The Perfection of Kitchen Utensils: A Guide to Choosing the Right Tools for the Job

When it comes to cooking, having the right tools for the job is essential. One often overlooked aspect of kitchen utensils is their size and shape. Take, for example, the humble spatula. Why do many kitchen stores offer enormous, cumbersome spatulas that are more like shovels than actual spatulas? It's clear that these giant spatulas are not designed for everyday use in the kitchen. In fact, they're often so large that they can't even fit inside a fridge.

That's why we're on the hunt for the perfect spatula – one that's just the right size for scooping, flipping, and serving food with ease. A good spatula should be thin enough to get under food without scratching pans, but sturdy enough to hold its own. We've found a great option in this particular kitchen utensil, which boasts an impressive length without being too long or unwieldy.

Another crucial aspect of kitchen tools is their functionality. In the case of our trusty spatula, it's designed specifically for working with cast iron pans and other robust cooking vessels. The material is thin enough to allow for precise control, while still providing the necessary durability to withstand even the most demanding cooking tasks.

Of course, no meal is complete without a delicious dip or sauce. For those who love Thousand Island dressing or Russian dressing, we've got some great news: these condiments make fantastic dipping sauces on their own! And if you're feeling adventurous, try mixing together ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, and chopped pickles and relish for a unique flavor combination that's sure to please.

When it comes to cheese, sauerkraut, and other toppings, the possibilities are endless. But what really sets our favorite condiments apart is their unique flavor profiles. For example, if you're looking for a spicy kick in your life, try pairing your grilled cheese with some Narniar – a spicy sauerkraut from Cleveland that's essentially like kimchi.

And don't even get us started on the importance of sauerkraut in general. Fermenting your own sauerkraut at home is a fun and rewarding process that can add a whole new dimension to your cooking. With the right ingredients and techniques, you can create delicious, tangy sauerkraut that's perfect for topping everything from burgers to hot dogs.

Finally, let's talk about one of our favorite topics: taking food pictures on social media. When it comes to capturing the perfect photo of a dish, there are a few key things to keep in mind. First and foremost, make sure you're using good lighting – natural light is always the best option. Next, consider the composition of your shot: think about how you can arrange the food, garnishes, and other elements to create a visually appealing image.

And don't forget to tag us on social media! We love seeing what our followers are cooking up in the kitchen, and we'd be happy to feature some of our favorites on our page. So go ahead, get creative, and show us what you're working with. With a little practice and patience, you'll be taking stunning food photos in no time.

As for us, we're excited to continue exploring the world of cooking and sharing our favorite recipes and tips with you all throughout April. Be sure to tune in every day at 5 PM EST to catch a new episode of Dish at a Time, where we'll be dishing out delicious eats and chatting with special guests along the way.

In the meantime, keep on cooking up a storm and don't forget to share your creations with us! We can't wait to see what you're working on in the kitchen.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody happy wednesday wednesday it's wednesday um so a little bit of real simple fun meal today we are gonna do it's almost like if uh uh a reuben and a patty melt had a baby that's what this would be but there's tons of options i'm using ground pork you could use ground beef you could use ground chicken you could use any ground meat that you could fathom you could do it just strip straight vegetables however you want to do it so a lot of options here how this could be made so the first thing i had about a pound and a half of ground pork i split it into four um balls and i made the balls kind of like uh oblong because when we smash them we want them to fit on our bread i'm using rye bread kind of a funny story is that the we are a little low on rye bread because you know we're kind of working in a delivery world here and liz didn't know that you know this is obviously my our house and so it's functioning as a house and our little uh tv studios or whatever we want to call it right now and liz didn't realize that the rye bread was going to be used today for the show so she ate some rye bread today so we don't have quite enough rye bread to make all of our patty melts so i'm gonna demo one on rye bread and then for our dinner we'll probably have them on a roll or wheat bread or an english muffin whatever we could kind of get up so we season these with salt and pepper i'm gonna put my pan over about a medium high heat now you different sizes of pans work here uh you know you could do a couple at a time but an easy way to do it is it set up a tray next to your pan and so if you're doing one or two or three at a time as you're getting the meat seared you could move it to here so then when you build your patty melts and if you need to keep it warm in the oven you can set an oven