The Science of Food with Chef Chris Waltman

In today's episode, Karey and Justin are joined by coworker and Chef, Chris Waltman to discuss the science behind the food and how a basic understanding can go a long with the home cook. Ears up, tummies hungry!

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Please rate, follow and share the podcast. Help us introduce the characters and characteristics of the foodservice / restaurant industry to others. 

Transcript

What does people plus food service plus conversation equal? The food service for thought podcast produced by Forbes, Eva and Wallace and hosted by Carrie Clements and Justin Alverez. The bimonthly podcast connects the food service industry through in depth conversations with chefs, restaurant equipment suppliers, food service establishment owners and so many others that make up our wonderful industry. If you like food people and great conversation, we think you will enjoy the food service for thought podcast.
Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of the food service for thought Podcast, the podcast connecting the foodservice industry. Carrie, did you hear my voice crack?
Is it that are you like going through the change? Puberty is hitting and
it's when my my beard hair goes from black to gray.
Well, that happened a bit ago. So yeah, that happened about a decade ago.
Well, welcome everyone. We are here today with a very unique episode because we have a very unique and awesome guest. His name is Chef Chris Waltman capital C. And he is here today to talk about a really interesting topic. Chris. Welcome. And sir. Thank you all for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
It is a pleasure to have you here and a pleasure to have you in our employ. So we have only been trying
me years to line this up. Which is funny since Reagan was in office was when we when we started our business even board Yeah.
Yeah, what? We didn't get her we didn't get our stuff together on this one. Till now. Just scheduling and things. So this is I'm looking forward. But here it is. So we're gonna jump right into it. Chris with our moves booths questions. We do not need to tell you what moves boosh stands for. So our first question is going to be if you were a food, what food would you be?
Oh, that is a phenomenal question. And also very complicated at the same time. I would say spatchcock chicken
Okay, tell us
where, where's the bell that we can ring for most unique answers you've ever had on here? Well, I mean, he kind of had to give us the most unique, don't you think he's, you know, he's if you said if you were just like a glass of water, I would have just hung up.
All right, so why why spatchcock chicken? Well, it's a very versatile thing to cook, you can literally go with almost any kind of flavor profile you want.
It is always juicy and flavorful, because you have the skin wrapping the outside of the chicken, but it's easy enough to cook because you took the spine out so it cooks very evenly. It could be smoked, it could be fried, it could be poached if you really wanted to go down that road.
It could just be pan seared and finished in the oven. It could be roasted it just the versatility of it and the flexibility to be able to do a lot with it. And for anybody that doesn't know what spatchcock chicken is, basically, if a whole chicken was sitting on the counter, and one of those cartoon pianos fell on it on top of it from like 50 stories up, that's what the spatchcock chicken looks like. So
that's great. All right, Chris, good answer. Very unique. That is the most unique, most unique here it is. I want to before we get to the next question, ask Is this something that you would be willing to demonstrate in the Test Kitchen in the crosscore unit?
Absolutely. Yeah. It's one of the things I love to cook for my family and enjoying myself. Would you be willing to test this in my kitchen?
In my oven?
Absolutely that I've been waiting nine years for you to invite me over So
Carrie, you might see some expenses for a round trip flight to Phoenix come back, don't worry about it. I approved it. Okay. All right. Next question for from
Chris.
If you were cooking for your loved ones, I believe already know the answer to this but for the people that you love, what are you cooking for them? I like doing a lot of barbecue but kind of more lately what my family has been really enjoying is my homemade meatballs.
So meatballs, and then some fresh pasta and a nice homemade
uh you know marinara.
Fresh pasta is what I thought you'd say. I know that Olivia likes to help you cook and like to help you cook pasta especially and I've seen she gets very excited about pasta night. If she gets to make pasta with me she actually gets very upset when I make any kind of spaghetti or like, like if I did Cheaney Alfredo or something and we don't make the fresh pasta.
Yeah, I have to remind her how much time that takes.
She's like, excuses. Well, at least it's not a huge mess in the kitchen with kids and flowers, right? Yes, it is. Everywhere.
All right, Justin, back to you.
