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Yeah, thanks. Yeah, John actually uh is uh working on uh an opening now, so he's getting crushed. Where? Uh I'm not exactly sure. I'm gonna let him talk about it when he when he when he comes back.
I'll let him let him deal with it. But uh, and so like we're we're skeleton crew as far as our normal our normal peeps except for we do have in the upper left hand corner Quinn how you doing I'm good uh apparently I represent the entire left side today yeah yeah even though like even though you're like cracked off and floating in the in the ocean over there have you bought all of the emu from your emu farmer before he moves up and moves to uh our side of the uh of the continent but but I I have a very fascinating story they had an emu chick born with four legs you know what wait wait four legs and two wings yep it's like must must have been like an absorbed twin thing but apparently it's it's incredibly rare they usually die but he's uh he's still kicking yeah how's it uh so you you haven't tasted it yet no I don't think I'm gonna I don't think I'm gonna eat the precious four legged email what what else can I do with it anyway uh the uh before we go any further and before I talk about two headed cows and the Buckthorn uh buckthorn whatever the name of it is the famous taxidermy restaurant outside of Denver which has uh like so well let's talk about it now they have so much taxidermy if you ever wanted to go to a restaurant you're like I I want like you know, kind of standard steakhouse fare along with like, you know, Rocky Mountain oysters and other but but I what I really want is a whole bunch of taxidermy at the same time. I think it's called the Buckthorn I someone has to look it up. The Lodge I think. And one of the things they have uh the the owner I think was friends with uh you know dead president uh Roosevelt so I think there's even some Roosevelt shot stuff in there.
But uh they have a two headed cow. Hmm. Yeah. That he's like apparently they found it dead because, you know, like Quinn says four legs. I think two heads is even harder than four legs.
I would imagine. Yeah. Anyway, uh so uh intri introduce you now so you can enter the conversation not have an awkward silence. Uh special guest today, Greg Baxstrom with his new book Nothing Matters but Delicious. Right?
Is that true? Nothing? Some things. It's it wasn't meant to sound that nihilistic. Uh it was supposed to be more nonchalant.
It doesn't you know if it doesn't matter if you f up kind of a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds a little bit more uh scary than it's meant to be. Right. And you worked with uh now does uh Joshua Davis Stein he's been on the show before does he prefer J D S or does he go by the full I've known him for a handful of years now.
I still just call him Joshua David Stein. Yeah, because he's one of those people you can't really I've he abbreviates his what's it called? What are those things called that people substacts. I think it's J D S of it but like he he's one of those you always use all the name people. You know?
It sounds good. I think maybe he was like always in trouble at home and so they always used his full name. Yeah. You know? Anyway so uh was that fun writing the book or no?
It took him like I had a couple of writers try to help me get through the process. I had been trying to do it for a long time. But uh they just happened to be out of state and so sort of communicating the information that they wanted to get the book going was hard for me. I'm dyslexic. I have ADHD, I'm bipolar.
So Joshua just came and laid on my couch and would type while I made us food and talked, basically, and that's how that's how the book got done. That's nice. Yeah. Um he does food books and kids' books, but not yet a kid food book, right? I don't think so.
No. Weird, right? Like why keep your life so siloed? He's working on like a long format story right now. That that's it's like about a chef and apprentice and for kids or for adults?
I think it's for adults. Well I don't know. That's a good question. You know who's working on a kid's book is George Moats, the hamburger guy. Oh, yeah?
Yeah. About hamburgers. About burgers? Yeah. Like in the history?
Uh no, strangely. So it's the story is is uh there's a diner, and the the diner is going, you know, down the tubes. No one wants to go to this diner. And uh this kid is like, you need to make this hamburger that I want you to make, but it's some like weird preposterous hamburger. By the way, speaking of preposterous hamburgers, why is your hamburger bun upside down?
I think it's trending now. So we use we used to have this culinary director, Sherry. Uh she was just on the season of Top Chef. She just opened a restaurant called Cynthia in the West Village. And uh she threw that one together, and it people people really liked it.
And you know, it was it was like trying to be a smash burger, but it's not really a smash burger because we put butter in that beef. If you smash, you just kind of smush it on the butter out. Right. So we started smashing the bread instead. Huh.
I've seen it and I've seen it. And then you flip it upside, but do people flip it right side? They can't because you've already sauced the other side of the thing. You can't flip it. It's you're done.
You're you're stuck with it. And you butter it as well, right? Yeah. And it is true that the it is true that if you're gonna use a standard bun, the the the gly, whatever you want to call it, the crust side won't absorb butter properly compared to the bottom side. But it will maybe resist the SOG more.
Right. Yeah, yeah. What are your thoughts on that? I think it's just to be provocative. Yeah.
What are your thoughts on uh English muffins? For burgers, I had one at Olmstead and it was for brunch. It was a brunch burger and it was really popular. So I'm all for it. I like the there's they're called like the they're pork Portuguese English muffins.
Yeah. Like the port muffins, so they're bigger, they don't really have all the nooks and crannies. They're it's more of like a straightforward. But the actual Portuguese ones that are slightly sweet? There's they are definitely a little sweeter.
Yeah. And uh so we used to take like breakfast sausage and ground beef and marry them together, like a 50-50 mix. So it would kind of eat like breakfast sausage, but have the substance of a burger. And then we made like a tomato hollandaise and yellow mustard. So it kind of tasted McDonald's y.
Which white people by the way, people like McDonald's. I don't know if you know this. Yeah. I'm just figuring it out for myself now. I'm not sure if you're aware of pivoting.
Yeah, yeah. Uh all right, so wait, so let's finish let's finish the burger, which is in this book, by the way. So what's interesting is like a lot of the well-known items that you have had on previous menus and even uh at your place here in Five Acres here in uh Rock Center, are they in the book? You can make them. How similar are the ones in the book to the ones that you make make?
Uh during the process I was kind of convinced uh that if the recipe requires specialty equipment, someone's not really gonna make it. So I tried to edit all of them so you didn't really have to buy anything too fancy. So like there's the carrot crepe, which was very popular at Olmstead, but I made an easier version of it. And well, since you brought up the carrot crepe, well, let's finish well just remind me, because I want to go. You say well, f forget about we'll do it now.
So, like in the carrot crepe, right? You make a uh you hyper reduce the carrot. How do you stop the carrot from getting kind of you know how carrot juice, if you reduce it, can kind of get like weird and break? Like, how do you stop that from happening? You gotta keep whisking.
You gotta keep cleaning the side because you want all that pulp is what's gonna help make it orange. It it's not like an ugly color if you don't do it, but it will be much more orange if you keep whisking it and you don't let all the pulp go to the sides while it's reducing. Because you reduce it quite a bit. I reduce a quart into about a quarter of a cup. Then you add cream and reduce again a la Peterson in his original cream-based sauce book before he modernized it.
Yeah, yeah, and then a bunch of butter. And then a a boton of butter. Yeah. And the trick too is like once you mount the butter, you'll have what you expect, sort of like a burblanky looking kind of sauce. But if you put it in a Vitamix, a vita prep blender, and you you turn it on for like five seconds, you're kind of like whipping air into it.
