The Cook Who Tested Everything: Ella Quittner is Obsessed with the Best

This is Mill Street Radio from PRX and I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. Back in the day, I sometimes stopped by to visit Julia Child at her home and I often used that opportunity to quiz her on maybe the best way to zest a lemon or whatever was my latest obsession. And Julia would look at me like I needed to chill out and have a cocktail. Today, I meet my match. Another obsessive, it's Ella Quitner. When I was in elementary school, I spent a full two years fixated on poaching eggs in complete silence. As an adult, Ella has now spent years meticulously testing recipes for the ultimate pancakes, chocolate chip cookies, and of course poached eggs. Coming up later in the show, she'll share her findings and what makes her obsessed with the best. But first, dessert. Producer Mari Orozco invites us to a potluck to eat hundreds of cakes. After months of anticipation, the day has finally come. I just got off the train and I already see a long line of people. I'm standing outside of an industrial warehouse in Brooklyn. Hundreds of people stretch in a line around the block. A line so long that a passerby might wonder if a pop star is throwing a surprise concert. But with everyone carrying elaborate cakes and the hint of vanilla wafting through the air, it's clear this event is far sweeter. Actually, this cake picnic took me out of retirement. I haven't baked in like five years. I'm like very cognizant that I'm not going to have the prettiest cake here, but I'm very excited to see everyone else's. Once referred to as the Met Gala of Cakes, Cake Picnic has become an online sensation. It's a community cake potluck with one simple rule. No cake, no entry. How did you hear about this event? Instagram. TikTok. I've been stalking it for a while. This is my first time. I've tried to get tickets last year, but I can't get tickets. No, these are like concert level tickets. Yeah, three seconds. Three seconds? Yes, yes, yes. Only one for my friend group to get a ticket. Cake Picnic is for everyone, from professional pastry chefs to home bakers. It celebrates cake in all its forms and was born out of a profoundly simple desire. Cake Picnic started with this idea of, I want to eat a lot of cake, but I don't want to bake all of it by myself. Maybe other people want to do it with me. That's Elisa Sanga, the founder of Cake Picnic. She's a year and a half into organizing these events, and they just keep getting bigger and bigger. We recently broke the record in San Francisco, So I think two weeks ago where we had 2,068 cakes. Oh my God. Yeah. Cake Picnic tours around the world. In 2025, they spread the cake spirit to eight cities, including Los Angeles, London, and Dubai. And they're not stopping anytime soon. In my emails and inbox every day, it's like, come to Serbia, come to Korea, come to Paris, come to Malaysia. So it's like, I love cake and new friends so much. It's like, why would I turn that away? I'm not much of a baker. I actually don't think I've ever baked a cake in my life. Yet, the thought of being surrounded by hundreds of colorful confections makes me giddy. So I follow the smell of buttercream inside. Welcome to Cake Picnic. If you're coming in from the sixth floor, please file on in. After checking in at the front door, I step into what feels like a cake lover's fantasy. Giant posters of sumptuous cakes decorate the drab concrete walls. Participants don pink baseball caps with the words super moist stitched on the front, courtesy of Betty Crocker. And full-length mirrors with cake picnic imprinted on top become the backdrop for endless selfies. There's even a custom cake picnic song playing on loop. Just a sweet, sweet sugar fest. Cake picnic, who got the slice? Part indoor, part outdoor rooftop, the entire sixth floor is filled with hundreds of cakes. 916 to be exact. Cakes in the shape of a big red apple, a popcorn bucket, a trash can, and a savory turducken. Classic, experimental, there's every cake you could imagine. So I made a sourdough cinnamon bun tower that's pumpkin spice flavored. I made this three-tier funfetti cake with homemade sprinkle cookies. Hard to describe a bunch of Korean flavors that I grew up with. So there was mugwort, red bean, black sesame. Almond cake with poached pears and a browned butter almond buttercream and caramelized croissants. Incredible. What was the inspiration behind that? Um, I don't know, butter? About two hours into the event, the mood starts to feel less like a party and more like purgatory. We are running a little behind, so please be patient. The cakes lay untouched on the tables as participants pace around. If you're feeling a little claustrophobic, step out to the balcony, grab some fresh air. They scroll on their phones, stare at the volunteers, and take a picture in the selfie mirror. Again. And then… I guess we're starting it soon? I don't know. There's two doors on this side. Attendees are divided into groups, each with a different colored wristband. Groups are then called up to cut as many cake slices as they can before the countdown begins. They only have about five minutes to slice. And that's when it devolves into a kind of Hunger Games. In a panicked fever, bakers race against the clock, wielding cake knives, bumping and weaving through the crowds. And then it's done. Time is up for Red and Orange. Red and Orange, please do it now. Pops file out with cake-filled pizza boxes adorned with the cake picnic logo and leave behind a completely demolished cutting area, littered with frosting and gum paste flowers. Some participants are triumphant. I actually snagged a slice of the savory cake that I saw. It was the turducken one. Others come out feeling like it was a dream. It's a war zone up there. Oh my gosh. Chaos or excitement, frenzy or pure unadulterated joy. There's something about cake that sparks a particular enthusiasm. I asked Cake Picnic