Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, my husband, we have written 37 cookbooks, including the latest cold canning, which we're actually gonna talk about a little bit as a side quest inside of this episode. It's not really the focus of what we're doing, but it'll come up. Trust me. Cold canning is all about how to make small batches of condiments, preserves chili, crisp chili, Mac. Just dessert, sauces, even triple sack, small batches at home. Anything that could be traditionally put up, well, we can put it up in a small batch and store it in the fridge or the freezer indefinitely. Check out our book Cold Counting, which is available now wherever books are sold. But besides that, we have got, as is tradition, our one minute cooking tip. We are gonna talk about a trend, another trend. We've been on a trend phase lately, but another trend, um, this is a trend you may not know about, but you probably have actually experienced it. Mm-hmm. Even if you don't know about it, 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 making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

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 get tenderer before large pieces of beef.

Okay? So talk about that as a chef. Talk about like if you were making a chicken, let's say making a chicken braise stew, what would you want to. Cut smaller in order to speed up the time versus what? Would you wanna leave in larger chunks or would you want it all smaller?

Hmm. Well, things like a chicken stew where I'm putting vegetables in it. If I'm putting the vegetables in at 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 a later point in the cooking, I'll make them smaller so they'll cook faster. If I put small chunks in at the beginning, they'll be mush. 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,

right? Uh, you know, I, I've seen there's a new product out on the market right now that I can, I don't know its actual name, but I'm gonna describe it as onion mush, and it is a bottle of allegedly minced onions, but you squeeze it like ketchup into a skillet. Mm-hmm. Onion puree. Yeah, it is. It is weird. And it looks really gross, I have to say. But this, this would be no good for saute, right? 'cause it would burn I instantly, oh, you're

not gonna use that. Although ginger, jarred ginger, that's considered chopped ginger often comes in that mush. Almost like a tube where you could squeeze it out. Lemon grass paste too. Yep. And in a lot of Asian cooking, both Southeast Asian and Eastern Asian Indian, Indian food, adding Chinese food. You do call for these pastes of garlic and ginger, but Right. Generally in Western cooking, you want things to be in pieces.

Yeah. That squeeze bottle onion mush. I see people, I see them online in, uh, cooking videos. I see them squeezing into like chili after it's been going for a while. Mm. And I see them squeezing it. Into things after it's been going on a while. It's

perfectly fine. You're not gonna get any sweetness from browning those onions. No, you're not gonna highlight the sugar in it. You're just gonna be adding a raw onion. You're gonna be adding a rough onion flavor to that.

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've gone nowhere when we circle back? I think that's what it means. So, uh, we've actually gone nowhere for a long time, so. Uh, well, let's go back to the smaller equals faster. So what's the point here

That smaller pieces of food, protein, or vegetables will cook faster than larger pieces of food. So keep that in mind when you chop your vegetables and cut your meat for stews and for dinner.

Okay, so that's, uh, our one minute cooking dip. We're gonna move on to the main segment of this podcast, but before we get there, let me say that it would be great if you could rate this podcast or even write a review. Thank you for doing that. This podcast, as you well know, is unsupported. And if you could rate a. Or give it a review, even nice podcast. That is the primary way you can help support this podcast. And don't forget if you want 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 down this road of what chaos cooking is.

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's cutting boards, there's pots, there's oil, there's chopping, there's peeling, there's garbage. There's not garbage.

Especially, especially when you cook a Chinese or Sichuan. Dinner party for people and I look at the kitchen and realize what I have because I do a lot of the washing up and realize what I'm gonna have to wash up chaos. It is utter chaos in that kitchen, but it's,

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 you look at and go, what is that? What are you doing?

Okay, so let me explain what this is. Chaos cooking started as this idea that you take whatever you have in the fridge and pantry and you make something out of it. And this means that things that don't. Usually go together are shoved chaos style into each other. Now, let's go backwards. So this is a revival of sorts of a kind of fusion cuisine except not. Let's talk about that for a minute. So talk about your experiences with fusion cuisine.

Well, fusion cuisine where we are, one culture's cuisine meshes with another, was starting to come around in New York City in the late seventies when, you know, I was in high school and the first kind of. Uh, a foray into that was probably the chino Latino restaurants, which if you don't, if you're not from

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.

Yeah. These are even more downscale than your typical diner. Right. But there are waiters and they were more of a fusion menu than fusion dishes. 'cause you were going to these restaurants 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 and the stir fries, but they weren't combined within the dishes. They were two separate parts of the menu.

