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But it's like, really?
Like you wanted to open a restaurant and this is the direction you decided to go in?
And often these people are then, you know, given enormous media profiles.
They make really successful lines of like packaged foods.
That are also mediocre.
Yes, that are also incredibly mediocre and overpriced.
And so you end up with these people who are sort of like the guiding lights of the culinary world in some respects who have not ever made like an incredibly good plate of food in their lives.
this is the sporkful it's not for foodies it's for eaters i'm dan pashman each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people and today we're bringing you another salad spinner edition of the sporkful this is our rapid fire round table discussion of the biggest strangest and most surprising food news of the moment and of course you can't have a round table discussion discussion with only one person, right?
I won't tell people that our table is also rectangular, but most importantly, we need people for me to talk with, and that's why I'm so happy to introduce our two esteemed guests who you've heard here on the show before.
First up, joining us from Austin, Texas.
She's a food writer, recipe developer, and industrial engineer, but you can just think of her as one of my favorite food science nerds.
On Instagram, her handle is UpgradeMyFood.
Some Some of her recent videos include deep dives on the science of paneer and how to spot the difference between real and fake saffron.
Her work has appeared in Serious Eats, The Hindustan Times and others.
Welcome, Swetha Sivakumar. Hi.
Hi, Dan. Thank you for having me.
And joining me here in studio in New York is a salad spinner veteran.
She's a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek.
In her Buying Power column, she covers consumer goods from cars to clothes to weight loss drugs.
Lately, she's been writing a lot about how the new world of tariffs is affecting all kinds of products.
Please welcome Amanda Mull.
Thank you so much for having me.
Great to have you both here today.
We're going to run through a lot.
We've got a lot to cover.
I think we should just jump right in.
Are you ready to spin the spinner?
Yes, let's do it. Let's give it a whirl.
First up, we've got a couple of stories that I am grouping together under the heading Buy American Unless European is Better.
Now, first up, is food really better in Europe?
Something I have heard anecdotally from a lot of people.
You may have heard it, too, is people say, I can't eat pasta in America.
I can't eat bread in America.
And then I go to Europe and I eat all these things and I have no issues.
I feel wonderful. And this idea is becoming a bigger, bigger part of kind of the culture.
Joe Rogan says that pizza, pasta, breads, quote unquote, really wreck him in the U .S. He can eat them in Italy with no problem at all.
Gwyneth Paltrow recently admitted that on a flight in Europe, she ate peanut M &Ms and said, quote, I would not do that in America.
So Gwyneth is really living dangerously.
Joe Rogan blames the fact that in the U .S., it's common for grains to be fortified with folic acid.
But there's no evidence that folic acid's bad for you.
It's just the synthetic form of vitamin B9.
Another popular claim is that wheat in Europe is easier to digest because they don't use glyphosate, An herbicide found in Roundup's original formula, but contrary to popular belief, they also have this herbicide in Europe.
So first off, have either of you heard people say this, just anecdotally?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Absolutely. I mean, I have had an experience like this one.
The first time I went to Italy, things that gave me heartburn in the U .S. suddenly weren't giving me heartburn.
It was one of those things.
I had come with like a cache of over -the -counter medicines and didn't need any of them for the entire like nine days I was there.
and I was sort of shocked.
So it doesn't surprise me to hear people talking about it.
It's something that gets repeated so often and that these sort of like health influencers or news influencers talk about so much because it does like evoke both fears that Americans have, even if they've never been to Europe and an experience that I think is like not uncommon. So it has that like that power of making people go, huh.
I also think that the ratio of, you know, the available processed foods to the fresh foods that get circulated is probably higher in, say, Europe, Japan, or India.
When we made a family trip last year, we noticed that they have a very nice scale for processed food.
It was a very visual tool.
It was ranked between 1 to 5.
It was an easy bar to identify whether something they're picking up is going to be super high saturated in sodium or sugars.
And so we could use that scale very quickly to make decision points in certain supermarkets.
And I think that level of government using their powers to make it very easy for people to make healthy choices is probably better out there.
