BORDERLINE SALTY

On today’s episode of Borderline Salty, hosts Rick Martinez and Carla Lalli Music weigh in on shrimp heads, how to use up the veggies in your CSA box, and their tips for cooking steak. 

Plus, one of our favorite drag queens, Miz Cracker, joins us to share an egg-cellent kitchen nightmare story. 

This week’s recipe book: 

Check out Miz Cracker’s podcast (where Carla has been a guest!) here. 

As always, we’d love to hear about your cooking conundrums at 833-433-FOOD (3663). 

Find us on Instagram @borderlinesalty

Find full episode transcripts and more about the podcast on our website borderlinesalty.fm. 

If you can’t get enough of our hosts – we don’t blame you! Subscribe to Carla's newsletters here and find links to her Instagram and YouTube channel at www.carlalallimusic.com. 

You can order Rick’s cookbook “Mi Cocina: Recipes and Rapture from My Kitchen in Mexico  here, watch the companion Mi Cocina video series here, and find all of his socials at www.rick-martinez.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

Rick Martinez: Hi, I'm Rick Martinez, I am a cookbook author and a daddy to the most perfect, beautiful chocolate lab rescue named Choco.

Carla Lalli Music: And I'm Carla Lalli Music. I'm also a cookbook author, video host and the adoptive parent to two perfect felines Pegglton Geggleton McGee and King Jeffrey Horchata from the Royal House of Horchata.

Rick Martinez: Good grief. Wait, Peggleton Meggleton? 

Carla Lalli Music: No, no. Peggleton Geggleton -- 

Rick Martinez: Geggleton.

Carla Lalli Music: Geggleton McGee.

Rick Martinez: McGee.

Carla Lalli Music: And King Jeffrey Horchata.

Rick Martinez:  Horchata as in like the drink. 

Carla Lalli Music: Oh yes. 

Rick Martinez: Oh OK. 

Carla Lalli Music: From the Royal House of Horchata. 

Rick Martinez: From the Royal House of Horchata. Yeah, obviously 

Carla Lalli Music: They really own their names. Rick and I have been solving and laughing our way through food problems together for more than a decade in test kitchens, in videos and at magazines. 

Rick Martinez: And now we're doing it here on Borderline Salty, the show where we take your calls, boost your confidence and make you a better, smarter and happier cook just like us. 

Carla Lalli Music: Today will weigh in on all the good stuff inside those shrimp heads, how to use up the veggies in your CSA box, and give you our best tips for cooking steak. 

Rick Martinez: And we'll be sitting down with one of our favorite drag queens, Ms. Cracker, to hear her own kitchen nightmare story. 

Carla Lalli Music:That's right. Buckle up. We've got a lot of exciting things to get to this week. But before we truly get into it, Rick? Tell me something good. 

Rick Martinez: Carla, I have been in New York for four days and I have eaten around the city, eaten more than probably humanly possible. And at the end of every day, I finish with a sundae. 

Carla Lalli Music: Love you for that. 

Rick Martinez: Yeah, it's a lot of work, but I push through. I'm a professional. This is what I do for a living. The sundae at Thai Diner is epic.

Carla Lalli Music: Epic. 

Rick Martinez: Epic. So it is coconut gelato, coconut caramel, palm sugar, whipped cream, toasted coconut -- toasted peanuts in this like beautiful etched glass goblet that appears with, you know, drips of cream and, and melty goodness everywhere. I mean, you taste the whipped cream and you're like, Why is this so good? I've eaten whipped cream, you know, all my life. 

Carla Lalli Music: All the ways. 

Rick Martinez:  Oh, all the ways. And I'm like, Did you put MSG in this? Why am I like addicted to this? And it's like, it's palm sugar. An amazing ingredient. People should be using more palm sugar. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yes. And more sundaes should be served in a footed goblet. 

Rick Martinez: 100 percent and more people should end their days with a sundae. 

Carla Lalli Music: Amen! 

Rick Martinez: You cannot go to bed unhappy when you eaten a sundae No, you cannot. You will be a happier person in the morning when you get up because you had a sundae. 

Carla Lalli Music: Sing it, sister. Amen. 

Rick Martinez: OK, Carla, tell me something good. 

Carla Lalli Music: You know what's good, Rick?

Rick Martinez: What's good? 

