Sauced

Chicken Piccata puts the bird in its title, but the capers run the show. Pull out that hand-harvested flower bud, too precious to come in a normal-sized jar, and two professional chefs will tell you the dish stops being itself. So how did an ingredient you can barely fish out with a spoon, one that people swear once cost more than gold, become the thing a weeknight classic lives or dies on?

This week we get into what a caper actually is and why it comes in six market sizes almost no one has heard of, the word everyone uses for this dish and no one can define, and how these little buds landed in a recipe that started without them. We settle the non-negotiables (the brine beats the bird, apparently), make the case for vermouth over wine, and land on lemon three ways that keeps it all light and bright.

The caper even makes it into the glass. This week's two drinks both take a hit of caper brine: the Piccatini, an Italian gin martini with dry sherry and a touch of Bianco vermouth, and the Dirty Limoncello Spritz, homemade limoncello lengthened with Prosecco and sparkling mineral water.

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Thanks to all of this week's partners:

G4: https://pkgdgroup.com/g4-tequila/

Underberg: https://underbergamerica.com/

Wines 'Til Sold Out: https://www.wtso.com/

Buy this episode's wine: https://www.wtso.com/shared/product/ID92321/

Celebrating 20 years. Use code PAIRING for $10 off orders of $100+. One-time use. Cannot be combined with other discount codes and may not be valid in conjunction with special sales.

The same thing that ruins osso buco is the thing that makes it. The tough silverskin wrapped around a veal shank starts shrinking at about 140 degrees and cups the meat into a hockey puck. Cook it low, hold it long, and that same collagen melts into the gelatin that turns a cut the butcher couldn't give away into a special-occasion plate.

This week we get into the two moves that keep the shank from cupping, why veal sends the whole dish white instead of red, and the trick that makes the texture better the day after you cook it. We land on gremolata as a non-negotiable, walk the low-and-slow window that separates spoon-tender from fall-apart, and find room for a little cinnamon nobody saw coming.

There's a French streak running through this Italian dish, so this week's cocktail is the Ponte Vecchio, a brandy Boulevardier with Amaro Nonino and Punt e Mes, stirred over a rock with a lemon twist to echo the gremolata.

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Follow us on Instagram: @sauced.pod

Thanks to all of this week's partners:

El Ateo Tequila: https://pkgdgroup.com/#our_brands

Underberg: https://underbergamerica.com/

Wines 'Til Sold Out: https://www.wtso.com/

Buy this episode's wine: https://www.wtso.com/shared/product/ID93777

Celebrating 20 years. Use code PAIRING for $10 off orders of $100+. One-time use. Cannot be combined with other discount codes and may not be valid in conjunction with special sales.

Lobster used to be fertilizer. Coastal tribes buried it in the fields, colonists let it wash up in piles two feet deep, and prisoners complained they were being fed bugs. In 1634, William Wood wrote that a heap of lobster shells by your door marked you as too poor to eat anything else.

This week we follow that same animal to a fifty-dollar tray of cold lobster salad on a buttered, griddled bun, and figure out how the cockroach of the sea got its glow-up. We take opposite corners on the only debate that matters, Maine (cold, a little mayo, celery) against Connecticut (warm, drawn butter, nothing else), get into why the sweetest meat isn't the tail, how to pull it off the heat the second before it turns to rubber, and why a new-shell lobster seasons itself from the inside.

There's no booze in the dish, so this one is about what you drink beside it. Sother's cocktail is the Maine Dispatch, an agricole rum Daiquiri with celery juice and tarragon.

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Thanks to all this week's sponsors:

Asil Raicilla de la Sierra: https://pkgdgroup.com/#our_brands

Underberg: https://underbergamerica.com/

Wines 'Til Sold Out: https://www.wtso.com/

Buy this episode's wine: https://www.wtso.com/wine-search?terms=93%20Pt.%20Talbott%20Vineyards%20Sleepy%20Hollow%20Vineyard%20Chardonnay%202023/

Celebrating 20 years. Use code PAIRING for $10 off orders of $100+. One-time use. Cannot be combined with other discount codes and may not be valid in conjunction with special sales.

You might think teriyaki is a sauce, but it's a cooking technique. Teri means the shine, yaki means grilled, and the name describes what happens when you lacquer meat over fire, a move the Japanese have been making since the 1600s. The bottle didn't arrive until 1961.

This week we trace it from an 1813 shrimp dish to the supermarket aisle, and make the case that the real version, four ingredients reduced in a pan, beats anything you can buy. We get into why almost everyone still reaches for the jar, and how a Japanese grill dish quietly became Seattle's default cheap lunch, outnumbering the town's McDonald's. Plus the one fruit that will wreck your chicken if it sits too long.

Sother's cocktail this week is the Pina Yaki, Japanese whisky with yuzu, a roasted pineapple syrup, and a little of the teriyaki sauce shaken into the glass.

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Thanks to all of this week's partners:

Mezcal Ultramundo: https://pkgdgroup.com/#our_brands

Underberg: https://underbergamerica.com/

The most famous ratatouille in the world isn't a ratatouille. The dish that makes the critic weep in the Pixar film is a confit byaldi, thin sliced and fanned in a pan, designed by Thomas Keller off a recipe Michel Guérard published in 1976. What Provence actually makes is a stew, and this week we make the case that the stew is the better dish.

