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Wasps, meepers, bastions. I don't care where you've been before, you ain't seen nothing like the Rust Boat Kid. You can be more than just another scavenger. You can help keep Speranza running. Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to Binging with Babish. For this week, we're taking a look at the foods from Ark Raiders, a game to which I myself have become addicted and being repeatedly killed within. Oh Jesus. What's that? It also features a lot of food. Apricots, olives, mushrooms, lemons, prickly pear cactus, and seeds being the stars of the culinary show. So, what is it like to cook in Ark Raiders? Let's find out.
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ranked lists. Squarespace's brand new designer templates make it so easy to set up exactly what you need. To create one of your own, head to squarespace.com for a free trial and use code Babish for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. When you load into a raid, what's usually your top priority? Priorities during a raid are as follows. Looting, looting, looting, avoiding other players, avoiding rocketeers, looting. Getting home alive so I can see Scrappy. So, let's start with breakfast, the key players of which are going to be apricots and seeds, which I'm going to use to make some breakfast seed bars.
We're starting with 1/2 lb of fresh apricots that I'm going to pit and cut into quarters, just small enough pieces that they can more easily break down because I'm going to cook them. Just throw them in a medium saucepan with a couple tablespoons of agave or the sweetener of your choice. I probably should have used honey because honey is one of those very few, if not the only food that never goes bad. So, presumably 120 years from now in Italy, which is apparently where the game takes place, there would still be honey. It's perfectly good. So, just pretend that was honey. We're going to cook them for 10 to 15 minutes until they completely break down into an apricot kind of jam. I'm then going to further
puree this jam using an immersion blender and then set it aside to cool. Then, perhaps the most valuable ingredient in Ark Raiders, seeds. I'm going with a 1/2 cup each black and white sesame seeds, golden flax seeds, sunflower kernels, which is this the center of the sunflower seed, and pepitas or pumpkin seeds. I'm putting those in a dry nonstick pan and toasting them until they become a little fragrant. It's obviously going to wake up their flavor a lot more, especially if you do it in slow motion. How much of your strategy is planned versus improvised? Well, I think nobody can have a true plan in any given raid. Too many things are out of your control, just like in life. But you could like make a plan say to not fire on an arc in a dangerous
situation, right? Wait, what's that? Uh wait, wait, no. Next, I have a handful of dried apricots that I'm going to roughly chop and add to our seed mixture along with our apricot jam. Mix everything together, taste for seasoning. If it tastes off or musty or almost like crayons in some way, it means one of your seeds has turned. The oils in it have gone rancid. So, you might need to start over or better yet, taste your seeds before you mix them all together. This guy needs salt and sugar, so I'm going to add salt and sugar in the form of some light brown sugar. The molasses should help give our seed bars a firmer texture. Now, to bake these, ideally you want to put it in a silicone mold of some kind, or an 8 by 8 brownie pan, but the studio's under construction
and I don't have those handy, so I'm going to use a small nonstick skillet. And make sure the skillet is oven safe, because that's where this guy's headed, into a 300° oven for anywhere from 1 to 2 hours. I want the seeds to start catching some color, and I want all the sugar and fruit to be able to set up, so the seed bars hold together once they cool. In my case, this is what the seed bars look like after about 2 hours. Let it cool completely before slicing and serving. It certainly looks pretty, but how does it taste? And the answer is extremely healthy and homemade. This tastes like your friend growing up, their hippie parents who made sure that they made all the snacks for school or whatever. Something that's more
good for you than it is enjoyable, but it's still enjoyable. There's fresh, bright fruit flavors and nice, fatty, rich flavors from the seeds. It tastes very healthy, but it's also very palatable, and it became my actual breakfast for a few mornings after. You seemed pretty confident picking that fight with the rocketeer. What gave you that confidence? What gave me that confidence was the belief in my team, that they would have my back, and that they would help me flank the rocketeer, so it wouldn't just kill me to death with rockets. This is my only anvil, dude. Are you dead? Are you Oh, [__] hell. God. You know, I Were we going in as a team, or did you just want to be on a voice chat?
I had five bullets left. You had five bullets left. You would you know, would you care to tell me about that? Now, we're moving into the next dish. I'm going to make a mushroom lemon pasta, for which, of course, I need to use some expired pasta, just like in the game. And after digging through the very, very far back of my pantry, I actually found some truly expired pasta. I can't wholeheartedly recommend that you eat expired food, but when it comes to dry goods like pasta, you're probably fine. Next up the mushrooms.
