549: From Dinner SOS: What Should I Cook This Winter?

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. at Bon Appetit. Here's their podcast, Dinner SOS. Dinner SOS is a podcast where Bon Appetit answers desperate home cooks' cries for help. In every episode, food director Chris Morocco and a rotating cast of cooking experts tackle a highly specific conundrum and present two solutions. The caller will pick one, cook through it, and let us know if they successfully helped rescue dinner. This week, we're sharing the episode, What Should I Cook This Winter?, where Chris and a few special guests answer a mailbag full of listener questions about cozy cooking that will be sure to warm you up during this extremely cold winter.

1:09Keep listening to hear more, and don't forget to follow Bon Appetit Dinner SOS wherever you're listening now.

1:21Hey there, listeners, future callers, and cooking enthusiasts. Welcome to Dinner SOS, the show where we help you save dinner or whatever you're cooking. I'm Chris Morocco, Food Director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious. And this week, I'm joined by some voices that listeners know very well. I'm talking about the hosts of BA Bait Club, Jesse Shevchak and Shilpa Skokovic. Hi, Shilpa. Hi, Chris. Hi, Jesse. Hello. We are here today to talk about cozy cooking and how to keep things feeling fresh. Even in the dead of winter, we've got questions from making delicious, nuanced broth at home to keeping herbs fresh in your fridge.

2:03So we'll get to that. But before we do that, we now have two Bake Club podcast episodes out in the world, and the first three recipes are published. How are you both feeling? I feel like it's been so wholesome hearing the Bake Club just engage with us and seeing their bakes. Wholesome. Yes. Bake Club is, you know, I think the sentence that we say when we describe what Bake Club is and we're like, oh, it's the nerdiest corner of the baking Internet. But it's also the most wholesome place. Everybody in our close friends group on Instagram for the Bake Club is just so nice. Supportive. Yeah. They're like, I tried this.

2:43And do you have suggestions? And then 10 people will make suggestions. And it's just like nobody puts each other down. Everybody's like, oh, my God, your frosting swoops look amazing. Yeah, they're having a swoosh off. It's so cute. Wow. Okay. Is this a self-selecting population? How did it come to this? I mean, look at Jessie and I. We're both amazing people. Very nice and wholesome. And that's the energy you draw towards you? That's the energy we draw. That's the answer. What are you both most excited about for Bait Club in the new year? For me personally, it's the next recipe. Oh! I think it's our strongest one, and it's Sheldon and I's first collaboration recipe.

3:19Oh, yes! And I think it's a recipe that's like, I think, really genuinely interesting and unique. And it solves a problem. Yes. What recipe are we talking about? We're talking about our wood fire style. Pizza. Pizza. It's a recipe for pizza. It's a recipe for actually good pizza that's wood fire style, but you don't need a wood fire oven or a pizza oven. Okay. Pizza's a crowded space. Pizza's a crowded space. And then, you know, I've been saying this to everybody. We live in New York. You know, a good pizza is very easy to find. And making pizza at home, you really have to have a good reason to do it.

3:53And I think this one is. Like, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice, this pizza recipe that we developed. It feels like you can really get restaurant-quality pizza at home with no special equipment. Like super charred, nice and blistered. Yeah. All right. Well, I can't wait to hear more about that. I have a lot of questions, but they will be answered, I'm sure, by the next Bake Club episode. Yes. Please listen in to BA Bake Club.

4:24So, Shilpa and Jesse, when people talk about winter cooking, I feel like it's always under this veil of gloom and doom. But honestly, I think there's a big case to be made that winter cooking is a time for optimism, joy, and excitement. Those are very big words. Because I think we've fallen prey to a lot of these tropes, right? Like talking about winter as a time to be endured rather than a time in our culinary lives to celebrate. A time to take a little bit longer to cook something, to draw out the cooking process, to celebrate the low and slow of it all. to celebrate foods that maybe, you know, don't necessarily have like the same range of color, but to celebrate the darker, more brooding kind of cousins, you know, who lurk in the deeper shadows of our hearts and our crisper drawers.

5:23Wow. What do you think? Wow, he's a poet. That was beautiful. I agree, though. I mean, it's leisurely because there's no rush. It's winter. Yeah, where do you have to be? Yeah, nowhere. So just like braze, get cozy. Yeah. Yeah. I do agree with both of you. I think winter is a great time. I mean, a large part of it depends on where you live in this country, obviously. And all of us are on the East Coast where, yes, it does get a bit dire in the produce section. But again, like this is the time to stay home, eat. I mean, if you eat meat, then it's a good time of year. It's a great time to eat meat.

