Science Friday - SciFri Extra: Add A Dash Of Science To Your Thanksgiving Recipes

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

This Thanksgiving, put your cooking skills to the test. Looking for tips to avoid singed sweet potatoes, acrid apple pies, and a burned bird? In this 2016 conversation from the SciFri archive, Molly Birnbaum and Dan Souza from Cook’s Science help us understand the science behind favorite Thanksgiving recipes so you can avoid food failures, and get the most out of your roast and side dishes. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi, Ira here. Now that you've gorged yourself on leftover Halloween candy, you might be prepping for that next big food holiday, Thanksgiving, and stressing out about how to cook your turkey, right, to a safe temperature, but not dry it out. Should you deep fry it, brine, break it up into pieces and roast? Lots of decisions, but never fear we and science have you covered. We're dipping back into the SciFri archives to bring you some science-based cooking tips. to cut down on the holiday stress. With this conversation we originally aired back in 2016. Catherine, this turkey tastes half as good as it looks. I think we're all in for a very big treat. Why are you crying? I told you we put it in too early.

It's just a little dry. It's fine. I told you. Here's the heart. That's one of my favorite scenes in any movie. That was, of course, Clark Griswold, Master of the Disaster Holiday Meal. And while this scene from National Lampoon's Christmas vacation is one of the funniest, I think,

it ain't when it happens to you, is it? We've all been there. You've roasted a perfectly golden brown turkey. You've basted it for hours. Cooked it low and slow and resisted opening that door every five minutes. And when you finally called, carve it up and take that first taste, you get that sad, stringy bite. The one that makes it reach for the gravy, right?

A glass of water. Well, we're here to help you this holiday to become a master of your roast. And I'm not just talking about the turkey. We're going to tackle side dishes, too, the unsung heroes of any Thanksgiving meal. What can you do to balance the sweetness on your sweet potatoes? Which apples are best for baking? How can you create a broiler map? Yeah, we all need this to tell you the hot spree.

spots in your oven. My next guests are here to add a dash of science to our recipes. Molly Burnbaum and Dan Sousa are co-editors of the new book, Cook Science. How to Unlock Flavor in 50 of our favorite ingredients from America's Test Kitchen. They join

me here in our CUNY studios. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having us. Don't you love that scene in that movie? Oh, my God. That's one of my favorite movies of all time. I watch it every season before Christmas. It gets it right on. Oh, yeah. That thing just opens up and and then the scene after where they're all chewing the skin

and pouring cups of gravy on it, it's priceless. How common, as foodologists, how common is that? Kind of mistake with the turkey. So I think that goes a little bit too far, but I think a lot of people have a difficult time with turkey. I mean, for one thing, people really cook it pretty much once a year, so you don't kind of learn the mistakes and then apply those next year. So you've got to start with a really good recipe to get good results.

So is that the first biggest mistake? Get a good recipe. Yeah, start with a well-tested recipe, I think is key. And if you try it one year and you make a little change, make note of it, and then kind of follow through on that next year. But turkey itself poses some challenges in that it's really an odd thing to roast in terms of its shape and in terms of the composition of its muscle. So if you look at the breast, which is primarily white meat, those muscles are made for flight, which turkeys don't do very much, but they're kind of fast-switch muscles.

They're very lean and they can dry out really quickly. Then the legs, which do a lot more work, have a lot more connective tissue, more myoglobin, more oxygen goes there. And those need more heat to break down. So you're trying to roast two things at once and have them both be done perfectly. It's kind of an odd challenge. And a helpful solution is what? How to do that? We have a few helpful solutions for that.

One of the most easy things to do is actually break down the turkey a little bit so that you roast the breast separately from the legs. You can roast them all in the same pan. But if you separate them, they end up finishing right around the same time when the breast reaches 165 or so, and the legs reach 175 or so degrees Fahrenheit. And just having them separately because the breast is so much bigger, it cooks a little bit slower. Now, one of the real problems I have found over the years is finding the actual temperature of the oven. Yes. You know, my ovens are off of 25, 50 degrees sometimes. So that thermometer is really important to go in.

If it says roast to it for X number hours at 350, you better know that your oven is only 325, right? 100%. Yeah. Ovens go out of calibration really easily. And when was the last time you calibrated your oven? Oh. Hmm. Right?

Yeah. I think most people... I don't even know how to do that. Right. How do that? It depends on the oven. You know, in the owner's manual, which I'm sure you still have. Of course.

We would tell you that. But we find that an oven thermometer that you put in there is really important. So you want a nice new one in there. And, you know, you can adjust your oven based on what the read. and you're getting out of it. And that's an easy way to kind of make it work. And then you can have a professional calibrated as well. But they can vary a ton.