So it sounds like, Swetha, sort of what you're saying is like people tend to think like they eat something and they just only think about how do you feel 15 minutes after you ate it.
But it could be that things you've been eating for days before are also contributing to how you feel.
So if you're eating junk and junk and junk, then eat a plate of pasta and don't feel great.
It might not just be the pasta.
Yeah. I think something that's also interesting from like a consumer behavioral standpoint is that people just act differently and choose different things and have a different set of options available to them on vacation, no matter where they're on vacation.
Right. That's true.
Yeah. Yeah. If you're at home, you're more likely to go to the grocery store and buy something packaged.
You're more likely to hit up fast food.
If you're on vacation, you're seeking out special meals, special opportunities.
You're maybe spending a little bit more on your meals.
You're walking a lot.
Right. And that's kind of like one of the leading theories here.
I mean, yes, there are better and stricter regulations on what ingredients people can put in foods in Europe versus the U .S. That's certainly true.
That being said, a lot of the things that that Joe Rogan and his friends are pointing to as the issues have no scientific basis right one of the leading theories is exactly what you say that which is that when you're on vacation you're walking more you're more active that helps digestion you also may be eating more slowly because you're having leisurely vacation meals instead of scarfing food down on your 15 minute lunch break and eating fast of course can cause digestive issues whereas when you eat more slowly not only do you digest better but you tend to eat less right when you eat slowly We
can't say for sure how real this phenomenon is and what the explanations, but the leading explanation is not anything to do with what's in the food.
It's more about how behaviors are different when you're on vacation in Europe.
Our next article in this section also relates to American versus European foods.
The New York Times reports that Italian food companies are worried about losing business to American brands since those Italian companies' prices are likely going up due to tariffs.
Italy exports nearly $9 billion worth of food products to the U .S. Parmigiano -Reggiano, Gorgonzola, Prosecco, and olive oil, among the most popular.
Of course, American versions of these products aren't subject to tariffs.
Amanda, how worried should food companies in other countries be?
I think they should be a little worried, at least worried on the margins, depending on like what their addressable market is that they're serving right now.
Because companies that serve like primarily a very high -end market, consumers that are really worried about food origin as like an emblem of status or an emblem of quality, I think those producers are likely to retain customers better.
But if there is a really significant price interruption, the sort of middle tier and lower tier price customers that might want to get the nice parm or the nice cheese or the nice olive oil when they can afford it are probably not going to be affording it anymore.
But if you're a company that sells really, really high end stuff, like your future is probably pretty stable versus a company that is trying to sell to a lot of people at a lower price point.
Well, I can tell you just a few weeks ago, I was at the Fancy Food Show, which is a big industry thing.
at the Javits Center, the big convention center here in New York.
It's a big thing with like brokers, buyers, a lot of like middlemen in the food industry are there.
I was at this Follini booth with my like pasta and two different people told me that they are getting pressure to buy American and that there are places that stock pasta from Italy that want to switch to American made pastas.
That was kind of my big takeaway.
Like you look for trends when you go to a thing like that.
What are the trends?
That was the trend that I picked up on.
There's another complication of this whole story in this Times article that I want to get both of your takes on, it's not just that American goods are cheaper, they're often cleverly packaged to seem Italian, or Indian, or German, or whatever the case may be.
Some sellers have just kept the Italian name of the company's immigrant founders.
So, like, Ranzoni Pasta.
Sounds Italian, right?
Ranzoni. Well, it's an American company.
It was started by an Italian immigrant in America, in New York, about a century ago.
But other brands go even further than just using a brand name that sounds like it's from that place.
They use traditional terms like Romano or Gorgonzola, which are not protected by trademark.
And then there's another example here.
Packs of grated cheese from New Jersey bear the slogan, a taste of Italy.
I mean, what is New Jersey if not a taste of Italy?
I grew up in New Jersey.
It's basically like the 14th state of Italy, okay?
Cut us some slack. But, Swetha, how do you feel about brands that do this on their packaging that sort of evoke terms and images that sound like it's from somewhere else when it's not?