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 in that place because it scared me. So, uh, Chino, Latino restaurant were kind of, uh, vanguard of what happened. And what really did happen is in the late nineties, this fusion cuisine really started to develop, and I think the one that we as cookbook writers would know most about is Jean George, the jean. Van Corten, the the celebrity chef, and back before he was a celebrity chef, he got known for doing this at that time. Very weird thing, which is adding Vietnamese ingredients to Western dishes.

Well, that was his thing. That was his training. That was his passion. He actually had a Vietnamese restaurant along with his French restaurants he did, and then he started putting Vietnamese style ingredients and flavors. Into his Western foods. So his French restaurants would have a lot of lemongrass and they would have a lot of ingredients you normally wouldn't find in Western or French cooking.

Do you remember when the, when the Lower East side was, was changing over from the kind of rundown slum it had become and it was starting to become hip and you and I went down to one of the 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 this restaurant and it was, it was still mostly held down there, but this restaurant was one of these little beacon places. Mm-hmm. And, um, it served Vietnamese food wi, it was the opposite of V it was Vietnamese food with. French influences. So, you know, instead of, uh, I don't know what 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. I, I don't know, it was Vietnamese. I think what was happening had French overtones. Well,

I mean. France and Vietnam, you have all that problem. There's a long colonial history, which is 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 lot of butter used in Vietnamese cooking. Correct. Because of the French influence. So it's not surprising that those two cultures were one of the vanguards of this fusion cuisine. But didn't,

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 all kinds of things on top of their rice. Beef tenderloin. Yeah, beef tenderloin. And you started getting this kind of funky, weird fusion, but it was all ingredient based. So chaos cooking is. Kind of a riff on that, but it is much wilder in these social media days, and as I said, it started out as this way to take whatever's in your fridge and just smash it together to make dinner. Well, that's kind of

interesting because how many times have people said to us over the course of our career, we write new books.

Oh my God.

Can't you write a book with what I have in my refrigerator with what I have in my pantry? And I,

uh, people say really, honestly, we we're sending books and people will come to us and say, can't you write a book about what I have in my pantry? And I always gonna say, yeah, if you'll pay us a hundred grand, we'll be glad to write a book exactly directed to your pantry. But like, we, how do I know what's in your pantry? But you

know, maybe there's a way to take this idea and sort of. You know, uh, generalize it so that you can take things that are in your pantry and create recipes and maybe there is a chaos cooking book that we need to do. Okay. So

maybe, but, uh, um, I wanna say that this has already started up with apps. We're getting off the topic here a little bit, but apps are already starting that. You can say, I have this, this, and this in. Fridge, what else do I need to make a dish? And that's already starting in various apps. And you can in fact do this with chat GPT. Mm-hmm. You can say, I've got this, this, this, and this in my pantry, in my fridge. What do I need to buy at the store 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 recipe and chaos cooking videos. And uh, these are, I just want to tell you some of the ones that I saw early on. I saw one where someone took a packet of ramen noodles plus the packet of ramen noodle flavoring, which I think is mostly just MSG, right? The ramen noodle flavoring. Mm-hmm. And all they did is they. Boiled it up, they added the flavoring packet, and then what they had in their refrigerator was kisa, carrots and ketchup. And they just threw that all in there with the ramen noodles, and they called it chaos ramen because it was just crazy chaos ramen. Or I saw someone take, she had leftover hard boiled eggs in her refrigerator. Oh. God and she mashed, throw those out. She mashed them up with chutney and, uh, well, she said bacon. It looked to me like she was scraping bacon grease out of a jar, so it was hard. Boil eggs and bacon grease and chutney, uh, out of a dish. She was scraping bacon grease and she mixed it together and she put it on bread and she called it her chaos Egg salad. Okay,

well in that case, the bacon grease is just standing in for mayonnaise. So she was making some weird egg salad.

She was, I I've seen ones where they take a box of craft macaroni and cheese and they make the craft mac and cheese, except they mix bologna and sriracha into it. I saw one cheese. Okay, well

wait a second. I used to mix can tuna in, so that's great. There's just protein as protein. As protein.

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 I saw somebody, he came up. Chaos Ramen and they had no protein to add to it, but they did, which is, this is really odd. They had more Ella, so they just cut up Mortadella and dropped it in the ramen, which I cannot possibly imagine what that tastes like. 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 what comes out is pretty goop. It's pretty runny. It's all about it. Running down your face, running all over your. Plate

sounds like Tex-Mex food.

