August 25, 2025 • 26 mins
Chaos cooking. A new trend. Well, sort of new. About two years old at this point, but it's found it's way into restaurants across the country. What started as a "throw it from the pantry into a pot" technique has morphed into the new version of culinary fusion.
We're Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough, authors of more than three dozen cookbooks, including our latest: COLD CANNING, a guide to turning small batches of fresh produce into jams, chutneys, conserves, sauces, chili crisps, dessert toppings, and more, without a steam- or pressure-canner in sight.
We have lived through the ages of fusion cuisine and are really intrigued by this new take. It's sloppier and messier, but it's also sort of fun. Plus, we've got a one-minute cooking tip about how to cook faster. And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.
Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK:
[01:12] Our one-minute cooking tip. Smaller things cook faster!
[04:41] Chaos cooking: what is it, how does it work, and how have you already had an example of it without necessarily knowing it?
[23:10] What’s making us happy in food this week: fresh New England corn on the cob!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
bruce (00:01):
Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast
Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
mark (00:04):
And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, my husband, we
have written 37 cookbooks, includingthe latest cold canning, which we're
actually gonna talk about a little bitas a side quest inside of this episode.
It's not really the focus of whatwe're doing, but it'll come up.
Trust me.
Cold canning is all about how tomake small batches of condiments,
preserves chili, crisp chili, Mac.
Just dessert, sauces, even triplesack, small batches at home.
(00:29):
Anything that could be traditionallyput up, well, we can put it up in
a small batch and store it in thefridge or the freezer indefinitely.
Check out our book Cold Counting, whichis available now wherever books are sold.
But besides that, we have got, as istradition, our one minute cooking tip.
We are gonna talk abouta trend, another trend.
We've been on a trend phase lately,but another trend, um, this is a
(00:51):
trend you may not know about, but youprobably have actually experienced it.
Mm-hmm.
Even if you don't know aboutit, and it's called chaos.
Cooking.
That's the way a lot of people cook,is chaos, cooking, chaos, cooking.
I'll tell you what's makingus happy in food this week.
So let's get started.
bruce (01:12):
Our one minute cooking tip.
As a general rule, smaller equals faster.
Makes sense, right?
Cut things into smaller pieces.
They'll cook more quickly.
And this goes for vegetables, meat,anything you're cooking, small pieces
of beef and a beef stew will gettenderer before large pieces of beef.
mark (01:29):
Okay?
So talk about that as a chef.
Talk about like if you were making achicken, let's say making a chicken
braise stew, what would you want to.
Cut smaller in order to speedup the time versus what?
Would you wanna leave in larger chunksor would you want it all smaller?
bruce (01:44):
Hmm.
Well, things like a chicken stewwhere I'm putting vegetables in it.
If I'm putting the vegetables inat the same time as a chicken, I'm
gonna leave them bigger, right?
I'm bigger chunks of carrots,bigger chunks of parsnips.
If I'm putting the vegetables in at alater point in the cooking, I'll make
them smaller so they'll cook faster.
If I put small chunks in atthe beginning, they'll be mush.
(02:05):
By the time the chicken's done.
Right.
Right.
So you have to go by what.
Are your other ingredients?
What size are they?
How long is the protein gonna take?
How long are my vegetable steaks?
Should things go in at the same time?
Should they be cut in different sizes?
It's all a whole algorithm,
mark (02:19):
right?
Uh, you know, I, I've seen there's anew product out on the market right
now that I can, I don't know itsactual name, but I'm gonna describe
it as onion mush, and it is a bottleof allegedly minced onions, but you
squeeze it like ketchup into a skillet.
Mm-hmm.
Onion puree.
Yeah, it is.
It is weird.
(02:39):
And it looks really gross, I have to say.
But this, this would beno good for saute, right?
'cause it would burn Iinstantly, oh, you're
bruce (02:45):
not gonna use that.
Although ginger, jarred ginger,that's considered chopped
ginger often comes in that mush.
Almost like a tube whereyou could squeeze it out.
Lemon grass paste too.
Yep.
And in a lot of Asian cooking, bothSoutheast Asian and Eastern Asian
Indian, Indian food, adding Chinese food.
You do call for these pastes ofgarlic and ginger, but Right.
(03:08):
Generally in Western cooking,you want things to be in pieces.
mark (03:12):
Yeah.
That squeeze bottle onion mush.
I see people, I see themonline in, uh, cooking videos.
I see them squeezing into like chiliafter it's been going for a while.
Mm.
And I see them squeezing it.
Into things after it'sbeen going on a while.
It's
bruce (03:27):
perfectly fine.
You're not gonna get any sweetnessfrom browning those onions.
No, you're not gonnahighlight the sugar in it.
You're just gonna be adding a raw onion.
You're gonna be adding arough onion flavor to that.
mark (03:37):
Okay, so let's my least favorite corporate metaphor.
Circle back.
Let's circle back to where we were at.
Smaller equals fat.
'cause that, does that mean we'vegone nowhere when we circle back?
I think that's what it means.
So, uh, we've actually gonenowhere for a long time, so.
Uh, well, let's go back tothe smaller equals faster.
So what's the point here
bruce (03:57):
That smaller pieces of food, protein, or vegetables will cook
faster than larger pieces of food.
So keep that in mind when youchop your vegetables and cut your
meat for stews and for dinner.
mark (04:09):
Okay, so that's, uh, our one minute cooking dip.
We're gonna move on to the main segment ofthis podcast, but before we get there, let
me say that it would be great if you couldrate this podcast or even write a review.
Thank you for doing that.
This podcast, as you wellknow, is unsupported.
And if you could rate a.
Or give it a review, even nice podcast.
That is the primary way youcan help support this podcast.
(04:31):
And don't forget if youwant to subscribe to it.
Okay?
We're gonna talk about chaos cooking.
This is a huge trend right now.
You may not even know about it.
But, uh, we're gonna start downthis road of what chaos cooking is.
bruce (04:49):
I know for a lot of people, cooking just feels like chaos to begin with.
It does.
I mean, there's just so many flying parts.
There's ingredients.
It does, there's knives, there'scutting boards, there's pots,
there's oil, there's chopping,there's peeling, there's garbage.
There's not garbage.
mark (05:02):
Especially, especially when you cook a Chinese or Sichuan.
Dinner party for people and I look at thekitchen and realize what I have because
I do a lot of the washing up and realizewhat I'm gonna have to wash up chaos.
It is utter chaos inthat kitchen, but it's,
bruce (05:19):
that's organized chaos.
I mean, is it, A lot of bowls are dirty,but I try and stack them in the sink.
You do, and everything is stacked neatly.
You do chaos.
Cooking is, you know,it's what it sounds like.
It's messy.
It's sloppy.
It's this things that youlook at and go, what is that?
What are you doing?
mark (05:36):
Okay, so let me explain what this is.
Chaos cooking started as thisidea that you take whatever you
have in the fridge and pantryand you make something out of it.
And this means that things that don't.
Usually go together are shovedchaos style into each other.
Now, let's go backwards.
(05:56):
So this is a revival of sorts of akind of fusion cuisine except not.
Let's talk about that for a minute.
