Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce

and Mark. And I'm Mark Scrubber, and together with Bruce, my husband, we have written three dozen cookbooks, not counting the ones we wrote for celebrities. We're publishing our 37th cookbook soon. Cold Canning, or if you're listening to this out of order and not in real time, maybe we've already published it. Cold Canning. It's a small. Batch canning book. Make two or three jars of blackberry jam, blackberry conserves, or blackberry barbecue sauce. Keep them in your fridge or your freezer with no pressure or steam. Canning what? So, so easy. So easy, so easy. We're actually gonna make a recipe from cold canning on this episode of the podcast, a very. Special recipe one. So special, we actually gave it to our publisher, gave the product to our publisher. We're gonna talk about a one minute cooking tip as always, and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip grill, some food alanche, which means grilling alanche or. On the griddle in Spanish. It's an easy upgrade to your charcoal or gas grill. With a simple setup, just get yourself a carbon steel griddle. Set it over the grill grade. It opens up a world of possibilities. You can cook marbled cuts of meat that won't flare up or burn or dry out. Fish gets crispy and stays juicy. Vegetables don't fall through the grill grate and hard to sear things like citrus and avocados can be charred and caramelized, and it's a whole new way to think about using your grill.

It is. So what do I do with this thing when I'm done? How do I clean it? What do I do with it?

Let it cool out on your grill and then clean it the exact way you would clean cast iron in your kitchen. Put it in your sink, scrub it with coarse salt and paper towels and water. Then put it over a high heat on your stove to dry it off

or back out on the grill.

Right? But you'd have to turn the grill back on. Right?

But you can, you can put it back out on the grill. And turn the grill on, assuming you have a gas. That's a gas grill. Mm-hmm. Thing you turned it on and it. Then put it back out on the grill and heat it up and it should go to smoking, right? Yep.

It should be smoking hot so it's dry and it won't rust.

Right. Okay. So try that. Get yourself a, as Bruce says, a carbon steel griddle and put it right on the grill. And then just think of all the things you can make. I mean, you can thinly slice pork belly and you can caramelize it on your grill.

Mm. You don't have

to worry about asparagus spears going through the grates. They'll get nice and char out there. Shrimp bacher. Yeah, you. Put shrimp and you don't have to worry about it. Sticking fish filets, it's really a great thing, and especially carbon steel. Once it gets, uh, seasoned, it is just, it's a non-stick surface essentially. It's beautiful. Right. Follow the manufacturer's instructions about how to season it. Okay. Before we get to the next segment of this podcast, lemme say that. We would appreciate it if you could rate this podcast. If you could write a review of it, that would be terrific. We are not supported. In fact, we are not advertised on purpose. We don't accept advertising on purpose. So it would be great if you could help us out and help keep the podcast fresh by giving us a rating. Stars are nice and also writing a review that really keeps it fresh in the algorithm and that's the way that you can help support. This podcast. Okay, we're off to the kitchen and we're gonna make a recipe, an incredible wild recipe from Cold canning 18 spice curry oil. Okay. Before we get started, let me ask you, why would anybody make this?

Uh, because it's spectacularly delicious. It makes an amazing gift. You want to have it in your house. It's the same reason you wanna make the 18 Spice Chili oil. That's also in the book because. It's beyond just curry. Just like the chili oil is beyond just chili. There are so many spice. What am I gonna do with that? It's aromatic, it's beautiful. This becomes a finishing oil. You're gonna drizzle it over grilled vegetables or fish. You're gonna try it on Asian noodles. You're gonna put it on baked potatoes instead of butter. Drizzle it on the bread of a sandwich instead of mayonnaise, you have a marinade that calls for oil for, or a dressing that calls for oil use half plain oil and half of this. 18 spiced curry oil. Put it out as a dip with a bowl of cubed up baguettes and let people just dip the bread into the oil and eat it. It is so good.