founder Elisa Sanga for her thoughts on the magic of cake. Why cake? Like, what is it about cake that brings this communal energy? I think the question is, why not cake? I think Cake Picnic is so rebellious in that, you know, not only are we going to eat cake on any random Saturday without any birthdays or weddings necessarily, but we're going to eat hundreds of it in one time. So it's really kind of being aggressively happy about cake and celebrating it for what it is. So go ahead, have your cake when you want it. Have it in an industrial warehouse with 915 strangers. Have it alone, standing in the open door of your refrigerator at midnight. Have it because you can. It's the sweetest form of rebellion. That story was reported by Mari Orozco. She's a producer here at Mill Street Radio. Coming this spring, Cake Picnic founder Elisa Sunga will release a cookbook, Cake Picnic, Recipes for the Love of Cake and Friends. And now Stella Parks is back. She's returned as our guest co-host to take more of your baking calls. Stella is a pastry chef, also author of Brave Tart, Iconic American Desserts. Stella, thanks again for being here on Milk Street. So here's my question. I had experiences as a child, which inevitably or inexorably led me into the kitchen as a profession. And not all of it was success. So was there something that happened to you around the kitchen when you were younger that sort of led you in this direction? Or you just were born knowing you wanted to obsessively cook American desserts, for example? I was born knowing it. No. Actually, this is – I kind of got goosebumps just now. you asking me this question is the most perfect thing because my experience was my dad had a subscription to cooks illustrated and there was this chocolate cake feature and it was like one chocolate cake six different ways and so here's chocolate cake with sour cream and here's german chocolate cake or whatever and i was just like one chocolate cake six ways are you kidding me And I made every one of those cakes like 150 times. Really? And it was like an amazing experience just to see how these shifts and techniques and ingredients had such a profound impact on not only the dessert that came out of it, but also other people's reactions to it. The sour cream variation has always stuck with me because people would just be like, oh, it's so soft. and then the other kind of full circle moment about this. And we've talked several times, and I've been holding it together as a professional, but talking to you is like a thing that has legitimized my career, probably to my father, because he was the guy with the subscription. He's like, oh, this is Christopher Kimball. This is very serious stuff. This guy takes it seriously. Like, truly. Anything that can enhance your status with your family. But no, sincerely, those recipes, and especially the early issues of Cook's Illustrated, had a huge impact on me. I felt serious and I liked that like the black and white, the illustration just formative Well I love the fact that it wasn't that it was the chocolate cake recipes it was six ways which deeply connects with your inner psyche because the idea that there are iterations with different techniques is so stellar parts like lifting up the hood getting into the engine, figuring it out Well, let's wrap this up Wrap this up, let's take a call Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Hi, my name is Anna. Hi, Anna. Where are you calling from today? Charlotte, North Carolina. And what's your question for us? I was reading a recipe, and the recipe asked for baking powder and baking soda. And that kind of drove me to a rabbit hole, thinking, why not just baking powder? Why do we need the baking soda? Is it for flavor? And then I kind of kept thinking, like, why don't we use yeast on cakes, just on bread? So I would love if you guys can nerd it out a little bit and explain to me why we have those three different things. Yeah, absolutely. Double-acting baking powder is a pretty straightforward ingredient. It's got these multiple components in it, but essentially there's like a pre-rise that happens where when you mix up a batter or dough, these two agents react in the moisture of the dough thanks to their own pH. They're like a self-contained unit. They release air into the batter. And this is what makes it double acting, that you have this one release of air, this wave of air that comes out before you even put it in the oven. And then you put it in the oven and there's another leavening agent that releases gas when it gets hot. And so that causes the existing air cells in the batter to expand. So boom, it raises your cake or your cookies. Ideally, if you're not using too much of it, it has a neutral flavor profile. It doesn't do anything to the flavor of what you're working with. Baking soda basically mimics the first stage of that It reacts to acidic ingredients in the dough or batter and releases gas and causes it to expand But it contributes a bit of flavor to it It can add an alkalinity to it Like when you think of like a really well chocolate chip cookie there's probably some baking soda that's going on and helping that. I like to use baking soda as a seasoning. People often say, well, you don't need to have both. It's like, well, I mean, maybe technically not. But baking soda, I think, can help round out the edges of a flat chocolate experience. It can help promote better browning because it alters the pH of the batter that you're working with. So I think it can kind of add a little bit of a savory flavor. So I will often include it in my recipes, not strictly for leavening purposes. I think I'm going to start using that when I'm roasting stuff. I think there's definitely some literature on the subject. Kinji, I know, has done several recipes. He actually uses baking powder in some recipes just to cause some like fizzing in the skin of, say, chicken wings or something. A turkey. Yeah. And so people will