*sniff* Is something burning?
*gasp* My spinach puffs!
*woosh*
Saved them! That's great. Good job. Very good job.
Watch it. They're still hot.
Good work, Kronk! Oh, they're so easy to make. I'll get you the recipe.
Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to Binging with Babish, where this week
We're taking a look at Kronk's spinach puffs from the Emperor's New Groove.
To me, he will always be David Puddy. Whoever he is,
We need some spinach to make spinach puffs.
So we'll start off with some spinach, freshly rinsed, and we're gonna remove all the stems.
Removing the stems is really more of an aesthetic thing.
You can leave them on if you want, but I like to take them off.
Then we've got a few fresh herbs here.
Before we combine them, I'm going to start by roughly chopping the spinach
into small bite-sized pieces, finely chopping three to four tablespoons of dill
(I like a lot of dill you can tone that back if you want), and finely mincing one shallot,
that we're going to bring over to some preheated olive oil and sauté until soft and translucent.
About two minutes, at which point we are going to add three large cloves of crushed garlic.
Do the whole classic "saute for 30 seconds or until fragrant" deal, crushed garlic can burn pretty quickly
so don't overdo it, and then add the spinach.
This stuff cooks down to pretty much nothing very quickly, so you can add more than I'm adding here,
but we want to add a little bit of salt to encourage moisture loss and watch it shrink.
Once our spinach has given up most of its water, we're going to add the dill
and cook minimally, because we wanted to maintain its earthy herbiness.
So, after those flavors have just barely gotten to know each other, we're gonna season with salt and pepper
then take off the flame to let cool for a bit while we start messing with cheese.
I've got about four ounces of full fat cream cheese here, to which I'm going to add maybe half a cup of feta.
And, optionally, an additional two to four ounces of grated Parmesan.
Do this at your own risk. The human tongue can only handle so much flavor.
Now, while still warm, we're going to add the spinach mixture to the cheese mixture and mix it all together into
a mixture, to which we're also going to add one egg yolk for a little bit of structure
and two or three slices of bacon, cooked crisp and chopped fine.
Why? Because there isn't any rule saying I can't or shouldn't.
Add that in, mix it all together, and there we have our
spinach-herb-garlic-cheese-bacon affair.
So now it's time to prep our puff pastry.
Now we've gone over how to make puff pastry from scratch in the Mad Men episode
And since I've done that once, I'm not going to do it again.
I'm going to use some store-bought stuff because it's way easier.
Making your own puff pastry is kind of like making your own Kit-Kats,
Sure, you could, but why would you do that?
Roll out your puff according to the manufacturer's operating instructions
and cut it into three to four inch squares.
There are any number of ways that you could shape these together,
but we're gonna go for the sort of trumpet appearance that Kronk's have in the movie.
We're gonna place these on a parchment lined baking sheet,
spoon about two tablespoons of our mixture into the center,
and brush two edges of the puff pastry square with a beaten egg.
This is going to act as a bit of glue to help keep our puff pastry package pristine.
Once you've got the edges brushed, go ahead and crimp them together, forming a sort of cornucopia.
Make sure you've crimped the edges together tightly, because puff pastry seams love to explode.
By the way, in the background, we have our oven preheating to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
We've made room in the fridge for a sheet pan, and I'm listening to 80's power ballads.
Do not skip these steps.
Once all of our parcels have been pinched, we're gonna place this whole thing into the fridge, uncovered
for about ten minutes because puff pastry plays nicer when it's cold.
Ten minutes later and fresh out the fridge, we're gonna give these guys an egg bath all over.
Make sure you don't miss any surface area because you will be left with some pallid, dull spots on your pastry.
Now, into the oven they go for 20 minutes, or until golden brown and puffed.
Go ahead and rotate the tray halfway through if you want even more even browning.
I recommend putting these on a rack to cool because you might find, once you put them on a plate,
that they're way, way, way too hot to eat.
I've been doing this show long enough to know when not to put something in my mouth.
So I'm gonna give these guys another 10 minutes before digging in.
And before I even eat one of these things, I can tell you immediately
that we got ourselves a Clean Plate Club member.
I mean, it's just jacked-up spinach and artichoke dip baked into buttery puff pastry.
The odds of me not liking this are hilarious.
In fact, I like them so much that I wanted to properly induct them into the clean plate club
but cooler heads prevailed, and I elected to share them with my friends and family.
Who will hopefully appreciate them more than Yzma did.
(Playing Africa by Toto)
(Backup With Babish)
(Still playing Africa by Toto)
(Backup With Babish, Part 2)
(Africa continues)
(Backup With Babish: The Grand Finale)
(Rain blessing session is over)