- Hey there, folks.
Welcome to pro tips from pro chefs.
I am Andrew Rea of Binging with Babish,
decidedly not a pro chef, but they gave me some airtime,
I'm gonna use it to talk to you
about salt and pepper.
It sounds pretty boring, right?
But it's not.
There's actually all different kinds of salt,
and all different kinds of pepper,
but I'm gonna show you the ones that you need
the most in your home kitchen.
First up, we have table salt.
This is the salt that you're probably most familiar with.
It's the one that's on your dinner table.
It's the one that comes in these whimsical cardboard tubes,
with the little metal spout that always breaks off
and ruins your day.
See how the salt just is cascading from my fingers?
While it's very good for baking,
not so good for cooking because first off, as you can see,
I can't pinch it.
You see how I have no control over what's happening
below my fingernails?
I feel out of control right now,
not a man in control of my situation,
my life, or anything really.
(Andrew chuckles)
Let's get rid of all this spilled salt.
Bad luck.
Okay, so, just so you guys know,
we love keeping in the flubs and the stupid stuff.
So feel free to keep all the silliness in.
Now, for cooking.
As you cook more and more often,
you wanna salt to taste.
That's what most recipes say, right?
Salt to taste.
For that, you wanna go kosher salt.
Kosher salt is the choice for chefs the world over
because you can control it.
You can pick it up, feel how much you're grabbing here.
This feels like about three quarters of a teaspoon to me,
if I had to guess.
And then you can control how much is going into your food,
and you get used to that and you can cook more fluidly.
You can cook by salting to taste.
That's what most recipes say, right?
Yes.
So the last salt that I want you to keep in your pantry
is flaky finishing salt.
Now these are big old honking salt crystals.
You see that?
These are not only gonna add a nice little bit
of salty bite to your dish,
it's also gonna add a whole lot of texture.
Also looks really nice.
This looks delicious, and tastes delicious
on brownies, on cookies, on your salted caramel,
on your steak when you finished plating up the steak
and slicing it, hitting a little bit of butter
and flaky salt, your guests will never leave your home.
You'll have to call a lawyer about squatter's rights.
(Andrew laughs)
Didn't come to me fast enough.
These are the salts.
These are the salts that I want you
to go out and buy right now.
I'll wait.
All right, so.
All right, all right, all right.
So let's get the salts out of the way.
Let's get off all this bad luck out of the way.
Look at all this spilled salt.
I'm gonna die tonight from this.
The Babish bench scraper for the discerning bench scraper.
Like as a person, a person who scrapes benches.
A bench scraper.
This is the bench scraper for the one of them.
(upbeat fun music)
So next up we're talking about pepper.
So this is a little theme going on here.
Salt and pepper.
All right. So you got it.
Pre-ground versus fresh ground.
This is what most of us have in our kitchens.
The stuff in the shaker, the stuff in the little square tin
that has the pour a whole lot side,
and the sprinkle a little bit side, right?
No? Good for you.
That must mean that you're using freshly ground pepper,
which I am a huge advocate for, because it tastes bigger.
It tastes brighter.
It tastes more floral.
You can control the grind size.
That's about it.
But all those things are worth the cost of admission alone.
And to prove it to you,
I'm going to bring my producer, Abby Glackin,
right out in here.
Is it pronounced Glackin or Glacken?
- Glackin.
- Okay. All right, cool.
Now, I'm gonna mix these up.
Close your eyes, please.
Thank you. Keep them closed.
And we have never met before, right?
- Who are you?
We have met before, that was the joke.
So I'm gonna mix these up,
and I'm gonna ask you to smell them,
which is not a pleasant thing.
It's never fun to smell pepper directly.
So I apologize in advance,
but you're gonna tell me which one smells better.
Big lift.
- I mean, I don't even smell anything.
- Okay, that's pepper A.
- All right.
- Now, what about pepper B?
- Ooh, Ooh, Ooh.
There's something there.
- There's something there.
See? All right.
You want something there, you want nothing there?
You want freshly ground pepper.
Thank you, Abby.
Great to see you. - Thank you.
- Well folks, I hope I managed to teach you
something halfway interesting
about a very uninteresting subject.
Until next time, my name is Andrew Rea.
Go check out my channel on YouTube.
It's called Binging with Babish,
and go to thedrewbarrymoreshow.com
for more tips, tricks, and Drew.
(upbeat music)