The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Mailbag Part 4

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

In their last episode before book-writing hiatus, Deb and Kenji take your questions, about truly satisfying turkey burgers, no recipe recipes, the correct order of operations for burger, fries, and shake at home, and more. 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.

Kenji is the author of the Food Lab and the Wok and a columnist for the New York Times. And Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen. She's also the author of three best-selling cookbooks. We've been professional recipe developers for nearly two decades, and we've got the same basic goal. To make recipes that work for you and to make you excited to get into the kitchen. But we've got really different approaches, and on this show, we'll cook and talk about each other's recipes, comparing notes to see what we can learn from each other. Welcome back to The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, and this week we have questions from

the mailbag from you guys, and we're going to try to get to as many as we can. For our first question, Gemma from Redmond, Oregon says, I'm trying to eat less meat, but I love burgers. What are some tricks to make turkey burgers as satisfying as a beef burger? Kenji, is this something you've tinkered with in your cooking at home? It is, a couple different ways.

We were talking about smash burgers a couple episodes ago, maybe in the last episode. One way is to do that, I use ground turkey thighs and smash them so that you get some really nice browning. And I think getting that browning in there really gives them a lot of flavor that can make them really nice and satisfying. The other technique I use, and this is a recipe I developed years and years ago at Serious Eats.

If you look it up, it's a free recipe. It's called Seriously Meaty Turkey Burgers. I tested a whole bunch of different things you can add to turkey to make it juicier and tastier. And what I landed on was roasting an eggplant. It's surprising, but you roast an eggplant and then you scoop out the flesh and you mix that in with the turkey meat, along with some salt, black pepper, a little bit of umami boosting ingredients, so like soy sauce,

a chopped up anchovy fillet, and a little bit of marmite, which is an yeast extract. You can skip the marmite or you can use something like liquid amino, something like that. But anyhow, it's a bunch of umami enhancing ingredients and then an eggplant which helps it stay moisture without really having to add a ton of extra beef fat or animal fat. So that recipe, you can find it on Serious Eats.

It's free, seriously meaty turkey burgers. And that, to me, I think that's, it's every bit as, it's more work, but it's every bit as satisfying as a beef burger is. Emilio from Enid, Oklahoma says if I want to make burgers, fries and milkshakes at home what is the order in which you would prep everything so that everything is ready at the same time? I can cook the fries in the oven or in my air fryer. I want to tackle this one. I think I would make the shakes first.

I think they'll be the most forgiving of a longer lead time because you could always pop them in the freezer for a bit to hold them. You can put it in the freezer, maybe even the fridge if it's like 15 minutes, and they're not going to melt immediately. So I would get the shakes out of the way. I would also want to make sure that I had a rough idea of how long it was going

to take me to make the burgers. If you're making four smash burgers, you're not going to need that much time. It might even be less time than you will need for your air fryer fries. So I would try to line that up so you can get them in the air fryer while you're working on the burgers. And the biggest thing, and we talked about this when we did our burger episode, is I want to get everything prepped out. I want to toast the burger bun first. Before I toast the burger bun, I want to have all the fixings and toppings together.

I already on plates ready for assembly, like thinly sliced anything, whatever kind of burger sauce we're going to use. Then I want to toast the buns first, have them laid out and ready to go. So when I get those burgers off the grill or out of the pan, everything is just ready to throw together and we can eat a piping hot burger. So if you can align it so the fries are ready in the air fryer or the air fryer can maybe keep them warm for five minutes without overcooking them, I think that's the best way to do it. What do you think, Kenji? Yeah, I agree. I think having everything mise en place ready

is the important part, and then making sure you know how long your burgers are gonna take to cook. Yeah, certainly the last thing you wanna do is have your burgers done and then sitting around getting cold while you're waiting for the fries. Whereas fries, I think, you cook them in the air fryer and you can keep them in a warm oven or keep them in the warm air fryer for a little bit longer

without losing too much quality. I think of the burger patty as being the least forgiving, like the one where you're going to have the most drastic quality loss if it goes too long. So I always want to do that last. In fact, if the burgers are coming out of the pan and nobody's sitting down yet, I'm really upset. I feel the same way when I make scrambled eggs for breakfast. I'm like, you all better be sitting when these eggs come out of the pan.

I'm not eating lukewarm scrambled eggs. So I've got my rules. My breakfast very often consists of eating cold leftover scrambled eggs. That the kids didn't finish? Yeah, exactly. Daddy can't eat till you eat. Yeah, with the lower parts of parenthood, I'll come home and I'll realize my daughter didn't finish her scrambled eggs and toast. I'm like, my breakfast is sorted. Jordan, who emailed us,

wants to know if we've timed large roasts for family gatherings, such as prime rib, turkeys, and crown roast. Jordan says that they always err on the side of wanting the roast to be fresh when they sit down, but it too often results in them underestimating the cook time and making everyone hangry while it's getting late and I tell them dinner is almost ready. Jordan wants to know how we handle this. Kenji, how have you handled this? First of all, if you have a really reliable recipe and a good thermometer, you shouldn't have to worry about that too much. These days, I use a thermometer. My friend Chris Young

makes this thermometer called, it's the predictive thermometer from Combustion Inc. And it's a digital thermometer that has five probes in it. So that when you put it in, you tell them what you want the target temperature to be. And it will give you a very accurate estimate of how long the food's gonna take to cook. So you can adjust your oven temperature to get it

to be exactly what time you want dinner to be served. That said, there's certain techniques that I think will make finishing a roast on time or serving it when your guests are ready a little easier. So what I'll do is like with a prime rib or even with a turkey or a crown roast, I'll cook it until it's done and then I'll let it rest. But generally with a big roast like that, it retains its heat pretty well. So you can rest it anywhere from say 15 minutes to an hour and it'll still be nice and hot in the center. And so all you have to do just before serving it is pop it into a really hot oven. So get your oven to 500 degrees.

