this cool method that I, where did I see it? Maybe it was David Leibovitz. I think I saw

Jim Leahy do this, where when you have older stale bread, the best way to make breadcrumbs, you take it, you take your bread, you put it in a bowl, cover it with water until it's like completely soaked. Okay. And then you drain it out and you put it in a bowl, cover it with water until it's like completely soaked. Okay. And then you drain it out and you squeeze out the bread as much as you can and then just kind of shred it up while it's still kind of wet and put it on a sheet tray and then put it in a low oven and dry it out. So get it wet for soaking wet first and then dry it out. And it ends up making breadcrumbs that are sort of more uniform in size and easier to break down into sort of nicer, I don't know, flaky pieces. It works out a lot better than just trying to grind up the bread.

It's what I've ended up doing with like most of my bread when it starts to get stale. I just soak it in water and then I just leave it to dry. And it eventually works its way into breadcrumbs. That's a great tip. And I'm 100% going to do this. I love it. I've seen people talking about like reviving stale bread with water, but I haven't seen it just to make breadcrumbs because that's what I really need. Yeah. Breadcrumbs is when it's too far gone to revive with water. Kenji, I made your meatloaf last night for dinner. And I want to talk about that when we get back. You were able to get through it in one day. We're going to talk about that. We have a lot to talk about.

All right. Welcome back to The Recipe with Deb and Kenji. So I made your meatloaf last night and it took me three and a half hours. I'm just very slow when I follow a recipe for the first time. I'm just very slow. I'm sure if I made it again tonight, it would not take me three and a half hours. But just because I definitely did not start with three and a half hours before dinner, I would say I was a little crabby by the time I was done with it. Just a little grumpy. Dinner was really late, but meatloaf was perfect for dinner because we'd finally gotten some snow in New York the night before and we were really excited. It was like the perfect cozy thing.

It smelled amazing. So I went to make the glaze and I realized, and this is just, I don't know about you, but there are ingredients that I never run out of and I never ever run out of apple cider vinegar. And I was out of apple cider vinegar, like thatched. It was completely gone. I sent my very grumpy teenager to the store, which he did ultimately go. There was a lot of negotiating and some very, listen, he's a teenager. I mean, would you be happy if you were just cozied up after a long day? I would never send someone in my family to the store to get a single ingredient for one of my recipes.

Okay. So I should clarify that we live in a very busy neighborhood in New York and there's actually a store two blocks out and there's a store a single block away that has everything. And so we've just decided at some point when my son was able to commute to high school that he could also go to the corner if we ran out of bananas. Anyway, so my poor son had to go out for the apple cider vinegar so I could make the glaze correctly. And I have to say the glaze was my kids. Well, they liked the whole thing, but they loved the glaze. They loved it it they were pouring on the extra they loved how much it had and it was a huge hit like I said it took me forever but the meatloaf was fantastic it was perfectly seasoned it was really

delicious and I had to like hold us back from having seconds because I wanted to have enough leftovers for dinner tonight and even my daughter who's like incredibly picky was super into it so that is two for two, Kenji. I think my kids like your cooking more than me. Well, the thing about my meatloaf is, so this is another one of those recipes. I haven't made it since I wrote the book because it's so many recipes. I totally know that feeling. It's so many ingredients in there.

I think it's 20 ingredients before you even get to the glaze. No, I know. Which is excessive. Is this like the classic that we're going to be saying every week? This is like the stuff you made before you had kids versus the stuff you make after you have kids? It's not even that. It's more that I feel like when I wrote this meatloaf recipe, I was like, okay, I'm writing this chapter of my book that's about ground meat. And this is going to be the representative recipe of how tender ground meat mixtures work.

You know, how like meatloaves and meatballs and stuff work. And I want to be able to talk about every ingredient that you could potentially put into a meatloaf that's going to affect its texture in the end. So that's why it's obviously got the breadcrumbs, the classic ingredients, the breadcrumbs and the eggs, both of which sort of lighten and leaven a meatloaf. But I think mine also has gelatin in it. Two gelatin packets.

I found some gelatin in my cabinet that expired. And you always think you're not going to be that person, but it turns out when you just don't move, you have stuff that's really... It expired in 2016. So earlier in the day, I had gone back to the store for that. Oh, it would probably have been fine. I think I probably would have... If there were two left in the box, but there was only one left in the box, so I needed to get a second one anyway. I know. I didn't really think it would expire anyway, as long as it hadn't solidified.