Back to me. All right. Last one was Bucha question Chris. What is your
Chris Waltons go to food? If you're feeling down, or if you're feeling up, or if it's celebratory, or if you're like, you know what I had a long day. I just want to come back home and whatever or family is out of town or you got the house to yourself and you're making yourself lunch or ordering lunch or whatever. What's your go to food?
Ice cream. I ice cream is for happy tears for sad tears. For board. Boredom for just I am an avid fan of ice cream. It is. It is my indulgence.
I think you just came up with a haiku right there.
Thank you. I mean, he's my second passion is poem writing. Very talented. Slam poetry. Should we be going?
Merci. All right. Well, that's a great question. I'm not not surprised. Well, hold on. Hold on. We got it. We got a follow up here. We wouldn't be journalistic integrity. What kind of ice cream Chris.
I like inclusions. I am not. I will say growing up I always just wanted like plain chocolate or plain vanilla or like strawberry or something like but like I've grown up to really enjoy different things that gets mixed into it. So some people do some stuff off the wall.
I don't know if it was Jimmy Fallon or something. It was it was one of the late night hosts years ago that had like
a Ben and Jerry's ice cream that had like
chocolate dipped potato chips in it. And that was yeah, it was
they don't they haven't sold it sold it in years. But I mean, if I could find someone who wants to put chocolate chip, potato chips and ice cream again. I would buy it every day.
Carry some of those Ben and Jerry flavors. They are not messing around. Yeah, I don't buy ice cream very often.
Because it won't last.
Yeah, that's my problem was I haven't looked I haven't looked to say I'll check it out.
I'll do some research next time. You know, Bluebell does a decent job but they don't get his funky. Ben and Jerry's depth theories funky.
Bluebell starting to step out of the box. They usually keep it to one or two inclusions unless it's something like a rocky road. But one of my favorite ones currently is a Bluebell and it's the Texas Two Step. Which is the cookies and cream mixed with chocolate chip cookie dough. Oh, oh, that's cool. Yeah.
Well, it's not for everyone. It's not for everyone. I feel like the same people that the people that apply to be to come up with the creative names for craft beers that don't get hired. They go work for ice cream companies to come up with their creative names. Like that's the second. The second line of opportunity for them. Textus Receptus. A good name. Sounds like a pretty fish foods. Yeah.
What if they What if these people have two jobs? They do both. And if they have three jobs, and they're also those people that come up the Lay's potato chip flavors, you know, every year they have like six flavors and you pick you know, everybody votes. Fantastic marketing. brilliant marketing. But yeah, anyway, pick a potato chip. People love lt O's.
Well, they do.
Okay, Carrie, you are up with the first question for Chef Chris. So he can start talking and I close my eyes. Okay. Yeah. We didn't mean to wake you up from your nap.
It is it is midday. So nap time. All right. Well, Chris, I think I first really got interested in how you approach cooking when you did take that the Harvard science and cooking course or I haven't ever experienced somebody who has that kind of unique twist that you do. So you're you're talented.
Jeff, and and you're an artist, you know, you have a lot of talents, a lot of creativity in you.
But then there's this also like this very analytical sciency side as well. So why? Why do you think those two interests collide when you cook? I really enjoy
understanding why food does what it does, based on the chemical makeup, the physics of how things, you know, heat up, how they cool down how they mix together, it really intrigues me so.
And then I like just being creative with recipes. So once you kind of have the baseline of understanding why food does what it does, it gives you a chance to be creative on top of that. So like understanding that, you know, when you make cookie dough, there's actually a really important stage of letting the dough rest, let the flour fully hydrate. So by understanding that and then adding that step into the process, then you can take something as basic as a base cookie dough, and then add whatever you want to it to be creative outside of the box.
Like we just did that event at our office, we did St. Patrick's Day themed, and I added Lucky Charms marshmallows in there.
Since I had a base recipe and understood how the cookie dough function itself, I can add on to it, and then add that different layer of creativity to it to make it a unique experience. At Justin, there was lucky charms and our cookies.
Yeah, I heard that little offended that I wasn't invited. They were magically delicious. They they were pretty fabulous. He I felt actually very, very good. However, we had another food
that was freaking awesome. I call it a pig candy. Chris called it what do you call it? Candy Bacon.