at like 200 degrees that way you can get the whole family set up you don't have to cook all four once or three at once or six at once or however many that you're doing the other things that we have is i have some sauerkraut here a lot of people were asking in the questions if i don't have sauerkraut what could i use you could use onions you could use cabbage you could use different vegetables you could use leafy greens all that stuff works so as the pan is getting hot i'm just going to put the slightest amount of oil on the bottom of the pan just to barely coat it nothing crazy and i'll show you why that is in a second we want a little bit of it like it to adhere just a bit so caramelizes before we flip it um the other thing that we're going to do is i have a another pan here that we're going to use to smash i'm going to put a little bit of oil on the bottom of that pan so it doesn't stick to our burger when we smash it so we're gonna take our burger almost there are you using 80 20 or 90 10 for years i never 90 10 is not an option for me with any ground meat like for me the two worst words in the english language when it comes to burgers together are lean beef or lean pork or lean whatever you need twenty percent fat minimally in a burger in a sausage twenty to thirty percent that's what makes it delicious the fat melts out but all remember about 70 of the flavor in meat is in the fat when you start pulling out the fat and the fat melts out it's not basting the meat as it's going through so you end up with burgers or meatballs or whatever you're using that are not only dry but don't have as much flavor it's a loss-loss situation for everybody all right so now we take our patty and you can hear the sear so this is ready and we're just gonna place it in the pan as soon as we place it in the pan we're going to take our other pan that we put oil on the bottom and we're going to smash it so it's a little bit bigger than our bread because this is going to shrink a little bit so we want it to be a little bit bigger than our bread so when it shrinks we have meat all the way across we're going to just let this do its thing because this is pork and obviously you want to cook it all the way through as opposed to a burger where you could do a temp i'm gonna put a lid on here for two reasons one you guys can't hear me when it's sizzling so i everybody will say i can't hear you with sizzling so this will reduce the sound of the sizzle it's still gonna get the caramelization on bottom and i don't have to worry about oil splattering all over the place so in this situation a lid works just fine now the bread we have rye bread any kind of bread will work a bun will work i when i think of a reuben and when i think of a patty melt i think of rye bread so as you guys may be saw when we made grilled cheese sandwiches whenever i'm toasting bread in a pan i like to do a little bit of mayo as opposed to butter it has some egg in there and oil and it just toasts up better to me than what people think is like a traditional butter situation so we put the mayo down spread it end to end oh come on michael get there all right eileen's wondering if you don't have a cast iron would you say nonstick or copper for this um either would work any pan will work in this situation cast enamel cast iron copper non-stick stainless you know you want a pan that that releases decently because you're gonna have to you know obviously flip the burger and i'm actually gonna put a little bit of water in the pan after the burger's done to wipe it out so then we could toast in it too so that way i mean you could use two pans to do this but i hate dirtying two pans because liz won't admit it but i'm doing all the dishes during quarantine i'm the dishes guy so it's a one-pan job today what else do we got for questions liv um nicole's wondering if it tastes like mayo when you fry it on the bread it does not taste like mayo when you fry it on the bread it just um the the fat content in it helps it toast nice and evenly and it works really well so it doesn't taste like mayo though so then look this is we have mayo up mayo up i flip this over on here so i can now put mustard on this side i'm using a cleveland mustard it's a ballpark mustard brown mustard you could use dijon you could use yellow you could use grainy if you don't like mustard don't use mustard all that is legal now the other thing that i'm going to do is this is an optional thing but when we did a little i did a test one of these today that we had liz is eating a little bit of meat growing quantity which is making my job easier and she's like i think pickles would be a good addition so i'm going to take some pickles and i'm going to slice them up and we're going to put some pickles down here and this is a sweet pickle but i wouldn't in this situation and i love sour i would probably wouldn't go sour pickle because we're gonna get the sourness from the kraut already so kind of this is a sweet sour situation which is nice and now i'm gonna take two pieces of cheese and place them on the pickle side all right this is pretty good what do we got for questions liv um rosemary is wondering if she could use italian sausage out of the casing instead of ground pork 100 it would be delicious so if i was using italian sausage out of the casing maybe then you don't go sucker out maybe you go roasted peppers or peppers and onions would be delicious but you could still and then maybe fresh mozzarella