Carla Lalli Music: Butter.

Rick Martinez: 100 percent. 

Carla Lalli Music: You know how it's really good? On a sandwich? 

Rick Martinez: Amen.

Carla Lalli Music:  I was reminded this weekend, butter on sandwiches is just the best. Every sandwich I had growing up, I swear to God my mom put butter on all of our sandwiches, and it's because it's really good. I made myself a sandwich yesterday that was good bread, lightly toasted, delicious salted butter from this farm up near her that she gets is like little adorable little tubs of cultured butter that have discernable little bits and flakes of salt that you can feel when you have the butter. Put that butter down, there was good Italian ham. There was lettuces that were dressed. I put salt and pepper. I closed it up and it was amazing. Oh, Dijon mustard. Got to have the Dijon. 

Rick Martinez: Butter and dijon is such a good combo. 

Carla Lalli Music: Great combo. 

Rick Martinez: OK, so to our listeners, let's recap: The perfect day and the recipe for ultimate happiness? A buttered sandwich with Dijon followed by a coconut sundae. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, you could put a few hours in between. 

Rick Martinez: Or not. Just keep going. Just live in the happiness. 

Carla Lalli Music: Right. That's a good day. 

Rick Martinez: That's a very good day. I think it's time for some caller questions. 

Caller 1: Dr. Carla, Dr. Rick, this is Amanda, and I have my conundrum for you. So I love to cook. And one of the things, though, that is my Achilles is doing a great steak Should we call it a miss-steak? I watch all the videos. I read all the articles, and I always come up with a really terrible steak that's burnt on the outside and like, bloody, awful on the inside. So I'm just looking for some tips on the meat, on the pan and some suggestions. Any tips would be great. 

Carla Lalli Music: Amanda steak-tuned. We've got solutions. 

Rick Martinez: I love that she said bloody awful. 

Carla Lalli Music: A real conundrum. Sometimes the simplest things are the most befuddling, right? 

Rick Martinez: Right, I mean, I think the most, at least seemingly obvious thing is that the heat is just too high. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah. So whenever you have something burnt on the outside and raw in the middle, that means the heat is too high. Your outside is burning before the heat has a chance to penetrate and warm up the middle. 

Rick Martinez: It might also suggest that your inside is too cold. So if you took steak right out of the fridge and threw it in a super hot skillet, it's going to stay pretty cool on the inside while the outside burns. 

Carla Lalli Music:  If you have a really thin, cheap, not great quality pan, you also will have trouble with regulating and controlling the heat where it's just so thin that it just scorches, you know, through. But let's go through basic steaking. I'm a frequent turner for anything that isn't a super thin steak, so something about three quarters around an inch or thicker, I fully believe in the frequent turning method, which is kind of turning the steak back and forth every two minutes or so, two to three minutes, so you gradually build up a crust on the outside while at the same time sort of regulating the temperature between the top and the bottom. So imagine just putting raw steak down in the pan and cooking it on one side until it's very brown. The side that's closest to the pan, there will be the most sort of heat transmission. But the top side of the steak, which is, you know, an inch above the surface, is going to stay cooler. When you turn it back and forth, you're gradually warming both sides and building up the sear for something around an inch thick. I think, like eight minutes, eight to 10 for nice, medium rare. And that's, you know, from there, you can kind of do whatever, resting the steak very important at least 10 minutes. I even like to rest longer. I like room temperature steak, but.

Rick Martinez: Also some people like to tent with foil their meats regardless of whether it's a steak or a turkey. 

Carla Lalli Music: When it's resting? 

Rick Martinez: When it's resting, and the thing about that is you're trapping heat. And so if you've cooked your protein to the perfect temperature and then you tent it, the meat will continue to increase further than you actually want. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, there's always carryover. 

Rick Martinez: Right, you're basically insulating it. So if you've got like the perfect medium rare and then you put a piece of foil on it, it's going to actually go into the medium range. So you need to make sure that you're not covering it with anything, just let it live and let it be free. 

Carla Lalli Music: Tenting, it's so true recipes used to always say turn with foil. 

