Science Friday - Ask A Chef: How Can I Use Science To Make Thanksgiving Tastier?

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Do you ever wonder about the science behind making that perfect holiday meal? A lot of factors determine if a turkey gets golden, mashed potatoes turn fluffy, or a pie gets that crisp crust.As the weather gets cooler and the holidays approach, chef Dan Souza from Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen joins Ira to answer listener questions about the science behind holiday cooking.Ready for even more cooking science? Listen to a past episode about an oft-overlooked protein source—complete with the Science Friday staff’s favorite recipes. Plus, learn about six foods that might fill our plate in a warming climate. To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Science make your Thanksgiving dinner even better? Chef Dan Sousa thinks so. So the outside is getting exposed to the hot oil and crisping, but the inside is steaming at a relatively gentle temperature. So you get fabulous meat out of that as well. It's Thursday, November 16th, but would you take a look at that? Today is Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Kathleen Davis.

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, which is followed quickly by the December holiday season. So for a lot of us, that means we've got to get our planning together for the big meals that we'll be making. And of course, a lot of food science goes into making a holiday meal great. Ira Flato speaks with Dan Sousa, editor-in-chief of Chefs Illustrated. Ira and Dan are also joined by Sophie Bushwick, Technology Editor at Scientific American. Do you do a lot of cooking during the holiday season, Sophie? I honestly, I do a lot of, I'll be the sous chef a lot for my parents who host.

Thanksgiving. And so I'll, you know, I'll help out, but I usually am not the one doing the cooking. Okay. We're going to, hopefully a lot of folks will be asking questions. We usually get lots of questions here. And I want to bring on Dan Sousa, a chef of America's test kitchen based in Boston, Massachusetts. He's sticking around with us. He's also editor-in-chief of Cooks Illustrated. And as I say, we're answering your questions about the science behind cooking. Our favorite holiday foods, Our number, 844-8255, 844-Sy-Tock. You can also tweet us at SciFri, and let's go right to the phones because here's, I think, the most popular question we get. Sharon in Fairlawn, New Jersey.

Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. I have problems getting all of the turkey to come out right. If most of it comes out beautiful, some of it comes out wrong. and I have spent a fortune on fancy meat thermometers, and I know not to push the thing against the bone, and I know not to leave it too close to the surface, and I still get some coming out raw and some coming out just fine.

You are a good company. I can't tell you how many times I have asked this question in our listeners, and maybe Dan, tell us what we're doing wrong here. Yeah, so I want to take the blame off of the collar and off of you, I, because this is it's actually a really an issue of the turkey shape and size where and the muscle composition where you have the breast meat which is much leaner and needs to cook to about 160 to 165 degrees and then you have the dark meat which is denser and kind of tucked away under the bird and that needs to get to a higher temperature about 175 degrees in order to be nice so it's this

really tricky battle of trying to get these things to line up so but there are some strategies you can use. One that I think is really the simplest, a little bit of up front prep, but then you get a beautiful bird at the end is to spatchcock the bird or butterfly, it is another term. And so you're using some really strong kitchen shears. You're cutting out the backbone, flipping the turkey over so that all the skin is facing up and you're pressing down on the breastbone to flatten it out a little bit. And what's great about this method, you put it directly onto a sheet pan or a roasting pan, and the heat from the bottom of the metal goes right into the dark meat. So those thighs are kind of splayed out there.

And so they cook a lot more quickly than they normally would. And that should help things cook at the same pace. If you're running into issues where you're temping the breast and it's getting too hot by the time, you know, waiting for the dark meat to come up, it's really helpful to make a kind of a, almost a heart-shaped little shield out of aluminum foil that you can pop over the top of the breast. And that reflects off some of the radiant heat coming from the oven. And that will actually slow down the cooking of that delicate breast meat while you wait

for the dark meat to come up. Interesting. So using a combination of those two things, you can really dial it in and kind of control those variables. My question about spatchcocking is that I know about spatch cocking chickens, but turkeys can be really big.