or provolone and then but you could still use the patty melt kind of technique but you could mix it up to go with the italian sausage so i mean i think that's kind of the beauty about everything that we've been doing for the past couple weeks it's like i want you guys to go okay i get the method i understand how he's making this now i can put anything in there that i have in my pantry or that fits my personal tastes because at the end of the day i cook for my tastes so you should cook for your taste because you're the ones eating it so you always want the food to taste how you want it to taste some people like things sweeter some people like things sour some people like acidity some people like things spicy but if you learn the technique you could make it any way you want to fit you and then everyone's happy all right lid's coming off and you can see how much that shrunk and now we give it a flip but you see how it still has that great crust that's really what you want crust is cane and i'm going to put the lid on and let a little bit of crust develop on that other side now too and then as that's happening or even before you could take a nice spoonful of whatever your favorite sauerkraut is if you have sauerkraut and put it right on top of your patty so it starts to heat up ellie's wondering what would be a good side to serve with with this dish potato salad potato chips anything that you love with a burger if you want to make get crazy and make french fries you can make french fries it's a lot of good french fry recipes i think i even did my fries on um on the food network kitchen app you know so it shows you how to blanch the fries for some little bit of fat and then rinse them and cool them and fry them again for like those super crispy restaurant style fries sweet potato fries if you wanted to bake them a lot of people like doing regular baked fries i'm not a baked fry guy i know everybody's gonna say fries in an air fryer i don't own an air fryer so but i heard that they're delicious so that's certainly an option too any of i think any of those options work very nice megan's wondering for the onions would you just sweat them or could you caramelize them you could sweat them caramelize them or put them on raw whatever fits your fancy megan all of those things work all right now i'm going to take my other two pieces of cheese we'll put those on top put the lid down lori is wondering she said she thought by putting the lid on it would steam the meat rather than brown it is that not true well no you as you saw the meat was still getting very brown as we were cooking it if i complete and if this was something that i wanted to cook mid-rare or rare i would not do that but there is a little steam release thing there but it's the meat is still caramelizing underneath it's just speeding up the cooking process and cooking it through and actually to help melt the cheese i like to take a little bit of water put it in the pan and now put the lid on so what that does is it builds up a lot of steam which is really going to get all the cheese melted completely through this is and kind of all that fat starts to work its way back into the burger this is an old diner restaurant trick like at our uh at our b spot restaurants right before the burger's done we put the cheese we put everything on we take a lid we put it on there we squirt a little water underneath and it melts everything down and it kind of brings that fat back up and it makes it a very happy place for the hamburger um some fans are wondering if you were using you wanted to replace this with a vegetable what vegetable would you use i think a mushroom would work great eggplant would work great anything that has a little bit of a steaky consistency would work really well all right so i'm turning the pan off real quick we're going to take our lid off again and then i'm going to take my burger and look at see that's really gooey the cheese is totally melted you could see that's what we want to see any of these other goodies that kind of fell off kind of pop those back on top and then to get two things i want to do here now i want to get like a quick wipe out of my pan and i want to get some of that residue off the bottom so i'm just going to pour a little water in and this is cooling it down a touch too because i don't want it quite as hot when i put the bread in so i'm going to let this water kind of pull up everything and it's like almost cleaning the pan and then when it's almost gone we'll just give it a quick wipe out with a paper towel now be careful when you're doing this obviously this is hot um obviously you know if you have too much fat in your pan it's gonna splatter that's one of the reasons i just barely brushed a little bit of fat in there because we didn't want the big splatter situation happening so you turn this off and i'm just going to wipe this out you could do this with if you want to wear a glove when you do this like a hot glove mitten whatever you call those things chefs never use those they just use towels and my hands are pretty seasoned to heat so i don't worry about that so that's all wiped out now so you got your wiped out pan ralph was wondering if he could do this sandwich on a grill yeah for sure no problem you're going to still want to use the lid technique um on a grill because you want to want to get everything nice and melted but 100 so now look we're gonna brush a little more oil in we're gonna take the