The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Mailbag Part 3

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

When is it OK to yuck someone’s yum? Garlic and ginger hacks. How to turn your kid into a lifelong cook. Kenji and Deb answer your questions in another mailbag. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hey, podcast listeners. I'm Chris Morocco, food director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious and host of the Dinner SOS podcast. Each week on the show, we bring the expertise of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen to your kitchen. And this season, we've got a little something for everyone. We're debating whether spring produce is actually worth all the hype. There are ramps, which I genuinely do love the flavor of ramps, but now it's like, I don't know, is it cool to love ramps anymore?

Solving your hosting anxieties. People aren't coming over to like judge me on the cabinets that I did not choose, you know? Like they're coming over and if they want to judge me, they can judge me on my lasagna. And that is gonna rule. And helping you become a better baker with our BA Bake Club episodes. Caramel, you really have to be fearless. You have to be fine with burning the sugar

because once you add those additional ingredients, it'll sort itself out. So join us every week on Dinner SOS. And if you have a culinary conundrum, let us help. Email us at podcasts at bonappetit.com. Happy cooking. From PRX's Radiotopia, this is The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, where we help you discover your own perfect recipes.

Today on The Recipe, we're going to answer some questions from you, our listeners. We love hearing from you guys, so let's just dive right in. Anna from Queen says, In my family, we enjoy eating raw ground beef, but whenever it comes up in conversation, people act grossed out and tell me that it's not safe. Tell me the truth, is that weird? I don't think either one of those things is particularly weird. I don't think it's weird to eat raw beef because, you know, steak tartare is raw beef, carpaccio is raw beef, steak tataki is essentially raw beef.

A lot of times, you know, if you get a rare steak or a rare hamburger, the center of it's going to be raw beef. So it's not that strange to eat raw beef. It's also not that strange to be grossed out by it. I think particularly if the raw beef that you're eating is ground beef that you just bought from the supermarket. From a safety perspective, food safety is a spectrum, right? There's risk anytime you put something in your mouth that it's going to be contaminated with some kind of pathogen. And so what you're doing when you're eating is you're really sort of controlling for that

risk. The government does a lot of that work for you. It makes sure that foods are prepared in clean environments. It has certain safety standards that work for you. It makes sure that foods are prepared in clean environments. It has certain safety standards that should be maintained. But at the end of the day, there are riskier and less risky things to be putting in your body. When it comes to meat, any kind of meat is going to be pathogen-free in the center. So if you have a beef roast, unless the animal was diseased or unless there was some kind of cut, the only pathogens on it are going to be on the surface of that meat, which means that the inside should be sterile. So technically, if you take that meat, if you take a steak and you cook it, it's perfectly

safe to eat once just the outside has been seared because the inside is going to be completely sterile. You've just killed all the pathogens on the outside. The problem with ground meat is that when you grind meat, you are grinding the stuff on the outside onto the inside. So it's really difficult to separate those two things from each other. It's difficult to sear the meat in a way that it's going to just take care of the outside.

So there's a few ways to reduce your risk. One of them is to grind the meat yourself. So buy a whole piece of meat, trim off just the outside, and then grind the inside, and that's going to be safe to eat. So you're really only taking what could potentially be contaminated on the outside of one piece of meat. The most risky way to do it is to buy ground meat that's pre-packaged because when you buy ground meat

that's pre-packaged, likely there are several different cuts of meat potentially coming from several different animals even that have all been sort of ground together and put into that package. And you don't know whether that was ground at a facility and has been sitting there for a few days versus very freshly ground um so you're increasing your risk because you're exposing yourself to more potential sources of contamination when you buy pre ground meat so I would say