put baking soda when they're browning their onions. Baking soda, though, is also necessary chemically if you have a very acidic batter. So buttermilk, sour milk, chocolate, other ingredients, brown sugar are acidic. And so you want a balanced chemical reaction. So if you have very low pH batter, very acidic batter, baking soda is alkaline and it will balance out that reaction. So you get more lift and you get a good flavor. Yeah, I have some recipes like buttermilk paired with baking powder specifically so I don't neutralize the buttermilk because I want that buttermilk flavor to come out, that tang. So it kind of depends on where you're going with it, you know, because there's other times where you're like, I had made a white cake recently and I didn't have any milk on hand. And I was like, well, I've got buttermilk, and buttermilk makes everything better. But the cake actually came out pretty astringent because, like Chris said, it's about balance. And so I didn't have anything there to neutralize it because it was a milk-based recipe. And the yeast question is interesting because, as I understand it, desserts, cakes were risen with yeast. Egg whites became then a sort of a thing with sponge cake and, like, Martha Washington cake, et cetera. They called them pies, but they were actually cakes with a couple layers with a filling. And then they started using wood ash and other things as a leavener. And by the 1850s, then baking powder was then a commercial product. So yeast was the only leavener of choice for centuries. The reason you don't use it today is it takes a lot of time. It takes time, but also its flavor. There are recipes that are really interesting that use yeast and baking powder. We just did a recipe for bisquetes, which are biscuits in Mexico. And they're amazing because you have some yeast and you have baking powder. You don't let the dough set as long as you would for a regular recipe. But it does give you lift. It gives you additional flavor and also changes the texture. Yeah, that's how my cinnamon rolls from my book, they're a yeast-raised cinnamon roll, but have a little baking soda in there. That little bit of baking soda kind of helps bring out the browning and bring out some like pretzely kind of flavors to the browning. I think it also has to do with how cakes evolved in America versus in Europe, where European desserts largely evolved in professional environments. And so these bakers have the means, the time, the resources to manage a yeast-based recipe, whereas American desserts evolved in the home kitchen. And so especially once you're looking at the mid-1800s, using a baking powder or a baking soda, chemical leavening really helped facilitate getting dessert on the table. I grew up in South America, and the way I learned to make cakes is we just throw all the liquids on the blender, blend it for a minute or two, and then mix on the ball with the solids. Because hand mixers were very expensive back in the day. So it kind of like went through generations of us making cakes using blenders. And it's a very foreign idea for Americans, which it kind of makes me laugh a little bit. I love it. There's a corn cake I came across at a market in Mexico City years ago. It was a blender cake. It's absolutely phenomenal. And I know that blenders are extremely important in the Mexican kitchen. Yeah. South America, you're going to find a blender in every house, but not every house has a hand mixer. Thank you so much. Anna, thank you. Thank you so much for calling. Take care. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Hi, this is Joe from Kentucky. The reason I call is I would like to make chocolate leaves to put on the vanilla frosting on my cake. And I would like to know what percentage of dark chocolate should I use? Do I have to add butter or Crisco in the Ben Marie? Okay, this is cool. This is a very nostalgic question for me, actually. And also, hello from Kentucky. I'm also here in Kentucky. Oh, okay. So when I was first getting into baking, I had the Cake Bible, which is, you know, this seminal work of pastry perfection that, you know, really shaped my outlook. But there's a whole section on how to do chocolate-covered leaves in there. and I think I was probably 12 years old trying to temper chocolate in my microwave in Versailles Kentucky and being in complete disbelief that the way you melted chocolate could have any effect I remember reading the recipe over and over and you know it says you've got to chop up really finely chop up all this chocolate and then very carefully melt two-thirds of it and then very carefully stir in the last third and I'm just like but at the end of the day all you've got is melted chocolate Like, why are they making this so hard? So you do need to temper chocolate for this enterprise. And honestly, you can use whatever kind of chocolate you like, whatever would match the aesthetic of your cake. If you want to have a white out experience, white chocolate does work. Whatever type of chocolate you use has its own kind of rules for tempering. And the great thing is many, many baking books are going to cover chocolate tempering, including the cake Bible, which I can't recommend enough. And they'll guide you through this specific task. And the long story short is you just want to melt the bulk of your chocolate gently and then add some additional chocolate to it that's been very finely chopped. So tempering is an important part of the process. But the other half of the equation in this situation is the leaves. And this is an area where you are going to want to take a bit more care to find something that's organic. And you want to make sure the plant you're working with, in addition to being organic, is also non-toxic. So it's safe for human consumption because in the cake Bible, the example that was used there was organic roses. So rose leaves work really brilliantly. One thing you can use if you have your own yard and you don't