(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm so excited to introduce today's guest, David Chang. He's a culinary icon known for founding the renowned restaurant group Momofuku, but wow, has he done so much more.

He's received six James Beard Awards, has three New York Times bestsellers, hosts two podcasts, and has four original TV series, including "Secret Chef" on Hulu, which comes out this week. With a resume like that, we could take this conversation in so many directions, but today I wanna focus on cooking at home, which is not only something Dave is super passionate about, but also it's the title of a book he released during the pandemic.

And if you didn't know, Dave is on a mission to empower people to become masters of their own kitchens. We're gonna cover a range of topics, like his favorite easy home cooking techniques, some underrated ingredients, a lot of home cooking hacks, the biggest of which might be using your microwave more, a device he's called the single best piece of equipment in a kitchen, and so much more.

So let's jump in right after this. Dave, thanks for being here. - Excited to be here. - You've really spent a lot of time talking about recently in the past few years, cooking at home. Why do you think home cooking and restaurant cooking is so different? And what are people getting wrong when they maybe try to emulate all these recipes they find online?

- Restaurant cooking is something entirely different than home cooking. 50% of many of the things that home cooks use and do are distilled from fine dining concepts. And the rest, they're just like whatever works best. But I would say most of the times, however you cook in a high-end professional kitchen does not translate whatsoever in a home kitchen.

And I jokingly say it's like learning how to drive an F1 race car. It's the same thing as a car, as a Prius, but very, very, very different. And as crazy as it sounds, I do think it's somewhat applicable because how I would drive a race car is very different than how I would drive at home.

And a lot of things are just sort of unnecessary. And so much of professional cooking is about volume, exquisite knife cuts, getting specific kinds of ingredients. They're just really not at all useful for the home cook. And I had never cooked at home before. I watched my mom cook, but I never cooked myself.

In college, I never cooked. So my real first job cooking was in a professional kitchen. And when you start cooking professionally, if you have friends that cook in restaurants on the line or something like that, you'll probably hear them say they never cook at home because they just are always too tired.

And the last thing they wanna do is spend all day cooking on their one day off. So you fast forward, I don't know, 15, 20 years later, I had never cooked at home. And almost in all of my apartments, I had paper plates or those plastic bundles of salt and pepper and soy sauce and chopsticks and plastic forks and knives.

Those were my utensils. And I never had anything. I never had a plate or cups until I started dating my now wife. She was like aghast at the fact that I didn't have anything to cook with or eat on. So literally, I never cooked at home. And then when my wife became pregnant with our first child, that's when I started to cook in earnest.

And everything that I did was not how I would ever teach anybody else to cook. They were very, very, very, I would almost say inappropriate ways of cooking because it was almost perverse. The thing that allows me to do it is I understand food science and I understand technique and I can sort of reverse engineer how to get to the end goal of a dish, which ultimately is delicious.

So long story cut short, I figured out a bunch of hacks that work for me and some of them work for other people as a home cook. - I love it 'cause I feel like I had the opposite thing. I was cooking at home a lot and then we had kids about three years ago.

And it's like, where's this time? I don't have time to cook. And we went through a few cycles and in preparation for this conversation, I read your "Cooking at Home" book. And I was like, okay, I'm ready to get back into it because we went from we have no time and we tried hiring someone to meal prep and deliver food to us.

We tried a lot of stuff. I'm ready to get back into cooking, but in a much more casual, not high stress, way things out like ridiculous way. So all these hacks are great and I wanna hear them. But you mentioned you have all this background in the science, you understand it all.

Does everyone need that? Is that a prereq? - I think science is important to at least trust or to have some understanding of, because I think a lot of the taboo things in a home kitchen stem from, oh, you can't cook it that way or you're not allowed to do it a certain way because this is how it's always been done.

And if you don't like challenging the status quo in life and the kitchen is probably not the easiest thing to sort of do 'cause cooking seems like the provenance of keeping it safe, keeping it simple, keeping it wholesome. If you believe in science, then it's a lot easier to do certain things that you may not normally do.

- Okay. Are there some principles that we should just lay out front before we chat about things people just need to kind of either throw out the window, old wisdom or science to understand and lay a foundation? - I mean, there's so much just stupid shit. - Let's do it.

Let's do it. - I mean, I don't even know which ones. You just have to see it to do it. Like I saw, like some people were telling me, oh, you gotta soak your chicken in milk. I'm like, why? Oh, 'cause it takes out the blood. I'm like, what are you talking about?

Like, you're not brining it, you're just soaking it for what? And they don't even know, if you ask them why, they're like, it's 'cause my mom did it. That's the kind of stuff that happens where you're like, okay, like it's not necessary for you to do that. It just, it's certain things about time and temperature.

That's all that matters. But I think the one that's the easiest thing that I talk about the most is probably the microwave. - Most people think the microwave is like a quick place to reheat leftovers. I, in the last week, have talked to a handful of people. All of them seemed like it was crazy when I told them we were cooking full meals in the microwave with like meat and fish.

So what do you want to tell these people that think the microwave is not a way to cook? Because I think you've said it's the single best piece of equipment you have in your kitchen. - I mean, it's a joke. It's like culinary arbitrage. It's like the best play if you were gonna try to make a financial trade here.

It's in like 91% of all US households collecting dust. And if people use it, it's usually for popcorn or for reheating leftovers or a mug of water for something. And the reality is, I mean, it's not a joke. It's sort of like you press a button and things get hot.

