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There's just something about family road trips.
Windows down, music up, snacks everywhere, and stories that turn into inside jokes for years.
And now there's one more thing to love, pulling over for a chicken sandwich that makes the whole car happy.
Culver's new lineup, crispy, spicy, or grilled, is made with 100 % whole white meat chicken breast. Topped with cool, crunchy lettuce, ripe tomato, Hey, it's Francis.
This week, we're bringing back an episode that's one of my favorites because, because, well, you know, it's so much fun when you get to look at something you see every single day in a new way.
And that's how this episode made me feel about my fridge.
Like, my literal refrigerator.
Check it out. I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
You know, sometimes it's amazing to me How much we are constantly surrounded by boring, everyday objects that completely changed the world when they were introduced.
Like, a few years ago, I had the chance to interview the great Jacques Pepin for this show.
And he told me that when he got his start in the kitchen sometime in the 1940s, it was his job to keep the stove on.
I mean, he literally had to feed wood into the fire to keep the stove and ovens cooking in the restaurant.
There was no gas in the kitchen, no knob to turn the heat up and down under his pots and pans.
So, like, imagine your kitchen with no gas.
Imagine your kitchen with no running water.
Or imagine a kitchen without the magic metal box that keeps food from spoiling for an impossible amount of time.
Before there was a refrigerator, you had to salt, dry, preserve, or pickle, like, literally anything you wanted to eat more than a couple of hours later.
or, you know, find a cold stream in a cave and dunk it in there.
The invention of the refrigerator not only gave us things like popsicles and cold iced tea, it gave us like half of our lives back from the ancient practices of preserving all of our food.
So today is our homage to the humble, world -changing refrigerator.
We've got Dan Souza from Cooks Illustrated to tell us everything we need to know about how to store your food the best way.
The chef Shola Olunoyo stops by with some techniques for making your fridge a tool that actually improves the flavor of your food.
But let's start with how we got that cold cabinet in the first place.
Jonathan Rees is a professor of history at Colorado State University and arguably the greatest expert in the history of refrigeration.
He's the author of several books, including Refrigeration Nation, A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America.
So, hey, Jonathan, it's great to talk with you.
Oh, lovely to be here.
Thank you. So, you know, it used to be that much of the food that humans would eat was basically limited to a few days or maybe in some cases, even just a couple hours from harvest, right?
Unless you took a lot of time and energy to preserve it.
And now you just stick it in this cold box that lives inside your home.
You don't think about it.
But your research shows how the power of the refrigerator goes way deeper than just that convenience.
So let's actually go way back in time.
Okay. And that's sort of a funny thing to say, but how have people kept food cold over the ages?
Well, for the most part, they haven't had to keep food cold because they only got food from right around them.
You can store things that are perishable like in root cellars and it'll last through the winter.
But for the most part, you would just eat what was close to you and eat what was fresh.
Ice is this thing that some people can get, cut it off mountains, deliver it to rich people.
But it's only in the last 200 years that it's become relatively common to be able to eat things that are cold any time of year.
That's amazing to think about the fact that like, oh, people didn't really eat cold food.
like yeah you know ice cream no there was no ice cream well refrigeration comes before refrigerators and refrigeration before refrigerators came exclusively from ice yeah so tell us about the history of of ice i guess before we had refrigerators well if you're close to cold then it's easy to get cold sure so up on mountains in obviously in very cold climates But in the temperate zone, it takes until the 19th century for people to realize that ice could be a commodity where you can cut it, store it, and keep it even when it's hot outside.
And in the 19th century, the person responsible for that was a Boston merchant named Frederick Tudor, who started in 1806, cutting ice off of a nearby pond in Cambridge and sending it to Caribbean islands.
This is a dumb question, but how do you send ice from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the Caribbean and not have it melt along the way?
So it does melt along the way.
But what happens is the outside ice melts, but that melting protects the inside ice.
So if you can pack a ship correctly, you can send ice all the way to India and still have about half of it left when you get there.
So it seems like a miracle.
That's incredible. now it seems quite amazing, but it really does make sense when you think about it.
Ice is insulated by more ice, so you don't get all of it, but you do get enough of it that you can make some money off it when it gets there.
But then the funny thing is that when you get ice to places like India or Martinique, you actually have to teach people how to use it, because those people have never seen it before.
Yeah, for sure. And so Tudor actually had to teach people to have a taste for ice.
So it starts in drinks.
That's the most obvious thing.
He did most of his business in America in coastal city bars, and that would transform cocktails forever.
But eventually it becomes common enough that people begin to bring it into their homes and stick it in what we would now call an icebox and keep their perishable food fresh.
Yeah. Yeah. So obviously that's the predecessor to what we know now as a refrigerator.