treat it is violet leaves. Even when the violets are not bloomed, they're kind of a heart-shaped leaf. They're safe to eat. They're actually very high in vitamin C. Otherwise, actual herbs, you can grab sage or if you can find some fresh bay leaves, those kinds of things will work really well. And if all else fails, they do sell silicon leaves for this exact purpose in like baking supply stores or online where you can just have, you know, whatever kind of leaf you want and paint it with chocolate and then let the tempered chocolate set and then just peel it right off. So how long do I put this in the freezer? Well, if you're using tempered chocolate, you don't have to put it in the freezer at all. You can just let it sit and the chocolate on its own will set back up. If you want to speed the process along, you can throw them into the freezer. sometimes that can cause like a little discoloration a little bit. But with properly tempered chocolate, that's not necessary at all. Although for storage, we might like to keep them in a cold place. Okay. Wow. Thank you. I appreciate your input. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for calling. This is Milk Street Radio. Looking for some baking inspiration, give us a ring, 855-426-9843. That's 855-426-9843 or email us at questions at MilkStreetRadio.com. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? John from Dublin, Ohio. How can we help you? I found a scone-like pastry in a local store that is called a toga. And I had never heard of anything like that before. So my first question is, what exactly is a toga? Have you heard of it? And my second question, how can I get a recipe to make them? I think the key ingredient is cream cheese. You want an honest answer? Yes. No, I've never heard of it. So why don't you describe it? It's shaped like a very thick, round cookie. It's very, very moist inside. It's not as dry as a scone. And I've done some research, and I haven't found anything like it anywhere. There's this arms race when it comes to scones and cookies. You know, in England, if you go to Brown's Hotel or someplace like that and you order the, I guess, tea or high tea at 4 o'clock, the scones that come out are little tiny biscuits. They're like an inch and a half in diameter. They're tiny. Right. And then you come back here and you get a scone, the things like the size of your hand. And so this just sounds like someone's upping the ante and it's a totally made up concept. But the cream cheese, I guess, would make it moister. I know that in general, if you make something with butter, it tends to be drier. But I'm going to defer to the expert here. OK. The toga expert. Her nickname is toga. Yeah. Stella Toga Parks. And it turns out it's a totally fake dessert made by a company called Aphrodite Divine Confections. So there's not really any, you know, storied history here. But if there's one thing that I love in this world is to take something that's completely commercial and store-bought and then, like, find a way to reverse engineer it into something delicious and homemade. So I'm into it conceptually, although I've never had one. So that is something of a handicap in terms of the reverse engineering. but I was able to pull up the ingredients list and that's a huge help anytime you're trying to reverse engineer something the list is high gluten flour cinnamon drops butter eggs cream cream cheese sweetened condensed milk sugar oats baking powder cinnamon and salt so super straightforward and my best guess is they're taking the cinnamon drops so those are like cinnamon chips that you would get in the baking aisle. So it looks like they're taking the cinnamon drops, this is my guess, the sweetened condensed milk and the cream cheese and making almost like a ganache type of filling out of that. And based on the website, it kind of looks something like that. You could really speak to that more, what the consistency of the interior element is. But I'm guessing those ingredients come out for the filling. The other ingredients go into making a cream scone that has eggs in it. And then probably the little filling bits are made into little pucks, maybe frozen, I don't know. Then the scote elements wrapped around it. So you think there is a filling in there? That's what's making it so moist? It's hard to say, but in a photo, it does look like there's a distinctive filling element. Okay. Okay. John, you tasted this and loved it? Yes. It was awesome. I never quite had something that was so small and filling and really soft inside for a scone. Was it like a little bit like sturdy like a cookie or did it have that like biscuity dryer kind of quality to it? It's pretty sturdy as a cookie, you know, but when you bite into it, you definitely sense that the inside is much softer. I'll have to experiment and see if I can come up with some version of it on my own. It's a good thing you called because Stella was looking for a new purpose in life. It's the toga. Clearly, Stella, you found it. I'm going to earn the name toga. Yeah, you're going to have to earn it. It's my destiny. Exactly. I wish you luck. Thank you. Thank you so much. Love your show. Bye. Bye. special thanks to stella parks you can learn more about her at brave tart.com coming up next ella quittner obsessively tests the best recipes for biscuits bacon and chocolate chip cookies this is mill street radio i your host christopher Kimball I joined now by Ella Quintner for her new book She ran dozens of head tests for making the best pancakes meatballs, yellow cake, and more. Her book is called Obsessed with the Best. Ella, welcome back to Milk Street. Hi, Chris. I'm so excited to be back. Talking to you is like talking to myself 30 years ago. I mean, it really is. I was, well, it's good news, bad news. I was going through obsessed with the best or 100 methodically perfected recipes. And it sounds, the insanity of it, and I say that in the nicest possible way, just reminds me of