They're not the most accurate instrument in the kitchen. But another thermometer that's really important is a digital instant read thermometer. And that's for taking the temperature of the bird itself when it's close to done. And that's super important because you really can't judge it any other way. And you're going to mess it up if you don't know. You want to pull it at 160, 165 in the white meat. That's the safe temperature. Anything over that, you're not doing it any favors.

And let me just remind it. everybody. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International, talking with Dan Sousa and Molly Burnbaum of Cook Science, How to Unlock Flavor in 50 of our favorite ingredients. And, you know, when you cook in the oven, the oven is full. It is really chocked full of stuff with the side dishes, but yet it's uneven temperature in different places. How do you know where it's hot and where it's cold? Can you do something? Sure. So one thing is most turkeys can rest for a really long time after they come out of the oven. So it's really nice to get your turkey done and let it rest up to an hour even. It's so big, huge thermal mass, it'll stay warm for a long

time, freeze up your oven to do a lot of other stuff. But if you're using your broiler, which is great for finishing the top of casseroles on Thanksgiving, and it's the fastest cooking method you can do in the oven. We came up with a really cool technique. We call it a broiler map. So on a rimmed baking sheet, you line it with white bread, and you put it the distance from the broiler that you're going to put your food, and you turn the broiler on and you let it go until some part of the bread is basically burnt. Take it out, and you'd be amazed at how uneven it is. But you really get to see what parts get hot, what parts are cool,

so when you're broiling something, you can adjust and put the food in just the right place. We asked our Twitter audience for some questions in advance, and we've got a couple here. Lyndon asks, is it really worthwhile to bring the meat up to room temperature before cooking? No, it's not totally necessary to bring the turkey up to room temperature before cooking. I think the most important thing is the temperature at which you take it out of the oven. So getting that breast meat to around 160, 16, and getting the legs to 170, 175. It might take just a little bit longer if the turkey is colder when you put it in.

But other than that, it doesn't really matter. Our own Jen Kwok asks, does Basing really do anything? It seems to just drip off. It does do something, but it's not really what you want it to do. So what Basing does is you put a hot liquid on the outside of it, and you actually get evaporative cooling. It evaporates off, just like water. on our skin on a hot day, and it cools the surface down.

So it'll actually slow down the speed of cooking of your turkey, which is not really something you want necessarily. It also adds liquid to the exterior, and what you're trying to do is drive moisture out of the skin so that it can then crisp and brown. So you don't need a base. It's kind of a waste of time. That's kind of a waste of time. Okay, that's a good answer.

You've got plenty of other things to do on Thanksgiving. No bother basing. Let's go to NICO in San Francisco. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for taking my call. My question is about brining. I know brining all meat and to make it more tender,

but it's so counterintuitive. You'd think sodium would actually make it drier. How does brining actually work? It seemed like salt would pull the moisture out of the meat. Right, right. And sometimes it does. So if you want to dry salt your turkey, what happens first is the salt pulls the moisture out,

but then it forms a concentrated brine, and then the salt starts to move into the turkey through diffusion. And that's what happens in a brine. as well, a water salt mixture. And as the salt moves into the turkey, it actually changes some of the proteins in there, helping them to hold on to water more easily so that when you cook it, it maintains more moisture. And it also seasons the turkey throughout as the salt moves in throughout the whole turkey. It's also really important the percentage of your brine.

So we use one in a test kitchen that's usually between 6% and 9%. If you go too high, you are just drawing moisture out. There's enough dissolved solids inside of muscle fibers that the water, through osmotic pressure still wants to go in, but if it gets too high, it's going to pull it out. So what cup per water is that, 6 to 9%? Oh, you're quizzing me. Off the top of my head. Yeah, I'm not sure up the top of my head.

Well, we'll find that during the break. Yes, definitely. I got to look it up in the book. Look it up. The book is Cook Science, How to Unlock Flavor in 50 of our favorite ingredients, talking with Dan Sousa and Molly Burnbaum. On number 844-724-825, hoping a little bit of research in science will help you get a better and more flavorful turkey as well as other side dishes. We'll get to you and also tweet us at SciFri. We'll be back right after

this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. This hour we're talking about how to roast the perfect bird and all those side dishes this holiday. Molly Burnbaum and Dan Sousa are walking us through a few tips. They're co-editors of the new book, Cook Science, How to Unlock Flavor in 50 of our favorite ingredients from America's Test Kitchen. Let's go to the green part. I'm try to sneak into some healthy stuff into the meal. You can make a kale salad. It's not your typical side dish, but I'm learning now that you massage your kale, Molly. Is that what you do with kale? You massage your? That is definitely something you can do with your kale. So kale has two issues that I think make it hard to love it raw in a salad. One is that it's kind of tough,

and the second that it can be very bitter. And to help with the toughness of kale, massaging it, actually running your fingers over it to help the leaves loosen up a little bit. You can use a rolling pin over a bag. It really helps tenderize the leaves. But what happens when you do that is it makes the flavor of kale a little bit more bitter. And that's because the flavor of kale really only happens when you start to damage the cells within it, because then an enzyme interacts with a sulfur-containing compound to create a totally new compound that they wouldn't interact if the cells weren't damaged.

