- Welcome back!
It's Football Fusion, episode four.
I don't know.
Do you stare right into the camera?
Today we're gonna do Cincinnati versus Baltimore.
Two of America's most thriving metropolis slam together
two of the world's most important culinary stations
of ingenuity and innovation.
Bengals, Ravens, crab cakes, skyline chili.
We're gonna make a crab cake with skyline chili flavors.
And then the other thing we're gonna do
is really high art, really something else.
We're gonna, we're gonna, I can't even describe it.
It's gonna be pasta.
Click this here to watch the Peep Show episode
that Andy did.
We're gonna do that, but with crab, I guess, right?
No, chili.
Nailed it.
(guitar music)
- [Babish] Okay, we're doing crab cakes
with skyline chili seasoning, because what if?
- [Sawyer] And then we're doing pasta cakes
with skyline chili on top,
so instead of a crab cake,
it's a pasta cake with chili on top
as a little cute appetizer type of thing.
I have the vision.
Andy had the vision, but it's gonna be good.
Spoiler, I think pasta cakes
is the most redeemable part of this,
so pay attention to this if anything.
For pasta cakes, you make pasta,
you let it get a little mushier
than how Andy and I like to eat it, al dente,
and then you put it in the fridge.
We're gonna be squeezing those into cakes later.
So while that's getting cold, we start making chili.
To start, dice an onion.
Or for me, learn how to peel an onion,
have your friend come over, give you a smaller knife,
which made it a lot easier,
don't use your biggest knife if you're not good at cooking,
use a smaller knife,
and then be taught how to dice an onion.
It actually turned out pretty well.
Watch my pinky here.
Watch 'em him save me.
Oh!
There you go and then look, boom.
Now throw them into a well-oiled skillet
and just let 'em get hot, sweaty, translucent.
You're gonna be doing this all day,
so don't rush it, don't worry about it.
Throw some tomato paste in there after a little while
and just let it go.
Scrape it, push it around.
Do yo thang!
Next, we're adding in chili powder, cinnamon, cumin,
all spice, and red pepper flakes.
Once that's nice and combined
in a beautiful Babish stainless steel pan,
you gotta dump in two cups of beef broth,
a can of tomato sauce,
and a couple teaspoons of Worcestershire sauce,
and apple cider vinegar.
I'm also adding in a cup of water
because skyline chili is notoriously thin.
Breaking with tradition on this show,
I'll be wearing gloves to touch raw meat.
Don't know if you know this about me,
I have Palmer Hyperhidrosis,
a terrible affliction that has plagued me my entire life.
The thing about sweaty hands is that it's like a disability,
but nobody really has any remorse for you.
It's just sweaty hands.
They just recoil and, y'know, you explain or you don't.
To those on the subreddit, I say I see you and I love you,
you sweaty, sweaty mess.
Make sure you thoroughly mix all this stuff up.
You want to break the beef down and spread it around.
Also it's never too late to put on an apron.
The Bills gave me that sweatshirt.
Thank you, Bills.
Thank you, everyone.
They gave my baby boy pajamas.
Speaking of sweet boys, now it's time for the chocolate.
No, not the film featuring Johnny Depp and Judi Dench.
This, a half-ounce of dark, unsweetened chocolate.
Mix that in nice, bring it to a boil,
and then let it simmer for about an hour.
While that's happening, let's go work on our other dish.
- Hey.
Let me share with you my vision here.
- Okay.
- Cincinnati and Baltimore are not friends of each others.
They're rivals.
They hate each other like any town hates any town.
We all hate each other.
- And it would seem as though their flavors
don't work together either.
- And that's what we're here to hopefully bridge?
This would be skyline chili-flavored crab cakes,
hoping that both cities, when they take a bite,
they have a sense of appreciation for an enemy.
You know, you think, "mm, that's kind of cool."
- I love your, I love your intent.
You know, that's the whole point of the show,
is mashing foods together from two places.
I am, I am incredulous as to whether or not
this is going to taste remotely good.
- [Sawyer] Do I put this in the bowl first, do you imagine,
and then stuff on top of it?
- [Babish] That makes perfect sense to me, yeah.