So how did mechanical refrigeration come to be?
It is really complicated.
I have to wind up for this one.
Mechanical refrigeration is something that everybody knew they wanted, but coming up with it takes about 100 years of inventions from all around the world between about 1750 and 1850 and when it's developed in the 1860s the first kinds of mechanical refrigeration are these giant machines that weigh about five tons and the first main use for these machines is to chill water to create ice and that's how Americans become ice crazy because if you have an ice machine just a few blocks away from you, you can get it delivered to your home every day and you could know that the perishable food in your
ice box is going to stay fresh.
Okay. And are those machines fundamentally different than the fridge I have in my kitchen now?
They're fundamentally different in the sense that they're much bigger, but they work on the same fundamental principle, which is something called called compression cycle refrigeration.
How does that? How does the fridge work?
I know you're a historian, not an engineer.
Yeah, I am a historian, not an engineer.
And I did a lot of reading and I got a lot of help for this.
And I don't want to bore you with all the exact details.
And I'm not sure I could replicate them anyway.
But I can tell you that compression cycle refrigeration is a pretty basic concept.
There's a refrigerant.
It's in a tube. The tube goes around in a circle and when you put it under pressure the refrigerant inside the tube changes state so when it changes from liquid to gas it draws in heat from the space next to the tube so that's going to make the inside of the refrigerator cold when it draws the heat away and then on the back side it's going to be hot which partially explains why the back of your refrigerator is hot even if If the compartment is cold, that's the very basics of compression cycle refrigeration.
So it doesn't create cold air.
It just keeps sucking the heat out of the air.
Right, right. And you said that technology was essentially invented in the mid 1800s.
Yeah. Has it changed?
Well, it has. The same cycle still works.
But just for instance, the most popular refrigerant in the 1860s was ammonia.
And now most refrigerators, household refrigerators, are going to use Freon.
Okay, so since the technology has kept fairly consistent, how have fridges changed over the years to make them more marketable?
So the first really big change is from those giant five -ton machines I was talking about down to something that's going to fit in a kitchen.
and the reason they left ammonia was because they needed to fit it in a kitchen for reasons that are well beyond my comprehension ammonia simply did not work as a refrigerant in a very small unit um for one thing it's a noxious gas right if you had a refrigerator leak there would be a big problem so they couldn't just shrink it so a bunch of inventors in the very very early 20th century, started working on new refrigerants and new ways to create refrigeration.
And you get about 25 years of experimentation from about 1900 to 1925 until you get sort of the modern refrigerator that comes along in 1927.
It's a thing called a monitor top.
It's the first really modern refrigerator and the key breakthrough which comes just after that is the new refrigerant Freon.
You can create a refrigerator with a bunch of different refrigerants but Freon sort of clears the field when it's introduced in 1930.
Everybody builds with Freon from then on.
Yeah but the basic refrigerator has been the same since like you know 1927.
Yes Yes, if you had an effective 1927 refrigerator and it worked, it would keep your food just as cold as the one you bought last year.
Probably the main difference you'd notice is that the 27 refrigerator is much, much smaller.
Okay. Yeah. So size.
The freezer is going to be tiny in 1927.
One of the things they did in the 40s is separate the refrigerator and the freezer better so that you can fit frozen food in it.
And then there are lots of little additions to a refrigerator that evolved over time.
Crispers for the vegetables, that comes in the 1930s.
The frost -free refrigerator comes in the 1950s.
There's like a pedal for the door.
That doesn't last, but that's one of the early innovations from the 30s.
And again, probably the most obvious difference is the size.
they would get you to buy a new refrigerator by offering you a much bigger refrigerator and lots of americans will go for that uh particularly in the 50s and 60s okay so that's super interesting right because like size you know like sure we we market things on size all the time but you know does that also mean that we were living in a different way like now we were actively trying to store more food in the home at one time or um some of it has to do with other their technologies, Birdseye is the man primarily responsible for the perfection of frozen food.
That starts in the 20s, but they don't really have that really cost -effective and widespread until the 50s.
So there's not much need for a bigger freezer until then.
But once you have frozen food, people want bigger freezers because they have access to things they wouldn't have have otherwise, like frozen orange juice, which is a big thing from that era.
And then some of that is simply the fact that we're moving out to the suburbs after World War II.
We have lots of disposable income, so we can pay higher electricity bills, we can build bigger kitchens, and with bigger kitchens come bigger refrigerators.
What are some other ways that refrigerators changed over time?
Well, besides all the, for lack of a better word, accoutrements that come with refrigerators in their first decades.
The outside of a refrigerator changes as well.
The colors change with the size.
Those of us who are old enough might remember avocado green and harvest yellow during the 60s and the early 70s.