5:54Yeah. Lots of braises, as Jesse said. Potatoes, squash, they're all there for you. Yeah, citrus. Citrus. Citrus is a very big highlight. Citrus is a big highlight? Yeah. So, in this headspace in winter, what are you cooking? I like just like cozy food. Yeah, food that feels warm. What is cozy food? I think it could be two things. I think it could be like a long braise, obviously, is the answer. But it could be like a quick weeknight food that just feels like, oh, I'm doing something special and cozy for myself to stay in tonight. What would be a cozy pasta and what would be a non-cozy pasta? A cozy pasta would be like a baked pasta.

6:37No. A non-cozy pasta would be something with like capers, you know. Oh, like something very bright. Yes. Okay. So shrimp scampi wouldn't be a non-cozy pasta. Yeah, that's like a romantic pasta, but I don't think it's cozy. What about you, Shilpa? I think I gravitate more towards like a lot of spicy food. Spicy food in summer? No, in winter. In winter? Yes. That makes sense. I think everything feels a bit like heavy and dull, and I'm craving that spice to kind of slap me in the face. But like what form of spice? Could be anything. I generally add like a lot of jalapenos or serranos to many things.

7:12Like if I'm making scrambled eggs, I'll mince a few serranos. Fresh chili heat. Fresh chili heat. I do like that, and I think it sort of brightens everything up. Oh, interesting. So like heat, but make it fresh. Make it vegetal. Yes. Interesting. Make it that kind of like bracing kind of bell pepper cutting through your palate like a scythe. Wow. You know? Wow, Christopher. And I do want to call out, you know, I don't think cozy necessarily has to be the fastest or easiest version. No, like a braise is like peak cozy. Yeah. There's like different forms. Yeah. And it doesn't even have to be through the form of a recipe.

7:51Like the other day, you know what I got at the coffee shop? I got a mocha. Oh, wow. I'm freaking mocha. And I was like, this is cozy. This is it. Coziness is happening right now in this cup. And it was like I had a new relationship with myself, with coffee, with hot chocolate, and with the cafe. Yeah, cozy is a vibe. And it's not how you get there. It's like how just the vibe of it. How you feel. Yeah. I love winter cooking. It feels like it becomes like a sensory experience. Like besides just like scent and taste. And I like that. You know, like hugs me. Oh my God. Do you think it's the enclosedness of the spaces we're in in winter that like, you know, you don't have the windows open.

8:35You're kind of focused inward and like more in touch with the sort of like sensory cues around you. I think so. It feels like a gathering almost. Like you invite friends and like it cooks as you're like mingling and it like warms and we all smell it. Yeah. Yeah. Love. So our February issue has a feature that focuses on what I think we kind of want at this time of year, which is cozy but plus some semblance of ease, right? And you, Jesse, in One and Done, you kind of put the lens of like one cooking vessel, right? Whether it's a pot, baking sheet. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of like the one cooking vessel recipes you came up with?

9:18Yeah, so in this issue, there's five of them. And then each represents like a different piece of equipment you probably have. And that's all it uses. So there's a rice cooker one. And I did the impossible. I made rice cooker risotto, which is you just cook arboreal rice with like butter and shallots. And then you finish it at the end with more butter, more stock and some cheese. And it really mimics this like beautiful creamy texture of risotto. I did with the Dutch oven, like a one pot chicken thighs with spiced couscous and carrots. So it's like the couscous cooks as you bake the chickens too.

9:50So the chicken fat kind of like drips down and infuses into it. I did a pot pie in a skillet, like a veggie one using mushroom. But then instead of making any crust or anything, I just take phyllo sheets and like scrunch them right on top with some oil and bake it. And it gets like really dramatic and crunchy and you like break through it. That was very striking. Very ruffly. Yeah, like very, very flashy. I did a sheet pan dinner, and this was, I used, like, Korean rice cakes, which, you know, like, are traditionally, like, simmered in a sauce or something. And these are baked with, like, a saucy kimchi mixture, and they soften, and then halfway through cooking, you put, like, a big piece of salmon on top and some bok choy, so then it's all cooked at the same time.