It's all about all of that. I, there's this guy I follow on social media who I love so much who tries to eat dinner every night with 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 standing in the kitchen and he's trying to like eat pizza and this cow is just slinging everything all over the kitchen anyway. Okay. That's not chaos. Cooking. The chaos. Cooking has become, I think it is such a thing that it has actually, um. Uh, invaded, uh, now I wanna say invaded. It's influenced actual dishes that are now showing up in restaurants.

Well influenced, yeah. What I think what's happened is this idea of mixing unusual things together was taken out of this sloppy, messy chaos, right? And refined and put into. Set dishes that you might not expect to be the way they are, but they are the way they are. They're no longer necessarily sloppy. They're not messy. They're just sort of unexpected things and not unexpected. Like the old days of fusion where you had garlic ice cream, right? That was very unexpected, but it was shocking. Now it's unexpected like a little miso in a bolognese. Which gives an umami and an earthiness and a saltiness that improves the dish where I'm not sure garlic improved ice cream, right? But I can tell you that miso improves bolognese. I can see

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, this is 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. You pour cans of soup, like random cans of soup, like cream of celery and tomato soup over the top of 'em. You. Cover it all with cheese and then you just bake it. And that's this alleged Big Mac casserole. Well, I found restaurants legitimately serving their version. They can't say Big Mac because that's of course a trademark name or a trademark item, but they, they're serving their version of these kind of hamburger casserole. Okay. But what's

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

places that I found are not making their own bones and do not have really good beef. One of them is right here in Hartford, Connecticut, and I assure you it's not doing any of that

because

the

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.

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 that I could get a Diet Coke, and I got the Diet Coke in the drive up window. I drove away and I took one slurp of the Diet Coke, and I swear to God, it tasted, it tasted like french fries. It did. It was disgusting. It tasted like it smelled. Like the french fries and hamburgers and a McDonald's. I was like, this isn't a Diet Coke. This is french fries. Well, it's

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

still have hair

well, so those cups were sitting in that stench for weeks and they stench smell like it. Okay.

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 saw a place that was making Ria Ramen. Mm-hmm. Yu and in fact, we ate at this place. We didn't have the Ria Ramen just a few, just a week ago or so. This is the restaurant connected to Mass moca, the spectacular modern art museum in Massachusetts. But what is Beria Ramen

Beria? Well, Beria is a braised. Meat, usually goat in Mexican cooking, and it's got chilies and spices, and it's very fatty and greasy 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 put that in a bowl of ramen with that. Broth from the bi. I could just imagine. It's fabulous. They pro, I think they topped it with guda cheese. I think so. And scallions? I think so. I don't know why I didn't get it.

And, and I've seen a lot lately of pokey hummus bowls. Mm. And that is that instead the rice at the bottom of a pokey bowl. Mm-hmm. They put hummus down there. Sure. Um, I've. Seen it with Middle Eastern pickles in it, and yet on the top is still that pokey sauce and the raw tuna, so it's like this weird smash of the two. It's not fusion well,

but kind of is. You're fusing different cultures foods together. To me, it's the perfect marriage between 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're getting really great things. Okay, I'm gonna disagree.

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 things smashed up against each other. There's the hummus and the Middle Eastern flavors, and then there's the pokey and it's dressing, but on top of it, and it strikes me that they're 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've just taken two things. You've pushed them up against each other, but this chaos, cooking has even invaded what we do. And this is, now I'm gonna bring up Cole Canning. We weren't really trying to. Be chaos cooking. But when we got to the salsa matcha, you wanna explain what a salsa matcha is. So

salsa matcha, if you're familiar with Chili Crisp, which most people are familiar with, chili crisp. But this time, which is, you know, the seasoned Asian hot, spicy oils with the layer of crunchy chilies and onions and garlic underneath it, salsa matcha comes from Mexico and Cru in fact. And it is a similar thing of dried chilies, but there's always a nut. There's always a dried fruit. There's always an aromatic flavor and you 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 up together, 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 recipes for salsa matcha in our book is something you would probably never ever find south of the US border. No, you wouldn't. And that's. Two kinds of dried chilies, including maritas, which are a little smoky, dried cranberries, walnuts, little ginger, and it's an amazing and maple

syrup. First

little

sweetness and maple. It's a cranberry maple salsa macha. This recipe be very, very new.

It's a New England Salam. Macha. Yeah.

