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Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold
No Tangent Tuesday: Frozen Food and Wisdom Teeth
Dave chats with Nastassia, Quinn and Jack for a classic No Tangent Tuesday. From wisdom teeth and frozen vegetables to guanciale curing and the merits of multiple centrifuges, the crew bounces between home cooking habits and deep technical dives.
• Quick Dinners and Frozen Food Quality – Nastassia shares her weeknight meal of pre-seasoned Whole Foods chicken breast, frozen broccoli, and pre-cooked rice. Dave explores the merits of frozen vegetables and the shelf-stable rice market. Peas and corn are praised; frozen Brussels sprouts are dismissed. Dave discusses his chicken saltimbocca technique and the ups and downs of using essential oils in cooking.
• DIY Guanciale and Curing Techniques – Quinn details a home-cured guanciale project using sage essential oil. Dave critiques the use of essential oils due to limited flavor diffusion in fat and questions whether the result matches the flavor of fresh herbs. The discussion expands into dry vs. wet styles of guanciale, optimal moisture loss, and terminology (e.g., “unctuous”).
• Frozen Fruit and At-Home Pizza – The crew discusses best uses for frozen fruit and Quinn describes a weekend pizza session using a gas-fired Ooni oven and homemade guanciale.
• Why Dave Avoids Homemade Cocktails and Pizza – Dave explains why he no longer makes cocktails or pizza at home, preferring to enjoy professional results (e.g., Wiley Dufresne’s pizza spot). He still enjoys home cooking for non-work-related food, like chicken pot pie.
• Spinzall Centrifuge Sale – Dave announces a temporary price drop on the Spinzall 2.0 centrifuge due to warehouse clearance. He explains the advantages of multiple small centrifuges versus one large industrial model, citing reliability, flexibility, and clarification performance. He also clarifies the technical differences between various centrifuge types (swinging bucket vs. fixed angle).
• Cane vs. Beet Sugar – In response to a listener question, Dave breaks down the minor but real differences between cane and beet sugar, including pH levels, crystallization behavior, and potential impacts on jelling and caramelization. Taste tests suggest differences are detectable when dry but vanish in solution.
• Goat Cream and Centrifuge Separation – Dave explores whether a Spinzall can separate cream from goat milk. He notes goat milk has smaller fat globules that make it naturally homogenized and explains how traditional cream separators work using spinning disks. He suggests testing the top fat layer from Spinzall output for reconstitution into cream.
• Durum Wheat and Semolina – Mike C writes in about baking with coarsely ground semolina. Dave and Quinn explain distinctions between semolina and fine durum flour (semola rimacinata), touching on hydration needs and flour properties.
• Clarification on Nitrogen Use in Cocktails – Dave stresses clear terminology when discussing nitrogen (N₂) versus nitrous oxide (N₂O). He warns against confusion when referring to “nitro” cocktails, noting that nitrogen creates microfoam textures while nitrous is used for rapid infusion.
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01:05:45|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.Belated Birthday Tangents
01:00:58|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.Apocalypse Plans: OG Cooking Issues Crew
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01:01:27|On this episode of Cooking Issues, Dave and the crew are joined in-studio by chef India Doris for a wide-ranging conversation on cooking across London, France, Spain, Scotland, and New York, learning to break down whole animals in a butcher shop, the realities of restaurant labor in the UK versus the U.S., and what it actually takes to open your first place. Along the way: haggis, black pudding, game birds, owner mentality, kitchen culture, staffing philosophy, and the financial tightrope of building a restaurant from scratch.Paul Carmichael & Dennis Ngo
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