This is not a new concept.
You know, if you look at the history of food marketing, it's always been there.
Cheddar cheese, in fact, started off with the coloring was added to reflect the fresh, the orange tint that the cows would have in their grass fed in the summer to reflect something that is fresh.
And that has become now an industry standard. So trying to imitate the best quality out there is not something new.
But I think what is probably troublesome is the fact that certain products which have the designated, you know, the DOP, protected designation of origin, there are certain characteristics of that product that make it so good.
For example, if you have, say, the San Marzano tomatoes grown in volcanic soil in Campania region in Italy, or whether it is the saffron grown in Kashmir, or the Darjeeling tea, there are certain attributes of the geography that make it really good.
The people in those places are also trained for decades, if not hundreds of years, to put out a product that is of extremely high standards.
And so for you to try to replicate that, it's actually, you're not going to reach that level of standard. It is important to know high quality when it comes to food, because there's a lot of time and effort put into making these products and that makes them special.
And I feel like that should not be taken away from the consumer.
A hundred percent. I agree.
All right. You ready to spin the spinner again?
Yes. Let's do it. All right.
We have two stories I'm calling New Frontiers in Pasta Science.
First up, we have an article from the academic journal Physics of Fluids, which is certainly a must read in my house.
I don't know about you two.
Sueta, have you ever read Physics of Fluids?
You're a scientist. Have you?
Yes. Wow. All right.
Thank goodness you're here then.
You're the right guest for this segment.
I'll go on the record saying I never have. So Physics of Fluid published a study entitled Phase Behavior of Cacio e Pepe Sauce.
The authors write, In this study, we systematically explore the phase behavior of Cacio e Pepe Sauce, focusing on its stability at increasing temperatures for various proportions of cheese, water, and starch. We identify starch concentration as the key factor influencing sauce stability, with direct implications for practical cooking.
There goes my favorite line.
Specifically, we delineate a regime where starch concentrations below one percent lead to the formation of system -wide clumps, a conditioning determining what we call the mozzarella phase and corresponding to an unpleasant and separated sauce.
Sweta, you're a trained engineer and food science nerd. In normal person terms, what is this paper telling us?
What this paper is telling you is that if you want a starch solution to form a beautiful sauce, you need it to be of a certain thickness.
If you just boil the pasta, that water is not thick enough to give you the starch -based sauce in which you suspend the cheese in.
Just to be clear, typically when you make cacio e pepe, you're adding pasta water to cheese, and the pasta water has some starch in it because the pasta releases starch into the water.
But sometimes people are making cacio e pepe with pasta water that is not starchy enough.
enough to create a creamy sauce.
Is that what you're telling me?
Yes. And you think that the cheese would easily melt and easily react with the water, but it's not the case.
If you think of cheese, think of the step before it.
It used to be milk and you precipitated the cheese solids out of it.
Now you are saying, go back and just integrate back into the water seamlessly for me and be a sauce for me.
And cheese is not going to do that.
To make cheese, you turned a liquid milk into a solid cheese.
So it's not so simple to just snap your fingers and take the cheese that's had its liquid removed and turn it back into a sauce.
Exactly. And so the way you have to do that is you have to do a little bit of alchemy in there, and that's why you add sodium citrate to it.
Yeah, exactly. And this is what that paper was saying.
The sodium citrate creates a reaction in the cheese that makes it soluble in water, allowing the cheese to melt into a sauce.
And this is not just something, like, reserved for a lab, right, Sueta?
Like, you can do this at home.
You can try this. You can take a few pinches and add it to your cheese sauce, and it will melt beautifully.
So it'll convert any of your favorite aged cheeses into basically an American cheese.
And if you write out the formula, chemical formula for sodium citrate, It spells out, do you know what?
What? It spells out as nacho.
It is N -A -3 -C -6 -H -5 -0 -7.
Oh my God. So it is nacho.
Amazing. Yeah, so that's basically why you get that creamy sauce by adding that magic ingredient, which is sodium citrate.
Now, you don't have to do that.