It's so crazy that CN actually picked it up this week. So I mean, it's, it's, we weren't intending to be fusion. Or we weren't intending to be chaos, but it ends up being in the spirit of chaos, cooking. There's a, uh, chili crisp. Bruce mentioned this in the book that, uh, he made that is just completely non-traditional and it's made with Nori, the dried seaweed. And these got this weird. Seaweedy taste to the chili crisp that was kind of in the spirit of fusion cooking or in the spirit of chaos, cooking. I don't know that we were trying to actually do it, but

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 that are balanced versus not balanced. If you think it, it's chaos only if it's not balanced right? Then none of our recipes are chaos. But they started out in the same kind of idea.

And I, I, I should just say one last thing, and this is a bonus side point I, in researching for this episode, I saw several. Bars, very, very hip bars that, uh, offer chaos cocktails and chaos Cocktails means that the bartender grabs anything and everything and pours it into a shaker and shakes it up and pours it out to you. And it can be as insane as Bailey's and Ousel and. Fuck.

And people are paying for this. They are. Do you remember?

And, and the, the idea here is that the K Wait, wait one second. The idea here is the KA cocktail is only once. Yeah. Like you're getting the only one of these that will ever be made. I never do it

again. Do you remember on, uh, public access tv? Back when we lived in New York, there was lolly. I do. And Lolly was on once a week and Lolly made cocktails.

Boston, I think.

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 up and dump them in the blender. Yeah. And it was, that was serious chaos bartending. It

was like Bailey's and Midori and Strega, and she would just keep adding stuff to it, strawberry lur, and then she'd

taste it, oh, it needs banana. And then she put some banana liquor in it. It was the most disgusting. Okay, well

mix up, but, but

you know, you know, people are paying for it. I

know that I, it's a thing now that people are paying for chaos cocktails because there's this idea that you're gonna get the one and only of this made. And I saw one bar in particular in Las Vegas. That was actually doing it so that when 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 to make it all, you know, like, uh, an original drink just for you. I, I would need no. Yeah, no, uh, yeah, no. Everybody knows what, I think a mixed drink 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. You can hashtag chaos cooking on any platform and you can find lots of people doing it. Uh, before we get to the last segment 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 podcast out of a giant landscape of podcasts. Thanks for doing that with us. And now, as is typical, the last segment of our podcast, what's making us happy in food this week.

Corn on the cove. It's that time of year. Wow. You stole mine. That was actually gonna be mine.

Okay, come on.

I drove from our house out about 45 minutes to a farm stand that is a pick your own place and they had corn and it was probably some of the best corn I have had. He up here in New England.

Say you drove out there, he drove out there. You drove out there, uh, because last year you went out there and bought about a billion San Marzano tomatoes. I picked them

myself too.

Right. And the plants were basically down, it was the end of the season and they were down and on the ground and you were picking them up off the ground in order to make tomato sauce. Mm-hmm.

And I did, and I got some tomatoes yesterday. They had a few San Marzanos that were pre-picked. And I did get a small bag and it was enough to make. Two quarts of, uh, marinara sauce.

Yeah. Are you gonna go back when they go down and try to salvage, like perhaps you were on a salvage mission last year.

I was, I was. It was kind of messy. It was like walking on tons of rotted tomatoes. Yeah. That

I, I have to say, and here's my thing. And so while we're gonna talk about this for a second, I have to say that, uh, people go crazy about 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 now in New England when our corn is coming in, yeah, I wanna have it a couple times and then I'm done with it. I'm actually done with the concept of corn. It's really. Odd with me and I, it's not that I loved it. Mm. I loved it last night. One of the things, I think it has to

be good though. There's nothing to be good there. Nothing worse than bad corn. And

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's happened is over the years, the hybrids have gotten sweeter and sweeter and sweeter and now it is so sweet. It's just unbelievable house. It doesn't even taste like corn anymore.

Right. That's

the problem. Right. That was I, I mean, I was eating it last night 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 a year, I do really love fresh corn. Good

sweet corn. Like that is really a, a treat. And I can even see up a dessert the same way I can imagine sometimes a sweet potato. Oh,

chaos cooking. Now I can

see a sweet potato too. We're gonna dessert too. Gonna make

a corn apple pie. No, I'm just gonna serve corn. No, it's just corn apple pie with anchovies on the top. And

no, let's just say after a dinner party, everyone gets an ear of corn

and ketchup ice cream there. That's my chaos. Cooking pie. Oh, so

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 noodles and she'd melt cream cheese in it and squirt ketchup, and that was her, you know, creamy tomato sauce

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 end on that for this podcast. Thanks for being with us, as I say. And please come back next week for another episode of Cooking Bruce Martin

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 tune into an episode of Cookie. Bruce and Mark, it's real. It's us. We're here. No AI here at Cookie, Bruce and Mark.