So talk about your experienceswith fusion cuisine.
bruce (06:06):
Well, fusion cuisine where we are, one culture's cuisine meshes
with another, was starting to comearound in New York City in the late
seventies when, you know, I was inhigh school and the first kind of.
Uh, a foray into that was probablythe chino Latino restaurants, which
if you don't, if you're not from
mark (06:23):
New York, wait, I just have to say if you're not, you're New York.
These restaurants are not fancy.
These are super downscale restaurants.
bruce (06:30):
Yeah.
These are even more downscalethan your typical diner.
Right.
But there are waiters and they were moreof a fusion menu than fusion dishes.
'cause you were going to theserestaurants and there was.
The Latino food, the yellow rice,the plantains, the chicken, and
then there was the Chino foods.
There was the roast pork andthe stir fries, but they weren't
combined within the dishes.
(06:52):
They were two separate parts of the menu.
mark (06:54):
When I moved to New York in the mid nineties, there
were still a few, I mean like.
Two or three Chino Latino restaurants.
There was one down on 14th Street.
Mm-hmm.
I love that place.
The hiking district.
It was, uh, I never went inthat place because it scared me.
So, uh, Chino, Latino restaurant werekind of, uh, vanguard of what happened.
(07:14):
And what really did happen is in thelate nineties, this fusion cuisine really
started to develop, and I think the onethat we as cookbook writers would know
most about is Jean George, the jean.
Van Corten, the the celebrity chef, andback before he was a celebrity chef, he
got known for doing this at that time.
Very weird thing, which is addingVietnamese ingredients to Western dishes.
bruce (07:37):
Well, that was his thing.
That was his training.
That was his passion.
He actually had a Vietnamese restaurantalong with his French restaurants
he did, and then he started puttingVietnamese style ingredients and flavors.
Into his Western foods.
So his French restaurants would have alot of lemongrass and they would have a
lot of ingredients you normally wouldn'tfind in Western or French cooking.
mark (07:59):
Do you remember when the, when the Lower East side was, was changing
over from the kind of rundown slum ithad become and it was starting to become
hip and you and I went down to one ofthe Vanguard restaurants down there and
it was a Vietnamese French restaurant.
Mm-hmm.
And it was right.
On the corner of, I don't even remember.
And we sat in the window of thisrestaurant and it was, it was still mostly
(08:22):
held down there, but this restaurantwas one of these little beacon places.
Mm-hmm.
And, um, it served Vietnamesefood wi, it was the opposite of
V it was Vietnamese food with.
French influences.
So, you know, instead of, uh, I don't knowwhat the fu it ha, instead of just regular
fu it had some kind of really deep beef,bone reduction as part of the broth to it.
(08:46):
I, I don't know, it was Vietnamese.
I think what was happeninghad French overtones.
Well,
bruce (08:50):
I mean.
France and Vietnam, youhave all that problem.
There's a long colonial history, whichis why mostly in Vietnamese restaurants
you are given forks and knives.
Yeah.
And it's not chopsticks.
Right.
And which is why there's also a lotof butter used in Vietnamese cooking.
Correct.
Because of the French influence.
So it's not surprising that thosetwo cultures were one of the
vanguards of this fusion cuisine.
(09:11):
But didn't,
mark (09:11):
it started blowing out.
Right.
Fusions started blowing out.
And you started getting, you know,funky paellas made, not with seafood,
but funky paellas made with allkinds of things on top of their rice.
Beef tenderloin.
Yeah, beef tenderloin.
And you started getting thiskind of funky, weird fusion,
but it was all ingredient based.
So chaos cooking is.
Kind of a riff on that, but it is muchwilder in these social media days, and
(09:36):
as I said, it started out as this wayto take whatever's in your fridge and
just smash it together to make dinner.
Well, that's kind of
bruce (09:43):
interesting because how many times have people said to us over the
course of our career, we write new books.
mark (09:47):
Oh my God.
bruce (09:48):
Can't you write a book with what I have in my refrigerator
with what I have in my pantry?
And I,
mark (09:53):
uh, people say really, honestly, we we're sending books and people will
come to us and say, can't you write abook about what I have in my pantry?
And I always gonna say, yeah, ifyou'll pay us a hundred grand,
we'll be glad to write a bookexactly directed to your pantry.
But like, we, how do Iknow what's in your pantry?
But you
bruce (10:07):
know, maybe there's a way to take this idea and sort of.
You know, uh, generalize it so that youcan take things that are in your pantry
and create recipes and maybe there is achaos cooking book that we need to do.
Okay.
So
mark (10:20):
maybe, but, uh, um, I wanna say that this has already started up with apps.
We're getting off the topic here a littlebit, but apps are already starting that.
You can say, I havethis, this, and this in.
Fridge, what else doI need to make a dish?
And that's alreadystarting in various apps.
And you can in fact do this with chat GPT.
Mm-hmm.
(10:40):
You can say, I've got this, this, this,and this in my pantry, in my fridge.
What do I need to buy at thestore in order to make a dish?
And what's the recipe?
But where did this trend come from?
So about a year ago, social media started.
Flooded with these chaos recipeand chaos cooking videos.
And uh, these are, I just want to tellyou some of the ones that I saw early on.
(11:00):
I saw one where someone took a packetof ramen noodles plus the packet
of ramen noodle flavoring, whichI think is mostly just MSG, right?
The ramen noodle flavoring.
Mm-hmm.
And all they did is they.
Boiled it up, they added theflavoring packet, and then what
they had in their refrigeratorwas kisa, carrots and ketchup.
And they just threw that all inthere with the ramen noodles, and
(11:22):
they called it chaos ramen becauseit was just crazy chaos ramen.
Or I saw someone take, she had leftoverhard boiled eggs in her refrigerator.
Oh.
God and she mashed, throw those out.
She mashed them up with chutneyand, uh, well, she said bacon.
It looked to me like she was scrapingbacon grease out of a jar, so it was hard.
(11:46):
Boil eggs and bacon grease andchutney, uh, out of a dish.
She was scraping bacon grease and shemixed it together and she put it on bread
and she called it her chaos Egg salad.
Okay,
bruce (11:56):
well in that case, the bacon grease is just standing in for mayonnaise.
So she was making some weird egg salad.
mark (12:02):
She was, I I've seen ones where they take a box of craft
macaroni and cheese and they makethe craft mac and cheese, except they
mix bologna and sriracha into it.
I saw one cheese.
Okay, well
bruce (12:11):
wait a second.
I used to mix can tunain, so that's great.
There's just protein as protein.
As protein.
mark (12:16):
I saw one last night where somebody was making chaos ramen as I was lying
in bed before we recorded this today.
I was on TikTok and Isaw somebody, he came up.
Chaos Ramen and they had noprotein to add to it, but they
did, which is, this is really odd.
They had more Ella, so they justcut up Mortadella and dropped it in
the ramen, which I cannot possiblyimagine what that tastes like.
(12:39):
So as a general rule, chaos,cooking is supposed to be messy.
Most of the chaos cooking videos online.
Are incredibly sloppy.
They're slinging food,they're throwing it around.
If you do hashtag chaos cooking,you'll find a million of them.
And also, generally whatcomes out is pretty goop.
It's pretty runny.
It's all about it.
Running down your face,running all over your.
