Tripp Kramer here from TrippAdvice.com.
Next to me, I have Chef Mark Margi, who is going to be helping teach you how to make
three gourmet meals.
This is going to sound crazy, but we were able to figure it out for under $10.
Chef Margi, man, thanks for being here.
Mark: Hi.
Thanks for having me.
Tripp: Yeah, for sure.
Why don't you tell the guys a little about you?
How long have you been doing this for?
Mark: Yeah.
I'm a chef.
I'm actually a chef, it’s not made up.
We’re not just like friends.
I've been a chef for a little over 10 years, cooking in mostly higher end places, Michelin
star restaurants, been in Europe a little bit, LA, San Francisco, that whole area.
Basically, what we're going to do, we're going to make a bunch of stuff.
It's going to be something you could make.
It's going to be super impressive because it's going to be with those high end techniques.
I'm going to show you how to do it at home without having to get all crazy.
Tripp: Where did you get all this stuff from?
Where can the guys get some of this stuff and how much did it cost?
Mark: Sure.
I went to Trader Joe’s.
I figured that's a pretty common spot people can go to.
Nothing that I got is super rare, though you can probably get it in almost any grocery
store.
I went to Trader Joe's because I knew they had it at a good price.
We got everything and you talked about being under 10 bucks.
I did the math, some a little mathematician over here, and five bucks a person for all
this food.
It ends up being enough food for 12 meals.
I think we did the math.
12 meals, it's a deal, it's a steal to sail of the century and it's going to be super
delicious.
Tripp: You can have multiple dates and still make a lot of gourmet meals and have plenty
leftover.
Mark: This is the first thing we're going to make.
We're gonna make a butternut squash pizza.
It's different, which is nice.
You don't need a couple of things.
You're going to need some pizza dough.
You can make it yourself but they make perfectly good pizza dough that you can buy.
That's what we're doing here.
Some butternut squash.
This is about 12 ounces, diced up.
It doesn't have to be super even because we're going to puree it later.
Some red onion that you're going to take a quarter of that and slice it super duper thinly.
Some apple cider vinegar, which we're going to add to our puree.
Some goat cheese, crumb with that on top.
A little bit of spinach just for some green.
Some olive oil, salt and pepper.
Super easy, super simple, but super delicious.
You got your butternut squash here, diced up a little bit of olive oil.
Give that some, you can be generous.
Put some salt and pepper.
Freshly ground if you can.
You can buy these, they're cheap.
Put sea salt or kosher salt.
Don't use table salt, that stuff is not good.
Give that a little world around.
You can get your hands dirty, but honestly it's all going to get mixed together later.
It's going to pop this in the oven.
We have this oven to set to 425 degrees.
We're going to put that in for about 20 minutes.
It's going to get nice and toasty, and then we'll take it out.
Cut yourself onion, about half of this piece.
That's perfect for our pizza there.
It’s about 10 minutes or so, we want to check the oven.
Depending on your oven, some are more powerful.
You can see this is still pretty firm.
To get there, try another 10 minutes or so.
It’s been 20-24 minutes, we check on our squash here.
It’s super roasty, and literally you can smash it.
We're going to puree this now and make the base for pizza.
We're going to put our squash in there.
If you don't have anything like this, you can get a potato masher and mash it up.
We're going to add a little bit of salt, pepper and add a splash of apple cider vinegar to
give us some acidity.
Tomatoes naturally have acidity.
Match that since tomatoes are the classic pizza sauce.
Put some butter to make it nice, creamy and smooth.
It's not crazy smooth, but it doesn't have to be that's perfect.
It's not chunky anymore.
This is our sauce.
All you have to do is get everything else together for our pizza.
We can go ahead and build it.
Our sauce is done.
Everything else is already prepped for our pizzas.
All we have to do is go ahead, roll the dough out and we can make our pizza.
The dough that I got normally, they come in one pound packages.
For this recipe, you can split it in half.
You can make two pizzas out of this recipe.
It's fell out of a pan about this big.
It could be considered a personal pizza, depends on how hungry you are.
It could be an appetizer.
You'll notice these are sticky dough, can stick your hand and it gets messy.
What you can do is get a little bit of water on your hands.
It's the same thing you do if you've ever made sushi.
It won't stick to wet hands.
After I do it out.
I give it a flip to make sure it's not sticking too much.
You'll notice this is super not round.
It's kind of amoeba ish, it's an amorphous mass, but it's totally fine.
You're trying to get the size of it, as large as the base of the pan.
You can roll it out a little bit, which will have it be a little more even.
See the size of your pizza, that's looking pretty good.
Put a little bit of olive oil.
Thrown around like that.
Then all we have to do now is to lift this up.
Go in and you can hear a little sizzle.
All you need to do is fit it roughly to the base of the pan like that.
You can see it sizzling a little bit.
Put the puree squash in the middle, move it around a little bit and finish the layer.
Baby spinach here.
Tear it up so it can spread out.
Some of our onions that we shaved earlier.
Goat cheese, crumble that.
It’s a little blob here and there.
There's some parm here.