10:32And then the last one was a cozy pasta, a baked pasta. And for this, you just put old ingredients to make a quick sauce, So like tomatoes and butter and garlic, like very minimal. And then bake that so it gets nice and flavorful. And then you just put raw pasta in, cover it, and then bake it again. And then all that extra water is absorbed by the pasta and it comes out perfectly cooked. You top with cheese and it's done. That was crazy how that turned out. I was enthralled by that recipe, that baked rigatoni. The fact of not needing to pre-boil the pasta and just what a win that is. All right.

11:09So the other thing about winter is that produce is usually, not always, less exciting. In terms of what you can get fresh near you for a lot of folks, at least in the U.S., you know, there's just less out there to seek out. So another story that, you know, we have in the February issue, a series of recipes developed by Kendra Vaculin, who works with us in the test kitchen, all based around pantry staples. Now, the starting point of this story was even just taking a step back and considering what is a modern pantry staple? If we were to look in our own cupboards and our own pantries, what would we find today?

11:49I loved Kendra's story about modern staples because I think it speaks to how many of us live and cook on a day-to-day basis, even those of us who work in a test kitchen and cook professionally. And I think the beauty of this recipe was that it took ready-to-eat ingredients that you would find in a supermarket and transformed them in a way that you wouldn't guess that they were made from store-bought ingredients. You know, one of the recipes that really stood out to me was the chana masala pockets, where Kendra uses pre-made pouches of curried chickpeas. And then she wraps it in store-bought pizza dough, and it gets baked off.

12:30And then she bolsters the filling with a little bit of spinach just to change it up a bit. But honestly, minimal intervention. But then it's something completely different from that pouch that you started with. Then she did this pork and tomatillo udon with tomatillo salsa, which I think was spectacular. Store-bought tomatillo salsa. Yes, store-bought. And then she did—oh, this one was pretty brilliant. She used, like, a jar of Reo's marinara sauce to make a quick and dirty paella. And then she had used canned salmon, but spicy salmon, you know, to make these hand rolls, which was, like, rice, avocado wrapped in a little bit of nori.

13:11And then the funnest one, I think, was the Annie's white cheddar mac and cheese. It was a box of, you know, mac and cheese. And then Kendra transformed it with the addition of broccoli and a little bit of chicken broth into a chicken and broccoli soup. And I know that we were also in love with it. Yeah. And what I loved about this story is this did not feel like some kind of theoretical exercise. We are all constantly seeking out and using shortcuts in our own cooking. Because I think if anything, we are in something of a unique position to be able to assess what is worth doing yourself and what can be outsourced, right?

13:52Like, I don't know, what percent better would Kendra's udon noodles be if she had made her own homemade tomatillo salsa? Yeah, I mean, maybe a little bit, but yeah. Single digits? Yeah. And honestly, it wouldn't have been the right thing to even focus on, right, in the context of that recipe. I mean, I just think, like, there's a certain amount of work and intention that has been put into most of these pantry staples that we are leveraging in unexpected ways. And that is so true for me. Like, the things I've done with Rao's marinara sauce, the things I've done, you know, with Rick Bayliss's now discontinued, don't get me started, red enchilada sauce, and have not found a great substitute for it.

14:37Saucy Lips is fine. And now they don't sell it at Whole Foods WTF. Because it all comes back to that. Rick Bayless, if you're listening to us, please ring back. Rick, what did you do? No, but seriously, that wasn't just a crutch for me when I was making Mexican food or making chicken tinga or something like that. I would use those pouches in a Thai curry. You know, I would use it anywhere I wanted a confluence of rehydrated dried chili product with tomato product. That's a lot of dishes. Yeah, that's true. You know what I mean? Indian food, yeah. Completely. So anyway, I thought that was like a real banger of a story.

15:18Yeah. I want to give one more shout out for the Feb issue. Cheese course, which was a story that I developed. I don't develop that many recipes anymore. But I really wanted to highlight the ability of cheese to stand in in a lot of different types of dishes almost for protein. And I think if you're somebody who's looking to bridge into more plant-forward cooking, you're not necessarily seeking to be vegan, you know, but you are looking to stay more vegetarian. I think cheese can provide a bit of a bridge. And I don't just mean the cloak of like mozzarella that's on Jesse's baked rigatoni, which is superb and is so warranted and so delightful.

