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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live from the Heart of Manhattan Rocket Fire Center, New York City News Stance Studios. Joined as usual with John, how are you doing? Doing great, thanks. Great got Joe Hazen rocking the panels behind me.
What's up? Hey, hey, hey, welcome, full house. Everything's well, we have a full house inside, but we're missing. There's no Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. She's still gallivanting, doing whatever, hammering things that she's doing elsewhere.
And uh Jackie Molecules can't make it. But I believe, holding down the upper left-hand corner of our continent, just off the edge, we got Quinn. How you doing? I'm doing all right. Yeah?
Yeah? All right. I don't know. Yeah. Well, all right.
And today's special guest, I'm gonna get on my my special swag, which they did not bring. I had to bring this from my own house. Yeah. All right. Today's special guests.
Can I get this on top of my are uh Alex Hawk, manager and culinary innovation, manager of culinary innovation at Burger King out of uh Miami, Florida, which by the way, I did not know it was a Florida situation. Born born there, stayed there. It's great. You wouldn't think that flame broiling would come from from Florida. Anyway, and you go Zach or Zachary?
What do you prefer? I know on your chef's jacket and says Zach. Yeah, Zach. All right, all right. I'm the same way.
Like when people say David, I'm like, okay. I feel like someone's trying to yell at me when they say Zachary. Maybe we'll use it. Yeah, go for it. Zach Young, the director of Culinary and Commercialization at Burger King, a title nobody understands.
Right? Accurate. So, uh, and by the way, if you're listening live, it means you're a Patreon member. If you want to know how to become a Patreon member, uh, John, well, first of all, call in your questions to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507.
And you have an extremely rare opportunity actually here to call in and ask questions about people who literally make food and recipe decision uh uh decisions that millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of people will eat. Uh so rather unique opportunity. Call in your questions if you're a Patreon member and Jaron Why tell them how they how they can do that and why they might want to. Go to Patreon.com slash cooking issues. We got a couple different membership levels there.
Uh they all get you access to the Discord. Um they some provide you access to the webcam feed, you get access to listening to the episode before anyone else. Um, just a whole bunch of other cool things, discounts with our partners, great things like that. So check it out, patreon.com slash cooking issues. And it's getting hot, so like I'm still sweating like a dog from my bike ride, which means I can't put my glasses on yet because they'll fog over.
I gotta wait like five, ten minutes before I can read my papers in front of me. You know what I'm saying? This feels like a cool spring morning compared to what I wake up to in Miami. You know, everybody, everybody equilibrates to their own climate. Sure.
You know what I mean? This is why I wish I lived in one of these like butt cold places so I can make fun of all the people coming in and complaining about the cold. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. But I grew up in Pennsylvania, so I get a little uh a little of both.
Yeah, I used to visit Phoenix in the summer on the regular, back when they used leaded gasoline, while when Phoenix was still hardcore polluted, but there wasn't as many people, so it's probably even hotter now. But it's a dry heat. So that one tenths. That's so garbage. The dry heat, the dry heat argument is the biggest load of crap that anyone's ever said.
Because you know what? Like, sure, an oven's also dry heat. It'll kill you. You know what I mean? Like 122 degrees is freaking hot, no matter what the humidity is.
It is true that if you come out of a pool in Arizona at night and it's a hundred out, you can be as you evaporate as all of the moisture in your body evaporates off. But nah, man, 122 hot on anybody's anybody's diet, any amount of humidity. I'm just gonna say that. Yeah. I mean, if we get up to 122 down in Miami, though.
You'd all be dead. It's like a bowl of soup. Oh my God. You would literally be stewing. Yeah.
I wonder, you might, you guys might be able to answer this. I have never calculated. I wonder how much higher the heat transfer coefficient is at Miami humidity levels. Oh man. Well, we'll go put some probes out and find out.
I would bet I would bet on the order of 50% more. Uh yeah. I mean, you would it would have to be a lot higher. Like just the amount. I mean, I don't know relative to like when we talk about it in cooking terms.
Um Yeah, we'd have to go look. Because your humidity, I mean, it's way higher, your transfer is gonna be higher. Yeah, and also you're you've you've lost evaporative cooling. So like what's the point of the thing? Yeah, I mean, that's really your biggest issue.
I mean, they're not nothing is coming off of you. It's just gonna stay low class. Yeah, I mean, how you can't, you can't you can't anything over your body temp at 100% humidity, you can't unhose yourself. You know what I mean? There's no de-hose.
You know what I mean? It's not just doesn't work. It's not okay. Yeah. It's not how we were intended.
It's not the way our bodies are built. We're not, you know, these we're not extremophiles without the proper suits. Man was not meant to live in Miami. No, no. I mean, I don't know.
We'll see. Uh, don't worry, it'll be underwater soon. Okay. I'm just playing the cool, you're right, Al. Yeah, yeah.
Just playing around. Uh all right. So uh this is the portion of the show where we discuss what happened in the past week. So what do you guys got for us? Oh, we're what do you guys got?
Wait, when when have you how long have you been uh in New York this time? Uh Zach was here a little longer. I got in Sunday night. Pretty nice. So you had some time.
I mean, what can you say? How about this? What can you say you were working on at work that was interesting that you're allowed to talk about? And by the way, I'm gonna ask you questions, and if you can't answer, you can't answer it because we understand, you know, company's company, big company. Everything I've worked on this week has not been not been in the public eye.
So I'll default to Zach. Yeah, I got you. I got you on that one. Okay. So this will answer two of your questions.
So what do I do in commercialization? That side of our business is really taking whatever was designed as food and then figuring out how to feed millions of people with it. So we had in this last couple weeks, um, one of the major bakeries that supports us is unfortunately going out of business. And so we've had to go rework the bakery system to make that work. So we do fresh bread for a lot of our core bakery products.
And so we not only have to work out how we're gonna get all that made, we gotta figure out how all those trucks are gonna get rerouted to those stores because they actually for a lot of those deliver them directly to the stores, and those bakeries are really helping manage a lot of that. So it gets really complicated in how you figure that out when you have an issue like that. Now, since since Burger King's been around since the 50s, like how much did you guys take on the just in time? Like in other words, like for those who like don't understand, when you go to a Trader Joe's, if there's even a small blip in the transport chain, it looks like it looks like there's been a run on the bank because they just don't they don't have anything other than today's SKUs in their store, basically. So they run out like that.
Or if, and especially in New York City, where they're trucking in from Jersey and Pennsylvania, if they're like, I don't like the weather. Nope. No groceries for you. That's how it works here. Uh but like is Burger King like like that just in time, or you guys give yourself a buffer?
Depends on the product. Like certain things, yeah. I mean, they're they're pretty much getting them multiple times a week, and if they miss one, you are definitely in trouble, and that thing's not on your menu. Um things like vegetables, things like bread, things that are, you know, really coming in and coming out very quickly because they're the big things that we have on the menu. There are other items that we, you know, any of our frozen items that are snacking or fries or things like that, you know, a little bit more security in those, but even those, like they're high volume, they go through them quickly.