You can just use your starch solution to suspend the cheese in it.
But for that, you need the sauce to be thick enough so that it can hold the entire thing together and still have the cheese melt into it.
And that's what the paper is talking about.
That is so interesting to me because every time I talk about American cheese, especially God forbid on public radio, the phone lines light up.
How can you call this guy a food expert?
He's American cheese.
It's not even cheese.
You know, they start waving their tote bags over their head.
They get very upset.
And I have long been a defender of American American cheese.
I love American cheese.
One of the reasons why it's so great is, to me, it is the best melting cheese.
Yes. It's a key ingredient in one of the mac and cheese recipes in my cookbook.
But Swetha, some people are going to hear this and they're going to say, sodium citrate?
That sounds like a chemical.
You want me to throw chemicals into my beautifully crafted artisanal cacio e pepe?
That sounds wrong. What is sodium citrate?
Is it a chemical? It's a chemical, just like sodium chloride, salt is a chemical.
Salt is a chemical, right.
Right. And it's very safe.
It's been used in food since the 1985, I think.
It's been used in Velveeta.
Sodium phosphate has been used since 1920.
That's when James Kraft, you know, started making the American cheese.
And you can take any cheese, any type of hard -aged cheese, and convert into a melting cheese by just adding the sodium citrate.
I'm ordering some sodium citrate, like, right now.
So am I. I am about to do—I am originally from the South.
And I am about to do some mac and cheese chemistry at Thanksgiving.
Do that. For sure. This is a huge.
Just don't tell anyone.
This is huge information.
This is my major takeaway from this episode.
Next article in our pasta science segment.
Now after I just insulted public radio listeners, I have an article from NPR.
We love you, NPR. We love NPR.
I used to work at NPR.
They're great. NPR reports that there's a secret to making pasta and white rice better for you.
You just have to know how to unlock it.
Now, it's become conventional wisdom that among the various carbs out there, whole grain rice and whole wheat pasta are considered a little better for you.
Refined carbs like white rice and white pasta, not as good because they're lower in fiber and protein.
They get digested faster, leading to a spike in blood sugar.
But food scientists have figured out a way to help people digest refined carbs carbs more slowly.
In the process, they've uncovered a special nutrient hidden inside white pasta and white rice.
It's called resistant starch. Sueta, what is resistant starch and how do you unlock it?
If you take your rice or your pasta and you put it in water and you heat it up.
So what that starch molecules inside is going to do is it's going to absorb the heat and swell well and become into an amorphous form.
This form is very easy for the enzymes in your mouth and your stomach to take apart and quickly give you the energy.
So it gets processed very fast. Right.
When you take the same cooked rice, your leftover cooked rice, and you put it in the refrigerator, you're going to start dropping the temperature.
Now, when you start dropping the temperature, the starch molecules inside have this property where they start realigning themselves into tighter and tighter configurations.
They're going to kick the water out, and that is the process of retrogradation.
That's why rice that sits in the fridge turns hard, or why bread left out.
As water leaves it, retrogradation of starch makes the bread turn harder.
Absolutely. When you eat it, the enzymes are not going to have as much access to that tightly configured reconfigured structure as much as it did when it was in a just cooked form.
And because of that, it crosses your mouth, it crosses your stomach, and it goes into your small intestine where there is a gut microbiome, which is then letting it sit and ferment and takes its time.
And it has the ability, it has the, you know, the tools that's necessary to break those resistant starch down into short -chain fatty acids, which are metabolites that are very good for your body.
So it's called resistant starch because it's resistant to digestion.
Correct. So the starch doesn't get digested as quickly or at all.
But when that resistant starch gets in, you know, farther down the digestive tract, it is basically food for your good gut bacteria.
Correct. So that adds another benefit.
But I can imagine, Sueta, Amanda, you may be wondering this as well, who wants to eat cold rice out of the fridge that's hard as a rock?
Doesn't taste great.
Not Indians. Right.
We have actually covered the retrogradation of starch on this show before.
It's sort of one of our beats.
It's important to have a beat.