It's like the most magical element I could possibly think of. It's unfortunate that the UX and the UI is so bad on microwaves across the board and the marketing of it, because if the microwave technology came out today, I don't think you'd call it a microwave. That's what happens when you leave it to the military to come up with sort of marketing.

It'd probably be called the turbo chef, right? 'Cause that's what you use when you go into a Starbucks and they reheat all your food. It's a convection oven and a microwave, but it's called a turbo chef. And that's gonna be coming to a kitchen near you. And it's gonna be marketed as the new convection oven that's going to dramatically chop off 75% of your cooking time.

And it will conveniently drop that it's using microwave technology to cook your food faster. People are using microwaves all the time. When they go out to eat, they may not realize it. But ultimately, if you understand the science, you're using microwaves to effectively heat the water molecules inherent in foods.

And that's all that's happening. And it's steaming in and of itself. So it's the most energy efficient way of cooking. Again, if you cook for two hours, it's probably not right for the microwave, right? But for cooking, like say blanching some broccoli or something like that, why would I take four liters of water, take 12 minutes to bring that to a boil, steam or boil my broccoli when I could do that in five minutes in a microwave?

It's just more energy efficient, number one. Number two, it's gonna be the most nutrient dense way of preserving all the stuff in your food because there's no osmosis. There's nothing happening where you're gonna lose any flavor or any nutrients to the water or to the outside environment. Three, you can cook cleaner than anything else.

I don't have to add anything to a microwave, right? Like I don't have to add oil, I don't have to add fat. So it's theoretically, 'cause you can, make delicious things with no fats whatsoever if you should so choose. And if you look at it just as a steamer, basically it's really good for anything that doesn't need to be crispy or long braise for that matter.

We're trying to break down muscle fibers, et cetera. So most people would think that it's crazy to cook a lobster in a microwave, right? They'd say that's insane. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And trust me, I used to be one of those people and tell like, oh yeah, the science sort of makes sense.

And not that science doesn't make just a sort of sense, it makes a lot of sense. And I'd argue that you could butter poach a lobster in the microwave within any day better than you could and more consistently than any other way of cooking lobster. - That's crazy. I haven't made it to that point.

And for anyone listening that isn't familiar with any day, it's a set of microwave cookware that is not just for the microwave. The one thing you didn't put in your points was the thing you're cooking with is also the thing that you can store leftovers with and the thing that you can put on the plate to serve with.

- And you can put it in an oven. This morning I just made package of Korean wheat noodles, fresh noodles. I had a package of like one and a half pounds of frozen chicken thighs. I had some leftover shiitake mushrooms. I had a couple of cloves of garlic. We're leaving town on Friday.

So I just wanna use all the stuff we have in the house. And now that I'm at the office a lot more, the studio, I'm cooking all my meals ahead of time. So my wife or whoever's at home, they can still have a freshly cooked meal. They're just reheating it usually in any day.

So I took a large deep any day. I took out the chicken thighs and I covered it in any day and I microwaved it for about seven and a half minutes. I took out a pair of scissors and it's still raw in the center, right? This block of frozen chicken thighs.

And I just cut it up. Again, seems insane. Taking scissors, kitchen shears, and I'm cutting into little bits. The main reason why is as a home cook, I don't want to wash more dishes than I need to. I'm always worried about cross-contamination with poultry. So if I take the chicken raw, put it on a cutting board, I have now chicken all over my hands.

I'm gonna cut it. So I have to wash the knife. I have to wash the cutting board. I have to wash my hands multiple times if you're gonna do it correctly. And now if I just do it in the any day, I don't even have to wash my hands 'cause I've never touched chicken.

I put the lid on. I cook it for about seven and a half minutes so it's thawed out, but the center is still gonna be raw. I could cook it all the way, but there's no need. So I'm taking frozen chicken. Usually if I have to defrost it, that's at least a day, but how else are you gonna defrost it?

You have to like just leave it out. So I've done that in seven and a half minutes to defrost it. Now I've chopped it up in the bits. I've taken the garlic and I've taken the shiitake mushrooms. I've added, you know, momo soy sauce, some dark soy sauce, some agave, some neutral oil.

And I'm just sauteing that, added some scallions. And as that's cooking, I added my chopped chicken and all the juices that accumulated and pretty much saute that for like a minute. And then I add the noodles that I cooked, re-season and I'm ready to go. Put it back into any day and they're gonna reheat that for lunch.

So again, is it pretty? Absolutely not. But I'm not like cooking for an audience other than my family. The final product looks delicious, tastes delicious, but it was a roundabout way of getting there, but it was extremely quick. I cooked that in 10 minutes. The water was boiling, I microwaved the chicken.

So to do a delicious dish in 10 minutes, it's hard to beat. - I've had a great experience cooking in the microwave recently this past week. And I actually reached out to Anyday and they decided to offer a deal for all listeners. So if you want 15% off your Anyday purchase, go to allthehacks.com/anyday.

But if you're an All The Hacks member, check your email because there's a 20% off code coming your way. And if you're not a member, you can join at allthehacks.com/join. Okay, I have a few more questions here. Are there any other unusual things you cook in the microwave? - I mean, lobster, listen, I say lobster because that's the people go, what the fuck?

But the reality is, is if you just like eating vegetables, which you're gonna use all the time, every day. If you have kids, it's how I cook almost everything for my kids as well. Vegetables work extremely well. Frozen vegetables work really well. I make gravies in there and I can make a one-pot mac and cheese from scratch faster than a box mac and cheese.