So you can run out of fries just as easily sometimes because you're just ripping through them so fast. Right. And then and also like extra inventory is extra space, extra money means like and it's all the way back because like you have the production of it, they're storing it, then it goes to the distribution centers, they're storing it to some degree, then it goes to the actual restaurant, they're storing it to some degree. So in each of those levels, you really gotta manage where you have inventory. So like if you have something that takes off, it'll deplete through the restaurant, and then it may deplete through the the distribution center really quickly, and now this whole supply chain is at risk because you're not just about like getting it to the restaurant, you're about all the way back to the manufacturer getting it to where it needs to be in a DC to then get it to the restaurant and it'll be moving stuff all over the place.
We'll we'll have issues sometimes where like certain areas are doing really, really well, something takes off, and then we're even just moving around DC to DC because something's really happening in a region and we gotta move things around. Yeah, speaking of uh I was told by the internet that the Whopper Jr. was invented by a bun Snafu. By a Bun Snafu. Yeah, that may be true.
Yeah. I was told what they the story on the internets is that uh they opened a franchise in Puerto Rico and the buns didn't make it in time for the opening. And so the franchisee bought local buns that were smaller and people liked it and Burger King National was like, you know what? Oh car we're gonna chip. Most of that story is definitely true.
I can tell you that Puerto Rico is uh all our franchises great. Puerto Rico is a really special little group down there and they own all the restaurants in Puerto Rico and they are just a great group um that really cares a lot about what they're doing down there and they expand some things in some really fun ways and they still bake buns on in like in Puerto Rico. That's where their buns come from directly like and all their buns today come from there. So it's a pretty cool little little world down there. And they've they've been really fun to work with as kind of their own little microcosm of of little innovation that they like to do.
I still have never made it to Puerto Rico. You know why? Stupid It's great Puerto Rico's awesome tells me. Yeah. They tell me I got you know like they t everyone tells me all the places I have to go, all the foods I have to eat and here I am.
Dumb. Uh John, what do you got? Anything uh from a restaurant world over the past uh week uh you look like I just the look I know I don't know it's like I'm always trying to think of this but you know it's hard to like think of something when I'm just really like expediting and working the past like I'm never working on much you know in a sense like I help do some minor prep. I guess we just like tweaked the chicken brine recipe a little bit, added a little habanero vinegar into it. So we one of our signature dishes is this periper chicken inspired by Nando's out in the UK where uh India grew up.
And yeah, it's great. So we've just been thinking of ways to keep improving it. And that was one of them, and it seems to be going over well. So you know, everyone says, and this is sorry, this is this, I won't spend too long on it. But everyone's like, meh, meh, meh.
Marinades don't matter because it's just on the surface. But you know what? There's a lot of flavor pickup on the surface, and you eat that way, and when you're cooking, or in chicken, especially if you beat the hell out of it or if you needle it. I mean, like, all of these things can affect what's going on. So I think people poo-poo.
People run a study where they dip, they dip a chicken in first of all, they always choose something that doesn't draw well. They choose an object that doesn't have like a lot of like interconnective stuff that doesn't draw. And then they draw conclusions way beyond what they've tested that marinades actually don't work. And I'm here to tell you, like, yeah, sure, of course. You know what I mean?
What do you what do you guys think? Oh man, I could we could spend an hour talking about vacuumes. Um, I would say definitely when you're talking about like trying to get the flavor in there, you get into, you know, a lot of those molecules are bigger and they're just gonna they will stay to some degree on the surface unless you inject them or do something like that. Or if you're doing some like chopped-informed item like a nugget or whatnot. Um, as far as like getting like moisture into your chicken, though, there's a lot you can do in a brine.
There's a lot like chemically that you can do the basic protein chemistry that's going on in any meat, but certainly in poultry, um, there's ways to make much juicier chicken if you really know what you're doing there from a marinade perspective. And like, are you a phosphate man? Uh you don't need to use phosphate either. So, like when you get down to what that is, it's just really playing with pH. And so, like, when you go into more of a vinegar brine, you're typically going the opposite direction.
There's a way you can go that way as well. But yeah, you're trying to buffer to the right pH level to then basically let those proteins hold on to more water is essentially what's happening. You're getting more binding sites essentially there for the water. Um and you'd say, okay, well now you're just adding water to my chicken, whatever. Sort of true, but then if you are doing the right things there, you can make it so that that water is evaporating off through the cook and you're back to really juicy, really flavorful chicken.
And things like salt will actually penetrate in there. So if you do the right salt, you do either white water, you do those things, you can actually get to like really juicy, flavorful chicken. You can't go too far, but if you do it just right, you can get really good product. Speaking of chicken, yesterday I learned that you guys are siblings to Popeyes. We are.
We are. Popeyes, good chicken. Great chicken. Yeah. Yeah.
Their test kitchen is right across the hall. I'm sneaking over there and stealing some uh chicken sick. What kind of friars are they? What kind of fry? Are they ambient?
Are they ambient friars? They're not pressure, are they? Are they pressure? Uh are you allowed to talk about it? Now we're getting into the secrets that I know for lots of other reasons too.
Uh I don't know if we can say what that is. Um you wouldn't be hard to find out if you were really interested. And I think in the internet you could find that out. But uh I need you to go across the hall and ask them this question. Okay.
So Burger King, very smartly, is like some people can't choose between onion rings and French fries. And so you can get half-sies. Yep. On Popeyes on their website, you can't say split the damn thing between spicy and not spicy, because I have people that don't want the spicy chicken. And this is what we in the trade refer to as stupid.
They would refer to it as complicated, but yeah. I mean I mean, you just get down to like in any of these. If your big brothers figured it out, why can't you do it? No, you know what I mean? We're great.
I agree with you. But uh no, I mean, it's difficult, right? Like any of these things, they're they're doing a much harder thing in like handbreading chicken and hand frying and all those things. Like that is very complicated. And so the more complexity you add in there, you just gotta look at it and say, what's the payoff for that?
So, like, yes, could we do that type of thing? You could, but most of the consumers that want that are probably ordering enough that they'll just do two orders of that thing. So now if you offer that, now you've actually just cut into your total sales because that person was gonna buy both. And like in the fried chicken game, there's plenty of people that like hot fried chicken, and there's plenty of people that like to overorder it and eat cold fried chicken the next day. So like you get you've already built a relationship with your customer in that way.
You can unbuild it in those ways and and modify it, but then you really got to know that you aren't just like undercutting your own business and doing that. And so, like in our world, we do a bunch of analytics to figure out like what is a consumer really wanting there, and then we'll run a test. Like for that type of thing, we would go pick up a market and just say, hey, okay, let's let's do this. Let's see how operationally complex it is, and then let's go see if like sales actually increase. If they do, great, throw it on the menu.
But if they don't, like now you've undercut your own business and made it more complicated, so now everyone's getting a worse experience that you're making less money on. It's like that's not what you want. Correct. You said uh you said hand bread, they don't bread in store, do they? Oh, yeah, they do.
I would love to see their breading line. Also, we can't talk about the fryer, but the frying medium really. Oh, yeah. I mean, they excellent choice. Look, uh, here's here's something I was gonna I'm just gonna say this.
Anyone who's buying just chump chump oil at the supermarket. Jump oil. It's like what man, we could go into oil too. What uh what's chump oil in your mind? Uh right in regular people oil that's not stabilized for frying.
