In Episode 027, Taryn talks with Jessica Formicola from Savory Experiments all about beef! Jessica is incredibly knowledgeable about all things beef and just came out with a cookbook showcasing beef recipes. In the episode, Jessica discusses different types and cuts of beef as well as gives some tips for shopping for beef and recommendations for grilled beef recipes. Listen in to learn more about cooking and grilling with beef!
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or your favorite podcast player. Or scroll down to read a full transcript.
GUEST DETAILS
Connect with Jessica.
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Bio: Jessica Formicola is the creator of Savory Experiments, a trusted food and lifestyle blog and the author of the cookbook Beef It Up!. She appears regularly on national networks providing cooking demonstrations and entertaining ideas. She has contributed to Parade, The Daily Meal, Mashed, and Better Homes & Gardens, and has partnered with over 100 national food brands on product
releases and cooking tutorials. Jessica lives near Baltimore, Maryland with her husband and children.
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Some of the following are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
- Beef It Up Cookbook
- Certified Angus Beef
- Beef resource on Savory Experiments
- Metal skewers for grilling
- 12-inch cast iron skillet
RECIPES MENTIONED
These are some of the recipes mentioned by Jessica in the episode. They are on her website, Savory Experiments.
TRANSCRIPT
Taryn Solie: Hello, grillers. I am so excited for you to listen to today’s conversation. I know, I probably say that every time. But I really do mean it each time. I mean it. Today I talked with Jessica Formicola all about beef. Let me tell you, she has so much knowledge that she shares. It’s truly amazing. There are so many tips, so many tricks, and a lot of things to think about that I think people don’t normally think about when they’re buying beef, that you’re really going to learn from.
Before we begin and you know where I’m going here. If you’re enjoying this podcast, I’d love for you to share it with somebody who loves grilling and outdoor cooking as much as you and I do. As a newer podcast, it helps spread the word and I would really appreciate it. Now let’s get into the episode.
Today on the podcast, we have Jessica Formicola from the creator of Savory Experiments, a trusted food and lifestyle blog, and the author of the cookbook, Beef It Up. She appears regularly on national networks providing cooking demonstrations and entertaining ideas. She’s contributed to Parade, The Daily Meal, Mashed and Better Homes and Gardens and is partnered with over 100 national food brands on product releases and cooking tutorials. She lives near Baltimore, Maryland with her husband and children. Jessica, welcome to the podcast.
Jessica Formicola: Thank you for having me.
Taryn Solie: I’m so happy to have you here. I’m excited to dig into our conversation today. We’re gonna be talking about beef, which as I just mentioned, you wrote a cookbook all about. But before we get into that, I want you to tell the listeners a little bit more about your food background.
Jessica Formicola: Well, I am not professionally trained. I think that’s usually the first thing people ask me is, did you go to culinary school? No, I did not. I’m actually a psychotherapist.
Taryn Solie: Oh my gosh.
Jessica Formicola: It’s what I went to school for, yeah. So I practiced for many years. I was actually the director of an outpatient psychiatry program at a hospital for 12 years, but my love was always in the kitchen. So every weekend we’d invite all of our friends over. We were all transplants. None of our family lived near us. My husband and I, that’s what we are. We’d make dinner, but I’m terrible at following recipes. It’s one of my many faults. But I would create recipes. We’d have a family style meal and people started asking me for the recipes. I was like, I have no idea. A little bit of this little bit of that. So one day at work, a patient no-showed, and I literally Googled how to start a blog. At that point in time, I had no idea that food bloggers even existed. This was 11 years ago now. No clue. I mean, the market wasn’t out there. It wasn’t really a thing. There were a couple of people doing it, but it wasn’t monetized. It was very much just a hobby. I started putting my recipes there for the folks that would come over for dinner. They loved it. There were no pictures. There was no intro. There was no anything. It was just a recipe. I remember the day I came home from work and told my husband that 30 people had looked at my blog that day. 30 people I did not know, had looked at my blog. I was so excited. A few weeks later I got my first sponsorship opportunity from a jam company that was gonna pay me in jam. I was elated. I thought I had really made it, man. So it just kept growing. At that point in time, probably for the first year and a half, I didn’t even have social media, but I kept writing and I kept teaching myself. My blog is called Savory Experiments and it’s because I was experimenting in the kitchen. I was teaching myself new techniques. I was teaching myself about new ingredients and I was sharing it with my readers, the good, the bad, the ugly, the failures, all of the things. They appreciated that, it was relatable. It was approachable. We’ve kept it that way. None of our recipes are super involved or advanced. There’s a couple and honestly they don’t do that well because they’re not Food and Wine or Bon Appetit or anything crazy, but it’s down-home comfort cooking food, and it’s made for busy families. There’s a lot of shortcuts. There’s a lot of semi-homemade meals. There’s a lot of ways to make your food taste restaurant quality without having to spend a million years in a sous vide machine or doing a reverse sear. So it’s easy, it’s fun and it really tastes good. I think that that’s where people started to catch on.
