Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold

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.

Dave is joined by Joe, Quinn, and Jackie Molecules for a stripped-down crew episode covering a lot of ground: severe dust mite allergies, coin-selling in the Diamond District, homemade rotaps, and the musical qualities of real silver. Dave recaps Nick Wong and Sam Yoo’s Golden Diner pop-up, including cheeseburger fried rice, scallion waffles, and the eternal question of whether a waffle could beat a pancake in a fight. Plus: Quinn experiments with a frico Oklahoma smash burger and jam-based semifreddo, the crew debates Blizzards, Carvel cakes, Burger King fries, hot dog preferences, low-temp eggs for service, polydextrose in cocktails, oil-blanched fries, and homemade boquerones.

Chef Nick Wong joins Dave in studio to talk Agnes & Sherman, his Houston restaurant named for his parents and built around personal, deeply considered food. They revisit Nick’s FCI days with Dave, from throwing hatchets and pushing kitchen equipment through the city to hot dog contests, meat glue demos, and the value of doing what you said you’d do. Plus, Angela Garbacz calls in, Dave answers a Spinzall question, and Nick breaks down scallion waffles, cheeseburger fried rice, crispy shell-on shrimp, salt-and-pepper fries, and Eng Soo’s Chicken.

Marco Canora joins the show to talk Brodo, bone broth, and what everyone gets wrong about stock, from marrow-bone misconceptions to the commercial realities of packaging broth at scale. Dave and Marco get into spent hens, fish fumet, lobster shells, blanching greens, cocktail dilution, juice-shake techniques, and why a little acid can save a pizza sauce. Plus: mason jar vacuuming, weevil management, fava bean grievances, striped bass butchery, gummy-bear wellness, and the eternal difference between “interesting” and actually good.

Dave is joined by Sother Teague and Tim McKirdy of Sauced to talk cooking with booze, drinking with food, and what separates a good carbonnade from Belgian slander. Before that: John returns to fine dining, Nastassia survives Spirit Airlines, Jack hits the Austin wedding shot wheel, Quinn breaks in a new wok, and Dave recreates 1870s kaiser rolls from a Vienna Exhibition report.Plus: polished cast iron, mushy peas, Irn-Bru, Buckfast, fish and chips, Guinness on a Lukr faucet, forbidden Jarts, Shrinky Dinks, fry oil management, and why carbonnade should be thickened with mustard-slathered bread.

Dave and the crew are back from hiatus and catching up on everything from luxury party snacks and properly aged gummy bears to bitter lion’s mane mysteries, banana ripening, homemade tofu, chicken consommé, and the eternal problem of the soggy bottom half-inch of banana bread. Plus, on-off steak cooking, peanut butter whiskey, milk punch theory, and a ruling on whether shabu-sliced beef smashed into a bun counts as a burger.

Dave and the gang warm up with a packed week-in-review before George Motz drops by to talk burgers, burger history, and the newly revised Hamburger America. George talks about opening Hamburger America, preserving regional burger traditions, the challenge of recreating historic burgers accurately, and what it means to document 220 of the country’s most essential hamburger spots. A wide-ranging burger conversation with one of the form’s great evangelists.

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.

The OG Cooking Issues crew are all in studio for the first time in ages ! Find out whether the BDX cocktail cube can handle shaken drinks, and why Dave’s new hood is somehow both excellent and maddening. There’s also an extended detour into apocalypse escape plans, emergency Zodiac boats, and why New York remains a terrible place to survive the end times.Plus: Quinn reports back from yet another emu egg experiment—this time in the form of Spanish tortilla—prompting discussions of balut, giant deviled eggs, bird brains, and the general menace of cassowaries. Rounding things out are questions on pre-gelatinized starches, whether anyone should still be eating brains, what on earth to do with butter-flavored popcorn oil, how to break into bar prep work, and whether popcorn can be popped directly onto a decorative wire tree.