You know what I mean? Like you know, like there's although interestingly, the I don't I don't know much about it, but the Weston Corporation has started selling a fry-based, a fry specifically fry oil for consumers. And the issue with it, I think from a sales perspective, is that the the average consumer, my age, which there's five of us left, like uh, you know, they're used to certain specific oils being terrible at frying. Soy, canola, because of like the off flavors, the fish flavors you can get. But the modern ones don't have these problems because they they've had the they've had the fat the uh fatty acids from them that would make those fishy off aromas removed.
They've been stabilized for frying. And so I think people get afraid, well, unless you're afraid of it for a health reason. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about organoleptically. Um uh, you know, if you're afraid of a particular oil based on its provenance, it's like you kind of have to erase that when you're looking at fry oils and the way they're formulated.
So the average person just doesn't have the ability to go buy good fry oil at their supermarket, you know? Yeah, not in the supermarket. But I feel like most people that are frying, like go to a restaurant depot or something. Go somewhere where they do sell that kind of thing and go grab some. It's just so much better.
Yeah, I mean it is. You're right. Like the the amount of technology that's gone into making those fryer oils better is is huge. And they've done a lot of things to balance them and they've done a lot of things to blend them properly. And it's not always just a canoa or a corn or a you know, whatever, whatever your thing's gonna be, um, having the right mix and having the right, you know, profile you're looking for from like longevity versus flavor versus you know, overall heat that you're going for.
You know, if you're in lower temp ranges, you want a different thing for an higher range. Yeah, but nobody is at home. Everyone's everyone at home is jacking their freaking temperature because they and then like you know what I mean. Yeah. I know a guy who can recover.
Yeah, well, you know, Jimmy rig one, yeah. I'm definitely not allowed to recommend that people hot rod their home fryers to three thousand watts. Just light a fire underneath it. It'll be fine. Well, but then you know you have the coals.
Look, I'm saying it's ch good frying at home is relatively challenging. Yeah. Fast frying. Now I think like this is why like old school, like old school frying where like chick old school chicken frying, which is a lot longer at a lower temperature. More pan frying, yeah, shallow pan frying.
Yeah, you can do a good job at home. Yeah, but like real, real and here's the thing. Tough with french fries, yeah. Yeah, well, yeah. This is why uh my first fryer that I owned.
I mean, I worked at a fry station when I was in like high school college, and I was like, oh my God. And that's when I learned that the like the 40 to 50, 60 pound fryer range is where everyone should be. Sure. You know what I mean? But uh I was given a fry daddy, and I was like, this makes three great French fries.
Three. Yeah, that's you put anymore, it's it's overloaded. You drop the temperature. But everyone wants to overload because you know, what are they gonna do? Have right efficiency.
Yeah. I have a I have a I think it's wherever I forget. I'm gonna do, I'm gonna record it soon. I bought a uh they made in the 70s a potato chip factory, quote unquote, and it automatically cuts. Oh, like a spiralizer and then drops it.
It has like a little cuisinar blade and a screw feed and a plunger. And you put it has to be a small potato, so it's like 70-sized potatoes, although not baking potatoes, small. So I I made a pre-cutter, I made a cookie cutter to pre-cut. So you drop it in and it goes mew mew mew mew mew. There's a cat in there?
It shaves off. Yeah. It shaves off the cat inside, the high temp cat shaves off three, three or four potato slices into this like tiny thing of oil, and it's got an auto skimmer. So it flips it over and then scrapes it out of the oil. And so you could get a bag of potato chips in three hours.
But you have to just sit there and look at it. It's the dumbest. I love it. I'm gonna PID control it because the the thermal control is not the best. But when it's operating at Did you hear?
And I know this is not a big deal for you guys, but did you hear that they genetically engineered a uh potato that doesn't oxidize when you cut it? No. Yeah. What I mean, don't have to soak it. Yeah, but like what uh what I feel like in anytime you do that type of thing, I feel like you have some other big issue, like, oh yeah, it does that.
Also, though. Oh, yeah, we all die. It's fine though. Yeah, it's also you know, red and it tastes terrible. But what you know it looked fantastic on Instagram.
I have to say, the I mean, you know, that's a big problem. I you know, I lose five minutes of my life, but my potatoes don't brown, sale. It still tastes good. I I mean when you get into that, like so much. If you can do that and like no other attributes change, good job.
But like that's I've said it on air, even though they don't pay us a dime. The honey glow pineapple, they did a good job. They allowed it to ripen, but it doesn't get soft. They taste good, it's a good product. So I buy it.
I buy exclusively that for the bar. Yeah. If you can do like if that's what they've done, awesome. But even if that's where they're at now, that just means that it's possible and they'll figure out how to make it work later, typically. Unless it's like a fundamental chemistry thing that just can't change.
Right. There was that tomato that they supposedly made that was hard, but then nobody liked it. Remember? There was a tomato that supposedly developed the ripe flavors but didn't turn to mush. This was like a decade ago and it didn't work.
Yeah. I know some tomaco. That's my personality. Oh, that's a good Simpsons reference. I appreciate that.
Are we talking about a Lestra Olean type of thing? I love that stuff. That's really kind of what you're doing. Did you guys do that? No, we didn't.
No, God knew. No? Were you owned by PG and E back in the day or whatever it is? No, uh, that's Pacific Gas. Uh it's uh Proctor and Gamble.
Yeah. No, but things like that, like, those are the unsuccessful versions, right? Like there's plenty of versions of the colours. I would say that would actually work. Commercially, commercially unsuccessful because first of all, who's like, you know what we should call this?
Wow. You know what I mean? So dumb. And then on top of it, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You can only put it in snack foods.
It cannot go into anything that's actually consumed for nutrition. And people are like, what? And then like it got people like the whole leakage thing. Wow. It's just not good.
I love that label, you know. Yeah. You know, it's like that was the uh the that's what became ICP later, right? It's all the juggalos. And then the best part of wow.
Yeah. Wow. Whoa, whoa. But uh that was it's a myth because what happened is is they I mean, not to get too down into it. My my day.
We're already there. My prediction in the 90s was a chamber pot in every seat. But uh no, but uh seriously, once they figured out hydrogenate, they took that thing out. Now, there was for a while a diet pill that basically turned your whole body into a lestra. Do you remember this one?
It was called a lie. And I tested it. Oh, and uh what it did what it did is is it stopped your ability to like of your intestines to absorb and break down fats. And what that meant is if you ate liquid fat, bee peep be loop boop deep boop boop, you know. I don't think it made any of those noises on the way out.
Yeah. Or you have a weird uh more sounded like somebody microwaving corners. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, I don't know how the hell to get on this. This is a mistake.
Uh all right. We do the full food experience all the way to the first time. Well, that was you know, the Museum of Food and Drink was gonna do farm to toilet. No one's done it yet. That's hey yeah, we're missing out.
It's a circle of circle of life, yeah. It gets back to fertile. But it was to tail plus. I don't know why we missed that part. Yeah, because dumb, dumb.
You guys did the moldy whopper. Why didn't you finish your job, dude? We should have. Mold, by the way, moldy whopper is not that they're serving a moldy whopper, they were just proving that they didn't uh jack it with so many preservatives that it would not mold. You can compost a whopper.
We do we fight mold in our whoppers regularly. It's uh like we don't put those in there. We do have clean label uh bread. We have a very hearty clean label. Yeah, like we're surprisingly clean labeled to like it's it is difficult to get some of these products all the places we need them.
