- [Babish] This episode is brought to you by Cash App.
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that's money and that's Cash App.
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Sundaes so big you gotta eat them with a big spoon,
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- Did anyone order me a plain cheese?
- Oh yeah, we did.
But if you want any,
somebody's gonna have to barf it all up 'cause it's gone.
- Bless this highly nutritious microwavable macaroni
and cheese dinner and the people who sold it on sale, amen.
Guys, I'm eating junk and watching rubbish.
You better come out and stop me.
- [Babish] Hey, what's up, guys?
Welcome back to Binging with Babish
where this week we're taking a look
at the foods from "Home Alone,"
for which you might notice I'm championing a blender.
I wanted to make these recipes
as easy and family friendly as possible
and the blender represents numerous opportunities
for shortcuts and even improvements
in all three of these recipes.
First up, for the pizza,
maybe the most obvious one, a quick pizza sauce.
14-ounce can of San Marzano tomatoes,
two cloves of garlic,
half a teaspoon of dried basil,
one teaspoon of dried oregano,
and a generous pinch of kosher salt.
Blend on a medium speed for 15 to 30 seconds
until smooth with a little bit of texture.
From here, you could cook this for about 30 minutes
if you wanted to mellow out the flavors,
but I like my pizza sauce to do the cooking in the oven.
Next up, the dough, and you might be surprised
to see me with a package of store-bought pizza dough,
because if you're anything like me for your entire life,
you've labored under the delusion
that store-bought pizza dough is awful.
To explain why, I'm going to perform a recreation
of how I would make pizza dough back in high school,
in other words by following
the horribly incorrect directions on the bag.
First, we're gonna roll out the cold dough
into a vaguely pizza-like shape,
maybe spray down a cooking sheet
with nonstick spray if you're an overachiever,
abandon the traditional circular shape of the pizza
for a more rectangular,
I-need-to-make-it-fit-on-the-tray kinda shape,
give it a smear down with some jarred pizza sauce
and a generous sprinkling
of pregrated low-moisture mozzarella,
part skim for health.
Then into a preheated 400 degree Fahrenheit oven,
this guy goes for an indeterminate amount of time
until the cheese is deeply browned
and the crust is pale and flabby.
Now at this point, if the crust wasn't glued
to the bottom of the tray, it would look like this,
then it gets subdivided into more manageable pieces
by virtue of a wheeled blade,
and then depending on hunger levels, eaten.
And this would end up tasting exactly like school pizza.
That is to say not pizza at all.
So I would go on to make two assumptions:
store-bought pizza crust is bad
and I'm bad at making pizza.
Now, while the directions on the back
of the bag might be horrible,
if you look at the ingredients,
you'll see that it's just flour,
salt, water, yeast and sugar.
The same stuff you'd use at home.
Then once you buy it, you can refrigerate it
for up to five days to cold ferment it
and improve its flavor.
Once you're ready to make a pie,
we're gonna pretend that we just made this dough ourselves,
stretching it into a taught ball for proofing and shaping.
Each of these bags of dough is one pound or about 450 grams,
which is a solid weight for a big ole 14 to 16-inch pizza.
Once everybody's balled up,
I'm placing them in a generously flour covered container
for anywhere from one to two hours depending
on the temperature of your kitchen
until grown in size by about 50%.
Then to roll it out,
I'm gonna use the technique I learned from Mark Iacono.
That is to roll it in two directions,
leaving a sort of hump in the center of the dough,
then rotate the dough 90 degrees
and roll out the hump into an even circle.
But rolling is really only a good start for pizza dough.
Ideally, you want it to be stretched.
So once we get it out into a relatively even round,
it's time to start passing it knuckle over knuckle,
gently stretching it ever wider
and trying to keep it even throughout.
There might be a slight bump around the outside
where the crust is gonna go,
but for the most part,
the crust is gonna rise of its own volition.
Once stretched out as thin as humanly possible,
we're placing it on a generously floured pizza peel,
applying a thin veneer of sauce,
there's nothing I can't stand more than an oversauced pizza,
and a generous sprinkling
of freshly grated low-moisture full fat mozzarella.
Now you can max out your oven with a pizza stone in it,
preheating it for a full hour before baking.
But this being a New York-style pizza, it prefers a
comparatively sweltering 700 degrees Fahrenheit,
much more easily and safely achieved
in an Ooni pizza oven.
After anywhere from five to seven minutes,
with several rotations to ensure
even crust and cheese browning, you should end up
with a really solid New York-style pizza made
out of a dough that I thought was inherently horrible,
but like most things in life,
just requires a little love to be its best self.
Now, while making pizza
in the rain might not have been very fun,
the cold and humidity made for a perfect environment
for recreating the irrepressible Rob Schneider's
steamy pizza reveal in "Home Alone 2."
Mr. McCallister, let me present you
with your very own cheese pizza.
(cameraman laughs)
Did it steam?
- [Cameraman] Yeah!
- Oh shit!
- [Cameraman] There was a big plume.
- That's just like the movie.
Now, I definitely over-cheesed this guy.
I had added more cheese before pulling it out of the oven
and paid for it when I tried to retrieve a slice.
Bottom was beautifully blistered,
the crust had a nice chew to it.
Overall, it's a surprisingly great way
to make pizza last minute.
Now, before we get off the subject of pizza,
even though it's never mentioned in "Home Alone,"
I wanna see how this dough performed
in the lesser known Chicago-style thin crust bar pizza.
The most popular toppings for which include pickled chilies
and cooked Italian sausage.