That tastes way better. But my kids probably will still wanna eat the box mac and cheese. - And when you're making it, is it just throw in water, pasta, butter, cheese? Like, you know, you can throw it in or? - Well, yeah, a lot of it's, again, just understanding the food science of it all.

So if I add water, just to cover the macaroni or any pasta shape, and I add some salt, but not too much salt because the salt's gonna reduce, right, because I'm gonna evaporate most of the water away. I'll say I put a cup and a half, two cups of pasta, cover it with water, maybe a couple millimeters over the pasta itself.

I'll pop it in the microwave, uncovered, and it'll be there for about like nine to 10 minutes. I will take it out. Fat water now is going to be concentrated with starch, right, so it's gonna be almost viscous. But I wanna microwave it to the point where most of that water has evaporated.

There is some left. For that same reason, when you make pastas, a lot of times you're adding at least a scoop or two of the pasta water back into the sauce because of the starch that's now in the water. The pasta's now pretty seasoned because of the amount of salt that I put in.

Now, all I need to do is make a roux to make a bechamel 'cause that's how you traditionally make macaroni and cheese. You take flour, you take butter or some fat, and then you milk to it, and you thicken that up, turns it into a gravy more or less, and then you can mount it with cheese, and that's your cheese sauce.

That's a lot of pots and pans already, right, if you're doing it that way. All of this is gonna be in one pot. After nine to 10 minutes, I'm taking the pasta out. I'm gonna throw maybe a tablespoon or two of butter right in there. I'm gonna add a tablespoon of flour.

I'm gonna add a little bit of milk, maybe like three, four tablespoons. I'm gonna mix it up, and I'm gonna put it back in the microwave for about three minutes. It's gonna come back out. I'm gonna stir it up, and I don't have to worry about lumps because the macaroni itself is an agitator.

It's like every piece of macaroni is effectively a whisk, so all I have to do is mix it around. I can even put the lid on and shake it up, and it's an extremely sort of like thick bechamel now, and now I can add in the cheese, and it's now ripping hot.

I add the cheese in now because it starts to cool it down so I can more quickly serve it to my children. They don't have to wait, right? I could've added the cheese earlier. This is all about how do we save as much time as possible? So I can take the cheese.

I can liaise it with the sauce, and I can help bring the temperature down, and I have velvety, beautiful macaroni and cheese. I didn't have a colander. I didn't use a double boiler. I didn't use a pot. I mean, that's a four-pot, at least a four-pot endeavor to make home-cooked mac and cheese, and I did it in 12 minutes in one pot and in any day, so.

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Again, that's allthehacks.com/v-u-o-r-i. And get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. - Is the microwave something where you have to get the time right? And the way I'll ask the question is, is six minutes, stop it and start it again for one minute, is that the same as running it for seven minutes?

Like, can you fine tune it or does it take a little bit of warmup each time? - I mean, the microwaving manufacturing divisions, like, they need to get their act together because they're all working off of different platforms, more or less. So almost every microwave, even if you buy it from, say, Panasonic or any of the big microwave producers, they change their wattage yearly, sometimes, for no time or reason.

So every microwave is gonna be different. It really is crazy. You need to find the wattage and there's a lot of different things you can do to find that. But it's really getting to know your microwave. And the wattage really has a lot to do with the time. So the things that are gonna affect the microwave are no different than, say, cooking turkey.

If you put an eight-pound turkey in, it's gonna cook way faster than a 28-pound turkey. The laws of thermodynamics don't change in a microwave. So if I put a huge piece of pork butt in that I'm trying to cook, it's gonna take a long time. No matter what the wattage is on the microwave, it's gonna take a long time.

But again, if we're cooking pasta and I'm trying to bring some water to a boil, a lot of that depends on the power of the microwave. So some microwaves might be able to do that in seven minutes. So the microwave I have in the studio is less powerful than the one I have at home.

So you can really screw up a recipe pretty quickly if you don't get it dialed in. And the other thing people don't use is the power levels of a microwave. Again, I hope to one day make a microwave, but the first thing I would do is change the interface where I don't have to press a button after I put in six minutes to find power level 30 and then press start.

It's so not intuitive whatsoever. The power level, all that is is if I say power level 30, it basically means for every like minute, it's only on 30% of that time. So the waves are only hitting 30%, right? It's on 30%. And then you can hear the microwave click on and off when it's at a lower power level 'cause it's not hitting the food with microwaves consistently.

- So it's not actually reducing the strength, it's just reducing the time. - Correct, correct. And you can cook very, very delicate things. You can cook some of the most beautifully steamed fish in a microwave. Again, like I love steamed fish. The older I get, it's not just 'cause I love Cantonese food, just steamed fish is just dope.

The older I get, the more I wanna eat steamed fish, but I don't have a double boiler and I'm not gonna steam fish in like a wok setup. You know what I mean? Like things that are easy to do in a restaurant are not so easy to do at home.

How often do you eat steamed fish? Probably not that much, right? - It's like almost always on a skillet. - Right. - Or in the oven. - And steamed fish is delicious when you have a nice piece of fish. So like these are things that you can do. I could talk about the microwave all day long, but most people fuck up on the microwave by putting plastic in.