- [Sawyer] What we're doing here
is we're mixing crab cake flavors,
which we got Old Bay, chili powder mustard,
all spice, and cumin.
- Before you dump this in, I just wanna point out
that we're about to put cinnamon in crab.
- Yeah, ooh!
- Here we go.
It might just be that I don't like skyline chili.
Fight me. It's not good.
- [Sawyer] That is a problem.
- Okay, so mayo and mustard in with the cinnamon. (gagging)
Oh, the Worcestershire.
And then I just crack an egg into this.
- All right, so now it's time to get your mitts in there.
You wanna do it together?
- Let's do it together.
- All right, you be left hand.
I'll be the right hand.
(both laughing)
- [Sawyer] Is that what I do, I don't know.
- [Babish] Yeah, you pick it up
and you interlock your fingers.
Shake it around.
It's nice and cold.
It's much nicer to do with someone else, actually.
All right, there we go.
You do the big hand stuff.
I'm gonna do the finger action.
- I'll put it into the finger.
- [Babish] Yeah. See this, this breaks down the pieces.
You're, you're, you're guiding into the, the Heller.
- All right.
Should we ball?
- [Kendall] Yeah. Let's ball.
- It's ball balling.
Okay. So we're, I'm going golf ball size.
I think that's appropriate.
You got some, some big pieces of crab.
I'm gonna break up here.
Just if we're going that small
this is a very unique, I, I will say unique.
This is surely not been done before.
- [Sawyer] I mean, if this is a movie,
this is how it has to be right?
You know, gotta do it.
- You know, there's no drama if we're like
this is gonna be great.
- Yeah, yeah.
- You know, there's no, there's no no intrigue.
Why you even watching?
If you know it's gonna come out good at the end.
- Right. If you know that they're gonna stumble upon
one of the most delicious crab cake recipes of all time
you know why you been watching.
- All right, so we have our, let's see.
Ohi-, Cincinnati style crab bowls.
Chili cakes.
We got crab style, chili skyline cakes.
- Boom.
- Let's fry 'em up.
- Put it on the box.
Okay. Let's fry 'em up or.
- [Kendall] No, no, they get baked.
- Let's bake 'em.
- Let's, let's bake 'em up.
- [Kendall] They need to be brushed with butter.
- Let's brush 'em up.
- [Babish] At what temperature are you baking these?
- [Sawyer] 425.
While the crab cakes bake
it's time to make a sauce to dunk these suckers in.
We're going to use a simple cream cheese tartar sauce.
We're mixing half a cup of mayonnaise,
half a cup of cream cheese, a tablespoon of capers,
and a quarter cup of cornichons, little pickles.
Once those are combined, I'm tossing in some Dijon mustard,
and a few tablespoons of finely chopped parsley.
Notice how quickly and smoothly this Babish blade
slices through these helpless leaves.
I wanted to do this sauce, especially because I've heard
that real Cincinnati heads order skyline chili dip.
So this is an ode to the heads, always the heads.
Little lemon on top. Stir, boom.
It's a sauce. Beautiful sauce.
And now let's see how the cakes turned out.
- Let's see.
I understand that in football teamwork's important, so.
- Seamless.
- These look good.
- I like all these burns.
- I love that.
They, they have a, they have a nice crisp to them.
They're, they're, they're, they're good touchy.
Okay.
- Okay.
- The bottoms look great.
They're really nice and crispy tops look great, too.
They look great.
- Soft, smelly crab.
- Oh. Cheers.
- Cheers.
(people laughing)
That's kind of mild honestly. That's, that's good.
I'm not getting the cinnamon.
- I am.
(Sawyer laughing)
- Yeah. There's a ring-ness to it.
I'll try the sauce.
- So ring-ness, like in your ears?
My problem with it is that it tastes like a good crab cake
until I get the flavors, until I get the cinnamon.
It's like, okay, good texture, good, good, good.
But the flavors just don't go.
I think the apropos, Cincinnati and Baltimore
don't like each other. They're rivals.
- Rivals.
- It would make sense that their flavors don't play nice.
- This is science. I don't, I don't take this personally.
This is where I came, this is where I wanna be
at the nexus of the discovery.
And this is it.
You know, you know, it's not.
- That's the nexus.
