Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Newstand Studios in Rockefeller Center, joined as usual with Nastasia. The Hammer Lopez. How you doing? Good.
Back from uh wherever you were last time. Was it last week you were away? No, you were away. Oh, I was at Harvard doing the Harvard thing. Yeah.
Well, I don't know. If it comes up, it comes up. Joined as usual in the studio with Joe Hazen. How you doing? I'm doing great.
How are you? Doing all right. Uh we got Jackie Molecules still in Mexico. What's up? Still in Mexico, recovering from uh my meat bucket meal.
Oh, yeah. So uh a couple of weeks ago I told uh Jack that he needed to go. What's the actual name of the meat bucket place? Oh, I can't pronounce it off to look it up, but we should just continue to call it meat bucket. We'll call it meat bucket, but we gotta you you put it on the Patreon uh like exactly where it is, right?
You geotagged it. So it's this place in Mexico City. Yeah, we'll do that. Where and where they have this like uh like a giant, like uh, I guess, what is it? What is that?
A rondo? Big, but bigger, big, large, right? Uh full of some bubbling meat liquid, which is it's unclear. Uh what percentage oil and what percentage uh water-based liquid would you say that is, Jack? It had to be more on the oil side.
Yeah. And then just like uh uh all the meat. Like all the meats. All of them. Like just sitting there.
You know, well, there had to be some broth in it because it did bubble, right? So we know it wasn't strictly speaking, oil because it also wasn't hot enough to dehydrate it. So it wasn't like uh you remember back in the day, Nastasia uh used to spend her summers in oh, I uh I'm talking to someone. I haven't introduced him yet. Our special guest today on the show is Dorothy Calens, who is the founder of uh Savore magazine way back uh in uh the what was that, 1993 or four, 1994, which was an and and all then after Savore went to Newsweek for a while, and as you put it, uh saw that uh through uh what was it, 911 and two wars, decided to get back to food, and uh since has become a uh a producer of cookbooks, which we'll talk about, but is here today to talk about her new book, which is actually I read somewhere which is kind of unbelievable.
Is this really the first book that you've done under just yourself with with no one else or no? Very first. And it may be the last. Yeah, writing books does suck. Uh The Kitchen Whisperers, cooking with the wisdom of uh our friends.
All right, so uh, and it by the way, so uh if you're listening live on Patreon, call in your questions uh for Dorothy to 917 uh 410 1507. That's 9174101507, but back to meat buckets. So uh it's this it's this like bubbling cauldron with all these kinds of meats in it, but then you just order what type of meat and they pull it all out of the chunk out. Correct. Yeah, hack it up, and then they they dip their tort now, their tortilla game is not the best tortilla game in town.
I mean, come on, because it's Mexico. That's true. Please. But again, you know, uh not everyone can have all the skills, right? And so then they they they dip the tortilla into into the bubbling liquid and then put your your your uh hashed meat onto it.
Uh yeah, so was it uh was it everything you'd hope for? I had my first tacos de ojo eye eyeball tacos. Oh oh god, that sounds unpleasant. Was it? Why would you go for the I don't just go for the delicious?
Don't go for the freak meat. I tried most of them. I tried most of them, you know. You know, I'm a conclusionist. Dorothy, you ever had any freak meat that you like, or do you or no?
I mean, I like awful, right? You like you? Yeah, yeah, sure. But like sweetbreads? Yeah.
Oh, those are great. You know, when done well. Do you like them when they're super gooey, or do you like a little crunch on the outside of your sweet bread? Oh, I like crunch. Yeah, yeah.
Always crunch. Yeah. I've never been huge on like just straight braised sweetbread things, just pile of goo. Not my thing. Texture-wise.
Although brains are pretty good. Do you still eat? They have brain taco at this meat bucket place you can get it. And someone handled it. It's not in the pot with the rest of the stuff.
I don't know what they do with it. I don't know. Uh but that's correct. That's correct. It's not on the pot with the rest of the brains.
They pull that separately. I don't eat brains anymore. Ever since the Mad Cow, do you still eat brains? Rarely, but I wouldn't turn it down in a good place. Now, do you eat brains?
Do you like your brains like like egg-style like cooked in with eggs? Or do you like just like I believe in the tacos? The ones I had, it was just like like a like a like a tranche, like brain. It's like uh eat the texture is yeah, the texture has to be played off against something better, crispier. Yeah.
But so like so it in in in in a game of marrow versus brains, what do you go for? Oh, you know, there's something fabulous about a roasted marrow bone. Yes, that is delicious. Great. Yeah, yeah.
Haven't had that in in years. You have to you have to ask your butcher to slice them in half and then season them and broil them in. Oh man. I've never you ever used to eat the marrow stuff, Sashi? What about you, Joe?
You a marrow guy? No. Come on. What about like uh you're you're you're Italian? Did you did your family?
Did you grow up with asubuco? Oh, we did Osabuku, yeah, of course. Did you pop the marrow out of the asabubuco? That's what your pinky was made for. I have done it a few times.
Don't love it. The other side of my family's Jewish. We don't eat innards. Don't eat brains. Don't eat any bone, anything like that.
No. Yeah. Yeah. I grew up, you know, you chew the ends off the chicken bones, you pop the marrow out of the asabuko. But for some reason, my mom, maybe once or twice, she did.
She never made, she never, we never did the split marrow bone with the with like the parsley on top and all of that. That's the one to do. Yeah. I had I remember the first time I was served super fancy, where the like uh uh at a Michelin three-star where in France where my wife and I couldn't afford it, but we went there anyway. Yeah, you ever been to uh Pre Catalan in the Bois de Bologne?
No, but I know of it. Yeah, yeah. So like, you know, whatever, we didn't know. We were real young. It was like super stuffy at the time.
We didn't have the money, and we didn't realize that this is like where the hookers go to hang out, right? The Bois de Bologna. So like, and we didn't have money, there was no cell phones, and there was no uh no taxis, and we didn't speak French. And so we got lost in the Bois de Bologne, and we were super late for for dinner and sweaty because we were running around trying to find it, asking all of these French hookers in broken French how to get to this three-star Michelin restaurant. It's quite an experience.
Great meal though. Great meal. They had all the uh do you appreciate goofy, goofy French like serving clothing, like all of the weird like special clothing that all those? Yeah, yeah, whatever, and the the dish towels tucked into the waist. Yeah.
You like that stuff? I do. I do too. Yeah. Do you prefer French service or Italian service?
At this moment, I would take any kind of service. Uh all right, all right. So, how about this? Nastasia, since well, we we'll do the questions later on. Like we'll bang them all out.