So do you ever run into an issue with spatch cocking like a really big bird and not being able to fit it on the pan? Yeah. So if you're working with a really large bird, that can definitely be tricky. We really love to look for birds that are in like a 12 to 14 pound range.

So it's on the smaller side. And if you want to do like, if you're serving a lot more people doing a separate roasting pan that has, you know, some thighs in it or another chicken breast, the reason being these problems we're talking about, they get exacerbated as you go up in size on the bird because you have so much more volume to get through in terms of cooking that breast. So, but as batchcock, you know, 12 to 14 pound bird will absolutely fit nicely in a roasting pan or on a sheet pan. Good question. Yeah, good answer too. Let's go. Let's go to Baltimore County, Maryland. to Woodstock there. Hi. Welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, good afternoon. Yeah, my question is for Dave Sousa about how to avoid the airplane hanger effect in a two crust from scratch apple pie. Wow. What, what, Ted, tell it. What is that, Woodstock, what is that effect? Describe it to us, people who are looking at the radio now. You got the top crust of your apple pie. It's finished. baking. It is a big dome. It's domed up. It looks like a Norman Rockwell painting. And then you let

the pie cool. You cut into it and it's just a big pocket air. And there's a sad thing of apple filling lying down in the bottom crust. Wow. That sounds tragic. Yeah, I think I heard Julie with Chris Kimball years ago refer to it as an airplane hanger effect. And I assume that that was the the official term in the bakery trade. Well, Dan, it sounds like we have a heat physics question here. Yeah, this is a great question. And I actually have never heard it referred to as the airplane hanger, but I knew immediately what you were talking about.

It's a really good visual, that huge kind of gap between the filling and the crust of the top. So the reason this happens is the apples are collapsing during baking, but that crust sets in shape much earlier in the process. And so there's actually a really nifty technique that we've employed in some of our recipes where we take advantage of a food science phenomenon called persistent firmness, where if calcium and pectin-rich, some pieces of produce that are calcium and pectin-rich, if you heat them to a low temperatures, usually are in like the kind of 130 to 150 range, and you let them hang there for about 20 to 30 minutes, you kind of reinforce some of the,

some of that pectin and those bonds. And so that even after you heat it to a higher temperature later, they'll maintain more of that their structure and they won't collapse as much. So an easy way to do it is to get a little butter going in a skillet and throw your apples in there and sugar, toss, toss, toss until everything's kind of nice and warm, not super hot but warm, cover it and let it sit for about 20 minutes off heat and then use that in your pie. And it works remarkably well. You'll find that you will have much less of an airplane hanger effect than a much fuller slice of pie. You're civil engineering your pie.

Pie is a big engineer. feet. So that makes sense. Let's go to Wayne in Queens, New York. Hi, Wayne. Wayne? Yes, go ahead. Oh, hello. How you doing? Thank you for taking my call. Quick question. I have, you know, I guess I have a vegan family members, and, you know, Thanksgiving Day has a lot of meat and a lot of heavy meals. And I need to shed a few pounds myself. I want to know, do you guys have, like, a recipe for keeping in the family of

Gorge, like we were talking earlier? For a butternet squash with not so much heavy cream. and stuff like that, something that's relatively light that I could make easily. Good question. Okay. Thank you for calling. Yeah. What do you do for vegetarians and maybe something with butternut squash? Dan, got something there? Absolutely. Yeah. And honestly, I think there's so many great sides for for vegetarians. You almost don't even need a main. You know, I think turkey gets a lot of the credit, but we all come to the table for those sides. But a really nice way to treat butternut squash is a recipe I did a long time ago where you peel it and then slice it thin so you have kind of quarter inch thick slices of it.

Lay them out on a sheet pan with a bunch of olive oil. If you don't want to use butter, that's fine. And roast them low in the oven so they get nice browning, especially on the bottom. And take them out, they get nice and tender and then spread them out on a platter and they're basically a canvas for flavor. So I love doing hazelnuts on top and chives and lemon, but you could do like a really nice tahini and lemon. in situation. It's kind of up to you at that point how you want to top them. But it really makes the squash front and center that and that nice browning. And you're not adding more sweetness to it because it's already sweet enough. So you're going with nice savory combinations on top.