(13:02):
Plate
bruce (13:03):
sounds like Tex-Mex food.
mark (13:05):
It's all about all of that.
I, there's this guy I follow onsocial media who I love so much
who tries to eat dinner every nightwith his cow and the cow, literally.
Okay, that is true.
Chaos.
The cow literally slings the food.
All over the kitchen.
I mean, this is a whole live cow standingin the kitchen and he's trying to like
eat pizza and this cow is just slingingeverything all over the kitchen anyway.
(13:27):
Okay.
That's not chaos.
Cooking.
The chaos.
Cooking has become, I think it issuch a thing that it has actually, um.
Uh, invaded, uh, now I wanna say invaded.
It's influenced actual dishes thatare now showing up in restaurants.
bruce (13:42):
Well influenced, yeah.
What I think what's happenedis this idea of mixing unusual
things together was taken out ofthis sloppy, messy chaos, right?
And refined and put into.
Set dishes that you might notexpect to be the way they are,
but they are the way they are.
They're no longer necessarily sloppy.
(14:04):
They're not messy.
They're just sort of unexpectedthings and not unexpected.
Like the old days of fusion whereyou had garlic ice cream, right?
That was very unexpected,but it was shocking.
Now it's unexpected like alittle miso in a bolognese.
Which gives an umami and anearthiness and a saltiness that
improves the dish where I'm not suregarlic improved ice cream, right?
(14:26):
But I can tell you thatmiso improves bolognese.
I can see
mark (14:28):
you're doing some research for this episode.
I found a couple of restaurants making,uh, their version of Big Mac casseroles.
And if you don't know, thisis big in chaos cooking.
That is, you go and you buy.
I don't know, three, four Big Macs, five,six, and you line them up in a nine by 13.
You smush them into a nine by 13 dish.
(14:50):
You pour cans of soup, like randomcans of soup, like cream of celery
and tomato soup over the top of 'em.
You.
Cover it all with cheeseand then you just bake it.
And that's this alleged Big Mac casserole.
Well, I found restaurantslegitimately serving their version.
They can't say Big Mac becausethat's of course a trademark name
or a trademark item, but they,they're serving their version of
(15:13):
these kind of hamburger casserole.
Okay.
But what's
bruce (15:15):
gonna work about that for me is that restaurants are
going to make their own buns.
Restaurants are gonna have.
No really good beef.
I assure you.
The
mark (15:21):
places that I found are not making their own bones and
do not have really good beef.
One of them is right here inHartford, Connecticut, and I assure
you it's not doing any of that
bruce (15:32):
because
mark (15:32):
the
bruce (15:33):
point that people were doing with the original big man casseroles
was to get that taste of McDonald's.
There is a very.
Distinctive taste to McDonald's.
Oh gosh, can I say this?
You could smell it.
Come at a mile away, can.
mark (15:44):
So we were out once, uh, driving around rural Pennsylvania and I was
thirsty and I wanted a a, a diet Coke.
We stopped.
At, uh, McDonald's, right?
We stopped at McDonald's just so thatI could get a Diet Coke, and I got
the Diet Coke in the drive up window.
I drove away and I took one slurp ofthe Diet Coke, and I swear to God, it
(16:06):
tasted, it tasted like french fries.
It did.
It was disgusting.
It tasted like it smelled.
Like the french fries andhamburgers and a McDonald's.
I was like, this isn't a Diet Coke.
This is french fries.
Well, it's
bruce (16:15):
the same reason when you come home from one of those
restaurants, your hair smells like it.
Oh, and your clothes smell like it.
Well, those of you who
mark (16:22):
still have hair
bruce (16:23):
well, so those cups were sitting in that stench for weeks
and they stench smell like it.
Okay.
mark (16:29):
Okay.
All right.
Well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Back up.
All right.
Not, we're not gonna say that.
On air of, so we just saw, I just sawa place that was making Ria Ramen.
Mm-hmm.
Yu and in fact, we ate at this place.
We didn't have the Ria Ramen justa few, just a week ago or so.
This is the restaurant connectedto Mass moca, the spectacular
(16:51):
modern art museum in Massachusetts.
But what is Beria Ramen
bruce (16:55):
Beria?
Well, Beria is a braised.
Meat, usually goat in Mexicancooking, and it's got chilies and
spices, and it's very fatty andgreasy and luscious, and delicious.
Delicious, delicious.
And so if you take that oily,braised, highly flavored meat,
say it's goat or lamb, and you putthat in a bowl of ramen with that.
(17:18):
Broth from the bi.
I could just imagine.
It's fabulous.
They pro, I think theytopped it with guda cheese.
I think so.
And scallions?
I think so.
I don't know why I didn't get it.
mark (17:26):
And, and I've seen a lot lately of pokey hummus bowls.
Mm.
And that is that instead the riceat the bottom of a pokey bowl.
Mm-hmm.
They put hummus down there.
Sure.
Um, I've.
Seen it with Middle Eastern picklesin it, and yet on the top is still
that pokey sauce and the raw tuna, soit's like this weird smash of the two.
(17:46):
It's not fusion well,
bruce (17:48):
but kind of is.
You're fusing differentcultures foods together.
To me, it's the perfect marriagebetween fusion cuisine and
chaos, because chaos had both.
Things that shouldn't go together,but they're putting together and messy
fusion just crosses cultures here.
We're crossing cultures and we'regetting really great things.
Okay, I'm gonna disagree.
mark (18:08):
I'm gonna just because I'm gonna say in the old fusion cooking, when Jean
George Ton put lemongrass in, let's say I,I, I, I don't know, braised beef that was.
A melding and a balance.
This strikes me as just two thingssmashed up against each other.
There's the hummus and the MiddleEastern flavors, and then there's the
pokey and it's dressing, but on topof it, and it strikes me that they're
(18:30):
just smashed on top of each other.
It's, it's weirder.
It's less balanced to me.
Same with Bi Ramen.
It seems like you'vejust taken two things.
You've pushed them up against eachother, but this chaos, cooking
has even invaded what we do.
And this is, now I'm gonnabring up Cole Canning.
We weren't really trying to.
Be chaos cooking.
But when we got to the salsa matcha, youwanna explain what a salsa matcha is.
(18:51):
So
bruce (18:51):
salsa matcha, if you're familiar with Chili Crisp, which most people
are familiar with, chili crisp.
But this time, which is, you know, theseasoned Asian hot, spicy oils with
the layer of crunchy chilies and onionsand garlic underneath it, salsa matcha
comes from Mexico and Cru in fact.
And it is a similar thing of driedchilies, but there's always a nut.
(19:13):
There's always a dried fruit.
There's always an aromatic flavor andyou fry each of these ingredients, the
chilies, the nuts, the dried fruit,the aromatic, and then you put them all
in a food processor and impulse 'em uptogether, probably as originally done
in a mortar and pestle and chopped up.
But nice.
It was I the food processor.
So like one of my favorite recipesfor salsa matcha in our book is
something you would probably neverever find south of the US border.
(19:37):
No, you wouldn't.
And that's.
Two kinds of dried chilies, includingmaritas, which are a little smoky,
dried cranberries, walnuts, littleginger, and it's an amazing and maple
mark (19:47):
syrup.
First
bruce (19:48):
little
mark (19:48):
sweetness and maple.