It’s good.
I like it.
Put a little bit of pepper and salt, making sure you get some salt on that crust.
That's important.
We're going to let this go for about a minute or so to get a little bit of color underneath
it.
I have my oven set to broil.
We're gonna broil the top, cook from both sides.
Takes about a minute more here, it's going to be about three minutes in there, and we're
going to be done.
It's actually a really fast from pan to plate kind of thing.
Nice golden brown color.
That's perfect.
I will take this whole pan.
This is fine.
Don't go right next to the grates, but if you go down below, it might take a little
bit too long.
That's a good mix between there and halfway, two or three minutes, and it'll be done.
Nice and crispy.
You can check it to make sure it’s good.
Get some nice colors on there.
Cut it into six little board, serve it up.
Meal number two, we're going to make a roasted mushroom risotto, pretty classic.
Everybody loves it.
We have all our traditional risotto ingredients.
We have arborio rice, specifically for risotto, some chicken broth, if you want to keep it
vegetarian, you can use veggie broth, that's totally fine.
A little bit of white wine.
Honestly, this is the cheap stuff, but we're cooking with it.
You don't need expensive stuff.
Some mushrooms, some onions, some garlic, some parmesan cheese, a little bit of butter
because I love butter, and a whole bunch of fresh thyme.
Everything's prepped for risotto.
We're gonna go ahead and get started.
Three pans going, have one for our actual risotto.
What we're going to want to do is get some olive oil or onion in there.
What we want to do is we want to soften this up.
We don't want to get any color though it's going to turn translucent.
We're not sauteing or anything like that.
You don't need a crazy high heat.
Don't be scared of salt.
What we're going to want to do is we're going to put all our broth in there.
The reason we do that is we're going to add broth incrementally as we're cooking our rice.
We don't want to have the temperature fluctuate a bunch.
You want to stay hot so we're going to pop rock out a hot rice, and it's not going to
mess up our cooking by adding something cold to something hot.
Literally all I do is, I grab half of this, and chuck it in there.
What that's going to do is that broth is going to extract all the flavor.
It's going to pull a bunch of the leaves off as well.
You don't have to spend 10-15 minutes sitting there picking thyme leaves.
For me it's super duper helpful.
We want some grape seed oil in the pan.
Go ahead, you can see they’re sizzling away.
We want salt and pepper.
For about three or four minutes, it'll soften it up.
We added our rice to the pan as you can see.
All we're going to do is stirred around, make sure it's nicely coated in your olive oil.
If you need that extra splash to coat it all, that's perfectly acceptable.
Anytime you add something to your pan, add a little bit of salt.
It's going to season in layers.
The mushrooms as you can see are really nice and toasty.
All we're going to do now is we're going to add our garlic that we chopped up before.
All we're going to do at this point is to cook this out for about a minute or so until
the garlic is nice and fragrant.
You have like a white dot but the outside is translucent.
That's exactly what you want.
It means that some of the starch coat has set up and it's going to make sure that we
end up with a really creamy result.
We're going to go ahead and add a wine glass worth about a third of the bottle roughly.That
is totally fine.
It doesn't have to be perfect.
We're going to leave it at medium pretty much for the rest of the cooking time.
You want to stir this periodically.
Mushrooms are looking good.
You got some nice color on the garlic.
They're super fragrant.
This is just hanging out in the back, we're not going to need them until later.
You can see the wine is pretty much all gone.
If you look at the bottom of the pan, you can see that creaminess, that's starch coming
out of the rice, that's pretty much what you want with the risotto.
What we're going to do is we're going to add enough broth that it comes to the top of the
rice.
All you want to do is cook this, stirring periodically.
A lot of times, with risotto recipes, they'll say stir at constantly for 48 minutes.
You don't have to do that.
Just stir every couple of minutes, don't let it sit.
The idea is you want to beat up all the rice granules, want to rub up against each other
like that.
That'll knock off starch, which will add to the liquid and will make it creamy.
It's simple.
It's easy to make.
These mushrooms, Tripp just try them.
Mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper, they're amazing and they're 10 times better
than most things you're going to get in a restaurant.
They cost about two bucks.
We've added three additions of our stock and cooked it down our broth.
You can see there's a little bit of liquid in the pan, but it's not super soupy.
What we're going to do now is we're going to add some parm.
Carry gold is awesome butter.
We're going to stir that in.
Put about half of the mushrooms and we stir that in.
It is a mushroom risotto.
It's not just a risotto with mushrooms on top.
You can see how creamy that is.
Seriously, look at that.
I want to give it a taste and check for seasoning.
Yeah, super good.
It tastes great.
That's only half the equation.
You want to make sure it looks good.
Super common saying is you're going to eat with your eyes first.
You want to make sure that your presentation is nice.
What you do is get yourself a nice wide plate or a white bowl.
You can go in here like that.
Give it a shake.
See what goes out to the edges, little pockets of mushrooms there so you can know what you're
getting yourself into.
Let’s place that around like that.
You can break some leaves off and scattered around, gives a little green, some nice contrast.
Done in about 20 minutes.
