Show Notes
Dave and the crew cover a lot of ground this week, starting with geography confusion, regional slander etiquette, Jack’s post-New York cough, and a surprisingly heated discussion about whether former residents still have the right to talk trash about New Jersey. From there, the show dives into language drift, emoji fatigue, Bananagrams rage, and the ongoing battle between “less” and “fewer,” before pivoting into ramen noodles, heirloom wheat, kansui levels, nixtamalization, and the question of how alkaline is too alkaline.
Later, Dave gives a birthday recap defined less by celebration than by windshield replacement, flour sifting, and side-by-side extraction tests for bread baking. Nastassia reports back from an Elizabeth Falkner pop-up at Mozza, Jack checks in after taking Dr. Jessica Harris to Mŏkbar, and John gears up for Easter with spiral ham, biscuits, mac and cheese, and Eggs Benedict, prompting a full breakdown of ham reheating strategy, biscuit technique, and poached egg logistics.
In the listener questions, the team gets into frozen drink machine formulation, including ABV, sugar, acid, xanthan, methylcellulose, and polydextrose; preserving strawberry color during maceration; fixing uneven crème brûlée crusts; pasta dough silkiness, hydration, and yolk substitution; and pistachio sorbet ratios, nutritional databases, and the danger of bad pistachios. The episode closes with upcoming guest announcements and a grilling troubleshooting question that turns into a reminder that when Dave says high heat, he means truly absurd heat. 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.