16:00I mean, you know, the ability of cheese, and I'm thinking of like a cheese like paneer, which I used in a stir fry that's just like a very kind of like, it's like a dry fried style green bean. the touch of curry powder, mirin, and soy sauce with big, long spears of paneer. Paneer just has this wonderful, gentle expression of kind of like milky, dairy richness, but without like much pungency to it. You know, it's just very clean, but it holds up to aggressive cooking methods. You can grill it. You know, it can do everything that halloumi does, but it's just so much milder. on the other hand you know i do use halloumi but um i shred it and use it in place of meat in a no meat meatball paired with an aromatic tomato sauce that's got just like a little bit of cinnamon in it and then lastly i have a burrata topped salad with a very spicy tahini dressing that's got a little bit of toasted sesame oil to kind of double down on that sort of sesame sort of like high note.

17:06The marvelous ability of burrata to play well with like really intense flavors and be very complimentary, but also just add a satiating quality of whatever it's on top of or underneath or next to. But yeah, anyway, check it out. I love the meatballs. Oh, I like the paneer stir fry the best. That was good too. That was my favorite one.

17:33We're going to take a quick break When we get back, we'll tackle some listener questions about cooking in the winter.

17:56Shilpa, Jessie, are you both ready to answer some listener questions? I am now. I'm ready. Awesome. From Jessica, I've never made a broth as good as I get in noodle soup in a restaurant. I love a good brothy noodle soup, especially if it's Thai, Japanese, or Chinese. I know a lot of broths are good because they are long-cooked meat broths, but surely us pescatarians and vegetarians have good options too. My favorite broths are a tiny bit sweet with loads of umami. I primarily eat vegetarian with some fish. I'm allergic to shrimp. Can you help? If I'm making something where broth is like a star, like a soup, oftentimes I will get a boxed broth and then I will just like reinforce it.

18:44Like put it in a pot, put some smashed garlic and slices of ginger in there and lemongrass, just kind of let it simmer. And then that totally transforms like a okay product into something very good. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I think that is totally fair game. I'd say like that is like your tier one approach, right? You just buy something that's store-bought, but you figure out what you want to do with it to level it up a little bit. But as like a sort of tier two approach, I would say, here's the thing. Like there are certain meat broths where sure, you can put a bunch of things in a pot, bring it to a simmer, skim it, and have like an okay broth.

19:20But for me, the most intensely flavorful meat-based broths are the ones where something has been roasted. Something has been, you know, sweated down. Something flavor has been built from the ground up and considered at every stage. So simply if you have time or at least are willing to make a big batch of something, apply the same strategy to your vegetables. Like roast off some leeks and onions and carrots and a little dab of tomato paste. And then like, you know, throw those roasted vegetables into a pot with some water and a few halved heads of garlic. And then simmer it as though it were a meat broth.

20:02I think sometimes there's this idea that, oh, well, I'm making this vegetarian so I can just kind of cut out the meat and therefore treat this a completely different way. But honestly, I'm not saying you have to work harder, but you probably, in terms of making your own vegetable broth from the ground up, it does take some effort to reach the levels of nuance and concentration that you're looking for here. Yeah, I agree. I mean, looking at Jessica's, you know, note that she loves, you know, a brothy noodle soup, especially if it's Thai, Japanese, Chinese. Like one thing that stands out to me with all of those is there's a lot of strong flavors in those foods, in those cuisines that you don't really need to start like along with a long cooked broth.

20:51Like when I think of Thai food, for instance, I rarely think of like a broth as a supporting character as much as it is about the curry paste and other stronger aromatics that, you know, really bolster and bring flavor. And I think by leaning harder on those ingredients, like starting with the base of like a good curry paste or like adding curry powder, adding hondashi, all of these can quickly build flavor in your stock in like with a pot of water and then layering all of the flavors kind of. That's the secret. Yeah, for the record, handashi powder, that is a brand of dashi powder, but dashi powder usually it's like powdered sort of granules, which are the concentrated essence of kombu and bonito, which are the two kind of signature elements that go into some forms of dashi, the sort of foundational broth that underpins a lot of dishes in Japanese cuisine.