So and you know, we'll get Dorothy to weigh in and once, you know, she's more used to the tangents that we're gonna I'm inevit inevitably gonna go on uh throughout this thing. Okay. So let's go back to the book, the new book, The Kitchen Whisperers. So it's it's interesting because and the and again the uh what is this called again? A slug line?
Is that slug? What what do you call that thing afterwards? It's kind of a it's a subtitle. Subtitle. Yeah.
So it's cooking with the wisdom of uh our friends. So not necessarily, by the way, like a lot of people talk about you know the wisdom of of your ancestors, and while there are some people from you know your parents' generation, your grandparents' generation, it's really a lot about like friends, like people who are, you know, your age, younger than you, older than you, but not it's not about necessarily handed down wisdom, it's about shared wisdom, right? That's that's right. And actually the the subtitle I wanted on the book was Cooking with the Voices on Our Heads, because that's really the experience that I have, which is when I'm alone in the kitchen, I hear people telling me to do things or suggesting or whatever. But the publisher thought that that might sound like I was a crazy person.
So we had to we did cooking with the wisdom of our friends. But basically, I think that we all, when we are in the kitchen, are listening to where where do we go next? Where do we take this ingredient next? How do we do this thing now? You know, what what what what you know?
And I have a constant dialogue, and I'm so lucky that I've got a lot of people who are whispering to me. Well, that's well, yeah, I mean, you've known quite a few kind of amazing, amazing cooks. And so the the thing about it is it's it's not chronologically oriented or chronologically um organized, I should say, but it's uh you it it does end up reading somewhat like a memoir because you can trace the kind of history of what you were doing through the people you choose and the stories that you tell about them. That's exactly right. Right.
So it's and so it's an interesting story. Let's just talk about let's talk about this uh story. So Savour, and and even though this is not in the book, I I can't help myself. So for those of you, I would guess most of our listeners, how old would you say they are? Uh they're between 25 and 45.
Okay, so they don't know necessarily what it was like to be a cook coming of age in the early 90s. And uh so that's my like you you hit my prime sweet spot. I'm 50 now, right? And so um for for the people who grew up and kind of were, you know, in the basement reading the, you know, in my case, my mom's cookbooks, you know what I mean, uh, in the 70s and 80s. Uh, you know, then in the in the 90s, you know, in the early, early 90s, late 80s, early 90s, you just had this kind of breakthrough.
Uh food was don't let anyone tell you different food was bad in the U.S. I mean, it really was. It was not good. You know what I mean? There were good great cooks.
Would you agree with that? Absolutely. Great cooks. There were there were great cooks, there were old style cooks, French trained, Italian trained, whatever, classically trained. But there were also beginning to be a new generation of American cooks.
And that was the thing that we were excited about, um, even at Met Home, which I was the editor of before we did Sever, we traced that burgeoning American cook. Think about Alice Waters, think about Jonathan Waxman, think about Larry Forgion, Wolfgang Puck, all those people. I mean, Wolf was not American originally, but basically they were interested in dealing with American ingredients, American traditions. Let's not try to be the French chefs. Let's not try to be the Italian.
Let's make our food. Yeah, exactly. And I think someone now can't possibly imagine how focused Americans were on other people's food instead of our own. They can't imagine it. Perfectly said.
Yeah. By the way, uh going back to that time, so just before, maybe maybe, I forget exactly what year it was. Do you remember when Julia Child did uh cooking with master chefs, where she got a bunch of young, like, and then she put them all on her television show? That was kind of that was an early, I think for me, you know, an East Coast uh kind of sign that, oh, there's this whole group of other people. Now, a lot of them were doing French E-style stuff, but some of them weren't like Emerald, and you know, who was first made famous in that.
But so 1993 and 94, within that span of two years, two very different publications came out that both like incredibly altered the landscape of food thought. Yours and uh Cooks Illustrated. And uh I just, you know, they seem so diametrically opposed in their mental attitude about um kind of what's going on. They seem so like kind of diametrically opposed about uh what what's going on but over the years have you found that the two attitudes have both woven their their way in a kind of an interesting way into kind of American food culture? I think so.
That's a that it's a very good thing. I mean the Cooks Illustrated was a real book, a real magazine about cooking and techniques and recipes and it wasn't filtered down through an Italian chef or a French cook or or even a a Mexican one. It was really what what do American people, what are they gonna cook? And that was that was a good magazine then. And as for Sevur, our our point of view was there's so much fakery going on in food.
There's you know our great example was low fat casuale. Well who wants to have low fat casserole? If you're gonna do it, do it once and do it right. So you honor the place, the ingredients, the the the the experience and we we one of the great surprises for me when we we launched that magazine was how many chefs loved Sever. And they loved it because they they told me there were holes in their practical knowledge and their restaurant experience that didn't tell them, for example, where where does saffron come from?
How how do, you know, how do those little the wait? They're the the center of the steeples of of crocuses. Nobody knew that. And and that's was interesting to us. I'm not saying nobody knew that.
Remember, there's no internet either. Right. There's no there was, I mean, there was only you'd have you'd have to book read a book. Yeah, you or you'd have to go to a library and get a book. Which is the again, people don't people can't possibly imagine how it was like in those old days.
Yeah, like I still when I I can still smell the library. Like when I like and I think about it like the smell of those musty books. I love it. You know what I mean? But that's gone forever.
And you know, the internet's fantastic. I love it. I use it all the time. But like I I love the I love the library. Yeah, so there was not a way for someone to know, but so you were pointing people towards these things that in truth were completely lost here on most, on most people, right?
99% of people, unless you could travel a lot. And my God, reading this, you guys traveled a lot. How did you get the budget to do this stuff? Well, we we it was hooker by crook. We didn't, we had a very small staff, and we paid very mid-level wages, and we, it was the experience of working there that mattered to all of us.
And we managed, we managed to travel because we traveled very light. There was only sometimes there was only a writer and a photographer to produce a story. And the stories could be eight or ten or twelve pages long because they went deep into something and they gave you the experience of being there and understanding it. I mean, we really believed profoundly that where you grew up, wherever in the world it was, you used those ingredients for a reason, and that cuisine came out of those ingredients and the practices. And we need we wanted to know it.
We were starving for it. We were hungry for it. But you know, you couldn't do that magazine now. We've all agreed that the my co-founders and I, you couldn't do stuff because there's so much going on in the world and there's so much, everybody knows, everybody knows everything now. And you can or they think they do.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, everyone knows a tiny bit about a lot. Yeah. Which, of course, that was my whole skill set growing up.