If I remember correctly from our last time talking about this, Swetha, you first heat up the starch. Then when it cools, it retrogradates, which turns the food hard. When you reheat the food, it does bring the starch back closer to what it was before.
but it never gets back to the full starchy stretchiness.
So am I right that even if you reheat your rice or pasta back to your ideal temperature, like, is there still some resistant starch in there or is it back to what it was before?
I believe so. I think that is one of the findings of the article is that there is definitely a little bit of resistant starch. The quantity is something that has to be yet reset.
I'll be honest, I'm kind of like, I'm torn on this because it's interesting And I'm glad that I know this now.
But like, I would rather eat any food in its optimal condition.
And if it's not the greatest food for you, then just don't eat it too often or don't eat too much of it, hopefully.
I do think that really good pasta, if it's high quality, refrigerated, warmed up the next day, is still good.
Rice is harder to resuscitate.
I'll put a little splash of hot water in with it and then microwave it a lot to get it really hot so that I'm sort of like trying to re -steam it, essentially.
But then I might be defeating the whole purpose.
And even then, it's never quite the same again.
Am I right, Sweta? Yeah.
I mean, it depends also on the type of rice.
You take out basmati from your restaurant, Indian restaurant, and put that in the fridge.
The next day, it's going to be like rocks.
It's over. Right. You can fill a shotgun shell with that and take somebody out.
Yeah. And even when you heat it, it becomes this weird texture that is no. That's a no from me.
Swetha, do you have any, while we're on the subject, do you have any secrets for reheating rice?
We agree it's not ideal at any point.
But like you're in a pinch. It's been in the fridge.
Do you have any tips?
Steamer. It's the best is your steam, you know, take your thing out so that there's enough moisture getting in.
I think the problem is that the moisture is not penetrating.
But if you put water, it gets this gooey structure.
So you want your steam in and then you want to keep it for about solid 10, 15 minutes in a steamer.
And then you can resuscitate it to a certain extent.
I do not still bless it as a good one.
But you're getting there.
Okay. All right. All right.
Fair enough. All right, we're going to take a quick break.
When we come back, we are going to spin the spinner once again.
Each of you brought in an article to share.
Plus, Sueta will hold forth on the awesomeness of condensed milk.
And Amanda will crap on the Hamptons, which will be fun for all of us.
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Welcome back to the Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman. Before we get back to the show, I want to tell you back in 2017, we aired one of our most popular episodes ever about Shadi Martini, who ran a hospital in Aleppo.
Now, like a lot of Aleppians, Shadi is obsessed with food.
And one of his favorite places to eat in Aleppo is always this local sandwich shop called Sergia.
One specialty on the menu, a sheep brain sandwich. It's a magnificent sandwich. The way they do it, they boil it so you don't have any smell or anything.
Then they will put inside also the tomatoes, the pickles, and the lemon juice with some garlic.
And it melts. It just melts.
And when you eat it, it's like it's over and very quick.
It is delicious. But like so many other Aleppians, Shadi was forced to flee his home city during the Syrian Civil War.
Then, just last year, things took a dramatic turn in Syria.
Now, after 12 years in exile, Shadi is able to go back.
When we were driving and I started seeing Aleppo, it was a lot of emotions.
I cried. I cried a lot.
I never thought that I'll be driving this road again and driving into the city again.
We recently re -aired this original two -part story, and then we added part three, a brand new update in which Shadi talks about his return to Aleppo, and we get the latest in the sandwich shop.
That what's up now, check it out.
One more quick note, make sure you stick around to the end of this episode for a special bonus segment brought to you by Samsung.
Alright, back to the show and I'm joined once again by Bloomberg Business Week senior reporter, Amanda Mull.
Hello again, Amanda.
Hi. And the food science nerd behind the Instagram feed, Upgrade My Food, Sweta Sivakumar. Hello again, Sweta.
Hi there. All right.
Ready to spin the spinner once again?
Let's spin it. Yeah, let's do it.
Here we go. Now it's time for guest's choice.
You've each brought in a story that you want us to discuss.