Katie bacon, okay, I have this, you know different places before we're in frickin Texas. But whatever magic pixie fairy dust he put on, there is the best thing ever.
So Candy Bacon is a great example of understanding the science of food and how it affects your flavor palate. So
the balancing of salty sweet and savory and then spicy altogether gives you just like this really strong umami presence when you're eating it. So with that candied bacon, there was you know, some nice thick cut bacon, brown sugar, there was little bit of barbecue spice in there, which was some garlic powder, onion powder, some cayenne, some paprika, and then by you know, slow roasting it and letting the the actual bacon render out the fat and the sugars carmelize and then it got to a hard ball state where the sugar actually
hardened to more of a candy texture and made the long bacon chips kind of stiff. And then when you bite into it, you get a bit of a bit of a crunch and then you get this like overwhelming sensation of sweet salty, smoky. Savory, spicy. It's just it kind of keeps your palate guessing what's what's next. magically delicious. Justin.
I thought Chris was making late 90s early 2000s political show reference hardball with Chris Matthews.
This stuff was great. But that's the thing Chris, you always you always are going for something that's really I don't want to sound like a goober and say approachable but you know, it's not intimidating. But it's got a twist. It's always got a little, little, little something extra. So it's a it's the it's the flare, it's the flare, it is a flare. Yes. Like when when Chris makes the peanut butter and jelly and cut some
sandwiches. Yeah, he does that you got to incorporate geometry in there.
So clearly, you did say something that I thought was was interesting. And Chris I'd like to know your your opinion on this was you said simple. But
whatever else you said I wasn't paying attention but simple but but unique. And one thing that I remember hearing early on and Chris, I'd be curious to know how you navigated that was it's really hard to not jump the gun on wanting to be creative or pushing the envelope without mastering for lack of a better word. The basics of how to do what you were talking about is like this. Once you understand how the food does what it does
Right. And I feel like so often people are trying to be, they put creativity ahead of like execution, definitely. So when when a chef is writing a menu, they need to first think about the techniques they're going to use and what what can be executed easily by the staff, what what can you know, meet the ticket time they're trying to achieve. And then once they kind of have that they want to build on those flavors. So something that I used earlier on in my career, and I still lean on it from time to time, is a book called the flavor Bible.
And it is a great reference. If someone's, you know, I had a lemon buttermilk pie that I gotten the recipe from a family member many years back, and it was really good. And I wanted to step it up and do something different and unique with it. So I went in there and I literally went and looked for lemons. And what this what this book is, is the reference of flavor combinations, what things complement each other, and what things can even contrast each other in a in an exciting way. So one of the things that I brought up was, one thing that really complements lemons is blueberries. And it's not always, you know, some of the things you'll find in this book aren't necessarily something you would just assume. So what I did was I ended up making like a blueberry compote, and then stirring it into my lemon buttermilk pie batter mix. And so when it would bake off it had this like blueberry swirl in there and it just accentuated the flavors and made it that much more exciting.
That's cool. That's That's an awesome book. That's even a great book. I think for anybody that likes to just cook at home. Right? Yes. Because exactly that is you get seasonal springtime and everything you can start okay, what are the good vegetables and what herbs go with them and what all sorts of fun stuffs. I think that's really cool. Yeah, I mean even breaks it up into you know, you have a lot of, you know, coriander How can I use this coriander up and you can go in there you can find different things that kind of pair well with it. And then you can start building off you know, what do I have at home and you can start making recipes with that or even just seasoning some chicken. Something as simple as that.
Carrie on page seven of the flavor Bible it says coriander pears excellent with the garbage can.
Quick. Okay. That's how I feel about rosemary. Is this thing on, Mary. Yeah, I know. I saw what you were doing you were trying to do that thing where you think you're funny, but you're not funny.
I
breathing? I feel like that about rosemary. Not gonna lie. I don't I don't love rosemary. Just well, and so certain things people use too heavy handed. So something like rosemary is a very overwhelming flavor. Something like coriander can also be overwhelming. So it's, it's understanding how to balance the flavors and not make it so much that that is all you taste. So I there's very little food aversions I have personally, but I just don't really care for olives. I feel like olives to me when someone throws it on something is unless it is supposed to be focused on the olive like an olive tamponade.