Knowing a tiny bit about a lot. I was that guy. I knew a tiny bit about a lot. Now that everyone does, I, you know, I'm just I'm no one anymore, right, Sus. It's over.
It's over. It's gone. Um so an interesting one of the interesting things you you bring up here, um again, you it's now very uh fun to go and look at old food photography, magazine food photography, because of the weird stilted imagery and the way everything looks. And you you talk about having to, because you were in magazines. You didn't just start Sevur one day.
You were you you were working uh as an editor at uh Methome. You start you started that one, right? I started it, and I was editor for for 11 years. Right, yeah. And then and what where were you before that?
I was a freelance journalist. Yeah. So, in other words, like you're well steeped in this kind of like 80s, like 80s food journalism, uh, you know, and photography. And you're saying that they were shooting everything on eight tens. Well, by the way, people don't know it.
Describe this thing. You don't even know what it is. Yeah, yeah. So I it it it's it's it's a person. It's big as a person.
It has a head that's bigger than any of ours, or all three of ours put together. And it you had to look upside down under a black cloth at the food that was set up on a table. That was how I came into food photography. And anything we could do to run as fast as we could away from that kind of because what it does is it it makes it fake. Yeah.
It's not real. And and it and part of the problem of food in America was that it was all so twirled up, so painted and propped and messed with, and it never looked like anything you cooked. Yeah. So the first thing we did when we started Sever was we had a kitchen. We were lucky enough to have o offices in Soho.
And we had a big table and a the kitchen was right next door, and we would come out and it was a big room full of lots and lots of available light, and that's how we shot our food. Just cooked, available light. And in the in the early 90s, they said this wasn't, that wasn't a thing. You know, I I uh I remember even in late 90s, like after, you know, you you kind of made this style uh more popular, it was still, you know, uh the food and wine did a shoot at at my uh loft and uh they were uh for uh fried chicken because uh every every Sunday we would have family dinner and I would cook a bunch of fried chicken and all this stuff. And um years, years.
I still make fried chicken. The um and they were like, oh, we're gonna get uh we're gonna get a photographer who likes to work with natural light. I was like, ooh. Ooh. Brain surgery.
Yeah. Well, I only once I used to have to, you know, everyone has to make money. I'm not very particularly good at it, but I did a couple of food styling jobs back in the day. And I once had to do one for one of those old school cameras. Very famous photographer.
Not I can never remember which is which, which is the movie maker and which one is the uh photographer, but Penn. They're both dead now, I think. Was it Arthur Penn was the photographer? Arthur Penn was the movie. So his brother Irving Pennsylvania.
Irving was the was the photographer and Irving Penn, everything about his his pictures was was predetermined. Oh yeah. All day, one shot. You were not allowed to speak to him. And it was a giant.
I want to know how you make your your fried chicken. Uh well, that's an interesting question. So uh my fried chicken fried chicken is all about how you know kind of what you're trying to achieve. I don't believe in perfection. Uh I I have, you know, I believe that there is a particular goal that you're looking for.
Um I do I brine mine, uh I brine it actually in milk, not in buttermilk. Not in buttermilk. Well, the reason is is um I think it the the acidity and look, if you're gonna cook it really hard, then uh buttermilk is good because the the acid will kind of uh soften the chicken flesh. But if you're not going to take the extra step of overcooking the chicken, I find that buttermilk soak can make it a little bit soft. Um yeah, yeah.
So I I do, and I don't even know if water would be the same as milk. I just I've always used milk for 30 years, I've 40 years, you know, whatever I've used milk, so I I use milk, salt, milk salt sugar, sugar basically as the as the soak. And then uh overnight, Brian? Uh well, so if I if I need to make it faster, I will just increase the salt and sugar content and cheat a little bit. Uh but yeah, then uh again, I haven't tested it because this is the way I grew up, like old school, dry them out on racks, you know, uh for a couple of hours.
Then I do flour, then uh buttermilk, egg, uh soda, buttermilk, buttermilk, egg, salt, pepper, soda powder, then you know, back into the flour again and then and then fry. That's it. The reason it the reason I do dry wet is because I I don't like to work with uh batter-based chicken just because it's too complicated. It's not bulletproof. If you don't get the viscosity of a batter just right, it either slips off, I think it's too thick.
Oh, yeah, that's an awful thing when it slips off into the pan and you think Oh my God. Oh my god. So uh you're familiar with um uh uh um Willie May Scotch House in New York. No, absolutely. So I had the great pleasure a couple of years ago back when uh, you know, traveling was a thing of eating at Dookie Chases and Willie May's in one day.
One day. I had both their fried chickens one day. Fabulous. Uh and so you know, Willie May Scotch House is uh an all-batter situation with no pre-dust. Now I've got some people on the air, some friends of mine, I won't call them out, who I I had researching this because it's incredibly difficult if you don't make uh chicken every day to to to get an all-batter um recipe to work, especially with no pre-dust.
It's just very hard. To get it to stick. To get it to stick. The viscosity has to be dead on every time. So like one of the theories is, and I've seen videos of them doing it, they never got the recipe, of course, right?
I think they're using a um, they're using a high acid, I think, marinade uh just to stop. So like, you know, one of the things that I I do that's odd in mine, and I saw you raise your eyebrows a little bit, I put soda in. So buttermilk is good in a in a in an outside batter because um if your batter or your breading is slightly acidic, it won't brown as much in the long cooking of uh of frying as if you added baking soda. But I don't know, I just always put baking soda in. And but if I'm gonna do a super long fry, sometimes I'll scale it back so that it's still slightly acidic.
Anyway. So you're always feeling the fingertips are at work. Yeah. Yeah, but anyway, I can't get that. And so I'm writing a book now, which you know, late.
And in my fry thing, I'm gonna be like, listen, I've worked a lot on trying to figure out this batter only thing, but I just don't think it's it's worth it. Because if you're not gonna fry every day, you're not gonna get that in your bones. It's you're just not gonna get it in your bones. So great. I I love that.
I love that's exactly the way cooking should be, is that you feel it in your bones if you're lucky enough. Yeah, oh, speaking of somebody uh text me, I haven't had a chance to look at the video yet. Made the leg balls. I'm gonna look at your video uh and we'll talk about it uh next next week. Uh so I I do my uh I uh I have it here in in the thing.
Uh so like uh people in my family, I won't call them out because they get mad when I call them out. Uh don't like to eat meat on bones. Well, by the way, uh interesting. In your book, you mentioned bring the rabbit back. You have a like a little couple paragraphs, a couple graphs on bringing the rabbit back.