It's a cranberry maple salsa macha.
This recipe be very, very new.
bruce (19:53):
It's a New England Salam.
Macha.
Yeah.
mark (19:55):
It's so crazy that CN actually picked it up this week.
So I mean, it's, it's, weweren't intending to be fusion.
Or we weren't intending to bechaos, but it ends up being in
the spirit of chaos, cooking.
There's a, uh, chili crisp.
Bruce mentioned this in the bookthat, uh, he made that is just
completely non-traditional and it'smade with Nori, the dried seaweed.
(20:17):
And these got this weird.
Seaweedy taste to the chili crisp that waskind of in the spirit of fusion cooking
or in the spirit of chaos, cooking.
I don't know that we weretrying to actually do it, but
bruce (20:30):
no, I don't think I was ever trying to do chaos, but
I was trying to find unusual.
Flavors to put into other things,but only in ways that work.
Right?
So you talk about things thatare balanced versus not balanced.
If you think it, it's chaosonly if it's not balanced right?
Then none of our recipes are chaos.
But they started out inthe same kind of idea.
mark (20:49):
And I, I, I should just say one last thing, and this is a
bonus side point I, in researchingfor this episode, I saw several.
Bars, very, very hip bars that, uh, offerchaos cocktails and chaos Cocktails means
that the bartender grabs anything andeverything and pours it into a shaker
(21:11):
and shakes it up and pours it out to you.
And it can be as insaneas Bailey's and Ousel and.
Fuck.
bruce (21:20):
And people are paying for this.
They are.
Do you remember?
mark (21:22):
And, and the, the idea here is that the K Wait, wait one second.
The idea here is the KAcocktail is only once.
Yeah.
Like you're getting the only oneof these that will ever be made.
I never do it
bruce (21:30):
again.
Do you remember on, uh, public access tv?
Back when we lived in NewYork, there was lolly.
I do.
And Lolly was on once a weekand Lolly made cocktails.
mark (21:38):
Boston, I think.
bruce (21:39):
And she's had a blender and she was in her kitchen and she had about a
hundred bottles of booze in front of her.
And she would just pick them upand dump them in the blender.
Yeah.
And it was, that wasserious chaos bartending.
It
mark (21:49):
was like Bailey's and Midori and Strega, and she would
just keep adding stuff to it,strawberry lur, and then she'd
bruce (21:56):
taste it, oh, it needs banana.
And then she put some banana liquor in it.
It was the most disgusting.
Okay, well
mark (22:02):
mix up, but, but
bruce (22:04):
you know, you know, people are paying for it.
I
mark (22:05):
know that I, it's a thing now that people are paying for chaos cocktails
because there's this idea that you'regonna get the one and only of this made.
And I saw one bar inparticular in Las Vegas.
That was actually doing it so thatwhen you, and it's super expensive,
and when you order a cast cocktail,the bartender actually gets blindfolded
and then just grabs bottles.
And supposedly this is supposed tomake it all, you know, like, uh,
(22:29):
an original drink just for you.
I, I would need no.
Yeah, no, uh, yeah, no.
Everybody knows what, I think a mixeddrink is an ice cube in bourbon,
so I can't imagine doing that.
But anyway, it's a thing and it's a trend.
So that's our talk about chaos, cooking,how we intersected with it, where it
may have come from outta fusion cuisine,but how it's not really fusion cuisine.
It's far weirder than that.
(22:49):
You can hashtag chaos cookingon any platform and you can
find lots of people doing it.
Uh, before we get to the lastsegment of this podcast, let me
say it's great that you're with us.
Thanks for being on this journey.
We appreciate your selecting our podcastout of a giant landscape of podcasts.
Thanks for doing that with us.
And now, as is typical, the lastsegment of our podcast, what's
(23:11):
making us happy in food this week.
bruce (23:16):
Corn on the cove.
It's that time of year.
Wow.
You stole mine.
That was actually gonna be mine.
mark (23:21):
Okay, come on.
bruce (23:21):
I drove from our house out about 45 minutes to a farm stand
that is a pick your own place andthey had corn and it was probably
some of the best corn I have had.
He up here in New England.
mark (23:35):
Say you drove out there, he drove out there.
You drove out there, uh, because lastyear you went out there and bought
about a billion San Marzano tomatoes.
I picked them
bruce (23:44):
myself too.
mark (23:45):
Right.
And the plants were basically down,it was the end of the season and
they were down and on the groundand you were picking them up off the
ground in order to make tomato sauce.
Mm-hmm.
bruce (23:52):
And I did, and I got some tomatoes yesterday.
They had a few San Marzanosthat were pre-picked.
And I did get a small bagand it was enough to make.
Two quarts of, uh, marinara sauce.
mark (24:02):
Yeah.
Are you gonna go back when they go downand try to salvage, like perhaps you
were on a salvage mission last year.
bruce (24:09):
I was, I was.
It was kind of messy.
It was like walking ontons of rotted tomatoes.
Yeah.
That
mark (24:13):
I, I have to say, and here's my thing.
And so while we're gonna talkabout this for a second, I have
to say that, uh, people go crazyabout corn in the summer, and I am.
Less than crazy something.
I don't like it.
I just don't go insane for it.
And when it comes in, it's about nowin New England when our corn is coming
in, yeah, I wanna have it a coupletimes and then I'm done with it.
(24:35):
I'm actually done withthe concept of corn.
It's really.
Odd with me and I, it'snot that I loved it.
Mm.
I loved it last night.
One of the things, I think it has to
bruce (24:42):
be good though.
There's nothing to be good there.
Nothing worse than bad corn.
And
mark (24:45):
one of the things I think that's happened since I was a kid, 'cause when
I was a kid, I loved corn on the cob.
And I think one of the things that'shappened is over the years, the
hybrids have gotten sweeter and sweeterand sweeter and now it is so sweet.
It's just unbelievable house.
It doesn't even taste like corn anymore.
bruce (25:00):
Right.
That's
mark (25:01):
the problem.
Right.
That was I, I mean, I was eating it lastnight and I was putting butter and salt
on it and I loved it, but I said to.
Bruce, this almost tastes like dessert.
Mm-hmm.
It's really close to dessert.
Mm-hmm.
But, um, you know, a couple times ayear, I do really love fresh corn.
Good
bruce (25:14):
sweet corn.
Like that is really a, a treat.
And I can even see up a dessertthe same way I can imagine
sometimes a sweet potato.
Oh,
mark (25:21):
chaos cooking.
Now I can
bruce (25:22):
see a sweet potato too.
We're gonna dessert too.
Gonna make
mark (25:24):
a corn apple pie.
No, I'm just gonna serve corn.
No, it's just corn apple piewith anchovies on the top.
And
bruce (25:30):
no, let's just say after a dinner party, everyone gets an ear of corn
mark (25:33):
and ketchup ice cream there.
That's my chaos.
Cooking pie.
Oh, so
bruce (25:37):
was my grandmother into chaos cooking when she used to make me her
Sion with cream cheese when I was a kid.
And she would boil thin noodlesand she'd melt cream cheese in it
and squirt ketchup, and that washer, you know, creamy tomato sauce
mark (25:49):
that makes.
We barf.
We're going end on that.