It will thicken and be like more spreadable. Huh. And it's more forgiving. And that lasts longer too, or no? Well, what I get out of it is I could put it, I could put carrots and clams in that sauce in a pot and bring it to a boil and it won't split on me.
What? Yeah. Really? So you can kind of hammer it a little bit. Just that little bit of air or just the Yeah, it just like stiffen and you can like do more with it.
You could put a little mohawk on a plate and how much is the fact that you have, and I'm assuming that when you boil so if you if you don't read the recipe, I mean just go read the rest. Buy the book and read the recipe. You can go on Kitchen Arts and Letters, you can buy the book with discount from cooking issues if you're a Patreon. You buy the book, you make the recipe, then we could talk about it with you folks at home, right? Fair enough.
But the carrot goes in, it's drastically reduced. Then cream goes in, that's reduced by half, right? Which is kind of like you're taking that like all the way down. But does the cream stabilize the mounted butter as well or not? I would suspect, yeah.
Yeah. Because we had someone who wants it works well with like any any real root vegetable. I mean, I I've done it a lot. It was a per se thing. So we did it with like beets and kind of other root vegetables.
Well, so that's the other question I had. So in it, you're like, you could if you want to and you like beets because you have plenty of things. Is that a Brooklyn accent you're saying? I don't know. You could do you could do you you could use beets, you could use sweet potato.
Anyway, so like you do it. But the thing is that like uh does it actually change and it made me think that when I used to want colored pasta, I would just like add ketchup. If I wanted it red because you can't taste it in the pasta, can you clearly I think you're gonna taste it in the sauce. But can you taste the carrot in the crepe? Oh, because the carrot crepe, it's it's it's a crepe recipe that you just take the milk out and you replace it with carrot juice, so you for sure you can taste the carrot.
So it's not like colored pasta where basically it tastes like carrot. Oh, nice. Yeah, I guess because there's a lot more liquid. I don't know. I guess like you know, it's the majority of the weight of the recipe.
Yeah, do you agree with me? The most colored pastas taste like the base pasta. They you know they taste like sauce and salted water. Yeah. You know I mean no the ones I see a lot.
I mean, if you go to a grocery store, it's like the spinach ones or like the beet ones. Yeah. All right. Well, uh so while back on uh spinach, you do make a soup with where the broccoli and the spinach seem to be cooked for a relatively decent amount of time without shocking, and yet it is very green. Do you have any tricks on keeping that soup green?
Your your blended just serve it right away, you know. Like if you need to, you can make it ahead of time or cook it less, like you were kind of alluding to. But then you would have if you make it ahead of time, you gotta shock it and then you're reheating it. But if you just make it if you make everything else and you're just making that right before you're serving it, then you're just pureeing something, checking the seasoning and serving it. And you don't really need to worry about if it's gonna last any longer than when you're gonna consume it.
Right. No, no. All right, so back to the story of the of the girl in the diner. Because that's where we started this conversation on hamburgers. So she's supposed to have a hamburger, and uh the owner, of course, dismisses her because what the hell does she know?
She's a kid. And this guy, like a reporter or someone comes in, you know, some sort of like reviewing weasel comes in and uh, you know, wants something special. And so the kid finally convinces this person to make the burger and it's a huge hit, and that becomes their specialty burger. That's the That's a good story. That's the nutshell.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's gonna be geared towards youths or adults. Yeah. Ute.
Yeah. Uh from my cousin Vinny. All right. So uh wow, I can't believe I remembered to bring that back around. Joe, can you believe I remember to bring that back around?
I would not have been able to do that. I would have gone on another tangent. I mean, as I as I do. I think I thought we were talking about taxidermy again. Uh well, we were supposed to go back that, but I think we hit that one hard enough.
I think we're good on taxidermy. Uh yeah, I think we're Quinn, we good on taxidermy or no. I think so. Covered and smothered. Yeah.
Well, unless you think that your emu farmer is gonna make enough money on their four-legged emu if it's like their equivalent of Mike the Headless Chicken. You familiar with Mike the Headless Chicken, Quinn? Uh, vaguely. That was like the chicken that like survived a long time, right? Well, survived a long time after the person miss-killed it, left the brainstem on Mike the Headless.
Yeah, relatively speaking. Yeah. I mean, for chicken lasted a lot. For a chicken without a head lasted a lot. What were we talking about?
Like a year or two, two years. Yeah, yeah. And it was touring around, Mike the Headless Chicken, and they would just sh cause I think the crop was still there. So they would just shove like grain in the crop, right? Because the brain stem was miserable.
Yeah. Well, I mean, Mike, Mike didn't know any better. And the guy, I think, made a decent amount of money. Not so much that they tried to do it again. When I was bad, I can only imagine.
Yeah. Imagine how many chickens had to do it. And trying other animals. Yeah, Mike Two. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm sure that got out of hand. Gets real, real ugly. I remember uh I found a microwave. When people throw away kitchen equipment, a lot of times it works. There's just something wrong with it.
Like this case, when I was in college, someone threw away a microwave and the cord was broken. I looked out, I was like, I gotta fix this. So I fixed it. I had a microwave, but I didn't really care about it, right? So I also found a crate of light bulbs and a crate of CDs.
Anthrax killer bees was the C D. It was a whole case of anthrax killer bees. And so that's when I, you know, kind of fell in love with microwaving light bulbs and CDs. You know, and so what's the result of that? Oh, CDs look like uh like lightning fingers from the emperor for a little bit, and then they start like humping up and getting all crazy because of the the so they look good, but the And you're trying to get like fumes to get high off of?
I mean, what's the case? No, no, just the visuals, just the visuals, you know what I mean? But uh the best is uh like incandescent light bulbs. You ever microwave an incandescent light bulb? I've hit my brother with incandescent light bulbs and fluorescent light bulbs.
Oh, fluorescents are the key. If I knowing what I know now about like how toxic the inside of a fluorescent light bulb is, but I remember once I found uh we had an entire loading dock full of they had taken the entire building where I was and taken all the fluorescence out and replaced them all. So the entire loading dock was nothing but those eight foot long fluorescents, and then like one of those giant full dumpsters on a loading dock. So we were just standing there, we were lightsabers. Of course.
Because like the sound of a fluorescent light bulb breaking. Yeah, shattering. It's just choice. Yeah. You know what I mean?
It really is. Just the noise and then like if you if you if you like javelin them, they if you hit just right, they kind of collapse in on themselves as they go. I mean it's just a good visual. Oh my God. And the poof and the noise and just because they're so thin and long the shatter you know what I mean?
And don't try to mimic it people A, it's not healthy, but with some puny little light, get you an eight foot fluorescent old school fluorescent tube. They're like an inch over an inch around. What's the color of the explosion? Oh in a microwave? No just out and just out in the street.
It's like a cloud. There's a little puff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it's just the the noise and just like just like this thing going away so quickly.
You know what I mean? Just like disappearing into into nothing. It's amazing. Um I never hit people with them. Oh.
