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Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold
KojiCon with Rich Shih and Jennifer Rothman
This week on Cooking Issues, Dave Arnold is joined by Rich Shih (Koji Alchemy) and Jennifer Rothman (Yellow Farmhouse).
The crew dives deep into KojiCon 2025, the virtual conference celebrating all things koji, fermentation, and mold-based magic. Rich and Jennifer break down what attendees can expect, from global experts sharing techniques to the vibrant Discord community exchanging ideas.
Other key topics:
• Fish Aging with Mold – Dave unpacks the Papa Shell YouTube videos and the use of Mucor flavus for dry-aging fish, questioning technique, contamination risks, and whether it’s all just a long play for funky seafood.
• Meat-Shaped Stone Obsession – The Taipei National Museum’s famous Tong Po pork-shaped rock sparks a wild discussion on turning art into food, recursive meat shaping, and a potential Instagram project that may never happen.
• Avocado Sorbet Trials – Quinn spins a Ninja Creami batch and debates if adding buckwheat honey would be culinary brilliance or a disaster in the making.
• Plastic Wrap Deep Dive – Dave lays out the case against PVC-based cling film, explains why commercial kitchens still swear by it, and asks the ultimate question: Where’s the industrial-sized polyethylene wrap?
• Rodent Tasting Notes – From capybara to nutria to the theoretical culinary potential of vole, the crew debates which critters are underrated on the dining table.
• Koji in Home Ec? – Jennifer shares insights from Yellow Farmhouse’s work in food education, shifting high school curriculums from standard home economics (or Family and Consumer Sciences) to a deeper understanding of the food system.
Plus, Dave rants about poorly executed microbiology in YouTube cooking experiments, breaks down the risks of flavor scalping, and issues a passionate plea for visiting museums while traveling—because yes, the Taipei National Museum is worth skipping a meal for.
All that and more, this week on Cooking Issues!
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Tiny Trash Trucks: OG Crew NTT
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01:01:13|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.Fidel Caballero of Corima and Vato
01:01:35|Dave is joined by chef Fidel Caballero of Corima and Vato for a deep dive into Northern Mexican cooking, starting with an ingredient close to both their hearts: turkey butts. Fidel explains their place in the tortas of Chihuahua and Juárez, before getting into squab-butt tacos, asiento, molcajetes and metates, and why Northern Mexican food deserves more attention.They go deep on flour tortillas: White Sonora wheat, boiling-water doughs, butter versus chicken fat, sourdough and lactic acid, hot presses, giant Sonoran sobaqueras cooked on an inverted wok, and why a proper Juárez burrito bears little resemblance to its enormous California cousin. Fidel also talks mole from scratch, Tokyo turnip cajeta, grilled fish collars, and the cooking behind Corima and Vato.Plus, Jack attempts to break his daily cold-brew habit, Quinn reports back on tomato-water bread and amino-acid-enhanced tomato soup, and Dave weighs in on grinder maintenance, pre-gelatinized starch, tomato soup, vintage Japanese whisky, stand mixers, guacamole, and the enduring question: where the hell can you buy turkey butts in New York?New American Tangents
01:00:40|Dave tackles a packed round of listener questions, starting with a surprisingly deep investigation into the canonical club sandwich. Then, a listener trying to recreate the original marshmallow using marshmallow root sends Dave into the problem of building a vegan marshmallow.Also on the docket: choosing an outdoor fryer and getting serious about homemade french fries, how cold Dave keeps carbonated cocktails at Bar Contra, using tomato water in bread dough, storing whole-wheat flour under vacuum, cooking for 12 people aboard a research vessel, and what to know before making turtle soup. Plus, Dave talks peak tomato season, debates whether “New American” still means anything, and checks in with Nastassia about the realities of feeding a touring crew.Back From LA, With Tangents
01:01:50|Dave reports back from Los Angeles with stories from a Morihiro pop-up and the hard-core world of tiki fandom. The crew also gets into airplane etiquette, Canadian Parmesan-style cheese, pressure-cooker stocks and braises, stabilizing sorbets, aging ice cream bases, purging clams, and the opening arguments in a definitive ranking of the world’s best sandwiches.NTT: Mojitos, Movies and More!
01:00:32|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.Dustin Everett of Fish Cheeks
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01:03:45|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.Max Wittawat of Bangkok Supper Club
01:01:30|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.