Another HD&C Cocktail Hour! The Guys Have Drinks and Talk About Eggs

 

(Image from Unsplash.com)

Hi all!  Another week, another podcast companion.  Sorry it was a couple days late this week, Jesse (your humble narrator) had a busy week.  Also, this was a long episode, and it took forever to edit.  I had to excise a lot of drunken rambling and ranting.  (That's right, what you hear is the stuff we could use.)

We had an absolute blast doing this one!

First, a Shout-Out to Alex M!

Okay, listener Alex M. asked us a question about Roy Choi, which led to a lively discussion about food trucks, the pros and cons, how they stack up next to brick and mortar, and their impact on American food culture.  Well, Alex M. has a food truck, Motley Chew, and it looks pretty awesome!  Check out their insta.  Nate and I have plans to check it out ASAP.  The food looks great, but even better, the food looks like the kind of food you would actually want to order off of a truck.  (I make it no secret that I had misgivings about the big food truck boom of a few years ago, specifically about the long-term financial viability of trucks selling esoteric food, but Motley Chew seems to stick to the classics: great looking sandwiches, fantastic looking dogs!  We can't wait to check it out!

Link: Michel Roux's Egg Book

This is simply the best book on eggs any of us have ever seen.  TK gave me a copy when it came out.  I'd already bought it, so I held onto it, and later on, when a young line cook went above and beyond for me, I gave my extra copy to him.  Chefs should give their cooks books whenever practical.  Anyway, as of this writing, you can get a copy from the Evil Empire for about 10 bucks.

Wait, what rocket-ship??

Okay, if you listen to the episode, you'll hear a snipped of a discussion about the phrase 'All Gastronomy is Molecular', along with a discussion about a rocket-ship symbol.  Allow me to explain:

All Gastronomy is Molecular is a phrase I think I coined.  If I heard it somewhere, I don't remember where.  But at any rate, it's an important concept to us.  It was initially a defense of 'molecular gastronomy,' the irritating term applied to progressive cuisine (Grant Achatz's term), or, as Ferran Adria put it, 'technique-concept cuisine.'  I personally favored the more fun and informal 'sci-fi cuisine,' but some think that cheapens it.  At any rate, as use of hydrocolloids, advanced tools, and esoteric techniques was on the rise, you would occasionally hear chefs decrying that style of food, as it wasn't 'real' cooking.  Well, that's balderdash.  In 1706, cornstarch would have been seen as a miracle.  Cuisine incorporates new ideas, techniques, and ingredients constantly, and that's what the slogan (or motto, or proverb) is designed to promote: the idea that EVERY NEW DISH EVER CREATED uses science, whether it knows it or not.  The first guy to realize that you could roll a chicken leg in flour and then dunk it in hot grease rendered from pigskin was practicing 'molecular gastronomy.'  All cooking is science, and if you have a way to cook that doesn't involve molecules, call me, and I'll buy you a beer.

So Nate really liked it.  REALLY liked it.  Like, he had shirts made.  I was so proud.

So Anyway, What's This About a Rocketship?

Behold, the infamous Tristan Kitchen 'Rocket-ship' Logo.  What does it look like to you?

Here's the deal.  Cooks draw dicks on things.  It's just what we do.  We sign our prep lists with them.  We like leaving little dirty jokes for one another.  (We also like dirty labels.  That's why we label the duck fat 'fuck dat', it's why the shiitake mushroom ragout is labeled 'shit gravy,' it's why the chicken breasts are labeled 'chicken tits,' it's why the expo call for half-rack of ribs was 'one boob,' it's why the octopus is labeled ''puss' and not 'octo', and it's why the panisse is deliberately misspelled 'penis.'  (Call back to our very first funny story.)

So anyway, prep lists were often signed with little wieners, big wieners, realistic depictions, and cartoonishly large (or small) specimens, in various stages of turgidity.  And this was before any of us had seen Superbad.  

But then the digital age came, and we started typing our prep lists up, typically using Excel.  At this point, it was easier to just use a slash and a couple of periods as our sigil, our sign-off, our signet.  A little impersonal, but when you were emailing a list to your partner, rather than chancing leaving a hard copy out where it could get misplaced, wet, or accidentally discarded, a drawing would have been cumbersome.

So we switched, and it became a big joke, and that's the story of the rocket-ship.  That's our story, and we are sticking to it.

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