Binging with Babish: Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs from Frasier

Hey, what's up guys? Please stick around after the episode for a big announcement about the channel. Hey, baby, I hear the blues are calling, tossed salads and scrambled eggs. Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to Binging with Babish, where this week we're taking a look at the scrambled eggs and tossed salad. I'm sorry, I mean the tossed salad and scrambled eggs from Frasier. First up for the sort of TV accurate version, we're breaking four eggs into a bowl, getting a little cocky with our one-handed cracking and retrieving shell fragments with shell itself. Then we're seasoning with a little bit of kosher salt, both for seasoning and so that when we beat it so hard it spills, the eggs will beat up extra smooth. Into a nonstick pan goes a little bit of butter, which we're gonna melt until foamy. Add our eggs and basically just kind of slowly drag across the bottom of the pan with a rubber spatula, ensuring that when curds form, they're big and soft. Perfect basic scrambled eggs. Now I'm gonna make a salad inspired by the insultingly gestural ones you get at brunch. Some greens and chopped tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice. Of course, as I was doing this, I'm realizing that I didn't actually toss the salad. So we're gonna go ahead and give that salad a little toss, plate it up, scatter it with tomatoes and flank it with our fluffy scrambled eggs. Season those bad boys with a little bit more salt and freshly ground black pepper. And there you have it, toss salad and scrambled eggs. And while this is certainly fine, as is so often the case on this show, I think we can do a whole lot better. To quote astronaut Mark Watney, I'm gonna have to Fraser the ---- out of this. Measuring out 1.2 grams of sodium citrate and 0.3 grams of xanthan gum, which I'm gonna sprinkle over 60 grams of 36 month old Parmesan, ensuring even distribution. Give it a toss to evenly coat. Then we're measuring out 120 grams each milk and heavy cream in a medium saucepan. Bring it up to a bare sub simmer, kill the heat and add the cheese mixture. Then we're gonna puree the whole mixture using a high powered or immersion blender, creating a quick, smooth, relatively thin cheese sauce, which we're gonna pour and filter into a whipped cream siphon, charged with a nitrous cartridge and refrigerate until ready to use. This is gonna make for a Parmesan espuma. It's like dense, heavy foam. Now every good salad needs croutons and we're gonna make kind of croutons. Scooping the crustless guts out of half a loaf of pan rustico and pulsing in a food processor until we form some big, fluffy, webby crumbs. Sort of like a panko that's been slightly enlarged by the honey I shrunk the kids laser. Break up any clumps, spread it out evenly on a rimmed baking sheet and dry in a 200 degree Fahrenheit oven. Now onto my favorite salad dressing in the world. We're starting with the juice of half a lemon, about 30 grams, about 10 grams or two teaspoons of champagne vinegar, 40 grams or a third of a cup of extra virgin olive oil, a heaping teaspoon of Dijon mustard, 15 grams or about a tablespoon and a half of honey, one small shallot, very finely minced and one finely chopped anchovy filet. Alternately, you could use two teaspoons of anchovy paste. We're also gonna grate in half a very small clove of garlic. You don't wanna overdo it, about a teaspoon of kosher salt and half a teaspoon of ground white pepper. Go ahead and beat it until once again, you make a mess. And what results is an unbelievably delicious vinaigrette. One that I might get sciency with later on. For now, we gotta prep the base of our salad, which is gonna be a tomato mosaic. So I'm endeavoring to cut equally thick slices of multicolored tomatoes, which I'm gonna lightly salt, let rest for 10 minutes and then blot dry with paper towels to prevent color bleed. Now comes the matter of precision, something I'm historically very bad at. Cutting the tomatoes into perfect squares of exactly the same size. Trying to keep some gel and seeds intact wherever possible. Then after what's gonna feel like an hour, you've got some perfect square tomato jewels and perfectly good scraps for less snooty salads. Now using chef's tweezers, we're gonna try to pick up a tomato, fail, just end up using our fingers, but pointing to the tomatoes with the tweezers. Truly makes you feel like you know what you're doing. Then actually using the tweezers, I'm gonna remove a couple of random squares, replacing them with halved multicolored cherry tomatoes for a bit of playful variety. There you have it, the base for our salad. Next up, I wanna make some balsamic vinegar pearls. So I'm thoroughly chilling two cups of canola oil. Once that's nice and frosty cold, I'm dissolving two grams of agar agar in half a cup of vinegar with a quarter cup of water. Bring that to a simmer, let it cool slightly, pour into a dropper bottle while still warm, and gently drip some drops into the cold oil, which will immediately set the agar agar so we can then drain all the oil, gently rinse the pearls under cold running water, and keep them in a little bowl of water in the fridge until ready to use. As far as salad toppings go, I think these are frankly delightful. Next up, I want some toast soldiers for my scrambled egg. So I'm cutting some nice thick sticks out of the rest of that