These days, it's iron doors or steel doors, excuse me.
And I asked a refrigerator designer, a kitchen designer, about the steel doors.
And are designed to appeal to men, that it makes them more likely to go in the kitchen if the door is steel rather than just some sort of off -white.
Huh. Because it makes it look more industrial and tough.
And somehow makes it more acceptable for them to be there.
Oh, God, men are terrible.
We're talking to Jonathan Rees, author of Refrigeration Nation, and we'll be back with more with him.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
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I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're here with historian Jonathan Rees, author of Refrigeration Nation, the History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America.
Let's get back to it with him.
Okay, so now we're getting into this other conversation that I think is also really interesting, right?
Because you said there's sort of a push and pull between what's industrially possible, like creating frozen food commercially, and the kind of market that creates, And then the market for frozen food now demands a different kind of refrigerator.
So tell us about how the evolution of refrigeration has actually evolved our food system, like how our food industry works.
Yeah. And it changes at every point going back to ice.
When you can refrigerate, whether it's with a refrigerator or at some point in the production of a particular good before it reaches your kitchen, new things become possible.
New tastes become available.
Yeah. So, just to pull an example from my earlier book, lager beer comes with German immigrants in the late 19th century and it used to be made only in winter because you needed cold weather in order to be able to create it.
But first when you can cut giant ice blocks, brewers could now make lager beer all year round.
And it turns out that Americans really like that particular German import in the late late 19th century it becomes the most popular beer in the United States and everybody wants to drink it and when refrigeration becomes mechanical it becomes even easier to make it and it can be mass produced uh you know before the 1830s ice cream has to be made with a hand crank machine uh with a little bit of ice and some salt and some cream and some flavor and you can't possibly mass produce it.
But first, when you can use ice to chill it, more ice is readily available.
That makes ice cream more common. But then eventually, when you can refrigerate the whole system and people have freezers at home, you don't have to wait for the ice cream man in order to be able to get ice cream.
It becomes much more popular as refrigeration expands and the product becomes cheaper and it becomes something that people can eat every day if they're so inclined.
Yeah. And also like this this idea of seasonality.
Yes. Everybody underestimates how many foods are actually seasonal.
You may know that apples are seasonal.
The best apples come in the fall.
However, eggs are seasonal, but we're so good at keeping chicken eggs fresh that you wouldn't know anymore.
Lots of things are seasonal and refrigeration at every point in the provisioning chain from where it's produced to your kitchen makes that something that you can buy at an affordable price and eat every day if you're so inclined yeah and so for all the well i actually i don't want to editorialize let me just ask you how like how do you feel about all that like in the sense that you know so much of what we eat now is made possible yes by the invention of of refrigeration, you know, over 150 years ago.
But what are the trade -offs that you see of, you know, how our food industry works, like the possibilities of this invention?
So there is a series of really important trade -offs.
There's some really good stuff that comes from refrigeration and refrigerators.
And there's some pretty bad stuff that comes from refrigeration and refrigerators.
The good stuff is sort of an end to seasonality, the ability to access foods you wouldn't access.
I mean, I'm really grateful that I can get eggs all year round.
I can't imagine what life would be without that.
Another really good thing is the effect of refrigeration on waste.
You don't waste as much food because you can preserve it.
And actually there's also a case that you waste more food because you can preserve it, something I would call the Costco problem as shorthand.
I do understand that analogy.
At least on one very important level, food does not spoil as much because it can be refrigerated all the way through that provisioning chain.
However, on the other hand, there's an effect on flavor because you'll be eating and getting used to eating things.
They're not as fresh because they've been refrigerated.
They may still be fine for you.
but when you have something if an american goes to europe and has something fresh that they wouldn't normally have fresh there'll be like a revolution in their taste buds because they're like i did not know this thing could taste that way um so there's a flavor trade -off and of course um there's the effect of all the energy expended on refrigeration um on climate which is also a problem.
Sure, of course. I think if I had to come on a side, I favor good over bad, but that doesn't mean that you have to have a giant refrigerator.
It doesn't mean that you have to keep your old refrigerator when you buy a new one and just stick it in the basement and run that all the time because it still works perfectly well.
It doesn't mean that you have to always eat local, but you should keep that in mind when you're deciding what you do want to buy.
Let me ask you this, because earlier you'd said, you know, going back to the ice industry before there was mechanical refrigeration, like that was really an American industry.
Yes. And I think you also mentioned that the first home refrigerator was a GE refrigerator, so it was also an American industry.
So Americans have had a real particular and like innovative, for lack of a better word, relationship with keeping food cold.
Do you see in your research around the world, do we actually have like a different relationship with cold food than other societies?
Think about ice in your drinks.
On one level, you wouldn't want to have all sorts of cocktails you could name.