And that's why like fresh bread is really hard. Like a lot of people are unfrozen. You know, most of ours is not we here and there we have to do it just because like getting bread to Hawaii is not exactly the easiest thing to do when you have a bakery out there, but do you do a collab with Hawaii with uh with wine? Yeah. No, we we do do special things, like we do a teriaki whopper out there.
They made an awful cartoon. King's Hawaiian made an absolutely awful like video, like worse than the have you seen any of the Brazilian mockbusters? No, but they sound great. Oh, no, they're real bad. Like uh the my favorite one, which everyone needs to go watch, is for about five minutes, turn it off.
Just say you've watched it. Rat tattooing. It's a rat tattoo-y rip-off, and it's Chef Marcel Toing is the is the rat chef. And yeah, it's a mockbuster. It's a thing.
They have a car's rip-off, but I forget what it's called. They have uh they have an up rip-off that's called like fly away balloon man or something like this. Classics. Absolute classics. King's Hawaiian has maybe the most unwatchable cartoon.
There's a there's a religious finding Nemo that is possibly as bad as the King's Hawaiian. Which by the way, I like their product. This is no shade on the roles. Sure. Just stick to the roles.
Yeah, stick to the roles. Don't do an animated know your role. Like there's a bunch of problems. So get your role. Let's get some questions for you guys from the Patreon people.
Uh uh Teddy D writes in uh as someone who wants to consume this is a this is uh, you know, do you do beverage? Sure. Yeah. Uh as someone who wants to consume less sugar but won't give up on taste and wants something more with scare quote natural, uh why does stevia fall short today? Is it the lingering bitterness?
Yeah, yes, uh, or the way it behaves in high concentration formats like syrups, and is anyone close to solving that in an industrial manner? This may be a beverage question, but this gets down to an ingredient question. Bring it back to the back. Uh yeah, I mean it's two things. It's the the way the sugar hits your palate, too.
So like if you think about, you know, what fructose, glucose, sucrose, they all kind of have a different flavor curve. So like fructose kind of like really hits your palate hard and then kind of peters off. You know, sucrose combination of that and glucose, and it just kind of wafts over your palate. A lot of the artificial sweeteners, like they just hit you really hard up front. You know, they're very, very concentrate, or they're not concentrated, they're very, very powerful in very low concentrations.
So they don't hit that right. And then you have to put a lot of other things in there to ultimately get it to wash over your palate properly. So then we have to put in thickeners and different things because like sugar just naturally will thicken it up to the viscosity that you want, it'll give you the body that you want, it'll give you all the things that you kind of want. And and I say want, it's what you're used to, right? Like people like diet soda, people like whatever, that's what they're into.
In stevia, it's it's the way that it hits, it's the way that it lingers, it's the way that kind of bitter off note, whatever you really want to call it, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, hits your palate. And it goes back to like if you drink a bunch of it, I bet that you're okay with it. I don't like it because you know, I grew up with sugar and then did diet sodas, and diet sodas hit my palate the way I want them to now. Like I'm to the point where like a normal sugar, or if you go like a high fructose corn syrup or like an actual like classic Coke or something, are so sugary to me that I don't love them.
Like they're too syrupy to me because I drink a lot of diet soda. The volume that we drink diet soda in that test case is a lot. Yeah, because for if you're hydrating with a soda, it's gotta be diet. For sure. Yeah, and that's that's what we end up doing.
Yeah and and you know, is uh to the other point of that are we close to a solution? Um, not like there's not like one on the horizon. It's like, oh, we're about to get there on this. There are lots of other ways that we try to do that. And there's lots of tricks that we try to play of like how can we make your palate feel that?
And a lot of the answers are like, hey, you know, don't go all the way to zero. You know, put a little bit of fructose in there. Put a little bit of sucrose in it. Put a little bit of a real sweetener in there that'll get you over like some of the rough patches. Because like in any food, like there's good and there's bad, and you try to just get this right wave of all the good that hits your palate correctly, and the bad just kind of washes out.
Right. That's if you do that right in sweeteners, you can kind of balance it out. It's just kind of tricky to always hit that. And then they also shotgun them, right? They add like a bunch of them to try to like not have too much of any one nasty.
Yeah. And then you get into this place of like it's it's zero or a thousand. Like no one wants, you know, a lot of people have tried like the Dr. Pepper 10s and those things where it's like we put a little bit in there, a total more balance, whatever. And I think they were, but then no one wanted them because it was like I want nothing or I want everything.
Have you met us? Yeah. As a people? No, it's the it's the argument I make when we try to do these like in-between things. It's like, look, the especially in America, our consumers want like I will eat salad for a week so I can have a piece of chocolate cake.
But I don't want half sugar chocolate cake. Like just give me the full chocolate cake. That's what I'm saying. Although, uh, what would a chocolate salad be like? I don't know where to find out now.
Yeah, yeah. Um, on that on soda, we something you said like stuck with me, is like if you get used to it, you get used to anything. I grew up pre, I grew up on freaking saccharin. Yeah. You know what I mean?
And a little rough when you go back to it, it's nasty. The only thing that saccharine remained in after NutralSweet became a thing was uh tonic water because the lingering bitterness of saccharine meant that they could use less quinine. Yeah, like it actually worked, right? And you still get, you know, some pieces of it here and there in little packets or whatever, but like it just doesn't show up that much anymore. Yeah, no.
And then uh I just missed the cyclomates. Everyone said that cyclomates was real good, which was the one that got the first artificial sweetener cancer scare. Yeah. And so cyclomates got banned and saccharin came in, and then I came in kind of the the tab generation in the 70s. You know what I mean?
You can tell how important this is because you have literally diehards for classic Coke, current Coke, Coke Zero, and Diet Coke. And each of those are essentially I mean they're the same thing trying to hit the same thing, and they all got there a different way. And they're all wrong except the Diet Coke people. I do have an argument with my wife constantly. Yeah.
I'm a big Coke Zero guy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm not used to it. Diet Coke for me is like if I want boom.
Yeah. Like you, if you had drank stevia, would like it. That's what I'm hearing. Oh, yeah. Dicoke has a higher Dicoke has a higher caffeine content too than Coke Zero.
Diet Coke, uh did they move? Are they still uh um neutral sweet or did they move to a Splenda formulation on that? I don't, you know, I'd have to look. I don't remember what I'm saying. It's been a while.
I'm they're very protective of it, right? Like it's one where they don't want to change it because it is just so well established of like that consumer wants that, right? Because it was originally a Coke Zero and then it switched to a technically Coke Zero sugar. Yeah. They're not the same thing.
Yeah, and I don't know, it's a switch in ingredients when they changed the name. I didn't follow it closely enough to know the history of where they actually landed there. It's also a green version of the coke. That's the stevia version, I think. Are you are you talking about the Heinz green squirt blast?
Oh yeah. Easy squirt blasters. Purple green, all those things. Yeah. How did they get the do any of you actually know how they I looked it up once?
How how did they get the color out of the ketchup so that they could cover it over with other color? And what did it look like? When they went green and purple and all that? Because I heard that they bleached out, they they somehow oxidized and bleached out the lycopene and then jacked it with color. I don't know if that's true.
I mean, I think there would be there's definitely things you could do there. I I guess I don't know. I just always assume they had just thrown a whole bunch of artificial color in there. To the point you can almost taste it. I mean, but like I mean, lycopene's pretty intense.