So when your guests sit down, you throw it in there for five minutes and it comes out sizzling hot on the outside and it's still warm in the center. So that's generally how I deal with it. And another technique you could use is if you, if your roast is the kind that has a lot of drippings, like a prime rib was gonna have a lot of really fatty drippings, you can take the roasting pan,

put it on a burner just before serving, and then pour those hot drippings over the roast while it's resting to sort of re-crisp and reheat the outside and get it sizzling hot again. All that said, I also find that roasts are one of those things where they're good over a variety of temperature ranges, if you've done them properly and they're not

overdone and so they'll stay juicy whether they're piping hot or warm or even cold. It's like a good roast beef is gonna be still juicy when you eat it cold. I was thinking that, yeah, they've got a little bit of wiggle room there. Yeah, it's not like a hamburger or a steak or chicken breast where it's really gonna suffer from sitting around too long.

So yeah, I would say stop erring on wanting the roast fresh out of the oven when you sit down. Get the roast out of the oven, let it rest while your guests get ready and it'll taste fine. When I'm doing like Thanksgiving turkey, I really lean on that resting time because you're not gonna want to carve it

when it comes out right away anyway. So by the time it's coming out of the oven, and I'm probably not gonna carve it for 15 minutes or 10 minutes, depending on the size of it, then it's gonna take at least another 10 to 15 minutes to do it. That's what I'm telling people to sit down as I'm finishing that up.

So it gives me a little more of an idea of when it's gonna be, but when it comes out of the oven, we're getting into go time. And it's also usually when I pop my sides back in the oven to rewarm. So I use that time. Jessica from Medford, Massachusetts says, do you have any no fail, no recipe dishes? I'm just starting to get into cooking, but I don't have the patience to follow recipes.

I totally get it. And not everyone's a recipe cook. We've talked about this from the beginning on the recipe, aptly named. I am a recipe cook mostly because I'm always in the back of my mind trying to write recipes. And so when I make something exactly right, I want to remember how much of everything I use. But for normal people, just cooking at home and not trying to upkeep a cooking website,

social media, and write cookbooks, it makes sense that you would want to have a bunch of new recipe recipes in your back pocket. And for me, I feel like probably one of my biggest go-tos is some sort of vegetable taco, almost like halfway between a taco and probably more of a quesadilla, but you can really just have fun

with either a sheet pan of vegetables or just a quick saute of peppers, zucchini, whatever you have around, some onion and garlic, and then you just grab whatever cheese you've got and then you put it together in a tortilla, brown it in a pan, and you can cover it with avocado or salsa, whatever kind of topping you have, or you can put an egg on top of it. But I feel like there's really no reason to ever use measurements there. It's just about getting a good flavor on the vegetables.

Maybe throw in some beans for more nutrition and bulk. But I feel like that would probably be something that, honestly, the measurements feel more exhausting to use than it would be to just make something delicious. How about you, Kenji? Do you have a favorite no recipe recipe? I rarely follow recipes, you know, like I'm much more technique driven, like I learn some techniques and then I apply them. But currently one of my favorite no recipe recipes, and I got this idea from Sam Sifton in his cookbook. He has a cookbook out from a couple years ago. I think it's called No Recipe Recipes. He has a recipe. You take a head of cauliflower

and you put some anchovies on it and then you roast it in the oven in a Dutch oven. Then you add some stock and you puree it all and it becomes cauliflower soup. And it's really good. I use that technique for all kinds of vegetables. So I've done squash or pumpkin soup. So I take like a whole squash, like a butternut squash or a cabochon squash, deseed it, chop it up, chop up an onion, roughly toss it with the chopped up squash with some olive oil, salt and pepper, throw it in a Dutch oven, and then just toss it into a 400 degree oven and let it roast until it's soft. And what you end up with is vegetables that are kind of charred on the top and steamed

and soft on the bottom so that when you then add stock and puree it all, you get this really nice sort of complex flavor because you've cooked the vegetables in a bunch of different ways. But yeah, it'll work with cauliflower, it'll work with carrots, it'll work with squash, it'll work with zucchini. Any kind of vegetable that you think would be tasty roasting will turn into a really good roasted vegetable soup if you just do it in a Dutch oven and add stock and puree. That's a great one. I love that because it's so much more interesting flavor than you're ever going to get just from sauteing and then simmering a vegetable. So thank you so much for your questions.

We love getting them and I hope those were helpful answers. That's it for today's episode. 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 Martovic. Thanks for listening. RadioTopia from PRX.