Amanda, kick it off.
All right. Right, so recently New York Magazine did a whole issue dedicated to the Hamptons, various phenomena, culinary and otherwise, that happen out on Long Island.
And I'm sure some people have at least heard of it, but just in case, like it's sort of a luxury vacation destination several hours outside New York City all the way in the very, very tippy end of Long Island.
Yes, it is a cluster of beach towns that are incredibly expensive, very exclusive.
Right, a lot of celebrities.
Yes, lots of celebrities, lots of New York area finance people, things like that.
And so the article you brought in is entitled, The Food's Not Great, The Service Stinks, and No One Can Get a Table.
What really makes a Hamptons restaurant work?
Tell us more about this article and why you're interested in it.
Well, the article is by New York Magazine's food critic, Matthew Schneier.
And he basically spent some time out east, as they say, as other people say.
I do not spend time in the Hamptons.
I am not rich. and he went to a bunch of, like, the local haunts, a bunch of the places that are really hard to book during peak season, and basically concluded that, like, there is definitely food in the Hamptons.
Like, you can, like, buy a meal there if you can get in, but a lot of it is really sort of fine.
Mediocre. Yeah, it's, you know, for all of the money and power and access and luxury goods available in the Hamptons, the food itself is not going to knock anybody's socks off.
There was a upscale market that a year or two ago started selling lobster salad.
Yes. For $100 a pound.
That made headlines.
$100 a pound lobster salad.
Yes. So just to give you some sense of what we're dealing with here.
Yes. And so what do you make of that, Amanda?
The fact that you have all this money and all these people who presumably eat at very fancy upscale restaurants in other parts of the country and the world, so they know what what a good meal is.
And yet here they are with nothing but mediocrity.
This is part of a larger phenomenon that has been fascinating to me for years, which is that the restaurants that are most beloved by actual elites are often incredibly mediocre.
This is a phenomenon that persists outside of the Hamptons.
Anybody who has been to, and I'm sorry if you're listening to this, the people who own it, Cipriani knows that this is another famous upscale place in New York.
Yes, yes. And this is a phenomenon in L .A.
Any place that you get like the really wealthy, really powerful people who have access to the best of everything congregate, you end up with a lot of restaurants that are very expensive, that are very hard to get into, that are very sceney among that crowd, that serve just whatever, that are not doing anything interesting culinarily, and that are charging you a ton for the privilege of eating that food.
So what do you think is the appeal to these folks?
folks. In the US, we tend to conflate the idea of being rich with the idea of having taste.
And often these two things do not coexist in the same individuals.
Like by and large, these are people who spend most of their lives like focused on other stuff who have no particular expertise in food, may not be particularly interested in food, may view it as something that is more of a luxury good than something that is like a true pleasure that sort of value these these places for the social milieu that they gather together that they value being around other rich people they value being able to like go around to a couple other tables and shake hands with the business guys that they also know or their friends from the tennis club or whatever the food at these
places is often like a third or fourth consideration and I think that this crowd is more concerned with status yes than with food and so the thing that's most appealing about these these places is the fact that it's hard to get in, is the fact that other rich, powerful people and celebrities go there, and they want to be able to view themselves as part of this select group.
Right. The draw that a lot of these places have is this sort of like proximity to fame or power or wealth instead of what they're actually feeding you.
I started my career off working in the fashion industry, and it might not surprise you to hear that people in the fashion industry want to go to a restaurant that is more about the ambiance and the company than about, like, what you're actually eating.
Next up in the guest's choice segment, Sweta, what have you got for us?
I'm going to talk about the wonders of the humble condensed milk.
Condensed milk, love it.
So I just wrote an article for Serious Eats in which I published this three ingredients to make your quick no -churn ice cream.
And Hedy McKinnon has also released two -ingredient ice cream with just condensed milk and mangoes in the New York Times recently.
So I feel like condensed milk is having its day, its time in the spotlight right now.
I love sweetened condensed milk.
I'll eat it right out of the can.
But what is it? What even is sweetened condensed milk?