Plastic is what is bad. - I read some of the science and I don't think we need to have a conversation about all the crazy things some people say about microwaves. My mom sent me an article when I told her we were cooking in the microwave. She's like, "Oh, it's 10 things you should never put in the microwave." And it was like this a little bit ridiculous article 'cause it was like, "Well, you never wanna put this in 'cause it might get too hot." And I'm like, "Well, that's not a problem with the microwave.

That's a problem with you just making something hot." But there's a lot of data. I'll put it in the show notes about the safety of microwaves and all these myths pretty much getting debunked across the board. - Microwaves get people really mad and I see it with commenters on social media.

Like, "You're spreading cancer and carcinogens." I'm like, "What the fuck are you talking about? Didn't you read that article that just came out?" I'm like, "What article are you talking about?" So yeah, the microwave gets people very upset. That's for sure. - To go to a few other things outside of the microwave, let's talk a little bit about food and what kind of food you're buying.

You talked about fish. How important is quality and are there areas where quality matters a lot, whether it's higher quality or organic and areas where it doesn't matter? Or how do you think about what you're shopping for? - Well, we can just start with fish. Most fish in the supermarkets is hot garbage.

I mean, it just is like... I mean that like even the best supermarkets have dodgy fish markets. It is not that way for a lot of Asia. There are certain places that do a good job, like Bristol Farms does a good job with fish, but it's still not awesome.

I think we have a long way to go to sort of get to some of the best fish purchasing that we have in other parts of the world. But for the most part, it's really hard to understand when it was caught, how it was handled, and storing it on ice and water is actually not what you wanna do.

You wanna keep it away from these things. Again, how things are handled in a professional kitchen are very different than what you see at a supermarket. So more often than not, I think sometimes the best fish is maybe sometimes the salt cod or the frozen fish. I mean, I have a lot of frozen fish.

Whether it's organic or not, let's just worry about the quality first, right? The freshness levels. I know the floor on a piece of frozen fish is way higher than the floor of a potentially fresh fish. The ceiling is lower as well, but at least I know exactly what I'm working with.

I do think there's probably mislabeling. There's just a lot of the handling is wrong, and I think that's maybe human error, but I tend to buy more fresh fish from fish butchers that I know or from the restaurant. There's a place in LA that's great. It's called The Joint.

And there's a lot of fish mongers via the pandemic that started selling fish from wholesale originally to now retail. So I think that's gonna become easier, but I would predict that in the next five to 10 years, you're gonna see wholesale changes in how supermarkets handle their fish, for sure.

Mainly because they're gonna have a longer shelf life of fish if they handle it a little bit differently. - Well, when you say frozen fish, do you mean like you go to Safeway and you see like bags of frozen fish in the freezer section or is this kind of?

- Yeah, I'll take that all day long. I am like the worst kind of food snob. I eat super high end stuff and super low brow stuff and everything in between. What I want is a piece of fish that I know has been handled right. And if it's not organic, that's fine too.

Like I have Arctic char that's frozen, that's not organic or wild. I'm okay with that, right? Where I'm not okay with is say salmon. I think salmon is a seasonal fish and it should be smoked or preserved. Ora Kings is good and that's from New Zealand. But for the most part, they're striped bass from Mexico that's farm raised.

Not all farm raised is the same. I don't love farm raised salmon. Mainly because of how it's raised and how it's fed. I just try not to eat things like that. But do I? Yeah, sometimes I'll go to a Trader Joe's or something and I'll buy some just because I know it's what my kid will eat.

And I'll take a cut of salmon that I know is okay. You know what I mean? It's really hard to judge the freshness on something. I guess I just opened Pandora's box 'cause we could talk two weeks about fish programs. - I'll throw people the direction of your podcast 'cause I feel like one of the most fun things that I've heard you do is you just go deep on one thing.

So I bet that somewhere in those episodes, there's something on fish or something like that. So if anyone wants just a deep dive on any of these topics, I bet there's something there. So I'll throw that out. - People should buy some salt cod. It's a delicious thing. Most of Europe wouldn't be here today if we didn't have salt cod.

So honestly, salt cod is wonderful. They take something that was plucked from the ocean at its peak freshness and then preserve it in salt. I'll eat a lot of tinned seafood too. That's fine. Just because you know exactly how it's processed. And another thing is frozen vegetables get a bad rap.

But very similar to frozen fish. I will take frozen peas over fresh peas any day of the week. Because the starch content changes on peas unless you're literally plucking it that day and eating it that day. And not everyone's so lucky to live in the Bay Area or Southern California where you might be able to get fresh peas that day.

Like there's an idea with farmers that I talked to like they shucked peas 'cause that's how some chefs want it, right? Because that perfect sweep this level before the sugar turns to starch. Well, that's a very hard product to come by. Well, a frozen pea is literally plucked at its peak sugar level and then frozen immediately, flash frozen.

So again, the floor is definitely like higher than a fresh pea, but the ceiling is not that much lower. So there's a lot of things if you start asking yourself, is it better or worse? I don't think that's the right question. And even going back to fish, it's like, what are you looking for?

Are you looking for a piece of fish that tastes delicious and that is of like high quality? I don't even mean, I think freshness is the word that is important, but even freshness isn't the right word because a lot of fish I think moving forward is gonna be dry-aged.

So how are you going to sell a fish when people ask, is it fresh? And if you say, if I'm behind the counter, I'm like, no, that's been aged 32 days. That's gonna throw people for a loop. - And how much of, is this thing taste good? Is the food or I think you said like one of the most important things people should learn is how to season things.