Rick Martinez:  Yeah, and it's like, nothing's going to happen. No, just leave it alone. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, and the last thing I'll mention for Amanda is, once it's rested, learn how to find the grain of the steak for slicing it. Because the protein's like ropes, they're going to be going lengthwise or on a diagonal or across and just find them and then angle your knife to intersect them. And that's a good rule, even if you're cutting a tender steak or something with a lot of texture in it, like skirt. Can't wait to hear how it turns out. 

Caller 2: Hi, Carla and Rick, my name is Zach. I've been a vegan for like many years now, and I cannot make a good homemade broth. They always end up tasting too flat or too salty, you know, not enough depth. So I really love to know your take on a good homemade vegan broth. 

Rick Martinez: I think that's a great question. I, I love making vegan and vegetarian recipes, and I always start from the point of treating my vegetables like I would meat, and I think that this is no different. So like when you're making a really rich, flavorful bone broth, a lot of times you will roast the bones and also the vegetables. That's going to help you a lot because it's going to concentrate the flavor of the vegetables. You know, you just want to give them a quick rough chop. Get them on a sheet tray. Toss them in a little bit of olive oil and then put them in a 450 oven until they get really nice and caramelize. It may take between 30 and 45 minutes, but that's a very critical, very flavorful 45 minutes. You know, there's also a lot of things that you can add to your broth to make it more flavorful and give it sort of that umami burst like mushrooms. I love adding, I mean, if I have fresh mushrooms or I say my my mushroom scraps. But I also always have dried mushrooms like shitake in the pantry. Just drop a handful of those in there. You'll get sort of like that nice, rich, earthy, umami flavor. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, all of that richness and depth, but it doesn't make it taste like mushroom broth. I think also from the Asian Pantry, Kombu is a great thing to add to your stocks, and you don't even need to simmer a stock for that long to get all of the benefit of having that in there. I think your advice about roasting the vegetables is so smart because you're not only concentrating the flavor, but you're like complexifying it. If that's a that's a word.

Rick Martinez: It is now 

Carla Lalli Music: Complexify your veg. It's so catchy. 

Rick Martinez:  It is. Are you listening, Webster? 

Carla Lalli Music: Complexify, 2022. You're getting not only like sweetness, but also that bittersweet flavor that comes from caramelization and browning. So it's just going to be like a lot more aspect to the vegetable than like a sweet carrot. But I think the reason the stocks or the broths are coming out salty is because there's not enough in there. So you're adding salt to it. And basically, you're just making like salty water. 

Rick Martinez: Right, I never, ever salt my broths and my stocks. I think, you know, one of the things that he said is that his broth or tasting very flat for an animal protein based stock, I always cook, you know, long, you know, like hours and hours and hours, For a vegetable stock, I'm only going to go maybe an hour, hour and a half to me after about an hour, they've released all of their flavor that they're going to give you. And after an hour, they're going to start to develop off-flavors. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, another thing that I like to do is if I've added herbs at the beginning of the stock making to then hold back like a handful of them. And so at the end of the stock, when you're five minutes away from pulling it, you can just throw those fresh herbs in at the end and their fresh flavor will infuse without sort of getting cooked off. And that can be like another layer to bring to the broth. 

Rick Martinez:  Oh, that's a great idea. I like that a lot because it's basically like you're making a tea, and you can do that honestly with some of the other aromatics, too. So, for example, some ginger, some raw ginger, or even a squeeze of lemon or lime that'll actually add a little bit of acidity and help the flavors out as well. 

Carla Lalli Music: Great tips. Next caller, please 

Caller 2: Hi Carla and Rick. My name is Jenn. Every year I signed up for my local CSA, but I am just one person. How do I use all of that produce? I feel so bad because it seems like at least a third or half of it go to waste every week. Is the solution that I just throw everything in a soup every week. It's just is so much work to prep and eat your vegetables every single week. So I'm hoping you have some tips for how to use an immense amount of vegetables and maybe how to prep them a little bit faster so that I literally don't spend hours every day just chopping. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, that's really resonates with me. I did my first CSA this year, but also just as a person who cannot control themselves at the farmer's market. I have come home with produce hauls from the farmer's market and been like, I am so I can't even fit it in the fridge, you know, like what have I done? One just general piece of advice: Cooked vegetables take up a lot less room than fresh ones, and also, once something is cooked, it will have a little bit longer shelf life. CSA vegetables tend to store very, very well because they are so fresh, but you know, especially big bunches of greens. It takes up half the fridge, but if you strip those off, chop up the stems and just braise the greens right straight out of the gate, then you can use that in like five different ways. You can make a pasta out of it. You can make your grain bowl with it. I have used big bunches of Swiss chard to make like a cook Swiss chard pesto like you take the really big thing and just make it smaller and you won't waste as much. But wow, yeah, this is definitely a very real challenge. 