Uh, yes.
Great.
I'm glad you had that grandmother.
I'm glad I didn't.
Um, we're going to endon that for this podcast.
Thanks for being with us, as I say.
And please come back next week foranother episode of Cooking Bruce Martin
bruce (26:03):
and with all the AI out there in the world, you don't
know what's real and what's not.
Know that every time you tuneinto an episode of Cookie.
Bruce and Mark, it's real.
It's us.
We're here.
No AI here at Cookie, Bruce and Mark.
Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast
Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
mark (00:04):
And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, my husband, we
have written 37 cookbooks, includingthe latest cold canning, which we're
actually gonna talk about a little bitas a side quest inside of this episode.
It's not really the focus of whatwe're doing, but it'll come up.
Trust me.
Cold canning is all about how tomake small batches of condiments,
preserves chili, crisp chili, Mac.
Just dessert, sauces, even triplesack, small batches at home.
(00:29):
Anything that could be traditionallyput up, well, we can put it up in
a small batch and store it in thefridge or the freezer indefinitely.
Check out our book Cold Counting, whichis available now wherever books are sold.
But besides that, we have got, as istradition, our one minute cooking tip.
We are gonna talk abouta trend, another trend.
We've been on a trend phase lately,but another trend, um, this is a
(00:51):
trend you may not know about, but youprobably have actually experienced it.
Mm-hmm.
Even if you don't know aboutit, and it's called chaos.
Cooking.
That's the way a lot of people cook,is chaos, cooking, chaos, cooking.
I'll tell you what's makingus happy in food this week.
So let's get started.
bruce (01:12):
Our one minute cooking tip.
As a general rule, smaller equals faster.
Makes sense, right?
Cut things into smaller pieces.
They'll cook more quickly.
And this goes for vegetables, meat,anything you're cooking, small pieces
of beef and a beef stew will gettenderer before large pieces of beef.
mark (01:29):
Okay?
So talk about that as a chef.
Talk about like if you were making achicken, let's say making a chicken
braise stew, what would you want to.
Cut smaller in order to speedup the time versus what?
Would you wanna leave in larger chunksor would you want it all smaller?
bruce (01:44):
Hmm.
Well, things like a chicken stewwhere I'm putting vegetables in it.
If I'm putting the vegetables inat the same time as a chicken, I'm
gonna leave them bigger, right?
I'm bigger chunks of carrots,bigger chunks of parsnips.
If I'm putting the vegetables in at alater point in the cooking, I'll make
them smaller so they'll cook faster.
If I put small chunks in atthe beginning, they'll be mush.
(02:05):
By the time the chicken's done.
Right.
Right.
So you have to go by what.
Are your other ingredients?
What size are they?
How long is the protein gonna take?
How long are my vegetable steaks?
Should things go in at the same time?
Should they be cut in different sizes?
It's all a whole algorithm,
mark (02:19):
right?
Uh, you know, I, I've seen there's anew product out on the market right
now that I can, I don't know itsactual name, but I'm gonna describe
it as onion mush, and it is a bottleof allegedly minced onions, but you
squeeze it like ketchup into a skillet.
Mm-hmm.
Onion puree.
Yeah, it is.
It is weird.
(02:39):
And it looks really gross, I have to say.
But this, this would beno good for saute, right?
'cause it would burn Iinstantly, oh, you're
bruce (02:45):
not gonna use that.
Although ginger, jarred ginger,that's considered chopped
ginger often comes in that mush.
Almost like a tube whereyou could squeeze it out.
Lemon grass paste too.
Yep.
And in a lot of Asian cooking, bothSoutheast Asian and Eastern Asian
Indian, Indian food, adding Chinese food.
You do call for these pastes ofgarlic and ginger, but Right.
(03:08):
Generally in Western cooking,you want things to be in pieces.
mark (03:12):
Yeah.
That squeeze bottle onion mush.
I see people, I see themonline in, uh, cooking videos.
I see them squeezing into like chiliafter it's been going for a while.
Mm.
And I see them squeezing it.
Into things after it'sbeen going on a while.
It's
bruce (03:27):
perfectly fine.
You're not gonna get any sweetnessfrom browning those onions.
No, you're not gonnahighlight the sugar in it.
You're just gonna be adding a raw onion.
You're gonna be adding arough onion flavor to that.
mark (03:37):
Okay, so let's my least favorite corporate metaphor.
Circle back.
Let's circle back to where we were at.
Smaller equals fat.
'cause that, does that mean we'vegone nowhere when we circle back?
I think that's what it means.
So, uh, we've actually gonenowhere for a long time, so.
Uh, well, let's go back tothe smaller equals faster.
So what's the point here
bruce (03:57):
That smaller pieces of food, protein, or vegetables will cook
faster than larger pieces of food.
So keep that in mind when youchop your vegetables and cut your
meat for stews and for dinner.
mark (04:09):
Okay, so that's, uh, our one minute cooking dip.
We're gonna move on to the main segment ofthis podcast, but before we get there, let
me say that it would be great if you couldrate this podcast or even write a review.
Thank you for doing that.
This podcast, as you wellknow, is unsupported.
And if you could rate a.
Or give it a review, even nice podcast.
That is the primary way youcan help support this podcast.
(04:31):
And don't forget if youwant to subscribe to it.
Okay?
We're gonna talk about chaos cooking.
This is a huge trend right now.
You may not even know about it.
But, uh, we're gonna start downthis road of what chaos cooking is.
bruce (04:49):
I know for a lot of people, cooking just feels like chaos to begin with.
It does.
I mean, there's just so many flying parts.
There's ingredients.
It does, there's knives, there'scutting boards, there's pots,
there's oil, there's chopping,there's peeling, there's garbage.
There's not garbage.
mark (05:02):
Especially, especially when you cook a Chinese or Sichuan.
Dinner party for people and I look at thekitchen and realize what I have because
I do a lot of the washing up and realizewhat I'm gonna have to wash up chaos.
It is utter chaos inthat kitchen, but it's,
bruce (05:19):
that's organized chaos.
I mean, is it, A lot of bowls are dirty,but I try and stack them in the sink.
You do, and everything is stacked neatly.
You do chaos.
Cooking is, you know,it's what it sounds like.
It's messy.
It's sloppy.
It's this things that youlook at and go, what is that?
What are you doing?
mark (05:36):
Okay, so let me explain what this is.
Chaos cooking started as thisidea that you take whatever you
have in the fridge and pantryand you make something out of it.
And this means that things that don't.
Usually go together are shovedchaos style into each other.
Now, let's go backwards.
(05:56):
So this is a revival of sorts of akind of fusion cuisine except not.
Let's talk about that for a minute.
So talk about your experienceswith fusion cuisine.
bruce (06:06):
Well, fusion cuisine where we are, one culture's cuisine meshes
with another, was starting to comearound in New York City in the late
seventies when, you know, I was inhigh school and the first kind of.
Uh, a foray into that was probablythe chino Latino restaurants, which
if you don't, if you're not from
mark (06:23):
New York, wait, I just have to say if you're not, you're New York.
These restaurants are not fancy.
These are super downscale restaurants.
bruce (06:30):
Yeah.
These are even more downscalethan your typical diner.
Right.