Yeah, it's true. It would be difficult. I mean, you could I don't even know if you'd go over it. Like then you get into weird color stuff where like can you whiten it out with like a titanium dioxide and then you know, now you're in like a blank palette and then you can go over that. I I don't know that that would work.
I would like you, I don't know how those fight. Anyone that can hear us, let us know how to do it. Cause I'm gonna make I'm gonna make Heinz clear. I mean clear crystal heinz? Yeah, crystal heinz.
I think it would have high school. That would be a little like the body of it would be hard. But I think you could actually get closer to like a clear heinz than you would. It did have a much different texture. You'd have to make it really weird though.
Yeah. I I I I missed that whole because I I you know I didn't have kids yet, so I missed the whole ketchup ketchup wasn't broke. I didn't need it fixed. Go to the cake ingredient aisle and get you some artificial color. I bought a bunch of titanium dioxide a couple of years ago because uh Dax wanted to make actual edible Tide Pods.
And so, like, you know, I had figured it out. Wait, the re the regular ones aren't? Exactly. Whenever I whenever I bring tide into the house, I would be like snack time. Uh but like, yeah, I was gonna make, you know, like uh edible edible sheets and like mold them out, and then and so like I'd What precedent are you setting over there?
Well, exactly. My wife saw the the bag of titanium dioxide and I started like getting ready to 3D print the molds and stuff to cast the sheets and everything, and she's like, A, like you should be making money instead of this. And B, what the hell? You're trying to encourage people to eat things that look like Tide Pods. This is two kinds of bad ideas, and I've only looked at it for 10 seconds.
I'm sure there are more. Yeah. But it won't even clean the laundry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was like, yeah, fair.
Fair. So I never made them. But if anyone's listening, make them. Make them. Send them in.
I'll eat them. Uh they just send you an actual Tide Pod and eat it. I mean, I hopefully hopefully the challenge culture is over. Is the challenge culture over? I don't know.
I just like the idea of sending like 10, and it's like the uh we we just keep one as a regular one. Should she eat our Tide Pod? Yeah, should she have Tide Pods like and you guys just eat one each episode and see who loses? Yeah, yeah. Tide Pod, Tide Pod Roulette.
Yeah, not a good idea. All right. Okay. Another question in from uh not so serena. Now when you answer her, uh she's a professional.
Uh-huh. Like so, but like food form uh unlike the like I forget who she's working for now, but like she's in in the biz Naz. Okay. So uh for Zach and Alex, what is what is your favorite product launch you've done at Burger King or otherwise in your career? And as an add-on, what's an item you've worked on?
And we talked a similar thing yesterday before I had seen this question. What's an item you've worked on that you think is underrated and or wish people uh knew more about and tell me why you love those things? I know I know both of mine. Well, I'd there's a million things. Like I've so I've been around in different parts of this industry, and there's lots of things I've got to work on that I probably can't talk about.
But in in Burger King World, um the big one for me over the last year was the Whopper. Like we redid the Whopper, we went through and picked apart all the ingredients and said, like, is this the best tomato? Is this the best mayo? Is this the best lettuce? Is this the best bun?
We figured out the things that we thought would really move the needle. And and it's really difficult with something like that because it's super nostalgic. People have a real relationship with it and they really love it for a lot of different reasons. So you can't, even if you thought, like, oh, we could go to some like crazy, you know, let's go to a brioche or let's go to some other you know, crazy bread. Really difficult to do that because you know, you're gonna really alienate a lot of your customer base.
So we had to figure out how you make it all better and how you bring in new consumers and really celebrate what the food is, make it better, make the people that get it today still like it and like it better, and then make new consumers really interested in it. So it's like a really complicated mix. Um, which I think anyone that has like a really like you were talking about chicken earlier, like trying to reinvent a classic on your menu like that is always really difficult. So that was really fun to go do. And then because it's so big, it's like everything had to be perfect.
So, you know, I was talking about bakeries. We have over 30 different bakeries around the US that support our system, and so had to go around all those bakeries and go work with all these bakers and all these teams to go perfectly make our bread in every single one of these bakeries, and then do the same thing for mayo and do the same thing for, you know, we were originally playing around with the patty, we were originally playing around with the lettuce and the tomatoes. Well, playing around with lettuce, hold on. It's gotta be iceberg, right? Is there a different answer?
No, but so there's so many like layers to that though. Like, where is it made? Is it made in a greenhouse? Is it made in these different fields? How are we processing it?
Like, are we washing, are we doing it back in house? Are we cutting it ourselves? Are we having someone else cut it for us? Are you shred or leaf? Uh, we're more of a not like a shred, we're like a chop, is what I would call it.
Um, but then you get down into the depths of that of like what is the right way to do that and to deliver consistency because we could bring it back in house, which we used to do for everything. We still do it in some of our stores. Um, but then you have you gotta wash it and you gotta chop it and you gotta have consistency in that and all the different ways you do it. Are you doing it by hand? Are you doing a chopper that you know is a little more automated when you're gonna do it?
Get to the chopper, get to the chopper. Yeah, and then we do that. Um, and so like in any of those, we go and explore that whole thing and say, is this worth it, right? Like, let's say we could make, you know, we've looked at really good leaf lettuces and said, like, this would be amazing. And then you go look at like supply and say, like, yeah, this would be amazing for like two months until we ran out of supply.
Also, you know what's really good on a burger? Iceberg lettuce. Yeah, exactly. And it holds up. Like, those are the things you come back to is like you find out pretty quickly, like, no, that's just not the right thing.
But versus like a tomato, where you know, I think a lot of people know what a good tomato and a bad tomato is, and then you can really talk about like where it's picked, when it's picked, what regions we're getting it from, what sizes we're specing in so it fits on the burger right. And then we have two sizes of burger, so like does it fit on the Whopper well? Does it fit on the Whopper Jr. well? Does it fit on all of our builds well, you know, of our chicken sandwiches, any of that stuff.
So then you get into a lot of depth of like, you know, in tomato, it's like what's too ripe, what's not ripe enough. How do I get it perfect in restaurant every time? Because if it's too ripe, it's not gonna slice. It's not ripe enough, it doesn't taste very good. So like that balance is always really difficult.
Um and then like the hidden gem on our menu, I think is the we were talking about it earlier, actually. The original chicken sandwich, I think is like the hidden gem. And it is not now, but will in the future be probably my biggest uh just in industry, honestly, one of my favorite things to have worked on. Because we're we're elevating kind of everything on our menu. That's the broiled one, the one that was originally the BK broiler or different.
No, this is the chicken sandwich. This is the this is the just a fried uh long boy. Yeah, the long long chicken for international uh folks. But the original chicken. Is that a cannibalistic reference?
Yeah, that's it. No, but it's it is the you know, it's our classic longer chicken sandwich, and it um it's one that's been on our menu for a very long time, and no one's really updated it because it's such a nostalgic thing. And so like similarly, trying to elevate something like that is really difficult because you can't go too far away from what makes it great, but it's you know, people haven't really touched it in 30, 40 years now. And so from my background anyway, it was one to really go tackle and say, like, well, let's go look at it. We did it with Whopper.