myself. I remember I used to stop by Julia's in Cambridge when she was alive here. And I go up and say, you know, I tried zesting lemons this way and I tried zesting lemons that way and this way so much better. And she'd look at me like as if I was totally insane. And just had another cocktail. But the good news is I love and I've spent my whole life, you know, testing cake flour versus bread flour and freezing versus refrigerating and this and that and the other thing. And so I love it. But I think today let's go through some of the recipes in the book and let's agree or disagree and just have some fights. OK, let's have fights. Because I think that would be fun. Yeah, I think that would be really fun. A food fight. A food fight on a Tuesday. I love your story about going in and saying, like, I just did this this way. I feel like there's a look people get. Yeah, it's the look. When they realize you're about to ask them 16 more follow-up questions on something they thought they put to bed with you a week ago. Well, I think the expression or face was, why is this person here? How long is he going to stay? How can I get him to stop? And how can I get them to just leave? People don't get us. People don't appreciate us. Well, I think, and we can talk about this more. I think over the last 30 or 40 years, I have slightly altered the way I think about testing. So I'm a little less into the 12 ingredients and spending an extra half hour for the very best. Because best for me implies some other things like how much time do I have or how much do I really care? And maybe as I get a little older, I don't care quite as much about perfection. So my definition of best recipe might be a little different. But let's take one. Let's take poached eggs, okay? Sure. About 10 years ago, I bought poaching egg cups, you know, where it has a little wire and they hang on the inside of the pot. I know them well. And I'm going like, that's it. And I poach eggs every weekend. And I just like, I just use the egg cup. Now, you would argue, I'll argue for you that you don't get the same delicate texture, right? I would argue that. And I would also argue that it's important to learn the fussy method to getting a perfect poached egg for that time. You're in an Airbnb with very limited equipment and you don't have your egg cup thing from William to Noma. And you have to impress your in-laws with a perfectly poached egg. Well, it's a $3 silicone egg cup, so it's not like it's expensive. So you travel with them? No. I'm just kidding. I don't travel. You have like a holster. But I guess just to be on your side for a moment, I do think there is a different texture. So is that your defense? It's one piece of my defense. I have a few defenses. I actually write in the book about this because when I was in elementary school, I spent a full two years fixated on poaching eggs in like complete silence with one of these devices, probably a rudimentary precursor to the cool one you have now. It's something someone in my family had bought from like an As Seen on TV ad. I've used those things, yeah. And I did used to find it to be an almost perfect product, but I've moved away from it, one, because of the textural reason you just described. In order to cook the egg, because it's not directly touching the water, it's not definitionally getting poached, You have to use a higher heat, which obviously, as we both know, makes those proteins coagulate more quickly and leads to a firmer white. And the second reason is I definitionally don't think that's a poached egg. So if I'm doing this whole chapter on the absolute best way to poach an egg, I feel like I need to draw some boundaries. So you've really drunk the Kool-Aid. I mean, you're really, I mean, you're strict here. This is Catholicism to the nth degree. Like we're going to, it's hook, line, and sinker. It's certainly something. So let's take biscuits. So I did these bisquetes from Mexico City, which use yeast and baking powder. And they're really huge and they're kind of yellow and they're, they take like an hour and a half because they got to sit around for a while. So I went back and took my classic baking powder biscuit. But this time I made the ingredients very simple. And then I folded in a series of ways to get more height and layers to it. But I can throw it together in five minutes and bake it for 12 minutes. Your biscuit recipe, under pressure, flaky biscuits, which sounds great, but you've got to freeze the biscuits for 20 minutes first. So I'm like, you know what? I wake up in the morning at 530, I want a cup of coffee, and I want my bloody biscuits as fast as possible. So my decision was I'm not going to do a biscuit recipe that takes 45 minutes. Yeah. Because I just think that's inherently against the concept of biscuits. Like biscuits have to be fast. So, you know, what say you about that concept of fitting a recipe to its actual use in real life? I say that I am so happy for you that you were able to come to that realization about yourself and your needs and biscuits. The limitations of my. No, I don't think it's limitations. I think it's just like, you know, when you realize, wait, I'm an anxious traveler. I need to get to the airport four hours earlier and that makes your life better. It's like having that realization about yourself and your preference is almost as important as the food you're making. and I write a little bit in the book about how the way people prefer their biscuits, whether it's the technique, the flavor, the ingredients, says a lot about who they are as people. You align a lot with my relatives on my mom's side. Her grandmother and her aunts in Kentucky were these very stubborn women who, you know, basically chose to live in this tiny town in the Appalachian Mountains that flooded so badly every year that they would have to literally pick up everything, move while it was wet, and then come home when it was dry and rebuild. But they didn't want