pickled cheese side and put that down then we're gonna take burger put it on top you can see i could even push the burger down a little thinner to get slightly better colors but it's gonna still be good and then we put our other piece of bread right there so we got cheese on both sides and we're going to let things start to toast what do we got for questions liv oh of course everyone is checking in with norman what's he up to norman norman uh norman's in timeout again today he was just wound a little bit tight today um as puppies do so again 95 of the time he is good uh but today he was slightly on high wipe it was um it was raining this morning and this afternoon so he hit like i usually wake up try to take him for a walk afternoon take him for a walk night time take him for a walk so his his play time walk time has been reduced today so norman is a little bananas you know i've always had up to norman i've always had mastiffs and uh bulldog greens very lazy terriers a lot of energy more like people keep saying to me boy chef you've lost a lot of weight what are you doing i'm like keeping up with norman that's what i'm doing okay so see how that's nice and golden brown there and that's mayonnaise it's crunchy it's golden brown i'm telling you once you do mayonnaise you'll never go back you'll never go back i'm gonna put the lid on real quick um just to get that look that other cheese melted as the other side's browning i've turned the heat down to about low now so this toast is slower on the other side and we're in a good place what else we got for questions liz juanita is wondering if you let the meat rest here um yeah you know in a patty melt situation not so much we kind of pulled it it rested for a little bit when we were getting the bread going kind of got the juices back in and then we're putting it back on just to kind of melt and toast and bring everything together so not as necessary as a steak or a chicken or a turkey um in a situation like this for the patty melt not as big as a deal and then if some of those juices run out they're going to run into the bread which is still going to be delicious um emily is wondering if you have to grease the pan when you have the mayo on the bread already no you could just look very you saw i just took a brush and i just brushed i mean literally probably a half a teaspoon just to make sure that you know my pan was coated and i wasn't just going straight on steel like in a non-stick pan maybe people wouldn't do it but a little bit of oil is going to add a touch of flavor too um so no no harm no foul there all right looking good i was talking a little bit too much but that's still we lost a pickle acceptable no we didn't watch this magic that was intentional i'm waiting for this one to pull out ooh there's a little this one's like dangling on the edge it's going to be mine in a second um we oh we have a couple people wondering what is the tool that you're using right now and well this is this is all right so this is a restaurant spatula it's called a fish this is the spatula you want at home like sometimes people send me stuff uh like the spatulas that they sell in kitchen stores are so ridiculous and cumbersome like how about the grill spatulas that are like this big i can't even get it in the fridge that are like this big like i mean tongs this should be the length of tongs maybe this long but not any longer this should be the size of a spatula no bigger no small i have one in here that liz likes to use and i mean what is this thing it's this isn't a spatula it's a shovel it looks like what you get the ice on your car off yeah it's ridiculous i'm gonna get rid of it um but this is what you want i mean it's got it's the perfect size it holds everything it's very thin which allows you to get under and lift stuff off surfaces does it scratch the pans though well this you know i don't use non-stick pans or very rarely do i use non-stick pans so a cast enamel pan i mean this kind of pan is fine a a pan with stainless steel interior is fine a uh carbon steel is fine uh cast iron is fine so as long as you're not using a lot of nonstick cookware which i don't really like anyhow in the um up so i have it easier all right so burgers out another thing if you have a little bit of thousand island or russian dressing great option for a dipping sauce i know everybody likes the dip sinclair was wondering yeah a little dipping sauce so and if you don't just mix a little ketchup with a little mayonnaise and a little mustard and some chopped pickles and relish or whatever then you're good all right let's cut this sucker all right see that's what we're talking about cooked all the way through totally gooey gooey the pickles were a great call by liz well liz is very smart i mean we're not uh other than the spatula situation she rarely makes mistakes which um we've been together about 30 years and trust me i i think i was right twice but i didn't even admit that i was right because i didn't want to didn't want to get in trouble i mean right but she's been right in in almost 30 years she's been right 99.9 of the time and i'm fine with that that's all good right that's how you have a happy marriage absolutely i'll see and this is what i love cheese for gays let's go for the dip pickles i love sauerkraut these are some of my buddies in cleveland they make one called narniar it's a spicy sauerkraut it's like the it's cleveland kimchi essentially it's sauerkraut with a good