Rick Martinez: Yeah. And weirdly here, tomato season is the winter. And I have friends here who have a ranch. And so last, I think January or February, we went to my friend's ranch and they literally had trash bags of heirloom tomatoes. 

Carla Lalli Music: Boo hoo. 

Rick Martinez: Yeah. And I was like, first of all, like, why are they in trash bags? Like, what are they? What's happening? I don't understand this, and they're like, We can't like, we don't have enough people to give these to. I'm like, OK, well, I'm taking your trash back home. So I get home now. I literally have like a 30 gallon trash bag full of tomatoes, and I'm like.

Carla Lalli Music: Oh my god.

Rick Martinez: What the hell? And so a 

Carla Lalli Music: A literal bushel. 

Rick Martinez: A literal bushel. And so, you know, like, I roasted some. So I think that's one easy trick for any vegetable, really. You throw it on a sheet tray and depending on what you want to do, you can like do a harder roast and get color. All I'm doing is like removing water. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, roasting, I think also is super smart. If you have lots of different vegetables because you don't really have to do much, you don't really even have to peel most vegetables. So you could just like, get the dirt off of them, throw them on a sheet tray, lots of olive oil, salt, pepper. You could add a dry spice if you want to. Goodbye. Throw them in there. 

Rick Martinez:  I also think pickling like I don't think people pickle enough things, and it's not just for cucumbers. And so like, I've done this with beets, I've done this with squash. They also don't take up very much room and they last forever. Welcome to Borderline Salty. How can I help you? 

Caller 3: Oh my god. Hi, my name is Devon, and I have a bizarre question, so I love to cook and my husband has an issue with parsley, so we try to use parsley, he says to him, it tastes like dead fish. And of course, everybody knows about cilantro and stuff. But I have never heard of anybody having such an aversion to parsley, and I was wondering if you have ever heard of that and/or if there is maybe an herb that is similar to parsley that can substitute it for color and garnish that doesn't remind my husband of dead fish or like pond water. So, love you both! 

Carla Lalli Music: Dead fish or like sick frogs? The pond makes me think of frogs. 

Rick Martinez: Yeah. So either way, there's a dead animal floating in a stagnant pond. That's not that's not a recipe I want to make. 

Carla Lalli Music: I mean, I've eaten a lot of parsley in my life and like, sometimes it's like wet grass or something. You a little mulching, maybe, but like dead fish, come on. 

Rick Martinez: I mean, I think it's an easy fix. I mean, first of all, use what he likes. So I mean, that would be my first question. Like, I would just ask him, like, what is it that you like? What doesn't taste like dead fish to you? But then also, you know, I think you need to think about the dish itself. 

Carla Lalli Music: Right, and so as far as substituting, I think I'm a little looser about this than you are like for me, parsley is in the category of like tender herbs like the ones that rustle in the breeze as opposed to, you know, being more like -- 

Rick Martinez: I like that.

Carla Lalli Music: There's like rustle in the breeze herbs. And then there's like evergreen forest herbs, you know, the tenders in the breeze, like, in my mind, I'm pretty. With those except for to, which I feel like is a very strong flavor, but I would just be like, OK, cool, then use chives, use [phonetic Chervil], you know, tarragon can be a little bit forward, so maybe use half the amount of tarragon, but I think you think about flavor a little bit more specifically. 

Rick Martinez: Yeah, I mean, I feel like if this dish was more Italiany then I would probably lean more towards basil or even like a fresh oregano, like just a little bit of that or marjoram. I love marjoram as well. If it was more Asiany or Mexicany, I would go the cilantro route. But I also think that like whatever you decide to use, you just need to cut it back. Because I know when I write a recipe and I ask someone to use parsley, I'm probably going to ask you to use a lot of it. And again, it's partly because it's it's such a neutral flavor, and I might also be using it as that pop of green. And so if I'm using something like basil or mint that is very strong and can easily dominate a dish quickly, I wouldn't want you to use a cup of that. So I might start off with like a quarter cup chopped as opposed to a full cup or even a half cup of parsley. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, I feel like he could like start by leaving it out. And then maybe with the herbs, if he's not sure how it's going to taste, put them on the table and add them to your dish. And then you could kind of taste as you go and decide if those flavors are good together before fully committing. 