But there are waiters and they were moreof a fusion menu than fusion dishes.
'cause you were going to theserestaurants and there was.
The Latino food, the yellow rice,the plantains, the chicken, and
then there was the Chino foods.
There was the roast pork andthe stir fries, but they weren't
combined within the dishes.
(06:52):
They were two separate parts of the menu.
mark (06:54):
When I moved to New York in the mid nineties, there
were still a few, I mean like.
Two or three Chino Latino restaurants.
There was one down on 14th Street.
Mm-hmm.
I love that place.
The hiking district.
It was, uh, I never went inthat place because it scared me.
So, uh, Chino, Latino restaurant werekind of, uh, vanguard of what happened.
(07:14):
And what really did happen is in thelate nineties, this fusion cuisine really
started to develop, and I think the onethat we as cookbook writers would know
most about is Jean George, the jean.
Van Corten, the the celebrity chef, andback before he was a celebrity chef, he
got known for doing this at that time.
Very weird thing, which is addingVietnamese ingredients to Western dishes.
bruce (07:37):
Well, that was his thing.
That was his training.
That was his passion.
He actually had a Vietnamese restaurantalong with his French restaurants
he did, and then he started puttingVietnamese style ingredients and flavors.
Into his Western foods.
So his French restaurants would have alot of lemongrass and they would have a
lot of ingredients you normally wouldn'tfind in Western or French cooking.
mark (07:59):
Do you remember when the, when the Lower East side was, was changing
over from the kind of rundown slum ithad become and it was starting to become
hip and you and I went down to one ofthe Vanguard restaurants down there and
it was a Vietnamese French restaurant.
Mm-hmm.
And it was right.
On the corner of, I don't even remember.
And we sat in the window of thisrestaurant and it was, it was still mostly
(08:22):
held down there, but this restaurantwas one of these little beacon places.
Mm-hmm.
And, um, it served Vietnamesefood wi, it was the opposite of
V it was Vietnamese food with.
French influences.
So, you know, instead of, uh, I don't knowwhat the fu it ha, instead of just regular
fu it had some kind of really deep beef,bone reduction as part of the broth to it.
(08:46):
I, I don't know, it was Vietnamese.
I think what was happeninghad French overtones.
Well,
bruce (08:50):
I mean.
France and Vietnam, youhave all that problem.
There's a long colonial history, whichis why mostly in Vietnamese restaurants
you are given forks and knives.
Yeah.
And it's not chopsticks.
Right.
And which is why there's also a lotof butter used in Vietnamese cooking.
Correct.
Because of the French influence.
So it's not surprising that thosetwo cultures were one of the
vanguards of this fusion cuisine.
(09:11):
But didn't,
mark (09:11):
it started blowing out.
Right.
Fusions started blowing out.
And you started getting, you know,funky paellas made, not with seafood,
but funky paellas made with allkinds of things on top of their rice.
Beef tenderloin.
Yeah, beef tenderloin.
And you started getting thiskind of funky, weird fusion,
but it was all ingredient based.
So chaos cooking is.
Kind of a riff on that, but it is muchwilder in these social media days, and
(09:36):
as I said, it started out as this wayto take whatever's in your fridge and
just smash it together to make dinner.
Well, that's kind of
bruce (09:43):
interesting because how many times have people said to us over the
course of our career, we write new books.
mark (09:47):
Oh my God.
bruce (09:48):
Can't you write a book with what I have in my refrigerator
with what I have in my pantry?
And I,
mark (09:53):
uh, people say really, honestly, we we're sending books and people will
come to us and say, can't you write abook about what I have in my pantry?
And I always gonna say, yeah, ifyou'll pay us a hundred grand,
we'll be glad to write a bookexactly directed to your pantry.
But like, we, how do Iknow what's in your pantry?
But you
bruce (10:07):
know, maybe there's a way to take this idea and sort of.
You know, uh, generalize it so that youcan take things that are in your pantry
and create recipes and maybe there is achaos cooking book that we need to do.
Okay.
So
mark (10:20):
maybe, but, uh, um, I wanna say that this has already started up with apps.
We're getting off the topic here a littlebit, but apps are already starting that.
You can say, I havethis, this, and this in.
Fridge, what else doI need to make a dish?
And that's alreadystarting in various apps.
And you can in fact do this with chat GPT.
Mm-hmm.
(10:40):
You can say, I've got this, this, this,and this in my pantry, in my fridge.
What do I need to buy at thestore in order to make a dish?
And what's the recipe?
But where did this trend come from?
So about a year ago, social media started.
Flooded with these chaos recipeand chaos cooking videos.
And uh, these are, I just want to tellyou some of the ones that I saw early on.
(11:00):
I saw one where someone took a packetof ramen noodles plus the packet
of ramen noodle flavoring, whichI think is mostly just MSG, right?
The ramen noodle flavoring.
Mm-hmm.
And all they did is they.
Boiled it up, they added theflavoring packet, and then what
they had in their refrigeratorwas kisa, carrots and ketchup.
And they just threw that all inthere with the ramen noodles, and
(11:22):
they called it chaos ramen becauseit was just crazy chaos ramen.
Or I saw someone take, she had leftoverhard boiled eggs in her refrigerator.
Oh.
God and she mashed, throw those out.
She mashed them up with chutneyand, uh, well, she said bacon.
It looked to me like she was scrapingbacon grease out of a jar, so it was hard.
(11:46):
Boil eggs and bacon grease andchutney, uh, out of a dish.
She was scraping bacon grease and shemixed it together and she put it on bread
and she called it her chaos Egg salad.
Okay,
bruce (11:56):
well in that case, the bacon grease is just standing in for mayonnaise.
So she was making some weird egg salad.
mark (12:02):
She was, I I've seen ones where they take a box of craft
macaroni and cheese and they makethe craft mac and cheese, except they
mix bologna and sriracha into it.
I saw one cheese.
Okay, well
bruce (12:11):
wait a second.
I used to mix can tunain, so that's great.
There's just protein as protein.
As protein.
mark (12:16):
I saw one last night where somebody was making chaos ramen as I was lying
in bed before we recorded this today.
I was on TikTok and Isaw somebody, he came up.
Chaos Ramen and they had noprotein to add to it, but they
did, which is, this is really odd.
They had more Ella, so they justcut up Mortadella and dropped it in
the ramen, which I cannot possiblyimagine what that tastes like.
(12:39):
So as a general rule, chaos,cooking is supposed to be messy.
Most of the chaos cooking videos online.
Are incredibly sloppy.
They're slinging food,they're throwing it around.
If you do hashtag chaos cooking,you'll find a million of them.
And also, generally whatcomes out is pretty goop.
It's pretty runny.
It's all about it.
Running down your face,running all over your.
(13:02):
Plate
bruce (13:03):
sounds like Tex-Mex food.
mark (13:05):
It's all about all of that.
I, there's this guy I follow onsocial media who I love so much
who tries to eat dinner every nightwith his cow and the cow, literally.
Okay, that is true.
Chaos.
The cow literally slings the food.
All over the kitchen.
I mean, this is a whole live cow standingin the kitchen and he's trying to like
eat pizza and this cow is just slingingeverything all over the kitchen anyway.
(13:27):
Okay.
That's not chaos.