Yes. I think so you you speculate, or maybe it's the person you're talking with, I can't remember, speculates that uh rabbits are pets and that's why we don't eat them. I think it's the tiny bones. Oh, you do? I mean, maybe it's a combination of the of the of the bones and the Yeah, I don't think people have the experience of eating it.
And that and that's the barrier to entry. That was David Tannis. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, is a great rabbit cook. Never had his food.
Oh. Best. Because he's he's a chef, but he's not a chef. He's a cook. So rabbit, you don't you think it's just a kind of what do you guys think?
Pet or bones, some combination, just we don't eat it? What bones? Bones? Joe, what is your feeling? I I think it has to do with the bones as well.
But I love a rabbit ragoo. Yeah? Love it. Hmm. A lot of good Italian rabbit dishes.
Yeah. Wonderful. You know what my issue also, uh like uh rabbits dry out when you overcook them. They really, really do. Now, if you're gonna shred it and have like a sauce, then who cares whether you've overcooked it?
Yeah. But like, you know, I don't know, like the the again, as as someone who uh my age, right? I'm in that that kind of demographic where we all were aspiring to serve kind of these unadorned kind of like there we there was an anti-sauce period. You know what I mean? That's right.
There was a a purist. Well, it was that I think much of the French and Italian cooking that we knew as as really cooking was sauce-based. Right, right, right. So we wanted to do the opposite. Yeah.
Right. And so, you know, and so then you know, those kinds of meats are hard to do unadorned, I would say. Yes. You know, because if you're just gnawing on the It's not a throw a rabbit on the grill kind of thing. Yeah.
Right. Right. You have to you have to really work with it a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Uh hey, speaking of sauces, do you remember when uh Peterson's sauce book came out? Was it Peterson, right? Was that his name? His name just went out of my head. Oh my God.
I was just thinking about how we were anti-sauce for a while and then this magnificent sauce book from 1990? 1990. Anyway, I'll get to it. I'll get to it. Okay.
I'll get to it later. My brain will come back. Okay, so let's talk about what do you want to what do you what do you want to talk about? Here's what I want to ask you about. Okay.
Uh after you left uh Sever, um, and then you went to Newsweek for a while and talked about that a little bit then you started doing what you call in the book and even in your thing on the back producing cookbooks. Now it's an interesting way to think about it. The production of and your you know your husband as you mentioned here is a filmmaker so you seem like you know production in the blood here. So you know what it really was treating the work of a chef like I was making a magazine about it. What size was this book?
What was the feel that I wanted readers to get from it? How much of how much how to could you put into it? How much how helpful should it be and how beautiful should it be and it's always the balance the balance of those things. So for me producing a cookbook was just like producing a magazine. You decided on the size of it you decided on who the the photographer would be you'd work with the with the photographer on and the chef the cook with every thing that there was every every chapter every idea and then and I wrote them with the with the person who was the with the chef and so it was a it was like a magazine.
But when you're gonna And I did the layout with um I was I'm so lucky to have a wonderful art director who I've worked with actually on Met Home and we've we've produced books together and often he's on the shoot with with me and we're deciding oh that could be a great spread so all of a sudden which is a means a picture that goes across two pages you're you're you're controlling it from the very beginning right but that's got to be a huge investment for you to choose someone to do that with yeah so how do you find the people that you're going to do this kind of thing with and and and they a lot of them show up in in the book obviously I've been a very lucky girl I've been uh I've been able to after I left magazines and I don't ever feel like I want to leave magazines because magazines are dear to my heart you picked a good time to leave magazines the the um I I was put together um with Michael Anthony for example who's the sh the executive chef at grammarcy tavern and by the way just a sweetheart the couldn't be um a finer person and I said to Michael well this is we sold that book I have a uh wonderful agent David Black who just sees the potential in things that guy's wonderful he he is a lovely human being I owe a lot to David um if you want to go get her if you if you're if you're a cookbook writer and you want someone to eviscerate the uh the publisher to get the advance, he's a good guy, right? Well, it's not it's not really that because that that publisher is gonna pretty much know have a range that they're gonna give the advance to. But at any rate, so so the so when I did the grammar Seed Tavern book, um the first thing I knew people would want was the f was to be able to cook the recipes. So we uh immediately eliminated everything that demanded a stratospheric skill in the kitchen because there it's just ridiculous to try to even put that in a cookbook. Now there's some some things, there are things that recipes that vary in in skill necessity, but we explained everything.
We explained how to do pickles. Well, you bring that up in your book, actually. I love that. I mean, Michael taught me that it it was uh it was an it opened doors for me. But it was also I mean, again, and I don't know how much people who don't live in this world will understand this, but you um you when you write about it, you seem almost surprised yourself that here is something that he was actually doing in the restaurant that also works well for a different reason for a home cook.
And so I could see almost a light bulb going off in your head as I'm reading you, like talking about that, because there are and I'm going through that with my book that I'm writing now. There are there are certain things that strangely work for both, not necessarily for the same reason. And so it seemed to kind of jump out at me with that when reading that thing. Is that did you do you feel those kind of moments when you're working? Absolutely.
I'm for the reader, and I think that's what an editor really has to be. I'm I also for Michael and and the other wonderful chefs I I get to work with, and I want to make sure that their ideas are clearly and um importantly transported to to a reader, but uh basically, no, no, you're not gonna ask a a home cook to do a certain number of things. That's why you go to a restaurant like Grammarcy, for example. So, and I knew Grammarcy needed to have the the Grammarcy Tavern book needed to have a lot of the glory that is the space of that restaurant. And I interviewed the architect.
Right, you talk about that. And and how he, you know, how he thought that through and how he and Danny Meyer decided that it was going to be like um Italian country inns inside, even though it was an American restaurant, because it wanted to have some intimacy. It you know, it was it was you know, kind of before the knock them dead walk into a room and gasp school of restaurant design. Danny Meyer must have had a budget because as you say in the book, Stasi would have liked this. He sent them to Italy to go eat at a bunch of nice looking restaurants.
Yeah. Well, they were they were going to Italy on their honeymoon. And he just sent them to the places. No, he didn't say it. Okay.
All right, all right. Uh so uh Anastasi and I actually uh had um so you know, we were working on the Museum of Food and Drink. We hit we uh we did a fundraiser. We had Michael Anthony do it. Remember what we gave him?
No. TV dinners. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And he knocked it out of the park. Well, because you know what, he's a dad.
And he ha has had to grow cook for his kids. He but he bought a bunch of those, you know, those like Swanson style. Again, I think Swanson might be the name might be back in in business. Uh but for those of you that you know weren't alive back then, uh you they literally had these things. Do they st Joe, do they still have these things?