Olives in general, are just so overwhelmingly powerful with flavor that when you put it on something that's like the one thing you're getting on the front end of your palate. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. I can see that.
I know you love all I do.
Know it is a good example because I have had here's the other thing about olives, you can put the wrong olive on the wrong thing. You know? Absolutely. And not many people know there's all different kinds of olives. Like I have a great recipe for a column Allah, all of jam, which is just lovely. But other than that, I'm not going to go out of my way to eat olives. Like I'll never sit there with a I've seen people sit there with a jar of black olives. Or even like green olives like stuff a blue cheese, just not my jam. Yeah, yeah. I also, olives should not have blue cheese in them. We're gonna get hate mail. It's not the first time and probably have to beef up our security after what I'm about to say. But you should. It's okay to put mementos in olives. That's cool. And the green all of that's fine. Put it in your martini or just snack on it. You shouldn't be putting blue cheese or whatever else in there. And especially not just
assume that everybody wants that crap. And they're all lives. It's horrifying. It's really what's wrong with America today.
It's leading cause I do feel like all of us had a moment, like in the early 2000s where they're getting stuffed with everything. Garlic, blue cheese, more olives, whatever. And I think it's backed off a little bit but
But, Chris, you brought up a great point, I think we all have things we don't like. And as you're getting older, if you still poke around with food and try stuff out, I found that a lot of things that I didn't like were because of how it was given to me early on. And you know, I'm fine with coriander, rosemary, whatever. But yeah, rosemary, something where, like, if you're roasting a turkey, like one sprig will do the trick. And most people take like, you know, like their, their fall leaves that they rake up that much rosemary, and they stuffed it in the turkey. And then people are like, I don't like rosemary, it's like, well, yeah, cuz you just ate six pounds of rosemary on your turkey. Right? That's true. I think a lot of people who aren't trained like you guys are, might see your recipe and do this less is more kind of thing. And then at the end, it's just, okay, who's calling for pizza?
Not not doing this again. Okay, Chris. So if you were, if you were breaking down some basics on
Well, let me stop myself when we were talking earlier, before we recorded we were talking about, I asked you, if culinary schools dive really deeply into the science of food, you know, there's there the way food reacts when it's introduced to heat or cold, or how it changes. And, you know, for me, I mean, like, an easy to see thing is a baked potato, right? Here's potato
beforehand. And then, you know, you can do so many different things with a potato. So you said that most culinary schools aren't really diving that deep
into the science of yeah, not.
Not so much. And I personally think it's because most culinary school programs are
like a year and a half or so maybe two year programs. So they don't have the time to get into all of that. So a lot of what they're trying to teach is, you know, so food safety, maybe some some p&l stuff, they're going to go over basic techniques like solid Tang, and roasting and poaching and boiling, and
they don't have the time to really get into it of like recipe development. So like one of the really hard things that you don't see many people do is developing recipes for baking. Because savory cooking, you kind of you can kind of cook on the fly, you can add a little bit of this change that adjust things, but when you make a dough or a batter, it's all at once. And so either it's right or it's wrong, for the most part. So like a lot of people don't understand why you would use baking soda. So Baking soda is a great thing to use in savory cooking to unlock people don't under don't know that, that if you add a little bit of baking soda to your ground beef, when you cook it, it's actually going to raise the pH level. And it's going to help the ground beef, the actual protein structure itself, retain the moisture and brown quicker. So when you're cooking ground beef, just adding like so you have like a pound of ground beef, you add a teaspoon of baking soda, you mix it in real well and you go to saute it, it's going to brown real quick and it's going to stay moist, whereas a lot of people try to brown their ground beef. And they dry it out because they're just staring at as hard as possible and all that moisture is pulling off and the moisture is pulling off because the muscle itself the protein structure is contracting. And that squeezes out the moisture like a sponge. But the baking soda gives it a chance to help retain that. And so that's what people also try to do similar things like that with with brining things. So they'll Brian some chicken or Brian a pork chop or maybe some salmon. And when they cook it, the protein structure itself has the ability to retain that moisture because of the salinity in it.
So yeah, tell Justin,
that's all you gotta do.