It's made from a pig that expired in 2014. I made it from an expired pig. How could it expire twice? That would bring it back to life. So there was that. There was three anchovies in it, which is another non-traditional ingredient. Two teaspoons of soy sauce, if I remember. Now, it had half a teaspoon of Marmite in it in it. And that was for me where I drew the line. I did not want to buy Marmite. I did not want to own Marmite when I did not want to own Marmite. So I decided for half a teaspoon. And I did Google things you could put in instead of Marmite, like nutritional yeast, but I didn't have that either. So. So to be clear, Marmite is a brown spread from England that's made from, it's a yeast

extract. So it's fermented, right? Yeah. I think it's a by-product of brewer's yeast and it's high in amino acids and very sort of umami and salty tasting and people spread it on their toast. But I often call for it as a sort of little flavoring and coloring thing that you stick into soups and stews. Well, at least I used to when I was in my sort of umami bomb phase. I was thinking about adding half a teaspoon of beef bouillon base. I use those in bouillon jars. I was thinking about it, but I didn't see anyone mention it. Yeah, that would absolutely work because beef bouillon is largely made from yeast extract as well.

Yeah, it seems similar and especially the ones that are concentrated. So it's already a paste almost. All right. Well, next time I'll do that. But I'd already used a little bouillon for the broth, the half cup of broth. So it's got the marmite, the anchovy fillets, the soy sauce. After that, I think it's fairly traditional. The only thing that surprised me, and this is just, again, did not grow up eating it. I did not know that meatloaf sometimes had cheese in it. Now, I don't know if this is

like vestigial kosher, even though I did not grow up kosher, but I always joke about that when I'm like separately, like it just, it's not like my natural instinct to put cheese inside meat. But then I asked friends about it and they were 50-50. 50-50 were like really excited about the idea. They love the idea of cheese and meatloaf. So it really was just me who wasn't used to it. I don't know where I saw cheese first. I think I probably saw that like when I was working at Cook's Illustrated, cheese and meatloaf. And I don't know if that was like a thing that they had in one of the recipes or just something we were testing at the time.

It didn't taste like cheese. Like it didn't give any cheese flavor, but there was just a, there was a really good flavor. Everything is like binds more moisture into it. Like that's what the breadcrumbs and the gelatin and any moisture that comes out of the meat, it's stuck in there. Like it's trapped in like a little matrix. In the meatloaf matrix. This is definitely a song. It has to be one.

But the only other thing I did, probably not exactly to the letter of the recipe, was that I used a pork-beef-meatloaf mix. And I don't know what percentage it was of which, but otherwise I would have just bought... What does mine call for? It calls for one and a quarter pounds of beef and three quarters of a pound of pork. And I would have otherwise just bought one pound of each because that's how they're sold. But there was a meatloaf mix. It was probably more beef than pork anyway. It seemed, it looked to me more like beef, but the total flavor and everything was fantastic. It was

really good. I liked the way we were able to use the loaf shape. So for your meatloaf, we pack it into a loaf pan, chill it for a bit. I actually put it outside on the terrace, like stuck it in the snow. I've got a nice Instagram of that for you. Because my fridge is bursting at the seams right now. Yeah. For my mom's house, it was the hallway in her apartment building. Was it really cold? Oh yeah, yeah. The hallway has windows. And so the hallway is like, it's as cold as it is outside. We're lucky to have a little terrace outside, which we don't use nearly as much as I always thought we would, but it's fantastic for storing wine, cheese, or whatever I can't fit in the fridge on a really cold night.

So the meatloaf went out there while I warmed the oven. I put it in so that I did the foil thing was very clever. So you cover it with foil and then you upend it onto the foil and it becomes a little bit like a holder for it. I wouldn't call it totally clever. I mean, so the issue, what you're talking about here is like, so meatloaves, you can either bake them in a loaf pan or you can bake them free form on the tray, or you can do it what I did, which is start them in a loaf pan and then like upend them and turn

them out onto the tray. The main reason I did that is because my meatloaf has like a ton of extra liquid in it. Like it's, it's a lot sort of moisture that, you know, it's more like a meat batter that you start with as opposed to as a dough, as a meat dough. And so it's hard to, it's hard to make it into a loaf shape, like free form. And so I started it in a pan to get it to set its shape and then finish it on the tray so that you can glaze the outside. But I thought it was nice that we got the best of both worlds because you get to have the shape more. You don't have to choose, but you don't get, you're not limited to the shape where you don't really get any edges to it. So it does give it a chance to bake open. There was definitely a lot of juices that came out and I discovered I have a turkey baster and

I just use that to remove them from the pan. But it was delicious though. I didn't get any color on it when I did the glaze like three times and put it back in the oven each time, but it might've just been, I don't know. I have a new oven, so I don't know if it's working exactly as it's supposed to. When I took it out at the end of the cooking time, it was a few degrees over, maybe almost 10 degrees over from what I wanted it to be. And I was surprised because I feel like my oven's usually slow, but it didn't matter. It was perfect. It was incredibly moist. It didn't taste remotely overcooked. I think the gelatin and the other ingredients really give you a buffer zone where it's forgiving of reheating.