So from there I started writing for magazines and then I realized I really enjoyed TV. Now I do TV a lot and radio and podcasts and all the things. I’m not practicing psychotherapy. I’ve been a full time blog for five years now. It’s just crazy to me.
Taryn Solie: Oh, that’s amazing. What a journey. I mean, A, that’s a really big jump, right? From psychotherapy to recipe creation. That’s not very much related, I would say. But what a journey and it sounds like it’s something that you really are passionate about and enjoy.
Jessica Formicola: I love it. It’s funny because people say that there was a connection. For me, cooking was my cathartic release. We tell everybody that they need self care and people automatically go to, well, I need to go get a massage. For me, it was the kitchen. My husband knew I had a really bad day at work when I was whipping up a three course meal when he got home. It was my release. I’d like to bring that back to people and families that cooking doesn’t have to be a chore. It can be fun. Part of that is reframing how you view it.
Taryn Solie: Yes.
Jessica Formicola: If we view it as a family activity and something that can get us out of our norm instead of something we have to do, then it is fun and you can get everybody involved. You know what? Kids tend to eat foods that they’ve prepared, even if it’s not something they usually would eat because they feel a sense of pride in the fact that they made it. So I think it’s great. It ends up being related to that self care and mental health as well.
Taryn Solie: Yeah. Well, and I can say that too, for me and with, and really with this podcast, I love grilling because I can get outside. Not always. I live in Seattle and so sometimes it’s rainy and dark and not very nice weather, but especially in the summer you’re out there on a grill. The sun is shining, you’re breathing some fresh air. It can be very cathartic. So I love that point. I think that’s an excellent point. So very interesting, very varied food background. I wanna know what was the impetus for your cookbook getting into beef, because that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. So talk a little bit about how that came about.
Jessica Formicola: Well, it definitely was spurred a long time ago when one of the first brands I started working with was the certified Angus beef brand. It was probably one of the first large scale brand ambassadorships I started with. Honestly, when I started it, I was like, oh, it’s beef. I like steak, I like burgers. It’s good. I quickly bought into this brand and I think, understanding that too certified Angus beef is a brand. So Kleenex is a brand of tissue. Certified Angus beef, actual brand of beef. But what makes them so special is that they employ farmers and 100% of their ranchers, their farmers, are American, on American soil and family owned and run. So while you’re buying a larger brand, you are supporting a business that is here in the United States, run by small families, that have been doing this for generations. They live where they work and they really are passionate about what they do and how they do it. How they raise the beef, the type of food, the feed that goes into the cattles, the native grasslands, the use of rainwater. There’s so much upcycling that happens in the beef industry within the United States. I know that there’s definitely a bad reputation for beef industries outside of the United States. But the ones within the US are actually really positive when we look at upcycling, for instance, using rainwater instead of fresh water to feed cattle. Literally 100% of every cattle is used for something, whether it’s medical, a lot of medicines, heart valves and stuff come from cattle; whether it’s bones, beef, broth, beef bones. If it’s hides for leather and things like that. If you have leather seats in your car, you know, you’re part of the beef industry. They also use leftovers from other parts of farming. So if you buy those little baby carrots at the store, they don’t grow like that. There was a lot of waste that happened there. Those get bought by beef farmers that get fed to the cattle. Turnip tops, carrot tops, leftovers from almond ranchers that make almond milk. There is a lot of waste there. So there’s all these things, but they also help to nurture native farmlands. So they generally live on land that isn’t otherwise farmable for other types of agriculture. But what they do do is rotate them around different fields and let their excrement literally fertilize the native grasslands.
