How To MAKE AUTHENTIC CLAM CHOWDER | CULINARY ACADEMY | Dalstrong

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Creamy, briny, and soul-warming—this is New England Clam Chowder done the right way. In this episode of Dalstrong Culinary Academy, we break down the step-by-step technique behind making a truly authentic clam chowder, from sourcing fresh clams to building deep layers of flavor with classic ingredients like bacon, potatoes and heavy cream.

Led by expert chef Gaetano Ferrara, this documentary-style cooking experience gives you both the culinary know-how and the tools to bring a coastal classic to life in your own kitchen. Learn the tips, tricks, and knife work that elevate this iconic dish from good to unforgettable.

Featuring Chef Gaetano Ferrara & Stan De Souza

How To Make AUTHENTIC Clam Chowder | CULINARY ACADEMY | Dalstrong

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0:00 Intro Culinary Academy Episode 3
00:25 Authentic ingredients for Clam Chowder
00:40 Recap Episode 2
01:00 Cream vs Tomato Clam Chowder
01:31 Prepping your clams
02:21 What is Mise en Place?
02:51 Prepping and cooking the bacon
03:45 Chef Gaetano’s experience with Clam Chowder
04:08 Building the flavor base
04:51 Cooking the Clams
05:40 The story behind the Clam Chowder war
06:23 How to know when Clams are done
06:44 Assembling the Chowder
08:15 How much do Clams cost?
08:35 Final preparations for Clam Chowder
10:27 Plating the Clam Chowder
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Once upon a time, getting this dish wrong was illegal. This is traditional New England clam chowder, and getting it right matters. Welcome to the Dow Strong test kitchen. I’m Stan Doza and this is Dal Strong Culinary Academy. Welcome back everybody. Today we have Chef Gitano Ferrer, celebrated culinary instructor. What are we doing today? Today we’re making a traditional New England clam chowder. Fantastic. So, what do we have? Uh we have some of our basic ingredients here. Uh they’re staples in the recipe. changes from different parts of Maine. So, that’s a bit of a a change, and it’s really hard to narrow down on what is the most traditional, but we’re going to go with what I’ve researched to be the most authentic. Last time, you showed us how to elevate local ingredients into an amazing pork tenderloin dish. But today, we’re headed to the American East Coast with one of the most historically debated recipes out there. So, chef, before we dive into this dish, good one. help us understand why people are so passionate about their chowder. There’s a few reasons and a few variations of this dish and we’re going to talk about the cream versus the tomato debate. So, the creambased version that we’re going to be making today is the New England style. The other one is the tomato-based version, and that’s more from a Manhattan area. They call it Manhattan, but it actually its origins actually come from Long Island where Portuguese settlers came down and they made a tomato-based version of that dish. And there’s also an illegal part to that story, but we can get to that later. My jokes were that bad. Absolutely that bad. So, we’re basically going to dial into the the beginning of this dish. So, it’s going to start with uh a little bit of double smoked bacon, uh some beautiful white onion, and we’re going to cook all that down with some celery. Once that’s all nice and translucent, we’re going to go ahead and steam open our clams. Now, these are whole clams. These are cherry stones. These are quite big. But one thing we’ll do here at the beginning is we’re going to just sprinkle a little bit of cornmeal onto these clams that are soaking in the water. And what’s going to happen here is these cornmeals are going to sink to the bottom and the clams are going to actually think it’s sand and they’re going to start to pump it through their bodies. So that helps us get all the sand out of the actual clam itself so we don’t have gritty chowder. That’s a hack folks. Use that at home. We rinsed our clams. We had them soaking in that cornmeal that was helping purge all the sand out of them. So, these are ready to go for the cooking process in the chowder when we get to that point. Okay. As for now, I’m going to go ahead and get my misison plast ready. I know we know what mison means, but for those of us who don’t, would you mind explaining to us what it is? Absolutely. So, mislass is basically the act of putting everything in its place. So, before you start cooking, a lot of people have difficulties cooking in general because it’s always chaotic and a bit messy and they feel stressed. shouldn’t be that way because you should have all of your prep done so that you can