Yeah, that's it. So Kerry's gonna dump like a box of baking soda in our next round.
If I do that, let's do that experiment.
You call me calling the fire department. So Chris, that's a really excellent tip. That's really good for people at home to know. Do you have one more? In your bag of
chips, tricks, chips? Chocolate covered potato chip ice cream tricks? Sounds good. You have? Do you have something else? Because I do want to ask you a few more questions. But is there another tip like that for the for the average home cook? That might not know that's minimal to do with. We've all got baking soda lying around the house somewhere for sure so
marinate your meats
It just makes such a big difference just doing like a dry seasoning on it right before you throw it into a pan, that's just, you're really missing out on the availability to add such a depth of flavor in it. And really what people forget is using acid. So using your vinegars using your citrus juice, it adds a lot of depth, it adds a lot of brightness to it, a lot of people try to lean specifically just on salt to use as a flavor enhancer. When when vinegars can do a great job of that.
You can you can brighten up a dish so much by just squeezing a little bit of lime on top of it right when it's finished, too. Yep, and marinating really doesn't have to be as long of a process. A lot of people think if you have a couple things going get your marinade ready, though you're meeting it 15 minutes, it's kind of like, you know, the minimum I would go, ideally, overnight would be best. But you know, marinating makes a big difference when you're cooking. I just made a roasted chicken. And it was horrible. And my friend was so nice. She said, sometimes chickens are just bad, but I wouldn't marinate like a chicken would I. So the one downside when you do like a skin on chicken is the skin itself will actually kind of hold on some of to like the salt that you're using. So it just like the meat will retain moisture. And so you kind of don't want that to happen with the skin because then the skin won't get that crispy texture afterwards. So it's it's finding the balance. So some people instead of marinating all chicken, they'll use a, an injector to actually inject a marinade into the chicken itself. Hmm. And that way that the skin skin isn't ever in the environment where it'll either get denatured from the acidity or it'll, it'll retain more moisture because of the salinity.
Look at me and learned stuff and things.
Well, and one thing so Chris is 100% right and one thing to add to the marinade, right Chris and you can speak to this better than any of us is most of the stuff that you could use to do a very simple marinade is stuff we probably already have at home. Right It's vinegar is it's mustard or Mayo it's maybe some sugars, some salt. If you have fresh herbs or dried herbs or whatever is I don't know if you sort of have a go to kind of allpurpose marinade that is great for people busy weeknight, you know, it's not pasta night or whatever, but you're just you're gonna grill up some chicken or, or whatever and you want to marinate in for an hour before you do that do you have a quick go to kind of just ingredient off the top of your head, for sure. So what might even be better has given you just a general guideline of doing a marinade, just Oh sure. So kind of think of almost like a salad dressing. So salad dressing is going to be three parts oil to one part acid. So take a little bit of a step back from that and do equal parts oil acid, and then add some herbs in there as you want. Maybe add some garlic in there and you can add a little bit of mustard or so wisher something that's going to kind of have like a pop of flavor, and then salt it to taste. So what you want to do is when you're making this marinade,
obviously before you put on the meat because you don't want to taste it after you put on the meat, you're going to salt it to where it's just a little saltier than you would prefer to eat the meat.
And that way when it marinates it absorbs it goes through the osmosis process, it's going to even out the salt throughout the the protein itself.
Got it? Okay, so you said equal parts right. So if I have a cup of oil, now I can do a cup of red wine vinegar or a cup of lemon juice or something like that. And then I can squeeze in some mustard and add some some garlic, some herbs, some desire, whatever you got lying around the house and then stir stir, stir salt that to a little bit more than I would prefer. And then you're off and running. Absolutely.
And then another way to you know enhance your cooking especially at home is having a finishing sauce. So either make like a pan sauce from which from which you sear the meat in
or you can even do something outside the box so something that I really enjoy a lot. I personally enjoy barbecue lot and something you don't really necessarily see a lot in the barbecue world is an Alabama white sauce.
And it's very unique and different and most people haven't experienced it.