Is that equally more important, less important than the freshness? At the end of the day, I assume, as long as you're not getting sick, what's most important is, does it taste good? - Yeah, of course. The reason I talk about water is if you store it in ice and water, it sort of accelerates the production of ammonia in fish.

So it's counterintuitive to like keep fish away from sitting on ice, right? So it doesn't matter what kind of fish, if it tastes like ammonia, it's not gonna be delicious. So we put that away. Let's just say I use a block of frozen fish, right? I get some frozen sockeye salmon.

What I'm looking at that is really is like, okay, I could turn this into something that's tasty, right? In and of itself, maybe not so delicious as say a king salmon, but what could I do? I could add some soy sauce. I could add some herbs. I could add a little sugar.

I could turn that into teriyaki. So I'm just trying to always figure out like how do I make it tasty? You can make good food with bad product, but it's really hard to do consistent, basically. - And when you're trying to make things tasty, do you think there's some underrated ingredients that people should be keeping in their kitchens to make things taste better that they're probably not using right now?

- I mean, yeah. People should cook more with MSG, but they won't. - Why? Like as someone who's done zero research, other than I feel like I know that there are a lot of people that say no MSG, which inherently makes me assume it's not good, but based on what you just said, makes me think maybe that's totally.

- Show me one scientific report that proves that like MSG is actually bad for you. - It's usually these like really faulty double blind studies like always a screwy study. You can be sensitive to MSG, but you can't be allergic 'cause it's a glutamic acid. You die if you are allergic to glutamic acid, right?

You need it to survive. It just so happens that it can also be very delicious. And when you dry age beef, you produce and harness more glutamic acid. With the production of certain fermented foods create a lot more umami, MSG, monosodium glutamate. So the artificial form is created and that's what you can sprinkle on, but it's naturally present in so many fucking foods.

Parmesan is basically just dairy MSG. I've talked about it a lot in like say our "Ugly Delicious" episodes. The reason I get so upset about it is because it's these similar to the microwave. It's something that is widely held to be true on what? You know, and these are the ideas that I really like in food and culture in general.

I love searching for the bad ideas. And I ask myself, why is it a bad idea? Is there like overwhelming data that supports it's a bad idea and the hypothesis is tested? Or did some dumb ass, you know, stupidity and bias and prejudice say it was a bad idea?

More often than not, those are the things that happen to be the things that I care about. And MSG is one of them. And there's a few factors that happened in the '60s that created a lot of the MSG syndrome stuff, but people eat MSG all the time. When you eat a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich and you go to get a Popeye's crispy chicken sandwich and people love it, those same person that says they're allergic to MSG, they're eating MSG.

Almost every snack food that you get, delicious, delicious chips. You know what they have? MSG. To me, it's funny because people eat it all the time, both naturally and artificially in their foods, whether they realize it or not. Yet it just so happens that if it's like Chinese food or Asian, then it's bad for you.

I'll leave it at this. The marketing behind MSG and the faultiness behind it is so great that currently, that if you go to any supermarket, people buy it all the time in MSG and it's pure form. Uncut, pure MSG. It's in your supermarket right now labeled not as MSG, not with some dragon Asian bullshit font on the packaging.

Accent. You ever heard of accent, the seasoning salt? Yeah. Right now, people buy it. They add it all the time, a lot of secret family recipes. And if you look at it, it says the only one ingredient, monosodium glutamate, produced by Ajinomoto, the largest producer of MSG in the world.

So people add chicken bouillon cubes. You know what that is? It's basically a cube of MSG. I'm not saying dump MSG in. There's things that they can do to make the food more delicious. They do that with Parmesan. People add Parmesan to everything. Why? Oh, it tastes good. Why does it taste good?

Oh, 'cause it's Parmesan. I was like, oh, 'cause of the buffalo milk bullshit? No, it's 'cause it's got a lot of glutamic acid in it. - Sometimes the smallest changes make the biggest impact and Trade Coffee is a great addition to your new year routine. And I am so excited to be partnering with them today.

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- We use a lot of olive oil. I have like several kinds of olive oils at home, mainly for like health benefits 'cause I have to eat certain diets 'cause as I get older, my cholesterol, but in general, I think olive oil is a beautiful thing because there's so many flavors and heats to it, especially if it's fresh or fruity.

There's cooking olive oils. There's dressing olive oils and everything in between. So I think for me, it's like a baseball pitch. I have like three olive oils on hand all the time, one to cook with. And again, like I'm not cooking with the super fragrant, very expensive olive oil because all those fragile compounds that make it delicious will be destroyed in that violent cooking process.

So there's no reason to do that. I mean, besides the own Momo products, I use savory salt in everything and that doesn't have MSG because there's other ways to harness it. The one thing I don't add all the time to my food is black pepper. I just don't do it blindly and religiously like everybody else.

Salt and fat are the two big difference makers, if I had to think quickly, with home cooking versus professional cooking. The amount of salt and the amount of fat used in a professional kitchen is quite frankly gross compared to what you would use in a home kitchen. - And you talk about pepper and spices.

Do you use spices a lot? Like do you have, the average American home has the spice rack with 25 different things. - Yeah, I mean, that's another thing, whether it's La Boite or SOS Chefs, there's so many great spice shops. I tend to stay away from like the stuff.