Cooking.
The chaos.
Cooking has become, I think it issuch a thing that it has actually, um.
Uh, invaded, uh, now I wanna say invaded.
It's influenced actual dishes thatare now showing up in restaurants.
bruce (13:42):
Well influenced, yeah.
What I think what's happenedis this idea of mixing unusual
things together was taken out ofthis sloppy, messy chaos, right?
And refined and put into.
Set dishes that you might notexpect to be the way they are,
but they are the way they are.
They're no longer necessarily sloppy.
(14:04):
They're not messy.
They're just sort of unexpectedthings and not unexpected.
Like the old days of fusion whereyou had garlic ice cream, right?
That was very unexpected,but it was shocking.
Now it's unexpected like alittle miso in a bolognese.
Which gives an umami and anearthiness and a saltiness that
improves the dish where I'm not suregarlic improved ice cream, right?
(14:26):
But I can tell you thatmiso improves bolognese.
I can see
mark (14:28):
you're doing some research for this episode.
I found a couple of restaurants making,uh, their version of Big Mac casseroles.
And if you don't know, thisis big in chaos cooking.
That is, you go and you buy.
I don't know, three, four Big Macs, five,six, and you line them up in a nine by 13.
You smush them into a nine by 13 dish.
(14:50):
You pour cans of soup, like randomcans of soup, like cream of celery
and tomato soup over the top of 'em.
You.
Cover it all with cheeseand then you just bake it.
And that's this alleged Big Mac casserole.
Well, I found restaurantslegitimately serving their version.
They can't say Big Mac becausethat's of course a trademark name
or a trademark item, but they,they're serving their version of
(15:13):
these kind of hamburger casserole.
Okay.
But what's
bruce (15:15):
gonna work about that for me is that restaurants are
going to make their own buns.
Restaurants are gonna have.
No really good beef.
I assure you.
The
mark (15:21):
places that I found are not making their own bones and
do not have really good beef.
One of them is right here inHartford, Connecticut, and I assure
you it's not doing any of that
bruce (15:32):
because
mark (15:32):
the
bruce (15:33):
point that people were doing with the original big man casseroles
was to get that taste of McDonald's.
There is a very.
Distinctive taste to McDonald's.
Oh gosh, can I say this?
You could smell it.
Come at a mile away, can.
mark (15:44):
So we were out once, uh, driving around rural Pennsylvania and I was
thirsty and I wanted a a, a diet Coke.
We stopped.
At, uh, McDonald's, right?
We stopped at McDonald's just so thatI could get a Diet Coke, and I got
the Diet Coke in the drive up window.
I drove away and I took one slurp ofthe Diet Coke, and I swear to God, it
(16:06):
tasted, it tasted like french fries.
It did.
It was disgusting.
It tasted like it smelled.
Like the french fries andhamburgers and a McDonald's.
I was like, this isn't a Diet Coke.
This is french fries.
Well, it's
bruce (16:15):
the same reason when you come home from one of those
restaurants, your hair smells like it.
Oh, and your clothes smell like it.
Well, those of you who
mark (16:22):
still have hair
bruce (16:23):
well, so those cups were sitting in that stench for weeks
and they stench smell like it.
Okay.
mark (16:29):
Okay.
All right.
Well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Back up.
All right.
Not, we're not gonna say that.
On air of, so we just saw, I just sawa place that was making Ria Ramen.
Mm-hmm.
Yu and in fact, we ate at this place.
We didn't have the Ria Ramen justa few, just a week ago or so.
This is the restaurant connectedto Mass moca, the spectacular
(16:51):
modern art museum in Massachusetts.
But what is Beria Ramen
bruce (16:55):
Beria?
Well, Beria is a braised.
Meat, usually goat in Mexicancooking, and it's got chilies and
spices, and it's very fatty andgreasy and luscious, and delicious.
Delicious, delicious.
And so if you take that oily,braised, highly flavored meat,
say it's goat or lamb, and you putthat in a bowl of ramen with that.
(17:18):
Broth from the bi.
I could just imagine.
It's fabulous.
They pro, I think theytopped it with guda cheese.
I think so.
And scallions?
I think so.
I don't know why I didn't get it.
mark (17:26):
And, and I've seen a lot lately of pokey hummus bowls.
Mm.
And that is that instead the riceat the bottom of a pokey bowl.
Mm-hmm.
They put hummus down there.
Sure.
Um, I've.
Seen it with Middle Eastern picklesin it, and yet on the top is still
that pokey sauce and the raw tuna, soit's like this weird smash of the two.
(17:46):
It's not fusion well,
bruce (17:48):
but kind of is.
You're fusing differentcultures foods together.
To me, it's the perfect marriagebetween fusion cuisine and
chaos, because chaos had both.
Things that shouldn't go together,but they're putting together and messy
fusion just crosses cultures here.
We're crossing cultures and we'regetting really great things.
Okay, I'm gonna disagree.
mark (18:08):
I'm gonna just because I'm gonna say in the old fusion cooking, when Jean
George Ton put lemongrass in, let's say I,I, I, I don't know, braised beef that was.
A melding and a balance.
This strikes me as just two thingssmashed up against each other.
There's the hummus and the MiddleEastern flavors, and then there's the
pokey and it's dressing, but on topof it, and it strikes me that they're
(18:30):
just smashed on top of each other.
It's, it's weirder.
It's less balanced to me.
Same with Bi Ramen.
It seems like you'vejust taken two things.
You've pushed them up against eachother, but this chaos, cooking
has even invaded what we do.
And this is, now I'm gonnabring up Cole Canning.
We weren't really trying to.
Be chaos cooking.
But when we got to the salsa matcha, youwanna explain what a salsa matcha is.
(18:51):
So
bruce (18:51):
salsa matcha, if you're familiar with Chili Crisp, which most people
are familiar with, chili crisp.
But this time, which is, you know, theseasoned Asian hot, spicy oils with
the layer of crunchy chilies and onionsand garlic underneath it, salsa matcha
comes from Mexico and Cru in fact.
And it is a similar thing of driedchilies, but there's always a nut.
(19:13):
There's always a dried fruit.
There's always an aromatic flavor andyou fry each of these ingredients, the
chilies, the nuts, the dried fruit,the aromatic, and then you put them all
in a food processor and impulse 'em uptogether, probably as originally done
in a mortar and pestle and chopped up.
But nice.
It was I the food processor.
So like one of my favorite recipesfor salsa matcha in our book is
something you would probably neverever find south of the US border.
(19:37):
No, you wouldn't.
And that's.
Two kinds of dried chilies, includingmaritas, which are a little smoky,
dried cranberries, walnuts, littleginger, and it's an amazing and maple
mark (19:47):
syrup.
First
bruce (19:48):
little
mark (19:48):
sweetness and maple.
It's a cranberry maple salsa macha.
This recipe be very, very new.
bruce (19:53):
It's a New England Salam.
Macha.
Yeah.
mark (19:55):
It's so crazy that CN actually picked it up this week.
So I mean, it's, it's, weweren't intending to be fusion.
Or we weren't intending to bechaos, but it ends up being in
the spirit of chaos, cooking.
There's a, uh, chili crisp.