But that sounds like it was fun. It was. I mean we were 13 probably yeah. Uh but when you stick an incandescent light bulb in a microwave it lights up all different colors. And then what happens is like it like a plasma forms and then eventually and this is what you would wait for.
So we've we stole a box of uh of uh 300 watt light bulbs for like industrial you know two or three hundred watt light bulbs and with they were and they were clear no no frosting on them and they lasted quite a while which was amazing but occasionally uh so what happens is the plasma arcs to the side of the envelope, it heats up there, and then they blow up, they explode. So our microwave perpetually was just like littered with glass shards. We would take the metal chunks out, but it was just littered with glass shards. We didn't need anything out of it. I was just gonna say, like, but you would still use it for popcorn or is it a big thing?
No, listen, like we had a dining hall that was open like almost 50% of the time that I was in school. So like if we wanted food, we would just break into the dining hall and get cereal. You know, we knew how to break into the dining hall. It was like a butter knife problem. You know what I mean?
Like locks back in those days were no big deal. So, you know, every kid knows how to take a butter knife and go to the door and get in. You know what I mean? Anyway, so yeah, I didn't need it. And plus my roommate Tom would always like get funky and order a pizza on his mom's credit card.
So I didn't need any of this other stuff. So it was just for science. Yeah. So uh one time, this is where this comes. One time this happened, the plasma hit the the light bulb and it blew out and it formed like one of those edgerton like like splashes of glass and didn't shatter.
And we were like, whoa. And I was gonna save it, but I was like, it'll happen again. Never. No. Never.
No documentation, no photos of anything? No, this is like nineteen, you know, ninety, nineteen eighty-nine, nineteen ninety. There was like, you know, we waste film on this. I don't even think I had a camera. Right.
You know what I mean? Who had a camera back then? You know? I was four. Yeah.
Well, anyway, but those were the good microwave days. Yeah. How the hell have we got on microwaves? What happened? What were we even talking about?
All right, let's get back on food. Oh maybe soup. I don't remember what we talk about. Yeah. Uh Quinn, what do you got for me in the week in review for food?
Not too much. Uh this week. Uh may another gelato. This time I'm testing out a Japanese cane sugar. I was you know, mild, but when you say Japanese, do you mean like Okinawan?
No, it was no Okinawan, it was uh some other prefecture where they just have you know, historically for a while, ground cane sugar. I wanna say it was like also like even like traditionally boiled over fire, maybe things worse a while ago. Fire do that. You know what I mean? How is the how was the sugar too?
Do you like those like super funky black Okinawan sugars? Do you like those things where too much? Yeah. Too much. I find a dessert.
I don't like Chevy desserts like this was quite subtle. So subtle, okay. So if it was subtle, I mean my next question was it worth the money. When quality is part of your name, it's more than a word. It's the reason for everything you do.
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Um I probably wouldn't get it again unless it was easier to order. Again, I ordered like a bunch of stuff direct from Japan. Okay, hang on, I got the details. It's called Zarame coarse sugar from Kikeujima Island. Hmm.
Don't know it. But here's my here's my feeling. You know what's pretty good? Like just like bog standard brown sugar if you want. Like a less, you know, listen, I'm all for like you know, non standard, non cane, jaggeries, great.
Uh I like all I like many forms of sugar, but like especially in recipes. But my question is always in a recipe, did I need this fancy ingredient? Or am I hurting? In other words, like if there is something special about this ingredient, have I damaged it by burying it in a recipe, right? I mean, you have a tomato issue, we can talk about it uh, Greg does.
So you do a fried tomato thing because specifically you're like, any a-hole can just get me an heirloom tomato salad. Well paraphrasing. Yeah. So you do a fry on it, but to keep it crispy, there's uh I believe it's a breading, correct? Yeah, so I mean it's sort of like a fried tomato.
However, uh, so the idea was like I wanted the tomato to be the entree at Olmstead. I wanted it to be the vegetable entree. And uh you know, when you play around with it, when you cook it, it does just turn to mush. So the idea was to make this mixture of flour and egg and have that be what gets golden brown. Like that is what's taking on the temperature, and that's what's taking on the golden brown taste.
And then if you start with a room temperature, ideally never refrigerated tomato, it will then have warmed through. It won't be like piping hot, but it will be a warm through, and the the golden brown meatiness is coming from the flour and the egg caramelizing. And then to take it a step further, because it's flour, egg, and tomato, it can be a little sweet. So we make like a shallot butter with chives and like a lot of coarse pepper and salt, and we pour it over the top, and then it kind of turns it more meaty. And now in the pictures were some of those rubies, Ruby Aunt Ruby Germany, Aunt Ruby's green, were they?
No, it was uh what was the tomato? Where were you getting them in the real life? Well, for that I had to shoot it in the winter, so it was incredibly hard to find. I think I got them from Italy or something. Yeah.
And uh there used to be a company that sold fake pumpkins for photo shoots. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, that was like the hard one of the hardest parts. I mean, the book itself was I mean, I'm glad I did it.
I hope it does well and hope it leads to more things. But it was it wasn't my skill set. Like doing that was not my skill set. Even though every recipe I've ever done at all the restaurants are documented and there's photos, you would think it would be a no-brainer, but it's still like you have to convert them to make them more homey, and then you have to get like a recipe tester to test it. Uh oh and getting all the vegetables.
I mean, we did it in the winter, and it's a lot of vegetables in it, so it was hard to get my hands on it. What would you use in the real life, though? What kind of tomato? Just I honestly I just get I don't stick to one kind. I literally just try to get the ones that are like are as big as my fist or bigger.
So that way you can like the perfect one is what if it's like your two hands together and you can top and tail it and cut it in half and still get about an inch and you get two steaks out of it. Nice that that would be the ideal. So I wouldn't worry so much about I mean to be honest, like even sometimes like a nice beefsteak works because it can hold up to the heat better. It's not as romantic as using an heirloom tomato, but it does hold up to the cooking process better. A lot of heirlooms suck though.
That's true. Yeah. A lot of them are really sometimes they're too soft or it's a lot of water inside of them. Yeah, just a water bag. Yeah.
You know? I like honestly, like uh I mean, look, I have my favorite tomatoes. I'm waiting a couple of months, they'll start, you know, yeah, soon, and I'll, you know get a little bit of a little bit of a little bit greenhouse ones available now, but the green, like some friends or not there. Like a like just like a standard like Kampari tomato, they're fine. They're better than like a crappy heirloom, I think.
I agree. So what do you do with the tops and tails of the tomatoes? Family meal? Family meal, sycamin sandwich, tomato sauce. This is a ketchup recipe.
That's pretty easy to follow. I saw that, but you mean like look, so we had uh who's on recently who's on Faraday, yeah. And she's like, Heinz, which I kind of agree with. Your thing is the ketchup doesn't have to be just tomatoes, so it's like ketchup Yeah, I've done it large. Yeah, like so w at Olmsted we were pretty strict.
We had a lot I I had made up a lot of arbitrary rules about seasonality and stuff. So we would make ketchup a lot with green tomatoes or tomatillos because they were sort of a little bit more readily available. And uh but then that migrated into I I took all the tomato out and I just put cherries in it. And it comes out. I mean, it's me.
