Whether it's a cured country ham, a decadent chocolate-caramel brownie, they all have one thing in common...SALT! Alton, Tyler and Michael Symon reveal eight dishes they guarantee are definitely worth their salt!
Whether it's a cured country ham, a decadent chocolate-caramel brownie, they all have one thing in common...SALT! Alton, Tyler and Michael Symon reveal eight dishes they guarantee are definitely worth their salt!
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Find episode transcript here: https://the-best-thing-i-ever-ate.simplecast.com/episodes/salty-goodness-ft-tyler-florence-alton-brown-and-michael-symon
[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: People ask me all the time.
SPEAKER 2: Where do you like to eat?
SPEAKER 3: What's your favorite food?
SPEAKER 4: What's the best thing you've ever eaten?
SPEAKER 1: That's why we're here now.
SPEAKER 2: Not only to tell you what we love to eat.
SPEAKER 3: But where you can go get it.
SPEAKER 1: I'm not shy about my adoration for saltiness. I like the salt.
SPEAKER 2: It's like a little tease to your tongue.
SPEAKER 3: There's not one bit of it it's not, wow, that is just unbelievable. It's salty perfection.
SPEAKER 2: It is so amazing.
SPEAKER 4: It will lay you down.
SPEAKER 3: This is like bursting bubbles of salty goodness.
SPEAKER 1: Salty, crispy, yummy, this is what makes this dish perfect. I'm telling you if you're down with the pig it is like the pinnacle of flavor. It's awesome. So if I need to think about one dish that really uses salt as forefront flavor, it has to be Michael Chiarello's bacon and egg pork belly confit at his restaurant Bottega in Yountville, California.
It's fantastic. It's one of those things I've tasted recently, I'm like this is great cooking. I think my next cookbook is his cookbook with my picture on the cover of it. It's eggs. It's peppers. It's got this delicious piece of salty pork belly on the side of it. There's not one bit of it it's not, wow, that is just unbelievable.
SPEAKER 3: Well, if Tyler loves it, I mean, I'm just shooting for his sweet spot. He's a Southern boy. So you take bacon and an egg and a little bit of extra fat all together, boy that's right in his wheelhouse. It's a fantastic dish. It has all the salty goodness you can imagine.
SPEAKER 1: We call it bacon and egg.
SPEAKER 4: And he's going to take those flavors and really turn it on its ear to take you back to the same place.
SPEAKER 3: We start off with a little pork belly. It's what we make bacon from.
SPEAKER 1: It's not just bacon. It's a big piece of bacon.
SPEAKER 4: We just have a little salt, sugar, and spice. This gets about four hours of curing.
SPEAKER 3: Just to the point where it's salty enough just to be like, my God, that is so perfectly balanced.
SPEAKER 1: Then it comes out of the salt and we put it right into a pan of olive oil and raises it for about 10 hours.
SPEAKER 3: Until it's really, really tender.
SPEAKER 4: And then we cut it into a perfect little cube.
SPEAKER 1: That cube gets seared until it's nice and crispy. A little bit of powdered sugar put on top to make a little [INAUDIBLE] of pork belly. It's going to go right into the broiler.
SPEAKER 3: And then they serve that alongside sunny California peppers. Some great salt and they're just cooked and stewed. And then on top of that, there's this gorgeous take on an egg.
SPEAKER 1: I'm going to show you one of the best eggs ever, which is slow poached. The shell is removed. It's bread and Panko. It's deep fried, so it's crispy on the outside. How good does that sound?
SPEAKER 4: Finish it off with a little bit of English flaked salt right on top of that.
SPEAKER 1: So this dish it's so well flavored. It's crispy, salty. It's sweet. It's got all these wonderful aromas going on. And then the gorgeous egg cut right in the middle and the yolk just goes-- it's so delicious. And that stuff's great but it's just a vehicle to get this gorgeous, glorious piece of pork belly confit. It's salty perfection. Just blends the two together. It's genius. Kudos, Chiarello.
