Giada At Home
with Giada DeLaurentiis
I just
learned that Michael Symon’s affectionate nickname for Bobby Flay is
“Hollywood”, because of Bobby’s early embrace of celebrity chefdom. That’s not
a criticism, by the way, from Symon (or me). Bobby was totally in the right
place at the right time to learn his stagecraft (he was already an accomplished
chef) when food television was just starting out. He admits his early forays
into cooking on tv were less than polished.
Bobby is visiting Giada in her California kitchen. But before
he gets there, she’s making dessert for him – a crostata, which is a free-form,
open-faced fruit pie or tart. Giada is
going to GRILL the peaches for the crostata, which is a really great idea. She halves
the peaches as she tells us to use really ripe ones. But hers
have a bright green center (around the pit)! Does that mean they’re not
ripe or are they some kind of exotic Californian peach that we don’t see in
these parts? Dunno.
The next thing she
does is also odd. She drizzles white balsamic vinegar (which I love) over the
peaches, making sure to fill in the holes where the pits where. BUT THE PEACHES
ARE STILL ON THE CUTTING BOARD, so she’s going to lose any vinegar that spills
over the peaches. That stuff is really pricey, so why not put the peaches in a
shallow pie plate (for example) and catch any stray dribbles? You could use that
in the next salad you make.
I don’t like this
next step either. She grabs the peaches and places them cut-side down on a
hot grill pan. As she does that, all the white balsamic vinegar spills out of
the pit holes into the bottom of the grill pan. She COULD HAVE poured the
balsamic vinegar on top of each pitted peach and then kind of swirled it around to
cover the whole top and THEN poured it out into that pie dish BEFORE she
grilled the peaches and not wasted it.
While the peaches are
grilling, Giada is getting started on her CAR-mel sauce. For someone who
squeezes every last syllable out of every single Italian word she uses
(including the ones that have basically become English), it’s weird that she
doesn’t give Kayr-a-mel its due. (Can you imagine how critical I’d be if I
didn’t LIKE Giada, which I do. I just can’t help noticing these things.)
Giada starts the CAR-mel sauce by mixing together 1/3 cup
sugar and 2 tablespoons of water and putting it over heat to dissolve.
She grabs a STORE-BOUGHT
crust. How can she say that with a straight face? And this is for Bobby? I hope
he’s po’ed. She takes the peaches out of the grill pan and places them in
circles on the pie crust with some in the middle. She folds over the edges of
the crust to make an inch-wide border. How good that would be with real pastry!
To top the peaches, Giada adds butter and lemon to the
pretty brown car-a-mel and, voila, it becomes a sauce. She pours it over the peaches in the crust
and put it into a 375°F. oven for 20 to 25 minutes. She’s going to serve it with thyme whipped cream. I SHOULD like the
sound of that, but I don’t.
Oh good, Bobby has arrived. Was he just lurking in the wings all along? Giada starts boiling
lobsters. Actually, she lets Bobby do it. He takes them out of the big
pot.
Giada tells Bobby to put the linguine in the lobster water.
He loves that she’s getting that extra flavor into the pasta. She halves long
green Anaheim peppers and cuts up Campari tomatoes, which are Italian cherry tomatoes.
She’s grilling everything.
Bobby likes that Giada boils the lobster before grilling
them. She coats the peppers and tomatoes with chili oil and seasons them. Bobby
says that Anaheim chili peppers are interesting. They’re not that spicy but
they add a nice flavor.
Bobby’s general
rule is that green chilies are used fresh and red chilies are used dried. And
the smaller the chili, the hotter it is. Isn’t
that like those rules for learning English (or any other language) where there
are so many exceptions, you might just as well not even call it a rule?
Giada puts the Anaheim peppers, tomatoes and lobster on the
grill.
Giada asks Bobby how he fell love with chilies. He tells the
(often told) story of Jonathan Waxman (the first
chef to introduce California cuisine to the East Coast) giving Bobby his first
job. Waxman introduced him to southwestern cooking and now he almost HAS to use
chilies to get his taste buds going.
Giada asks, “Was
cooking something you just fell into or something you always loved?” I know the
answer! Bobby fell into it. He was a lousy high school student and when he
started working in a kitchen he found his passion. Yup, that’s exactly what he
said. He was 17 when he got his first restaurant job and that made him want to
go to culinary school. And the rest is history, as they say. I said that, not him. Giada adds shrimp
to the grill pan. She tossed that in chili oil too.