Rick Martinez: Yeah. Or I mean, if you love parsley and he hates it, just chop it up, leave it out of the dish and put it on the table. And then you can put it on your thing and he can not put it on his. And then problem solved. 

Carla Lalli Music: Right, if you love someone, set their parsley free. 

Rick Martinez: Now, it's time for our next segment, Total Kitchen Nightmare. You might remember Carla's steak disaster story. 

Carla Lalli Music: Or you may recall Rick's plum cake inferno back from our BA test kitchen days. 

Rick Martinez: We could go on for hours with our own kitchen nightmares. But in this segment, we're bringing our friends and culinary heroes to share their kitchen disasters, and this week we have our amazing first guests, Miz Cracker. 

Carla Lalli Music: Hello, Cracker. 

Rick Martinez: Hello.

Cracker: Hello, Rick and Carla, I'm so glad to join you today. 

Carla Lalli Music: We are all extremely excited and it is no secret that in addition to being an amazing drag queen, a writer and comedian, you are a great chef. Oh, thank you. And we have cooked together. 

Cracker: Yeah, we have. 

Carla Lalli Music: So I know that for a fact. And behind every great chef is an even greater story of culinary catastrophe. Lucky if it's only one. 

Rick Martinez: So Miz Cracker, we want to know what's your total kitchen nightmare? 

Cracker: Well, you know how a Christmas Carol starts with Marley was dead to begin with. You know, you have to know. Like, you must know that otherwise none of the things that follow will seem fantastic. My story starts with, first of all, I am obsessed with eggs, like, I have had two eggs of some kind every morning for as long as I can remember. And my mom, she made coddled eggs in egg coddlers, soft boiled eggs, and we would have them on the little egg cups. And we have fried eggs and scrambled eggs and omelets and quiches and everything like, we were just obsessed. And as soon as my mom got the opportunity, she got chickens so that we could have fresh eggs, you know what I mean, it's like, the things that my family goes through to make sure that there are two eggs for every person in the morning. 

Rick Martinez: It's a beautiful thing. 

Cracker: It's a lot. It's an emotional [unclear]. So one time it was 2012, and I had decided to go on a cooking journey because I was saving money to go on my first solo trip out of the country, and I had decided that I was going to learn to cook so that I wouldn't spend money on going out, wouldn't be ordering breakfast sandwiches, which is another egg thing that I have in the mornings. I was like, OK, and I'm going to learn how to cook new kinds of eggs. And now maybe you can help me with this because I looked all over the New York Times website. There's a kind of egg that you make like, essentially, you poach it in oil. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, an olive oil fried egg also sometimes called like a Spanish fried egg. 

Cracker: That sounds right. Yeah. So in the Times, in the food section, there was this article about how easy it was to make one of these eggs. They recommended a large like deeper frying pan. And all I had at the time because I didn't have any money was this tiny little cast iron skillet that looked like a doll's skillet. And I was like, it's going to be fine. 

Carla Lalli Music: Just an egg. 

Cracker: It's just an egg. So I wake up one morning and I always take ten minutes to get ready for work at that point in my life. And so I wouldn't even bother to get dressed before I ate my breakfast. So I went in bare carnation to my kitchen and looked down at the instructions. And being an Aries, I was like, Well, I get it in overview, do you know what I mean, I understand. So I don't need to read the specifics, and I just took all the olive oil that I thought was appropriate. Heated it all up till it was very, very hot. 

Rick Martinez: Oh God. Oh my god. 

Cracker: And I was like, This has to be how you do it. Because like in my experience with eggs, this is what you do. So then I tilted it towards me so that there was like a big pool of oil. 

Carla Lalli Music: Oh. 

Rick Martinez: Oh my god! 

Cracker: Do you know what I mean? Because I was like, We want to drop the egg in the oil. It's like, Yeah, oil is in the title for a reason. Like, we want lots of oil. So I did what my sister and I refer to as the Meryl Streep because she has this thing in movies where no matter what character she plays, if they're cooking, she always cracks her eggs with one hand only. 