Do you know? Does anyone know? Jack, you're yeah, I've seen them in the store. But they don't have the that it was called literally the Swanson Hungry Man. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I saw them in the store the other. And it was uh uh it was like a a triangle shape pressed into aluminum foil. Right. And that's exactly what it was like some sort of like space program, like uh the potatoes were wet and dry at the same time. That's a wonderful description.
Yeah, it was just like and the the overcooked uh quote unquote Salisbury steak, uh they were an abomination. Anyway, so he bought the uh did uh you know um got amazing produce and did something very but but served them in those trays and it was uh that's great. Yeah that's perfect. It was uh it was kind of cool. Oh, another thing.
So you uh when you're talking about him, there's a couple of ingredients that weave their way in and out of the book a couple of times. So I'm gonna bring them up. One of which Jack uh in Mexico City has something to say about squash blossoms make several appearances in in the book. And uh last week I sent uh Jack to my favorite squash blossom experience of all times. How was the squash blossom lady?
So good. And it was uh it was a scavenger hunt to get it, and you were so kind as to send me the exact coordinates from the photo you had taken. And you were able to find it? There she was. Yeah.
Yeah. And where was this? So just so describe where and where in the Merced it is, Jack, because uh my memory is old. Go. I mean, just as you enter, basically, there's a whole row of sort of, you know, people preparing fresh hot foods.
And it's it's hard to miss. If you but if you're if you're looking at a map on Patreon. If you're looking at a map of the Merced market, it's the at the Merced market in Mexico City. If you're looking at a map of the Merced and North is Which is enormous. Right.
But if i i if if north is up on your map, you enter from the lower left side of the market, right? Correct. Yeah. Okay. So you enter from the lower left side of the market, and is are there still pinata dealers at that entrance?
No. There were not pinata dealers at that entrance. Probably beach balls. Something. There were still pinadas.
You had you had said there were no pinadas, but there were. Well no, what I said was is that the pandemic was very tough on the pinata business. Yeah. You know. Okay.
And it's in and people have been making piñatas for generations. It's tough on it. I'm not just talking about the garbage pinatas like the idiot pinata. I'm talking about like real like clay pot pinadas. Nice pinatas.
Anyway. I see. I see. So you go in and then you hook a right and you go down and she's on the left. That's still accurate.
Yep. Does she still have a contractor's trash bag full of squash blossoms? No. There was not a contractor's bag. They were just sort of there with the rest of the ingredients.
Although maybe when she replenishes, she breaks out the contract. I don't know. But there was there was it was copious amounts, right? That Munificent. That's gorgeous.
What an image. And uh I was saying, so sorry if you know you heard me say this a couple of weeks ago, but I had someone translate for me as like, is this just like am I just hitting this peak season? And she's like, no, we have this all the time. And I was like, oh my God. And did she the same way she just lightly hacks them up on the Kamal, cooks them, shreds the, shreds the cheese, and puts them on the tortilla?
And then that is it, is there anything better than that? Did you have any that have you had anything better than that recently? It was pretty good. It was pretty impressive. It made me question a lot of the street meet at the meeting.
It's like, well, squash blossoms cockets are this good. How much before I do anything else? How much did it cost? Like nothing. It's an abomination.
Like 60 cents, 60 cents each or something. It's ridiculous. I mean, I mean, how much does a one clamshell of squash blossoms cost at the at the market nowadays? Yeah, f four or five dollars. It's ridiculous.
It's it's half a dozen or yeah, ten of them. Yeah, she would have put m more than that into one serving. It's just like uh the other story I tell a lot, so sorry, Anastasia, is uh when I went to uh uh Dakar and uh gooseneck barnacles are free there. And so you're just like crazy. Anyway, uh all right, all right, so squash blossoms.
So let's talk about the squash blossoms because it comes up several different times in in the book. You grew them because you were also uh I had a I had a little garden. Yeah, which I because I was editor of garden design, but that wasn't why I grew them. It's just because I love them. And uh Christopher Hirschheimer, who I talk about in the book, who runs Canal House Station, which is a wonderful restaurant in Milford, New Jersey.
Um was she was at my house and we we were she we just went out and picked up squash blossoms and she told me the oar batter, which is simply half a cup of flour and half a cup of soda water. Oh, wait, was that but then someone else you said did a wine a wine and flour batter. Was that not for squash blossoms? Was that for something else? Like a half.
Well, maybe she did that, maybe it was half white wine. Half white wine and half fine uh flour. Yeah. I've never had I I I read an Italian book recently. I can't, the name escapes me.
Old. And they had some uh fried fried foods where the the batter was liquid was predominantly wine. I've never tried it. With w well, it's just perfect. And I do sage leaves like that.
I just I do, you know, you can I do uh wild mushrooms like that. It's it and a and in a little pot. That was the other thing that she taught me. That's why she's one of my key kitchen whisperers. Not, you know, you'd think, oh well, let's do a frying pan so we can keep it shallow.
No, keep it deep. A small saucepan with enough oil to dip the the blossoms in and they'll cook all at once. And it's perfect. Nastasia loves squash blossoms. You grow them.
You used to out of your window. You know what's weird? Which do you do you I uh not all squash blossoms taste as good as the others? For instance, like the blossoms on pumpkins don't taste They don't they're not as sweet as zucchini blossoms. So the ones that the ones that they do they have specific varieties that are better for the fruit that that I find basically worthless?
Or do they or or do they uh are all zucchini blossoms equally good or are there varieties whose blossoms are oh I think there's probably not very much difference but uh among zucchini squash blossoms. Yeah, pumpkin blossoms are not good. Yeah, they're they're it's a different animal. Yeah, yeah. I remember when uh right after my parents got divorced, my dad uh moved into somebody's um uh house.
He lived in their attic, you know what I mean? Well, it was an apartment. I mean, I mean he didn't like live in somebody. Anyway, the the the mom there, she grew squash blossoms, and when I was a kid, that was the first time, and she would do it in in the batter and fry them, but because I was an American, she let me put syrup on them. So I so I grew up with fried squash blossoms, uh like maple syrup, like pancakes.
She's like, uh, it's American case. You know what I mean? But like, yeah, that's where I learned. But I think most Americans, it's just too expensive for us to grow up liking them unless you grow them. Right.
And then you have them in such abundance. Yeah. Yeah. Ooh, squash blossoms. All right.
The other one is that I feel like you when you were younger, hated on rutabagas and only learned to like them later. I get that feeling. Yeah. And that was another Michael Anthony. It was that they're just big clunkers.