SPEAKER 2: To imagine food without salt, even to wrap my brain around that is to imagine the tragic ending to every movie I've ever seen all squashed into a one minute reel. We have salt and then we have ingredients that bring salty to the forefront. And one of the places that that's most pronounced for me is it a really good classically tossed lovingly created Caesar salad. And the best Caesar salad I've ever had is Pietro's in New York City without question.
You can get a Caesar salad anywhere. You can get it in an airport. You can get it on an airplane. I think you even get a Caesar salad free with a tank of gas in some states. This was my favorite.
SPEAKER 5: Do you like the other specials?
SPEAKER 2: No, I don't even need a menu, Carlo, do I?
SPEAKER 5: No, I know what you like.
SPEAKER 2: This is the best salad.
SPEAKER 5: We consistently make it the same way since 1932. We don't pre-mixed anything. Everything is done at the time you order.
SPEAKER 2: Then the magic starts. Because it comes out, and it goes to this little service station. He has a bowl with chopped garlic, little chopped anchovy.
SPEAKER 5: the anchovy gives it a unique flavor because of the salty.
SPEAKER 2: He adds a little bit of dry mustard.
SPEAKER 5: Colman's powdered mustard. It's a spicy mustard. I wouldn't substitute it for anything else. This is the great mustard.
SPEAKER 2: Red wine vinegar.
SPEAKER 5: Worcestershire sauce.
SPEAKER 2: Olive oil, just enough. And only he knows.
SPEAKER 5: Add your Romaine and you mix everything together.
SPEAKER 2: They toss it so much it's like the sound of a dinner bell ringing. You hear it? You wait. You wait. They toss more. You think they're done. They're not done.
SPEAKER 5: Take two tablespoon of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
SPEAKER 2: This guy was like a maestro and his salt violin was made out of Parmesan cheese. That Parmesan cheese is like sprinkling just salt love all over this. And it's just all these layers of salt, really. It's about cheese. It's about anchovies. It's about a pinch of salt. It's about a little Worcestershire. You can't see these things but you can just feel them. And it just tastes so salty and delicious. It's like food pampering.
SPEAKER 1: I'm not shy about my adoration for saltiness although I don't just eat it straight out of the bag. I like the salt. And if you tell me that I can only have salt once from now to the end of time, I would drive up to Dillard, Georgia, and go to the Dillard House. And I would have the country ham, which is about as salty as salty gets and it's still good. And I remember having this. And it never had something so intensely salty. But I couldn't stop eating it.
Country hams are preserved by salt alone.
SPEAKER 6: We bring them in and age them at least 20 more days.
SPEAKER 1: Then generally hung to dry.
SPEAKER 6: We like to have the heat in this room about 80 degrees. We take it from there and take extra care how we prepare it. We use bacon grease. Then we're going to add about a cup of coffee and a little bit of brown sugar.
SPEAKER 1: They've stuck more to tradition.
SPEAKER 6: My great grandmother did it in 1917, all the way through until she passed away in the '70s. Then we carried it on from there.
SPEAKER 1: And they've stuck to the tradition of their service-- sitting at big family style tables, which I love. That's kind of a lost style of hospitality I think in the United States. We all want our own tables. We don't want to eat with strangers. I like to eat with strangers. And they just bring food, which is nice. It removes from you the responsibility of ordering. It's like eating at somebody's house. Here's what's for dinner.
SPEAKER 7: Wow.
SPEAKER 1: When you're chewing this ham, the salt is there. It's right up front and then it kind of melds into a lot of other flavors. So it's the star on the Christmas tree, but it's not the whole mefillah. You have to learn how to see through the salt. And then it kind of melds into a lot of other flavors. Butter comes out and then a nuttiness comes out. And then you start getting spices. Like I swear there's pineapple there. And then a deeper sweetness. A very kind of almost primal sweetness that comes out of the end that makes you very glad you're a carnivore. So fruity, nutty, buttery, meaty, and heck, yes, salty.