Honestly, if that doesn't impress somebody, you should probably move on.
Tripp: Let's try this puppy.
That is good stuff.
It's time for our third recipe.
This is going to be the one with meat if you're waiting for it.
If all the carnivores out there were like, where's the meat dude?
This is the meat one.
Put sea salt and pepper.
If you want to use another spice mix or you want to do that and you're into that stuff,
check out this homemade spice mix and go to town.
I just like salt and pepper because it's pretty simple to come over here.
You need high heat.
We want to steer this guy.
We want color.
Colors has flavor.
That's important.
We're going to use grapeseed here.
We want to use a high smoke point oil more like clear oils.
When they're darker green in stuff, they're going to smoke at a lower temperature.
That means they're not going to get better and gross.This won't do that.
Lay it always away from you because if this splatters, you don't want this 500 degree
oil splattering on your face.
You can see the size of them.
We're going to lay it like this.
Cook this for about a minute.
We're going to get some good color on that first side.
We're going to flip it over and then we'll pop it in the oven to cook through.
Check that out.
That is the business.
That's what we want.
We want it to be super dark.
Go ahead, do that in the oven.
It's going to take about 15 minutes.
You wanted at least 350 degrees.
If you're very brave, you can go up higher.
You need to check on it all the time.
Like I said, 15 to 20 minutes will come, we'll go and we'll make our spinach.
We'll come back and it'll be good to go and they'll be perfect on time.
Now we're gonna go ahead and make our spinach which will be our side.
Get a big pan, medium to high heat.
Go a little olive oil because we're not going to be searing this super hard.
Add about a quarter of an onion and a six garlic cloves.
Get both of those in there.
Put salt and pepper.
A little optional thing is some nutmeg.
I caught my towel on fire.
Had an accident.
It happens.
I'm a professional chef and things like that happen.
Don't worry if it happens to you.
That's how you learn my friends.
Learn by failing.
We got some color on our onions and garlic.
Spinach cooks down a lot.
The idea is to take a big handful of it and let it sit for a second.
That takes a minute.
Literally a minute to cook it down.
Add a nice little pinch of salt there, little more pepper, and one last little shake of
that nutmeg.
In about 10 minutes, we're going to chicken out, we'll make our sauce right in the same
pan.
We can serve it up and we'll be good to go.
If you give it a poke, it’s hot, but give it a poke.
Once it's nice and firm, you can see it's not squishy.
It doesn't give too much.
You know that you're done.
If you have a thermometer and you're not sure, you don't want to trust doing the old poke
test, make sure your thermometer temperature reads at least 155 - 160.
That is perfect.
We cut into these right now, all the juices would spill out everywhere and we don't want
that.
There's a lot of good stuff in that pan that we want.
We're going to build a sauce right in this pan with around a couple different things.
We're going to add some wine and cook it down.
It's called reducing it.
We're going to add a little bit of chicken stock, cook that down, and then add some cream
and Dijon mustard.
We’re going to make a really nice coaty sauce.
Put a little bit of wine.
You don’t put a lot.
We're going to add a little bit of chicken stock.
We had some chicken stock leftover from our risotto.
Here's the thing, if you don't have wine and you don't have leftover chicken stock, totally
fine.
Just skip these two steps.
It's still going to taste really good.
This is just like bringing it up a little bit.
Put a little flash of stock.
Put down a heavy cream.
Little bit of salt and pepper.
I'm gonna reinforce that no make flavor a little bit.
Put about a tablespoon and a half of butter.
For about 3-4 minutes, maybe it's going to reduce.
It's going to make a nice coaty sauce.
It's going to coat our chicken.
As you can see it's already getting thicker.
It's coating the spatula, which is nice to see all that stuff.
That's all flavor, all that stuff on the pan, put that in your sauce.
That's good stuff.
Grab a spoon and run it through your sauce.
If you drag a finger through it, that lines are not going to move.
That's what you want.
If it coats the spoon, it's going to coat your food.
You want to get a taste.
Yes, super good.
There's Dijon.
It's not like straight mustard is gonna burn your mouth out but it's a nice little hit
from the Dijon.
It's nice and creamy.
That's it.
It's done.
Time to play it.
Our chicken has been resting a couple of minutes.
I honestly, a lot of times I like to do it like this to straight down.
I think it's cool.
Go ahead and get your spinach on your plate.
Lay a little bed down, put the chicken like this so you see the seared side.
Don't be shy with that sauce.
Get it on and get it around it.
Look at that.
Tripp: Let's try the third one.
I'm sure this is going to be delicious.
Yes, the ladies will allow this one if they're not vegetarian.
Very good.
Dude, that was awesome.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for teaching these guys how to make gourmet main meals.
If you want to learn more and see more of Chef Mark, check out his Instagram.
I'm going to put that below in the description.
You can check out my Instagram as well which I'll put in the description below.
Also I'm going to put a little link where you guys can get the full recipe so you can
check it out and have to watch this video over and over.
Follow the recipe and then do it correctly.
Check those out in the description.
Thanks again and I'll see you on the next video.