Okay, so I will tell you that it is pretty. Bruce is selling it pretty hard, but it is pretty amazing what happens here and, um, it, it takes a little bit of work. This one takes a little bit of work, but as you know, cold canning is all about small batch stuff, and it's no pressure canning. So we can actually treat this as a canning recipe, even though of course you'd never put this in a pressure cooker. Mm-hmm. Or in a steam canner. But we feel it's in that same preserving family as Blackberry Jam. We actually made a huge bottle of this and took it to our publisher for his 40th birthday 40th, he said. He's a child on his 40th birthday and gave it to him as his 40th birthday gift. This is something that you might want to make and then find smaller, decorative, uh, bottles. Remember, no reactive glazes. No reactive dyes on those bottles. Then you could put. This oil in them, and you can bring it as house presence. Mm-hmm. You can keep a whole row of them up in your refrigerator. I know in the book, because of USDA requirements, we say this will stay six weeks in the fridge. Honestly, in our house, I bet it stay six months. Yeah. In the fridge. I've

had to stay six months without going rancid, without any reduction in the beautiful flavors. And it starts with a neutral oil. I'm just using canola oil. Four and a half cups or 1020 milliliters. Okay, so

you're using canal oil. Can you name some other neutral oils? You can use

a corn oil. You can use plain vegetable oil. You can use s soy oil. Soybean oil. Safflower oil. Sunflower oil. I mean, if you

wanna get. Totally ridiculously fancy. You can use avocado oil, but why?

Why? It's so expensive and there's, it's just ridiculous. It's expensive. There's no point in that. No. So I'm dumping this oil into my large stock pot, and I'm using a larger pot than you think I need, but I don't want to have any splashing or sizzling happening over the edges of the pot. And now. All of these spices are going to go into this pot one by one with the oil as it starts to eat. Okay? So as he

put, test puts 'em in here. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give color

commentary here. Okay. Starting with five chili de are bowl,

you know what those are? Those are those long red chilies you sometimes find in Chinese food. You wanna find the dried ones, and if you want to, I would advise it. Take. The dried woody stem off each of the five chilies. You don't have to, but I would advise doing that. Mm-hmm. One tablespoon or six grams of ground turmeric. Okay. Easy just buying your ground turmeric to use it. Same comes up next. Yep.

One tablespoon or six grams of brown mustard seeds, which are a little spicier. Yeah. Brown mustard seeds are hotter than yellow. Mm-hmm. So watch this carefully. Yep. One tablespoon or six grams of cumin seeds. Mm-hmm. The same. One tablespoon, six grams of fennel seeds. Mm-hmm. Now the next one's a little harder. You might not find it at your regular supermarket. One tablespoon, six grams of Fen Greek

seeds, and you might not find Fen Greek at your normal supermarket. You would find it at an East Indian supermarket. Mm-hmm. Or an East Indian grocery store or a large giant gourmet supermarket, you'll find it. You can buy a small package of F Greek seeds or bottles, and you can store them in your freezer indefinitely, so they will not go bad. Then

we have one tablespoon or six grams of black peppercorns, whole black peppercorns, right, and a half teaspoon of saffron threads. Okay?

Now this is the big expense and this is what's gonna give this oil. Its. Beautiful, reddish yellow color are these saffron threads, and this is what will set you back. I will admit. Mm-hmm. The half a teaspoon of saffron is expensive, but if you look around online, you can find sales and you can find it. If you're willing to buy it in slightly larger quantities, the per teaspoon rate of it falls down. True.

Now we need cardamon pods. We're gonna have 10 green ones and two black ones.

Okay. Now explain the difference between green part cardamon pods, and I noticed that the green ones are a little bit cracked, right? Mm-hmm. So you've cracked those on a cutting board with the side of a knife. I

break them open because I want the seeds inside the pods to really have access to that oil in the. The black ones are hard. They're big. They're almost like small peach pits and really took a lot of work to crack 'em open. Those are smoky, they're kind of amazing. You'll get them in the same stores where you can get F Greek seeds, not necessarily something in your regular supermarket. Again, store it in your freezer, but search them out. If you can get them. They're really good. Right now we're gonna have 10 whole cloves, right? A three inch cinnamon stick, and that's about,

uh, seven centimeters. Mm-hmm. For those. Uh, playing at home,

a whole nutmeg. And that also cracked open with the side of, okay, now we aver. How do

you crack a whole nutmeg. Now we not talking about ground nut, we're talking about the whole big seed. Mm-hmm.

I put the side of my cleaver on it and I hit it with my fist. I. And it cracks right open. Okay. One star anis and three bay leaves. Okay.

That's a lot of dried stuff. Chilies that are all turmeric, mustard seed, Cuban seed, fennel seeds, fe, Greek seeds, black pepper, corn, saffron, cardamom, pods of all sorts. Cloves, whole cloves, cinnamon sticks, not meg, um, star anis and Bailey leaves. If you are trying to keep all this track and tracking your head, don't worry about it. This recipe appears on our website. Cooking with Bruce and mark.com or Bruce and mark.com. Either find the episode for this podcast on our website or go to the recipe dropdown menu and you can find this exact recipe, including a beautiful photo

of

this chili

oil. Thank you, Eric Medco. Thank a brilliant photographer.