SPEAKER 3: The ham looked fantastic. But you have to add salt to that. I want to talk about something that's naturally salty. It's all about caviar. And when I think about caviar, it has to be the caviar sampler at Tsar Nicoulai in the Ferry Building in San Francisco. This is like bursting bubbles of salty goodness. Caviar it's like you're celebrating the good things in life. I first discovered star Nikolai as caviar while I was shooting my show Chefs Versus City. I had some of the caviar and the experience was so memorable for me that I had to rush back after we finished filming and have more.
Once you belly up to this wonderful caviar bar it's on. This is what I'm looking for. The Tsar Nicoulai sampler, an assortment of all their best caviar's. You might go in there and you might just buy one caviar, but you would be depriving yourself, robbing yourself, and then you might fall in love with the caviar you never knew existed. Now we're ready for the salty goodness. My sampler features five different grades of caviar.
What makes Tsar Nicoulai's place very unusual is that they actually use local California sturgeon that's farm-raised by the company. You're going to see a lot of different colors and sizes of actual caviar. As the fish gets older, the eggs tend to get bigger as well. Mother-of-pearl spoon. You don't want to use metal with caviar. It's going to oxidize and change the flavor. The real excitement is being able to have some distinctions between the caviar.
Start right up here at the top with the golden reserve. Now, this is what they must be talking about when they say the gold rush. All that caviar starts exploding in your mouth like Pop Rocks. It's the essence of the ocean. It's briny. It's salty. It's all those beautiful things they expect caviar to be. A little bit goes a long way. One little morsel resonates in your palate. This one doesn't have tons of salt. Go on to the next one. It's sort of like this symphony of flavors and textures. It's like very citrusy to me. It's straight up decadence.
And if there's any other time that you want to flick your pinkie up while you're eating something, it's when you eat caviar. Caviar the perfect sparkling beverage, doesn't get better than this. I mean, just like this. Let's do this every Wednesday.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER 2: It's like a little tease to your tongue. It's so decadent, and good, and sweet, and salty. It's like everything you want in one bite of food. I'm not just talking about any brownie. I am talking about the sweet and salty brownie at Baked in Brooklyn, New York. I'm going to get a little brown sugar and it's so good. This brownie is the commitment. It's not just in Brooklyn. Baked is in the middle of nowhere in Brooklyn and it is so worth the trek.
I've never had a brownie like this. They took that salted caramel idea, jacked it up times like a million, and made this brownie. Everything you thought about a brownie start over after you have one bite of this and then let that be your base. Ruin you for brownies for the rest of your life.
SPEAKER 9: Today we're going to be making sweet and salty brownies.
SPEAKER 2: It's like a flour less chocolate cake with caramel oozing out of it. But they were able to take that where you can put your fingers on it and eat it. That is awesome. Really, it's not about just being chocolate. It's about the salted caramel goodness that's inside this brownie. That's what makes this brownies so special.
SPEAKER 9: We're going to put a bunch of sea salt in and this is going to make this caramel extra special.
SPEAKER 2: It's a layer of brownie, and then a layer of caramel, and then a layer of brownie again. There is no time to share this brownie. You know I don't want to share this brownie. You're going to eat this brownie all by yourself in the corner, just and your brownie. Hmm. I miss the brownie. It's calling to me right now. And you don't know why it's so good because you don't taste the salt right away. It's just kind of like this after taste that hits you and you're like what's that.
SPEAKER 9: Well, that's awesome.
SPEAKER 2: It's that caramel. It is far beyond yummy. It's like lava caramel that's salty and sweet surrounded by chocolate. Who doesn't love that. I mean, it's perfect.
SPEAKER 4: The way I discovered this dish was one of my food writers at Esquire said you like salty food, you have to come to Philadelphia and try this dish. And I did. And it was one of the best things I ever ate. It's very rare that something like this dish comes along and would make my list of the best things I've ever eaten. I'm talking about the Cypress Breakfast at Kandla in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When I order this dish I eat everybody. There's not a morsel on the plate by the time I'm done.