bite to it but whatever your favorite sauerkraut is works great you can make sauerkraut at home we have a lot of time on our hands right now maybe you want to ferment your own go online tons of recipes how to ferment sauerkraut um and it's a fun little project i love doing it this is so good and this will be good with any meat with any veg quite frankly if you just wanted to do a grilled cheese with the swiss the sauerkraut pickles the mustard and the french onion dip it would be fantastic it would be really good all right one more question liv because i gotta finish this um so a fan was wondering if they were making a bunch of these patties would you just leave them in the oven to keep warm while the other ones were cooking i would keep making them putting them on a tray and then just hold them in the oven and they'll hold fine but set your oven very low like one what's the lowest setting on the oven let's see 150 150 175 just keep them warm keep making them hold them when you have as many as you need to feed your family call everybody in put them on the table they're going to hold up fine especially if you don't use that weird 90 10 me all right guys so we're going to be here for the rest of april which we're very excited about um food network kitchen facebook page every day at five o'clock if you we would love you to take pictures of anything that you make and we would love to see it so if you tag at food network or tag chef simon with the y we'll see them and also hashtag is that how you do it liv yeah totally is that how the young kids are doing it so hit so hip um simon with the y dinners and we will see it all so i'm going to finish my porky melt or my reuben melt or whatever the heck we're going to call this thing but have a great day dish at a time day at a time i love you guys i'll see you tomorrowhey everybody happy wednesday wednesday it's wednesday um so a little bit of real simple fun meal today we are gonna do it's almost like if uh uh a reuben and a patty melt had a baby that's what this would be but there's tons of options i'm using ground pork you could use ground beef you could use ground chicken you could use any ground meat that you could fathom you could do it just strip straight vegetables however you want to do it so a lot of options here how this could be made so the first thing i had about a pound and a half of ground pork i split it into four um balls and i made the balls kind of like uh oblong because when we smash them we want them to fit on our bread i'm using rye bread kind of a funny story is that the we are a little low on rye bread because you know we're kind of working in a delivery world here and liz didn't know that you know this is obviously my our house and so it's functioning as a house and our little uh tv studios or whatever we want to call it right now and liz didn't realize that the rye bread was going to be used today for the show so she ate some rye bread today so we don't have quite enough rye bread to make all of our patty melts so i'm gonna demo one on rye bread and then for our dinner we'll probably have them on a roll or wheat bread or an english muffin whatever we could kind of get up so we season these with salt and pepper i'm gonna put my pan over about a medium high heat now you different sizes of pans work here uh you know you could do a couple at a time but an easy way to do it is it set up a tray next to your pan and so if you're doing one or two or three at a time as you're getting the meat seared you could move it to here so then when you build your patty melts and if you need to keep it warm in the oven you can set an oven at like 200 degrees that way you can get the whole family set up you don't have to cook all four once or three at once or six at once or however many that you're doing the other things that we have is i have some sauerkraut here a lot of people were asking in the questions if i don't have sauerkraut what could i use you could use onions you could use cabbage you could use different vegetables you could use leafy greens all that stuff works so as the pan is getting hot i'm just going to put the slightest amount of oil on the bottom of the pan just to barely coat it nothing crazy and i'll show you why that is in a second we want a little bit of it like it to adhere just a bit so caramelizes before we flip it um the other thing that we're going to do is i have a another pan here that we're going to use to smash i'm going to put a little bit of oil on the bottom of that pan so it doesn't stick to our burger when we smash it so we're gonna take our burger almost there are you using 80 20 or 90 10 for years i never 90 10 is not an option for me with any ground meat like for me the two worst words in the english language when it comes to burgers together are lean beef or lean pork or lean whatever you need twenty percent fat minimally in a burger in a sausage twenty to thirty percent that's what makes it delicious the fat melts out but all remember about 70 of the flavor in meat is in the fat when you start pulling out the fat and the fat melts out it's not basting the meat as it's going through so you end up with burgers or meatballs or whatever you're using that are not only dry but don't have as much flavor it's a loss-loss situation for everybody all right so now we take our patty and you can hear the sear so this is ready and we're just gonna place it in the pan as soon as we place it in the pan we're going to