Obsessed with the Best: Extended Cut

I'm Christopher Kimball and this is a special episode of Mill Street Radio. Today it's an extended cut of my latest interview with Ella Quintner. For years she's run dozens of head-to-head tests for the best chocolate chip cookies, yellow cake, and much more. Her book is one of my favorite new cookbooks this year. It's called Obsessed with the Best. Ella, welcome back to Mill Street. Hi Chris, I'm so excited to be back. Uh, talking to you is like talking to myself 30 years ago. I mean, it really is. I was, I was, well, it's, it's good news, bad news. I was going through obsessed with the best or a hundred methodically perfected recipes. And it sounds the insanity of it. And I say that in the nicest possible way. It 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, 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. Okay, 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 him 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, OK? Sure. About 10 years ago, I bought poaching egg cups, you know, with 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 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. Well, no, but I have to, look, I have to appreciate this because when I grew up in the food world back in the 80s, 70s, 80s, it would just rank with recipes that didn't work, complete lack of rigor in the kitchen, a lot of professionalism about the writing maybe, but very little in terms of recipe development. And now, of course, that's all changed and people are into the science of cooking. But I think that's a fair answer. I think my eggs are steamed, not poached. And it's a different thing. My answer to you is I have $6 worth of egg cups. I can make poached eggs in five or six minutes and throw them in the dishwasher. And they're good enough. I do think you're hitting on something. And I don't mean to supersede our food fights because I would still like to fight mightily. But I think we have this cultural connotation with the word best, especially when it comes to food. That implies that I have sought to perfect every single recipe using every single tweak, hack, trick, ingredient. That's not what I set out to do, and I hope it's not what I created. I think that for me, best means something different depending on the dish. So in the case of poached eggs, best might mean an actually definitionally poached egg for textural reasons. but I might support a shortcut or a technique minimalist recipe for something else. Like in the chicken chapter, for example, I give two mother recipes, one which is what I think is the juiciest, most delicious, most succulent chicken, and that one takes many hours and requires a two-day brine. But I also give a one-hour chicken that's like, uh-oh, I have to have chicken on the table in 90 minutes and I'm in Safeway right now. Because I agree with you that best can mean 100,000 different things to everyone, and it also can change based on a person's culinary context. Well, let me add another dimension to this, which has grown on me, like many other things, in recent years. And that's a recipe that gets to the essence of the recipe, right? So if you're going to do bacon or biscuits or pancakes or whatever, what's the thing that most elegantly expresses the essence of the recipe, the thing that makes it a special recipe, right? without fuss and without extra ingredients, without extra work. That's where I get really excited. It's like cacio e pepe. I spent time in Rome a year ago figuring this out. And, you know, it's three ingredients, right? Right. It's cheese, pepper, and pasta, and water. And how do you take those three ingredients or four ingredients and figure out the most elegant solution? And that recipe for me embodies what I love about the perfect recipe or the best recipe is it expresses the inherent beauty of what you're after. You hit on something I think is really interesting conceptually, and I don't mean to get too cerebral about our food fight. But I think that what you said about recipes that excite you being ones that really elegantly show one thing effectively is a lesson I've had to learn as a writer across different modalities. And it's something that came up a lot, Recipe developing this book. because with a project like this, I would feel the urge to combine and sort of Frankenstein together six different things. Like this is going to be the baked macaroni and cheese with the creamiest sauce, but the best flavor, but the crispiest top, but also the best corners. With 13 ingredients. Yeah. And it reminds me of a lesson I had to learn. I split my time between journalism, foodstuff and screenwriting. And it reminded me of a lesson I had to learn in screenwriting, which is like, what is this scene supposed to be about? It's all well and good if you have your fun little darlings or things that you wanted to work in the dialogue because they're cute or give texture or give you a sense of the world. But ultimately, the scene needs to be about the thing that it is supposed to be about, and it needs to impactfully be about that. And you can only add in some of that shading very very very scrupulously after you kind of made that work And I think a recipe is the same thing You can Frankenstein together 40 different purposes because you going to end up with a recipe that doesn really serve anyone's need. Yeah. And also people get obsessed with the thing. Like the thing is, oh, let's do Neapolitan meatballs that are 40% bread, you know, and then a year later they do another beet ball recipe, little polpete, and there's no bread in them at all. And they go, hey, these are really great. I mean, so you go down a road, you get all caught up in it. And then two years later, you come back and do the opposite. And you realize that, well, okay, it's not wrong. It's just a different thing. That's all. 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 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. I'm Christopher Kimmel, and you're listening to a special episode of Milk Street Radio with Ella Quintner, author of Obsessed with the Best. Coming up, Ella's Perfect Bacon will be right back. This is Mill Street Radio. Now let's get back to my interview with Ella Quintner, author of Obsessed with the Best. 