What makes this breakfast so irresistible is all the different kinds of salty goodness going on the plate at once. You have chewy cheese, and salty, crunchy ham, and the crunchy egg. It turns the idea of bacon, egg, and cheese on its head.
SPEAKER 10: The Cypress Breakfast is from my home country, Cyprus, in the Eastern Mediterranean. Represents a lot of my work my grandmother used to do 2021, 30, or 40 years ago. Just authenticity and simple cooking.
SPEAKER 4: Everything on the plate is salty or salted, but there are different kinds of saltiness going on, and it's surprising.
SPEAKER 10: It's a bit of oil, just to beat up the eggs.
SPEAKER 4: First of all, the egg is fried in olive oil not butter. So it gets a crunchy edge and a crunchy underside.
SPEAKER 10: Your eggs are ready now, fried, and crusty.
SPEAKER 4: And then the white of the egg becomes this sort of silky layer. And then the yolk is just this oozy buttery perfect topping.
SPEAKER 10: A good chunks of the [INAUDIBLE].
SPEAKER 4: You get this beautiful cube of salty cheese. They grilled it just plane on the griddle. But it tastes like butter and somehow even bread. It tastes like you're eating a whole grilled cheese sandwich. The [INAUDIBLE] ham, it's like a Canadian bacon. It almost looks like Canadian bacon. You cook it like Canadian bacon and it draws out all that salty porky smoky flavor.
SPEAKER 10: And what I do before I remove the eggs. I will add the bread in there.
SPEAKER 4: It's typically served with some kind of a cool salad. Oh, it's amazingly good. It's salt like you've never tasted. You want more and more of it. You want more water but like you want more of this stuff. It's delicious. It's surprising. It's addictive. There's sweetness. And there's some bitterness going on. And there's the cool vegetables and the crunch. You have to taste it. It's everything I want in my breakfast with salt.
SPEAKER 3: It is not jerky how the world thinks of jerky. It's like spicy dried salty brisket and it's changed the way that I feel about jerky forever. The best salty snack that I could ever think of is the beef jerky at Czuchraj at the West Side Market in Cleveland, Ohio. This isn't your everyday jerky. This is a process of love. There's all kinds of jerky's there. There's turkey jerky, chicken jerky, beef jerky. But the one that I really love is that spicy beef jerky. It's got that salty goodness. A little bit of the chili and big thick cuts of jerky.
For me, it's tradition. You go to the West Side Market. You go to Czuchraj. You get your spicy jerky and then you do your shopping. People think jerky, they don't think moist. But this has some guts to it. The reason that the Czuchraj jerky tastes different is the process. They take the meat.
SPEAKER 11: This is a beef brisket. It's a very lean piece of meat.
SPEAKER 3: They season it.
SPEAKER 11: Our dry spices consist of hot cayenne pepper. We also add garlic to that and a couple of other secret spices.
SPEAKER 3: They marinate it. They smoke it, 50 pounds at a time over hickory chips.
SPEAKER 11: The hickory wood actually coats the meat in the smoking process, which is a natural preservative. We throw it in and cook it the same way as it did 100 years ago.
SPEAKER 3: I've never had jerky so thick, and tender, and full of flavor like I've had at Czuchraj. That's what sets theirs apart. It's like eating a steak, a jerky steak. If I close my eyes I could smell it right now. I just-- it is just beautiful. Break into it. And that's what I'm talking about. It's dry but it's moist. This is beef jerky at a whole new level.
When you eat the beef jerky at Czuchraj, it will change how you feel about jerky. And whenever anything changes how I feel about a certain dish that makes it the best thing I ever ate. This is what jerky is supposed to be. It's juicy. It's tender and it's layered with deep flavors. Salt, spices, smoke. It's almost like eating a meal. It's everything that you could ever want in a jerky. You want the best jerky anywhere you go to Czuchraj.
SPEAKER 1: When I have caviar I'm the young man in the sea. I feel like I'm Poseidon's son. What? I'm here to work, bro. All right. Raise the roof homes.