Transcription
Why does restaurant food tend to taste better than the food that we cook and or eat at home? In a way, it's kind of become an industry-kept secret. Cuz nobody really wants to say it, but let's be real. Two things matter to a restaurant: speed and quality. As a result, kitchens all over the world have developed cheat codes in their cooking game to elevate taste, texture, speed, and efficiency. And these are hacks that normal people would never know about without years of cooking experience. So today, I'm going to be giving away all of the top secrets that I know, and some of my favorite Austin restaurants will show you how they utilize these secrets.
Now, why do restaurant meats taste so good? One thing that will help you is a short cure. Whenever you season something and cook it, the salt is really only on the exterior of it. But if you season it ahead of time, it allows the salt to penetrate into the flesh, draw some moisture, and add a little bit of salt to the interior of the protein. This also works with vegetables. I'm going to show you a simple one. You take any protein that you normally would cook. This works really well with chicken. These are bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs. All you need to do is put them down on a tray, season them generously, maybe a little more than you would with salt. You can also add pepper, you can also add spices, but I would recommend just sticking to salt. Then let them sit on a wire rack, completely exposed, in your fridge overnight. And then the next day, cook them however you like. You want to grill them, you want to roast them, you want to sear them, do that. And you'll notice you might just get the crispiest skin and most flavorful chicken you've ever cooked. At Sate, they cure 500 lbs of brisket with salt every week for their famous smoked brisket tacos. Later in this video, we'll see another secret hack that they use to take it from cured to tender, shredded meat. And then, of course, there are longer cures where you would then add curing agents like nitrites, nitrates, to make bacon or smoked meats. That would require measuring because some of those curing agents can kill you.
Is that nice? Big problem. Your flavors don't pop like restaurants do. It starts with two very basic things. The number one thing is always season your food to the maximum with salt. This is a non-negotiable. Any restaurant that undersalts anything that ships is not going to go beyond the pass if it's a good restaurant. But the real secret here is, once you've seasoned your food properly, the biggest thing that restaurants do to make their flavors pop is utilize acid. Lime juice, lemon juice, vinegar. I think a perfect example is with something simple like a vegetable. These shishito peppers are being lightly grilled, a little bit of char, cooked through. And at this point, you would season it with salt, maybe a little bit of spices like togarashi. But here's the kicker: a little bit of acid. We've got lime juice that we're adding to these. You can do lemon juice, you can do a little bit of vinegar. It seems so insignificant, like it's not going to do anything. This is going to go from basic salted vegetables to all of a sudden, it's like, "Oh, that's nice. I get a little pop of tartness. I want to go back for another bite." In a restaurant, this is a very common thing to do. Anytime that there's like a vegetable side, it's usually going to be dressed with salt, olive oil, lemon juice, or some form of acid to add some level of dynamic quality. That's exactly what Este in Austin, Texas does with their ceviche. They dress their Pomano or snapper with salt and fresh lime juice. They also add some other things like a splash of ice water for balance, carrot pico de gallo, more salt, and more lime. Then it's plated nicely with avocado, cilantro, and chili oil. But the key differentiator is the acid. And at Emmer & Rye, they use lemon juice to balance the fat of their beef belly ragu and fermented tomato water, which has more of an acidic quality to add to their take on a cacio e pepe. Pyn is going to come in and taste test two of these: one with acid, one without acid. First one, by far. Bright acidity goes well with, like, the subtle heat of the shishito. I feel like it makes the togarashi and salt come out more, amplifies everything. I'm telling you, this is what they do.
Moving on. Techniques exist to make things happen. Back in the day, we would take real long processes to make great sausage. But nowadays, we have science, and we have hydrocolloids. It's a scary word, but I promise you, it's not scary. It's literally just a nice magical powder, not the illegal kind. This is utilized through restaurants all over the world. A hydrocolloid can be many things. If it's an emulsifier, it will stay emulsifier. If it's a thickener, it will stay thicken. But I just want to focus on one as an example, and that is xanthan gum. Because anyone can buy it. Most grocery stores sell it. You can get it on Amazon really easily. So maybe you don't want to add a lot of fat to a sauce, but you want it to be thicker, or you want it to be emulsified. Like, let's say a hot sauce. I have my fermented Fresno hot sauce recipe. You can get that recipe, the link in the description. But if you just add a tiny little bit of xanthan gum when you're blending, it will never separate in the fridge. You will never have to shake it when you use it. It will always be emulsified and look nice with zero fat, zero calories. And that's just one hydrocolloid. Do your research and look at the rest.