take our other pan that we put oil on the bottom and we're going to smash it so it's a little bit bigger than our bread because this is going to shrink a little bit so we want it to be a little bit bigger than our bread so when it shrinks we have meat all the way across we're going to just let this do its thing because this is pork and obviously you want to cook it all the way through as opposed to a burger where you could do a temp i'm gonna put a lid on here for two reasons one you guys can't hear me when it's sizzling so i everybody will say i can't hear you with sizzling so this will reduce the sound of the sizzle it's still gonna get the caramelization on bottom and i don't have to worry about oil splattering all over the place so in this situation a lid works just fine now the bread we have rye bread any kind of bread will work a bun will work i when i think of a reuben and when i think of a patty melt i think of rye bread so as you guys may be saw when we made grilled cheese sandwiches whenever i'm toasting bread in a pan i like to do a little bit of mayo as opposed to butter it has some egg in there and oil and it just toasts up better to me than what people think is like a traditional butter situation so we put the mayo down spread it end to end oh come on michael get there all right eileen's wondering if you don't have a cast iron would you say nonstick or copper for this um either would work any pan will work in this situation cast enamel cast iron copper non-stick stainless you know you want a pan that that releases decently because you're gonna have to you know obviously flip the burger and i'm actually gonna put a little bit of water in the pan after the burger's done to wipe it out so then we could toast in it too so that way i mean you could use two pans to do this but i hate dirtying two pans because liz won't admit it but i'm doing all the dishes during quarantine i'm the dishes guy so it's a one-pan job today what else do we got for questions liv um nicole's wondering if it tastes like mayo when you fry it on the bread it does not taste like mayo when you fry it on the bread it just um the the fat content in it helps it toast nice and evenly and it works really well so it doesn't taste like mayo though so then look this is we have mayo up mayo up i flip this over on here so i can now put mustard on this side i'm using a cleveland mustard it's a ballpark mustard brown mustard you could use dijon you could use yellow you could use grainy if you don't like mustard don't use mustard all that is legal now the other thing that i'm going to do is this is an optional thing but when we did a little i did a test one of these today that we had liz is eating a little bit of meat growing quantity which is making my job easier and she's like i think pickles would be a good addition so i'm going to take some pickles and i'm going to slice them up and we're going to put some pickles down here and this is a sweet pickle but i wouldn't in this situation and i love sour i would probably wouldn't go sour pickle because we're gonna get the sourness from the kraut already so kind of this is a sweet sour situation which is nice and now i'm gonna take two pieces of cheese and place them on the pickle side all right this is pretty good what do we got for questions liv um rosemary is wondering if she could use italian sausage out of the casing instead of ground pork 100 it would be delicious so if i was using italian sausage out of the casing maybe then you don't go sucker out maybe you go roasted peppers or peppers and onions would be delicious but you could still and then maybe fresh mozzarella or provolone and then but you could still use the patty melt kind of technique but you could mix it up to go with the italian sausage so i mean i think that's kind of the beauty about everything that we've been doing for the past couple weeks it's like i want you guys to go okay i get the method i understand how he's making this now i can put anything in there that i have in my pantry or that fits my personal tastes because at the end of the day i cook for my tastes so you should cook for your taste because you're the ones eating it so you always want the food to taste how you want it to taste some people like things sweeter some people like things sour some people like acidity some people like things spicy but if you learn the technique you could make it any way you want to fit you and then everyone's happy all right lid's coming off and you can see how much that shrunk and now we give it a flip but you see how it still has that great crust that's really what you want crust is cane and i'm going to put the lid on and let a little bit of crust develop on that other side now too and then as that's happening or even before you could take a nice spoonful of whatever your favorite sauerkraut is if you have sauerkraut and put it right on top of your patty so it starts to heat up ellie's wondering what would be a good side to serve with with this dish potato salad potato chips anything that you love with a burger if you want to make get crazy and make french fries you can make french fries it's a lot of good french fry recipes i think i even did my fries on um on the food network kitchen app you know so it shows you how to blanch the fries for some little bit of fat and then rinse them and cool them and fry them again for like those super crispy restaurant style fries sweet potato fries if you wanted to bake them