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 um 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 hung over and just need bacon. Well, I mean, I think you should make it. I think you could love it. I don't know. Here's what came to mind when I read this recipe. You know, Lonesome Dove is one of my favorite books and the TV series back in the 70s, which I hope you've watched is terrific. But there's a scene where Ball, the cook, he's making breakfast and the biscuits have been baked in a Dutch oven outside on a fire. So he's just cooking up the eggs right in the bacon. And he's got his cowboy coffee right next to it. And the coffee and the grounds are spilling over into the skillet with the eggs and the bacon. And I'm just going like, there are the two bookends of the world of cooking breakfast. You have this incredibly complicated biscuits and bacon, and you have this guy with coffee grounds in the skillet along with the bacon. I will say my number one thing, this is going to throw a wrench in your vision of me, The number one thing I'm really unfussy about and sloppy is coffee. When you said cowboy coffee, I nodded to myself because I totally made cowboy coffee for like two years when I was living in an apartment without any sort of like filter or coffee maker or French press. Well, French press only costs about $10. But it's just where I draw the line, I guess. Like I just the mental load of caring about coffee can't do it. I'm happy for it to be totally mediocre in my own home. You use the term mental load. So where does that come in like when you're doing your bacon recipe? You seem to have unlimited mental capacity for that, but not for making a good cup of coffee. Yeah, I guess. It's an interesting question. I don't know. I think about it all the time because I think to other people I must seem like such a sort of type A neurotic perfectionist. And I am very neurotic and I am really obsessive. But I do think that would surprise you. I can be very sloppy in my own day-to-day life. I don't know, like, where that line is drawn, but I totally have a line. But that's so true. I mean, you know, people are shocked when they learn that Julia Child loved goldfish, you know. For sure. Or that James Beard loved, you know, bacon and potato chips. I mean, it's like, yeah, well, they're just human. And also I think maybe you could relate to this, Chris, because, you know, like you said, I'm kind of the 30 years later, you doing all these crazy, insane tests that do require quite a bit of mental load. But it's like at the end of the day, I don't want to necessarily go through all of this effort to create something totally perfect. Sometimes I want to like microwave a weird half of a sandwich that I have from 11 days ago and see if it's still good and like eat it while I watch like Milf Manor on TV. You know? Yeah. Like, do you ever get that? Well, people always think, you know, you present yourself over many decades as being a certain type of person. And that's true. I mean, you can't do this on television without it being real, I don't think. It has to come from somewhere. But that doesn't mean there aren't other sides of you. Of course. 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 happy for us So you put buckwheat flour in chocolate chunk cookies We put rye flour So I a huge believer I think white flour has no flavor Agree. It's completely useless except for texture. And then buckwheat and rye and whole wheat really are necessary and great additions. And it also balances out the sweetness of whatever else is in the dish. I assume we're agreed on that? 100% agreed. And I would also add, I wonder if you know the food science reason for this because I don't, but I think adding these harder kind of coarser, drier flours is doing something interesting for these cookie recipes where you're letting the dough sit and hydrate for many days. I feel like it's sucking in moisture that's making for like a more consistently textured cookie at the end than if you just used all purpose. Well, I think it's also American desserts like English puddings are super sweet, right? I mean, the old recipes, you have to cut the sugar in half sometimes, which causes other problems. And the idea of having an offsetting savory or spicy or salty note, I think, makes them better. Totally. So that's what I think. You know, rye is a very spicy flour, and it really adds that depth. Okay, so we checked that off. 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? Glutenin 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. Yeah, I had a science guy I used for years and he used to say it's like pasta, right? Dry pasta. You put in water, all of a sudden it starts to stick together. And that's kind of what gluten is. But I do have a question for you. I'm sure you've worked with food scientists and asked them questions. I've had this experience over the years. At first, they give me like the fifth grade answer, right? Like we just talked about gluten. It's probably much more complicated. And then, you know, time goes by and I ask the same question two years later and I start getting like the 10th grade answer. And I finally worked up to like first year of college answer. But I always felt that they weren't ever giving me the real answer because the real answer is too bloody complicated. Like food science is hard. It's the old joke about why Einstein wasn't a food scientist. It's just too difficult. So I just think there's a never – it's like peeling the onion. There's a never-ending layers of truth and that I'm not a scientist and so that I really don't know what's going on really. Well, I'd like that on a shirt, what you just said. I have no idea what's going on really. Right. Well, it's true. No, I think it is true. And also with food science, a lot of it sounds plausible. So you'll Google like, why does blah, blah, blah happen when you do blah, blah, blah? And you get to this Reddit thread of this like extremely self-possessed Redditor being like, well, that happens because of this, this and this. And it sounds like it makes sense, but it's like really hard to check. Like, are you going to call Harold McGee every time? Well, it's when someone stands up, and I've done this, I've been guilty of this. If you're watching a food show or whatever, and someone mentions amino acids, when they say that, you know they're bullshitting. Because amino acids is like a deep, deep topic. And whatever they say about it is just completely superficial and useless. Look, I love Harold McGee, but he knows what he's talking about. When he tries to explain it to me, it's like, you know, I kind of get it, but he's not telling me the real story. Totally. And after a certain point, I like, you know, I get to a point in my questions where I'm like, it's better for all of us if I don't know more. I'm Christopher Kimball, and you're listening to an extended cut of my interview with Ella Quintner, author of Obsessed with the Best. Coming up, the big brining debate. We'll be right back. This is Milk Street Radio. Now, here's the last part of my interview with Hela Quintner. 