Hey what's up guys, welcome back to Binging With Babish
where this week, since everyone's heading back to school we're making a sandwich from:
"Back To School", I mean it just makes sense.
Looks like he's putting a few key appetizers into this sandwich, one of which is deviled eggs,
and the superior way to boil hard-boiled eggs is not to boil them at all, but to steam them for 15 minutes.
This produces more evenly cooked eggs that are somehow more easy to peel
especially if you shock them in an ice bath right after they come out of the steam...
...basket. Anyway deviled eggs are a pretty straightforward thing it's hard to mess with perfection
we're just separating the whites from the yolks,
and adding to the yolks two tablespoons of mayo,
a tablespoon of white vinegar,
a teaspoon of grain mustard,
a little hint of onion powder and a little hint of celery salt.
Beat all that together using a spatula or a wire whisk
and if you're feeling extra fancypants, scoop the whole mixture into a piping bag so you can
create elegant little soft-serve twists out of your filling.
Sprinkle with the requisite paprika and cover and refrigerate while we gear up to start making cocktail meatballs
This is a pretty standard meatball mixture of ground beef, bread crumbs, eggs, spices...
check out the recipe in my book coming out October 3rd
or on my website at bingingwithbabish.com
We're gonna bake these before we start simmering them in the sauce.
This helps them retain a little bit more of their beefy flavor instead of cooking them for 5 hours in the slow cooker,
as most recipes recommend. Bake it 375 for 15 to 20 minutes or until cooked through,
in the meantime we're going to take a look at sauce.
Cocktail meatball sauce is the combination of sweet and sour
the classic formula being grape jelly and ketchup,
but there's a lot of room for experimentation in this equation.
How about sweet chili sauce and apricot preserves?
Delicious.
Or if in the mood for something a little more smokey and spicy why not:
barbecue sauce and apple butter?
Just try and think of what fruit would most logically go with which sauce, like in the case
of last week's Himalayan ketchup,
which, yes I hung onto because it's very very delicious,
we'd reach for the mango chutney.
Now all these taste really really good on their own but what
if I took a little bit of each and mix them all together
how wacky would that be this is gonna taste like a friggin nightmare it
Whoa. That's really, surprisingly good. Yeah, I think we're gonna move forward with that.
I don't expect you to recreate this at home but if you happen to have all these preserves and sauces on hand,
you're some kind of preserve and sauce nut, I highly recommend it it's actually
really genuinely good.
We're gonna toss the meatballs into the sauce and let them simmer on the stovetop for about 45 minutes
while we make the last piece of our puzzle, what to me, looks like Spanakopita?
Spanacopita?
Spanakopeeta?
Whatever. We're sauteing some spinach in a little bit of hot butter for a few minutes before adding
two or three cloves of crushed garlic.
Saute for a few minutes until it's shrunken down to like one-one-hundredth of what you started with
and if it's still in too large of pieces for your liking,
put it on a cutting board and give it a good chop.
Now to the spinach we're gonna add:
a couple tablespoons of chopped dill
and maybe half a cup of feta cheese, optionally you could also add
mint, oregano, scallions, all kinds of stuff.
Now on to phase 2, or 6, or whatever we're on, we're going to butter a single sheet of phyllo dough
and stack another layer of phyllo dough on top.
This stuff is available in your grocery's freezer and it's not nearly as scary as it looks.
Slice into roughly 3-inch wide, 12-inch long segments
and place a solid 2 tablespoons of filling on the top end of each sheet
and fold it up into a triangle like an American flag
or a
Greek flag
or
wherever
you personally are from.
Preheat the oven to 375, brush the tops of your little pastries with butter, and bake for
20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown.
A little less labor-intensive option is to use puff pastry.
This stuff is also available in your grocery's freezer and doesn't require any of that complicated layering or
buttering, and as you can see while it yields a pretty good result it's not the real thing.
For the real thing you got to go phyllo.
But then again this is the 80s we're talking about
they weren't really concerned with the real thing.
The food was bad back then.
Anyway it's finally time to start assembling our sandwich,
sorry that's been a very sandwich heavy few episodes here
I'm not trying to become the
Sandwich Channel it's just,
the movie's called "Back to School" for god's sake I had to do it.
Anyway we're gonna layer our meatballs in the bottom of our scooped out loaf of Italian bread
and top that with some Spanakopita,
and our deviled eggs,
for a sandwich that screams,
"I'm not adhering to your social conventions, I'm Rodney Dangerfield."
I thought the scooped out step was kind of unnecessary
but it turned out to really keep everything contained,
which is no mean feat when you consider all the
shapes and sizes of this sandwich's contents.
And as is the case with most exercises in sandwich absurdity on this show, this tastes...
pretty great.
It's a whole bunch of fantastic appetizers and semi compatible flavors jammed together
in fact, if I weren't so carefully watching this show's
impact on my waistline, I might have eaten the whole thing myself.