Taryn Solie: The regenerative agriculture kind of movement. Yeah.
Jessica Formicola: Exactly. Exactly. So they. Use all of these different elements that really creates this huge cycle and they care about these animals. They really do. I’ve had the opportunity to visit cattle ranches, to visit feed yards, to meet the ranchers. One of my favorites, her name is Debbie and she is a female. Her husband is a banker. My husband’s also a banker. He goes to work every day in the big city. She is the rancher, she’s the farmer. I just love it. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some female butchers, and it’s funny because you know, everybody’s moving towards chicken and other things and I’m like, you know what? Honestly, when we’re looking at the humane raising of proteins and sustainability and keeping things local, beef is actually your better bet.
Taryn Solie: It’s so interesting. Not people’s first thought, I don’t think.
Jessica Formicola: No. I think a lot of that sensationalized with looking at data and stories coming out of other countries. I don’t mean to say that that’s not happening, because it certainly is. But the beef industry within the United States is actually very well run. I personally like buying it. I like that about it. So I have been passionate about beef. I’ve learned more about beef. Beef is hard, especially for the home cook because there are over 150 cuts of it. So it can be a little, well, it’s not like chicken – you have your breasts and your thighs and your legs. You’ve got so many different pieces with beef and then geographically speaking, it’s sometimes called different things in different geographic locations. But also just from grocer to grocer. Some cuts aren’t available everywhere. You live on the west coast, so you probably see a lot of tri-tip. We don’t get that over here on the east coast. So when I see a recipe for tri tip, some of my readers don’t know what we’re talking about. So beef can sometimes be a little intimidating. So consumers tend to look for the cut that they, in their head, believe looks the right shape and size for the recipe they’re creating, instead of the actual right cut. The other intimidating thing about beef is that every cut needs its own tender, loving care. Everyone is cooked very differently. Some need high heat sears, some need long and slow and wet. They just all need something different. So you can’t necessarily guarantee that buying the same size or shape is going to be the same cooking method that that particular recipe called for. So I’m trying to help people better understand beef, better understand how to cook these pieces, because you don’t have to break the bank on beef. Honestly, right now per pound, beef is actually cheaper than chicken and pork. So it’s more economical as well, especially for larger families trying to spread that dollar out. So figuring out how to take these cuts and make the most out of them and make any of them, whether it’s prime choice or select, into a really delectable meal.
Taryn Solie: So interesting. There’s so much that goes into it. And there’s so much that I didn’t think about. I’m sure many of the listeners didn’t think about either. I’m really intrigued. I did not realize how many cuts of beef there were. That’s a lot.
Jessica Formicola: That’s a lot. I even have a chart that I refer to sometimes. I literally wrote the book on beef and I still, wait a minute. Where does that one come from, you know? I have a chart of a cow in my kitchen that I refer back to. Nobody is gonna be, except for really the beef butchers and maybe the chefs over at certified Angus beef brand, are gonna be always knowing all the things about beef. No one expects you to know all the things, all the time. But as long as you don’t access the information, that’s really what counts. This is what led to the. My publisher actually contacted me because they knew how passionate I was about beef. So they asked me if I’d be willing to write one. I said, you know what? I’ve had several opportunities to write books in the past and they just haven’t been a good fit. This is something that I really love and care about. Yes, I’d love to write a book on beef. But what made it interesting and kind of interesting too, with your podcast is that all of the recipes in this book are actually made in the kitchen with no special equipment.
So I love grilling as well. We have a grill, we have a smoker, we have all the things and many of these can be transitioned to the grill. But I lived in the city for forever and I didn’t have a grill. A lot of other people don’t either. I think that when we think of beef books, we automatically think they’re all grilling and smoking and it doesn’t have to be. It can be. Tastes great that way but it doesn’t have to be. So that’s what made this book a little bit different, but we also have a really long chapter in the beginning demystifying beef cuts. So I actually have a big grid showing you what cuts are, what the names are and how to best prepare it. What to look for when you’re shopping. So there’s about 30 pages before you even get into recipes that give you this great beefy education that you can use, whether you’re looking at my recipes or your recipes or anybody else’s recipes regarding beef.