I mean, it's some hodgepodge alt and brown recipe with some other two recipes that I kind of just tinkered around with. And I'm not gonna say it tastes like Heinz, but it, you know, the point was to get it as close as I could to standard ketchup. It's not supposed to taste like fancy ketchup. It's it's supposed to taste like store-bought just you replace the vegetable. Right, right.
Fruit, you know. Uh is that one of the I can't remember. Is that the one where you you do the reduction with the vinegar and then you splash the vinegar back in because a lot of it volatilizes when you're doing the cook? Yeah, so it's it's like uh I mean at home I would just use corn syrup, but in the restaurant I would use it's equal parts glucose, sugar, and white vinegar, and then there's like a ratio of uh clove and allspice. And then you just take whatever you want and you robe coo it into a pulp.
So like tomatoes with onion and garlic or cherries or whatever, and you pour that equal part ratio over it and you just rock it down until it's half gone. You puree it as good as you can, and then because there's so much acid and so much sugar in it, like it just changes once it's cold. Like the taste of it changes and the viscosity of it. So I just like I throw it in the walk in or the fridge and then I recalibrate the next day and I add a little vinegar, like you just said, or maybe it needs a little maybe maybe it's a little sweet, so you add a little salt to it. On vinegar, Ms.
Get I'm gonna hit things as they come into my head. I apologize. So uh you're a fan of uh vinegar based pickles, right? Specifically the raspberries you call out two or three times. Do you pour the do you pour the vinegar over the raspberries?
How hot does it matter how hot the vinegar is? First of all, like, why do people always heat the vinegar? I would have guessed that it's pretty much dead. Is that just to dissolve this stuff? Are you trying to heat the I you know, despite doing this for like twenty five years, I am I'm like a very nostalgic cook.
Like I, you know, that pickle recipe is what I did at Alenia, probably 20 years ago. And uh, I mean, it's a it's sweet. Like now I would alter it and maybe like cut the sugar in half depending on the price, you know. I I tried to give a straightforward kind of universal recipe in the book. Uh but I do I do boil it so that way it can take on, you know, the spices that I put on it so it perfumes it a little bit more, but it's mostly to it's mostly just uh I guess sometimes it is to cook the product because like if I do ranches, I'll or radishes, I'll blanch them for one minute just to take the edge off, and then I'll I you know I don't want them to have that much snap, so I'll put them, I'll transfer it into the hot pickling liquid and give it a day, and they kind of curl up a little bit, but they'll imagine the raspberries having the liquid be hot enough would like knock fungus back so that you wouldn't get any sort of softening or growth before the pickling liquid could get to the raspberry.
That makes sense because like you know, McGee. I also wanted it to be broken down, right? Right part of that, like I wanted it to kind of be this slush of raspberries and pickling liquid. And oil on top, you say. Yeah, that was like an old uh you know, to save time at per se, like if we had a pickle like uh beautiful baby carrots, and maybe they were room temperature or colder than the dish, you would we would just like dress the top layer of the ninth pan or the pint container of the deli with a layer of oil.
So when you were taking it out, there's already salt, there's already sugar, there's already acid, and now there's oil. So it's like a dressed component that can just go directly on the plate instead of having to then like you know, it just saved a millisecond. But yeah, but you call it breaking, which is interesting. What do you think that comes from? Also, per se, fine dining.
Like, whenever if we had like a meat ju or something or a fish sauce, and we and it was emulsified and we intentionally wanted oil floating on top of it. Like we used to do this thing called aggrido, where it was a ratio of sugar, vinegar, a juice, and glucose, and we would same thing. We would just put that in a pot and reduce it by half. Glucose to syrup. Yeah.
Yeah. And uh you would be left with something the viscosity of honey or maple syrup of whatever flavor. So it could be like pink peppercorns or truffle or horseradish or something. And uh yeah, it was universal, you know, we were able to use it a lot. Yeah.
I used to uh drag like so. You're adding by dragging things in. I used to drag out. So when I would fry finished meats, I would drag them through broth to like knock the oil off the top. You know what I mean?
Like it's all about it's all about trying to save yourself some time. Yeah, I don't think there are any rules anymore. You know, like I just uh You know, I used to be so like uh about French cuisine and and a bit of a francophile, and now I don't think there's a right way or a wrong way to do anything anymore. Yeah. Although, you know, something you said a second ago, like you know, you you made all the quote unquote you know ridiculous rules for yourself.
But on the other hand, like without rules, like nothing's more frightening than not having some rules to follow. Oh, that the the toughest question I would get in my career before opening a restaurant, be like, so what is this restaurant gonna look like? What is your restaurant? And like I needed someone to put parameters on it for me to describe it. Like, is it in Chicago?
Is it in Brooklyn? Is it in Manhattan? You know, do I have a million dollars? Do I have four million dollars? Do I have a hundred thousand dollars?
Like, I I needed some context to then like I can solve that problem. But when it was too broad, I I can't answer that. I I need there to be some rules. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, rules are helpful.
Yeah, yeah. Uh if you're listening live, that means you're on Patreon. You can call in your questions to 917 410 1507. That's 917 410 1507. And if you want to be able to listen live, call in questions and get the discount on the book.
Nothing matters but delicious. Uh yeah, tell them how to join, Quinn. Yeah, you go to Patreon.com slash cooking issues. We have multiple uh membership levels. Uh the top two levels get you the video feed.
All of the levels get you the live audio feed, early access to the recorded episode, and to get access to discounts at Kitchen Arts and Letters and a few other uh, you know, friends of the show uh businesses that we work with. Yeah. Uh oh, my one cooking thing of the week uh that I didn't mention, it's I've actually had it for a while, is uh I don't know how remember how long ago, but uh JJ Johnson when his rice book came out, came on, and uh he introduced me to John John Mushrooms, the Haitian mushroom, which are delicious but expensive and hard to source. But apparently everyone uses so they're black, they're ink black. And what you do is you you make uh they come fresh or they're dried.
No, they're dried, and you don't eat the mushroom. So you make the you make like a broth and then you you squeeze out and discard the mushroom. Nobody eats the mushroom, it's just the broth. And it smells kind of it's one of those weird things that kind of like when you're making it, people are like, I don't know. They don't like the smell when it when you're starting to make it, but they all like the finished dish.
And so you make John John rice and you you know, anyway. But where is it from? Where Haiti. Oh, it's like wild it's wild crafted in Haiti. Got it.
And um, but it they're expensive. Even in Haiti, they're expensive and hard to get. So everyone uses uh not everyone, but a lot of people use these John John bullion cubes. And so I cool. Yeah.
So I finally I've tried the mushrooms, but you know, they're hard to get. So I bought a brick of the bullion, and it's not the same, but it is good. It you know, if you it's mushroomy, like it's like earthy and savory. Yeah, it's got a specific aroma. Yeah, try try you might like the f the actual mushroom to try once um or twice.
They're they're good. They're they're they're they're interesting. They're worth they're worth getting. You know what I mean? I'm a fan of b bouillon cubes.