just focus on your actual cooking. So, it just means mislass everything in its place. All right, chef. Thanks for explaining that. So, let’s get started on our mison. Absolutely. So, first thing we’re going to get started with is our bacon. So, this is a beautiful double smoked bacon and we’re just going to come in and we’re just going to pull the rind right off of this bacon. Okay. So, a lot of people use regular bacon. That’s completely fine. You can basically just chop that right down. Won’t be an issue at all. I like the extra smokiness of a double smoked bacon myself. Okay, I’m just going to get this beautiful rind. And I’m going to get it going in that pan. And then we’re just going to chop this down. When we’re making a chowder, we basically want everything to fit on a spoon. Okay. So, our pieces, all of everything that we’re going to eat in our mouth should not be bigger than what fits on a spoon. We want to make sure we do this on a quite a low heat. We don’t want it to be too too hot because we want the fat to melt. We don’t want to fry the pork. Right. Okay. So, I got my temperature way down to low right now. Oh, okay. So, chef, have you actually been to the east coast of the states? And have you had chowder there? I have. I’ve been many times. Uh, Boston is one of my most favorite places. Uh, great sports teams, great city cultures, uh, amazing cuisine in general. outside of chowder. We can see all that great fat in the bottom here. Yeah. We’re going to basically cook down our onions and celery which we have ready to go here. Misan plus right off top. Such a simple dish. Very simple, very hearty. Um healthy as well. Yeah. All right. So, I’m going to go ahead and finish making my R before I add my clams and my vegetable stock in. So, I’m only going to add about we’ll call it 1 tbsp of flour, okay? Cuz I don’t want it to be too too thick, right? And basically now we’re going to coat all these vegetables. Okay? Now, when you’re doing this method right here where you’re essentially making the rue in a pot, this is technically called an aromatic r because there’s so many aromatics in the pan. So, now I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to insert my clams. We’re going to make a nice little bed of veggies and we’re going to kind of stand our clams up just like that. A little bit of vegetable stock. And we can add a little bit of clam juice as well just to keep the flavors as intense and true as possible. We’ll put a lid right on there now. And we’ll raise our temperature up a little bit. And basically when those clams open up right away, that’s when they’re done. We don’t want to overcook them. This is the problem people have with clams and they get afraid of cooking them. They’re not sure when they’re cooked. Once any shellfish like that opens, sure, they’re cooked. We don’t want to overcook them or else they’re going to get dried out and rubbery. It’s now really nice. Next up, I’m going to start getting my potatoes ready. So, we can come here. So, while Chef Gano is finishing creating our flavor base, let me tell you about what he mentioned earlier when making the wrong chowder could get you in trouble with the law. In 1939, Main Street Representative Cleveland Sleeper was so outraged by Manhattan’s tomatobased version that he introduced a bill to make adding tomatoes to chowder illegal in Maine. The proposed punishment, digging a barrel of clams at high tide, which is impossible. It sparked what newspapers called the Great Clam Chowder War. Sleeper even arranged a cookoff between a New England chef and a Philadelphia restaurant owner. The judges included the main governor and Ruth Wakefield, who invented the Toll House chocolate chip cookie. I’m guessing New England won. Of course, the newspapers declared Maine Shower wins over tomato type. One food writer called Manhattan Chowder a terrible pink mixture and wrote that tomatoes and clams have no more affinity than ice cream and horseradish. So, as we can see here, our clams are starting to open. So, as they open, I want to just remove them. Okay. Now, if by chance you get a clam that doesn’t open, just discard it. That means it’s dead and it’s no good. Now, all clams are different. They don’t all open at the same time, right? Because they’re all different sizes. cuz the muscles are different sizes. So, basically once they open, you need to pull them out accordingly. Okay. So, we have our clams out and cooling slightly. Now, we’re going to go ahead and add our potatoes into this. Okay. All right. Potatoes go in. So, now we’re here with our clams. Okay. As you can see, these are nice big clams. You can just pull these right out. Okay. So, these are already fully