Do I have like garlic powder and onion powder and stuff like that? Yeah, but do I have a kefir lime leaf and do I have razza whole new, do I have different spice blends? Absolutely, and I think black cardamom, green cardamom, things that I purchase in small amounts, mainly because it has a shelf life and there's no reason to buy a large amount because by the time I get to the end of it, it will have gone bad.

So I have a lot of small jars of like one or two, like I have two pods of cardamom. I have like two things of cinnamon. - I would imagine that the average person listening right now has not replaced the spices in their spice rack for over a decade.

- Well, longer than that, I'd probably say, some people right now, I bet you, if you look into your spice rack, if you bought an existing home, there's probably the spices of the previous owner still there. - So I have talked in a past episode about, you're not gonna get the flavor you want out of dried oregano if it's 25 years old.

- It dissipates. Like I don't understand why people would think that it doesn't. If film and cinema like degrades over time, why would it like a spice? It just does. I think spice is a huge thing. Spices in general are an amazing way to unlock flavor. For home cook too, like the freezer.

I don't think people use the freezer enough as a pantry. I view anything as a freezer as almost like a shelf-stable product. And freezing foods are the best way to preserve and to ensure quality. So whenever I cook at home now, whether it's an any day or not, like I made chicken soup and I hate throwing food away.

So I'll serve enough chicken soup for dinner for the night, even though I'm not home, it's all set up. And then I'll preserve the other half into smaller containers and put them in the freezer. So I can just reheat that at any time. So that's a huge tip. People don't use the freezer enough 'cause I think it gets a bad rap.

- I mean, when it comes to kids, we'd be like, "Okay, well let's make oatmeal and then freeze like small pieces of it so that you could throw in the microwave and heat it up real quick." If we make a lasagna, double the recipe, make a massive lasagna and freeze half of it.

- Exactly. Well, another thing on reheating, just for people, not all ceramic is good in a microwave. Most are, depending on the glaze, but not all plates. This is another bullshit thing. If you look on say Amazon or most places that sell a plate that says it's microwave safe, they're straight up fucking lying.

'Cause if it's plastic, it's plastic. And there's a ton of stuff out there that's plastic that says it's microwave safe and it's not microwave safe 'cause it's still plastic. Even containers that you might buy as a microwave dinner in a plastic that says it's microwave safe, it's not microwave safe.

I wouldn't microwave in that plastic. And the only things you can microwave safely are silicone, certain shapes of metal and glass, that's it. - Yeah, I think the metal one will throw people, but that's for another conversation. You talked about how you could just cook chicken straight out of the freezer.

I think one of the things that we've found ourselves is you buy ingredients and you're like, "Oh, it's expiring, throw it in the freezer." Is there an argument to just put it in the freezer right out the gate? If you're not sure if you're gonna use it for a while?

- Yeah, that's basically how my mother cooked. She was like, "First in, first out," instead of, "Last in, first out." - Yeah, my grandparents did a little bit of that, but then sometimes you'd be like, "This thing expired two years ago." - Yeah, I mean, it's crazy because sometimes I find myself doing the same thing.

Like, let's just say it was like block of cheese. My mom would buy so much damn cheese and then freeze all of it. Buy a new block of cheese, take out the frozen one and put the fresh one in the freezer. I find myself doing some things like that, for sure.

- So let me ask you a few rapid fire things, 'cause I know you have some strong opinions that are a little contrarian. Peeling? - Not for everything. I mean, peeling carrots, I think, is dumb, for sure. - No, I mean, that's what people are here for, is like, "What am I doing wrong?

"How could I be more efficient?" - I mean, yeah, just take a clean sponge and you can wipe it down. I mean, carrot peeling, for example, even potatoes, if you just wash it, but a lot of it's just aesthetics, but a lot of that flavor's in the skin itself.

- What about ginger? I feel like that's the most pain in the ass thing to peel. - No, ginger's easy to peel if you just use a spoon. How do you peel ginger? - I've peeled with a spoon, but sometimes the ginger's, like, so small. If you get a big piece of ginger, great.

If you get one of those, like, fraggle all around, like, trying to dig around and break off the nubs and all that stuff, I'm like... - But you gotta peel with the right amount of pressure. Even with a spoon, if you peel it, you can cut through those knobs with the spoon.

But in general, sometimes if I'm lazy, I'm not peeling the ginger. I'll just give it a quick wash. - Fruit, wash all fruit? - Yeah. If I go to the farmer's market and I get, like, berries and blackberries and raspberries, I don't wash them. I wash them before I'm gonna eat them.

- My wife has been experimenting with what's the way to make berries last the longest. And, like, the answer is not wash them and put them in the fridge wet. It's, like, get them as dry as possible. Like, put a paper towel around them. Do what you can. That gives them a lot of extra shelf life, we've found.

I feel like I grew up in a house where it's, like, you get a chicken breast or chicken thigh, and it's, like, trim off all the fat of the chicken and then cook it. Waste of time? Or are you trimming all that fat off? - That's a sad dinner, or whatever that is.

That's your friend. Why do you wanna cut that out? It's for your life. It's ridiculous. - Okay, and then last, you talked a lot about kids. Any tricks for people with kids that have made your life easier? - I'm probably not the right person to ask, 'cause I think if they ever develop some kind of eating disorder, it's because of me.

'Cause I make them whatever they want. I'm the worst kind of parent. They tell you, offer one thing to your child, and if they don't want it, then you should just, like, hold it aside 'til they eat it later. Not me. I can't. I end up making, like, sometimes four things.