You wouldn't want to have it without ice.
But on another level, if you put ice in your drink, you're diluting your drink.
So there's lots of examples going back to the 1850s of Americans going to Europe and asking for ice and it simply not being available.
And then as it becomes gradually more available to Americans, Europeans just think we're crazy for using ice in so many things.
Because why do you want that diluted?
But we get used to things that are cold and it's passed on culturally between the generations.
And that's just not true in a lot of other countries.
Oh, that's super interesting.
The United States has the biggest refrigerators in the world because we are more interested in abundance and price than we are in preserving flavor in many instances.
Yeah. Bigger is better.
And that means bigger refrigerators.
Yes. So, Jonathan, I love talking about this stuff, but I have to ask you, how did you get so into refrigerators?
so I I did my dissertation at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and unlike most of my colleagues in grad school I was working in the engineering library on an entirely different industry but when you came up the elevator right at eye level was a 100 year old journal a whole run of 100 year old journals from an industry called ice and refrigeration which was from the dawn of the 500 ton machine.
And I started thumbing through them one day and I was completely hooked.
I couldn't understand what these things were.
I was sort of shocked at how surprised people were that such things were possible.
And probably most importantly, I noticed that they kept blowing up.
The first academic article I ever wrote was about ice machines blowing up.
And I sort of have figured out why, which has to do with the refrigerant, ammonia being flammable.
And I realized there was no regular book on refrigeration in its whole history, so I wrote it.
There are now. There's more books than mine, but there wasn't when Refrigeration Nation came out.
Right on. Well, this has been totally fascinating, Jonathan.
Thank you so much for coming in.
Oh, no problem. Jonathan Rees is a professor of history at Colorado State University and is the author author of Refrigeration Nation, the history of ice, appliances, and enterprise in America.
So how do you use a refrigerator?
I mean, obviously you open the door and you stick your food in there, but is it really so simple when, you know, sometimes you pull out a head of lettuce and it's frozen solid?
Or when the whole fridge smells like your leftovers?
leftovers Dan Souza editor -in -chief of Cooks Illustrated is here to tell us how to really make sure we're using our fridges well.
Hey Dan it's great to talk with you.
Francis it is always a pleasure.
So forever and I mean like literally until just a couple months ago you know I always have one of those extremely basic dumb metal box refrigerators you know super loud the freezer's on top so every time you use it you're like bending over and hurting your back i kept like bonking my head on the freezer but they like never break so i could never feel okay about getting rid of it and then when i finally decided i had to get a new one um the loud compressor was driving me absolutely crazy i finally went to fridge shopping and it was nuts like there are like whole computers attached to some of them
you know doors that turn clear when you tap them crazy features but as far as i can tell like the big distinction is do you want french doors you know like those double doors or the single door so i just want to ask you what do you like in a fridge what i like in a fridge well um i i have the same situation as you or your previous state and um yeah it will it will never stop working so i'm just kind of stuck with it um so i so i focus a lot on just like how to use the fridge properly but um that door question I think is a great one.
And my philosophy in the kitchen in general is if something takes two hands in the kitchen, it's much more complicated than if something takes one hand.
It's all about efficiency and being able to, you know, have something in your other hand because you're multitasking and then also open your fridge and easy to grab something.
So I just like the operation of a single hinge fridge.
Obviously, the door opens a little bit wider, but I like that full expanse, seeing it all at once.
and you're never guessing the wrong one.
Like it's on this side of the fridge or this side of the fridge, you know, and not playing that game.
So it might seem, you know, minor or trivial, but if you're in the kitchen all the time cooking, it can add up to real time.
Yeah, you're a man of simplicity.
I appreciate that. Absolutely.
Okay, so then we don't have to talk about all like the crazy features because I, you know, we could be here forever talking about something super esoteric.
But those doors that do turn clear when you touch them, that's pretty cool.
Anyway, when you are opening the fridge, you know, obviously it's a cold environment and, you know, the temptation is to think like, oh, you just like put stuff in there and then you're done.
But there are in fact like better places to put certain things, right?
Absolutely. Yeah. It's funny.
It's like you can be like good at using your refrigerator or not so good, which is kind of an odd concept.