that if you're going to eat ground meat you want to make sure that it was very freshly ground if you want to be absolutely safe what you can do is buy a whole cut of meat get a pot of boiling water, and very quickly dunk that whole cut of meat into the boiling water just to kill the bacteria on the outside. About two seconds will do it. Then take it out, cube it up on a clean cutting board with a clean knife and feed it into your meat grinder or into whatever sort of chopping tool you want to use. And that should be about as safe as eating ground meat can get. Also don't yuck people's yum. I mean, there's a lot of fear of contamination,

which is brightly placed of unsafe food, but it doesn't mean that just because somebody didn't grow up eating it, that it's, you know, you wouldn't point and go icky at some other cultures food. So I would think the same thing would apply here too. My first restaurant job was at a Mongolian grill. It was one of those places that has like a raw meat bar that you go and like put meat into a bowl

and then you bring it to the me at the center by the round grill and they cook it for you. There was this guy who used to come in every Sunday who would always wear vampire themed t-shirts, had long scraggly back hair, had his two canine teeth filed down into like vampire fangs. Okay. Would go over to the raw meat bar, take, fill up a bowl with raw beef

and then just stand there like staring at us and eating the raw beef. It was very clearly like a person who wanted us to see that he was eating the raw beef. Hence the stare down. Yeah, but he did it every Sunday. Mm. That's my whole story.

Wow. Question number two. Katie from Wichita, Kansas says, I don't cook with ginger very much. Every time I buy it, I use a thumb-sized piece and the rest of it ends up going bad. Can I substitute ginger powder or crystallized ginger? And I actually, I was in the same situation

because I just wasn't going through ginger fast enough. And my friend Rayneux suggested that I freeze it and that's what I do now. I just freeze the, however much ginger I have, like the whole piece, you know, skin on everything. And I actually, it's so easy. I feel like it stays really fresh. And then I actually just grate it as I need it.

It's much easier to grate because it's frozen. So it really turns powdery and grater very quickly. I find it even easier to microplane because a lot of that fibrousness that can get caught when it's fresh. So yeah, I highly recommend freezing it. I really, I've kept it in the freezer for months. It did not get freezery at all.

Maybe it's just the skin or how compact it is. It doesn't really pick up those freezery smells in the same way. And so I think it's worth it to use fresh. There are uses, I mean, ginger powder has its place and it's good in some recipes. And I love crystallized ginger, especially when baking. I think it's really nice in certain baked goods,

but it's not, neither of them are gonna taste exactly right if you're replacing a recipe that calls for it. They miss the sharpness of a fresh ginger. Exactly. It's almost like a garlic powder versus fresh garlic. It's just a sort of fundamentally different flavor. They're not really replacements for each other. What I do with my ginger.

I mean, I tend to use a lot of ginger cause I cook a lot of Asian food, but if I have scraps of ginger, the ginger peel or little bits of ginger leftover, I do one of two things. So one, I'll either put it in a container and pour soy sauce over it. And then you can just use that as ginger infused soy sauce, which is really delicious and stir fries or an eggs or as a seasoning. The other thing I'll do is I make stock with it. So I tend to make a lot of ginger and scallion stocks,

which you can make with fresh chicken or you can just use store-bought chicken stock, throw some ginger scraps and scallion stems into it and simmer it for a little bit, and you get a really nice stock for making part of the sauce for your stir-fries, or if you're making something like egg drop soup, or any kind of soup, yeah, making a ginger and scallion stock is what I do. Yeah, I use that also for like making wonton soup too.

It just gives a little bit of that flavor. Have you ever made a fresh or homemade ginger ale? I have not. I had a dear friend who started this company called Rachel's Ginger Beer here in Seattle. She passed away a few years ago, but Rachel's Ginger Beer is still around and they make excellent, excellent, fresh ginger ale.

Like I like it, like it has the little bits of ginger still at the bottom. I've never made ginger, but I've wanted to. I feel like it would be really nice to make a good, gingery, simple syrup, you know, that you could just add to seltzer and have a delicious, obviously it would be a lot spicier and brighter than the stuff you buy in the store, but it sounds amazing to me.