(laughs) Five things until they eat something. Because as a parent, all you want to see is them consuming some kind of calories. That's all I want. I've been known to make quite a few things quickly for them, and I think they understand the power that they wield over me now.

But I would say, as a quick thing to try for your kids, is a crepe. Do you make crepes for your kids? - I don't think I've ever made a crepe for my kids. I've made it before kids, but. - All right, well, again, there's restaurant crepes, and then there's home cooking crepes.

And most of the things I say that I cook at home, I would never cook it that way in a restaurant, right? In a restaurant, you need a specific shape and thickness and aesthetic. So you need one egg to one cup of milk to one cup of flour, basically.

And you could add olive oil or some kind of butter, melted butter, and I put that into, like, a little blender, and that's it. Very, very quick. On a nonstick pan or a black steel, you just pour a little bit over medium heat, and then, so you want to get the right thickness, but it doesn't matter.

You just want to get as thin as layer as possible. And then now you can turn that into just about anything. I can turn that into sort of crepe pancakes. So it's not necessarily traditionally pancakes, but then I can sort of roll them up like they're a crepe Suzette or something like that.

And then, just what I'm trying to do with something that is like a crepe is constantly change the shape and form of it so it looks like it's different to them, and put different feelings in. So if it's a crepe, then I can get it more crunchy on the bottom.

I can get it super crisp, like it's almost like a tortilla, and I can put cheese and ham, and I could turn that into like a crepe quesadilla-like thing. Or I could even crack a scrambled egg in there, put some cheese and some bacon, and roll that up. So it gives me a lot of flexibility.

And I found that if you are sort of stuck in your ways of presenting something to a child, then you're gonna be limited. And I think being able to tweak things on a daily basis prevents them from getting bored from eating. So the crepe is the only thing left in my pitching arsenal that they still can't hit.

(laughs) - And part of this is just getting comfortable with experimenting. Any words of wisdom to someone who feels like, gosh, they have to follow a recipe for everything they're doing? - Well, we wrote a book during the pandemic, "Cooking at Home." And I posit, even though it sounds ridiculous, that recipes are actually responsible for bad cooking.

Because if you follow recipes, and I see this a lot, like if I post something, or I make something, and someone's like, oh, how'd you make that? And I give them like, I did this, this, and this, and they ask like, no, what are the exact measurements? Most of the best cooking in the world happens with no recipes.

It just so happens that in America and some of the Western world, people can't cook without recipes. I find it that long-term, it probably hurts your ability to develop intuition. And I love recipes to a degree, but I also think that they're not the best thing for you if you wanna learn how to be a better cook.

Because if you're cooking at home, it's improv every night. It's not a scripted Broadway play. - Or at least it should be, maybe. We did something a little crazy. Neither my wife or I are Korean, but there's this thing, you probably know it, it's like, "Somchil Il." It's like the 21 days after you have a baby, someone comes to lose you.

So we'd learned about this and we thought, well, that sounds like something great. Like someone's helping take care of mom and the baby. So we hired this woman to live with us for, I think it was like 30 days after our baby was born. We did it again. She then went and did it with both my sister's kids and no recipes.

For 30 days, she cooked three meals a day, zero recipes the entire time. And we were like, "Oh, we're doing it all wrong." She was like, "What if I try to make a pizza "out of a kimchi pancake?" It was just so creative. And I don't know, it just changed our perspective on how we cook.

- Well, I'm glad you got the sangheuri. Sangheuri is the pronunciation. But it's like the fourth trimester is a big deal in Korea. Yeah, I'm glad that you did that. But also, my mom never gave me a single recipe. I wish she did sometimes, right? But if you have a recipe that you want from your mom or your aunt or your uncle, I think what you find more often than not, what I'm guilty of, and I'm sure everyone else is, "Hey, text your mom.

"Hey, can you tell me how you make that dish?" And then, "Can you give me specifics?" I think probably what would be more impactful, and I don't wanna seem cheesy or hokey, is get on a flight, spend a long weekend, and make it with them. That's what I think is missing in a lot of these things, is the recipe can actually prevent you from actually learning how to actually make it right.

For example, I've lived in Los Angeles for two years, and I don't know the names of any of the fucking highways, because all I do is follow GPS, right? I'm never going to follow the names. People ask me, "Hey, you just go on Wheelshare, "and you're here?" I was like, "I don't know, and I'm never gonna know." I understand that most people's cooking is like car GPS for them.

- I know you're not focused as much on the restaurant thing, but I asked some listeners if there's any questions I should ask you. One thing people want to know is, when you go to a restaurant, how do you decide what to eat? Is it just whatever you want, or are you trying to figure out what the best thing is, and what tactics do you have for someone who's like, "I wanna find a great restaurant, have a great dish, "and I don't know anyone." It's not like I'm friends with the chef.

- I think first and foremost, probably do some research, but don't just follow Yelp, right? Or let's just say you do follow Yelp, and you find that there is sort of truth to say a restaurant that has a three-star rating, or like a three-and-a-half-star rating, but that restaurant has a lot of fives and a lot of ones.

That right off the bat looks something that's probably gonna be awesome, right? If you dive deeper into the data, and you realize most of the people that give it ones are people that don't understand the kind of cuisine. Most of the people that give it fives are the people that do understand the cuisine.