The people that made it most famous was Big Bob Gibson's. They've done very well and many barbecue competitions across the world. They're very well known to Memphis Memphis in May. It's basically a mayonnaise, horseradish, black pepper. That
apple juice, lemon juice and cayenne. And just that simple mixture, it's it bright, it pops, it's a little bit sweet, it's really good to finish off some pork or some chicken off the grill. It's just really, really enjoyable. Is that a is it a thinner sauce or a thicker sauce, it's a thinner sauce. So what a lot of people do if they use it for like a barbecue competition, or if it's a barbecue restaurant, what they'll do is they'll actually grilled chicken, and then they'll dip it in there right afterwards, and then serve it on the plate at that. So it's a bit of a thinner sauce, but it could just be drizzled on top as well. Or it could even be used as a dipping sauce. If someone wanted to put some fries in or whatnot.
Sounds great. So somebody could just if you grill some chicken breasts, which, you know, chicken breasts can be kinda boring grilled, sometimes, somebody could just have a finishing sauce and dunk it and serve it.
Oh, like in the idea, it kind of goes back to that candy bacon concept. It's it's got a little bit of fat because the mayonnaise is mostly fat. It's got the sweetness, so it has the apple juice in there. It has the tartness because as a lemon juice, and it has a little bit of heat to it. Because as Cayenne it's it's the idea of good flavor is balance. It's finding a nice, you know, leaning on one leaning on the other and just finding that middle ground. So not not too heavy one way or the other.
Okay, I would like to learn a little bit like if there's a takeaway for cooking, what do I need to know about starch? What do I need to know about acids? What do I need, you know, just like real quick little snippets about one or two different things
that might help me not be just a horrendous cook.
So starches are good a lot of people get, they're either very comfortable cooking like a rice, or they're not at all. And it's kind of understanding that there is no middle ground. Yeah, it's either it's either they cook an amazing rice, or their rice is like crunchy in the middle. And as is nothing worse than eating rice that's not fully hydrated. And that's the problem. They're either not adding enough liquid or they're not giving enough time to fully absorb that that moisture. And you can't really force it beyond its own capabilities. That's why rice typically is not quicker than 15 to 20 minutes, because it has to have that time to fully absorb that moisture. You can do pressure cooking and and kind of introduced into environment where it forces itself in there. But then texturally you lose the integrity of what you want. So
there's a there's a great recipe I really enjoy with rice. If anybody wants to get into rice, who is very uncomfortable with it, take a microwave safe dish such as like a Pyrex or glass bowl of some kind, take a cup of rice cup of jasmine rice,
a cup in three fourths of water or stock or a liquid that they want to kind of help season it.
A teaspoon of salt, tablespoon of butter, cover it, cook it for this is 1000 watt microwave for about five minutes at 100%. And then 10 minutes at 15%. Pull it out, fluff the rice, cover it up, give it five more minutes. And then you're going to uncover it and it's going to be this just perfectly hydrated, fluffy, delicious rice that you can add to any dish. And it's something as simple as knowing that process where if you wanted to make Spanish rice, so go ahead and substitute half a cup of that liquid and add half a cup of salsa instead. And maybe add a little bit of coriander if Justin's not looking. And then when you cook it, you could you could have maybe maybe even like a teaspoon of garlic in there. And so when it cooks, you're getting all those flavors in there. But you know the science that that that rice is going to be able to hydrate because it has enough moisture and it has the right amount of time to do it. So all of a sudden, now I have a Spanish rice, same recipe, just doing a little bit of variation within it.
One of the things that really helped me kind of understand that concept is a company called America's Test Kitchen. They put out tons and tons of books. What they do with their books that's very different than most cookbooks, is they kind of talk about, you know, a traditional way of doing something and then their variation and why that variation works. And they kind of break down the science of why to go this way. I think it's a great thing for anyone who's a home cook, who wants to learn who wants to kind of go down the road of understanding food or maybe cooking food a little bit better for their family to kind of read into like the things that they're teaching. It's so
easy just to put a recipe online. And so you go and like, oh, I want to find the, you know, baked ziti. I'm gonna go look a recipe and you're like, Oh, this is a really awesome looking blog, they have all these great pictures and this person does all these things. And you just assume that that recipe is really good. Well, you have to kind of take a step back and either vet where you're getting the recipe from, or understand the food enough to see the mistakes. They're they're putting in the recipe, because that is a real thing that people experience. They think, oh, maybe I'm just not good at it. Maybe you're just looking at a recipe that's not well written. Yeah, either. They didn't add all the steps that they took, or they you know, Miss wrote something or it's just altogether not a great recipe. I think that's probably my only issue. I probably turns out a very, very good cook. And I've run into all the berry berry bad recipes. And now just a litany of bad. I mean, that's just Florida. Merci. All this time. All right, well, so give me give us an example of when you were being creative, and you were, as Carrie put it, pushing the envelope, and stuff went sideways. Give me Give us a fun story about how the recipe did not go according to plan. I've tried to kind of dabble in fermentation of different things.