Put some lemon in there. Just another idea for using up ginger, but again, the freezing thing for me was a big aha, and I've been doing it for about five years, and it's really, I have no qualms about buying ginger, and I really just only go through it when I go through it, so I highly recommend it. Esther from San Leandro, California says, I love garlic, but it's a hassle to mince every time I cook. I've seen people on TikTok batch mints and freeze into tablespoons. Does it work?

Does freezing change the taste? Kenji, this is a great question for you because we've talked about this before and I think you're going to give it a thumbs down. I'm going to give that a thumbs down. It's not the freezing that changes the taste. It's the pre-mincing. But garlic in particular is one of these things where there's the flavor and then there's the pungency, the stuff that is like really sort of sharp.

And that pungency is a thing that's created only after the garlic has been split open, after the cells are split open. There's these precursor chemicals inside that once the cells are split open, they react with each other and form this compound called allicin, which is what gives garlic it's really sort of sharp pungency. The trick with garlic is that you want to sort of balance that pungency with the garlic flavor and the garlic aroma. If you let the garlic sit after it's been minced, that pungency becomes really

powerful because more of that chemical forms. If you then let it continue to sit, eventually it's actually going to start to lose all of its flavor because that chemical forms. If you then let it continue to sit, eventually it's actually going to start to lose all of its flavor because that chemical dissipates. You know, anytime you smell something, it's the chemical physically leaving a thing and coming into your nose. So if you're smelling something, it means that whatever it was coming from is losing that smell. So eventually, garlic will start to lose all of its smell. So the reason why, you know, jarred garlic tends to be really flavorless is because most of the smell has already

dissipated from it by the time you've done it. Frozen garlic will have a stronger garlic flavor and aroma, but oftentimes what happens is that you end up in that middle phase where the pungency is sort of overwhelming. And so frozen garlic will never taste as good as freshly minced garlic, or will never taste like freshly minced garlic. If you're finding garlic to be a hassle every time you mince it, I don't know that there's any real good work around, because I've never had a prepared garlic product, whether homemade or store bought,

that matches the flavor of freshly minced garlic. What I do though is that I mince my garlic by smashing it. I whack it really hard with the side of my knife, and then I just run my knife over it a few times, and it's really easy and fast. You don't have to brunoise your garlic know you don't have to to brunoise your garlic you don't have to mince it all 100% by hand like smashing it works really well smashing it into mortar and pestle works really well or using like a

mini chopper works really well but I do I do feel pretty strongly that garlic is at its best when it's prepared right before cooking with it. I love using my garlic press I think I've one from Zliss and it's fantastic. I have regular garlic like, you know, in the skin, but I also have a container in the fridge of peeled garlic and I find that the flavor of it is fantastic because it hasn't been chopped yet, as you've explained. It hasn't lost its pungency

because those cells inside the clove aren't broken up yet. So I use pre-peeled garlic. I find it really keeps for a couple of weeks in the fridge, sometimes longer. I look for ones that are dry packed, not wet. There are some brands that it comes in a sort of a watery thing,

and I don't like the flavor of those as much, but you often can find them where they honestly just look like nuts or something. Like, you know, there's just no liquid in there. I find those keep for weeks and the flavor is fantastic. So you just take the number you need, you put it in your garlic, no chopping, no fussing, no peeling.

And you never have that mystery where you smash into a garlic clove and realize it was rotten, and now you don't have garlic. You can also put garlic in the skin, in its paper, into the garlic press and press it through, and the skins get kind of filtered out by the holes in the garlic press. I don't agree with that.