Exactly. Okay, so you don't have to write it all down now. You can find it there. So what are we

need to do

with this? But

what you do need to do is clip a candy or deep. Fry thermometer to the pan so that the tip of the thermometer is down into the oil. You're looking for a target temperature of 200 degrees. And just be clear, what's our heat here? Our heat here right now is high because I'm heating it up. Once we get to that target of 200 Fahrenheit, I'm gonna turn it down to a medium low so it maintains that. And I think you got stuff to do while this is getting there. I do.

So while this gets up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, or 93 Centigrade or Celsius? No. Thank you Mr. Science. I know if you're playing along at home, as we say, I'm going to get some aromatics going, some fresher aromatics. Mm-hmm. And what I'm gonna do is take two medium yellow onions, I've peeled them, I've cut the root stem off, and then all I'm doing is thinly slicing these into rings and I'm gonna separate the rings. This is all going to get ready to go inside of this oil once it gets up. To temperature. Mm. So I'm gonna work on this for a second, and, um, why don't you just talk about what, uh, onions do for this.

The onions will give this a sweetness and onions will give this a depth of flavor that is a fresh flavor. 'cause onions are a vegetable, they act like a fruit here. There's actually a lot of sugar in onions, so it does add a lot of sweetness. Um, and while Mark is slicing those onions, I'm smashing forecloses of garlic and I'm just. Peeling the, the outer husk, the garlic. Well, since

we're doing a podcast, how are you smashing them?

So that its, I'm using the palm of my hand and all I have, okay. I can't do that. That hurts me on. You put the side of your knife on the garlic and then you press down or punch down the side. And the shell, the peel cracks and you just get the garlic out of the peel really easy.

Right? And you don't have to do any of this garlic. It's gonna go in whole. And, okay, I'm done with my onions. So now I'm gonna slice up. I've got about a four inch, I don't know, what is this? This is a bad 10 centimeter. 10 centimeter piece of ginger. And uh, I'm going to slice it into thin rounds if the husk. This ginger, the skin on it is really, really fibrous. You might wanna take it off with a vegetable peeler, if it's fresher and more compliant and juicy, you don't have to take it off. Mm-hmm. Uh, it just can add a little bit of a bitter flavor. And let me just say before we go on with this, we're getting near temperature here, but let me just say before we hit this, that the onions, the garlic, and the ginger are why by USDA recommendations. We can't store this in the fridge more than six weeks because these. Are fresh vegetables and while we are going to strain them out, there's still vegetable matter left in the oil, and this is what the USDA is concerned about, that it can go rancid. If you wanna be absolutely certain, you'll use this up in six weeks. Or you'll freeze it. Mm-hmm. But, um, again, we've kept this in the fridge for a very long time and nothing has happened. But don't listen to us, listen to the USDA. Okay. Alright. So come on. So

it's at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We can see the spices bubbling away at the bottom of the pot. Little bubbles coming up. Um, you can't really hear it sizzling 'cause there's a lot of oil here and it's a very low temperature. But Mark's gonna add the onions and the garlic and the ginger to this oil. Wow. And he's going to be one of the most. Patient cooks ever, because he has to stir this occasionally for one hour.

Okay. Yeah. This is where it's not easy, so you're gonna have to, well, you're gonna get all this in here, then let it settle and drop your heat to low. Mm-hmm. So it's barely moving in the pot. And then simmer this thing for an hour and you need to stir it. Fairly often. Mm-hmm. You don't have to stand at the stove, but you certainly have to stay in the kitchen or in, you know, I dunno what your dinette area right outside the kitchen dinette. I know. Well, I'm imagining you to my mother's kitchen. So the dinette area right outside the kitchen. Fancy. You had an Eden kitchen? Well, no, we did not. We had a. Dinette. Oh. Um, which is not your dining room, it's your ET version of a dining room. So you need to stick around for a bit and watch this. It's gotta go for an hour. Mm-hmm. And then

what happens? Well, then the onions will have frizzled up a bit. The garlic will have frizzled up a bit, and they will have imparted all of their flavor into that. Ridiculously aromatic oil and now you turn off the heat and you set it aside for two hours to cool down.

