Open Post: Hosted By Ina Garten’s Skepticism Of The Significance Of Bay Leaves
When Ina Garten isn’t fielding steamy texts from her husband Jeffrey Garten, she’s Cooking For Jeffrey. Ina loves to host dinner parties for negligible-to-most reasons to celebrate–like the 37th anniversary of the time she and Jeffrey got caught over-the-pants rubbing at the drive-in. But even though Ina is an old pro in the kitchen, she couldn’t give a definitive answer when someone pondered the usefulness of bay leaves in any recipe that calls for them.
Delish says that Ina was recently a guest on The New Yorker Radio Hour and a caller asked if she considers bay leaves worthy of including in a recipe only to furiously fish out of your mouth later because you forgot to pull it out before serving the dish and whoops maybe that’s just me every. fucking. time.
“Dear Ms. Garten, about 10 years ago I read a short story in Harper’s about which I remember nothing, not the title, the author, or the plot, except for a scene in which a character fishes a bay leaf out of a bowl of soup and flicks it away and he tells his dining companion bay leaves are BS. Ever since then I’ve been nagged with the question, Are bay leaves BS?” asked Alex Lewin in Berkeley, California.
But Ina didn’t have a definitive answer, since she herself has never deviated from a recipe that calls for them because she’s Ina MFing Garten.
“I really don’t know the answer to this, and I will say that I always also wonder whether a bay leaf makes a difference,” Garten said in response to the question. “There are a couple of things that I use bay leaves in and I’ve always wanted to make them without the bay leaves to see if it made a difference and I never have, so I’m not sure.”
“Can I just say, this is called making news,” host David Remnick said. “Ina Garten calls bulls**t on bay leaves.”
But lots of people use dried bay leaves, which might be a waste of time and miserable single-item grocery store trips.
“One dried bay leaf doesn’t do much. You generally need a few bay leaves in a recipe to make a difference. Unless the leaves are large and really fresh, if the recipe calls for one, I will often use three,” he said. “Fresh bay leaves are much more potent and different in flavor profile. They have a menthol-y thing going on, so avoid if that’s not your thing.”
Moral of all of this: start cooking with Ina’s friendly rival Martha Stewart’s much more potent preferred leaf.