Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold

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.
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Dave is joined by Farideh Sadeghin, author of The Hot Dog Cookbook: 50 Recipes for a Classic American Food, for a deep dive into hot dog culture, regional styles, and the surprisingly high-stakes question of what belongs on a dog.

They get into New York onion sauce, Seattle dogs on alleged “bialy sticks,” Colombian and Brazilian hot dog toppings, Zweigle’s red and white hots, Connecticut meat sauce, New Jersey Rippers, Italian hot dogs, Fenway Franks, split-top buns, and why a hot dog should usually remain a handheld food. Farideh also talks about the anxiety of writing a book on a food everyone has strong opinions about, the difference between hot dog chili sauce and standard chili, and why Heinz is the only ketchup worth discussing.

Also covered: Quinn’s 25-pound pea situation, saffron labeling disasters, Rochester flour history, pit beef versus roast beef, Maryland crab habits, lobster-roll bun standards, grilled cheese crunch, and the final verdict: a hot dog is not a sandwich.
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It's a No Tangent Tuesday, which means everything is on topic — including Dave getting lost in Rockefeller Center for the hundredth time. Quinn is back from his antibiotic recovery, Jean just survived catering the Roots Picnic VIP section with a rented reefer truck (and a branch that won), and the California crew is dialing in from LA.

Dave opens by explaining why his new miniature Ro-Tap machine — a 1917-standardized particle analysis sieve shaker running at exactly 150 BPM and 85 decibels — cannot, in good conscience, be operated in a Manhattan apartment. A caller brings the real problem of the week: his partner can't eat onions, and chili without onions is a crisis. Dave prescribes asafetida (AKA hing) and hints at fermented West African dawadawa as sulfur-forward workarounds. Quinn, recovering from his own dietary restrictions courtesy of a GERD diagnosis, has been running low-sodium experiments with glutamic acid powder — which leads to a full detour on salt, Tuscan bread, sweating bakers, and why the Civil War soldier's salt ration proves nothing.

Bar food rankings break out organically: potato skins, mozzarella bricks, fried cheese curds, and the great belly clam vs. strip debate, with Dave confessing he failed his son by not making him eat belly clams in Connecticut. Quinn rounds things out with a pina colada gelato stabilizer deep-dive and a vanilla oleoresin gelato report, Dave gives out the full Razzmatazzarak recipe from the old Booker and Dax days, and God's mojito is teased for next time.
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