Friend of the show Chef John has a saying: Never Let The Food Win. This is of course a variation on a singular concept. You know, the “lemons to lemonade” concept. What he means is that—another of his sayings—food can sense fear. Yes, there will be mistakes and slip ups. It’s what you do with them that matters. Here’s an example of a Chef John disaster made right. Now as he has a cooking show, he made another one for the cameras. But even the drop can be saved. You can kind of mold it into shape, or serve it as a mixed jumble, or whatever. Taste is what matters.
Preface over, now on to the show.
So...As you know, I meal prep on the weekend to get my meals for the week, as diaried here and here. I usually cook on a Saturday, let the food cool, and then parcel it out.
HOWEVER
Saturday is the one day I set aside to DRINK. SNL sketch aside (HT to Dan Aykroyd), you never see chefs overtly drinking when they’re cooking. Scratch that, Jacques Pepin always has wine when cooking.
So I have to balance cooking with drinking. Disclaimer: I NEVER drink when I’m making karaage. Because deep frying. Because my siblings set my house on fire growing up because they overheated the oil for French fries when I wasn’t there to actually do the cooking while they were doing kid stuff like watching TV (Another diary for another time).
So, teenage story aside, Saturday is the day I usually cook my meals for the week. I usually do some sort of braise, or long-ish form cooking. Why? Because I can make enough to last me for a week, and sometimes cooking in the middle of the week isn’t feasible.
What follows are some mistakes and whoopsies I’ve made in the past few years. Some of them MAY have been the result of a lot of wine, some are just me being dumb. But I was still having wine.
First, a story from younger days when I was starting to seriously get into cooking. Before I knew exactly what kosher salt was. Recipe calls for x amount of kosher salt, I used the same amount of table salt. Yeah, it was pretty much inedible. You can’t recover from that.
Most of my errors currently have to do with timing. And achieving the perfect simmer for a braise. Example 1: Peposo. Here we show my faults if I drink while I cook. First, an underestimation mistake. I used the amount of wine called for in the recipe, even though my pan was a bit bigger, and I used one or two more short ribs. Hindsight says I should have added one more cup. But here’s the deal: I didn’t check it enough. The recipe said rotate every half hour after the first hour. So I did. But I did not pay attention to the liquid levels. Which, if I were to check on let’s say every 15 minutes, I could have noticed something. So as I wrote,
Confession time: I let mine go a bit too long and the wine totally reduced, leaving the meat basically frying in beef fat. I got some heavy crustification from all the wine caramelizing to the meat. It was still good. You get that hit of pepper, followed by slight sweetness from the wine, then that tender beef and fat.
So while I was disappointed there was no sauce, I was pleased by the flavor and crustification of the meat. The same thing happened a couple weeks ago when I wanted to make what my father’s sister called “greasy noodles”. It’s basically thick noodles in a mixture of beef collagen loaded liquid. So I put some chuck roasts in a roaster with more liquid than I would put in usually—plus I had some demi and some better than bouillon so the liquid was FORTIFIED. Then I made my mistake. I put onions in at the beginning. There’s a difference between getting a char on the edges of an onion and cooking it for 4+ hours in an oven, even in liquid. And of course, I decided after 3 and a half or so hours to let it go for at least another hour. The liquid levels looked fine then (I was actually checking those this time). But I should have recognized that the liquid was getting very dark. Anyway, when I checked it next, most of the liquid had gone away and the onions were like black. How to save my pan? I pulled the meat, turned the burner on, added water and my flat wooden spatula deglazed everything perfectly. I added the noodles and mixed, then chopped and added the beef. The flavor? VERY beefy and the onions had a sweetness. BUT. You definitely could taste the char. So there was bitterness too. Would I make it again? Oh, HECK yeah.
But things have also happened that had no relation to any wine I may or may not have been drinking. Such as making a beef and barley stew, and having only a tiny bit of barley. What to do? Add something in at an appropriate time. I had some Israeli couscous that I added in that case.
Temperature was too high, you weren’t stirring enough and stuff got scorched to the bottom of the pot? Scrape most of it off to avoid the scorch taste, then perform Dutch oven triage. That happened with a beef and barley stew I was making with oxtails. I wasn’t gonna waste THOSE. Plus I saved my Dutch oven and it’s still in use performing wonderfully.
So, long way round, as Chef John says. “Food can sense fear. Never let the food win”, there are ways to salvage almost any food disaster, short of extreme oversalting and “Sharonheit”, or otherwise yeeting your food into the sun so it looks like you should be throwing a Ring into it or it came from a fossil bed. So with imagination, quick thinking, and a stocked pantry, you shouldn’t have to call DoorDash because you screwed up.
WFD this weekend is colonoscopy prep. I made some beef bone broth for a dish I may diary about later, and also some poultry bone broth for my clear liquid diet. There WILL be a diary on the meat jelly I made.
Today’s comment discussion: What are YOUR tricks and thinking for saving a disaster and not letting the food win?