At one point, I was on this health kick where I was like, I gotta drink kombucha every day. Kombucha is remember that Bucha is the best thing for you. You know, it gives you that good gut biome. And I will say, by all means can Bucha is really good for you. You just got to kind of watch it, some of them can have a lot of sugar and that kind of counteracts the fact that you're trying to make your gut biome healthier. So I
think it's called a Scooby it's it's actually a like a
disk,
a fermented like bacteria disk that you actually grow to make kombucha. And so I got into this little phase in my life where I was, you know, doing my own kombucha, and then after you like, because it's basically just tea and sugar, and then the, the bacteria eats the sugar and creates this microbiome that kind of makes ferments the tea itself. And so then I would take that and I would, you know, add different sweeteners or things into because the, it would eat all the sugar up. So you want to add flavors back to it to make it not taste terrible. So at one point, I added some some blended strawberries. And I had a jug and I didn't do a good job of what they call burping. Because when things ferment, they release gases, and it builds up pressure. So I had this big glass jug. It was about a gallon of kombucha that I've been making. And I've been traveling for work, and I just kind of like forgot about it. And I was like, Oh, whatever.
And I actually gotten in town kind of late at night from a work trip. And I was like, You know what, I really want to try some of this strawberry can Bucha that I made.
And it was I was still in the experimenting phase of kind of understanding it. And it was probably 10 o'clock at night or so my wife is asleep. My only one daughter at the time she was asleep. And I go to open this jug. And the pressure was so intense that it blew up
the lid, it hit the ceiling kombucha, sprayed everywhere all over me. All over my kitchen all over my ceiling all over everything. And kombucha has since it's fermented, it kind of smells like beer.
So it smelled like strawberry beer. And it was just it stained everything I do because it was read. So it was a it was a learning experience of understanding. If I'm gonna forget to burp it, I need to go open it outside and away from my face as well, because it was just a nightmare to clean up. But it was it was a learning experience.
Just your entire inside of your house was read and smelled like strawberry grape. It took him a good two weeks to finally get that smell out. It just it kind of smelled like a
like a frat house to be honest, because it just smelled like somebody's been pouring beer on the floor. Just let it soak in and stink up and just that fermented.
My wife, Stephanie, yeah, she was very upset with me. She did. She said maybe we don't do kombucha anymore. Did the house wake up when all this went on? Are you able to?
Oh, yes. My wife woke up. She came out she saw stuff everywhere. She glared at me and then when
she wouldn't know part of
Oh my gosh, this makes my heart.
That is a good story. I really think we should end on.
Yeah, first. Yes, we do. We do need that.
And all seriousness though, Thank you, Chef Chris for being on. pleased to have you on again down the road to talk about some more of this stuff. But great, great stuff. Carrie, we'll put some of Chris's, we'll put some of your recipes that you listed out, we'll put that in the show notes for us. So if anybody wants to go find that information, if you're listening, it's, it'll be right there. And those are quick, great kind of base recipes that Chris gave that you can use and add your own creativity to it. So Chef Chris, thank you so much for being a guest. Thank you for having me. It was absolute pleasure. I really truly enjoy working with y'all and I love we got to do with this podcast. It's great. Thank you for listening to the food service for thought podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. And a big shout out to Forbes, Heever and Wallace and everyone on the team for producing the first ever food service rep driven podcast. Please subscribe rate and review. Oh, and go eat out at your local restaurant or grab some takeout or delivery even if you are just in the mood for some apps or dessert. Every bite helps