cooked and they literally just opened up. That’s right. So, let’s talk about the crackers. You can use any crispy cracker, bread, crouton, whatever you have around. So, you know, for me, uh you can use a variation of something like a cream cracker or we can even use a crustini. This is great to have around. You know, just toasted bread that you can slice thin, bake in the oven. So, here we have our clams. As you can see, they’re they’re actually quite big. A lot of clams you’re going to get at the store, if they’re canned, are probably going to be no bigger than that. They’re all quite small. Okay. So, we’re using these nice big cherry stones here because these are more indicative of what a traditional chowder would have. So, I’m just going to go ahead and cut this up into similar sized pieces that we discussed. And again, they’re already cooked. So, fully cooked, ready to go. And now, we just want to make sure that they don’t overcook. So, we’re going to add these in just at the last moment because we want to make sure they’re nice and tender. We don’t want to be chewing on clams all all night here. So again, process is so important. While while the potatoes are finishing cooking, we finish up with the clams, wait a little bit, add them in at the very very end. Absolutely. The chowder is never waiting for our next step. We’re waiting for the chowder to add our next move. So chef, let’s talk about the price of these clams. How much did this amount of clams cost? Well, these ones here were about $20 a pound. So, realistically speaking, if I went down to the wararf and bought them straight off the boats, it would be significantly cheaper. I bought these from a very high-end fishmonger, so they’re a little more expensive. Okay, so now we’re ready for our final phase of completing our chowder. Okay, as we can all see here, our potatoes are nicely cooked. They’re slightly thickening this beautiful broth that we have. Okay. Yeah. Now, we want to remember one thing when we’re making a chowder. We don’t want it too liquidy. So essentially, we want to be able to see our vegetables through the liquid. This way here, we know that we have still room to add our cream without it being too liquidy. Okay. Okay. So now I’m going to add my clams right back in and all their great juices. And now I’m going to finish it with some heavy cream. So here we can see as we’ve noticed throughout this entire video, we have not added any salt to our dish. So, I’m going to taste it one last time just to make sure my seasoning is where it needs to be and we’ll go from there. So, all the salt has come from the bacon and come from the cleanse. I wouldn’t add anything to this. Maybe just some more pepper. Now, traditionally, this doesn’t get any herbs. I love it with a little bit of freshly chopped dill myself. Yeah. And I’ve seen it in many places when I have visited the area, right, where there’s some people put dill, some people put parsley, some people may be fancy try to put some basil. So I have some fresh dill here that I’m going to just chop and throw in there. And it just gives it a little bit of freshness. Sure. It works really, really well with the actual flavor of the clams itself. We all know that dill and seafood go very, very good together. It adds a beautiful color to it as well. Yeah. And it really opens up with aromatics that way. Okay. And that’s kind of the texture we’re looking for. Okay. Not too thick, not too thin. Still kind of holds the spoon, right? Okay. That’s kind of what we’re looking for. Okay. Okay. We don’t want it too gluey. We don’t want our spoon to stand up in there. Okay. [Music] Personally, I can’t imagine adding tomato to a chowder. I after looking at this and smelling it, why would you do it any other way? I definitely wouldn’t. Uh I prefer it this way, but I mean it all it’s all relative to where you’re located and kind of the history of that region. So, I mean, you can still be a self-respecting New Yorker and love New England clam chowder. That’s all I’m saying. That’s all I’m saying, everybody. So, there you have it. Authentic New England clam chowder with centuries of tradition behind it. And I don’t know about you, but I got to have a bite. Jesus Christ, that’sing good, chef. Thank you so much. And now you’re under arrest. Can I have another bite before you take me in? Go for it. Okay. Thanks. Are you team New England or team Manhattan? Let us know in the comments below. What other regional classics should Chef Guy Tunnel tackle next? Don’t forget to like this video if you learn something new. Subscribe for more culinary adventures and hit that notification bell so you don’t miss a thing. Until next time, catch you later.