Yeah. I mean I I use um, you know, like uh I the what I I don't use cubes as much as I used to because I I just have all of these um I have a lot of vegetarians I cook for. And so I I tend to use the I tend to use the uh better than bouillon, like their vegetarian versions of like chicken and or um chicken and or beef. I use them a lot. I don't actually use their vegetable because I don't care.
I can make my own veg stock. I can't make a chicken stock that doesn't have chicken in it. You know what I mean? So uh oh, speaking of onion soup. So your your mom's right, the gloop, goop.
Yeah. So you say that, you know, for non fancy days, right? You always ration the chips, but for non fancy days, you use the actual like uh Lipton's like soup mix. Yeah, sour cream, lipton soup. Yeah.
But when you make it yourself, you know, for you're you're using like uh uh I think it was beef stock, it might have been bouillon, but the key thing is that you don't use dehydrated and or cooked onions. They're actual just raw onions. And so talk about the difference between those two and the it's sort of like you know, the homemade version of what you're trying to achieve when you mix the Lipton packet with the sour cream. So it's like my mom's side family recipe, and it's just like the homemade version of it. So we, you know, you dice an onion.
You can grate it if you really don't want to dice it. And it's a combination of cream cheese and sour cream. And then you make this liquid of I guess you can use beef stock, but you kind of want the salt from the bouillon. And uh so you you dissolve a couple of bouillon cubes in some water and a little bit of wisheshere, and then you paddle that all together, and it's similar-ish, but it tastes a lot better. Yeah, I mean like I said, I go I'm like in a phase right now with bouillon, probably because I did this book and I put that in there.
But at Five Acres, we do like our take on a Chicago Italian beef sandwich, and we make beef stock, even though we don't really have the equipment to do it. We still found a way. But instead of seasoning it with salt, and that's what I put the the meat in, I season it with bouillon paste, and that's the salt, so it's making it beefier. So like it's homemade, but it tastes a little recognizable and artificial in like a familiar way. To me, it's like the best of both worlds.
Yeah, I mean, I like uh I was told by some of my friends actually that I was a bad person, but I like even um not the cues, but you know, the powdered ones. Yeah. On like French fries and stuff. I mean, like, you know, the vegetta is like this chicken based powder. Yeah.
It's good. I had a 10. Seasoned chicken with it sometimes. Please, yeah, chicken on chicken on chicken. Yeah, you know what I mean?
Sounds very Rzak. Yeah, like the uh the R you know I've never been to any of those restaurants. I've never been. Really? I saw them dehydrating octopus and seasoning octopus salt on octopus once.
Gotta go all the way. Yeah. You know, uh back at the SCI, we had a we had a dish that was like everyone wants at some point when they're cooking to just do a dish that's an ingredient all the way down. Like all turtles. All mean not turtles, because that was a very random word choice.
Well ingredient choice. That's the old it's not ingredient. Like, you know, that's the old thing where like someone walk up, walks up to a physical. Turtles five ways? Is that what you're getting at?
No, no, no. So like this woman's like the the earth rests on the back of a turtle and is talking to a physicist, and the physicist goes, what's underneath that turtle? And she goes, like another turtle, and then well, you think it's it's turtles all the way down. Okay. So when I think of these like multi-dishes, I think of it's turtles all the way down.
It's a Dr. Seuss story, Yurdle the Turtle. Is that what it is? Yeah, Yurtle the turtle is one, yeah. Yeah, and if you come up to uh what's there's there's there's uh there's a saying is like if a turtle was on a fence post, you kind of want to know how it got there.
It's true. And it got there because another turtle. This is a world view. Like it's it's like in ancient times, I don't know if it's still around, but it's like called like turtle world theory. Turtles.
Yeah. Listen, here's my point about turtles. The turtles that you see in the markets in here are probably not legal, so you probably shouldn't get them. Do not support turtle poaching because don't. And uh frankly, everyone says that they used to be delicious.
Greg, what do you think? Have you ever had like an amazingly deli where do you even know what turtle tastes like? I don't. I've had turtle soup, but if you ask me what is a turtle taste like, I'm like, I don't know. You know what I mean?
I don't want to get anybody in trouble. One time at Per se somebody came, I can't remember who, and we uh made turtle soup, and there was a whole slaughtering ceremony for it. And like because they were following some cultural practice, like they they were really trying to stick to the standard, but it was a big uh there was a big like knife and there was turtle blood everywhere. I have had it. Dave Barron cooked it when he was at Next when he was the chef at Next for like the French menu they did.
It's fine, right? Like are you hankering for a turtle? No. I mean, but like the way people used to write about it, the calapash and the calipia, all the different kinds of fats, and like it's like okay. I don't know, man.
You know what I mean? No. I don't know. You don't need that one. No.
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It's Brooke DeVard from Naked Beauty. Join me each week for unfiltered discussion about beauty trends, self-care journeys, wellness tips, and the products we absolutely love and cannot get enough of. If you are a skincare obsessive and you spend 20 plus minutes on your skincare routine, this podcast is for you. Or if you're a newbie at the beginning of your skincare journey, you'll love this podcast as well because we go so much deeper than beauty. I talk to incredible and inspiring people from across industries about their relationship with beauty.
You'll also hear from skincare experts. We break down lots of myths in the beauty industry. If this sounds like your thing, search for Naked Beauty on your podcast app and listen along. I hope you'll join us. It kind of looked like rice.
Oh how unnecessary or good. I didn't need to eat it again. Yeah, it's good. Here's what's sad about that. I had a lot of cod semen in my life.
Milt. Milt. Yeah. Doesn't get better. Uncle Milk.
As I keep trying it. Yeah. It's not like beer when I was younger, and I you know, grew to like it. I'm not, you know, I'm not there on my appreciation level. You're not building up a tolerance for octopus eggs or cod milk.
No. I've never been. I mean, I'll eat anything. I was just in China for like uh three weeks, a few months ago. I ate like a chilled beef bile soup just to try everything.
How bitter was it? It was pretty bitter. It w you know there was a lot of ginger covering up some flavor flavor, a lot of ginger and garlic. Well, are you using the bile for a health reason or because it's delicious? Anything that must be covered up.
Other people were ordering it, so I ordered it. So uh on the octopus eggs. What's sad about that is uh you know this, I'm sure everyone knows this, uh, is that the octopus stops eating and just guards her eggs and blows water over it. So that to get the eggs means you you go, you get them you dive, go get the the mother to be and then scoop up the eggs. It's like a whole family done.
I mean, you know. Uh it's that movie, My Octopus Dinner or whatever. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I think that was the movie. I'm pretty sure. My octopus companion. Some teachers.
Maybe not dinner. Dinner. Maybe not. Listen, I I've said this a million times. Yes, they are like this, they're the smartest invertebrate.
By far the smartest invertebrate. How far that goes, I don't know. But smartest invertebrate. You know, uh they if they could, if they lived longer, they only lived like three years. Oh, really?
That's the lifetime? Yeah. I mean, they're not living like a long time. The even the big ones. So they're not learning that much in three years.
They're still children. Ding ding ding. No, I'm just kidding. Ding ding. I had a uh, you know, yeah, uh, whatever.