And then you realize, I mean, he there's a recipe in the book we s we did after Grammarcy called Via's for Vegetables, and he's just a vegetable head. He just loves vegetables. And he slices these things like silk thin, little thin. It never occurred to me to treat something as as beautiful as that. I mean, and he made a gratin out of it, which of course we did with potatoes, and I've done it with parsnips, and I've done it with um celery root.
But but rutabaga, well, it's lovely. I mean, I love rutabaga. Of course, I worked for years with a Swedes, so you know, uh I love I love rutabaga. I can't make myself love parsnips. Parsnips are our now, David Tanas loves parsnips, and he taught me about those, and he said, Do you have to remove the hardcore center of them?
I'll try it. So, like quarter and then lop out the middle middle section. Yep. Like you would a pineapple. Yep.
Exactly. And because that they're they're they're chewy and not very flavorful. Yeah, I mean, I always think of a parsnip as a trash can carrot. No, they they have there's a sweetness of them. I mean I'm look, I try to tell my kids, I'm like, uh, you know, try keep trying everything.
Maybe the other one that you you learn to like is persimmon. It took you a while, right? Yes. I still have not. I don't care about them.
I don't hate them. I just don't care about them. You now care about them. I do. I do care about them.
And I welcome them because when tomatoes are gone, it's almost half my my food vocabulary is l is when when the tomato season is over, I can't get myself to use. I use canned tomatoes, but I don't use tomatoes from the from the store. Right. Because they're trash. Yeah.
Uh garbage, filth. Uh did you although I have you learned to like the Kampari tomatoes that have come out in the past 15 years? I've tried. It's the only one I use. I'll roast them when I, you know, when I'm getting desperate about April or March or April, and I just can't stand not having tomatoes anymore.
I I put little I put herbs and garlic in them and roast them in the oven, and that's that gives give gives them a little some flavor. All right. So another tomato thing. You mentioned uh and I've read it so many times in my life, and I've never done it because it just seems horrific to me. Taking a a tomato, a ripe tomato to a box grater.
Like, what the heck is it? So that's catalon. Yeah, but what Coleman taught me that. And what what what you do with it is you get this rich um puree of uh flavorful tomatoes and you throw the skins away. Oh, so it allows you to keep the skin on your side of the so it's absolutely so it's a cheap way.
So if you don't want to buy a tomato strainer, if you're not make making the sauce, do you have a tomato strainer in the house, Joe, growing up? Uh yes, I did. Yeah. I mean, they're actually tomato strainers, people are not that expensive. They really aren't.
If you own a Kitchen aid, I know you're you're kind of anti-equipment. In the I mean, not anti-equipment. I'm learning my way around them. Yeah, I mean, the impression I get is that you feel that, you know, if you need all that equipment, maybe you should have just spent more time learning to cook. Yeah.
That's exactly it. That's exactly it. But I am a gearhead, I've always been a gearhead. I like equipment. But uh tomato strainer, because this again, I I can't remember whether I said this on the air or whether this is what I'm writing in the book now, but like tomato skins taste bad.
Yeah. They taste bad. Uh and so that what you're left with is a pile of grated tomato and the skin in your hand, you throw the sh skin away or in a compost. See, this I never understood. Yeah.
So now I now I understand the reason. Because I'm thinking all those catalons. Yeah. Yeah. Because by the way, seeds don't taste bad, they just have no flavor.
Skin tastes bad, actively bad. You know what I mean? Uh all right. Well, they they and you know, they the the Spanish just rub that tomato paste on on bread or toast, and it's just all you need is breakfast. Yeah, the bread with tomato.
I mean, I like it. I'm never like again, I've I've had it, I've had it in Barcelona several times. It's good, it's it doesn't, it doesn't take me to a child, it doesn't take me to a place. No, a memory place. Well, also their bread isn't like the bread that we love in other parts of Italy and France.
Yeah, although do you hate Tuscan bread as much as we do? I I don't it has no salt. Yeah. How can he eat anything without salt? Okay, okay.
So uh you know you know Jim Leahy from Sullivan's, yeah. So we've had him on the show a couple of times. He's great. Yeah, he's always good for a laugh. Uh he'll he'll say insane things.
Every time we have him on, we install Tuscan bread, right, Stuz? Yeah. And every time, what does he say? He likes Tuscan bread. No, and then what does he say?
No salt. No. What does he say? I don't know. He'll make us Tuscan bread with no salt, and we're gonna like it.
Yeah. Has he ever done it? You can go buy it at his place. He sells Tuscan bread without salt? Yeah.
No way. Yeah, he does. All right. You I don't have any money. I'm sure he will give you a loaf of it.
He's never really there. I mean I see him at the farm. I see him in Meeting Square, yeah. Ask him when you see him then. I don't think you think he actually made it's for instance, like, okay, Montreal bagels have no salt.
When Montreal bagels came to New York, you know what they added to them? Salt. Salt. Because we know better. Right.
Now I mean I don't want to put it that way, but it's No, I I know what you mean. I totally agree with you. Yeah, anyway. All right. Uh you bring up uh another person who we worked with at the museum, uh, Anita Lowe.
Did you do have you done a book a book with her? I never have. She's my neighbor and she's my friend. And I love Nita. Hold on.
We got a call. We'll talk about her in a minute. Caller, you're on the air. Hi. This is Jacob calling from Des Moines, Iowa.
Oh, I I lived in Des Moines, Iowa. When did you live in Des Moines? That's another story. Go ahead. Sure, sure.
And I I apologize in advance for asking a question because I know you guys are uh sounds like you're having such a lovely conversation, and unfortunately, uh due to uh my own uh what's the word? Uh not not being on the ball about this. I it's time sensitive, so I just want to make sure I get this right. Let's do it. Uh so I'm doing a drag queen dinner this Saturday, and because it's drag queen themed, I wanted to incorporate uh cocaine.
Uh not literally, but taking a cue from take taking a cue from Philip Voss uh of L Ideas in Chicago. He does the the coconut lime powder. I want to do a coriander lemon powder and kind of basically make it taste like lemonade to uh act as a palate cleanser between the main and dessert course. But like uh people aren't gonna sniff it though, right? No, I'm gonna I'm gonna get some boba straws and cut them into like little things so that they can slurp it up kind of like a pixie stick.
Okay, okay. So what are the what's the flavor base? Uh lemon and coriander powder. And so the the reason I'm calling is because I want to make my own lemon oil, and I heard you mention in episodes past about making lemon-infused oil using an ISI. And I was curious if you had a particular uh method slash recipe for that.