21:44Cool. Jessica, we hope that helps. Let us know how your broth turns out. Next up, we have a question from Caroline. Caroline writes, What do you think about using the Instant Pot for beans, especially when you can't be home to simmer them? Should they be pre-soaked? You know, for me, if I never use an Instant Pot ever, I think I'll be just fine. But Shilpa, I know you have strong thoughts on this. Do you want to take it away? I'm a fan. I'm a big fan. Yeah, same. Okay, I grew up in India, and we always used the pressure cooker for almost everything, including my dad also used it to hard boil eggs and cook pasta, but that's a different story for another time.

22:27Yeah, why wouldn't you use the Instant Pot for beans? It's the most efficient way to cook beans. You don't need to pre-soak them either. Oh. Well, I have caveats there. You don't need to pre-soak them. You could get some blowout if you don't pre-soak them, as in like your beans might be a little less pretty. Some of them don't hold their shape, but you totally can cook them not pre-soaked. I have before. Yes, you can. I agree with you, Jessie. Anecdotally, I feel like the pre-soaking, the gentle hydration of a bean that is like going from like a totally dried shelf stable state to a fully creamy, you know, ready to eat tender state.

23:04I have seen some evidence that like pre-soaking maybe helps the beans make that transition more intact. you know, without like falling apart. But I also just think sometimes beans just fall apart. They do, yeah. I have noticed when I cook them, I do like, I don't know, only like 20 minutes on the pressure cook. But then if you do the natural release, like the slow release, you get less blowout, I've found. Which it makes sense because it's like less dramatic pressure changes. Shilpa and Jesse, can one of you walk us through your favorite instant pot bean method? Like, are you using aromatics? Are you starting with broth or water?

23:40What's the timing here? I pre-soak my beans. Overnight? Overnight. And I like to season the soaking water. And, you know, I just want to say in favor of soaking beans, one, I think the cook is better. It's more even. There's less blowout. And two, I think it's like sprouting in a way. Like, you know, people are into like sprouted almonds and stuff like that. And pre-soaking does start like that process and it releases some of the enzymes. And I think pre-soaked beans are easier to digest. That's my theory. Okay. So soaked in kind of like a brine almost. And then next day I drain that water, the soaking water, I drain it.

24:21And then I put it in an instant pot with water and not much salt because I already put salt in the water. Maybe a couple of garlic cloves and that's it. I tend to not put a lot of aromatics in there because I'm generally making a big pot of beans that I then want to use for different applications. Yeah. An instant pot, like for depending on the bean, like anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes and then natural release and let it sit there for a while in that cooking water and then you take it out that's it any additions any subtractions put mine in the instant pot with some broth and whatever aromatics and then i cook it and that's it natural release and it's done yeah caroline sounds like yes you should definitely use the instant pot to make your beans so try it out and let us know how it goes next up a question from listener maureen My dilemma is reusing cooking oil.

25:11Confession, I've never done it. Because I don't know. Do I leave it out to come to room temperature? How do I filter it? How do I store it? I've been practicing chicken quarters confit, and I love it. It turns out perfectly every time, and I feel fancy. But when I make it, it seems like such a waste of olive oil. How do I save it? Like, what if I fried fish? And how should I reuse it? I need inspiration to make something besides potato chips or fried onions. There's a lot in there. And there is a difference between confit and frying oil. I will say that. Yeah, break that down, Jesse. Frying oil is just frying oil with little bits you have floating around from whatever you fried or like the aroma.

25:51But confit oil is like a combination of whatever animal fat emulsified with the frying fat too or the cooking fat, I should say. And water and some moisture content, which is where the potential danger might come in more. Yeah, so they're different. I would be more inclined to reuse frying oil than I would confit oil. Okay, but you've made chicken quarters confit. I'm not super familiar with that recipe, but I'm guessing at what it probably is. Because so you've eaten the chicken and you now have kind of a mixture of olive oil with some, you know, kind of chicken juices and aromatics going on in there.

26:36What are you doing with it? I think you could reuse it for a few days in clever ways, but that's it really for me. I would strain it into like a last jar. I agree. And then I think the oil would float up. Keep it together? Yeah, but the oil would float or whatever the fat, the combination of oil and like the schmaltz at that point. would float up, and then I would put it in the refrigerator, and you could reuse the same thing. If you're like, maybe, I don't know, you want to confit potatoes, you can do the same thing. Or if I just want to use the fat alone for something, like to saute chicken, for instance, I would just scoop that fat off from the top and then keep using it.