Okay, so we're not gonna do this in real time because we've done what we did in real time. So we're just gonna talk you through this. So again, stirring it for an hour, turn it off. Set it aside for two hours. Mm-hmm. And now you're gonna strain it. And this is where it gets a little tricky, I think, because what you're gonna try to do is get as much of the residue of these spices and the onion and garlic and all this stuff out of this. Oil In order to do that, there are a couple the techniques I can suggest. One is, of course, the chef thing of using a chinois or now as we call it a fine mesh strainer. So you wanna talk about what that is? Yeah.

The chinois is a conical fine mesh strainer really. Big and deep, and you set that conical strainer into another pot. It's, it's, it's a totally

racist name, chinois, because it's supposed to be like a Chinaman's hat, and a lot of people now only say, find me strainer. In fact, in our own cookbook, we no longer use the word chinois. We say, find me strainer, but okay. So it is, it's, it's a conical

thing, but yes, it's the shape this 'cause you can get fine MAs strainers that are just like little oversized tea strainers. And that's not what we're talking about. No, we're talking about, we're talking about something really large that you can pour this entire pot through and it'll hold back all the spices and all the onions. And all the garlic. And what will come out is this beautiful golden fragrant oil into another. Pot that you had that strainer sitting in. Okay.

And there's a couple other ways you can get this done. You can line a more traditional strainer with cheesecloth. Mm-hmm. It's hard to hold a cheesecloth in place. You have to really work slowly at it. 'cause the cheesecloth has a tendency to slip all around. You can find cheesecloth in the supermarket, usually by the wax paper on the aluminum foil. Uh, it's probably in a bottom shelf or a top shelf 'cause it's not bought very often. But you can find it there. You can do that. Let me also say. That some people say that you can line said strainer 'cause it has cool for two hours with paper towels. We do not recommend this because of the chemicals used in the pulping process to make paper towels and some of those chemicals can leach into the oil. So even at a cooler temperature, we still don't recommend it.

The other way you can do this and I have done it, is using a jelly bag. You can set your jelly bag up and you could pour the oil through the jelly bag. I wish

you could see my face.

And it will hold back all spice. If you

don't have, don't a conical strainer. Are you gonna have a jelly bag? Is that something you're gonna No. Really? Okay. How about a nut bag? You gonna have a nut bag? Nut bag to make nut milk. Nut milk bag. Okay. Right? Yes. Everybody's got that. Everybody has a nut milk bag. Everybody, literally, I don't even know why we're, we are, we're creating recipes since everybody's got a nut milk. Pack. It's just

like that book that we, we, we worked on for that Italian restaurant in Staten Island where one of the nons who gave her recipes, the book started the recipe with, you know, 24 Sea urchin cleaned. And when we wrote the directions how to clean it, she lost it. She just got so angry. Everybody knows how to clean a sea urchin. Sure everybody

does. And everybody knows how to work a nut milk bag and in fact has one at home or a jelly bag. So, uh, we're trying to give solutions for real people here, not you. So no, all cheesecloth, cheesecloth, everybody has any of this stuff. Now you can use a very fine mesh, um, half globe strainer, but you will have to do it multiple times. And even so, you will pass it through it multiple times. And even so you won't get it all out. Mm-hmm. Even at multiple passes. What's underneath your strainer, whatever you use. Even nuts. Milk bags for God's sake. It can be a bowl. It doesn't have to be anything fancy 'cause you're gonna then transfer that into your decorative containers. Don't try to strain this thing into a decorative jar. Oh, dear Lord. No, no, it won't work. It'll fall all over the place. You'll make a mess. So, you know, just get it in a bowl, a mixing bowl.

And let me say, not only make a mess, it is made with turmeric and saffron. It's so if you, whatever you use to clean up that mess will be yellow. Forever.

Yes. And you're catching counters if they're white, will be yellow forever and your floor can turn yellow forever. So yes, you wanna be really careful about this 'cause this is a really strong dye mechanism. But once you get this done and once you put it in the fridge and once you store it, let me just say two things about it. One is that it tastes better if you let it come back to room temperature before you use it. So if you're gonna use it tonight on takeout Indian food, if you're gonna use it on french fries, if you're going to use it on onion rings, if you're gonna dip. Bread into it before dinner. Any of those beautiful things you can do with this. Any of that, it should come outta the fridge for an hour or so before you use it, 'cause it's gonna taste better. All those, uh, aromas, those flavin, its are gonna come back to life at room temperature. And secondly, let me say that, you know, uh, you wanna store this in the coldest part of your refrigerator, so. Probably that's against the back wall. Mm-hmm. For a lot of people.