But this new compound is very bitter. I see you've got a bag. Is that a bag of kale? I do have a bag of kale. We brought you kale. We have two samples of kale here. One, we worked really hard on figuring out how to get kale to taste less bitter. Right. All right, I've got one sample here.

You have one sample there. That is raw kale that has just been lightly torn up for a salad. And this might not, neither of them might be super pleasant because there's no dressing or anything, but that is just kale that's been washed and torn up. Taste okay. Taste green. Exactly. It tastes healthy. Okay.

Now this one. This one is massaged. Massaged kale. Massaged kale. And so what we did is... Wow, it is much more bitter. Mm-hmm. Mm.

We need dressing. Dressing. Yeah, I mean, sometimes adding a lot of dressing to very bitter kale can help. And so one thing we did in the book was trying to figure out how to make kale less bitter. And we discovered that rinsing it after you massage it and create. all this bitter flavor can lessen the bitterness of the kale. Well, this happened to other vegetables that you, you know, maybe broccoli or anything like that, too?

Well, it's interesting. It's interesting. There's a number of different vegetables that kind of go through this. So in the Braska family, which kale is and cabbage, they really don't have flavor until you damage the cell. So you can control that. The same thing is true with alliums. So your onions, garlic, shallots, the more you cut those, the more intense the flavor is

going to be. even how you slice an onion, whether you slice it pole to pole or the opposite direction can actually change the amount of flavor. So there's a lot of vegetables that kind of fall into that camp. Another favorite is a green bean casserole. I love that. It's sort of cooped up with mushroom soup. Everybody uses mushroom soup in something. Of course.

You say try roasting the green beans. Why is that good for bringing out the flavor? Well, green beans are interesting in that they're a very hearty vegetable. and that's because most of their texture comes from the fact that we're eating the pod and not the immature seeds within them. And because of this, you can roast them for a long time and actually keep the texture and keep them together so that they stay intact. And this is because they have a lot of cellulose and pectin in this pod.

So roasting them for a longer time or brazing them allows them to soak up the flavor of the brazing liquid in a really nice way. so you can let them in the oven for a long time still get really good flavor. Let's go to the phones to Rachel in Pittsburgh. Hi, Rachel. Hi. I'm looking forward to bringing a side dish to my boyfriend's Thanksgiving. And I was really wanting to make the kind of quintessential sweet potato,

marshmallow, nut sort of casserole. But it always ends up tasting more like a dessert instead of a side. So I was wondering if you all had to be a potato, marshmallow, nut sort of casserole. So I was wondering if you'll have any suggestions about making it a little less sweet. Well, that's a tricky one. When you put marshmallows on it, you're almost kind of asking for that dessert aspect to it. But, I mean, the one thing that's really interesting about sweet potatoes is that they kind of change. From when you pick them, they're relatively high in starch and low in sugar.

And then during storage, there's an enzyme called amylase that converts some of that starch to sugar. So they get sweeter during storage and then a little bit sweeter during cooking. So longer, slower cooking can increase their sweetness a little bit. So I would recommend that you want to cook them actually relatively quickly. So if you're going to make them mashed first and then put them in the casserole, you know, put them into the water, bring them right up and boil them and get them done that way, as opposed to, you know, slow roasting or anything like that. And then I would have to say leaving up the marshmallows will probably help you at a lot.

It's not really a potato, is it, a sweet potato? Is it a real potato? Yeah? Yeah, it's in the potato family. But, yeah, it is quite different than white potatoes. And it's not the same as yams. Those are often names that are lumped together, but sweet potatoes and yams are totally different. One is more starchy than the other?

Yes. And yams are enormous. They're like the size of a small car. That's an exaggeration, but they're much, much bigger than sweet potatoes. I see if I can get a lot of it. I'm going to keep that vision. It's good at Val in Sacramento. Hi, Val.