Taryn Solie: oh, that’s so you’re selling me on this cookbook. That’s so interesting. I think I consider myself a fairly experienced cook. I’ve cooked, I’ve grilled, I’ve smoked a lot of those things for many years now. You know, even seasoned chefs or cooks don’t know about all of this information. It sounds like there’s so much available and so much to know. I love that your book kind of breaks it down for people. I think that’s awesome.
One thing I wanna talk a little bit about is not so much the different cuts, but the different types of beef, because I think people get confused about that, myself included. The select and the choice and the prime and what does that all mean? So can you break that down?
Jessica Formicola: Sure. It’s not that confusing, but the one thing I wanna say is don’t pay so much attention to it. I know that the beef industry is gonna have a heart attack hearing that. I will tell you what they all mean. So select is kind of the lowest, it’s actually not the lowest grade. There’s a grade below select called unlabeled or no roll beef. But most of what you’re gonna see in the store is labeled select, choice or prime. Prime is your absolute best beef. It is what you’re gonna get in steakhouses, high-end steak houses, things along those lines. Basically what it means is that it’s really well marbled. It has fat. So it’s funny because we look for grass fed beef and this, that, and the other thing. You know what? The beef that you actually want, the prime is corn fed because carbs make fat, like we do. To get that really nice kind of speckled look instead of these really thick ribbons of fat, you want these little tiny pockets. There’s little tiny speckled pockets, they’re gonna melt into the beef when you cook it instead of just being kind of chewy and gristly. You don’t want that. So that’s prime. But honestly, unless you’re making a really special meal at home and you’re making a steak, whether it’s a ribeye or a New York strip, don’t waste your money on prime. Go for choice. Choice is going to be a little bit lower. So you’re gonna have the same kind of striations, they might be a little bit thicker, but it’s not a huge deal. It’s still going to be really good. As long as you know how to prepare the cut you’ve purchased, it’s gonna taste amazing. Select can too. Now select, it’s funny because it has larger ribbons of fat but then that also means if you’re trying to eat leaner, it’s easier for you to cut away the fat. So you can still tenderize it. You can still marinate it and you can still do all the things to it to make it taste amazing and super tender, but it’s gonna be easier to remove those.
So the other thing to know when you’re buying beef is that it’s not graded individually by cut. It’s graded by carcu. So the grader, as soon as they’re breaking down the cattle, looks at the entire carcass, not a single piece and just stamps it with a grade. So they could be looking at one little piece of that cow, that cattle and saying, okay, this looks like a prime, then they stamp it.
Now we all know that every animal stores things a little bit differently, right? You know, I gain weight in my hips. So if you know what to look for in the striations, with these little fat specs, you can find something that’s labeled choice and therefore cheaper that really looks like a prime. Because it’s not graded by cut, it’s graded by carcass. And vice versa – you could see something that’s prime. Because the little tiny square couple inches that the grader was looking at looked like a prime, actually looks more like a choice and maybe you shouldn’t spend your money on it.
Taryn Solie: That’s so interesting. I did not know that.
Jessica Formicola: Yes. Fascinating. So pay attention. Don’t just look at that label and assume that you’re getting what you’re paying for because you might not be. You can make a really great, great dinner, great anything with a choice or a select piece. Then there are other types of cuts. Like if we’re looking at an eye round, which shouldn’t have any fat in it, that it really doesn’t make a difference if it’s prime or choice. It’s a typical, very thick, no fat cut, which means it needs a lot of very long, slow, wet cooking and then to be sliced very, very thin against the grain to make it good. So I’m not gonna waste my money on a piece of choice eye round. That makes no sense.
Taryn Solie: Yeah. Oh, that’s such a good tip. I love that. I think I should pay attention too. I mean, not just to like the select, choice and prime, but even when I’ll buy something and I’m not paying attention because I’m trying to shop and I toss it in the cart and then I look and it’s expiring the next day. Not necessarily meat, but something else, right? So just really pay attention is a good overall rule when you’re shopping.
Jessica Formicola: Especially with meat, grocers tend to not put a lot of meat out because they don’t want it to sit for very long, like you’re referencing. Always ask your butcher if they have it in the back. A lot of times they will. It might be frozen, but they usually do. If you want something to be a certain size, don’t be scared to call ahead and ask for it. One of the best relationships you can have is with the butcher. Let me tell you, they get excited about meat. I’ve never walked up to the counter and been like, hey, let’s talk about brisket and they’re like, I don’t have time. They will talk your ear off for an hour. Oh my God, there’s this woman here and she wants to talk about flats and points and she’s got me all worked up. So make friends with the butcher where the grocery store you go to and it’s a great relationship. Generally they’ll be able to find what you need and help you. If you don’t have your phone out or this grid available for you to make a swap mm-hmm they’ll know. They are experts on this. They know what the best swap is for each cut of meat.