I think one of the big things is that it's not the same temperature everywhere in your fridge even in the most ideal conditions and the main reason is most of the cooling power and the fans and stuff are in the back of the fridge so that's always going to be your coldest location and then moving forward and then onto the door it's going to be warmer and it can be by small amounts it also depends a lot on how much you open your fridge if you're opening it a lot that front area and on the door is going to warm up a lot more significantly so just thinking of your fridge in that way can really help
dictate where you want to store things so something like milk which is high in water which bacteria really loves is a very perishable product that's also got sugars and protein which bacteria love to feed on so that kind of thing while a lot of fridges have the door space for it and it's very convenient it's going to have a longer shelf life towards the back of the fridge marriage that's crazy because every single human being i know stores their milk in the door the fridge i mean like i have a kid and like you know she's drinking milk all the time and maybe that it works because she's drinking
milk all the time so we go through it pretty fast but i've always stored milk in the door well and that's the thing is like it's about you know real life so if you don't often have a problem with milk spoiling um it probably means you go through it fast enough you're in good shape if it's a common problem for you that's that's going going to help extend it by pushing it to the back there um really what the what the door is in my mind perfect for is your condiments so this is in condiments and you know a lot of your fermented products which are much much more stable um the kind of stuff that you
leave in your fridge for a really long time and then go back and use it so jams and jellies you've got ketchup you know fish sauce soy sauce all those fermented products you know fermented bean paste all that stuff i'm also a condiment like uh huge fanatic so i like having the easy you can see everything and you grab what you need and i use them pretty constantly so for me that that works a lot better but again it's what's going to work for you and if you go through milk really quickly it might not be an issue yeah right on what about like the cute little like egg holder thing that like we just
used to have or even like the butter uh compartment like those are often in the door what about those yeah they They are, so they're, I don't know, I find the egg one really adorable and I like the butter has its own little place.
They're very charming to me.
Unfortunately, there's not good science behind why you would use them, so mainly just charming.
You know, your big concerns with butter are oxidation, which leads to rancidity and really bad flavors and that's about keeping air away from it.
The other issue is odor absorption.
Butter is a really good odor absorber.
so um again you want to keep air that might be smelling away from it airtight we all know what airtight is and if you look at that butter keeper it's pretty obvious that it's not airtight at all so um it really does a minor minor job of keeping you know maybe some smelly odors that are really strong in the fridge could be a little bit less than there but it really all comes down to with your butter the the wrapper that it's in that that wrapper is wrapped up really tightly and nice and using it at a reasonable clip because it will still continue to oxidize and go bad so like keeping most of the butter
in the freezer is going to be a better bet but it doesn't have to be in that door space at all and I don't keep my butter in that little area you can use it for other things so for the eggs we're looking at a pretty similar situation where eggs can actually absorb off flavors and aromas as well and so they're best kept just in their packaging that you get you can also keep them a little bit longer if you keep them colder so you know sliding them into the back there is going to be a better bet okay and what about like produce like you always have those two crisper drawers what's about the crisper
drawers is that actually where you should put the produce it is a good place for produce so in general the refrigerator is a pretty dry environment that can be a really bad thing for leafy greens for most vegetables you know if you throw them in the crisper not in a plastic bag or throw them anywhere in the fridge plastic bag you see that they get soft on the outside and they wilt.
And that's generally due to moisture loss.
So the crisper, it's a smaller environment and most likely you're putting things that have a pretty high moisture content, maybe some water clinging to them in that.
So you're creating a little kind of micro climate, if you will, that has definitely higher humidity than the rest of the fridge.
It's also protected from the fans running and fans are obviously drying.
So in those ways, it is beneficial to keep things in the crisper.
We're talking to Dan Souza, editor -in -chief of Cook's Illustrated, and we'll be back with him in a minute.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
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I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table, the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're talking to Dan Souza, editor -in -chief of Cooks Illustrated, about how to really love your fridge.
Let's get back to it with him.
We've talked about how the temperature in the fridge is not always consistent among different places in the fridge.
But the temperature of the fridge itself is obviously important.
You know, when I was in cooking school, I was told you have to keep food below 40 degrees.
And obviously you want to keep it above 32 so it doesn't freeze.
There's a pretty small window of ideal fridge temp.
I keep a thermometer in my fridge just to make sure it's like, you know, it's, it's like too warm or, or, or whatever, but where should I put that thermometer?
And like, do you recommend people use thermometers in their fridge or am I just neurotic?
No, Francis, I'm so impressed that you use a fridge thermometer.
I don't think that's common, uh, common practice.
Um, yes, exactly. It's a, it's this narrow window and getting outside of it when you get into like true food safety rules, you know, getting over 40 degrees and having food sit there for, you know, if it It sits there for a couple of hours, the bacteria growth can really, really exponentially multiply.
And so it is super important.
And freezing, we all know what happens when you freeze greens or something in your fridge and it's really upsetting.
So fridge thermometer is a really great investment.
And the really nice ones will actually track if it's outside of, let's say it goes over 40 degrees, it will start to track the temperature and keep a record of it so that when you come back to it, let's say your power went out or whatever, it's not only like, oh, what's this temperature right now?
it tells you like, oh, you were actually at 45 degrees for six hours.
So I find that a really nice feature.