Yeah, that's one of the things about meatloaf is that meatloaf is very forgiving because of all the extra kind of binders and stuff that you stick into it. It's also why meatloaf, I think, does relatively well chilled and does relatively well reheated as well. Why it's like such a good leftovers food because, yeah, because you're binding all that moisture into it. How was your leftover turkey meatloaf for breakfast? Was it dry? Was it moist? Did it hold up? No, it was moist.

It was moist and it was moist and delicious. Well, it was crazy delicious. And I am so excited the dinner is made for tonight. And I know the kids are excited to eat it. We had some leftover mashed potatoes. So I made the brown butter mashed potatoes from my first book and I hadn't made them in years. And I do highly recommend them. They're really nice. I just sort of feel like if you're going to have to put all that butter in to make the mashed potatoes good, you might as well get some flavor

in them. And I don't usually do a ton of brown butter in savory things, but I feel like it works in the mashed potatoes. I feel like it works better in desserts in general, but here it's really nice to give you that nutty complexity. Let's say that you could do anything to meatloaf. But you won't do that. Yeah. What is it that you won't do? Sorry. No, I mean, I am trying to think of a way to get that into it. I'm like two out of three ain't bad.

You won't do jarred garlic to meatloaf. We did not talk about bacon wrapping meatloaf, which is very common. Bacon wrapping, yep. Neither of us do this kind of classic thing with a meatloaf. How do you feel about bacon wrapping meatloaf? I'm not big on bacon wrapping in general. I find that it's just not always the best use of bacon because the bacon always ends up either kind of leathery or not properly rendered, or it ends up crispy in a way that I don't really want on the outside of my whatever it is I'm wrapping in bacon. Yeah, I generally feel like there's not many situations where wrapping in bacon is going to actually improve matters. It's also like I have a general sort of aversion to it because around the time,

probably when our respective meatloaf recipes came out, like in the mid 2010s or so, was also around the time when I feel like there was, you know, like epic meal time and all like the sort of food challenge dudes with big beards wrapping things in bacon. There's just a ton of bacon wrapped stuff going on. There were bacon scarves. There were bacon beach towels. Yeah, but everything was wrapped in bacon at the time. So I think I generally avoided wrapping things in bacon. And I still do. Although, you know, one of the most memorable meat loaves I've ever eaten was when an early restaurant job when maybe we had just gotten a meat grinder at the restaurant or something. And so everyone was excited about grinding meat. And so for a family

meal one day, the chef ground up a bunch of like scraps that we had trimmed off a meat grinder at the restaurant or something and so everyone was excited about grinding meat and so for a family meal one day the chef ground up a bunch of like scraps that we had trimmed off a bunch of things uh and then had pulled out the biggest cast iron pan in the place was which was like this 20 inch cast iron skillet and then lined the whole thing with bacon and call fat and then filled it up with like various ground meats from all the animals all trimmed up and seasoned and then baked this gigantic it was the size of like a new york pizza but like four inches thick wrapped in caulfat and bacon and then sliced it into wedges and that was family that sounds amazing i mean i don't think there were a lot of vegetarians listening to this episode but

there's definitely not after you mentioned caulfat but i don't know i feel like maybe that would be nice though. Like I'm definitely still in that skillet moment we've had where I just think that most things in a skillet like come out better. And I think you would end up with a little bit more texture to it. It would probably bake a little faster. I actually experimented with the recipe that ended up in my book, in the first book, the one where you started in a loaf pan and then dump it out onto a sheet tray.