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 dry 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've had the shrimp at Penny in New York City, the shrimp cocktail, they're almost like melty. It drives me crazy. My kind of hard and fast is, unless it's a turkey, and I'll 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 do 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, to get back to the turkey skin, 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 in the oven. That'll give you the world's best skin. Sure. But I think it's a uniquely American disposition where A we don want our meat to be chewy I mean the French you know in terms of steaks they cut their steaks very differently But chew is viewed as a good thing They don want our meat to be chewy I mean the French you know in terms of steaks they cut their steaks very differently But the chew is viewed as a good thing They don want butter tender meat And two being a little dry is not the end of the world As I've said many times, that's why God invented gravy, right? I mean, if you have a juicy, wet slice of turkey with gravy on it, I don't think that really works. So I think we're just obsessed with the texture of meat. We want it soft like we're babies. And if it's slightly dry, you know, I don't know. I'm not going to get all upset about it. I think we're overly obsessive about meat. And we have great meat here. I had the best short rib last week, which was the opposite of what you're saying. You know, when we see a short rib on a menu, we think it's going to come to the table and be baby food. Right. And it had chew to it. And it was covered in this wonderful sweet and sour sauce. It was at this wine bar called Lay in Chinatown, if you have plans to be in New York anytime soon. And what was so special, I was reflecting on the texture, what was so special about it being more fibrous than a classic melt-in-your-mouth short rib was you had to spend more time with the meat and the sauce, like, mingling in your mouth to actually eat it. Oh, that, chewing, yeah. And it was so wonderful. It was to perfect effect. Melty cabbage. I said about two years ago, one of my useless pronouncements around the office, they're like, okay, cauliflower is almost over. Cabbage is next. Because I saw it in my travels. How did you figure out that this was going to be the next thing? I wrote a story. I can't remember if it was last year or the year before, because I couldn't stop seeing extremely sexy cabbage dishes on very hot New York City restaurant menus. And in fact, it was all stuffed cabbage. And this was around the time Libertine was opening. It was when Superiority Burger had recently reopened. Thai Diner, these extremely popular hot restaurants in New York, all had variations of stuffed cabbage on their menu. It was a few years post-COVID. And I was like, why is this happening? And I think the answer was loosely, like, cabbage is very hearty. It's cheap to buy in this very expensive ingredient environment. And pretty much every culinary culture, if you go back far enough, has some version of stuffed cabbage, probably for the same reasons, right? In the winter when you can't grow a lot of stuff, you could store your cabbage. So it's unbelievable when you start to dive into the number of kind of varieties of stuffed cabbage that are out there. So that just sent me in a whole cabbage tailspin, and I've been obsessed ever since. Yeah, I actually even had it in Japan when I was there in May, and it was just the best thing I ever had. What was it? How was it prepared? It was roasted, but it had a real rich, buttery, umami flavor to it. It was just unbelievably delicious. I mean, it didn't look like much. That's the thing. When you cook cabbage properly, it looks like a person who's fallen asleep on the subway. It's so good. It gets buttery. That's not quite how I would have described it. But now I think about it, it's like everything is kind of spilling over. Yeah, it's like had a long week. So what surprises you here? In other words, what result did you end up with that was either incredibly delicious and surprised you or the solution was weird and just unexpected? 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 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. I tested all of 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 gonna put them in the freezer for a few hours or longer i do this all the time now i read 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 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. You know what I would do? What? I would claim it's the amino acids. Well, you said amino acids, so you know what you're talking about. All you have to do is say it's the amino acids and everybody shuts it. You're my expert source now. Chris, why does it work? It's your amino acids. 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. 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 be in three of mine. Mine are timely, timely biscuits. 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. Thanks for listening to this special extended interview. To hear all of our episodes, head to MilkStreetRadio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Facebook at Christopher Kimball's Milk Street, on Instagram at 177 Milk Street. 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