- [Babish] This episode is sponsored by SimpliSafe,
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- Where's your lunch?
- You're wearing it.
What's that?
- Sushi.
- Sushi?
PB&J with the crusts cut off.
Well, Brian, this a very nutritious lunch.
All the food groups are represented.
Did your mom marry Mr. Rogers?
- [Babish] Hey, what's up, guys?
Welcome back to "Binging With Babish,"
where this week, we're taking a look
at the lunches from "The Breakfast Club,"
maybe the most famous of which
is Ally Sheedy's Pixy Stick and Cap'n Crunch sandwich,
which, upon closer examination,
I don't think was Pixy Stix at all, but just plain sugar.
But more on that later.
First, we have to do something I've never done before,
that is, make sushi.
First, I'm cooking some very thoroughly rinsed sushi rice
per manufacturer's instructions in a rice cooker.
In my case, that's one cup of rice to 1 1/2 cups of water.
Insert it in said rice cooker, hit the cooking button,
and let it do its thing until it says it's done.
Then we're dumping the rice into a hangiri, or in my case,
just a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper,
and seasoning with two teaspoons of seasoned rice vinegar.
Now, there's a specific method
for cutting and flipping the rice to cool it off,
one that I do not know,
so I think that makes me just about as qualified
as the typical sushi chef in 1985 Chicago.
Now, once we've found the appropriate fan here,
that's not gonna be it, Andy,
we're gonna use it to quickly fan the rice
so it cools to skin temperature.
Once we're done fanning, we're covering this with a moist,
clean kitchen towel so it stays, you know, moist
while we prepare the other star of our sushi, the fish.
I've got some nice sushi-grade tuna here
that I'm going to cut into strips
the width and length of my intended roll.
I'm gonna once again take the opportunity to apologize
for not doing this traditionally or even correctly.
I watched one video and am genuinely trying this out
for the first time.
Now we need to prepare our sushi rolling mats
by wrapping in plastic wrap, trimming our sheet
of toasted nori down to size, and for our maki roll,
place the seaweed first on the sushi mat.
Now, a very important tool in the preparation of sushi
is a bowl of cool water, which prevents the sushi rice
from sticking to the sushi artisan's hands.
Then we're spreading out two golf ball portions of rice
onto the seaweed, leaving a one-inch gap at the top.
Place our strip of tuna in the center
and use the sushi mat both to roll the sushi
and as leverage to pull it tight.
And there you have it. That doesn't look half bad.
But let's see what it looks on the inside
using a sharp and moistened knife.
Make sure you wet the knife between each cut
so you get nice, clean edges.
Then I'm gonna cut the edges off the roll,
cut it in half, and cut each half into three even pieces.
When I say even, I mean as even as I can get them.
There you have it. That kinda looks like sushi.
I'm just gonna place it in my high-end,
sushi-specific little lunch bucket.
Now, let's see if we can do any better using some salmon.
Now, as you can see, we have a short, stout oblong piece,
so I'm cutting these into thin strips that I can layer.
And I'm going to utilize this device.
This, my friends, is the very apex
of sushi rolling technology.
Once slightly lubricated with some vegetable oil,
it is an unstoppable force
in the immortal war of homemade sushi.
First, we're gonna spread out the rice
into two sort of channels in each half of the sushi bazooka.
Add our salmon and sliced avocado.
And once we've replaced the precision plunger,
we're sealing shut the apparatus
by virtue of the two locking hinges,
using the threaded compression module
to pack the sushi tightly into the chamber.
Make sure your power dampeners are modulated,
keep an eye on your force feedback rate,
and just sorta poop it out.
Oh, boy, I cannot watch that and not laugh.
But despite the technical prowess of our method,
we still need to wrap this guy in seaweed,
so we're gonna use the sushi mat to do just that.
Pull it tight, trim off any excess if you're like me
and you don't know what you're doing, and look at that:
this thing pooped out a halfway-decent log of sushi.
This one's a little bigger, so I'm gonna cut it
into eight pieces using my wetted knife.
And there you have it: salmon, avocado, and tuna rolls.
These, of course, must be accompanied
with the requisite fake wasabi paste
and a few slices of pickled ginger.
And there you have it:
Claire's how the other half lives
in 1985 high school lunch.
The only other actual cooking
that needs to be done for these kids is soup.
Brian strikes me as a minestrone guy,
so I'm gonna prep some mirepoix,
chop up one small zucchini
and about a cup of finely-shredded cabbage,
and finally chop some fresh parsley, oregano, and basil.
Then, over on the stovetop, we're sauteing the onion
in about a tablespoon of neutral-flavored oil,
after about three minutes adding the carrots and celery
along with one clove of pressed garlic
and sauteing for another minute or two,
adding four cups of homemade chicken broth
and one 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes.
Bring this guy up to a simmer,
and then once it starts to bubble,
we're gonna add our shredded cabbage, chopped zucchini,
half a can of rinsed cannellini beans, and optionally,
a rind of Parmesan cheese for extra flavor points.
Bring this guy up to a simmer, add the chopped herbs,
and then we're gonna cook for 10 minutes,
adding water or chicken stock as necessary,
depending on how much stuff you added.
Once this guy's cooked for 10 minutes
and the vegetables are starting to soften,
we're gonna season generously with kosher salt.
Add our pasta, which, by law,
has to the be the short little macaronis
that you always get in minestrone soup.
Cook until the pasta's done,
and then serve it up into your era-appropriate thermos,
which I'm pretty proud to say
is the exact same one seen in the movie.
Now, for maybe the best part of my day: making PB&J.
I don't know how you like to make yours.
I have been called generous
with my peanut butter and jelly proportions.
There are those who would call me a zealot.
