From Food Trucks to Footwear: Daniel Shemtob on Lime Truck and SNIBBS
Cooking Issues with Dave ArnoldShow Notes
Dave is joined by chef, food truck lifer, yakitori operator, and SNIBBS co-founder Daniel Shemtob for a run through hearts, food trucks, and what actually keeps you upright on a greasy kitchen floor. They start with skewers and offal: chicken hearts vs duck and beef heart, a Korean beef-heart “Heart & Soul” taco, tortilla engineering, and why overstuffed tacos are a design flaw. From there it’s boiled peanuts, peanut butter nerdery, uncooked cranberry “relish” with horseradish, Thanksgiving recaps from LA, Milwaukee, and beyond, plus British Columbia saffron versus Iranian saffron and how Persian techniques layer saffron, rosewater, and pistachio. Quinn and Dave get into extraction temperatures for mushrooms and saffron, raising kids to eat more than grilled cheese, and where dishes like tofu stroganoff and meat-free mapo tofu do (and don’t) earn the original name. In the back half, Daniel breaks down what 15 years on The Lime Truck have really taught him: why most of the money is in catering, how to design menus that can scale up and down, and how easy it is to gross big numbers and still make almost nothing if you don’t control labor and food costs. He also walks through the origin of SNIBBS—his own career-changing slip-and-fall, working with an orthopedic surgeon, why chefs need firm soles and a small but real heel drop, and how he ended up building a chef-driven shoe brand backed by people like Nancy Silverton, Andrew Zimmern, and Michael Voltaggio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold
Dave gets into Ashmead’s Kernel apples, acidity, and why terroir makes fruit data unreliable before laying out plans for his ultimate outdoor cooking setup: tandoor, Roman-style hearth, masonry oven, commercial deep fryer, wok burner, and a whole lot of propane. Plus: the return of paper-bag cooking, dairy-free mashed potatoes, what to do with a country ham bone, male vs. female rabbit, getting pu-erh tea flavor into baked goods, browning breakfast sausage, low-temperature pasteurization, blood bread, cucumber cocktails, and the pursuit of better home seltzer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Author Brian Hoefling joins Dave and the crew to explore Dryads: Spirits of the Trees, his deep dive into distilled spirits made from tree sap and other tree-derived sugars. They get into Sri Lankan arrack, Filipino lambanog, maple spirits, wild fermentation, palm sugar, garum, Roman cooking, and the surprising range of things humans have figured out how to ferment and distill.
It’s an All-Tangent Tuesday as Dave and the crew debate the unwritten rules of restaurants: bringing your own crushed red pepper, sneaking food into movie theaters, why some places refuse perfectly reasonable off-menu requests, and whether chimichurri disqualifies steak frites from being steak frites.
Dave Arnold is joined by Nastassia and Jack for an old-school Cooking Issues episode covering the etiquette of dining alone, phone calls at restaurants, and what guests should—or absolutely should not—bring to a dinner party. The crew gets into garlic fermented in honey and food-safety concerns, the right way to cool and store leftovers, fresh versus dried yeast, and Dave’s plans for an elaborate Peruvian-style rotisserie. Plus: cocktail texture, LA’s chaotic hillside architecture, Majordomo, upcoming travels to Houston and Paris, and the only universally acceptable answer to “What can I bring?”: wine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dave Arnold is back at Rockefeller Center with the crew, and Nastassia kicks things off with a beer can chicken experiment that went spectacularly wrong: green chicken, burning skin, emergency Popeyes, and a last-minute rescue by Daniel Patterson. Dave also reports back from Lima, with thoughts on Peruvian chicken, ceviche, pisco sours, ancient adobe cities, cocktail bars, and the city’s formidable traffic. Then it’s on to listener questions: getting Flavacol to stick to air-popped popcorn, the limits of long low-temperature brisket cooks, red versus white clam pizza, and more. Plus: undercooked eggplant, broken glass disasters, mushroom versus butterfly popcorn, New Haven clam pies, and the deep-fried-self art project that thankfully never happened. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.