Moving on. Why do raw fruits and vegetables, for some reason, somehow taste better at, like, a nice restaurant? Sure, you can pickle it, but the problem is that usually requires heat, and it also requires time. What if you need it quickly? What if you want a different kind of flavor that you can't really achieve through pickling? That's where compression comes in. You take a pickling liquid and you combine that with a vegetable or fruit. In this case, I have a cucumber sliced, and then I added to a vacuum sealer, vacuum seal it, and that's it. Instantaneously, we have pickled cucumbers. But it can be pickled with anything. They'll retain a much better crunch and get a cool-looking translucent look. They do something similar with the squash at Emmer & Rye. It gets "pickled" overnight by utilizing the vacuum sealer with vinegar, sugar, and aromatics. And it is the act of compression that really helps cut the richness of the smoked lamb pig's head carnitas. And at Este, they also use compression, but for something totally different. Instead of pickling, they use it to ferment chilies in a vacuum sealer for their fermented hot sauce. Then the bag just puffs up when it's ready to be used, and the chilies are blended with sugar, garlic, and white vinegar, strained a few times, and then served with fresh shucked oysters, mignonette, and a dark salsa. What about sweet fruits like pineapple, strawberry, or in this case, watermelon? What if it's not perfectly in season, or you maybe want it to be sweeter? You can literally compress the pineapple, watermelon, whatever, with its own fruit juice to give it more of its own additional flavor. Big brain thoughts: unripe fruit, compress it with its own juice, or compress it with a simple syrup, and it's going to taste like the greatest bite of fruit you've ever had.
How do restaurants make everything taste exactly the same every time? Some would say this doesn't apply to everyone. I think it actually is the most helpful tool you can have. This will work every time because you're going to use exact measurements every time you cook anything. This is useful in restaurants because it standardizes recipes. This is how you can rotate in different line cooks, different chefs, and the recipe still tastes the same. It's not just a recipe, it's an exact recipe down to the gram. And at Emmer & Rye, that exactness comes in handy for their 72-hour fermented heirloom grain sourdough. They make 18 per day. Every weekend, precision is key at Ramen Del Barrio too. Though all the salt flavor for their carnitas tonkotsu shoyu ramen comes from the carefully measured shoyu tare. It's so potent that they use exactly only 1 ounce or 28 grams of tare along with lard and tonkotsu broth, which flavors the whole bowl of ramen perfectly every time. For example, in this edamame sauce, we have exactly 5 grams of Thai chili, 25 grams of garlic, 25 grams of shallots. That's all going to go in a pan. We have a total of 100 grams of oil. We're just going to add a tiny bit of that, cook the vegetables, then we're going to add 150 grams of dashi, 25 grams of mirin, 25 grams of vinegar, 50 grams of shirodashi, and let that cook down. While that's cooking, we're going to put 70 grams of blistered jalapeños exactly in the blender. You don't want to be too spicy, right? You put the same amount of jalapeño, it's going to be exactly the same spicy. Then everything else goes in there, blend till smooth, and emulsify with the rest of your 100 grams of vegetable oil. You've used all the ingredients you measured out, and the product will be the same every time. You're making dinner for a group of friends, and you decided, "Hey, I'm going to cook 15 steaks or 15 chicken breasts." But you got to cook them all perfectly. How are you going to do that? How do restaurants do it? Sous vide. We all know this, we've all heard it. But I want to clarify something. This also applies to things outside of steak and chicken breast. It also applies to vegetables, it applies to eggs, it applies to many things. And the best part is, you can do this days in advance. So you get it to the perfect cooked temperature, and then all you have to do is take it out, put it in the fridge, and sear it when you're ready to sear it. Emmer & Rye takes sous vide next level with their Texas Wagyu bavette steak that gets seared and then rested in a beef fat bath, utilizing a sous vide circulator at 52°C or 125°F for about 20 minutes, keeping the beef moist, perfectly cooked, and ready to serve. Now, at Ramen Del Barrio, the sous vide octopus for their grilled octopus taco. First, it gets blanched to curl the tentacles and then broken down before being sealed in an aioli marinade and sous vide for 5 hours at around 74°C or 165°F. This ensures that after it's grilled, it's going to be super tender and perfectly cooked every time. Sous vide has a special place in my heart in the world of par cooking.
How do restaurants cook fried foods so fast, but at home, it takes a long time and it's not as crispy? The answer is par-frying, especially when it comes to big things that need to be fried, like fried chicken, where it can take sometimes 15 minutes to fry, like a whole chicken leg or chicken quarter. It's very basic. It could be any type of breading you want. Korean style, in this case, we have a TKO three-tier breading system. You're going to bread your chicken or whatever it is that you're breading, and then you're going to drop it in much lower temperature oil than usual, around 300 to 320° Fahrenheit, and you're just going to slowly let that cook just until the internals are cooked through and it starts to form a crust. You take it out, you drain it, and you can pop this in the fridge. You can leave this in the fridge for up to four days. And then when it comes time to actually serve and cook for people, all you got to do is take that same oil, clean it. This time, you're going to heat it up to 350 or 375°F, depending on what kind of heat you need, and you're going to drop it in again. You can do it straight from the fridge, that's totally fine, until it is golden brown and hot throughout. Because guess what? It's already fully cooked on the inside. You just got to get it crispy and brown on the outside, which only takes one to three minutes maximum. You just saved yourself a buttload of time. And by the way, that second fry is going to make it way crispier. I haven't even picked this up, and you can hear it.