And then I also wanted to confirm that you know, if I'm gonna be mixing powdered sugar, coriander powder, uh, and uh lemon acid powder into this, it's not gonna kind of like mess up the texture too badly. Well, okay. So I I sat down with the drag queens for some reference points because I want this to look like a drag queen, you know, inspired menu, and they uh eventually mentioned, yeah, cocaine's a big thing, apparently. So cocaine, hell of a drug. Yeah.
Uh we're doing okay okay, okay. So so let me see if I got the parameters. Uh the the the coriander, we're talking seed, right? And I'll probably grind grind it finely. Yeah, I mean the problem.
The problem with grinding coriander finely is the husks, the husks on coriander. So you you're gonna have to get some sort of uh very fine strainer and then just take whatever dustings make it through the strainer. Fortunately for you, cori coriander is very inexpensive, so save the save the rest for your shaksuka. You like coriander in your shaksuka, right, Dorothy? I mean, who doesn't?
Coriander and cumin, right? Need that. And you're a lover of pimentone, which we could talk about. That's been my kitchen crutch for the past, for the pandemic, I've been leaning very heavily on pimentong. Anyway, okay.
So uh coriander, and then the lemon, instead of doing like an oleo sacrum, you're I'm assuming you're using um uh endsorbit tapioca maltodextrin. It sounds like you're gonna powderize an oil. Is that am I correct? That's correct. Okay.
Uh so the the way that works is it's an extremely fluffy um, it's an extremely fluffy starch and the oil complexes, and then if there's minute amounts of liquid involved, then that will kind of pasteify it a little bit, but you can just add more to get over it. Uh I think you might be better off making like uh an oleo sacrum and then uh like decanting, pressing that stuff off and adding the tapioca maltodextrin to that rather than trying to get once you have a uh a lemon oil, it's never going to be as pronounced as um as it would be if you just use the straight peels to make an oleo. Uh right. And that's that's why I was gonna I was gonna dope it. I mean, are you talking straight lemon flavor or are you talking like if I want my my end result to be basically like lemonade?
Um I was planning on adjusting all of the flavor of it with like powdered sugar and citric acid malic acid. Right. Um well lemon if it's lemon, it won't have malic, it'll just have the citric. But the the other the issue is is that um um citric acid crystals are that the ones that you buy um are um not powdery enough to go in with the rest of the stuff that you're doing. So you're gonna need to blitz them.
Right. Just be aware that um that it then becomes you use a scale to measure it. Powders are very I'll tell you a quick story. I wanted to make uh popcorn salt for you know my kids and I, you know, just threw uh a bunch of salt in my blender and walked away and made it into a powder and then I tried to use my normal cook cook's hand on it and it uh oh my inedibly salty ineditably salty you know yeah yeah and I I've I've got I've got digital scales and micro digital scales so like if you've got specific uh per per percentages to throw at me like I'm all about percentages and metric and stuff like that. So I mean it's weird I've never I mean if you want it to literally be you have to figure out like you know just remember lemon juice is about six percent acidity.
So if you're thinking about it in terms of like how much quote unquote lemon juice should I be consuming for this amount of powder then you can kind of just do the math that way. Does that make sense? Yeah. Is this helpful? It is uh and I just want to confirm because I've only messed with uh tap malt and sorbit once um and it was is it we did it um oil into powder so we were making like a pork powder we would just take rendered lard uh throw it in the food processor zip it up and then drizzle in the fat and they would use equal parts by weight so if it was a hundred grams of powder it was a hundred grams of fat that would go into it and then season it is that the approximate uh it's been so long and it also depends on it depends on exactly the texture you want you can get anywhere from like a runny paste to a fluffy powder.
Uh this is one of those things that you're just gonna want to do, as we say by eye until it's the texture you want. Yeah, that's pretty much what I was planning on doing. Um but you said polio saccharum would probably be a better bet in terms of extracting lemon flavor. I would try it. Otherwise, otherwise, zest, you know, as many lemons as you can get a hold of and then put them into the oil and hit it in the ISI, let it infuse, and you'll get it, but it's never gonna be as strong.
I think you could do, and you could just cheat and add a little bit of lemon oil to it. A little bit, a little bit. I had I I have some of that. I have some of that as well. I think it's like a lemon infused oil that I got from one of those, you know, spice stores, so they have all the infused olive oils and stuff like that.
Oh, one of the Italian ones, those are actually pretty decent, but they taste a lot like olive oil. And yeah, you know, you're not gonna want it to taste like olive oil. Most of those, you know, I forget the name of the brand. There's like an old guy holding fruit on the front uh that I get at Depal's. But uh they do an orange, they do a lemon, they uh but yeah.
I don't know, that's not that's not lemonade, that's olive oil. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cool. All right, well, good luck.
Let's know how it goes. Hey, listen, make sure no one as a joke snorts that seriously. Yeah, no, I'm I I no, I'm I'm gonna make a I specifically mentioned to the hosts of the party, like, hey, I'm gonna have a couple of minutes on the microphone to talk about this, right? Because I don't even think that they've they've put the uh the palate cleanser like on the menu. That's gonna be a surprise thing.
And so I'm gonna be sure to like walk people through it. But yeah, Philip, Philip Foss has gone on record and saying you'd be amazed at what some people have done. Like take it pol politicians in there rubbing it on their gums and stuff like that. It's just like that's all fine, but it's just uh it's a especially if when the powders are that fine and they're I mean inhaling like a very fine powder into your nose that's not soluble, like an acid, like you can have someone have a very violent reaction to it. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, no. Yeah, yeah. No, I plan on being very, very clear about that. This isn't actually cocaine, this isn't meant to be snorted. Use your mouth.
This is a dinner. Yeah, rub it, rub it, rubber. Rub it into your teeth. This is the cocaine that's left over when you're done. Right on.
Yeah. All right. Good luck. Let us know how it goes. Yeah, tweet me and let me know how it goes.
We'll do that. All right, cool. So uh Anita is your neighbor. Yeah. All right.
And you are doing so we want to talk about this farmer? Because I don't really know about this farmer. Okay. The farmer is named Patty Gentry. And she has a farm in uh in Belport, Long Island.
She farms three acres of Isabella Rossellini's land, and she's an organic farmer, and she's an extraordinary person, and she's taught us a lot about things and what the Anita and she have our old friends because Patty used to be chef, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so I guess I talk about uh a dinner that Anita made, a benefit dinner for Early Girl Farm, and how um, you know, how fussy I thought um Anita was being about her oysters. Uh she was serving a first course of Great Gun oysters, which are grown right out uh in in uh Maritch's Bay, which is pretty pretty great, and they're wonderful. And so she had she had all these helpers, and I was one of them, and one of them, one of us was dropping little tiny um lemon curd, and another one was was dropping little shizo leaves, and another one was dropping little pickled um shallots and whatever. And I thought, you know, I thought this is really and then I ate the soup.
