Bonus Binging with Babish: A Quiet Place

Hey guys, welcome back to a very special episode of Binging With Babish where, as you can see, I've soundproofed my kitchen because this week we'll be cooking in the terrifying conditions portrayed in A Quiet Place. Fittingly, this episode is sponsored by Dolby Dimension. These headphones are great not only because they have active noise cancellation, but because they have a really cool feature called Life Mix, which pumps out an adjustable amount of ambient noise so you don't miss anything around you. Doorbell, baby crying, timer ringing in the kitchen. So while I enjoy my strict regiment of Frasier three times a day, I won't miss a thing, because I have my Life Mix on 7.

However, Sawyer likes his level 11, which gives him excellent hearing. . Turning him into my John Krasinski's bloodthirsty alien. So can I make the movie food while he watches the movie without disturbing him and getting killed? Well, there's only one way to find out. Download a decibel meter on my iPad, throw blankets all over the kitchen and get cooking. As a general rule, I will try to stay below 80 decibels while preparing what I believe to be the fish of the movie, the rainbow trout. First we have to clean and gut the fish, starting by cutting off all the fins.

Try not to make eye contact with the poor thing. Then we have to cut the gills, which is where most of the blood comes from. Once you've gotten those gnarly little things out of there, it's time to gut this guy. We are going to

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a single long cut along the bottom of the fish and remove everything we find inside. You want to remove as much as you can so that all you see are the fillets and tenderloin. Then we have to scale the fish. Using the sharp side of your knife, scrape the scales against the grain, so to speak, until all that's left is a smooth, slippery fish skin.

We then want to rinse this fish and dry it well, and then set it aside so we can prepare what looked to me like a tomato salad. The family in the movie seemed to really like garlic, so I'm going to take three heads of this smoked garlic, peel off most of the papery exterior, cut off the top so that all the cloves are exposed, and

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them in a container of metal. bowl. Now I suppose cooking fats would be pretty hard to come by a year and a half after the apocalypse, but olive oil has a theoretical shelf life of 24 months if stored properly, so let's assume you have a bottle hanging around for special occasions. . .

Let's also assume that they have kosher salt and freshly ground pepper because is it really worth living without them? Now, instead of aluminum foil, we will cover this metal container with a smaller metal container and roast it at 350°F for about 45 minutes. Remove once the cloves are soft and lightly browned. Now I could eat roasted garlic with a spoon, but smoked roasted garlic? This is some next level shit. We're going to let that side cool completely while we prepare the rest of the dressing. We start with what is left of the olive oil. My goodness, it seems that this is our last salad forever, children, and to it we are going to add a food with an indefinite shelf life, vinegar.

In this case white wine vinegar, in an approximate proportion of 1:1 with the oil. Now, as if there were so many grains about to burst, we will squeeze this garlic, sorry, disgusting, into our vinaigrette. I'm going to choose like 2 heads of garlic, because I love this stuff, and the third head I'll just eat off camera, probably in bed or something. Now I'll use a potato masher to mash those garlic cloves a little and then season them generously with kosher salt and freshly ground pepper. Now you may notice that I am making this in a disposable Tupperware. Not only because it's

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er than a whisk and bowl, but because the easiest way to emulsify a dressing is to place it in a container with a lid and shake it well.

In seconds you will have a creamy vinaigrette without effort. This hurts with a little lemon juice, but I can't imagine they have it in upstate New York where the movie was filmed, but what they did have in abundance were tomatoes. So I'm cutting up a variety of sizes and colors, placing them all in a nice

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wooden bowl and adding some chopped basil that they funnily enough had in the middle of the table with some fresh herbs instead of seasonings. So we're going to add that to our tomatoes and I'm going to add half a red onion, thinly sliced.

Because tomato salad is going to be pretty difficult to eat without mozzarella, and there's no way I'm eating it without onion. Look, it's a really pretty salad. I would do it even if it wasn't the apocalypse. Lastly, something that was not missing from the movie was corn, and it seems that Emily Blunt's character was cooking the fish on top of the corn as some kind of makeshift oven rack. So we will do the same in case it imparts any auxiliary flavor. Drop the fish on top and then it's time to score and season it. The punctuation isn't totally necessary, it's just a form of presentation, but we want to punctuate it in a cross-hatching pattern.

Both sides, don't be lazy now, and then we want to season generously inside and out with kosher salt, freshly ground pepper, and oil. Luckily, I found a secret stash of these things when I raided the nearby towns. Make sure it is well covered all around. Ideally, you'd like to stuff this guy with a bunch of herbs and lemons, but you can't always get what you want in the future sound of hunting aliens. 450°F, 25 minutes later you have a fully cooked fish that registers 145°F at its thickest point and which we can now cut table side, so to speak.

We'll start by making a shallow incision along the top of the fish to help remove the skin. You can see from the bar graph that I coughed and almost doomed us all, but Sawyer got distracted by the raccoons distracting the aliens in the movie, so we were lucky. Anyway, once we have removed all the skin, we make a cut in the center of the fish's back and begin to pull the meat down and up from the center with the forks. Then, once you've removed all the meat from the top, you can do the most fun thing you've ever done in your entire life, which is rip the entire bone off the fish in one go.

Wait for this if you want to make fish broth; Otherwise, pat yourself on the back for deboning your first fish. I mean it's great, definitely worth trying at your next dinner party. But now it's time to plate. By plate above I mean the kale leaf...since the family in the movie very cleverly eats on a giant kale leaf to avoid noise. So we're going to load it up with our tomato salad, fish, and top everything with some of our smoked and roasted garlic vinaigrette. And there you have it, a healthy, sustainable and simple meal, prepared and consumed in relative silence.

As such, we will be using our 5 finger forks and knives, and I must say it turned out pretty good. The trout, when cooked to 145°F, was tender and juicy, the tomatoes were nice and fresh, and the dressing was to die for. He desperately needed lemon, but the vinegar helped fill the void and he ended up becoming a member of the clean sheet club. And then the leaf itself became a member of the clean hands club. All in all, a great meal if you're trying to support your family in the new American wasteland. Alright, now it's time to surprise Sawyer with the fact that I've been making him food from the same movie he's watching.

Hey, looks like dinner is ready. Wait, could you hear me this whole time? Yeah, I had Life Mix turned up to 11, I could hear you breathing. Come on, I spent like $5 on the decibel meter app. Oh, I thought I heard fish. Hey guys, I just want to thank Dolby again for sponsoring this episode. It was kind of a perfect match because I love home theater stuff, these have to be the best home theater headphones I've ever tried. In addition to the adjustable Life Mix feature, they also have touch controls on the side, that attractive magnetic charger, and a robust app to control almost every aspect of the headphones.

They even have a head tracking feature to make it appear that the audio is coming from wherever the bluetooth source is. Check out the link in the description of this video to learn more about Dolby Dimension, the perfect gift for the audio archive, film archive, or mysterious alien future in your life.