I prefer to be called a giver.
There's your Ben Kingsley impression
from "Iron Man 3" that nobody was asking for.
And of course, this PB&J is served with the crusts cut off,
which means plenty of snacks for the chef
and a near guarantee
that you're gonna get bullied in high school.
Brian's parents strike me as a diagonal cut family.
Let's take a look at that cross section. Perfect.
Pack this guy into an era-appropriate baggie,
and we're off to the races.
Now we're onto the lunch of jock Andrew,
and this requires a little bit more protein:
a proud stack of what looked like
to me three turkey sandwiches.
I'm gonna top these with an elegant drizzle of mayo
and a much-less-elegant drizzle of mustard.
Maybe let's just spread all that
together with a knife, Andy.
Nobody needs to see your gross incompetence.
And then we're topping this up with yellow American singles
and what looked to me like a little bit
of iceberg or romaine lettuce.
Gotta get a little fiber in there.
Top everybody up, put 'em in plastic bags,
and shove 'em in a grocery bag,
along with a full bag of chips, banana,
full bag of cookies, and a six-pack of Coke.
Now, there's one more sandwich in question here,
belonging to my very first love Allison,
which, confoundingly, is one slice of wheat bread,
one slice of white bread, a generous smear of butter,
and a single slice of Mortadella, which is removed,
discarded, and replaced with Pixy Stix and Cap'n Crunch.
Now, most people think it was Pixy Stix.
I don't think it was.
I think it was just plain sugar, which used to be available
in those straw wrappers in diners.
But we're gonna try it with Pixy Stix just because.
So once we've got a generous smattering
of soured sugar on there, we're loading up this sandwich
with as much Cap'n Crunch as we can muster,
pressing down with every ounce of our teenage angst,
marrying the two slices together,
and, uh, not enough survived there.
I'm gonna really load this guy up with Cap'n Crunch
and shove it into my mouth immediately
to weird out my peers.
Now, I'm here to tell you what the foods
in your favorite fiction taste like, and I can tell you
that this one tastes really not very good.
It's got a great crunch to it,
but it's unwieldy, sour, sweet, and totally insane.
I'm gonna do what I can to muscle down a single bite,
but I'm gonna go ahead and give this one a 2 out of 10.
Now, it's possible it's because I'm using Pixy Stix
instead of regular sugar like she used in the movie,
so for the sake of science,
we obviously have to try that as well.
But, I'm sorry to say, not much better.
And with that, it's time to assemble our collective lunches,
which, unlike their real-life counterparts,
who realize that they all have
the same coming-of-age conflicts,
could not be more different.
Let's start with Andrew's lunch.
We've got ourselves a banana, which I cannot eat,
an apple, which tastes remarkably like an apple,
turkey sandwich, tastes exactly like a turkey sandwich,
milk tastes like milk, chips like chips, and Coke like Coke.
This is what I've been waiting for, though:
a Chicago specialty,
Matt's Chocolate Chip Soft Baked Cookies.
I had to special order these for accuracy,
and I gotta say, they're pretty good,
nice and soft with chunk-like chocolate instead of chips.
All in all, you're looking at about 6,000 calories here,
so everything a growing boy needs.
Next up, once again,
we have Allison's sugar-cereal sandwich.
Ugh. Why you doing this again, Andy?
You're not in high school anymore.
This isn't going to impress anybody.
Then we got Brian's lunch, which, probably my favorite.
You got some nice, piping-hot minestrone soup,
of which this thermos holds surprisingly little.
Thermos tech has come a long way in the past 35 years.
A juice box. No big deal, crushed it.
And something I haven't eaten in a very, very long time:
peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off.
Those jelly stains through the bread?
That's how you know it's a school lunch.
And lastly, we have my actual dinner tonight:
the sushi I made earlier.
Not looking half-bad, thanks to the Sushi Pooper 9000.
And it tastes like, well, you know, sushi.
Now, there's only one recipe here that really warranted
the Babish improvement, that being the cereal sandwich,
which I think would make some nice French toast,
so I'm gonna dry out a bunch of slices
of wheat and white bread in a 200 degree Fahrenheit oven
for about half an hour until they're totally dried out.
You can, of course, use stale bread.
Then I'm gonna make a crunchy cereal coating
by blitzing some Captain Crunch in a food processor
until it's a kinda chunky-fine powder.
Then I'm building a very simple custard out of three eggs,
one cup of whole milk, a little splash of vanilla paste,
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, a little grating of fresh nutmeg,
a big pinch of kosher salt, and of course,
the most important ingredient:
three tablespoons of white sugar.
Go ahead and tiny whisk this together
until it's a nice, smooth slurry
and no streaks of egg remain
and dump the Cap'n crumbs into another shallow, wide dish.
Now we're gonna thoroughly soak our cooled, dried-out bread
in the custard before dipping into the cereal,
and this is where Allison's press-it-into-the-bread method
really comes in handy, 'cause we really want
to adhere as much cereal to the bread as possible
before dumping it into some heated, foaming butter
and frying for two to three minutes per side
over medium heat until lightly browned.
Evacuate onto a rack set in a rimmed baking sheet
to keep warm in the oven until everybody's done,
and there you have it: Cap'n Crunch French toast
with a dainty pat of butter
and a much-less-dainty pour of maple syrup.
Let's prepare ourselves a nice, stacked bite,
oh, whoops, a nice, stacked bite here and see how it tastes.
And I gotta say, pretty good.
Most of all, it just adds crunch,
so definitely an improvement on the original,
but then again, so is anything.
Thanks again to SimpliSafe for sponsoring this episode.
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Visit simplisafe.com/babish to learn more.
The link is in the video description.
(upbeat music)