The mushrooms in the game to me look like oyster mushrooms. So, I've got about a pound of oyster mushrooms that I'm cutting into bite-size pieces. I'm also going to utilize some olives. I have about a half cup of green Sicilian pitted olives here and garlic. While there's no garlic in the game, there's got to be garlic, right? Now, you'll notice that this garlic is appropriately past its prime. It has sprouts coming out through the cloves. These sprouts, not only are they green, so they can discolor your dish, but also they're they're they're more bitter than the rest of the garlic. So, an easy way to fix that and salvage older garlic
is to slightly smash the clove and peel out the green stem, leaving you with perfectly good garlic cloves, which I'm going to just slice thinly and give a rough chop, and prep some shallots. If I'm bending the rules with garlic, I'm going to give shallots, too. Was there a point when you felt like the engagement with the Rocketeer was going well? Next, we're going to use both the zest and the juice of some lemons. This is the apocalypse, after all. Let nothing go to waste. Last but not least, some chives. They grow wild. They grow like weeds. It's feasible that we might come across some chives in damn
battlegrounds, for example. I'm out of ammo. Oh, Jesus. I'm out of ammo. What do I do? Do you learn more from successful raids or catastrophic wipes like we had last night? communicate with people using regular conversation or do you just ask rhetoricals to make them feel bad? Now, to cook this pasta, I'm going to drizzle some extra virgin olive oil into a nonstick pan. Then, we're going to add our mushrooms to said pan, give me a little extra bit of oil, and saute them until they've shrunk in size, given up some moisture, and they've got a beautiful golden brown color. And while those are cooking, we're going to start our pasta. Then, I'm going to make some space in the middle of the pan,
add a little bit of oil, and sauté our shallots in that space, letting them get some direct oil lovin' and heat before tossing them in with the rest of the mushrooms. Then, I'm going to add the olives. I want them to get a little bit of sauté action before being eaten. Then, I want to add some wine. Every wine bottle in Arc Raiders is empty, so I'm going to go with some vermouth. This is a fortified spirit that would not have gone bad in the years after it'd been made and opened. Then, I'm making the same clearing in the center of the pan, adding a little bit of oil, and sautéing my garlic in that space. I'm also going to add our lemon zest, let that get a little bit of heat, preemptively season with salt and pepper, and then we're going to add our
pasta. I'm pulling it about 1 to 2 minutes shy of the recommended cook time. I want it to be a little undercooked so it can finish cooking in the sauce. Don't shake off the pasta too much because we're going to be adding a lot of pasta water. Toss that together. I'm also going to add the juice of our zested lemons. Then, I'm going to add pasta cooking water and oil to emulsify together into a sauce. Adding a little bit of each until the right consistency is achieved. Something else that's going to help thicken and give body to our sauce is cheese. Now, this one's a stretch. I doubt that there's going to be viable Parmesan in post-apocalyptic Italy, but it's Italy.
You can't There's got to be some crazy dude in the cave that has figured out how to evade the ark that is making cheese. It's in their blood. Look, all I'm asking is to just not start fights when there's literally zero cover around. Like, not just "We're out in the open. Here's a rocketeer. Let me open fire on it and not tell anyone." You know, that sounds like a plan, Brad. And all I want you to do is just say that instead of asking a litany of passive-aggressive catty questions in front of an audience. Whatever. I have some Parmesan cheese that I'm going to add. I'm going to add about 2 oz of
Parmesan cheese, finely grated so that it emulsifies into the sauce, tossing it together with extra splashes of hot pasta cooking water so that it melts and emulsifies into a smooth creamy sauce. Taste it for seasoning, adjust with salt and pepper as necessary, and get ready to serve. Now, this would be a hearty wholesome meal to eat after a day of raiding the surface amidst murderous robots. Hit it with some Parmesan, some more chives, and serve. Look at this. It's beautiful. And it tastes fantastic. It's It's It's mushroom pasta with garlic, lemons, olives, Parmesan. It's wonderful. It's a fantastic easy pasta dish to throw together.
All right, I've had enough of this. I still need to make another dish, right? I think I know what I'm going to make. So, first we have to chop off Scrappy's head. Dude. Stop it. Stop. What are you doing? That's tape. That's hard. Dude, don't do that. For this third meal, I think we're going to have a rooster. I'm going to spatchcock him because I intend to braise him. Spatchcocking, of course, is cutting the spine out of poultry and then opening the poultry from the bottom like a book so that we end up with crispy brown skin and tender flavorful meat. Then I'm going to dry brine Scrappy a little bit.