Carla Lalli Music: Wow.

Rick Martinez: Meryl. 

Cracker: She's a goddess. So she can do two eggs at one time and crack and split. So I held the frying pan with one hand, did the crack and split with the other and --

Both: Oh my god. 

Cracker: Threw it all into the hot oil as it was tilted towards me and this big streak of hot oil went right down the center of my body, of my naked body. All the things that my y chromosomes have made have wrought. 

Rick Martinez:  Oh my god. 

Cracker: Were covered in boiling hot oil. And it was so shocking that my mind went totally blank and I didn't like scream or anything. I didn't make any noise. I just turned off the oven, walked the path straight back into my bed and I called into work. 

Carla Lalli Music: Wow. Wait, I have to ask when you called into work, what did you tell them? 

Cracker: I told them something like it's not happening today.

Carla Lalli Music: So Miz Cracker. If you were to give this whole experience, if you were to write this experience up as a short story, what would be the title?

Cracker: I guess I would call it Aw Nuts. Or Oil-vay.

Carla Lalli Music: Oil-vay. Oh my God. That is genius.

Cracker: So, I guess the lesson is here when you're trying something new always be confident, but remember to empty your glass so that it can be filled, if that makes sense, like let go of the things you think, you know, so that you can learn from a text or a chef because otherwise ah, things might come to a head as it were.

Rick Martinez: And maybe wear an apron. 

Cracker: Yeah. And also the obvious lesson, don't cook naked. 

Carla Lalli Music: Well ... 

Rick Martinez: I mean, you make a salad when you cook naked, then there's just I mean, well, I guess you could cut something, but. 

Cracker: You don't deep fry a turkey. And like, I'm thinking about it now. If you're like trying to impress a date or something, you can get dressed, cook breakfast and then undress again and be like, Oh, I threw this together, you know? I mean, totally. But put yourself first, you know? 

Rick Martinez: Yeah, save the naked for later. 

Cracker: Yeah, also to nerd out for a minute neurologically speaking the first time you put your hand on a hot burner. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah. 

Cracker: The information has to travel all the way up your arm to your brain and then back from your brain to your arm to tell your arm to move. 

Carla Lalli Music: Right.

Cracker: But once your system learns that hot is bad, it actually just travels into your nerves and then your hand reacts before the pain even gets to your brain. 

Carla Lalli Music:  Oh, amazing. 

Rick Martinez: Oh wow.

Cracker: So your body learns from bad experiences, so you actually need to build up a catalog of those things to teach your body how to respond to pain before your brain can even do it. She's got a slow brain, so she needs.  

Carla Lalli Music: I would argue the same is true for emotional pain.

Rick Martinez: That is very true. 

Cracker: Yeah, yeah, you got it. You got to go through those experiences to learn to pull away. When you're young, you date someone for five years and you're like, wait, this is not fun. And as you're getting your late thirties or beyond or you're on the first day and you're like, Listen, this is going to last four years, and that's it. 

Carla Lalli Music: Draw the line at four. 

Cracker: Yeah, drawing the line. 

Rick Martinez: So we've learned we don't fry naked and we have an expiration date on relationships. 

Carla Lalli Music: That's right. And in both cases, the genitals might get hurt. 

Cracker: It's a full circle moment. 

Carla Lalli Music: So before we get out of here, it's time for 'No thank you, please.' This is the part of the show where we discuss the foods we maybe don't love yet and open ourselves up to giving them the try they deserve. 

Rick Martinez: So, Carla, what are we talking about this week on? ‘No thank you, please’? 

Carla Lalli Music: Well, this week we are talking about shrimp heads.

Rick Martinez: Ah, ove shrimp heads. 

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, let's just level set for a second here. I think we are both big fans.

Rick Martinez: Huge fans.

Carla Lalli Music: Huge fans, love a shrimp head. 

Rick Martinez: My god. All of the flavor of the shrimp is in the shrimp. It's sort of like citrus, right? The juice is great, but the flavor is in the zest. Shrimp, same thing. 

Carla Lalli Music: So I feel like a lot of people, that's the leap they have to take. They have to get over whatever the squiggly-iggly feelings are about it and just like, get in there. 