This is no bigger than that is like can we go make this better? And so, you know, you guys will see for us, you know, the end of this year and beginning of next year, and then on beyond that, like we're doing a lot of generations of the next elevation of our core menu, and the next time that we like take a look at something, and then like we're gonna make it better. We're gonna make it better, we're gonna make it better. So we're gonna keep doing that. We have, you know, a lot of the next chapters kind of already sketched out and and working through.
So there'll be some stuff at the end of this year, and then there'll be some more stuff at the beginning of next year. And that's what you got for me. So I'm one year into my time at Burger King, so I have yet to launch anything yet. Um we're about to turn the faucet on, though. I just can't talk about any of that stuff till it launches.
If this was three to six months from now, man, I would have a lot. In fact, I am like I said before, on the precipice of revolutionizing a cooking method. Oh, that'd be great. I can't I can't wait. Wait, way to tease.
It's just not out yet. Um in my in my last role, uh Mid Atlantic Sea Store Chain based out of Western Pennsylvania. Um You do the math. You do the math. Not hard to figure out.
Uh I I helped uh develop a secret menu. We had touchscreen ordering. There was a secret key hidden on the menu. They said, Sky's the limit, develop whatever you want. I came up with six different ideas.
All Hamachi crude. All deliberate these were all excellent. Um, like a French toast stick platter. So deep ride French toast sticks covered in cheese sausage and syrup. Excellent mac and cheeseburger, a taco dea, which was a quesadilla with crunchy tacos in it, all these things.
And he's proud of that. I'm proud, well, this is what it is. It was a it was it was very fun. And then because they said the sky's the limits, I really kind of went for it. Uh we ran them through our calorie calculator at some point while they were in test and said, geez, you know what, guys?
I don't think we're gonna launch these. We might be getting a call from Men's Health magazine who releases a list every year of the unhealthiest fast food items, and they're like, all six of these would be at the top of that list. So that didn't launch. You redefined the whole list. So I don't know if maybe that's not my proudest, but that was that was by far the most fun thing that I that I've done.
Is it like did have you guys ever in the test kitchen going to launches that that you current Burger King doesn't make anymore or were uh what do they call it? The limited time limited LTOs, LTOs. Limit time offering. Uh do you recreate some of the old LTOs in the test kitchen? Yeah.
I mean have you done the Windows 7 burger? No. No. No. We do that, and then like we meet with our international counterparts too, and like we'll like we just did this about a month ago, where we'll all get together as kind of a global mix and and look at stuff that we're doing around the globe, too.
So like they can kind of see what we're working on because we tend to be working on a lot of the core plus, and then we get to see some like fun things from around the globe. Yeah. All right. From uh I think you're supposed to say Jameson, but it's j jam a five on. I think it's supposed to be yeah, Jamma Five on.
Uh, what tech that we have never heard of uh that you use at work would you really think that people would like to have access to at home? Alex, this is your moment for your favorite thing that we never bring in. A CVAP? Yeah. Oh man, man.
Yeah. I do love a CVAP. Um not really much use for it at Burger King, but man, do I love the way that's a good one? For those of you that don't know, it's uh it was the original it was built for Kentucky Fried Chicken by Winston, uh whatever his name is, uh whatever his first name is Winston. Winston.
And uh it's uh a water bath and a cavity, and you can get you you basically set the the dry ball wet bulb, but they don't do it in necessarily an intuitive way, they do it in crispy units, which doesn't make sense to any other person. But anyway, that's a vapor controlled technology. Yeah. Holds it crispy, keeps it hot without drying it out. It's great.
I actually, you know what? The one time I've called it on the show one time, I'm sure you don't remember. Um asking you, how could you incorporate a steam function and a wet bulb into a speed oven that would also involve the forced heat, forced air, um, cabinet temperature, and uh the microwave element. And you were like, Oh man, what are you asking me for? Yeah, no, but like look more complicated.
It's hard it's hard. Like, you know, uh my grandpa was a radar tech and I always asked him to help me build ridiculous microwaves, and he was like, no. No. I was like, all right. It's like my dad used to build lasers.
I'm like, Dad, I want to build, he's like, I'll help you build like a uh a normal person laser. I'm like, no, I want a CO2 laser. He's like, nope. Nope. It's uh legitimately dangerous.
Yeah, quite a child. Yeah, you know what I mean? But like, so like uh I feel like I had these foiled childhood things, but I've always wanted to deal with ridiculous microwaves. And then I realized that they were kind of correct. Did you know that there's uh a not small number of people who have been killed in the past six years doing DIY microwave hacks.
Oh, I'm sure. Where they're taking the transformer out and make doing like stupid crafts, like you know, scorch crafts and stuff, and like one wrong in your toast. You know what I mean? So, because they're using the high voltage side of the transformer and getting zorged, you know. So this reminds me of something that happened while I was in culinary school.
Uh we rented a house off campus. Old, old, old house. Um, one night, me and the guys hanging out decided, well, let's go see what's in the basement. And like it was outside access. Not really supposed to go in there.
We went in there, we went to this old dank basement, and there's just all these laser sequences set up everywhere. Really, really strange. In culinary school. In color, so it was a technical school. Um, and then Homaru Kantu ran this lab.
Oh, geez. Oh man. Zang. Uh like but uh in the back of this basement, we you kept walking, there's just a door. We open this door, and it's a perfectly all white room lit brightly with neon lights with five slots cut into the walls, and then each of those slots was a microwave.
And it was the str I still I want to go back to that house and find out what were they doing. What's going on in that basement? This sounds like just a fever trip. I don't know what you the craziest thing. Oh, wait, no, I'm I'm sorry.
This was I actually watched the new saw movie. Oh, yeah. You get to choose which I wanted to make a room-sized microwave. This is the thing that my grandpa wouldn't help me do. And I don't know why.
Rightly so. I wanted to imagine this though. It was back when I was in art school, and I was like, I was like, grandpa, listen, listen. You know, I was like, come on. You can picture it.
We get a round table and and and you we put it on a rotating platform, we put the raw food on the table, and we set we we time it so that when the food is done, the candle picks up just enough energy to carbonize and light as the thing goes ding, then you walk into the microwave and eat your meal. Okay. Well, it was even dumber at once you got to the end of you walk into a microwave to eat your meal. Well, but you know, you don't turn it on again. Someone just like kicks the door closed, like, oops, I put it on 30 seconds, whoops.
Yeah. What's the largest microwave you've seen, Zach in production? Uh, that gets it. Let's use for commercial thawing. Yeah, but when you did say that, I was like also just like a pallet of hot pockets and just like that'd be the ultimate cold and hot uh experience.
Um the biggest ones I've seen are on like fully cooked bacon lines. Are, you know, in the protein world, they they'll use them basically like bacon, you just have to really to get it to fully cook, which is a weird legal term in this case, because it's technically cooked before that. Right. During the cure step, it's cooked. Well, no, even in the this is even weirder.
So you have to have removed a certain amount of water from fully cooked bacon to call it fully cooked. So like it's not truly fully cooked and can't be labeled as such unless a certain amount of water is taken out of it, regardless of what temperature it hits. Doesn't matter that you've actually hit, you know, a kill step or a kill temperature. You have to have removed a certain amount of water. So there's like a weird distinction of like cooked but not fully cooked bacon.