I tested baking the whole thing in a skillet. I did a bunch of testing with baking meatloaves and castor and skills and stuff. You don't end up with the crustiness that you want, mainly because meatloaves, like as we mentioned before, they end up just expressing too much liquid and fat. There's just too much drippings that come off of them. And so unless there's like a place for those drippings to drain away to like there is on a sheet tray, they just end up like in a waiting pool of their own coagulated drippings. So they don't crisp up very nicely. Also, I mean, so we talked about bacon, but like, should meatloaf be crispy? Do we want it to have texture on the outside? Or are we okay with it being a soft food? I think it's a soft food. I think the times when meatloaf has texture is if you are at like a

diner and you're getting the meatloaf the next day and it's being griddled on a flat top. Which is delicious. Then you get, yeah, like on a meatloaf sandwich, I expect a little bit of like crispiness, I guess, on the edges, but a fresh meatloaf, probably not. So we agree. Well, we feel that meatloaf needs potatoes, generally mashed potatoes, although I've got my little crushed ranchi moment in my turkey meatloaf. Although a reader told me that her first cookbook was a Sesame Street cookbook, and her mother and her had made a meatloaf shaped like Snuffleupagus that was sitting on a nest of noodles. And I've been thinking since, I feel like maybe it wouldn't be bad with noodles. Was it like Snuffle, snuffle-o-fagus? You know, she-

Snuffle-o-fagus. It was a comment I found on the site and I loved it. And she had mentioned this. I was totally picturing a snuffle-o-fagus. She said, an aniseed noodle. I could see it. We ended up actually having it with stuffing yesterday because I didn't have any- Didn't have any mashed potatoes, but butter noodles was uh in the running for sure so kenji yes can you waffle meatloaf yeah have you done it especially raw meatloaf mix yes waffling meatloaf and waffling a meatloaf sandwich this is stuff we did during our Willow waffle days at Serious Eats. I think it depends on the meatloaf, though. I think like ones that are too meaty and crumbly don't work as well.

But ones that are on the more sort of breadier end of the spectrum that can compress a little bit and crisp up in the waffle iron, they work pretty well. Could you taco meatloaf? Do you do a meatloaf taco? I would say yes, right? Are we picturing a slice or like a stick of meatloaf? Do you do a meatloaf taco? I would say yes, right? Are we picturing a slice or like a stick of meatloaf or are we picturing like you saute the filling, like a ground beef filling? I'm picturing like a finger, like a finger of meatloaf that's seared a little bit on each side. And then I don't know, what do you do? What do you do as far as toppings go? Do you go with like

salsa and stuff or do you do like barbecue sauce or ketchup? I think it's gotta be the regular sauce and the potatoes. I think it's basically just meatloaf, but in a taco form. Yeah. Somebody's got, somebody's making a meatloaf burrito somewhere. I think it's about, it's about portability. Obviously the elite meatloaf, handheld meatloaf is the meatloaf sandwich. That's the classic. The meatloaf sandwich. Yes, absolutely. Meatloaf classic is like the number one meatloaf. Yeah. That's the one that, that neveraf sandwich. Yes, absolutely. Meatloaf classic is like the number one meatloaf. Yeah, that's the one that never felt so good, never felt so right. Does it leftover?

I mean, I think we know that meatloaf leftovers are elite. You had them for breakfast today. They absolutely are. Yes. There's nothing better. Yeah. And it's also like, it's like a top choice at a diner, I feel, because of that. Yeah.

It doesn't have to be freshly made. In fact, you're hoping it'll be rewarmed. Exactly. That would be the best way. And can you fry it in butter in a pan? That would be my method of choice for reheating meatloaf, I think. Frying in butter in a pan. Slice it and fry it.

Get some surface area. Get it nice and crispy. Get those edges caramelized. Yeah, I want that. I definitely want it. I think I'm going to do that tonight with the leftovers. I'm going to sear it off and get some edges to it. So yes, the answer is you can fry it in butter in a pan and you should. It would be amazing. Yes, you fry it until the edges are something about glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife. I never understood that line.

Isn't that the line in Paradise for the Last of Us? Yeah, no, that's it. It was long ago. It was far away and it was so much better than it is today. But that couldn't be true. I think we've run out of meatloaf jokes. The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez and Pedro Rafael Brasado of PRX Productions. Edwin Ochoa is the project manager. The executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Martavich. And Yuri Lasordo is director of network operations.

For more on the show, visit 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. Thanks for listening. Can I ask Deb a series of quickfire questions? Yeah.

Will you love me forever? Let me sleep on it. Do you need me? Will you never leave me? Will you make me so happy for the rest of my life? Only if I don't have to make a three and a half hour meal. I want somebody to make it for me though. It was amazing. 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 Radiiotopia.fm. Radiotopia. From PRX.