They had the octopus vocabulary of a three-year-old. What's the exactly? Exactly. So, like, you know, they their future plans aren't that far in the future. Yeah.
You know? They're not getting their hopes up. Yeah. Uh all right. So uh I'd be remiss uh not to uh uh get into this.
The beginning of the book starts with uh a story of first of all, you worked for some tweaked out people back in the day, like hardcore chef tweaked, and you yourself describe yourself as a hardcore tweaked out chef. Yeah, they were pretty stable. I mean tweaked might not be the right word. I was probably you know torked, torqued, yeah. Yeah specific exacting, maybe.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I've met a good number of the people that, you know, uh, of course. By the way, here's the hilarious thing. So for those of you that have no idea, like, you know, I don't know. I don't know where I don't know your history.
Yeah, I don't know you. You're you're hearing a voice over the internet. The um Dan Barber worked at Blue Hill for like a two years. Two years, yeah. And so you do a Dan Barber.
Uh this is the funniest recipe I've ever read, because like you do a recipe that's like uh part of something you did there, and you're like, I couldn't get the re the um dressing to taste right until I just used sunkist orange juice. Yeah, and that is for anyone that knows the whole that's like such a boom boom. You know what I mean? Yeah, it tastes good with it, you know. It is not the same without a little extra zip, you know.
Zippity dood uh. Yeah. Um so but the the book, you know, is it is a history of uh, you know, your kind of culinary history, and um but you know, but also like how that delved into something like uh alcoholism and self-punishing behavior and kind of your road out of that, and that kind of feeds into the nothing matters but delicious title. I don't know if you want to mention it or talk about it or yeah. I mean, basically, you know, my my background is is almost exc my background is basically like ten or twelve years of three mission star restaurants and then ten years of Olmstead.
So like I, you know, I started at Alinia, was there for four years and then went to Spain, uh Moogeritz, Arzak, Louis for about five months, and then uh per se, and then I was the chef of Blue Hill Stone Barnes, and then I was around a terra for a minute, and then I met Flet Cardoz and I helped him open up a restaurant and I you know I kind of just was a mercenary chef for a while and I bounced around, lived in Norway for a little while. Yeah, how is that? Because you another recipe you're like winter is depressing, and yet you worked in Norway. Yeah. There's this, you know, this is this guy, Chris, he has a Michelin star restaurant.
He also owns a Chinese restaurant, that's why I went to China. And uh he's just one of those guys where it's like like life lesson, it's like why you don't judge a book by its cover. You know, he's a big guy covered in tattoos, he's got a fetus and a pickle jar on his arm, he's got a gold tooth, he's bald, but he's like the nicest guy in the world and most generous, knows more about wine than most Toms that I know and can cook really well. And so I you know, I just lived with him and his wife for like four or five months when I was getting divorced. The light months or the dark months?
It was the dark months. Yeah, yeah. And uh I've I've been there a lot. I I like it a lot. It's uh you know, it's this Bergen, so it's the other side, it's like the West Coast.
Very small, very walkable, very nice people. It's one of those things where it's like, you know, I still travel and I like to uh go places where it's maybe you know, I don't know how to order the coffee there or what's the custom, but normally it's like everybody there speaks English. There's every brand that I know, so it's sort of like I get to travel, but I get to see my friends, and there's and I don't have to kind of have my guard up as to like my surroundings. So I I and it's very beautiful, so I I go pretty often. So coming from the Midwest and also having spent time in Norway, you got any Lefsa information for me or no?
No. No. I mean no, no. Cause like I went down a lefsa hole, and like, you know, the rolling pins nowhere yet because it requires me deciding whether equipment's important or not. Whether or not do I need a grooved roll?
So for those of you who don't know what the hell I'm talking about, it's a it's a potato-based flatbread, uh Scandinavian potato-based flatbread. They make big ones and little ones, depending on what you're saying. When we opened, we made a potato one at five acres. When we were like trying to be fancier, we made it. And so you the small ones don't require like the the grooved rollers, right?
And then there's no we just did it with we didn't have the we didn't buy anything specific for it. We we took those that type of recipe and we just made a flatbread with it, basically. Yeah. So there's group, so the I'm I looked into it, I watched a bunch of videos because I'm a dummy. And the group because here's what's nuts, right?
Some people are like, you need to use a flat square roller. That's not a roller. That is a flat square. That's not a roller. That exists.
Yeah. Don't ask me why. And then there's the groove roller people, there's the regular roller people, and then there's the groove roller with socks. So they put a sock over it. And if so the the whole idea of the grooves, I think is to stop sticking.
So they people like they wipe a crap ton of flour into it so that it's kind of self-releasing rolling pin, which is also the purpose of the sock. But then some people roll use groove rollers with no sock. The whole thing's confusing. So someday it's do professionals do the sock trick? I don't know if I've even seen that since I made a pie with my mom.
I don't know. I've never I've never had a rolling pin sock. Yeah. I have rolling pins. Yeah, same.
Uh-huh. I forgot about the sock trick. Are you a are you a taper or a straight pin? For rolling things out. Do you what do you keep uh what do you keep around?
Uh what do I have in my house? I think it tapers. Yeah. I think it but I have to I've never been an equipment guy. I don't have amazing knives or amazing tools.
I I think I have a plastic ladle in my house. Yeah. I don't somebody send me something, I use it maybe, but I've never I've never been a gadget person. No. Uh I wish I I think it comes from my dad.
My dad is like this really skilled carpenter, but he buys like the cheapest stuff at Home Depot to use. And he just like he's just handy, so he can fix it and repair it. So he buys the cheapest thing and it gets 20 years out of something. I think I've kind of developed that. Like I've been told that it's impressive what I can do with a dull knife.
Because I just, you know, okay, when I was doing all that Michelin stuff, I you know, I would bring them home a sharpened every knife. Not that I don't know how to do it, but I you'll get clowned in the kitchen if your knife isn't sharp. I mean, I remember Chef when I got transferred from fish station to a canopy station, Chef Benno was like, There's no way I'm letting you cut the fish with that knife. You gotta go to corn and go buy something before you come in tomorrow. And corn's fun.
But I was, you know, getting paid $90 a day. I had to drop $200 on a knife. Yeah. Well, what's uh what era was that? Was that uh what were people buying then?
Was that a UX 10 era? What were you getting? There was a period where every chef had a Masono UX 10, and then it was I mean, I remember that era for sure. Yeah. I don't even remember if I have that knife anymore.
That was the one. You look, you're like, oh you're in the you're in the clear for sure. That was the popular knife. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't even know what is popular anymore.
I think it's like so diversified, and knives have gotten so fancy and so expensive. I don't even play that game. I haven't bought a new knife in years. I bought one two years ago. It was like six hundred dollars.
It's too heavy though. I don't know, and I don't know why I I bought it because the handle looked fancy and it was like an impulse buy. What's your what's your favorite length? It's too heavy, you know? Like ten and you know, you're a ten.
I like tens. I like tens. Yeah. Do you like a light ten? Yeah.