Top all that up with mozzarella,
cook to a similar state of completion,
and then seemingly defying law, science and logic,
this round pizza is not cut into triangular slices
but rather into little bitty squares,
which at first seems annoying
but makes it much more conducive to party consumption
and caters to guests that might not like crust.
And with its flavorful toppings
and much more reasonable amount of cheese,
it's the one that we ended up eating the most of.
So as I always say, enjoy your pizza how you like it.
Anybody who judges you should take
a long hard look in the mirror
and ponder why they're judging people for pizza.
Anyway, next up, we're going into mac and cheese,
and you might be wondering,
how exactly are they going
to incorporate a blender into mac and cheese?
And the answer lies in full proofing the cheese sauce.
So into the jar of a blender,
in this order we are adding three large egg yolks,
a teaspoon of spicy or Dijon mustard,
an optional quarter teaspoon of cayenne pepper,
and 12 ounces of grated cheese,
eight ounces of which is going into the jar of the blender.
The rest we're reserving for extra cheesiness at the end.
Now, over on the stovetop,
we're adding four cups of whole milk
to a large saucepan or deep saute pan,
covering, bringing to a simmer,
promptly overboiling, scorching the milk and making a mess,
cleaning up, starting over, and doing better next time.
Once it's at a bare simmer,
we're adding one pound of elbow macaroni
or the short quick cooking pasta of your choice,
cooking it to a state of near completion.
That is about one minute shy of done,
then draining the pasta,
reserving the cooking milk in a large spouted container,
returning the pasta to the pot,
and heading over to the blender
while the milk is still plenty hot.
Then with the blender running on medium-high speed,
we're gonna slowly stream that hot milk into the sauce,
melting the cheese, tempering the eggs,
and emulsifying everything together for about 30 seconds
into a super smooth, comparatively effortless cheese sauce,
which we can add straight back to the cooked pasta,
give it a stir.
Then for a little extra cheesy meltiness,
you can add that four ounces of reserved shredded cheddar.
Give it a cursory mix to distribute it throughout the pasta,
cover and let rest for five minutes.
What results is a mac and cheese reminiscent
of the microwave stuff from your childhood
with vastly improved flavors and textures
from the fresh, whole ingredients.
Make sure to season to taste with kosher salt and dig in.
Now this stuff looks and tastes fantastic,
but it does set up in about 10 minutes.
If your sauce solidifies, hit it with a little splash
of water and a little bit of heat,
and it will come right back to life.
Emulsifying in the blender makes
the sauce nearly unbreakable,
despite just being milk, cheese and eggs.
Next and last is ice cream.
And as it turns out, the blender is the easiest way
to make no-churn ice cream that I've ever tried.
I'm starting with about two cups of whole milk,
one cup of which I'm gonna add to the blender
along with 130 grams of granulated sugar,
3/4 of a teaspoon of kosher salt,
and half a teaspoon of xanthan gum,
a thickener readily available at most grocery stores.
Then we're gonna blend this mixture together
for two minutes on high speed
to ensure complete dissolution of the xanthan gum,
a notoriously clumpy compound.
Once the two minutes are up,
you're gonna see that the mixture is slightly thickened.
Now we're gonna pour it into a bowl
along with the remaining one cup of whole milk,
two cups of heavy cream,
and a tablespoon of vanilla paste
or a teaspoon of vanilla extract.
Whisk this until combined, and believe it or not,
this is your finished vanilla custard.
Now, at this point, if you have an ice cream churner,
you can churn it,
but like I said, this is a no-churn ice cream.
The trick here is to first freeze your custard
into blender manageable pieces.
So I'm pouring it into an ice cube tray.
Now, Kevin's sundae was both chocolate
and vanilla ice cream.
So I'm gonna take half this custard,
add it back to the blender, add 25 grams of cocoa powder,
blend, and that's all there is to that.
Fill up an ice cube tray same as the vanilla,
and then these guys are headed
into the freezer until completely solidified,
at least four hours.
Now, if you just freeze ice cream custard
like this without churning it,
it's gonna turn into a block of, well, ice.
So here's where we're gonna rely on the blender
to smoothen and creamify our ice cream,
adding the custard cubes back to the blender
and blending on high speed.
Now, an alarming noise
from my blender taught me very quickly
that you can't blend this straight out of the freezer.
After freezing overnight, they need to soften up
at room temperature for about half an hour.
Then with the help of a blender stuffing stick,
they can be liquified,
breaking down to the consistency
of soft serve in about 30 seconds.
Now, this mixture can be spread evenly
in a freezer safe container, covered and frozen,
again, for at least four hours, ideally overnight.
Same procedure with the chocolate, as you might imagine,
and then four hours later,
we've got the creamiest, easiest, no-churniest ice cream,
entirely homemade, fully customizable,
and requiring no special ice cream making equipment.
So to make Kevin's sundae,
alls we gotta do is pile a whole bunch of vanilla
and chocolate ice cream in a bowl,
load it up with spray cream,
maraschino cherries, and chocolate-style syrup.
Then all there is left
to do is get the big ole sundae eating spoon,
cue up "Angels with Filthy Souls,"
which growing up I thought was a real movie,
and remember what it was like being left home alone
for the first time.
Hope you guys try out these recipes for yourself.
I hope you have a wonderful holiday with no need
for Rube Goldberg style traps to foil home invaders.
Thanks again to Cash App.
That's money, that's Cash App.
Download Cash App from the App Store
or Google Play store today to add your cash tag
to the 80 million and counting.
(upbeat music)