Bruce mentioned this in the bookthat, uh, he made that is just
completely non-traditional and it'smade with Nori, the dried seaweed.
(20:17):
And these got this weird.
Seaweedy taste to the chili crisp that waskind of in the spirit of fusion cooking
or in the spirit of chaos, cooking.
I don't know that we weretrying to actually do it, but
bruce (20:30):
no, I don't think I was ever trying to do chaos, but
I was trying to find unusual.
Flavors to put into other things,but only in ways that work.
Right?
So you talk about things thatare balanced versus not balanced.
If you think it, it's chaosonly if it's not balanced right?
Then none of our recipes are chaos.
But they started out inthe same kind of idea.
mark (20:49):
And I, I, I should just say one last thing, and this is a
bonus side point I, in researchingfor this episode, I saw several.
Bars, very, very hip bars that, uh, offerchaos cocktails and chaos Cocktails means
that the bartender grabs anything andeverything and pours it into a shaker
(21:11):
and shakes it up and pours it out to you.
And it can be as insaneas Bailey's and Ousel and.
Fuck.
bruce (21:20):
And people are paying for this.
They are.
Do you remember?
mark (21:22):
And, and the, the idea here is that the K Wait, wait one second.
The idea here is the KAcocktail is only once.
Yeah.
Like you're getting the only oneof these that will ever be made.
I never do it
bruce (21:30):
again.
Do you remember on, uh, public access tv?
Back when we lived in NewYork, there was lolly.
I do.
And Lolly was on once a weekand Lolly made cocktails.
mark (21:38):
Boston, I think.
bruce (21:39):
And she's had a blender and she was in her kitchen and she had about a
hundred bottles of booze in front of her.
And she would just pick them upand dump them in the blender.
Yeah.
And it was, that wasserious chaos bartending.
It
mark (21:49):
was like Bailey's and Midori and Strega, and she would
just keep adding stuff to it,strawberry lur, and then she'd
bruce (21:56):
taste it, oh, it needs banana.
And then she put some banana liquor in it.
It was the most disgusting.
Okay, well
mark (22:02):
mix up, but, but
bruce (22:04):
you know, you know, people are paying for it.
I
mark (22:05):
know that I, it's a thing now that people are paying for chaos cocktails
because there's this idea that you'regonna get the one and only of this made.
And I saw one bar inparticular in Las Vegas.
That was actually doing it so thatwhen you, and it's super expensive,
and when you order a cast cocktail,the bartender actually gets blindfolded
and then just grabs bottles.
And supposedly this is supposed tomake it all, you know, like, uh,
(22:29):
an original drink just for you.
I, I would need no.
Yeah, no, uh, yeah, no.
Everybody knows what, I think a mixeddrink is an ice cube in bourbon,
so I can't imagine doing that.
But anyway, it's a thing and it's a trend.
So that's our talk about chaos, cooking,how we intersected with it, where it
may have come from outta fusion cuisine,but how it's not really fusion cuisine.
It's far weirder than that.
(22:49):
You can hashtag chaos cookingon any platform and you can
find lots of people doing it.
Uh, before we get to the lastsegment of this podcast, let me
say it's great that you're with us.
Thanks for being on this journey.
We appreciate your selecting our podcastout of a giant landscape of podcasts.
Thanks for doing that with us.
And now, as is typical, the lastsegment of our podcast, what's
(23:11):
making us happy in food this week.
bruce (23:16):
Corn on the cove.
It's that time of year.
Wow.
You stole mine.
That was actually gonna be mine.
mark (23:21):
Okay, come on.
bruce (23:21):
I drove from our house out about 45 minutes to a farm stand
that is a pick your own place andthey had corn and it was probably
some of the best corn I have had.
He up here in New England.
mark (23:35):
Say you drove out there, he drove out there.
You drove out there, uh, because lastyear you went out there and bought
about a billion San Marzano tomatoes.
I picked them
bruce (23:44):
myself too.
mark (23:45):
Right.
And the plants were basically down,it was the end of the season and
they were down and on the groundand you were picking them up off the
ground in order to make tomato sauce.
Mm-hmm.
bruce (23:52):
And I did, and I got some tomatoes yesterday.
They had a few San Marzanosthat were pre-picked.
And I did get a small bagand it was enough to make.
Two quarts of, uh, marinara sauce.
mark (24:02):
Yeah.
Are you gonna go back when they go downand try to salvage, like perhaps you
were on a salvage mission last year.
bruce (24:09):
I was, I was.
It was kind of messy.
It was like walking ontons of rotted tomatoes.
Yeah.
That
mark (24:13):
I, I have to say, and here's my thing.
And so while we're gonna talkabout this for a second, I have
to say that, uh, people go crazyabout corn in the summer, and I am.
Less than crazy something.
I don't like it.
I just don't go insane for it.
And when it comes in, it's about nowin New England when our corn is coming
in, yeah, I wanna have it a coupletimes and then I'm done with it.
(24:35):
I'm actually done withthe concept of corn.
It's really.
Odd with me and I, it'snot that I loved it.
Mm.
I loved it last night.
One of the things, I think it has to
bruce (24:42):
be good though.
There's nothing to be good there.
Nothing worse than bad corn.
And
mark (24:45):
one of the things I think that's happened since I was a kid, 'cause when
I was a kid, I loved corn on the cob.
And I think one of the things that'shappened is over the years, the
hybrids have gotten sweeter and sweeterand sweeter and now it is so sweet.
It's just unbelievable house.
It doesn't even taste like corn anymore.
bruce (25:00):
Right.
That's
mark (25:01):
the problem.
Right.
That was I, I mean, I was eating it lastnight and I was putting butter and salt
on it and I loved it, but I said to.
Bruce, this almost tastes like dessert.
Mm-hmm.
It's really close to dessert.
Mm-hmm.
But, um, you know, a couple times ayear, I do really love fresh corn.
Good
bruce (25:14):
sweet corn.
Like that is really a, a treat.
And I can even see up a dessertthe same way I can imagine
sometimes a sweet potato.
Oh,
mark (25:21):
chaos cooking.
Now I can
bruce (25:22):
see a sweet potato too.
We're gonna dessert too.
Gonna make
mark (25:24):
a corn apple pie.
No, I'm just gonna serve corn.
No, it's just corn apple piewith anchovies on the top.
And
bruce (25:30):
no, let's just say after a dinner party, everyone gets an ear of corn
mark (25:33):
and ketchup ice cream there.
That's my chaos.
Cooking pie.
Oh, so
bruce (25:37):
was my grandmother into chaos cooking when she used to make me her
Sion with cream cheese when I was a kid.
And she would boil thin noodlesand she'd melt cream cheese in it
and squirt ketchup, and that washer, you know, creamy tomato sauce
mark (25:49):
that makes.
We barf.
We're going end on that.
Uh, yes.
Great.
I'm glad you had that grandmother.
I'm glad I didn't.
Um, we're going to endon that for this podcast.
Thanks for being with us, as I say.
And please come back next week foranother episode of Cooking Bruce Martin
bruce (26:03):
and with all the AI out there in the world, you don't
know what's real and what's not.
Know that every time you tuneinto an episode of Cookie.
Bruce and Mark, it's real.
It's us.
We're here.
No AI here at Cookie, Bruce and Mark.
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