And you I don't want a big heavy knife. Do you do do you uh favor the uh so you favor like the Japanese Western light light blade? Yeah. Yeah. Do people still do the people still use Wushstoff and stuff?
Is that still around? I don't know. I still have mine. I still have mine. Macs and stuff.
Do people still No, I don't think so. I like I used to like Mac. I had a Mac Petty that I used for a long time. Yeah. Uh yeah, Mac Petty.
I used to rock that a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I haven't I haven't. I don't have like a series of knives. I I have like a petty and a chef knife, and I just kind of do everything with those two knives.
I have knives that uh I let my kids use or that I let people come into my kitchen use because I just don't want to have to deal with them throwing it against a piece of metal and chipping the thing. I just don't I want to deal with it. Yeah. I just bring my downgraded stuff to my house, and that's you know, it's no longer restaurant quality anymore. Then that it just gets degraded and used in my home, and I use that.
Like I don't have anything fancy in my house. In fact, I sort of regret it. When I was shooting this book, I had to do some of it at my house, and I was getting insecure that people were going to look at it. So I w I bought a whole bunch of maiden pans and a whole bunch of stuff, and they're great. I you know, they're really great pans.
But I had still had the Wolfgang puck probably under a hundred dollars set from Christmas when I was fifteen. That's what I had been cooking and using, and I threw it away to make room for the maiden ones, but I had them for twenty-five years. Now you miss them. I miss them. I'm very nostalgic.
I you know, like I'm sure you can get in touch with the dude and get get a set of pants. I feel like I let my family down by getting rid of those pants. You know, just for some photos. Just for some lousy photos, man. You know how it wasn't worth it.
I've never been to a California pizza kitchen. I have in Chicago. Was it good? I think I was like one of my first dates I went to Chicago, a California pizza. It was downtown.
All right. So on Chicago, uh, talk to me about the uh Chicago Italian beef sandwich and how it how it relates to the other pantheon of beef sandwiches served with liquids to dip them in. Well, here we have to be careful because people are not gonna want a big wet sandwich. And like if you're in Chicago and you go to like a real blue-collar place, like they'll still they'll put the beef sandwich. It will be dunked like you expect.
And then they'll even put the french fries on the same parchment and they'll roll it all together and it will become one big steamed mess. And that's how we eat it. I don't really know why, but like I remember like there's joy in that. There's joy in that. Yeah, you open up the whole thing, and you know, it's a mess, and it's the fries are not crispy anymore.
Right. Nothing about it is crispy. It's been steamed. So here, like here at the restaurant rock center, we we like you know, we acknowledge that we're like a tourist restaurant, and uh we've kind of come and go when we open, we had lobster three ways, and then I was like, I could see the writing on the wall that like this isn't what fits, so I you know, I put a Caesar wrap on, and I you know, I kind of just begrudgingly change the menu. And then again, I guess I'm an insecure guy.
Then I got I didn't like that, so I I redid it. Okay, there's still a Caesarette because that's kind of what people want. But we make like a bright green Caesar dressing every day, and we make rotisserie chicken and we roast 10 off in the beginning of the day, and we roast more off later on, and so now it's nice and I like it, and like even if Chef Ackett's came, like I would serve it to him, it's good enough. But with the beef sandwich, you know, it's something where we're in rock center, so our you know, we have bills to pay, so it is expensive, and we don't want to get like the eye roll, you're a tourist restaurant and it's expensive. So we at least try to make it worth it.
So instead of like top round, we use prime rib and we cover it in all these spices and butter and we roast it off and we slice it paper thin, and then that broth where we make our own broth, but we season it with the beef bouillon, and then you get the jardinera and the green peppers and stuff, but we put the broth on the side and we just tell people to pour it over it because we would get them sent back too often if if they were a wet sandwich. Do you do you do you tell the servers to tell them how it would really be done? You're like, if you were real, we try to, you know, there's a lot there's English is not the first language for a lot of my staff and for the customer. So I don't want them to like feel like they're getting lectured or something. I do try at lineup.
I go, remind them, pour it over the top. It's not it's not a French dip. You're not trying to dip it. Pour it over it. You know.
And uh same thing, you know, the bread is made by Bianqui. So it's like it's a nice product. Uh but it has to be edited for the masses. Talk to me about sport peppers and Chicago and how they differ from the peppers that I would otherwise get here. Uh they're sort of like a very abrasive Gandija pepper, if you were, you know, to make a comparison.
Um they're very vinegary. You know, there there are some that are tend to be spicier than others. Uh they're not my favorite pepper. I mean, I I would take a Spanish candida pepper over that any day of the week. But uh, in the same vein, we try you know, we tried to make it as valuable as possible.
So it has like we sp like it's shockingly hard. One to buy poppy seed hot dog buns in New York. So we have we have them Yeah, we don't do that. No, and one company did and they had it sometime, so we now we have them made for us, and so that checks that box. But like we s we we're apparently still okay with food coloring because if we get relish and it shows up and it's not neon green, we send it back until the right one comes.
And usually it's from some producer in Chicago, like Vienna or something. And uh and it has everything, you know, they say it's like running it through the garden where there's like tomatoes and celery salt and onions and dill pickle and and the sport pepper. I feel celery salt coming back. I feel celery seed and celery salt are coming back. I'm hearing it more, which is good.
I like it on a salad product. Yeah, it on a salad. It's good, it's good stuff. Uh my son puts it in tuna fish salad. I can see that.
Celery's in it. What's you know, that's not a good one. Well, he won't put celery in, but he won't put the celery seed. Hmm. Interesting.
Yeah. I had some question. Now it has gone out of my head. Oh, uh in the book you have a list of one okay. Roundabout, because I'm gonna run out of time before I run out of questions.
Oh yeah. Oh my God, it's almost over here. I don't cook. You have a pork tenderloin recipe wrapped in prosciutto that goes back to your early culinary school days, you say when you had some sort of a nightmare scenario dinner where everything got lit on fire. I did a dinner with Patrick Deep Dish Burrelletti, who's a competitive eater.
He's won the Nathan's hot dog. He was my roommate. And uh he was like some church auction for, you know, bid on this guy in culinary school and they'll cook dinner and I bailed them out. So I'm I you know, w it was the first time we ever thought about food. Yeah, ourselves.
Right, right. Outside of the confines of it. But so pork tenderloin, I don't like it. I don't cook it everywhere. Never like you like it over loin, like you uh you just don't like pork that way.
No, uh it's just like I I'm always nervous when I make it that it's gonna go that either it's gonna be under, and so I'll like it, but other people are gonna get squeamy deemy about it, or it's gonna be a little bit over, it's gonna dry when I'm doing traditional cooks. I mean, I can obviously low temp it, you know what I mean? But then I don't know, so it's like never because like as soon as it goes a little bit too far the one way, then it's yeah. So like it's just to me. I think that's like too porky, kind of like an overcooked duct taste.
Like when it's hammered like that. Yeah, to me, it's just like to me, it's it's future sadness. So like if you are It's very uniform. Yeah it is like, you know, once you do it once or twice, you can, you know, it clicks and then you can make it nice. You know.