to leave. They knew what they liked. They knew how they liked things to be. I like these people. Yeah, amazing people. They didn't even like to cook, but they loved fresh biscuits with their coffee all day. And so a requirement of their household was that both fresh coffee and fresh biscuits be around all day. So they took an approach much more like yours. Just very simple ingredients mixed together. No folding bullshit. No vodka like I have in my biscuits. No pastry scrapers. No tandem bakery accordions. and they just threw them in the oven every couple of hours so that the biscuits were fresh and everyone was happy. I like a fussy biscuit. And in fact, my biscuits, something that I do because they are pretty labor intensive and they do take a while to get perfect and get all the nice folds. And I'm having you use the freezer to keep everything from melting. I really like to make several batches at once and freeze them cut for months at a time, tightly wrapped. and then pull them out like a magic trick, egg wash them, and bake them off for dinner parties. And so that's something that makes it feel like, even though it is kind of a fussy recipe for biscuits, worthwhile to kind of do all the labor up front. All right. Let's take bacon. Now, you're just out of your mind, okay? First of all— I wish you were the first person that called me out of my mind. Just so our audience can understand the depth, you call for two pots, two Dutch ovens, because you want to weight the bacon down. So now you've got to clean two pots. And then at the end, you've got to brush it with soy sauce and brown sugar and maple syrup. It's like, really? I mean, you're just cooking bacon. I mean, really? Come on. It's special occasion bacon. And I write about how I went to it. Bacon's always special occasion. It's bacon. That's fair. That's fair. I'll take this L. I'll take this L. You definitely don't have to use my technique. I developed it because obviously we all know, well, most of us know how to make pretty solid bacon. For me, the easiest way would be just put thick sliced bacon on a cold cast iron. Let the fat render as it comes up to temp. Flip it a few times. You're good. Get it to your level of done this you prefer. I wanted to go a step further and add to the conversation and develop something that more resembled this like kind of crispy, chewy New York City bodega bacon I like, which is where all of the crazy – there's something you benevolently didn't mention that's insane that I call for, which is like taking the bacon strips and arranging them into a pound symbol before you press them with the second pan. I missed that part. You probably blacked it out in a rage. But I'm basically trying to create a very specialized kind of bacon, which has these different textures and flavors that is not your everyday bacon and is not the bacon you make when you're like hungover and just need bacon. Well. I mean, I think you should make it. I think you could love it. I don't know. So let's talk about the things we agree on. Okay. So we're going to now come together. That sounds really healing. It does. I'm happy for us. So let's talk about some things that I have never done. You have. Well, no, I'm not taking you down. I'm actually building you up. White wine and cake, yellow cake. Talk to me about white wine and cake. Is this going back to the vodka and pie crust in some way, or is this a totally different concept? Yeah, I was thinking of it. I was like, I think he's going to ask me about this. It's funny because the actual answer is this is something that I've always done. And my entire life, it's made the most flavorful, tender, delicious cake with this velvety crumb. I never knew why. And when I started incorporating white wine in my cake trials here, something I found was, you know, similar to the vodka and the biscuits or vodka and pie dough, which is a very well-documented trick, alcohol reduces gluten formation. We know that, right? It kind of inhibits those two naturally occurring proteins from snapping together and forming as strong of networks as they otherwise would. Well, I thought, well, let's talk about that. My understanding of vodka pie crust is vodka is 50% alcohol. That alcohol burns off during the baking process or pre-baking process, which means you actually have less water in the dough, which means you have less gluten formation because there's less water. So you're also saying alcohol itself takes the gluten and gliadin and makes them less likely to pair up together? I don't know that it makes it less likely to pair up, but I've read that having alcohol similar to acid, like, you know, when you would add buttermilk or something to a glutinous dough, makes those gluten networks weaker. And that, like you're saying, alcohol, whether it's wine or vodka, has a lower water percentage than just water. And so you're ending up with a less of an ability to let those gliadin and gliadin. What are those, you know, those two? Glutinin and gliadin. Yeah, my extremely scientific understanding of it is water basically makes those two molecules have like a slip and slide that allows them to hook up and make this strong net of gluten. So the less water you have, the less slip and slide. So the least, you know, a less strong gluten network is going to form. So let's talk about brining. Okay. So, you know, I have a long history with brining, as you know, and I was a big advocate. And now I absolutely refuse to brine under any conditions. I love that for you. And I use a dry brine. So I know you have a shrimp brine in here. How do you feel about wet brining versus dried brining? I think I'm done with wet brining. I just think enough's enough. But you do it occasionally. For me, it completely depends on the protein. I do call for a brine for peeled shrimp. One, because I wanted to get baking soda in there to help keep the proteins in the shrimp from clenching too much when you poach them. Like I like a shrimp