We trace the word back to the Occitan, where it meant a coarse stew of odds and ends and wasn't a compliment, through to the 1930s when the version we recognize finally became canon. Then we get into the argument that decides the whole dish: cook every vegetable separately, or throw it all in one pot. Julia Child says separately and takes three hours over it. Jacques Pépin says one pot and pay attention to the timing. We settle where we land, and why texture is the entire game.

Traditional ratatouille has no booze in it at all, so we built some in. French dry vermouth, cooked down with the onion and garlic until it has completely evaporated, leaving the acidity and the herbs and none of the liquid. Sother's cocktail this week is the Hugo Spritz, elderflower and sparkling wine in a big goblet, garnished with dried lavender to tie it straight back to Provence.

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Thanks to all of this week's partners:

Arriesgado Ancestral Tequila: https://pkgdgroup.com/#our_brands/

Underberg: https://underbergamerica.com/

The Baja fish taco didn't come from a San Diego beach. It was born in the late 1950s at a black market in Ensenada, and the first ones were grilled shark. This week we trace it from that fish stall across the border to the college kid who turned it into a SoCal staple, then build the deep-fried version everyone pictures.

Along the way we make the case that the corn tortilla matters as much as the fish, get into the 3,500-year-old process that makes a real one, and argue out the non-negotiables that separate a Baja taco from just fried fish in a shell. Beer in the batter is a given, so we push the booze into a few places you wouldn't expect. Then we settle the fish question, the batter question, and how you build the thing in four bites.

Two drinks this week, head to head. Tim's Baja Old Fashioned, a split of añejo Tequila and Mezcal with maple and a few drops of bourbon-barrel-aged fish sauce. And Sother's Panic at Hibisco, añejo Tequila with hibiscus, pepita orgeat, and a four-citrus blend.

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Thanks to all of this week's partners:

El Acabo Raicilla: https://pkgdgroup.com/#our_brands

Underberg: https://underbergamerica.com/

Real Bolognese is a meat sauce that happens to contain a little tomato, not the tomato sauce with meat that most of us grew up on. That's only where the misconceptions start. It's never served on spaghetti. And Bologna guards the real thing so closely that the city registered the official recipe, right down to the exact width of the pasta, with the Chamber of Commerce.

We trace it from a cardinal's cook in the 1700s, whose ragù had no tomato in it at all, through Pellegrino Artusi's 1891 version to the recipe Bologna finally codified. Then we argue out every non-negotiable, from red wine versus white, to the surprising dairy that goes in before either (and the order that turns out to matter), to the fresh pasta the sauce was actually built to grip. There's even an ingredient the official recipe flatly bans that you'd never think twice about adding.

For the glass, The Academy, a gin Martini with fresh tomato water stirred in, named for the very institution that codified the sauce.

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Thanks to all of this week's partners:

Tequila El Viejito: https://pkgdgroup.com/#our_brands

Underberg: https://underbergamerica.com/

At least six towns claim they invented the hamburger — and the one the Library of Congress actually crowned still won't serve it on a bun or with ketchup. Which raises the real fight we spend the episode having: what even makes a burger a burger?

Just in time for the Fourth of July, we trace it from the Hamburg steak to the smash era, then go round after round on the things that actually matter — the bun, the cheese, the sauce, and the doneness most people get wrong. There's the counterintuitive salt rule that decides whether you end up with a burger or a sausage, three ways to cook booze straight into it, and a running argument that neither of us fully wins.

For the glass, the American Trilogy — rye whiskey and applejack, two of America's oldest spirits, built like an Old Fashioned for the most American holiday.

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Thanks to all of this week's partners:

Palomo Mezcal: https://pkgdgroup.com/post/palomo-who-we-are

Underberg: https://underbergamerica.com/

Paella isn't the rice — it's the pan. Or at least, that's where the name comes from. And in Valencia, where the dish was born, there's even a body that certifies which versions have earned the name and declares the rest "crimes against rice." Yet the seafood paella the whole world orders? The purists barely count it.

We get into the authenticity war, the official ten-ingredient list, why a whole category gets written off as "rice with stuff," the one ingredient that starts fights, and how a field worker's lunch became a prince's dish. Plus the no-stir rule behind a crispy socarrat, and the dry Sherry that goes in the pan before it goes in the glass.

For the glass, the Tonic con Cosas — a low-ABV cooler of Manzanilla Sherry, dry Spanish vermouth, citrus, and tonic, built off a Rebujito and a Bamboo and finished with a rosemary sprig.

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Follow us on Instagram: @sauced.pod

Thanks to all of this week's partners:

G4 Tequila: https://pkgdgroup.com/g4-tequila/

Underberg: https://underbergamerica.com/

Check out Wikipaella: https://wikipaella.org/

Five Paris chefs claimed to have invented Steak au Poivre in the early 20th-century. Four of them wrote letters of complaint to the same 1950 culinary magazine. The fifth had the best story.

We dig into the origin fight, Julia Child's surprising position on the flambé, the chemistry behind why pre-ground pepper is inferior, and a red wine pairing that mirrors the pepper on a molecular level.

For the glass, Americans in Paris — an Armagnac sipper built off the Vieux Carré, finished with a fresh crack of pepper over the top.

For the full recipes and more, become a premium subscriber at https://sauced.supercast.com/

Follow us on Instagram: @sauced.pod

Thanks to all of this week’s partners:

El Ateo Tequila: https://pkgdgroup.com/#our_brands/

Underberg: https://underbergamerica.com/