And where should you put the thermometer?
You know, some of them have a couple of measuring points.
So you can see you kind of like, you know, at the top and the front or towards the back.
But generally your biggest concern is going over 40 degrees.
You know, the freezing obviously is terrible, but it's not going to make you sick if your food kind of accidentally freezes in there.
so having it towards the warmer sections of the fridge so towards the front is usually a pretty good idea okay and is there such a thing as having too much or even like too little food in your fridge yeah so there's definitely a thing around having too much in your fridge and i would argue and this is completely anecdotal but just based on fridges that i see everyone has too much stuff in their fridge um come on you pay for the square footage it's true it's true everyone's probably probably run into the situation where you have a lot of stuff in your fridge and then you pull something out, usually
towards the back, maybe near the fan, and it's frozen.
It drives me bonkers, but yeah.
Yeah. And so what's going on there is you're basically overloading the fridge in a way where you're restricting airflow significantly.
And you're also making the system work harder because you're probably opening the fridge a lot more, so it's pumping out more cold air.
So keeping things clear of the fans, if you can see where they are, is really important in a smart practice but filling it a little bit less in general uh will probably help you out a lot too okay so this is maybe less a fridge question and more like a human behavior question but what are some things you find people putting in the fridge that they don't need to or vice versa what do people like keep out that they probably should be refrigerating i think the big one here that unfortunately still happens a lot is bread going into the fridge the refrigerator Stealing is essentially, you know, these
starch crystals that are nice and flexible in a fresh loaf, crystallize and trap a lot of water.
And so bread is hard. It's called retrogradation.
That happens about six times faster in that cold environment than on the counter.
So it's not helping your bread at all.
It's, you know, in fact, hurting it.
Okay. And what are, what are things that people don't put in the fridge that they probably could or should even?
Yeah. So fatty things that can go rancid pretty easily.
And I'm thinking specifically around like whole wheat flours, where you have the bran and the germ in there and you have oils.
Those, a lot of people do leave them at room temperature.
Getting them colder will actually prolong their shelf life and you'll get fewer of those rancid flavors.
And so the fridge is definitely one place to go with it.
If you have room in your freezer, that is even a better place to go.
It's like nuts, seeds.
Yeah. Those kinds of unstable fatty things.
I think there's also an interesting point of, you see on a lot of packaging, it says, um, keep in a cool, dark place.
And if you think about your fridge with the door closed, like it's cool and it's dark, it's like, okay, so you're supposed to put it in the fridge.
Right. But you know, that's really a directive, you know, to be around like, you know, let's say like 65 to 72, or maybe a little bit lower than that.
Um, and dark being, you know, in a cabinet, so it's not exposed to light.
And so So that's things like your olive oil, say, where pop that into the fridge.
It's going to basically harden up as the fat crystallizes.
So that's not going to be helpful.
And it's just not what it's asking for.
So it's going above and beyond what you need to do.
So if it says cool dark place, that's for your cabinet that's away from the stove, essentially.
And let me ask you about baking soda.
Because everyone has the box of baking soda that they just stick in the fridge with the top open to absorb odors.
Does that work? So I think that is one of the most genius rebrandings of a product that's ever existed.
It's like even if you're a big baker, how fast do you go through that little canister?
But opening it up, putting it in your fridge and changing it out, it's like so much more baking soda that you need to buy.
And it's kind of crazy because at best it's moderate at deodorizing.
And the reason why baking soda works in baked goods and in everything else is that it's basic and when it comes in contact with acidic ingredients and can neutralize them.
So there are some aromas coming off of food that are acidic in nature.
And so if those were to contact the baking soda, in theory, they could neutralize those odors.
So that's kind of where the background comes.
Wait, time out, hold on.
That sounds like it doesn't actually work in the real world.
That sounds like a bunch of bullshit.
Well, that's funny that you say that because we actually did some testing at Cooks Illustrated around it.
Of course you did. So we've done some research and it seemed that activated charcoal was mentioned in literature around odor absorbing.
And so activated charcoal, it's those kind of funny, rough looking little black stones that you get in an aquarium supply store.
They're pure carbon, they have tons of surface area and they actually have the ability to absorb a lot.
So we set up an experiment, we had two mini fridges and we placed a cup of baking soda in an open container in one and a cup of activated charcoal pellets in an identical fridge.
And then over the course of a month we placed smelly items in it.
So we had chopped onions, which for me is one of like the worst, like old chopped onions is one of the worst smells ever.
We had kimchi, you know, open kimchi, Parmesan, canned tuna that was open.
And over the course of testing, we had testers basically open the fridge and smell them and go back and forth.
And we found this was really striking difference that the activated charcoal was significantly less smelly than the refrigerated baking soda throughout the entire process.
