Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold

This week, Dave answers long-awaited cocktail questions, dives into techniques for building better drinks, and shares updates from recent industry events and ongoing Cooking Issues projects. The conversation also covers creative burger experiments, getting more out of a small kitchen, troubleshooting common cooking mistakes, and practical advice for working with cured meats, custards, and emulsions.

Along the way, the crew debates paper straws, swaps favorite food movies, and wanders through the usual mix of culinary science, restaurant stories, and spirited tangents.
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Fish Cheeks chef-partner Dustin Everett joins Dave for a conversation on seafood, Thai cooking, restaurant culture, and why one tiny fish bone can outweigh 160 perfect plates. They discuss frozen versus fresh squid, sticky rice, octopus, Portuguese seafood, fish aging, kitchen technology, and the balance between old-school technique and modern equipment. Plus: Experimental bread, and why fake grill marks bother Dave more than they should. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Cooking Issues, Dave and the crew are joined by Alex Hawk, Manager of Culinary Innovation at Burger King, and Zach Young, Director of Culinary and Commercialization at Burger King, for a rare look inside the food science, logistics, and product development behind one of the largest restaurant systems in the world.

They get into what it actually takes to create food for millions of people: bakery supply chains, fresh bread logistics, Whopper improvements, tomato specs, lettuce formats, clean-label constraints, regional menu development, and the challenge of making recipes work across thousands of restaurants and multiple generations of equipment.

The conversation also covers home frying versus commercial frying, fryer oil, Popeyes chicken, Burger King’s relationship to Puerto Rico and the Whopper Jr., artificial sweeteners, frozen carbonated beverages, CVAP ovens, water fryers, potato freezers measured in hundreds of millions of pounds, and why even a seemingly simple menu change can become a massive operational question.

Plus: Diet Coke loyalty, green ketchup, edible Tide Pods that mercifully never happened, the original chicken sandwich, secret-menu chaos, and the realities of innovating inside a global fast-food system.
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This week on Cooking Issues, Dave and the crew are joined by chef Max Wittawat of Bangkok Supper Club for a deep dive into Thai cooking technique, restaurant life, and ingredient realities in New York.

Max talks through the logic behind Bangkok Supper Club’s kitchen-counter tasting menu, why some dishes translate better than others outside Thailand, and how he approaches Thai flavors with precision rather than nostalgia. The conversation gets into makrut lime sourcing, cilantro root versus cilantro stems, galangal, fresh versus frozen aromatics, limestone water for crispness and texture, Thai basil oil, culantro, betel leaves, toasted rice powder, coconut milk, and why mortar-and-pestle work still matters.

Plus: Dave gets into hardtack and ship’s biscuit, Sunken Harbor Club, crinkle-cut fries, fennel hatred, durian tolerance, mandoline injuries, and the eternal problem of expensive bread.
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Chef Greg Baxtrom joins Dave and the Cooking Issues crew to talk about his new cookbook, Nothing Matters But Delicious, written with Joshua David Stein. Greg gets into the process of translating restaurant recipes from Olmsted and Five Acres for home cooks, including the carrot crepe, fried tomato, upside-down burger, onion goop, rehab nachos, and his one-cookie recipe.

The conversation moves through fine dining, bouillon, Chicago Italian beef, sport peppers, ketchup, pickles, lefse, knives, pork tenderloin, expensive butter, cheap ice cream sandwiches, and why constraints can be useful in cooking. Greg also reflects on his years in Michelin-starred kitchens, his time at Alinea, Per Se, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Mugaritz, Arzak, and El Bulli, and how sobriety and self-awareness reshaped his approach to food.

Plus: four-legged emus, taxidermy restaurants, microwave light-bulb experiments, Haitian john john mushrooms, turtle soup, cod milt, octopus eggs, celery salt, fennel seed, and the eternal question of whether a sandwich should arrive wet.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.