Mario Batali makes Soft Polenta with Seafood at the 2006 Classic in Aspen
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[MUSIC] First thing I'm gonna do is cook this polenta,
because, well, we don't use quick-cooking polenta. Now, you could,
if you wanted to make this more quickly. What's it
save you? About 45 minutes. But this takes about We
have 26 minutes till this is served. This takes 26
minutes. [LAUGH] Now the worst thing you can do when
you're doing polenta is put too much of this stuff
in it. In fact, I like my polenta to have
the texture almost of, what's that French word? Cream of
wheat. Cream of wheat. Yeah, but lighter than that. All
right we get it going and it looks rather watery.
When it comes up to a boil I may add
a little bit more. It's better to add a little
bit more polenta than try to save this murky, thick
mass by continuing to add water. I do, however, have
a gallon of water here boiling just in case. So
we're gonna take a little garlic and some red chilis.
Although not too many. Now I've had this dish in
a little town called [UNKNOWN] which is just over the
border from Croatia. It's just almost on the border of
Croatia and Slovenia over just north of Venice in [UNKNOWN]
And what they do is again they like to put
the garlic into a slow pan. And then take a
little bit less chili. I'm going to take about a
third of one. Now, we've got Dungeness crab, we've also
have jumbo lump crab. Both in my opinion luxury ingredients.
I grew up on the west coast, lobster was something
we could have two or three times a year. It
was great. It was okay. It was kind of special,
but compared To the deliciousness of crab. And the variety
of kind of crabs that you've ever tasted in your
life. These are two really good examples. You want to
make sure you take the head of this body off
like so. You don't have a hammer. Crash it like
that. You want to make sure that you pull that
body completely off and these little pieces in here that
look like little lung dickies They're the best part of
the whole darn thing. As well as, when you pull
these guys off, this meat right here is the super
premium. The claw stuff's for the Louie eaters and the
big dippers. For the pasta sauces, you want to save
this and when you get this liquid, just squeeze him
out over here. There you go. Because his life's blood
is our pure satisfaction. [laughs] And you get that nice
little crabby thing going on there. That's more important. If
you buy even one little piece of crab, that's more
important than all of the other steps. If you can
squeeze a little bit of that natural juice out of
there. And we're gonna take this crab and keep in
mind it's been cooked [BLANK_AUDIO] So we're just gonna gently
warm it through, that's it. Now of course, the only
thing it's really missing is a teaspoon of extra virgin
olive oil, there. Again with the parsley, you're saying what's
up. Boom, toss, to the plate. Now this is gonna
be a little surprising. You're not gonna be ready for
this. [BLANK_AUDIO] This is how thick I like my polenta.
[BLANK_AUDIO] It's almost like a sauce. [BLANK_AUDIO] Now we're gonna
do it like this, And you put that. Notice how
you haven't broken it apart. And you put it in
a big ole pile like that. And yeah baby. Or
even more cerulean. This would also be a Del Posto
classic. And now you have that dish as well. Now
if you wanted to kind of guild a lily just
a little bit Which I want to do. The Italians
would not understand this, but I would take just a
little bit of that lemon zest. And to kind of
trip it up, because I don't know if you were
at my seminar this morning when we were just trying
to discover, or describe how Suzanne Gowen, Patrick O'Connell and
Marcus Samuelsson and I All arrived at flavor. I think
the thing that was most significant to me, was that
my food has a little bit of acidity to it,
which makes it kind of the windy dilemma. But it
works out really well for the chefs. So there you
have it, just like that. [MUSIC]