- In honor of Riri Williams, this
is going to be a science-heavy episode, so get suited up.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Justin Warner here, and today we're taking to the skies
with a savory oatmeal?
Regardless, it's going to be delicious,
and it will be inspired by the one and only Ironheart.
First we're going to add some vegetable oil to the pan.
About a tablespoon.
Maybe two.
Going to swirl the pan around to give it a nice coat.
I've got this set over about medium heat.
And to this I'm going to add some onion.
You don't have to go to MIT to know that onions
are in the allium family.
Or maybe you do.
So alliums are essentially things that are in the onion
or onion-like family.
Generally, they're a bulb.
A greenish plant will grow out from them.
They have roots at the bottom of the bulb.
And generally, they have a sort of sulfuric flavor.
What does sulfuric taste like?
I guess you could say somewhere between onions and eggs.
So my onions have begun to brown.
I'm going to add some spices.
Here I have some cumin and cilantro in its seed form,
coriander.
So what I'm doing here is actually toasting the spices.
See, in the spices, there are oils and
volatile aromatic compounds.
These are compounds that are only
really released when they're heated
and then launched into the air.
That's basically what aroma is, is like invisible particles.
Now for the main event.
We're going to add our oatmeal.
Not only is oatmeal high in fiber,
it also reduces low-density lipoproteins,
which are LDLs, AKA (SPOOKY VOICE) the bad cholesterol.
You think bad cholesterol, like, gets up and it's like,
muah-ha-ha-ha, I'm coming for your arteries?
And to really amp up the savoriness
of this savory oatmeal, some iron-rich beef broth.
[SIZZLING]
That sound there that you just heard
is actually the sound of deglazing.
As things cook, they tend to stick to the bottom of the pan,
and caramelize, and actually burn ever so slightly.
But the thing is there's lots of flavor locked in there,
so when we pour in that liquid, what happens is it steams
and it lifts those things off the bottom of the pan.
While the oatmeal cooks, we're going
to make a spicy sauce inspired by Ironheart's
New Mexican adventures.
Here we have some dried New Mexican chilies.
This is oregano.
Then we have some garlic.
The sauce that we're going to be making is kind of a deep cut.
It's called chile caribe.
And basically what it is is somewhere
between a sauce and a puree.
To get these chilies ready for blending,
we're going to remove the ribs and the seeds.
The ribs and the seeds are where the spiciest elements
of the pepper are, because that's
where it stores capsicum.
Capsicum, of course, is the stuff that is hot.
It's an irritant to your tongue and any other mucous membranes.
When working with peppers, for maximum safety,
you should always wear gloves and never touch your eyes.
Pretty simple process to get rid of the seeds and ribs.
I'm just going to snip the top off, shake out
some of the seeds, and then I'm just
going to kind of cut it open as though you
were opening a letter.
That's a love letter from New Mexico.
So why New Mexico for Riri?
Well, Riri built her suit out of components
that she had borrowed from MIT.
And then, uh, well, she wanted to take them on a test flight
to kind of test them out and make
sure everything was hunky dory.
Well, she flew all the way to New Mexico,
and there she encountered some inmates
who had escaped from a prison.
This is actually not an uncommon sight in New Mexico.
There goes my tourism board deal.
[CHUCKLES]
Riri sees that these inmates have escaped,
and so Riri does what any hero would do
and puts them in their place--
back in jail.
In the process, though, she damaged her suit
and was stuck in New Mexico for a little bit, where I imagine
she could have had something like chile caribe, the sauce
that we're making.
We've got our heaping helping of chilies.
Now we're going to add some oregano.
Oregano is going to provide kind of like a little bit
of a floral note.
Some people like to say oregano is the pizza herb,
but it has all sorts of other applications.
And now I'm going to add some garlic to the mix.
This specific sauce never gets cooked.
By not cooking them, we're kind of preserving
the delicate sort of metallic flavors
that are in the peppers themselves.
Let's add some water.
You know what's funny is, like, water and iron,
they don't really get together.
They-- they make rust.
But it's neither here nor there.
It's going in there.
What's actually happening here is not so much
that these blades are sharp, but they spin so fast that it
creates a cyclonic force.
The particles that are suspended in there
are then going to collide with each other and break up.
Water helps that because it creates a stronger
cyclone current than air would.
You don't have to be an MIT student to know that you
should plug in the blender.
Or maybe you do.
[BLENDER WHIRS]
Oh, yeah.
Let's give it a taste.
It's spicy.
It's got some floral notes from the oregano.
It's got garlic.
But what it needs is salt. Salt's great.
It's one of the few rocks that we eat.
Now that we've added some salt, we're going to re-blend.
[BLENDER WHIRS]
Let's check on our oatmeal.
As we can see, our oatmeal is bubbling away.
The vast majority of the beef stock
has been absorbed by the oatmeal like a little sponge.
And I think this oatmeal is done.
Riri is Chicago's hometown hero, so we're
going to finish this dish off with some Italian beef.
Why?
Well, you don't have to be an MIT
student to know that Chicagoans love Italian beef.
Or maybe you do.
Let's serve this up.
I'm going to season up the oatmeal real quick.
Into the bowl it goes.
I think it's amazing how just adding
beef stock to the oatmeal gives it more of a-- a savory look.
To me, that almost looks like a risotto or perhaps a--
a porridge of some sort.
Next, our Italian beef.
Oh, yeah.
To add just a little more Chicago, some giardiniera.
Giardiniera is a sort of pickled vegetable mix.
This is going to add some texture and some acidity
to our savory oatmeal bowl.
Next, we're going to add our sauce.
Oh, boy.
For some crunch, some blue corn tortilla chips.
To echo our members of the allium family
that we had in the base of the dish,
we're going to add a few crinkles of green onion.
And then lastly, for a nice herbaceous
and floral note, some cilantro.
And as you will recall, we had cilantro in its seed
form, AKA coriander.
Let's give this Ironheart-inspired savory
oatmeal a try.
We've got herbs, we've got acid.
I mean, just like Ironheart, it's
kind of the complete package.
But let's find out.
There's so much going on in this dish that I love,
but I think the thing that I love
most is it reminds me of Riri in the sense
that this dish wasn't a miracle.
It wasn't bitten by a radioactive spider.
There's no superpower to it.
It just had a plan, and it had smart execution.
That, to me, is Riri Williams.
Well, that's all we've got for Eat the Universe.
We'll see you next time.
[MUSIC PLAYING]