So my question is, I have a whole bunch of apples that are, besides making apples, juice and apple pie. I have no idea what to do with them. And for the holiday, I was wondering, how could I incorporate those apples into side dishes or other food besides apple pie and apple juice? I love my apple pie, though. Yeah, what else can you do with apples besides? You know, you go apple picking, you're coming home with a bushel. You are. You're coming home with a lot. Well, so it really depends on what the kind of apples that you pick, actually. So we did a really interesting test in the book where we figured out we baked a huge variety of apples, and we also cooked them suede in little bags at 185 degrees, which is the temperature at which pectin breaks down very rapidly.

And we saw a huge difference between like the red delicious, golden delicious apples, which turned a mush very, very fast and are great for something like applesauce. And Granny Smiths, Pink Ladies, and Honeycrisp, which are on the other end, which stay firm for a long time. So those are great for baking. You can bake them whole. You can kind of core them out and use some of that apple chopped up with other more savory flavor stuffed back in. Those make a really nice baked apple. We also have in the book a really nice French apple tart, which is a little bit different than an apple pie.

It uses golden delicious and they're nice and soft. There's a mash underneath and then some softened ones on top. And that's a little more elegant, I think, than an American apple pie. It's a beautiful tart. This tart that are shaped in a rosette on top. And it's actually quite easy to make. Taughtal pum, as they say. Exactly.

We'll leave the pronunciations to you on that. I love that one in those of hours. Let's go to Cleveland, Ohio. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, my name is Renee, and I, first of all, I'm a huge fan of America's Test Kitchen. We watch it all the time. Awesome. My question is regarding the Myard reaction, how does that actually improve the flavor of your food?

And then kind of along the same lines with brining your food, put like sugar or honey or maple syrup, does that actually impart the flavor since those molecules are so much bigger than salt or are you wasting good maple syrup? These are both really good questions. So for the myard one, what's kind of happening during that reaction is you have amino acids reacting with reducing sugars, which are really small sugars. And it improves the flavor because it creates hundreds of new flavor compounds. There's a few reactions that go on during it. And you, get creation of compounds and then destruction and creation even more, and you end up with

something that is really, really complex. If you compare that to something like caramelization, which is just sugar, it's infinitely more interesting flavor. So that's what's going on with the myard reaction. In terms of brining sugar, yes, sugar will move a bit into the meat. It has a little bit of the same effect of salt in terms of pulling moisture out. So we do include sugar in a fair number of our brines. You have to be careful if you're doing something that you're going to roast at a relatively high temperature because you can get additional browning, whether you want it or not, if you add sugar. We like it on pork a lot because that sweetness works really well with it. Let's see if we get one last call or two in.

Let's go to Washington, D.C. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi. Hi, there. I got an idea I try. I think it's terribly easy. Well, I have a roasting pan that's roughly the same width as my bird, and I just cook it upside down or with the breast side down. And it seems like the juices of the turkey.

keep the breast moist, and when the leg's done, the whole thing's done, and no fuss, no must. I like that. Wow. Yeah. So I think that that's great, and you're definitely exposing that dark meat to, you know, the heat that's in the oven and protecting the breast underneath. I mean, the one problem there is you're probably not getting great browning on the skin. So a lot of our recipes, we start that way down, and we give the dark meat a head start

and then flip it about halfway through, so you get a little more even cooking, which is also nice. We also have an interesting recipe that we published recently in which you use a baking stone heated up really hot in the oven. Like a pizza with pizza on? Yeah, exactly. And you have that underneath the roasting pan, so you still have the breast up but the legs down. So it gets much hotter on the bottom. And so the legs cook a little bit more quickly and it all finishes at the same time. Wow.

That's a great tip. I'm saying, wow. Let's talk about leftovers because we're going to have a few. You know, everything seems to taste better. doesn't it? A lot of stuff does. Is that in our mind, or is there really something going on in the chemistry of what's going on in the dish? There really is something going on with it.

And I actually don't know a ton about the chemistry behind it. Sometimes you can get these kind of warmed over flavors that aren't very pleasant, but things like stews, a lot of times the flavors just get a lot more complex. In terms of like flavor movement going into things, I think that I think it's a good method. for a lot of stews and soups and those of that. If you want some great methods, I suggest you, get a copy of Cook Science, how to unlock flavor in 50 of our favorite ingredients

from America's Test Kitchen. You can read an excerpt of the book about the best baking apples. Yeah, a lot of different apples in there. Jonathan's are my favorite. It's on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash Thanksgiving. Molly Burnbaum and Dan Suza co-editors of Cook Science. Thank you for coming back.

Thanks so much for having us. Yeah, thank you. Nice to have you. That conversation, was recorded in 2016. Here's hoping that whatever you cook for your holiday feast, it turns out to be delicious. And on our list and on our list of things to be thankful for, you, our listeners. Hope you have a very happy Thanksgiving this year.

I'm Ira Flato in New York.