I feel like I've tried it a few times and I always get flecks of the skins in it and I don't like it. Either I get flecks of skin or I just don't get all the garlic out of there. So I say pre-peeled is great and you're gonna have great flavor from it and you don't have to fuss,

but keeps it really well. And also you suddenly become a person who's like, actually I'm gonna use eight cloves of garlic instead of five because I'm not going through any extra effort. So can make things really garlicy and it's really fun I would say that in blind taste tests we did at serious eats and at cooks illustrated the pre peeled garlic It does it's not quite as tasty as fresh peeled because in order to peel them those cloves are blanched first I have to make them easier to peel so they do lose a little bit of flavor So if you're making something like like a tomb or something that's really, you know, garlic forward, you're better off getting whole heads of garlic or unpeeled cloves of garlic. But like you, I keep peeled garlic in my fridge and I use it like it's very strong. I remember I was making a salad a few weeks ago and you were supposed to microplane two

garlic cloves into it. I mean the whole thing was so spicy with garlic that my daughter refused to eat it. I loved it but I mean it was a garlic salad and that was from the pre-peeled ones that had been in the fridge for probably a couple weeks. So there's really still quite a lot of pungency left. I've never really had an issue with that I could see if you were lining it up You might notice it, but I don't ever notice it just using it from the fridge and it's easy. So it's made for home cooks

So our last question is Sam from Plano, Texas asks. My son is 11 and is interested in cooking I let him help and he's pretty good at prep work But do you have suggestions for recipes he can tackle on his own cooking from scratch? You know, I think we should not underestimate 11 year olds. And when it's a good, well written recipe with clear instructions, I think they can make anything, really. You know, maybe a poached egg isn't gonna be like

the success the first time, but there's a lot of things that just with clearly written recipe, even something like chicken parm, which kids love, they could do. And there's a lot of steps, so it makes it fun for them. But I tend to go in a different direction with this where I want to find out what he's craving because I think we're the most engaged in cooking when we're cooking something that we really wish we knew how to make. Like, does he have a favorite dish?

Is there something that he doesn't like getting at restaurants because it never tastes good? And that's really, for me, the fun place to start because you won't mind the process, you won't mind the work that goes into it, and you'll really check something off your list and learn something new that you can take with you. But what do you think, Kenji? I agree, I don't think there's anything

that kids can't do, especially at that age. That said, I think a lot of it has to do with mental preparation, both for your kid and also for yourself, though, because what you have to do is be prepared to let them make a mess, be prepared to let them fail. You know, because I have this instinct, my instinct is if I'm cooking something and I, you know, I'm letting someone help, I have this instinct to jump in

and like fix it if something's going wrong, you know, or if I see like batter flying out of the bowl when it's being whisked, I'm like, oh no, like, let me do that. Like my instinct is to stop it from happening happening because I don't want to have to clean up the mess later. But when you're dealing with kids, you kind of have to let them make that mess, let them make the mistakes because otherwise they don't get better, you know? And you have to mentally prepare them exactly.

So I think you want to make them excited about doing it. So pick something that, or let them pick what they're going to do and let them get excited about it. You have to let them know that, you know, things might not go right the first time. You might even like get hurt. You might burn yourself. You might cut yourself. And those are let them know that, you know, things might not go right the first time. You might even like get hurt. You might burn yourself. You might cut yourself. And those are things that are just, you know, potentially going to happen so that they're

aware and they don't get surprised by those things and immediately turned off. The biggest thing is just being willing to let them make that mess and realize that at the end of the day, like whatever comes out is probably going to be at least edible. Also, I think you should get them involved in cleaning up the mess. Not to be mean like you have to make clean up your mess, but I think sometimes when you have that, when you understand, you know, like if you're going to get a stain in your clothes, the work of getting a stain out of a clothes like might help you try to be more careful when you're eating. Obviously not dumping all the cleaning on them.

But I think it's good for them to understand both ends of the process and even how to spray down a stove and clean it up. Be an expert. Have a life skill. The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Perry Gregory, and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions. Yuri Lasordo is the managing producer, Emmanuel Johnson is the Audience Engagement Manager, and the Executive Producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Martavich. Thanks for listening.

The Recipe with Kenji and Deb is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at RadioTopia.fm.