And you can also take it and then bake it afterwards and drive off all that stuff and then you can throw it back in there so it's reusable in that way as well.
So yeah, go to your aquarium store and pick that up as opposed to the baking soda.
Down with big baking soda, we've been lied to all these years.
Thanks so much, Dan.
This is really super helpful.
You're so welcome. It's been a pleasure.
pleasure. Dan Souza is the editor -in -chief of Cooks Illustrated from America's Test Kitchen, and he left us with a recipe for a classic refrigerator jam.
Find it at splendidtable .org.
Okay, so now that we have the basics of maximizing your fridge to keep your food safe, what about using your fridge to make your food taste better?
I promise that's the thing.
Shola Olunloyo is one of the most creative chefs in America.
He doesn't have a restaurant, actually, but rather a studio in Philadelphia where, among other things, he tests and experiments with high -tech cooking equipment.
I love following him on Instagram and noticed a couple years ago that he started working with a special cabinet called a dry ager.
It's basically a modified fridge that's designed to let you dry age meat like at an old school steakhouse.
But he's discovered ways of dry aging fish, butter, all kinds of things to make them taste deeper, funkier, crispier richer you name it and so we wondered can he help us think of ways to use a regular home fridge to improve the taste of our food so we called him while he was working in his studio and you'll hear some work in the background while we talk about the things you can actually age in your fridge no special equipment required well while the fridge is not as technically sophisticated as an aging cabinet it does operate loosely on the same principles which is temperature temperature control,
although humidity in most home refrigerators is relatively preset and it only varies based on the moisture of what you have in the fridge.
But in fact, those are the attributes that are helpful to create deeper flavors by allowing some moisture removal at cold temperatures so there's no decomposition.
It simulates dry aging.
So while you technically can can do some of the longer, complex things like sides of beef and things like that.
There are several things in both the marine and poultry -based world, chicken, for example, that will benefit from a few days of age in the fridge once properly seasoned and allowed to dry or pull some moisture out.
Oh, cool. So, plainly speaking, you're talking about letting a chicken sit in the open air of your fridge to let it dry a bit before cooking.
Exactly, but with air circulation.
Rinse it, make sure you dry it really well.
And if you spatchcock the chicken, you'll have much better results because you have more surface area.
So spatchcock the chicken and put it in a sheet pan with a rack, and you've seasoned it and put it in the fridge for like two or three days.
Okay, so spatchcocking, meaning to split the chicken open.
From the backbone on one side so it's like flat, yes.
Right, so then it looks like two half chickens splayed out.
joined together yeah that will work better in a home situation because then you're not sort of having to wonder about air being able to penetrate the cavity of the chicken i mean there are things you can do like put a little battery operated fan in the fridge next to the birds which might seem very strange when you have visitors but it does work and it moves air around you know it's a movement of air that's that creates the benefit of not having any stagnant moisture to start to create rancid flavors.
So when we say dry chicken, all we're just doing is potentially removing some of the moisture between the skin and the meat and any of the surface moisture and it has both a textural and a flavor improvement.
It will be more crispy while retaining its juiciness and then it'll have a bit more of a depth of terroir type flavor.
Chicken is a good example because as I think a lot of people would agree the most compelling The best selling chicken dish in American cooking history is Judy Rogers from Zuni Cafe.
And she actually uses herbs, salt, and then requires that you let it sit in the fridge for three days, which is precisely what we're talking about.
And then roast it and then rest it.
Yeah, Judy Rogers' Zuni Cafe chicken.
Yes. It's the simplest thing in the world, but it's probably the most famous roast chicken among chefs in America.
And the best, really, if you do it properly.
so yeah so once again you're talking about just pre -salting the chicken yeah letting it hang out in the fridge for a few days you know with with air circulating around it so not in plastic of any sort right and have that concentrates the flavor and you mentioned you can do that with fish as well which i think is surprising to a lot of people because you know people generally think fish has to be eaten as fresh as possible so why would we let fish age in a refrigerator Well, so we have to be clear about this.
One of the greatest impediments to fish consumption in America is just that a lot of people don't have access to the level of quality of fish that allows you to do things like this.
Even going to, like, a good, relatively decent grocery store, we're talking you can't use anything that's already been prefillated, that's been sitting around with, like, whatever other fish in the same ice bath.
it generally works with whole fish that's been recently butchered you know go to your store have them fillet a fish for you rinse them dry them lint -free towels paper towels okay and then just do the same thing on a on a sheet pan just two two days at the most if it's a fatty fish like salmon or mackerel then you could do up to four days and you will you will see like a you Those types of fish have visual cues.
Salmon starts to get a darker orange when it's pulled some moisture.
And it's not tacky to the surface.
