Hey whats up guys and welcome back to a very special episode of Binging With Babish where
as you can see i've sound proofed my kitchen because this week we're cooking under the
terrifying conditions portrayed in A Quiet Place.
Fittingly this episode is sponsored by Dolby Dimension.
These headphones are super cool not only because they have active noise cancelling, but because
they have a really cool feature called Life Mix, which pumps in an adjustable amount of
ambient noise so you don't miss anything around you.
Doorbell, baby crying, timer going off in the kitchen.
So while I'm enjoying my strict regiment of Frasier three times daily, I won't miss a
thing, because I've got my Life Mix turned up to 7.
Sawyer however, likes his turned up to 11 effectively giving him super hearing.
Making him the blood thirsty alien to my John Krasinski.
So can I make the meal from the movie while he's watching the movie without disturbing
him and getting killed.
Well, there's only one way to find out.
Download a decibel meter on my iPad, throw blankets all over the kitchen, and get cooking.
As a rule of thumb, I'm gonna try to stay below 80 decibels while I prepare what I think
was fish from the movie, rainbow trout.
First up we've gotta clean and gut the fish start by snipping off all the fins.
Try not to make eye contact with the poor little guy.
Then we've gotta cut out the gills which is where most of the blood is hanging out.
Once you've got those gnarly little things out of there, it's time to gut this guy.
We're gonna place one single long cut down the length of the bottom of the fish, and
yanking out everything we find inside.
You wanna remove as much as you can so all that you see are the filets and the spine.
Then we've gotta scale the fish.
Using the sharp side of you knife, scrape the scales against the grain, so to speak,
until all that remains is some nice soft slippery fish skin.
Then we wanna rinse this fish and dry it throughly, and then set it aside so we can prepare, what
looked to me like a tomato salad.
The family in the movie seemed to be very fond of garlic, so I'm gonna grab three heads
of this smoked garlic, peel off most of the papery exterior, slice off the tops so all
the cloves are exposed, and arrange in a metal bowl.
Now I'm guessing that cooking fats would be pretty hard to come by a year and a half into
the apocalypse, but olive oil has a theoretical 24 month shelf life if stored properly, so
let's assume they have a bottle kicking around for special occasions.
Let's also assume that they have kosher salt and freshly ground pepper because is life
really worth living without it?
Now, in lieu of aluminum foil, we're going to top this metal bowl with a smaller metal
bowl, and roast it at 350°F for about 45 minutes.
Removing once the cloves are soft and lightly brown.
Now I could eat roast garlic with a spoon, but roast smoked garlic?
This is some next level sh*t.
We're setting that side to cool completely while we make the rest of our dressing.
We're starting with what remains of the olive oil.
Oh dear, looks like that's our last salad forever kids, and to that we are going to
add a food with an indefinite shelf life, vinegar.
In this case white wine vinegar, in about a 1:1 ratio with the oil.
Now like so many pimples ready to pop, we're gonna squeeze this garlic, sorry, gross, into
our vinaigrette.
I'm gonna go with like 2 heads of garlic, because I love this stuff, and the third head
I'm gonna eat by myself off camera, probably in bed or something.
Now I'm gonna use a potato masher to mash up those garlic cloves a little bit, and then
I'm gonna season liberally with kosher salt and freshly ground pepper.
Now you might notice that I'm doing this in a disposable Tupperware.
Not only to be quieter than a whisk and bowl, but because the easiest way to emulsify a
dressing is to place in a lidded container and give it a good shake.
In seconds you will have an effortlessly creamy vinaigrette.
This stuff is hurting for some lemon juice, but I can't imagine they have that in upstate
New York where the movie was filmed, but what they did have lots of was tomatoes.
So I'm slicing up a variety of sizes and colors, scooping everybody into a nice quiet wooden
bowl, and adding some chopped basil which they interestingly had sitting in the middle
of the table with some fresh herbs in lieu of condiments.
So we're gonna add that to our tomatoes and I'm gonna add half a red onion, thinly sliced.
Because tomato salad is gonna be difficult enough to eat without mozzarella, and there's
no way in hell I'm eating it without onion.
Look at that it's a really pretty salad.
I'd make that even if it weren't the apocalypse.
Lastly something the movie had no shortage of was corn, and it looks like Emily Blunt's
character was cooking the fish on top of the corn as a sort of makeshift oven rack.
So we're gonna do the same in case it imparts any ancillary flavor.
Plop our fish down on top, and then it's time to score and season.
Scoring isn't totally necessary, it's just kind of a presentation thing, but we want
to score it in a cross hatch pattern.
Both sides, don't be lazy now, and then we want to season liberally all over inside and
out with kosher salt, freshly ground pepper, and oil.
Luckily I found a secret stash of this stuff when I raided the nearby villages.
Make sure it's well coated all over, ideally I'd like to stuff this guy with a bunch of
herbs and lemons, but you can't always get you want in the sound hunting alien future.
450°F, 25 minutes later yields a fully cooked fish registering 145°F at its thickest point
that we can now carve table side so to speak.
We're gonna start by making a shallow incision along the top of the fish to aid in peeling
off the skin.
You can see on the bar graph there that I coughed, and very nearly doomed us all, but
Sawyer got distracted by the raccoons distracting the aliens in the movie, so we got lucky.
Anyway, once we've got all the skin off we are placing a cut down the center of the fish's
spine and beginning to pull the meat downward and upward from the center with forks.
Then once you've got all the meat off the top you get to do the most fun thing you'll
ever do in your entire life, which is pull out the entire fish's spine in one fell swoop.
Hang on to this if you want for making fish stock, otherwise pat yourself on the back
for deboning your first ever fish.
I mean that's pretty cool it's definitely worth trying at your next dinner party.
But now it's time to plate up.
By plate up I mean kale leaf up...as the family in the movie very cleverly eats their meal
on a giant kale leaf so as to avoid any clattering.
So we're gonna load that up with our tomato salad, fish, and top the whole thing with
some of our smoked and roasted garlic vinaigrette.
And there you have it, a healthy, sustainable, simple meal, prepared and eaten in relative
silence.
As such, we're gonna use our 5 fingered forks and knives, and I gotta say this turned out
pretty great.
The trout when cooked to 145°F was tender and juicy, the tomatoes were nice and fresh,
and the dressing was to die for.
It desperately needed lemon, but vinegar helped fill the gap, and it ended up becoming a member
of the clean leaf club.
And then the leaf itself became a member of the clean...hands club.
All in all, a pretty great meal if you're trying to sustain your family in the new American
wasteland.
Alright, now it's time to surprise Sawyer with the fact that I've been making him the
meal from the very movie he's watch-- Hey sounds like dinner's ready.
Wa-wait, you could hear me this whole time?
Yeah I had Life Mix up to 11, I could hear you breathing.
Come on, I spent like $5 on the decibel meter app.
Oh, I thought I heard fish.
Hey guys, so I just wanna thank Dolby again for sponsoring this episode.
It was kind of a match made in heaven because I love home theater stuff, these have gotta
be the coolest home theater headphones I've ever tried.
In addition to the adjustable Life Mix feature, they've also got touch controls on the side, that sweet
magnetic charger, and a robust app to control almost ever aspect of the headphones.
They've even got a head tracking feature so it sounds like the audio is coming from wherever
the bluetooth source is.
Check out the link in this videos description to learn more about Dolby Dimension, the perfect
gift for the audiofile, cinefile, or muderous future alien in your life.