Just hit him on the inside and outside with some kosher salt, let him sit at room temperature for at least an hour or in the fridge overnight, ideally. Now, this dish is where the prickly pear is going to come in. Prickly pear is the fruit of a cactus, and it has an alarmingly red color, uh like even brighter and more hot pink than a watermelon. So, it's certainly going to make for an interesting color in our dish. Once everybody's peeled, we got to give it a try. See what this tastes like. I've never tasted prickly pear. I want to see what I'm getting into. And it's interesting. Um it's like watermelon, but earthier and more savory. It is also full of seeds.
It has more seeds than any fruit that I've ever consumed. So, to get rid of the seeds, I'm going to blend it up with some chicken stock and sieve it. So, I get all the fruit solids without the fruit hard. I'm tasting that for seasoning and you know what? It tastes weird. I mean, I used box stock, so that already tastes weird. That might be what's going on here, but I'm feeling like Scrappy might have died for nothing. So, I'm going to pass that through a fine mesh sieve to catch all the really tough particulate and the seeds and stuff and that is going to function as our braising liquid. I'm also going to cut up a few aromatics both to deeply flavor the braise, but
also to prop up the rooster a little bit if it needs to rise up further above the liquid. Now, into a 12-in high-walled sauté pan, I'm going to start by browning Scrappy skin-side down in the pan and weighing him down, so I have nice even color on his skin. I've never anthropomorphized my food like this and it's disturbing. Once we have some nice color on the skin, I'm going to set him aside and in the same pan give my onions some color, add a whole bunch of sliced lemons, some dried apricots, our garlic and our braise liquid. Then, I'm going to dunk Scrappy skin-side down in this liquid. I want to see what this fruit mixture will do to the browning of the skin. Will it assist the browning
process or will it inhibit it? All I know is that this looks well and truly insane. Bright pink, bright yellow and flesh-colored. Now, this guy's headed into a 325° F oven for about 2 hours. Rooster's pretty tough and it needs to be broken down slow and low over time. About 2 to 2 1/2 hours later and Scrappy is looking fantastic. Got to be some of the best browning I've ever seen on poultry skin. The skin is gorgeous. I think it's a result of that fruit sauce. Just the extra sugar just like making it burnishing it. Prickly pear rooster. Very, very crispy. I'm definitely exploring fruit sauces in future episodes for poultry cuz that seemed to have worked some magic. Very dark meat.
Nice and tender, not falling apart. I think it's cooked just right. That was about 2 hours and change. Smells pretty gamey. I've heard that rooster is pretty tough. And it is. Ooh, it's a little sweet. I think from the sauce. Yeah, sauce is interesting. It's got that nice fruity character, but also this dirty essence. I'd call it a like a dirt, like, you know, like soil. It tastes rustic, but also doesn't taste like, you know, I cooked that correctly. Maybe I'm just not a fan. Um, I really love what it did with caramelization. Everything on top has this beautiful color to it. If there's definitely a bitterness to
it, it's not from the lemon, it's definitely from the prickly pear. I thought that stuff tasted a little strange raw. And I thought it would taste very strange in a savory sauce. And I You know what? Dog gone it, I was right. There's just some strange flavor in there that I'm either I'm not used to or it objectively tastes bad. And I really think the rooster needs to be marinated before braising so that it tenderizes and retains more moisture. But I did learn a lot. So, perhaps Scrappy did not give his or her life in vain. So, what did we learn today? That Brad and I, underneath it all, hate each other's guts. You can hate each other in the game. And you can think that the other is a poopas who flaunts all their good
fortune in front of you as you are flailing to try and understand. Or you could think that the other person is naively confident in their abilities to take down very powerful enemies with no protection. And you can still respect and love each other as friends. So, I'll see you on the damn battlegrounds because that's the only place I'm capable of playing. Don't worry, I didn't actually kill Scrappy. That was Scrappy's brother, On that note, thank you so much for watching. Please leave a comment below. What do you want to see me make next on this show? What do you want to see me do or eat? What are your favorite arcs to kill? Do you kill arcs or do you kill other players? And if it's the latter, why? We're all in this together
unless you've decided that we're we're not. In which case, happy hunting and I'll be off playing Claire Obscure Expedition 33. Thanks again to my long-term partner Squarespace for sponsoring this episode. Be sure to head to rankedwithbabbish.com to submit your ideas for what you think I should rank next or who you want to see as a guest. While you're there, admire the smooth template designed by Squarespace. If you feel stuck creating your website, Squarespace can definitely help. In just one click, you can choose from curated color palettes and fonts that can be applied to any template. You can create an entire site in just a few
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