It's not dry. It's just kind of like firmed up.
These usually end up being better applications for pan -sautéed, a crispy skin, and baked in the oven.
It would obviously not be something you would want to attach a moist cooking method.
There's no point in aging a piece of fish and then poaching it.
right so but you'll get a crispier skin if you're into that kind of thing you know i like a really nice piece of black bass or striped bass a crisp skin and gentle tender flesh and you know all i need is olive oil and maybe some fennel powder and it's delicious right on yeah scallops also as well scallops like if you get good if you notice now when you go to buy scallops they usually specify specified dry scallops yeah again those those are scallops that haven't been soaked in any kind of preservative solution so if you can get those put them again in a wrap give them like two or three days to
just extra dry in the fridge when you sear them you'll notice like a nice much more golden color uh less iodine taste really really the sweetness of the scallop comes out it really does work that's super cool and and what about vegetables like we've talked about chicken and fish and letting them air dry a bit in the fridge right now vegetables so there are things you can apply to vegetables that actually really work in terms of flavor concentration if you remember the classic Japanese technique of making hoshigaki with uh persimmons oh that's when you tie the persimmons up and hang them and let
them dry in the air yeah yeah the bolshoi ballet of persimmons and uh and then they dry a little bit and they get this kind of like pruney dried kind of raisiny kind of consistency um it's possible to do similar things with just pieces of fruit you know like if you get like really ripe peaches and you cut them in half and you salt them lightly and you put them in a rack and let them be in the fridge for a few days you know salted peach on top of vanilla vanilla ice cream is fantastic it's all the natural sweetness with a little bit of salt for seasoning and no kind of like clawing artificial sugary
flavor pair that with like well -balanced vanilla ice cream or even like ice cream which has no vanilla just plain fiorite latte it's really a compelling flavor combination on the more savory side you can you know sort of like steamed carrots just to the point of doneness and just let them dry a little for a few days to get this almost tacky beef jerky ish texture so that you can also then subsequently cook them again like saute them in olive oil and then you now kind of have a vegetable replicating the texture of meat oh cool because it has like a caramelized exterior is partially dry but cooked
chewy interior and it's it's a very different texture from a steamed carrot a roasted carrot so that will texturally work for things like parsnips any type of root vegetable that is in that realm of family works well oh like beet like would you do without beets beets are perfect because beets actually have this sort of like it's the fruit that's closest to leather when you you sort of slice it really thin and try to dry it.
So I would roast a beet, just like salt -roasted beets, peel them, slice them thin, put them on a pan, and let them dry a little.
And then you kind of have this sort of like, it's basically beet jerky, like beef jerky.
It's beet jerky, you know.
That sounds super cool.
You almost fool yourself into thinking you're having like the terrestrial protein in the food, and it's all totally plant -based and delicious.
Oh, that's super cool.
I love that idea. Yeah, so what I need to do is spot my fridge, put down a little sheet tray with a little rack in it, and just have that be where I just set things to dry for a few days.
Yes, and the one piece of advice I'd give for this is, obviously in a home refrigerator, it's impossible to segregate everything in a practical sense out of your fridge.
But if you take the things that are pungent, the onions, the alliums, obviously the butter should be separate, And you just throw a couple of things in Ziploc bags, you know, give your fridge a good wipe.
You should be able to do this without having to worry about, you know, flavor and aroma transfer and any of those things, you know.
And these are just generally accepted best practices even if you're not doing the specific subject of this conversation.
Yeah, because you never want to get your chicken juice on your lettuce.
You should never have a messy fridge.
Right on. Well, this is great.
I can't wait to play around with some of this stuff.
Thanks so much, Shola.
Thank you very much. Shola Olunoyo is a private chef and consultant based in Philadelphia, and you should follow him on Instagram at Studiokitchen.
And hey, since I actually mentioned Jacques Papin earlier in the show, we actually have a recipe by him for curing a pork tenderloin, almost like a prosciutto, in a regular fridge.
It's called Jacques Papin's Saucisson of Pork Tenderloin, and you'll find it at splendidtable .org.
And that is our show for the week.
Hope you enjoyed it.
And remember, if you ever have any cooking questions for us, record them as a voice memo on your phone and email them to contact at splendidtable .org we'll talk to you next week our show is produced by APM American Public Media and if you don't already check out our podcast we're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to get yours subscribe to our weekly recipe newsletter it's called Weeknight Kitchen sign up splendidtable .org APM Studios are run by Chandra Kavadi, and Joanne Griffith.
The Splendid Table is created by Sally Swift and Lynn Rousseau -Kasper.
It's made every week by technical producer Jennifer Lukey, producer Erica Romero, digital producer James Napoli, and managing producer Sally Swift. I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM Studios.
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