And it's gorgeous platter to put out for the table. Yeah, you don't have to do that on Thanksgiving. You can use that. I'm getting hungry listening. I also really like that. Yeah, a lot of times something that's already sweet, like the sweet potatoes and marshmallows on top. Why did we start putting marshmallows on top? It's true. I know, I know. I mean, it takes it fully in dessert territory. Not that I won't totally go for that dish. All family recipes. That's what happened. Yeah.

All right. Let's go to Rochester, New York. Julie, hi. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Go ahead. So I'm now vegetarian, but many years ago, over 20 years ago, I cooked my first and only turkey. and I didn't know what I was doing, so I got a very large turkey, and I didn't defrost it for long enough. So what I ended up doing was, I know this is really bad, but in an attempt to, like, get all the stuff inside out and make sure it was ready for the oven, I ended up running it underwater and kind of aggressively defrosting it. So my question is, how close did I come to food poisoning all of my guests? Oh, wow.

That's some deep forensic research we have to do here to figure that out. You know, you definitely obviously want to be careful with poultry and thawing and all that. And the best way, if you can, is to just put it in your fridge long enough ahead of time that it's going to be totally thawed out. So you don't have to be, you know, running underwater and stuff like that. But there's a couple things with food safety. So there's obviously how you handle it beforehand and you don't want to keep it at a warm temperature for more than two hours. you want to keep it refrigerated. But the final step in all this process is the cooking.

And so if you, you know, I've messed up a little bit along the way, as long as you cook that bird to a high enough internal temperature. And what we really shoot for is 165 will get it done in less than a second. And that's the, that's why the USDA kind of recommends that. You can go a little bit lower than that as long as it stays at that temperature long enough. So 160 degrees, if you're there for, you know, I think it's something like a minute and a half, but go for like five minutes or more, it'll kill the same number of bacteria in terms of cell and out. So that final step is the most crucial. So yes, you want to thought in your

fridge if you can. And if you're doing it last minute under running water, you can put it in cold water. And every 30 minutes, you want to change that out for fresh cold water just to make sure that the temperature isn't climbing up to much. That's kind of best practices. But yeah, that final step using a good instant re-thrumometer and looking for the right safe temp is key. I hate it when I poison my guests. Well, when I heard this story. No one wants that. I heard, I thought this was going to be worse.

I thought it was going to be a case of a partially frozen turkey being deep fried and exploding. Oh, that's a soil. I mean, are you pro or anti deep frying turkey in general? Oh, me. Deep frying is a fabulous method to, um, to cook a turkey as long as you can do it safely, right? So you have, you have the, the fire set up far away from the house. You're working with a very dry. bird. Obviously, you don't want ice and water involved there. And you have the right rig and set

up for it. Your pot's not, you know, overfilled with oil. But it's an incredibly efficient way. It can cook a turkey and, you know, probably half the time it takes to roast it. You do get great skin. And, you know, what frying is really a steaming method. So the outside is getting exposed to the hot oil and crisping. But the inside is steaming at a relatively gentle temperature. So you get fabulous meat out of that as well. I think that's what we're doing. Be careful. Yeah. We're doing that this year. We've had, we've done it a few times. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about people making their Thanksgiving food and lots of questions. Let's go to Maine. Rob in Maine, welcome to Science Friday. Hey, good afternoon.

Thank you. I'm located in Caribou, Maine, northern Euristic County. We're a big time potato production up here. This time of year, friends and neighbors and family and everybody's got 50 pounds of potatoes all over the place of all different kinds of varieties. And I was wondering if if you'd be willing to discuss different varieties and their best intended uses. We have bakers and friars and mashers and sweet potatoes. Yeah, that'd be interesting to hear. Okay. Thanks for calling, Rob.