Yep. You mentioned french fries. So I wanna say that if you're the kind of person that loves mayonnaise with french fries, which is a lot of people in this world, you have never tried anything until you've tried making your own curried mayonnaise with this oil. You take one cup of this oil. And one whole egg and you put that in here it comes, I'm, I'm just waiting. And you put your stick blender there it is. Into that cup there. It's, and you turn it on and slowly lift the stick blender up. The same

people have nut milk bags. Yeah. Have stick blenders. The same people have nut milk bags. Yeah. Will make their own mayonnaise. Sure.

You make your own curried mayonnaise. It is to die for.

Okay. If you don't have a. Stick blender. You can make mayonnaise in a small food processor. It takes a long time and it never gets fully creamy. It never does. What it, oh, do it by hand.

Just get a nice balloon whisk in a bowl.

Oh, if you're an old French chef, you can actually do this thing by hand. That's slowly

drizzle one cup of this oil into an. Egg as you beat with a balloon whisk. Yes.

And uh, when Bruce says slowly, he means just absolutely. The thinnest drizzle. The easiest way he's right to do this is to get a large vessel, put an egg in it, and then the oil, and then use it, ugh. Stick blender and stick it in the bottom, turn it on, and slowly pull it up. Mm-hmm. And you'll end up with curry mayonnaise. Mm-hmm. And it is delicious. It's also delicious on broths. Oh yeah. So all that is great. And onion, cheese. And so there's the recipe that we're making. Again, the house smells so

good already.

You don't have to have written any of this down. You can find it on our website, bruce@mark.com, or cooking withBruce@mark.com. You can find it either listed under this podcast episode or under the recipes on our website, and then you can carry on in your own way with this curry oil. And trust me, it is truly worth it. Okay, as is traditional the final episode of this podcast, what's making us happy? And food this week.

Something that everyone will have in their house along with their nut milk bags to the stick blends. Oh God. Oh Lord. A smoked neck of venison. Oh, sure.

Oh, oh yeah. Everybody. In fact, I don't even know why we write recipes, because everybody's using their nut milk bags to eat their smoked venison neck. Mm-hmm. Of

course. Well, a very dear friend of ours was hunting and. When he butchered the the venison, I asked if we could please have the neck as a roast, and I smoked it over cherry wood for eight hours, and then I moved it into the gas grill and kept it at 200 degrees for another four hours, and it was the most delectable, smoky, tender, rich tasting, amazing meat. Ever.

Well, and so one of the things that's making me happy in food this week is something I'm, I made, I, I, the writer made to go along with that smoked ven and neck, and that's cornbread. Mm. And you should know that I am really picky about cornbread because I feel that in my lifetime now, I'm gonna be a totally old man here. I mean, really, honestly, I am so old. I, I I, I, I said to Bruce today that if I, if he died and I had to go on a dating site for people my age, he'd probably be called carbon dating. So, um. I, I'm really that old. So, but don't chin but don't be here all week. Right, exactly. So. Right. I don't have arthritis. I just have early onset rigor mortis. So, um, anyway, um, let me say that I grew up in a time when corn bread was not sweet, and I feel like in the course of my lifetime it became cake and, I don't know, it's a birthday cake. Yes. How it became cake, it

became birthday cake because

when I was a kid, we did not dump half a cup or even a cup of sugar into cornbread. My mother would put. A little like a pinch of sugar into cornbread just to help give the batter structure. Mm-hmm. So I don't understand this whole obsession with this sweet sticky cornbread, with this sticky top, it's to me gross. I like a dry top that gets slightly crunchy in the oven. The cornbread stays delectable without being so sweet. So I made cornbread and I made the recipe in the ultimate cookbook, and in fact, it doesn't even have any sugar in it has a tablespoon of hot. Honey. Honey. So it's Honey Cornbread. This is from our book, the Ultimate Cookbook from years ago, and I made that recipe and it was really good with that Smoke venison. It was delicious. Okay, so that is the podcast for this week. We certainly appreciate your being a part of this podcast with us. We appreciate your being on this journey with us, and we welcome you back. Subscribe to this podcast. So you don't miss a single episode,

and every week we tell you what's making us happy in food here on cooking with Bruce and Mark. So we would love it if you went to our Facebook group, also called Cooking with Bruce and Mark and tell us there, what's making you happy in food this week is we want to know and we want to talk about what's making you happy in food this week here on Cooking Rivers and Mark.