Larry: I'm the guy...
who goes around... telling people... that my grandfather... invented the Cobb salad!
Larry: Mmm.
Jeff: I've never had chicken like this.
Larry: I don't know what the hell they're doing.
Jeff: I don't know. It's nothing like anything I've ever even tasted.
Ted: What's in my new sandwich?
Larry: Oh? Okay? It's um...
You got whitefish and sable.
Ted: No condiments?
Jeff: Cream cheese, capers.
Larry: There may be some capers. I'm not sure. If you don't like them, you can brush them off. That's not a big deal.
Jeff: Onions.
Ted: That sounds awful.
Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to Binging with Babish, where this week
we're taking a look at foods from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Now,
I think the Larry David sandwich could only possibly work on a toasted bagel
so, let's start with the whitefish salad. I could make this stuff myself, but I live in New York City,
so why the hell would I do that?
Some smoked sable, some sliced white onions
(don't order this sandwich on a first, second or third date),
a smear of cream cheese, and a sprinkling of
capers. Top it up with the toasted bagel half. It's essential that you toast this sandwich;
you need something crisp to stand up to all the mush.
Let's get that all-important cross-section (kind of unimpressive as far as this show goes), and
try a bite, and I got to say this was really, really, really good.
I am not a smoked fish fan
but the sandwich was tangy, smoky, and funky in all the best possible ways. To see if he made an error in judgment,
let's make the Ted Danson sandwich, which is gonna start with coleslaw. We're gonna combine
maybe half a cup of mayo and a few tablespoons of heavy cream, a few tablespoons of white wine vinegar,
a good squeeze of lemon juice,
a teaspoon or two of white sugar (a little sweetness can be very nice in coleslaw), a couple tablespoons of Greek yogurt, one crushed garlic clove,
and a generous sprinkle of
paprika, mustard powder, and a very generous sprinkle of the celery seed (keep your pinkie up while you shake it), before we season with a
little bit of kosher salt and freshly ground pepper. Mix until completely homogeneous and then add our coleslaw mix.
This is mostly cabbage with some carrots, sometimes even purple cabbage if you're super fancy. Next up
We've got Russian dressing which starts with equal parts horseradish sauce and mayo and maybe about half as much plain-jane
ketchup. To this we're going to add a few dashes of hot sauce, a few dashes of Worcestershire-
Worcester-
Worces-
Worcestershire sauce,
paprika and half of a small onion finely chopped. Mix to combine and refrigerate until ready to use. And now a
wonderful trick that I've learned recently to toast bread using mayo instead of butter.
That's right; mayo spread liberally on bread yields a
golden-brown crunch that simply can't be beat. Then we're going to heat the turkey and melt some Swiss cheese in a hot pan. Top
generously with coleslaw and smear our opposing bread slice with Russian dressing. Stack it up,
and it's time for cross section number two of the day. So for me,
it's kind of like Christmas. This sandwich yields a somewhat an unimpressive cross-section, all sort of the same color and consistency throughout,
but it's pretty hard to beat the flavor of what is essentially a
turkey Reuben. I've been eating a lot of sandwiches though recently, so how about we make something
that's a little lighter, like a salad that easily clocks over 2,000 calories. Cobb salad starts with a bed of chopped iceberg lettuce,
watercress and
endive, or I'm sorry,
awn-DEEV.
We're gonna toss these together to make the base of our salad, and then it's time to make the dressing, which is a very thin
old world French dressing. It starts with a few tablespoons each of water,
red wine vinegar, the juice of one lemon, a teaspoon of I-don't-want-to-say-it-sauce, half a teaspoon of ground mustard,
1 or 2 teaspoons of white sugar, depending on your liking, a pinch of salt, some freshly ground pepper and 1 clove of minced,
not pressed, garlic. This is a hot button issue,
I'm not trying to make anybody upset. Mix until completely combined before slowly drizzling in
3/4 of a cup of canola oil while whisking constantly to create an emulsion. Lay down our salad bedrock and begin
striping with different salad toppings, starting with chopped bacon, chopped hard-boiled eggs, chopped poached chicken, chopped tomatoes,
crumbled Roquefort cheese, and lastly some diced avocado.
I'd say this is a pretty salad,
but it's barely a salad, isn't it? Garnish with some minced chives and serve with the dressing alongside.
I love this salad for serving to a crowd because you can sort of pick and choose
which toppings you want, which ones you don't. But me, I love everything on here
so I'm piling it high and then drizzling it with some of our French dressing. It also seems almost borderline
traditional to serve this salad on a plate way too small to accommodate
all the toppings. Seriously, Google Cobb salad and you see that they're all just spilling off their plates. OK, so last
but not least, we're gonna try and tackle
Palestinian chicken. Now, the restaurant in the show is based off of a LA chain called Zankou,
so we're gonna try and imitate their garlic sauce, but we're going to try and make the chicken a bit more
Palestinian by making Musa Khan, which is a kind of chicken
that's been marinated in a mixture of yogurt,
cardamom, sumac (lots of sumac), minced shallot, lemon juice, and some chopped fresh dill. We're going to also
season that with a bit of kosher salt, (maybe a few pinches worth),
a good drizzle of olive oil (that's going to help the color later on when we're roasting it) and a
few twists of pepper. Mix to combine, and now it's time to start prepping our chicken.
We're going to cut along each side of the spine, pulling it out so we can flatten out the bird much like we did our
Thanksgiving turkey. Snap the breastbone in half and place the entire bird into a
gallon storage bag or large tub (if your chicken's too big for the bag). Add our yogurt marinade and massage to make sure that it's evenly coated,
place on a baking sheet so nothing leaks out and
refrigerate for 24 hours. The yogurt works much like buttermilk, in that it has enzymes that break down the cellular walls of the chicken, making
it more tender and flavorful.
We're gonna roast that bird at 450 degrees Fahrenheit for about
45 to 55 minutes, plenty of time to try and copycat Zankou's garlic sauce, which is a Lebanese garlic sauce called toum.
We're going to peel and separate the cloves of two heads of garlic and
puree in the jar of a food processor, stopping to scrape down the walls and re-pureeing until it's a nice smooth paste.
Then very, very, VERY slowly,
we're going to be
drizzling in about half a cup of canola oil. To give you an idea of how slowly, this footage is sped up
5,000%. That slowly. Once we've added half a cup of oil, we're gonna drizzle in a quarter cup of lemon juice and then
continue to drizzle an additional half to three quarters of a cup of canola oil until we get a thick spreadable paste like this.
It's essentially a crazy garlicky eggless mayo.
Meanwhile, our chicken is coming out of the oven and boy, is it a looker. Rest for a bare minimum of
10 minutes uncovered before slicing in half, carving off the thigh and drumstick and serve with a heaping helping of toum.
I know that yogurt marinating is a very common method,
but I was not prepared for how crisp the skin was,
how juicy the meat was,
how flavorful the whole thing turned out to be. Is it as good as Larry and Jeff described it on Curb Your Enthusiasm?
I gotta say pretty much. Yeah, it's the one of the best chickens
I've ever made in my home, and I picked the whole thing clean when I thought the camera wasn't running.
[Outro music]