Taryn Solie: Yes, that’s a great tip. I love that. You’re not necessarily talking about a butcher shop, but your local grocery butcher.
Jessica Formicola: Regular grocery store butcher. I do have some butchers in the area that I go to for specialty cuts and things, or they’ll call me when they have something particularly fun come in. But I generally buy my meat at the regular grocery store. Again, this isn’t an ad at all for certified Angus beef brand, but I know that theirs have like 11 different quality points that they need to stand by. So if I am going to just throw something in the cart, generally it’s certified Angus beef. As long as it has that little shield, that little label on it. I know that it’s already passed these 11 different specifications. These are things that you wouldn’t know. It’s how tall the hump is on the back of the black Angus that it came from.
Taryn Solie: Oh, interesting.
Jessica Formicola: You’d never know that if you just bought like the regular store, but that amount of fat there tells you what the pedigree is of the actual cattle that goes into, how all these different genetics that you wouldn’t know from any other brand that’s not labeled. It’s so complicated.
Taryn Solie: It sounds complicated.
Jessica Formicola: It is, but that’s what makes it intimidating. I don’t want people to be intimidated. Just get out there and try it.
Taryn Solie: Yeah, no, I love that. I think that’s great. Do you have any other shopping tips before we start to get into recipes? Because I know you have a number of recipes to go through.
Jessica Formicola: Yeah, so I mean, I would say just don’t be scared of liquid. The red is not blood. It’s actually just moisture that’s been oxidized. Brown isn’t necessarily terrible either. Although I generally look for a pink rosy piece of meat. Definitely look at that date. Sometimes it’s the package date. Sometimes it’s the date used best by and sometimes it’s an expiration date. None of those are actually required with the U S D a. So it varies from store to store. If it just has a date on it, ask the butcher what that date means, because it doesn’t always mean the same thing.
Taryn Solie: Yes. Yes. That’s a really good point. There. There’s no industry standard for it and so you need to be sure again, just pay attention, right?
Jessica Formicola: Pay attention. I always pay attention.
Taryn Solie: Okay. I wanna get into recipes because you sent me ahead some recipes that you thought people would like to hear about. I want to give you a chance to go over some of these because they really look delicious. So what are some of your recommendations, maybe like a good starter recipe to go to first dip into?
Jessica Formicola: Well, I think having a good marinade is always good. So one of my favorites is an Asian inspired marinade. The basics from Asian foods, specifically soy sauce, are very high in acidity. So that acidity really works well with tenderizing any cut of beef. So if we’re doing a London broil or a flank steak or something that typically doesn’t have a lot of those fatur in them, it’s going to break down the fibers and help it appear less chewy just purely because you’ve added acid to it. So my Asian flank steak also uses Sherry, which is an interesting note that you don’t see a lot with beef. See it more with like white sauces mm-hmm and seafood, but I love that it adds that kind of unexpected after taste to this recipe, but also honey. Honey caramelizes, sugars caramelize on the grill, as you well know. So balancing the acidity with the sweet helps it. Then of course, we’ve got ginger and a little bit of Sesame oil and lots of garlic. If you read me or follow me, you know that I swear by fresh garlic only, do not buy the jarred stuff. I know it is a great time saver, but it is sweet. It is not garlicy. This recipe might call for two cloves of garlic, but garlic should always be measured with your heart and not with a measuring spoon.
Taryn Solie: Oh, I love that.
Jessica Formicola: It’s super easy.
Taryn Solie: I love that point about garlic too, because people will say a clove of garlic. It’s okay, well, is it a small clove or is it a large clove? So I love the measure with your heart, because if you love garlic, It’s two large cloves.
Jessica Formicola: It’s two large cloves and I want you to crush and mince them. So the other fun thing about garlic is that how you slice it is how much garlic pungency you’re going to get out of it. So grading it and mincing it and crushing, it’s gonna give you the most bold garlic flavor. But if you don’t want a ton of garlic flavor, but you want a little bit of an essence, if you will, then you could slice it and throw it in the marinade and the garlic will leach into the rest of it, but won’t overpower it.