that looks like it's had a really long day at work and it's just lying down on the couch with a martini. That's the shrimp I want in my shrimp cocktail. So I'm prioritizing, kind of optimizing that internal texture over preserving the shrimpiest flavor. So you don't want to pick it up by the tail and crunch into it with that clunched texture? Yeah, like rubber. No, I don't. I don't know. I want it to be If you had the shrimp at Penny in New York City the shrimp cocktail they almost like melty It drives me crazy My kind of hard and fast is unless it a turkey and I tell you why in a second I don't wet brine birds because I don't like that it makes the skin so much harder to crisp. Crispy poultry skin is like extremely important to everything about me as a human. And I just don't want to sacrifice that. Wait, wait, hold on. Hold on. Is this how you define yourself as a member of the homo sapien tribe? Yeah, literally. This is what separates me from the machines. What separates me from AI is my passion for crispy poultry skin. I have an almost romantic relationship with crispy poultry skin, and I'll leave it at that. But I don't want to risk inhibiting it with a wet brine. I know that there are ways around it. And in fact, a feta brine or a buttermilk brine, I'm excluding from that. because when you're brining in something that has compounds that will brown in it, that's actually going to help with the skin, right? But I think that something like feta, you know, that's going to leave little bits of residue all over the skin that's going to crisp up and brown. The buttermilk, we've all made that buttermilk chicken. It turns gloriously mahogany and crispy, so there are exceptions. But in general, I don't like to just do a water brine for a bird. By the way, if you took the soy sauce and maple syrup from your bacon and, you know, 325 oven, hour and a half, take it out, glaze it with that, put it back in another 30 minutes, take it out, glaze it and finish it in the oven. That'll give you the world's best skin. Sure. So what surprises you here? In other words, what result did you end up with that was either incredibly delicious and it surprised you or the solution was weird and you just unexpected? Hmm. Okay, I have one, but I think you're going to hate it. Well, that's even better. That's great. I thought our food fight was over. Okay, here it is. So I feel bad even saying this on a public radio show, but I used to hate fresh pasta, fresh Italian-style pasta. I was a hater. I thought it was always gummy and overcooked, and I was like, why can't it be al dente, like boxed dried pasta? I didn't like when you went to a fancy restaurant and they had their fresh pasta lasagna or whatever. It was like gloopy and floppy to me. And so I tried to set out to solve what was a very personal preference problem for myself in this book. I have a whole chapter on how to make actually chewy fresh pasta. And I tried a lot of things. I went to different regions in Italy, to Tuscany, to Modena, to Parma, to Bologna, to a house in the hills of the Longriano Valley. I also went to Japan because I wanted to study how they make udon and how you could knead with your feet to apply extra pressure for more gluten formation. Tested all these different things. The trick that I eventually settled on liking best because it was so easy to do at home, but which I find so shocking. And I'm almost like worried for the book to publish because it is so it sounds so sort of sacrilegious to fresh pasta. So you're going to make, you know, a very low hydration dough and it's going to be beautiful and supple and feel almost like suede when you touch it. And you're going to let it rest and roll it out and you're going to make your pasta shapes. But then before you boil them, you're going to put them in the freezer for a few hours or longer. You could I do this all the time now. I do like freezer stocks of fresh pasta and they're good for months. And the longer you freeze them, the better it works. But for some reason, when you boil pasta from the freezer, from frozen, it is like slightly chewier and slightly less overcooked than if you just do it from fresh. That's not so crazy. I mean, I have a theory, but I haven't been able to prove my theory with metrics, which is why I didn't mention it in the book. My theory is that when you put something in the freezer, over time the freezer obviously like wicks away little bits of moisture from it, right? Dehydrates it, yeah. And so I think starting with this already sort of judicious hydration level and then putting it in the freezer might wick away just an imperceptible amount that's so subtle that in my trials, like, you know, I obviously would boil pasta that was fresh versus pasta that was straight from the freezer and weigh how much water each of them took in. Obviously, on a Friday night. And I wouldn't be able to prove that the one from the freezer was taking in less water necessarily. So I think it must be happening at a very subtle cellular level. My other sub theory is that it's possible the freezer is in some way sort of curing the outside of the pasta. So it's not like taking in the water as readily when it cooks. I don't know, though. It just works. This has been, I mean, we could go on and on and just, we actually haven't argued that much, unfortunately. Well, maybe when you have me over for poached eggs, we can kind of get that argument restarted. No, you know what? I'll make you biscuits this day. I'll bring my biscuits. And we can do a blind taste. Yeah, yours will be better. But by the time we get around to yours, I'll eat three of mine. Mine are timely, timely biscuits. Ella, it's been a real pleasure. And let's get together something. Let's, please. I would love that. Thank you for having me. This has been so much fun. Take care. That was Ella Quintner, author of Obsessed with the Best. You can find an extended cut of our interview on Tuesday, February 24th at MilkStreetRadio.com or wherever you find podcasts. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Coming up, we'll learn all about the language of butter. I'm Christopher Kimball and you're listening to Milk Street Radio. Time to check in with our friends Grant Barrett and Martha Barnett of A Way With Words. Hey, Grant Martha, what's going on? Hi, Chris. Hey, Chris. Well, today we thought we would slather our conversation with a key ingredient in some of our favorite cuisines. Now, of course, I'm talking about butter. And I think by the end of this, you're probably going to say, butter my wig. That's a whole lot about butter. Butter my wig? What does that mean? I'm so glad you asked, Chris. Butter my wig is an archaic English expression to emphasize something. So butter my wig, I think it's high time we bring that expression back. Well, I guess in the day a lot of people wore wigs. All right. So maybe it was a more common concept. But butter my wig's good. Yeah, I'm going to use that every day this year. And as the Germans say, butter bei die Fische. And that literally translates as butter the fish. It means let's get down to brass stacks. Let's begin. It's a reference to what you might do right before serving fish in northern Germany. You add a pat of butter. That's a brilliant culinary step. Well, absolutely. Well, Chris, do you know which side your bread is buttered on? Now, that's an interesting expression because obviously I know it well. But no, I don't understand where that comes from, actually. Well, I ask because which side your bread is buttered on is just one of many sayings that equate butter with the finer things in life. Like, you may even have heard, have your bread buttered on both sides. And if you do, then you're extra fortunate. Many Germanic languages have buttery expressions that involve good luck. If you're unexpectedly fortunate, you're said to fall with your butt in the butter or fall with your nose in the butter. Or you might be said to land in the butter, especially if your prospects were poor to begin with. It's often used to mean that someone married well, either into money or married someone far more attractive. Your bread then is buttered on both sides. Yeah, it's interesting. In German history, back in the 1820s or 30s, there were a lot of terrible famines. So that whole lot of the stories about children being left in the woods, that kind of thing. Hansel and Gretel. That stuff actually happened. I mean, they had so little food, some kids were abandoned. Yeah. So I guess butter was, at the time, would have been the height of affluence in some places. Absolutely, yes, really luxurious. And you see something similar in French where the phrase faire sans belre means to make one's butter literally, but it also means to earn income without much effort. Yeah, and a plate of butter. You know, assiette du berg means an easy job or an easy source of profits. And, of course, in German, you'll also hear alles imbuter, which means everything's great. And the French speakers also say assiette du berg, it's butter, meaning it's a cinch or it's a snap. And they might say to put butter in the spinach, meaning to improve one's situation. And there's also in Hindi a phrase that translates as a big buffalo gives more butter. And that means that the more effort and the more investment you put in something, the better the results. But that phrase is also used to mean those who already have plenty end up getting more than everybody else. I'm going to run around saying a big buffalo gives more butter. I love it. Having metaphorical butter isn't always a positive. For example, in Spanish, to have a heart of butter is to be cowardly or to be easy to persuade because you're soft. Well, wait, wait. What about the expression melts my heart? That's supposed to be good. Well, soft is good or bad depending on the circumstances, right? Yeah, I guess so. And we have to include these. I love these in Portuguese. If something doesn't last, you might say the equivalent of it's butter on a dog's snout or butter on a cat's nose. That is, it's not going to be there very long at all. Butter on a cat's nose. Do you not have cats? Butter on a dog's snout. Slurp, it's gone. Okay. Well, here's one more. If you're buttering a cat's face, then you're giving advice to somebody who's not going to heed it. Has anyone ever had a case where a cat listened to good advice? With or without butter? Zero times. And there are so many of these expressions. And before this all turns into butter upon bacon, which means too much of a good thing, we butter wrap it up. Oh, Lord. I don't know two butter friends in the whole world. Oh, that's so sweet. Till next time, guys. Take care. All right. Take care, Chris. Bye-bye. That was Grant Barrett and Martha Barnett, hosts of A Way With Words. Martha just published her new book called Friends With Words, Adventures in Language Land. That's it for today. You can find all of our episodes at MilkStreetRadio.com or wherever you find your podcasts. To explore Milk Street and everything we have to offer, please go to 177 MilkStreet.com. there you can become a member get full access to every recipe free standard shipping for the milk street store and more you can also find us on facebook at christopher kimball's milk street on instagram at 177 milk street we'll be back next week with more food stories and kitchen questions and thanks as always for listening christopher kimball's milk street radio is produced by milk street in association with gbh Co-founder, Melissa Baldino. Executive producer, Annie Sinzabaugh. Senior editor, Melissa Allison. Senior producer, Sarah Clapp. Producer, Caroline Davis. Assistant producer, Mari Orozco. Additional editing by Sydney Lewis. Audio mixing by Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Theme music by 2Bob Crew. Additional music by George Brendel Eggloff. Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio is distributed by PRX.