Absolutely. Well, I have family from up in Maine, not quite that far up, but I love Maine potatoes. So I really appreciate this call. So there are really three categories that you're going to see in most supermarkets, and we can break them down basically on their starch content. And so you have at the high end of the starch range, you have russet potatoes. In the middle you have Yukon Golds or kind of an all-purpose potato. And then you have your red potatoes, which can be different colors, but they're the small, creamy ones.

And so you're looking about 20% starch by weight up in the russets, and then 18 and 16 as you kind of go down there. And that really determines the final texture that they cook up to. So you have russets, they'll fracture a lot as they cook and you get that dry, fluffy texture. So they're fabulous for mashed potatoes because they can soak up so much richness. They're also really ideal for roasting and getting that crisp texture and for French fries because they have kind of a lower moisture content proportionally. On the other, you know, the far end of the spectrum with the red potatoes, they are, they really hold their shape well because they don't have as much starch.

They don't break up into that fluffy texture. They remain really creamy. So potato salads are fabulous with, and they're really good in soups because they hold together. So that's those. And then the all-purpose potato, the Yukon Gold is the most common one, really sits in the middle. And so you can make a great mash with it. You can roast it. It will hold it shape relatively well in a salad.

But, you know, if you're unsure, Yukon Gold is a pretty safe place to go. But if you're, you know, baking a potato, you want to go for your russets. You're definitely going to do a salad. The reds are nice. Well, in your experience with all this Thanksgiving food, what is the easiest thing to make for somebody who's starting out making a Thanksgiving meal? the easiest thing. I mean, I think good mashed potatoes are pretty easy. I would probably go for that.

And what makes good mashed potatoes? So I think you're starting with your potatoes. Cut to about the same size. That's really key. So if you can make them smaller slices, they just need to be the same dimension so that you don't get some parts overcooking while the other parts not cook through.

You want to start them in cold, well-salted water, bring it up, and then don't boil it. Just kind of a, you know, just a simmer there. So you don't break them apart. strain them off and you want to process them while they're still hot. So going through a riser or a food mill will give you a really smooth texture. And then add your butter first, which will help coat some of that starch before you add your milk or your cream to it.

And that helps it so stay really nice and fluffy as opposed to getting gummy or too dense. And then use plenty of salt, season up with salt. And make them, you know, no more than an hour before dinner. And if you do make them ahead of time, put them in a pot. I mean, put them in a bowl over a pot of simmering water so that they stay nice and hot. That's kind of the key there. I think that's a pretty easy one to start with. Yeah.

And, you know, something about food that tastes better the second day, some of the turkeys and whatever. Well, it's true. And you have to make everything so you can make that Thanksgiving sandwich in the evening, right? I mean, that is, the meal is good, the meal is good, but the sandwich is great. Yeah, I agree. I think that the leftovers are, they taste better as leftovers than they do the day or, of Thanksgiving, and I don't know why, but they do.

Yeah, well, you know, all those sauces and whatever, take time to they sit there. Yeah, the flavors have to meld together, I guess. They sink in. Well, so fair. They definitely do, yeah. Yeah, is that well known? I mean, it's not just our imagination, Dan. No, not at all, not at all, especially in something like a stew where, you know,

you have big pieces of meat kind of in there and you get flavor penetration from the sauce going into it and kind of vice versa. So, no, it's, it's fact. you know, a stew will taste better the next day. And, you know, there's some recipes in stews that will go, you know, a few days and taste their best. So, yeah, there's truth to that. That's great. Dan, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today and for all your advice.

Oh, it was a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Dan Suza, editor-in-chief of Cooks Illustrated. Also, Sophie, thank you for hanging out with us today. It's been a pleasure. Sophie Bushwick Technology Editor at Scientific American. And that's it for today. A lot of folks helped make the show happen, including...

Nehima Ahmed. Santiago Flores. Rasha Ridi. Phyllisomears. Robin Kasmir. And many more. Tomorrow, guest host, Flora Lickman, will tell us all about the biggest science stories of the week

with science journalist Swapnakrishna. Until then, I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. We'll catch you later.