a lot of people like doing regular baked fries i'm not a baked fry guy i know everybody's gonna say fries in an air fryer i don't own an air fryer so but i heard that they're delicious so that's certainly an option too any of i think any of those options work very nice megan's wondering for the onions would you just sweat them or could you caramelize them you could sweat them caramelize them or put them on raw whatever fits your fancy megan all of those things work all right now i'm going to take my other two pieces of cheese we'll put those on top put the lid down lori is wondering she said she thought by putting the lid on it would steam the meat rather than brown it is that not true well no you as you saw the meat was still getting very brown as we were cooking it if i complete and if this was something that i wanted to cook mid-rare or rare i would not do that but there is a little steam release thing there but it's the meat is still caramelizing underneath it's just speeding up the cooking process and cooking it through and actually to help melt the cheese i like to take a little bit of water put it in the pan and now put the lid on so what that does is it builds up a lot of steam which is really going to get all the cheese melted completely through this is and kind of all that fat starts to work its way back into the burger this is an old diner restaurant trick like at our uh at our b spot restaurants right before the burger's done we put the cheese we put everything on we take a lid we put it on there we squirt a little water underneath and it melts everything down and it kind of brings that fat back up and it makes it a very happy place for the hamburger um some fans are wondering if you were using you wanted to replace this with a vegetable what vegetable would you use i think a mushroom would work great eggplant would work great anything that has a little bit of a steaky consistency would work really well all right so i'm turning the pan off real quick we're going to take our lid off again and then i'm going to take my burger and look at see that's really gooey the cheese is totally melted you could see that's what we want to see any of these other goodies that kind of fell off kind of pop those back on top and then to get two things i want to do here now i want to get like a quick wipe out of my pan and i want to get some of that residue off the bottom so i'm just going to pour a little water in and this is cooling it down a touch too because i don't want it quite as hot when i put the bread in so i'm going to let this water kind of pull up everything and it's like almost cleaning the pan and then when it's almost gone we'll just give it a quick wipe out with a paper towel now be careful when you're doing this obviously this is hot um obviously you know if you have too much fat in your pan it's gonna splatter that's one of the reasons i just barely brushed a little bit of fat in there because we didn't want the big splatter situation happening so you turn this off and i'm just going to wipe this out you could do this with if you want to wear a glove when you do this like a hot glove mitten whatever you call those things chefs never use those they just use towels and my hands are pretty seasoned to heat so i don't worry about that so that's all wiped out now so you got your wiped out pan ralph was wondering if he could do this sandwich on a grill yeah for sure no problem you're going to still want to use the lid technique um on a grill because you want to want to get everything nice and melted but 100 so now look we're gonna brush a little more oil in we're gonna take the pickled cheese side and put that down then we're gonna take burger put it on top you can see i could even push the burger down a little thinner to get slightly better colors but it's gonna still be good and then we put our other piece of bread right there so we got cheese on both sides and we're going to let things start to toast what do we got for questions liv oh of course everyone is checking in with norman what's he up to norman norman uh norman's in timeout again today he was just wound a little bit tight today um as puppies do so again 95 of the time he is good uh but today he was slightly on high wipe it was um it was raining this morning and this afternoon so he hit like i usually wake up try to take him for a walk afternoon take him for a walk night time take him for a walk so his his play time walk time has been reduced today so norman is a little bananas you know i've always had up to norman i've always had mastiffs and uh bulldog greens very lazy terriers a lot of energy more like people keep saying to me boy chef you've lost a lot of weight what are you doing i'm like keeping up with norman that's what i'm doing okay so see how that's nice and golden brown there and that's mayonnaise it's crunchy it's golden brown i'm telling you once you do mayonnaise you'll never go back you'll never go back i'm gonna put the lid on real quick um just to get that look that other cheese melted as the other side's browning i've turned the heat down to about low now so this toast is slower on the other side and we're in a good place what else we got for questions liz juanita is wondering if you let the meat rest here um yeah you know in a patty melt situation not so much we kind of pulled it it rested for a little bit when we were getting the bread going kind of got the juices back in and then we're putting it back on