So fully cooked bacon then's an inherently safe food. Because it has enough water out that you can put it in a jar. Yeah, and you know, it's there's still other requirements generally, yes, there's still other requirements you'd have to make sure that we're right more on the pack outside of a particular facility to make sure that it uh could be like ambient or anything like that. But yeah, generally speaking, it's got so much salt and so many nitrates and and so little water that like you're down to a water activity that's pretty low just out of that. But plus the salt and nitrates.
Like you're definitely there. I tried to make a home water activity meter back in the day. Did not work. So I will not talk about it. Uh Alex, you also, yesterday we were chatting, just for those no, we were chatting yesterday, we went to dinner.
Very nice time. Great time. Um also have or been were playing around with the water fryer, which is something people have asked about. And you say, like, you le you lurve it. I I I did, I really did enjoy that.
When I first saw it, I think my reaction was not dissimilar to everybody else's. Is like, wait, this is water and oil in a vat. Like, this sounds like a death trap. And then I I went through the presentation, saw it, worked with it, and thought, this is actually a really great idea. So, for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, uh, so if anyone's heard me talk about frying, everyone knows I'm a fan of the cold zone.
Right, right. Yep. And so uh the issue with these fryers is they have the the that in the chamber below the tubes, it's tube or it's electric or both. Uh it's closed, it is electric. Okay, so but but below the heat elements is in deeper than normal cold zone that like necks down into like uh an upside-down steeple.
Yeah. And once they can guarantee that the temperature in that cold zone is below the boiling point, they it's now water. And you just dump water in, it goes into the cold zone. All right, now just yeah, so the water actually flows through the oil before it superheats enough to boil over, it hits that cold zone, stays cool and continues to drop, and then it drops into a chamber below the oil cool zone into a water cool zone, uh, through a bottleneck, and then all of those fragments and things that are sloughing off during fryer also flow through that same process and continue to sink and then land eventually between the oil on top of the water. So when you're draining this, everything is just sitting right there.
It's not recirculating back through the fryer. Nothing's boiling over. We saw them fill a fryer basket with ice, drop it into the fryer at full temperature. This this melted and sank so fast that it didn't boil over and it hit that, it hit that that water portion. People do not do that.
Do not do that. Yeah. Don't try to build this one at home. Listen. Please.
Any of you? Don't listen. Do not. I'll say it one more time. Do not.
Second only to the microwave room. Bad idea. Yeah. Don't. But I think this is why people have a tough time wrapping their mind around something because it's like every part of your body is like, no.
No. Yeah. You know what I mean? But like the numbers, it's one of those like, but theoretically it could work, and then someone went and did it. It's cool.
Yeah. On machines that people have asked about constantly on the show over the years that you guys use in practice. And I'm gonna also piggyback to Teddy's question. Um maybe this is uh JM of five ons as well. Um the carbonated frozen machines.
So on a are on a carbonated, first of all, has anyone ever properly cracked diet frozens? Not that we've seen the other the issue more with those on our side is we don't have enough um barrels to need one. Like if you want that, you want full sweet. How many barrels do you have on your milkshake machine? Because you have like five freaking flavors.
Are they mix-ins? Yeah, they make sense. Yeah. So we on FCB's frozen carbonated beverage, we do you're supposed to have a three barrel. There's some people that still have two barrel.
Pepper. Yep. Because pepper. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So you've got you'll always have you always have two that are kind of like standards, and then you'll have one rotator that that comes in. That's the idea. And then on shake, uh, usually really just one in most restaurants. Some will have the double barrel where you have Sunday and shake, um, and then some will just have the single barrel, and then you have to make shake with it, kind of so it's it's vanilla base and both chocolate and strawberry and Oreo are all mix in?
Yeah. Yep, you got it. And it is like a Hamilton Beach m style thing for mixing, or man, one of Hamilton Beach, yes, not that far off of that. Which, you know, there's different generations of those too. Like we've had better and worse of those.
But like all of our specialty shakes, yeah, they're handmade, they're they're different syrups and and blends that we put in there in different like shake. We'll do things on top, we'll do things in them. You know, we've we've tried to do a lot of fun things in the shake space because you know, burgers and shakes go really well together. Yeah. I have a the original Hamilton Beach was Arnold.
And I own one from I mean the 30s, it says like Arnold number 17 on it. And as long as you don't plug it in backwards, it's fine. You do that and it just blows up. No, it shows just goes to full speed immediately. You you get you get shaked when you touch it.
There's a and I can't, there's a the way that it's assembled. Uh this particular model I can't find on the internet how to disassemble it. Like it's screwed together in such a way that I can't replace the internal switch. So, like part of the switch is floating. So as long as the side of the switch that's touching the body is on the neutral side, you're good.
But if you flip it so that that's on the 120 side, sh poigin. I just like this idea that like you'd flip it, it's on the wrong side, and it's not until you put a shake into it. Well, like it blows you back. There's now a soup machine. Yeah, now you're like stuck in there just forever making this stuff.
Yeah, I was talking to Joe Joe a couple of months ago. I used to have an amp custom with a K that was like it was like looked like Eddie Munster. It was like uh upholstered amp. And that thing, if you plugged that thing in wrong, it would blow you back. You would you'd have the base on.
If you were if I was holding the base, the strings, and I touched the amp, and that was boom! You know what I mean? It was like, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was nasty.
Hey, hey, we only have seven minutes, 30 seconds left. Quinn, I realized you didn't tell us what you did this week. You gotta get us something. Let them respond. What's up?
Oh, yeah. Uh we did like the best thing I cooked this week was a riff on a Metro Silena. I busted open a new trolley that we actually uh marinated in uh Shio Koji originally. Uh I did buy the Koji rice. I didn't make it this time.
But uh that turned out really good. And we did uh some BC cherry tomatoes, and that's British Columbia frog. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Yeah.
Um the tomatoes could have been a little riper. So we augmented the talk with a few pieces of uh strawberry. And it was actually really good. Yeah, nice. Shout out to Quinn for his books on ice creams or bays and things.
I have them. They're excellent. Excellent work, those are great. Um's geared towards the ninja creamy, right? I need to get that.
Creamy. Right. I we have uh we have an army of those in the test kitchen. So yeah. Really?
Great. Um back on frozins. May Quinn, you try him in whenever you want. Back on this frozen machine, because I've never used one. I've uh I've said before many times that I tried to modify uh an old regular ice cream machine to churn carbonated, it did not end well for the kitchen.
Uh it was a nightmare. The pastry this is one of the reasons one of this very many reasons that the pastry department hated me at the school. But uh so what percentage, what percentage of that drink is frozen? Because the carbonation's only in the non-frozen portion. And what's the bricks level of the starting base?
Is in other words, it's gotta be higher than soda, right? It's gotta be closer to 1213 and not like 1110, right? Yes. I'm trying to think what our target was, because we we did hack ours to put a frozen uh frozen Negroni in. Uh frozen carb groni.
It was uh that was that was a solid. Here's the problem. You get people crunked. Yeah, oh god, yeah. Like people get turnt fast.
You know what I mean? Uh something like that. Yeah, we opened up a bag in the box and filled it. We emptied the contents and added the Negroni syrup, and it was it was solid. What pressure are those things running at?
So you they're oh god, I can't remember where we're on PSI. I mean we there so the thing about those is they end up being some degree of set it, forget it, because they're they're preset to bricks levels and they're preset to um the amount of carbonation that's in them. So everything that goes into them is just built to like work, right? So we don't play as much with those levels because you need those to kind of set as the standard, and then you can play around with the flavors, but like you can't do too much to to adjust those too far up and down. There's a range, like you can go a little bit up and go a little bit down.