So sweetened condensed milk is basically milk that has been reduced under a partial vacuum.
So it has milk solids, fat, and things like that in it.
It is a thick milk, which is, you know, viscous because of the added sugars in it.
And it has been seeded with very tiny lactose crystals so that it doesn't, no matter you open it after two years, three years, it's going to be the smooth liquid.
You're never going to see any crystallization on the can.
It's a very simple product, but a very well -crafted product.
Now, if you're making ice cream at home and you want it to be soft and scoopable, you you have to have very small size of the ice crystals.
The problem is when you take ice cream mix that you prepare with your egg yolks and whatnot and stick it straight up into your freezer without using an ice cream maker, the ice crystals, they do something called Oswald ripening where they love to become bigger and bigger rather than stay where they are.
So basically, if you just try to freeze the ingredients together of ice cream without churning it, you're gonna get giant ice crystals which will be bad okay so the way that churning works is that it starts nucleating tiny ice crystals around and you as you keep churning it doesn't allow them to grow because it's mixing and mixing and mixing so it's in motion right to make good ice cream at home with small ice crystals it's a long somewhat complicated process it may require specific equipment it's kind of unwieldy yes so in my ice cream there are two main ingredients and if you you have this,
you're all set. The two ingredients are sweetened condensed milk and whipped cream.
Stick your sweetened condensed milk in your freezer and take it out the next day.
Guess what state it's going to be at?
So it's going to stay as that liquid gooey consistency even after freezing, like, say, a day or so.
That is one part of keeping your ice cream scoopable because you want your ice cream to take out and not be a hard concrete block.
The second part of of it is the whipped cream, which gives you the structure.
And it has two things which ice crystals hate.
One is fat molecules, and the other is air.
So both of them kind of spread throughout, creates this matrix.
And along with the sweetened condensed milk, you have a beautiful base.
And this gives you the perfect blanket to add whatever flavorings you want and make smooth ice cream at home with just these two ingredients, which are so easily available.
I love that. So Sweta, So we will link to your Serious Eats piece and the recipe for this no churn ice cream using condensed milk.
We'll put it in the show description.
But just give us the major bullet points.
Like how does it work?
You have to take two cups of whipped cream and then you have to fold in your condensed milk and your flavoring and then mix it up and then drizzle it with some more of the flavoring to make it look pretty and stick it in your freezer.
It's as simple as that.
Wow. I'm going to do that.
I'm going to do that with my daughter, Emily, because she is the resident smoothie maker.
in our house, and she loves a mango puree.
And I get the mango puree at like the Indian grocery store.
We sometimes make mango lussies.
And so this is going to be right up her alley.
I hope she likes it.
All right. Let's spin the spinner.
Now it's time for the lightning round.
First up, we have an article from The Atlantic entitled, Now is not the time to eat bagged lettuce.
When you think of food poisoning, I think a lot of people think of like undercooked chicken or spoiled milk or raw oysters.
But in terms of foodborne illness, leafy greens are the top culprit.
Sweta, this article says that bags of shredded or pre -chopped greens that promise to be pre -washed, so you'd think pre -washed, triple -washed, those have to be safe, but those are actually especially risky.
Why? It's because when you chop up the lettuce and you have the bacteria already infected, then you're going to kind of distribute it all throughout the bag, and then it gets sealed.
So within a matter of a couple of days, it's going to be pretty contaminated.
And also, as I understand it, these pre -washed greens, they get washed in giant containers.
If one of them has some kind of bacteria on it, it can very easily spread to the other heads as opposed to each being treated separately.
Yes. Extra steps of processing in raw foods like that can be a real problem because they add opportunities to spread infection around or to spread infection from like one batch to another.
other and especially because salad greens are the thing that nobody cooks.
In other types of processed raw vegetables, you're going to put it in a pan and that's going to kill a lot of stuff.
Yeah, that's going to solve most of your problems. But people, nobody cooks salad greens, especially not pre -chopped salad greens.
In Indian weddings, there's a number one rule is that you never touch your salad.
It's been passed down by aunties of all.
