Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold

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.

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.

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.

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.