But to your earlier question, like you also have a amount of overrun like you would in an ice cream machine. So you do have an amount of air that's also in this case CO2, but like you have an amount of gaseous phase that's in there too. So it's a weird mixture because when it comes out, it's also expanding while it's doing it, right? Like instant nucleation.org. Yeah, so you're doing that as well.
So it's a it's a little bit more complicated than just a standard slushy where you really are just talking about a water and a frozen space or a liquid and a frozen state. This has then all three states kind of all happening at the same time. So then the flow characteristics of it are a little different, just like in an ice cream, like when you have heavier, like a higher overrun, it flows a little bit better, but it also melts a little bit fat. Like you've got all these things that are going on, and it just becomes a little bit more complicated in how that thing melts and how you're trying to like make all the combinations. So paradoxically, right?
I would guess that because it is not a liquid that it will nucleate like a mother, which would be bad were it a liquid, but then it forms a stable thing and then probably actually still tastes relatively carbonated. Yeah, it does. I mean, surprisingly so, and because of how all that's happening, it really kind of expands and nucleates in a lot of different places very quickly, right? So like you get what you want of like a perfect perfect forming of crystallization, where like you're getting a bunch of very small crystals, right? Like you're not getting those hard, chunky pieces of ice that are in there.
You're getting like this really, really smooth and velvety experience. The thing is like, do you have the carbonation set right? Do you have all the things like it's not so much the bricks level that's in in the mix that's right, it's making sure that mix is actually correct, like that it's actually flowing in the right water to syrup ratio, and then that the carbonation is actually working and that someone has actually set it correctly. Now, here's some here's some stuff we have to get to because you were blowing our minds yesterday, and I think you're allowed to talk about these things. Quinn, I need you to make a guess for us.
And in and everyone out there listening, I want you to make a guess. So uh Zach, what is what is the largest freezer holding potatoes? How many pounds of potatoes would you say the largest freezer that Zach has been to can hold, Quinn? What would you say the large And what is it holding? Are we guessing dimensions or pounds?
Two pounds, yeah. It's not far from you either, yeah. Yeah. How about kilograms? Okay.
I gotta do, I gotta turn this around then. Whatever your guess is, Quinn, multiply it by 2.2. Holy, holy cow. We're gonna run out of time, man. What do you guess?
Make a guess. Uh 5,000 kilograms. 5,000 kilograms. That's a measly 12, like 12,000 pounds. Right?
Uh yeah. All right. So uh it's a little shy. Or 11. Okay.
Isn't it the other way? Uh Joe, what do you think? How many pounds is the potato is there of potatoes in this freezer? Oh, now you what? Oh, oh, potatoes.
Sorry, sorry. Potatoes. How many pounds? Uh six tons. Okay, so that's 12,000 pounds.
Really stuck to this 12,000 pound number. All right, all right, all right. What's the correct number, Zach? So I had to re-look this up this morning to make sure I wasn't, you know, just completely lying to everybody. Um and I was a little bit off.
So I will say that. Because what I told you guys was a billion. Oh, billion billion billion. And that's sort of true, but what this can hold at any given moment is 355 million pounds of fries or whatever potato items, and it's a hundred and seventeen thousand pallets of product. Wait, so so three hundred and how many thousand?
Three hundred and fifty five million mid pounds. Are we talking about that cheese locker in Wisconsin? No, no, no. That you know, I don't know what that would count as because that is also massive. But this is a man-made this is a man-made uh structure.
This isn't just big caves. Potato is massive. Yeah. So the here's the thing. So for those of you that can't do the thing, that is a pound of French fries ready to go, done, ready to rock.
Ready to go. Right. For every man, woman, child, and whoever you identify, every human being in the United States of America could right now go there and get a pound of fries. And why I had a billion in my head is because across that particular supplier system, they have that much just generally sitting around. Yeah.
So like you like that. Three pounds per person. Which, and that's just one supplier. So like there's most is this post-apocalyptic produce? So, sorta, yeah.
I mean, the other thing, what that tells you is like just how many fries we eat. Like we eat a lot of fries. And just how that world works. You also said it's an oxygen-free freezer. So that's it almost so that's it is complete, there's not a human person inside that freezer.
So it is completely automated. What ends up happening is they, you know, palletize their boxes of fries and it goes on a little pallet robot like you've seen, you know, on Amazon or whatnot. Just shoots over and then just goes in this giant, you know, vending machine style freezer where it just gets slotted into a spot, um, which makes it a real problem when we need to be like, hey, remember that thing you made that one day? I need it. And they're like, really, man?
It's like in the big old freezer. Like we're not easy to get. So Skynet already controls our fries. Yeah, they do. Yeah.
And they will hold you hostage. Yeah, yeah. All right. And how much beef do you guys rock on it on an average day? Oh, how much beef do we rock?
In pounds? Sure. Oh, I don't know that I have that number off the top of my head. Like roughly. So we do a couple hundred per store, around 7,000 stores, um, quarter pounds.
So you're at, you know, 50, what would that be? A couple hundred thousand pounds per day easily. That's just on Whopper, though. It'd be more than that if you counted all beef. It gets complicated because we don't like consolidate all the numbers on that, but we do many millions of pounds of beef every year.
All right. Now, on the uh on some of the limited times, you is do you are you still doing that Whopper by you thing where you were on the Instagram, like doing people's like uh how so between pizza and tropical, what's the what's the money? What's the money one that you're not gonna make? The one that you're not gonna make because you're like not gonna make people buy the stuff. That's hard to say.
You know, we in those, we try to work with what people are like we we get all the different ideas in and then we try to work with them because they can't always do exactly what they want. We have to do something that we'll we can actually get all the ingredients for. So we try to consolidate around ideas that people are really liking and then like pick the ones that are are kind of in that area. Uh typically it's the ones that like we're passionate about that we know will never go anywhere. Um you know, for me, I do think it would be something in the Italian world, because I really want to do something where we do like a smash meatball or something like that, where we play around with the Whopper, which we tend to not like to do, but like I would love to turn like a whopper meatball and then make like that build with you know crispy mozzarella.
If it happens, you heard you heard it here first. All right. Uh we have to go, we're out of time. The one thing I wish we'd had time to talk about, because I think it's super interesting. And so I want everyone in who's listens to think about this.
They have to design recipes that go out to how many thousand units? So 6,800 in the US, 7,000, US and Canada, and then you know, globally almost 20,000. Right hundred. And these recipes have to work on several and by several, like five or six different generations of equipment and be equal quality across all of those pieces of equipment with all the different supply chains, which is, I'm just gonna say, I don't really know because I don't do that for a living, but I'm gonna guess not easy. And so your kitchen must be crazy having all these different kinds of equipment laying around, and maybe someday I'll visit and I'll, you know, also go next door and eat some chicken as well.
Alex and Zach from Burger King, thanks so much for coming on. Uh, you know, come back in your time. Cooking issues. Love to thank you. Absolutely.
Thank you. When quality is part of your name, it's more than a word. It's the reason for everything you do. And at QFC, quality inspires us to make everything we do better. Every produce inspection, every juicy cut of meat we display, and every partnership with local growers who help us get fresh food to your table faster.
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