So you're you're pro. Yeah. I mean, I you know, something I noticed I was just in Chicago doing a bunch of events, and it is interesting. It's you know, I'm sure it has to do with the Jewish population here but there is m way more pork on menus in Chicago than I see here in New York. Really?
Yeah like I don't think of you guys as a beef town. Beef, but just meat. Yeah you know meat's delicious. Like there's not a lot of seafood in Chicago. Less.
Makes sense. Yeah. I mean does anything come out of the lake that you eat? I mean back in the day I mean pe I'm sure like not off of Chicago but people get perch and stuff and walleye. Yeah I think some areas you still eat salmon in the lakes.
So here's a question for you. Smelt. Uh one of the things I like to do when I read uh people's cooking books is search for ingredients that come back again and again that aren't necessarily part of everyone's all the time toolkit. For you fennel seed you like fennel seed more than the average person but at least that was my impression. You know what's also weird is there's a lot of dill in this book which I have no I don't know why.
Really just to show it up well but the but you don't put fennel in your sausage mix. It's not that kind of sausage. That one I think is like a curry one or something. Right lamb with curry and if no fennel in it. And that's like uh I do I do the line dance people are on their sausage no sage in it even though it was breakfast.
So the the fennel thing like I so I I used to be the private chef for the Seinfelds back in the day and sometimes there would be you know I would really try to to make it as nice as I could but sometimes there would be like something on the fly and uh and I wanted it to stand out and not seem mediocre that guy wasn't trying. So I would I came up with this like whenever I use fennel, whenever I use black pepper, I use the same amount of fennel and coriander seeds. And I I make like a peppermint with it, or I just make a grind. And like using that in chili or or in a broth base or something, or like on hamburgers or a meat, like it makes it, you know, slightly different, but it's not changing it to where like you gotta worry about the crowd and if they're gonna want it or kind of a thing. Which is why it's in the book kind of a lot.
Like I it's just like my kind of lazy trick to make things slightly different without putting any more effort into it. Yeah, my go-to is not as neutrally in like coriander and cumin. I'm like you have and you have coriander cumin because you have a chili style thing in there, but like I'm always like coriander and cumin. I like coriander. Too much?
No, I like it. Oh, you do it. That's what I use. That's like, you know, if I'm gonna spice something, yeah, I'm gonna add coriander and cumin to it like all the time. You know what's uh uh the bad thing about coriander is like if I'm doing a bunch of it, I'll like pulse it instead of grinding it through a grinder.
And then if you get husks, coriander husks are so persistent if they're not ground well, and then you're like picking them out, and I hate that because I know then when I'm tasting something I've made and I get a coriander husk and I'm like, I know everyone is gonna be experiencing that, and then I feel deeply sad because now it's too late, I can't get it out. That kind of stuff is such a like I'll eat anything. I again I was just in China, I beef bile chicken, they just chop up the whole thing with the bones and everything. I'll I'll if I know it's there, no problem. But when when it's a like if there's a bone in something and it's not supposed to be there, it's like the biggest turn.
I know I'm a chef and stuff, but I I can't like I just like I'm done. Like this, it was built sold to me as deboned or boneless or seedless, you know. Yeah, and it's in there, it just like it turns me off. So when that little piece of cartilage from the thigh is not carved off of the chicken thigh and they don't if if if it's if you solve serve me a whole thigh, no problem. I'll totally, you know, I get it.
But when it's not in there, it just makes me question everything. That's so funny. All right. So in the book, things that are worth money and things that are not. Things that are worth money, butter, interesting for cooking or for eating?
Or both. I think eating really. More for eating, yeah. Yeah. Spreading on bread.
Yeah. You know, I always have. And what's your butter of choice? I mean, I wish Caragol would give me some some uh sponsored content room, but uh is that the McGuire side of your family going carry-go? Yeah, I did a 23andMe or one of those, and I I'm definitely mostly Irish.
Yeah, yeah. I'm northern Euro mutt. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But you know, I did find out there's like a little Norwegian in me, which I didn't know about.
Well, now you gotta get back on that Lefsa train. Let me know which kind of uh roller to use. All right. Not worth spending money on, presumably not because they're not worth eating ice cream sandwiches. They're delicious, but you say don't spend extra money on them.
Buy the cheap ones. Yeah, because they're good. The cheap ones are good. And the the black cookie should stick to your fingers a little bit. I've worked at restaurants where we made them, and because it didn't stick to your finger, we had to remake them.
Like you would and it was a fancy restaurant, you would think that would be good, but no, that the guy wanted it the stick. Yeah, because that's what an ice cream sandwich is supposed to be. And they need to be tempered right. They can't be too hard. They need to be.
And when you when you do it, the the the cookie on top and bottom should break in the exact proper way. That's right. But that should all be basically free. And they should be it, it should be the cheapest one that the bodega has. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Uh back to the hamburger for one second. Do you think that shit because uh for those of you that aren't gonna read the book, you're a dummy, go get the book. However, uh, you grate frozen butter in the way that I would use for biscuits into the meat. Do you think that's a good way to take, let's say, like, let's say you're getting grass-fed at like uh like eighty-five or 90 percent meat fat in there. To get some fat in there and take it to like an 80-20?
Yeah, you don't want to do the smush thing, then you're just kind of you're trying to capture some of that fat and butter inside of it. Yeah. And get some of that on the bread, ideally. But yeah, I would I would think so. That's a cool idea.
We'll try. Yeah. We'll try. Uh we know how it goes. Yeah.
Uh succotash rule. If you're gonna have corn in it, the largest piece you can have is uh it's this way you cut the scallops in half. You're like, don't make the sizes crazy if you're gonna have corn. So the succotash is all a rule in proper size. There's something about eating a bunch of different things that are similar in size.
We can like feel the knife work and the shucking and all that. There's there's something luxurious about that. Yeah, yeah. All right, what am I missing? I'm missing a lot of stuff.
Oh, what about this? For those of you that want an exercise in being alone in your house, there is a recipe, I swear to God, for one cookie. Yeah. It's a controversial because it calls for a teaspoon or a tablespoon of egg yolk, which is wasteful. Okay, you could you could add it to your scrambled eggs the next day.
But uh the idea was like when I was getting sober, I was I had such a sweet tooth that I couldn't make a batch of cookies because I would eat the whole batch. So I developed a recipe that would make me one cookie. And uh we're out of time, but I'll say this because it's on it's on your menu now, I think, and it's in the book. Rehab nachos is specifically because of the like a better take on the kind of food that you would have during that time. Yeah, the first place I went to, like, they're not trying to get you to s be vegan and work out and stop smoking.
They just want you to stop whatever the shit you're doing too much of, you know. So and they're not well funded. So it was always hot dogs and burgers and nachos, like just in rotation for lunch and dinner, and I sort of got hooked up. Yeah. Well, and if and if nachos were too healthy for you, this one's uh cream, uh a cream queso base.
So, you know, if if nachos are too healthy, yeah, you can make the rehab nachos. Well, uh, Greg Baxstrom, nothing matters but delicious. Uh out at Fine Book Stores near you right now. Thanks for coming on Cooking Show Back to the show. Good to see you again.
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