Now, I like garlic. So I usually double and triple garlic, but any kind of marinade like this is great,because you can easily put it together. You can put it together up to 24 hours ahead of time. You can use a variety of different cuts of beef and it feeds a large crowd. So just one full roast. When we’re talking about beef, a roast is just any cut of beef that feeds more than one person versus the steak is something that feeds just one person. Supposed to. So you can put any kind of roast into this type of marinade, marinade it, grill it, to your preferred liking. Then of course, and I’m sure you’ve covered this so many times, make sure you slice it against the grain. Any protein, slicing it against the grain, shortens the fibers, which in your mouth creates the illusion that it is a less chewy cut of meat because you don’t have to break them down as much.
Taryn Solie: That’s something that I kind of inherently know, but I don’t think anyone has actually said that on the podcast yet.
Jessica Formicola: Oh really?
Taryn Solie: Yeah. I mean, I’m sure somebody has mentioned it with a specific cut here and there, but like you are giving the reasoning behind it, which I think is really important for people to understand.
Jessica Formicola: Whether I understand it’s chicken or pork, no matter what it is, if it is a fibrous meat, cutting it against the grain. That doesn’t mean that you’ll always cut it in the same diagonal too, throughout the entire piece. If you’re working with a trite, like we were talking about, you might actually have to change your angle. Skirt steak, stuff like that. For tacos, like you don’t wanna fight your meat. If it’s in a sandwich, like a steak sandwich. Have you gotten a steak sandwich before? You’re like fighting with it? You don’t wanna have to do that. But if you cut it against the grain, it’ll naturally just kind of pull apart at those fibers and it makes any cut so much tastier.
Taryn Solie: Oh, I love it. So I wanna talk about some of the other recipes that you have that maybe would be good for the grill or could be done in like an oven.
Jessica Formicola: Okay. So for an oven, I think that you could definitely do steak kebabs. Make sure you get those skewers really wet before you do it.
Taryn Solie: I don’t even like using wood skewers. I only use metal.
Jessica Formicola: I do too, but I know a lot of people use wood. But you can still get a nice, good brown, and that’s the kind of thing that only needs a sear. So I actually use a broiler instead of baking it. It’s good. Then my cranberry glaze tri tip, you can use that cranberry glaze on any kind of roast that you want, but it’s more of a basting, so it gets kind of this sticky fruit sauce on it and it is great in the oven as well. You can finish it off on the grill if you want to. Then I would say I don’t do as much other than like pot roast or prime rib, I do more beef in cast iron, which can be done on the stove or the grill. I live by cast iron. I think every home cook should know how to make a steak in your cast iron skillet. That is my go-to.
Taryn Solie: Mm-hmm. Do you do reverse sear but do you typically do a reverse sear on your steak or no?
Jessica Formicola: Well, part of the problem here is that I would probably eat my steak raw if they’d let me every time. So reverse sear typically overcooked my steak a little bit past my liking. So it’s usually just one sea in the type of thing than anything else for me, but you could totally do a reverse sear. So in the point of that is that and this is such a nuance and these are really for more, I don’t wanna say beef snobs, but beef aficionados here. For those who don’t know what this is, it’s a process where you basically, instead of searing the meat beforehand, which creates a brown, which creates acidity and flavor, some people say, oh, you’re cauterizing it. You’re sealing in the juices. That’s complete and total hooey, that doesn’t happen at all. Your juices will still come out. But you’re creating more flavor to the dish. It’s like anything that you brown, whether it’s vegetables or chicken or beef, whatever it is. But in this method, you actually bake it ahead of time, and then you sear it at the end. The thought process here is that it cooks more evenly but you don’t get kind of this little gray stryation on the end. If you cut open a piece of steak, that’s maybe more of a medium or a medium, well, mm-hmm, it has this gray area between the rosy red and the exterior. If you do a reverse sea, you won’t get that. So I reserve my reverse sears for beef tenderloins during the holidays mm-hmm stuff like that. That’s generally when I’ll use that technique, but for just a New York strip something, that’s a little bit thinner or a ribeye. I usually just do a single sear in cast iron, and then I shut off the heat and use a really, really, really good grass fed European butter with a ton of fresh garlic and parsley. Like an obscene amount of butter. But butter burns, and doesn’t have a high smoke point. So you really don’t wanna do that basting until the heat is off and it can kind of help lubricate it a little bit more without burning.