just to kind of melt and toast and bring everything together so not as necessary as a steak or a chicken or a turkey um in a situation like this for the patty melt not as big as a deal and then if some of those juices run out they're going to run into the bread which is still going to be delicious um emily is wondering if you have to grease the pan when you have the mayo on the bread already no you could just look very you saw i just took a brush and i just brushed i mean literally probably a half a teaspoon just to make sure that you know my pan was coated and i wasn't just going straight on steel like in a non-stick pan maybe people wouldn't do it but a little bit of oil is going to add a touch of flavor too um so no no harm no foul there all right looking good i was talking a little bit too much but that's still we lost a pickle acceptable no we didn't watch this magic that was intentional i'm waiting for this one to pull out ooh there's a little this one's like dangling on the edge it's going to be mine in a second um we oh we have a couple people wondering what is the tool that you're using right now and well this is this is all right so this is a restaurant spatula it's called a fish this is the spatula you want at home like sometimes people send me stuff uh like the spatulas that they sell in kitchen stores are so ridiculous and cumbersome like how about the grill spatulas that are like this big i can't even get it in the fridge that are like this big like i mean tongs this should be the length of tongs maybe this long but not any longer this should be the size of a spatula no bigger no small i have one in here that liz likes to use and i mean what is this thing it's this isn't a spatula it's a shovel it looks like what you get the ice on your car off yeah it's ridiculous i'm gonna get rid of it um but this is what you want i mean it's got it's the perfect size it holds everything it's very thin which allows you to get under and lift stuff off surfaces does it scratch the pans though well this you know i don't use non-stick pans or very rarely do i use non-stick pans so a cast enamel pan i mean this kind of pan is fine a a pan with stainless steel interior is fine a uh carbon steel is fine uh cast iron is fine so as long as you're not using a lot of nonstick cookware which i don't really like anyhow in the um up so i have it easier all right so burgers out another thing if you have a little bit of thousand island or russian dressing great option for a dipping sauce i know everybody likes the dip sinclair was wondering yeah a little dipping sauce so and if you don't just mix a little ketchup with a little mayonnaise and a little mustard and some chopped pickles and relish or whatever then you're good all right let's cut this sucker all right see that's what we're talking about cooked all the way through totally gooey gooey the pickles were a great call by liz well liz is very smart i mean we're not uh other than the spatula situation she rarely makes mistakes which um we've been together about 30 years and trust me i i think i was right twice but i didn't even admit that i was right because i didn't want to didn't want to get in trouble i mean right but she's been right in in almost 30 years she's been right 99.9 of the time and i'm fine with that that's all good right that's how you have a happy marriage absolutely i'll see and this is what i love cheese for gays let's go for the dip pickles i love sauerkraut these are some of my buddies in cleveland they make one called narniar it's a spicy sauerkraut it's like the it's cleveland kimchi essentially it's sauerkraut with a good bite to it but whatever your favorite sauerkraut is works great you can make sauerkraut at home we have a lot of time on our hands right now maybe you want to ferment your own go online tons of recipes how to ferment sauerkraut um and it's a fun little project i love doing it this is so good and this will be good with any meat with any veg quite frankly if you just wanted to do a grilled cheese with the swiss the sauerkraut pickles the mustard and the french onion dip it would be fantastic it would be really good all right one more question liv because i gotta finish this um so a fan was wondering if they were making a bunch of these patties would you just leave them in the oven to keep warm while the other ones were cooking i would keep making them putting them on a tray and then just hold them in the oven and they'll hold fine but set your oven very low like one what's the lowest setting on the oven let's see 150 150 175 just keep them warm keep making them hold them when you have as many as you need to feed your family call everybody in put them on the table they're going to hold up fine especially if you don't use that weird 90 10 me all right guys so we're going to be here for the rest of april which we're very excited about um food network kitchen facebook page every day at five o'clock if you we would love you to take pictures of anything that you make and we would love to see it so if you tag at food network or tag chef simon with the y we'll see them and also hashtag is that how you do it liv yeah totally is that how the young kids are doing it so hit so hip um simon with the y dinners and we will see it all so i'm going to finish my porky melt or my reuben melt or whatever the heck we're going to call this thing but have a great day dish at a time day at a time i love you guys i'll see you tomorrow\n"