- He has a more refined palette, you know,
he doesn't like it.
- I think if you wanna make these at home
this is a great form factor for crab cakes.
They're bite sized, the texture's awesome.
I love how brown they got on the bottom.
They bake up beautifully.
You don't have to fry 'em, which is like king.
Like normally you got a fried crab cakes.
This is fantastic.
I just think the addition of the Ohioan flavors
are (beep) with me.
I think if you went lighter on the chili powder,
and you added a different kind of acid like lime
do they have limes in Ohio?
- Unfortunately not.
Well, we're gonna try next,
I think has a higher chance of tasting. Just good.
This is, is it good?
That will be, it's good.
- This is a good.
- Right?
- The, the, I love that we get to again
end on a question mark with this.
- Yeah.
- Is it good?
Why don't you guys try it at home?
Tell us. Tell us.
(metal ding harmonizing)
- [Sawyer] We're cutting pasta.
- [Babish] We're cutting pasta, because,
this seems like, rather an ingenious idea,
we're taking the crab cake,
and getting rid of all the crab and adding spaghetti.
We got ourselves some skyline chili in crab cake form.
- Yeah.
- Which, if we can't make the flavors work together
we might as well make the form factors. Am I right?
- Yes. Yes. This will work.
Remember that pasta we cooked up and put in the fridge?
Now we're gonna snip it like it's the hair
of a hippie being sent off to war.
Then we're adding eggs and breadcrumbs to make it thick.
The goal here is to make this pasta into firm patties
and the egg and breadcrumbs help bind it together.
Did you notice I cracked an egg with one hand?
Here we go again.
Grace and ecstasy intertwined
like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Once the breadcrumbs, eggs, and pasta
are adequately mushed together,
it's time to oil up a pan
and make little smash burger pasta balls.
Smush your pasta down using a spatula
until the bottom is nice, crispy and brown.
Do this on both sides of your pasta cake
and then let it sit on a paper towel
to allow excess oil to fall off.
It really is that simple.
You repeat the process
until you have your desired number of crispy pasta cakes.
Now let's see how they taste.
- All right, so now we gotta put
some chili and cheese on this and eat it, right?
- That's right.
Skyline chili is notoriously thin
but we made it thicker.
- Just so you could pick it up
and cohesively eat a bite without, you know,
chilly leaking through onto your hand and your lap
and down your legs and down the street
and into the gutters where it's.
- It's wasted.
- Wasted.
- [Steve] What kind of cheese you got?
- [Sawyer] Cheese. Grated cheese.
Supposed to be thinner.
We made it thicker.
- What kind of cheese? Grated cheese.
(everyone laughing)
- Grated cheese.
Cheddar, I suppose.
All right.
- [Babish] I'm excited.
- [Sawyer] I want, I'm gonna get this sloppy one.
- Hmm.
- You know, that's, that's pretty, that's pretty good.
- Yeah. I like that a lot actually.
Love the cake.
- Great crunch to it.
But it's still, you know, you're eating spaghetti.
- And I'm a cinnamon boy, you know,
so I'm gonna like this you know.
- And I don't mind those spices in chili.
They're good.
- It was so much worse in the crab cake.
- Well, we gotta, you know, you gotta
you miss a hundred percent.
- Amen.
- I, I genuinely like it.
- Me too.
- I think that this is an improvement upon
a skyline chili dish that frankly can only be improved upon.
I'm saying some inflammatory things, but whatever.
It's bad. This is good.
And it's a perfect snack for, for game day.
People be like, what the hell is this?
- Right.
- And you'll be like, skyline chili cakes.
And they're gonna be like, that rolls off the tongue.
Like it's a hundred years old.
- Yeah.
- That fresh.
- I grew up with that.
- I think you did a fantastic job.
And I think you made Cincinnati and Baltimore
finally work together.
- This is a good one. Try this.
And heed the warnings of what we said about the prior dish.
But this one, sight unseen
Bill's just cleaned a playoff spot.
New England Patriots just does the
did the dumbest thing I've ever seen,
and I've watched football every year of my life
since I was born.
The dumbest play in history, Bill Belichick
the dumbest play in history.
Happy New Year. Okay.
(upbeat music)