That's probably a good thing. So the numbers don't always tell you the truth, what's behind it. I also think it's probably best to just use the guides that are there to do your own discovery. Finding what's best is sort of ridiculous. And I know that's easy to sell and easy to explain, but for example, if you go to Tokyo, and you go to any of the really sushi expert aficionados, right, that I know, if you say, "Hey, I wanna go to the best sushi restaurant," they're gonna erase you from their phone, 'cause this is like, you're just a dumbass to them.

It's so overreductive. I think what they wanna say is like, "Do you understand the nuance?" And to understand that at any given moment, there might be like five to seven serving the best stuff that night. So a lot of it is like the feeling, the price range. And I think doing the homework never hurts, but the best thing to do is just to go out there and do it yourself.

And I think the hard thing clearly is, people are on a budget and they can't go eat out all the time. So I think at that degree, it really doesn't hurt to go to the places that are like tried and true. For example, in New York, if people were saying, "Hey, where do I go?

"My parents are there. "Grandparents are coming." And like, "It's a good celebration for like eight of us." And they really wanna like blow it out. I'd say like, "Go to La Bernardin." Or even if it's late, "Go to La Bernardin." Because like, it's the kind of restaurant that can make everyone happy.

And it's delicious. And it's not like a four-hour tasting menu. If my friend who I know likes to spend a lot of their disposable income on high-end restaurants, and I know that like they're coming to town and they want something, I'm just like, "Okay, I got a table at Brooklyn Fair." Each restaurant probably has a purpose, right?

Some are catch-alls, some are specific. If I was in San Francisco, we'll think about Corey Lee, the great chef, my good friend. He has Banu, and he has San Juan, the Korean barbecue spot. One is for a specific occasion, for dining. Dining is very different than eating. Dining is feeding your brain simultaneously, and eating is San Juan, which is delicious, and everyone gets it.

So again, part of it is understanding and reading the room. I think before you even figure out where to go is like, "Who am I eating with?" And like, "What is the desired result?" And if you're thinking like, "Hey, I just wanna check the box. "I wanna go to a three-mission-star restaurant," then like the mission guide isn't always the best indicator, but it gives you a sense of what is there.

And even all those lists give you a sense of where to go and what to eat. But at the end of the day, I think going in the chat rooms, just reading everything possible. Instagram is a great, great feed. Like if you find gourmands out there, if you follow them, like Little Meg in Japan is a perfect example.

I think she's one of the great connoisseurs of food in the world. Where she eats is the good shit. You know what I mean? And that's what we have right now. We live in a world where you have instant information to a degree, and you have people that are doing the work for you.

You just gotta find those people first. So before even going online, I would probably find the people that you follow, that you might, like, you get a sense of, oh, if they like something, I might like something too. And they're almost like a proxy. So that's another recommendation that I would have.

Follow people online. - One tactic I have always used is find a restaurant that you like, five, 10 years, and go look it up online. And invariably, there's probably a restaurant you like that's like a three-star restaurant. And you're like, whoa, it breaks your brain because you just assume that a three-star restaurant on Yelp might be bad.

And it just changed my perspective. I was like, oh, I actually like this restaurant. The internet says it's not a great restaurant, so maybe I don't always have to trust the internet. - I'm looking for the either/or numbers, right? If it's a three-star restaurant where every review's a three, that's probably not for me.

I'm looking for, wow, you either love it or hate it. - Cool. When I was doing some homework, I was looking at, you got a show coming out on Hulu, and you mentioned you could cook with anything. And I watched this one scene in it where someone's cooking with, like, a closed steamer.

So talk a little bit about "Secret Chef," because I didn't get a preview, I didn't get to watch it, but it looks pretty interesting. - This was a show that we were working on for a while. So I was excited. I can't believe of all the pitches that we made for Hulu that they actually said yes to this one because it was the most insane one.

It was also gonna be the one that was a big budget and we were gonna need a giant soundstage. So we shot it down in Atlanta where they shoot Marvel films and everything, like these huge airport hangars. And we built this crazy setup where the contestants never saw each other while they were cooking without revealing too much.

And then as the challenges happened, what we wanted to do was make it where it was a game. It wasn't just about the food. The food was a vehicle for the contestants to play a game. So it was different kinds of strategy and different elements that I don't think you've ever seen in a food reality show thing.

And I was excited about the challenges we put them in because I think they're very fresh and they're things that you've definitely not seen on camera. And if you haven't seen it, I don't even know what I'm embargoed to say or not to say. So I'm gonna err on the side of being conservative here because I don't want to get Disney upset.

But one of those challenges, I will say that we gave everybody household products, things that you would not normally cook with to make a meal out of. And one of which was a clothing steamer. And they were supposed to cook something beautiful with that, possible. I saw that in the trailer, but I don't know what they came up with.

So I'll have to check it out. - It's a fun show, "Secret Chef." I was really excited that we could finally get that out in the world. - Awesome. Anywhere else you want to point people? - We have some stuff coming out with Major Delma Media. We have some products.

We have some more shows coming out. We have the podcast and we have a few things coming out on the Momofuku side from the consumer product goods and from the restaurant side coming up soon as well. So just stay tuned. - I'll put a link to all that in the show notes and thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you, Chris. - Wow, I learned so much in this episode. And while technically I got a jumpstart cooking more in the microwave last week, I'm even more excited to keep it up. And if you're excited to do the same, I did reach out to Anyday to set up a special deal for All The Hacks listeners.

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And if you have any cooking hacks to share, please send them my way by email to podcast@allthehacks.com. Okay, that's it for this week. See you next week. (upbeat music) (electricity buzzing)