Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold

Dave gets into Ashmead’s Kernel apples, acidity, and why terroir makes fruit data unreliable before laying out plans for his ultimate outdoor cooking setup: tandoor, Roman-style hearth, masonry oven, commercial deep fryer, wok burner, and a whole lot of propane. Plus: the return of paper-bag cooking, dairy-free mashed potatoes, what to do with a country ham bone, male vs. female rabbit, getting pu...

Author Brian Hoefling joins Dave and the crew to explore Dryads: Spirits of the Trees , his deep dive into distilled spirits made from tree sap and other tree-derived sugars. They get into Sri Lankan arrack, Filipino lambanog, maple spirits, wild fermentation, palm sugar, garum, Roman cooking, and the surprising range of things humans have figured out how to ferment and distill. Along the way, Nas...

It’s an All-Tangent Tuesday as Dave and the crew debate the unwritten rules of restaurants: bringing your own crushed red pepper, sneaking food into movie theaters, why some places refuse perfectly reasonable off-menu requests, and whether chimichurri disqualifies steak frites from being steak frites. Then things get technical with grilled lobster, birthday steaks, blood cocktails, yeast percentag...

Dave Arnold is joined by Nastassia and Jack for an old-school Cooking Issues episode covering the etiquette of dining alone, phone calls at restaurants, and what guests should—or absolutely should not—bring to a dinner party. The crew gets into garlic fermented in honey and food-safety concerns, the right way to cool and store leftovers, fresh versus dried yeast, and Dave’s plans for an elaborate...

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 form...

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:...

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 carbona...

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/priva...

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 emulsion...

Fish Cheeks chef-partner Dustin Everett joins Dave for a conversation on seafood, Thai cooking, restaurant culture, and why one tiny fish bone can outweigh 160 perfect plates. They discuss frozen versus fresh squid, sticky rice, octopus, Portuguese seafood, fish aging, kitchen technology, and the balance between old-school technique and modern equipment. Plus: Experimental bread, and why fake gril...

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 peo...

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 precisio...

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 thr...

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 sau...

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...

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...

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...

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 managemen...

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 cas...

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 in...

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 bu...

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,” befor...

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...

This week, Dave is joined by writer and chef Ham El-Waylly to talk about his new book, Hello, Home Cooking, out March 24. The conversation bounces from book-tour fatigue and the strange rituals of cookbook promotion to Ham’s childhood in Qatar, censored video game magazines, and the eternal question of how much pronunciation flexing is too much. From there: Brazilian hot dog parties, frozen pearl...

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,...