Rick Martinez: Exactly. Yeah. And I feel like you need someone to kind of walk you through it. So, you know, a few years ago, I did this dinner theater where I cooked for a group of theatergoers. And as part of the performance, I actually demonstrated to a group of mildly inebriated guests how to properly suck the head off of a shrimp. And it was a very fun experience, and I was kind of like, you know, making fun of just the act because it is whether you think it's gross or not, it's just kind of a bizarre thing to pull a head off a creature and then just like drink the juice out. But when you make light out of it and you're doing it in this performative way, I think people were more apt to try it. And I think that night I converted a lot of people into the must-suck-head camp. I also think that, you know, as a chef, there are some preparations for shrimp that I like to keep the shell and head on to preserve the flavor and the moisture of the shrimp. But I also think that there are a lot of people that when a chef puts a dish of prawns in their shell and with the head in front of them, they don't know how to eat it, especially if you're in a fancy restaurant, you don't want to look uncouth, like uneducated. And I think that moment kind of opened people up like, OK, I'm going to do this and no one's going to judge me for it. And then we're just going to all slurp some head. 

Carla Lalli Music: Just out there changing lives, aren't ya?

Rick Martinez: One at a time. So for me, whenever I think about shrimp heads, I remember this one episode of Anthony Bourdain, where he goes to a restaurant north of Barcelona, and it's like right on the coast. And it's this restaurant that's famous for their seafood and how fresh it is, and everything is just cooked on the plancha. So like salt. And that's it. High heat. And he's eating the shrimp and cooked in the shells, and he peels the shell off and he eats the flesh of the body. And then he just picks up that perfectly cooked beautiful shrimp head. And he looks at and he goes, this is God sauce and then proceeds to, like, put the opening into his mouth and just suck all of the juices out of it. And it's stuck with me so much because it's like as food creators, you're always trying to, like, make an amazing flavor out of lots of things and capture this. And it's just like, No, just this thing. This perfect thing at its most perfect freshness, cooked perfectly is the most amazing flavor it could ever be. 

Rick Martinez: Yeah. Honestly, it's like asparagus, right? You know the tip where you tell people like, just bend it and then where it breaks is where it breaks. It's like that same thing. You put one hand on the body, one hand on the head and then just bend, and then it will come off. Don't look at it. Just put it in your mouth. Throw your head back and swallow. 

Carla Lalli Music: It's God sauce. 

Rick Martinez: Amen. And that's it for this week's episode of Borderline Salty, but don't you worry. We'll be back next week. 

Carla Lalli Music: In the meantime, you can find recipes and recommendations from this week's episode in our show notes. 

Rick Martinez: And you can hear more from our guests today. Miz Cracker on her podcast, "She's a Woman." 

Carla Lalli Music: Or give her a follow on Instagram at Miz -- M I Z -- underscore Cracker. 

Rick Martinez:  If you have a question or a fear, you want us to help you through. You can always leave us a voicemail at eight three three four three three FOOD. 

Carla Lalli Music: Our number again is eight three three four three three three six six three. 

Rick Martinez: Borderline Salty is an original production by Pineapple Street Studios, we're your hosts. I'm Rick Martinez. 

Carla Lalli Music: And I'm Carla Lalli Music. You can find links to our work in the show notes for this episode. 

Rick Martinez:  Natalie Brennan is our lead producer. 

Carla Lalli Music: Janelle Anderson is our producer. 

Rick Martinez:  Our managing producer is a Agerenesh Ashagre. 

Carla Lalli Music: Our assistant producer is Mari Orozco. 

Rick Martinez:  Our head of sound and engineering is Raj Makhija. 

Carla Lalli Music: Mixing and engineering by David Sumner and Jason Richards 

Rick Martinez: Our assistant engineers are Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks.

Carla Lalli Music:  Legal services for Pineapple Street are provided by [phonetic Bianca Grimshaw at Granderson de Roche]. 

Rick Martinez:  Our executive producers are Max Linsky and Jenna Weiss-Berman. 

Carla Lalli Music: We appreciate Amanda, Zach, Crystal, Jenn and Devon for calling in this week. 

Rick Martinez: And thanks to you for listening. Talk to you next week. 

Both: Bye!

Carla Lalli Music: See you next time. 

Rick Martinez: Adios! 

Carla Lalli Music: Call me! We're waiting for your call.