I ate them. I was fortunate enough to sit down and eat this this Vichy Soise with the oysters in it, and I realized that Anita was cooking right down to the very second of presentation, that that bite of the oyster was so extraordinary. Yeah, it's so uh it's funny, like um reading that section. Uh by the way, she's also great. She's another one of those like people that's just a great person.
But uh I've worked with her at the you know at the muse at the museum on on these kind of events. And remember when we used to do events all the time, Stas? Yeah. And what I like, one of the things I like is that where, and by the way, I should add for people who are gonna read the read the book, it's one and another one of the threads that weaves through it is uh whether you think in terms of platters or plates. Uh and uh so when you're serving a bunch of people and you're not gonna do family-style service, there's this moment where you line up all of the plates, and then everybody has a different thing, and they all have to be assembled in a very short amount of time.
And it's one of those things where you get to see chefs, everyone's kind of busting each other's chops, everyone's kind of like, but everyone's very focused and fast. You know what I mean? Super focused. Everybody chips in, and like everyone kind of like if you don't chip in, people are like, Who's that idiot? Who's that jerk?
You know what I mean? And I really, I don't know, it just I have such fond memories. So I don't even think about it, it wouldn't even come to my mind for it being like fussy, because in my mind, it's like obviously every plate has to look the same because everyone's paid the same amount to be at this event. You know what I mean? And it's just like doot doot do doot.
And then when you get at the end and you're like, I'm running out of child. Because like they all, yeah, yeah, no. It's so like it's uh it's like uh that's the one that's one of the things I miss about um those kind of uh those kind of things. All right, I'm being told that we have very little time. Uh so also a lot of Marcella Hazano, I never met her.
She really smoked a lot, huh? You think you talk a lot about her like a smoker's voice. She did a lot of smoking. She did. She did.
Was she really as good a cook as uh as uh we uh you know, she was a home cook. She was a home cook. She just made the food, and it always was delicious. She was not a show off. She was simply she went in the kitchen, she knew her ingredients because she was so smart.
She had two advanced degrees. She her mind was going all the time. And she wanted people to understand about flavor and about presentation. And one of the things I learned when I was doing research is is how much Marcella herself had to learn growing up on the Adriatic. Well, she didn't know Roman food.
She didn't know Venetian food. She didn't know N the food of Naples. She she had to learn all that. She went to Milan and lived there with her husband, and she learned about this great market there called Peck. I mean, she's like, Oh, Peck is amazing.
She had to learn the things kind of the way we did, and she says that Italy is simply a series of different cuisines based on the ingredients, and uh that that those are the things you have reverence toward. And and she was no nonsense. Yeah, and I didn't realize that her husband was like a a promoter for her. It's kind of like a it's an inverse of the trope that we're used to, which is I thought was kind of cool. Like her husband.
Well, he he was a Harvard educated Italian American, and he would write her books from her Italian that she wrote on uh legal pads. Well, you said her yeah, her books in Italian, she wrote straight. She wrote straight, and then Victor would kind of have his way with them. So they're a little fussier in print than they then Marcella would have had them. Because she says things like, well, if you cut you chop too much, you brown it a little more.
If you chopped a little, you brown it a little less. Yeah, she seems salty in a good way in the book. Yeah. I wonder, like, uh, well, so I'm out of time. Can I get listen?
Bill with Bill has a shag bar hickory question. Don't bake the shag bar, don't bake the uh don't bake the bark. I don't care what anyone on YouTube says, you're gonna boil the boil the bark, don't bake it. Shag bark hickory uh bark, it it's wood. It's already been baked.
You're not gonna toast it to make it toasted. It's not vanilla. Please don't don't bake it. Just wash it. If you have a vacuum machine, infuse liquid into it, uh in the vacu, you know, pressure infuse into it just to make your life easy.
If not, don't don't don't sweat it. Make the pieces small. That's the best thing. Make the pieces of the bark small, shoot for a 50 brick syrup. Miguel, you're have you seen these new graphite cord uh all-clad pans?
Yeah, all c are they any good? Yeah, I don't I haven't used one. I've seen them. Listen, Miguel, I'm sure they're great. People like them.
Don't believe anyone who compares them to cast iron. That's not a valid uh thing because cast iron's not about fast heat conduction, and it's the heaviest pan. It's it's not apples to apples. Uh, most people don't need a pan that is the greatest conductor of all time. Aluminum is a good enough conductor of heat for 99-9% of all the stuff that we do.
If you like fancy pans and or if weight is a primary concern, then I'd say go for the the graphite. If weight is not a primary concern and you don't need to have the fanciest new pans, I wouldn't bother. If you're a neat freak, here's the thing people don't worry about. The rivets, that's the part of the pan that's gonna piss you off is the rivets because you can't get them clean. Am I right about this?
Absolutely. Rivets, baby. Uh Alexander, we're still working on the spinz all. We don't know when we're gonna get it. Okay, uh one last thing.
I know I know we're late. Sorry, Joe. Uh Micah wants to think Micah's gonna go camping, right? Uh and so Micah wants to know, and I thought maybe Dorothy, since you know you've dealt with people who've done a lot of strain, including you do a lobster bake in uh Long Island. Yeah.
Hard to get right, right? You say, aren't people buttheads when they're at your like they're making comments that, oh, should we order pizza? People are such jerks. People are such jerks. Okay, this is what uh he writes.
I don't think I'll have time to call on, but I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on large format meats to cook at a campsite with minimal equipment. Uh, pig roasting setup is a bit too uh much overhead, unfortunately. How about burying? Well, how about burying though? Yeah.
Do you like burying? Have you ever had a good like uh earthen roasted pig? What do you control though? I mean, the the question is do you make it about that experience? And if you do, then you better research it and figure it out and and and and do it right.
Yeah. Well, you know, let me let me let me just I'll leave with this because I know we're gonna uh if you make it about the experience, then it doesn't really matter if it's the best piece of the phone. That's exactly right. Yeah. All right, all right.
All right. Uh so Dorothy, thanks so much for uh coming on. I had a great time. The book, which you should go buy is The Kitchen Whispers. It came out this week.
Yeah. This week, congratulations. Uh, you know, and like you say, it's maybe the last one you do on your own because man, doesn't it suck to write a book? Not fun. It is it's fun when it's over.
Yes, it is. Uh all right, thanks so much. Cooking issues.
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