Taryn Solie: Yeah, I feel like you’re dropping so many points of knowledge, like cooking tips and knowledge that it’s so good. I love it so much. We do need to wrap up a little bit, but I want to ask what is a grilling because you said you guys grill, you smoke. What is a grilling recipe? It can be beef. If it’s not beef that’s okay. that? Either like a favorite or something you’re just really loving right now.
Jessica Formicola: Oh, I have a favorite it’s herb, grilled potatoes. If I could only eat one vegetable and I do consider potatoes a vegetable, they grow in the ground. I know they’re a starch. They’re vegetable to me. It’s herb grilled potatoes. It’s this funny red. It has so much nostalgia attached to it for me. My mother made it when I was younger. People get, especially southerners, man, we get very very into our mayonnaise wars. This recipe uses. Yeah. If you’re down in like Georgia and you mentioned Duke’s. Duke’s up. This recipe uses miracle whip, It is the only recipe I have ever used Miracle Whip for. You could use regular mayonnaise, but it just has more umami flavor, in other words, miracle whip’s got a little bit of tang and sweetness to it. I par boil these red potatoes. Use Miracle Whip. I thin it out with a little bit of chicken broth, onion powder, garlic powder, oregano and salt and I let them marinate. Then I usually put them in like a grill basket. I used to put ’em on skewers, but then it got too hard flipping them. But that miracle whip, man. It gets this nice char on it. It is so good. It goes with nearly everything and you can customize it with cayenne and paprika and all sorts of different, fresh herbs from your garden. It’s just such a good base. I’ve never made it for somebody and had somebody say, I don’t like this. They love it. Love it.
Taryn Solie: Oh, that’s so interesting. Because I am not a miracle whip fan and I know there are several people who are like, no to Miracle Whip. But it sounds very interesting. I would not have thought of putting those on potatoes and grilling them in that way.
Jessica Formicola: It is the only thing I use a Miracle Whip for. I’m actually going to test this over the weekend using a plain greek yogurt. Because I feel like it has that same tang to it. I might just need to add a little bit of sugar. But I haven’t tested it yet. I’m sure it works, but I need to figure out the nuances before I actually post the swaps, but yeah it’s the only reason I eat Miracle Whip is for these potatoes. They’re amazing.
Taryn Solie: Oh, I love it. They sound really good. Well, this has been amazing, Jessica. I wanna give you a chance to let people know where they can find you online and especially where they can buy your cookbook.
Jessica Formicola: Well, Beef It Up is available wherever books are sold. You can get on Amazon. You can get it from Barnes and Noble, a lot of independent book sellers have it. It’s at, I can’t even think of the name of the store now, Tractor Supply and a bunch of other places too. You can find me and links to where to buy the book at savoryexperiments.com. From there, all of my socials are there too, and they’re all @savoryexperiments. I’m really easy to find. I am a real human. You can email me, you can message me and I will personally write you back.
Taryn Solie: Perfect. We’ll include links in the show notes page to your socials and your website and to where people can find the book.
Jessica Formicola: Great. Thank you so much for having me.
Taryn Solie: Thank you so much for coming on. This has been a blast and I think I just, I’m all jazzed up about beef now.
Jessica Formicola: Good. I did my job. Beef it up, man. Beef it up.
Taryn Solie: That’s right.
Taryn Solie: Did you know all of that info about beef? I did not. I knew enough to cook different cuts of beef and cook it well, but I think Jessica gave some really great background on beef and the beef industry in the US, as well as some super helpful shopping tips that you can take with you to the store and when you’re cooking on the grill. I’m going to include a link to Jessica’s cookbook, which sounds fabulous, on the show notes page, as well as links to the recipes she mentioned, and a link to a post on our website that talks a little more about the different cuts of beef. I have a feeling it’s a lighter version of what she’s featured in her cookbook. To get to the show notes page, you can either go to my main website at hotpankitchen.com and click on podcasts in the main menu. Or you can click on the link provided in whatever podcast app you’re listening to. That’s it for today. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, keep grilling like a mother.
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