loaf of pan rustico, saving all the scraps for breadcrumbs. And this might be a bit shocking, but I'm gonna go ahead and deep fry this bread, bringing out the freaky side of toast that you didn't know was there. After less than a minute in 400 degree Fahrenheit oil, we're draining on a wire rack, sprinkling with salt and keeping warm until ready to serve. But we're not done frying bread yet. First, we have to toast our crouton-sized breadcrumbs in butter, sprinkling with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, frying until fried, pouring into a bowl. Then while it's still hot, we're grating on a little bit of Romano cheese, tossing after each addition, then spread them out on a rimmed baking sheet to keep them crisp. I told you I might get sciency with my salad dressing, and I frankly wouldn't have said that if I wasn't gonna do it. I'm combining one cup of dressing with one cup of water, then sprinkling with a few grams of soy lecithin powder. Not only is this a stabilizer that's gonna give us an unbreakable creamy dressing, but when immersion blended, it forms a staple foam on top that can be used for foam stuff. Last but not least, we got the eggs. I'm cracking four eggs into a tall container with a little pinch of salt and a little splash of water, and then immersion blending to get an ultra smooth homogenous curd. Now, during this process, I heard something go dink, then almost like magic, eggs started flowing out the bottom of my glass container, which confused my brain to a standstill for approximately three seconds. Come on now, get it, there we go. This time, trying again in a much thicker glass container, we're thoroughly pureeing the eggs, then passing them through a fine mesh sieve directly into a cold nonstick saucepan, to which we're gonna add about two tablespoons of butter, and then starting to cook on absolute minimum heat while stirring constantly with a rubber spatula. This is gonna very, very slowly set very, very fine curds, resulting in a French style scrambled egg that almost resembles a custard, perfect for dipping in or pouring over our toast soldiers. I'm also gonna add about two tablespoons of creme fraiche just to lighten things up, and with that, we're finally ready for service. I'm gonna balance some tiny radicchio leaves on top of our tomato mosaic, and then drape them with our vinaigrette foam. I don't remember culinary foam ever being mentioned in Frasier, but I just have to imagine he loves it. We're topping that with some of our Romano breadcrumbs, dotting with Parmesan espuma, topping the espuma with our balsamic caviar, actually using some chef's tweezers properly with some micro basil, few more breadcrumbs over top, and there you have it, my Frasierified toast salad. Now for the eggs, I'm gonna go with a sort of Lincoln log formation for our toast soldiers, and then I am perhaps foolishly pouring the eggs directly over top. No problem if you're just serving as is, but I need a platform for a big dollop of creme fraiche and a bigger dollop of actual caviar, Calvicius Siberian sturgeon to be precise. This guy really needs color, so I'm garnishing with finely chopped chives, looking pretty nice, and there you have it, toast salad and scrambled eggs designed with Frasier in mind. But how's it taste? First up, the scrambled eggs are beautiful. They're so rich and creamy and decadent. Then you add the salty pop of the caviar and the ultra crispy bread. Good night, Seattle, we love you. And the salad is utterly delicious. All the flavors work perfectly, but that being said, you could definitely achieve a similar result without any molecular gastronomy. And being that it was about eight o'clock when I finished shooting, these guys very quickly entered the clean plate club, a fitting way to say farewell to the old and make some room for new things to flourish. To whip, we've got some exciting news about the channel. For more on that, let's hand it back to Babish live in the studio. Thanks, Babish. Hey, what's up guys? It's Babish. Thank you very much for sticking around after the video. So I can tell you a little bit about the changes that are coming. I've been making this channel for almost 10 years now, and it has been the absolute privilege of my life. Thank you so much for watching, liking, commenting, subscribing, anything you've done to help build this thing into what it is today. And over the past three years, we've shifted our content strategy. We've made longer videos about more far reaching subjects, and the emphasis has gone away from cooking. And I want to flip the script on that. I want to hit reset. So we're about to go dark for a week or two, and then we're going to come back with an all new cooking show. One that seeks to recapture the energy that made binging great in the first place, which is informative, entertaining, educational, beautiful, and quietly funny. And a lot of that's made possible by this little mic that you see on my face here. This lets me give a much more binging like delivery while I'm cooking live. So I hope you stick around because I'm really excited to share what we've got cooking, so to speak. And once again, thank you from the bottom of my heart for sticking with me all these years. The journey that this show has taken me on is incredible. It's changed my life. You've changed my life. And I'm excited to say this with renewed vigor and enthusiasm and meaning. Keep cooking. I will, if you will.