4th of July Bonus! A Pie for Every State, Grilling with Meathead, The History of Oscar Mayer
Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio - Milk Street Radio
A special July 4th bonus episode of Milk Street Radio features interviews on grilling with Meathead, a creative pie project celebrating all 50 U.S. states, and the cultural history of Oscar Mayer hot dogs. The show blend
Key takeaways
- Digital thermometers are essential for accurate grilling
Transcript preview
Hey, Milk Street Radio listeners. We have some great news. Yotom-otelengi will be joining me on the phone lines soon. Please send us your questions about Middle Eastern food, cooking with vegetables or whatever else you're curious to ask Yotom. Email us at questions at Most Street Radio.com. Again, please send your questions for Yotom Oto-Lengi to questions at Milk Street Radio. And we'll be in touch. And thanks. special episode of Milk Street Radio. The 4th of July is just a few days away and to celebrate we're looking back on some of our favorite Independence Day interviews. Meathead reveals his most trusted grilling tools. We get a hot dog history lesson, an American icon Dolly Part and gets sculpted, not pie crust. I knew that I had to make a portrait of her out of pie crust because I knew that in pie crust I could capture the most wonderful volume. of her hair because you know the higher the hair the closer to God stay tuned for a brand new July 4th episode of Milk Street radio airing this Friday right now let's rewind to 2023 to get a tour of the grill with barbecue expert meathead. Hey Meathead welcome back to Milk Street. Oh it's always fun to talk to you Chris. It's fun to talk to you so let's start here I think I know the answer but what's the one grilling tool you really can't live without? the most important tool you can have. Cooking both indoors and outdoors is a good digital thermometer. This is 2023. If you've got a dial thermometer in your kitchen drawer that you rely on, put it in your driveway and back your car over it. It's a worthless piece of junk. It's a technology from the 1800s. It takes 30 seconds to read. It's not accurate. Contemporary rapid read or, if you want to call them instant read thermometers, will give you a precision temperature in under 5 seconds for under. 30 bucks. Okay, here's another topic. Oiling grill grates so the food doesn't stick. Now, I come from the school of oil it to death like 12 times before you put the food on it. I think you may be oil the food not the grates as I remember. But I find that with, let's say, fish like skin side down salmon, chicken, skin side down. I still run into trouble with that, especially if I don't leave it long enough to release. Any thoughts about that? Fish and chicken are the bane of every backyard cook. They're just gonna stick to the grate no matter what you do. You can put 10W30 on those grates and it's still gonna stick. I prefer to oil the food. The food's coming out of the fridge at 38 degrees. So when you oil the food, the oil the food, the oil is cooler longer, so it doesn't crack. When you oil the grapes, not only cracks, it smokes. And the flavor of... burning smoking oil is not appetizing so I prefer to oil the food and don't worry it's not going to raise your caloric level that much most of it will end up dripping off anyhow do you clean your grill after grilling leave the heat on high and and really clean it before you turn everything off or do you just clean it before you use the next time I do in theory but the problem is is I drink wine and I'm sitting at the dinner table and I'm having a conversation and so the grill is still on a out there goes a $20 tank of gas, but I do fire it up before I cook. I get it really as hot as humanly possible, scrape it down then, try to get carbon as well as grease off. A lot of guys think, okay, I got this wonderful smoke coming out of my grill. It's grease. You don't want grease smoke on your food. So you've got to scrape it down. Is there a reliable device to twist onto your propane tank that shows you how much you have left? No. There are devices that you can put between the hose and the tank, but it measures the pressure and the pressure is the same until the thing is almost empty. There is a device that I'm playing with now. I just got it in two weeks ago. It's a little magnet that sticks to the side of the propane tank and when you turn on the tank and you start cooking, the temperature in the tank starts to change. And so it will locate where the temperature differential is. That's cool. And it will show you the level of fill on the tank. You know, the key there is always have a backup tank on hand. Yeah. And we all know that because we've had times and we didn't have a backup tank on hand. What about crazy gadgets? I mean, everybody who likes backyard cooking gets sucked into some of the stuff. Are there any gadgets that are just nut so gadgets? it is like a wumba that has wire brushes on it and you put it on your grill and you close the lid and it bumble bumble bumble bumble bumble bumble bumble bumble bumble bumble around it bangs into the wall and it's supposed to brush your grill clean and it doesn't really quite do it and it's just hysterical because every newspaper and magazine has given this thing publicity because it looks cool and it sounds cool not my favorite it doesn't work all that great to scrape them down by hand and for me a really good quality wire bracelet brush is still the best way to go. So another thing that I think is interesting is that people load up massive amount of coal right if it's a charcoal grill and they cook some steaks on and some burgers and the thing's hot for another hour right so do you often like when you're done with a meat for example just always throw some vegetables on it or onions or do you just shut down the grill? Yeah. Yeah, throw an eggplant on there and when it, you know, just char the heck out of the exterior and you've got this marvelous off, you make your baba can noose out of that, you can throw some onions on there and you know, even cold chared onions are delicious. You throw chicken on there. Cold chicken is delicious. So yeah, or, I mean you can coal it doesn't hurt them at all you can dump water on them just as long as you let them dry out thoroughly before you use them again. Do you have any tricks? I mean let's assume you get into trouble. Let's assume you went in to grab a beer. You come back out flames the chickens burning. Do you have some ways of fixing disasters when you're grilling or at least mitigating them? I have a big stack of carryout menus in my kitchen drawer. There you go. Yeah, I mean, if chicken's gonna burn, it's almost always the skin. And you can pull skin off chicken, and it's darn good without the skin. And what I will often do is I will grill that skin separately. And I'll take those cracklings because they get crunchy like potato chips. And I'll either sprinkle it on a salad, or in a sandwich, those things are great. Finally, are you an adventurous griller? Like, I talked to a guy in London who has a middle eastern restaurant. talking about he's grilled over wheelbarrows, any container he can find. Do you ever do that sort of crazy stuff? Well I have because I want to see if it works and I experiment with it but unfortunately or fortunately I have just about every kind of grill you can imagine. Yeah I've dug a hole in the beach you know I've played with a garbage can but you know there's just so many nice cooking devices out there and even the cheap ones that are you know Once you understand the concepts, the physics and the chemistry involved, you can make them all work. I think that understanding what's going on under the hood is really crucial. Meathad, thank you. Now I know