How do you add intensity of flavor and an incredible texture to everything that you make without adding a lot of ingredients? There's an old-school way that's still used today, and it's called confit. Confit is a cooking technique. This applies to anything you can imagine: alliums like garlic and onion, high-sentiment meats like beef cheek, short rib, duck legs, chicken thighs. Anything you can cook for a relatively long time or slowly is going to benefit from a confit. And all it is is submerging something in a large body of fat like at a low temperature and cooking it slowly until it lightly caramelizes and cooks down. Remember I mentioned earlier we were going to show how Sate gets their smoked tacos from cured to super, super tender? Well, they use a confit method, which is slowly done in beef fat. And when it's time to plate, it gets seared and dropped onto a hand-pressed, hot corn tortilla, cooked to order, topped with guac, onions, and cilantro. One of my favorite tacos in Austin. This can also be a method of par cooking, but you can literally just take something out of the confit and eat it right away as well. You can also chill it in the fridge and reheat it. Confit was created to preserve, but what they didn't realize was that they created something delicious. Restaurants use this as a par cooking method, but they also use it to pull out a ton of flavor. When you cook something in a volume of fat, you're just slowly caramelizing the whole outside or slowly creating a 360° Maillard reaction on your proteins or caramelization on your vegetables. And I have two examples for you. Use any fat you like. It can be vegetable oil, or it could be beef fat, it can be duck fat. Here we have some melted duck fat, into which we are lowering some garlic, setting that on low heat, and just letting that barely cook until it's softened and caramelized like this. Now, on the other hand, something bigger like beef short rib. You can cook in tallow, maybe add some aromatics to it if you want, like garlic or black peppercorns or thyme. Lower in your short ribs, and you can cook that in a very low oven, around 275 to 300°F, or even on the stovetop at a low heat until it's incredibly tender, which will take probably an hour or two. But when you remove it, you'll have the most beautiful rib that honestly, eaten straight up, would be delectable. Or you can chill it and sear it the next day. That's hot.
Moving on. You want consistency and speed in the things that you cook. They're always good, and they come out very quickly. Or you want to grill something, but it's way too big, like a really thick carrot or a really thick piece of meat, and it would be burnt before it was cooked. What do you do? That's where par cooking comes in. Like at Emmer & Rye, where they par cook thick-cut squash before service to help with the quick plating of their roasted squash with peri-peri pepperonata, sunflower seeds, and guajillo chile. It's a two-step process. The first step is cooking it 80 to 90% of the way through with any method you want. That could be through roasting, any method of slow cooking, you can confit, whatever it is. And you're not worried about getting any color on it. You're doing it low, and you're just getting the internal temperature cooked up to where you need it to be. So, in the case of a carrot, you don't want it to be mushy, you want it to be just soft. And restaurants use this for the same two reasons: quick pickup times, meaning that they can kiss it on a grill real fast, get some color on it, and it's done. And it keeps consistency of product. The product will always be cooked perfectly, not overcooked, not undercooked. And it's something that you could do at home very easily. Don't you want that? So we're confiting our carrots in a large vat of fat with different aromatics, and we let them confit for about 20 to 30 minutes, very low, just until softened but with a little bit of bite. We then take them out, and then this is where the second stage comes in. Listen carefully. You can take that food and chill it and let it sit in the fridge for up to three days. And then whenever you're ready to actually serve it, then all you need to do is kiss it on a grill or in a hot pan or whatever you want, get some color on it, get it hot again, and it'll be perfectly cooked and perfectly seared.
This might be the biggest and yet most obvious solve. So you never make a nice dish that takes a long time to cook, like a braise or a roast, because you're at the stove all day long while your guests are chatting, and you're not with them. Or maybe you just don't want to spend any time cooking the day that you're eating. The evening before, the day before, two days before, if you have a braise or something that's getting slow-cooked, this is the perfect item to cook all the way through. All restaurants do this. None of them have ever made this the day of. And if they have, somebody's done up. So for example, like my barbacoa recipe, that's a great thing to make three days, four days in advance. All you do is the entire recipe all the way through, up until the point that you're making the tacos, making the braising liquid, adding your chilies, rehydrating them, blending it, braising your beef until it's all the way completely tender, even pre-shredding it if you like. Then all you have to do when the day comes that you're ready to eat is just heat everything back up in a pot, a pan, whatever, stuff your tacos, and serve. That is it. At Ramen Del Barrio, they'll tell you the same thing about the mole broth for their Tsukemen dipping ramen, which has so many steps and ingredients, you really would have probably the worst day of your life if you made this for service, to be honest. And at Emmer & Rye, you know, they're par cooking their huge Berkshire pork bellies in pork fat for a quick pickup during service. 90% of your time will really just be spent cleaning. The best part about that is all you really have to clean is a couple cooking utensils, a pot, and maybe a pan, because all the other utensils you use were used the day of cooking. The benefit is the day that you cook this, which needs to be a day or two before, you have the opportunity to dial all the flavors in. So everything can be cooked perfectly. The beef can be perfectly braised. If it needs a little longer, you can spend that time, and no one's going to be waiting. The day that you need to eat, including yourself.
But it doesn't end here. These are just some of the highlights that I love. There are many, many, many more out there. And if you want to see more of them, comment and let us know. But more specifically, subscribe. Goodbye. Love you.