They’re finishing the
dish with some garlic. Bobby is chopping the garlic and Giada is bothering him
by trying to clean up after him. That’s obviously her Cordon Bleu training,
where cleaning up as you go is almost as important as how or what you’re
cooking. (I abandoned that credo a long time ago. I’d
rather soak everything and do it at the end.) Bobby crushes the garlic on the
board with a bit of Kosher salt. “Everything good starts with onions and
garlic” he says.
Giada sautés some
chopped shallots in the chili oil and tells Bobby to get the Parmigiano from
the fridge. They spend a bit of time on a pronunciation lesson, with Giada
stressing the “R”, saying Bobby is saying PAMigiano. He can't help it, he still sounds like a New
Yawker. And wait a sec, what’s up with the cheese? Isn’t that a cardinal rule
in Italy – with seafood, no cheese? Oh, lookie here, Bobby asks the exact same question.
Giada says it’s an old wives' tale and Bobby says he agrees.
In fact, she says her
grandfather used to add the Parmigiano to the pasta BEFORE the sauce, so it
sticks to the pasta. Excellent tip.
Giada adds some clams to the cooking shallots. They take
some time to open, so Bobby taps them on the shell with his chef’s knife and
they open! That’s a good tip too. Giada is super impressed. Bobby adds all the
chopped, previously grilled stuff - the tomatoes, peppers and lobster to the
shallot pot.
Giada tells Bobby she doesn’t drain pasta, she just lifts it
out and into the pot with the other ingredients. Bobby grates cheese over,
Giada adds a bit of pasta water and some chili oil with some butter. Giada
mixes it all together. Bobby inquires why she’s adding butter and not olive oil.
She likes the silkiness they give to the noodles. They taste it for seasoning
right from the pot. Bobby slurps his noodles, while Giada laughs. “Wow, that was
classy.” Bobby says.
Next, Bobby makes them an apricot sour. He says he likes to
serves everything he makes, including cocktails, family style. He drops mint
leaves into a pitcher. He muddles the mint with some fresh apricots and superfine
sugar. He adds a sour mix, which, AHEM, he made himself with fresh lemon and
lime juice and simple syrup.
He adds the sour mix and apricot nectar and gin. Or you can add vodka. He stirs it gently. He tops the whole thing with Prosecco. I LOVE anything topped with Prosecco.
Maybe not a latte, but most everything else. Bobby puts one GIANT ice cube
in each lowball glass and pours the pretty drink over. Bobby says it’s sweet
and sour and fruity, but not too sweet.. The reason for the mint sprig is that
as you sip the drink you also smell the mint which becomes part of the taste of
the drink. (Bobby learned that at the Kentucky Derby.)
They eat the pasta and Bobby loves the taste of the seafood
and the spiciness “in unison”. Giada likes her pasta to have flavor in every
bite, and she doesn’t “want it to live alone.”
She cuts the crostata, while Bobby grabs the whipped cream
and ice cream. A little birdie told her he likes ice cream. He starts
eating while she’s still folding the thyme into the whipped cream. He says he
wants to taste the whipped cream too. She takes a big scoop of it and puts it...on HERS! They burst out laughing. He finally gets some and likes it all. He
says, “The dough is so tender”. It’s really great (not!!!) that Bobby is rewarding
her for using store-bought dough. She says nothing about the provenance of the
dough, which I actually agree with. I don’t think the cook has to admit
anything about what’s in or NOT IN the finished dish UNLESS you’re dealing with
medical issues.
About the pastry, I’m sure that dough
DID taste good, because that’s how they design it. Did you see this show, where
they tested 3 different wedding cakes on 4 different people, including a person
that jumps OUT of cakes.
The over $2000 cake (and the Safeway supermarket
wedding cake) lost to the Betty Crocker cake, baked by a producer at home. They
were judged on taste only, not looks. Betty has spent a lot of time (and money)
figuring out what it is that people want from their cake and she puts it all
together in a little box. I would have liked the producer to bake a cake at
home FROM SCRATCH! Who knows, though, maybe that wouldn’t have made any
difference.
I liked the pasta recipe in this episode, because I like the
idea that you can grill up a bunch of stuff in big pieces, chop it up, add it
to sautéed shallots and put it over pasta. Each ingredient is getting a boost
of flavor at different stages in the recipe. It all comes together for a
delicious dish.
NOTE: Bobby and Giada were supposed to be doing a
talk show together, which would have required Giada to move east. I’m not sure
she was thrilled about that, but I think the two of them together would have
been a great team. The only thing I can find about it is here, where it
looks like it was passed over…for the moment.