You never eat eat salad in an Indian wedding.
You eat everything else.
Next up in the lightning round, we have an article from Slate.
A lot of chain restaurants are famous for sauces.
Arby's has their barbecue sauce.
Taco Bell has their hot sauce.
In recent years, these restaurants have started selling their sauces in bottles in grocery stores.
So you don't have to go to the restaurant anymore to get them.
First off, have either of you tried the bottled versions of any sauce from any restaurant?
I've tried bottled Chick -fil -A sauces before, which is perhaps not surprising since I'm from Atlanta.
Which is, you know, for anybody who doesn't know the home of Chick -fil -A.
And, yeah, I mean, that's what it says on the tin.
Sueta, have you tried any of these?
I don't have bottled sauces, but I have a kitchen drawer full of Taco Bell sauces.
Just love them so much. Right.
So this late piece asked the question, does easy, constant access to the best part of fast food risk ruining what makes it great?
Amanda? You know, I don't think so.
I sort of disagree with the premise of this article because if you look at the fast food business, like the goal is easy and constant anyway.
They want you to have the opportunity to buy a McDonald's or Chick -fil -A or Popeyes or whatever in front of you in the most formats possible.
And I also sort of doubt that it diminishes the allure of the restaurants for a significant number of people.
And especially in an environment when a lot of people you see switching from getting takeout to buying something at the grocery store, buying prepared foods at the grocery store.
If that gives those businesses still like a share of not just food budgets, but a share of mind in people's minds, then I think that that is like completely complementary to the restaurants.
That's got its own value.
Yes. But, Sueta, let me ask you.
Does your drawer full of Taco Bell hot sauce packets mean that you go to Taco Bell less often?
I don't think it makes any difference.
We get more packets when we store them more.
So when you run out of packets, you're like, I guess we're going to Taco Bell for dinner.
Exactly. We've got to get stocked up.
Last item in the lightning round.
Now, just first of all, to explain like wide versus narrow, we're talking about the diameter of the opening at the top of the glass.
Like a champagne flute is a very narrow glass.
A pint glass that you get a beer in or soda in is a wide glass.
According to a recent study, people prefer wide rimmed glasses to narrow rimmed ones.
This is true even when you control for the type of beverage.
And yes, they tested on non -alcoholic drinks as well.
People are not only prepared to spend more on beverages in wider glasses, they're also more likely to reorder drinks served in wider glasses.
And drinking from wider glasses makes them feel better.
So I want to ask each of you, Sueta first, what kind of glass do you prefer?
I think the wider the rim, the bigger the glass, right?
Right. I would imagine the quantity is more for a wider rim.
For example, if you're selling hot coffee, and Indians, we drink coffee at a ridiculously high temperature.
If I want to maintain that temperature of coffee in a wide rim, it has to be that deep as well.
So that the temperature is maintained.
You know what I mean?
Like if it's just wide and it's like a saucer, it's going to drop.
Right. There's too much coffee exposed to the air and it's going to cool faster.
Exactly. It's going to get cold faster.
So I would imagine I'm just drinking a lot more.
So I think I would prefer a narrow rim.
That way I can hold the temperature and I can drink a little bit lesser amount.
Okay. Amanda? There are certain beverages that definitely could make me stray from my overall preference.
But I think my overall preference is narrow and like narrow with a straw, ideally.
I like my drinks really, really cold.
And if you go narrow with a straw, you're likely to get like a couple good rocks in there.
So similar to suede, the temperature of the drink, whether it's hot or cold, is a major consideration.
So you like the narrow rim, less exposed to air.
Whether it's cold or hot, it will retain its temperature longer.
Right. But yeah, I think there are some exceptions to that.
If you gave me a martini in a highball glass with a bunch of ice, I would send it back probably.
That glass is so iconic, it's hard to separate a martini from the glass that you expect it to be in.
Right, yeah. And there's certain situations where I think that the glassware and the drink match each other so well that I wouldn't let my personal overall preference interrupt.
But in general, I think I like a narrow one.
I'm torn. I'm with you on temperature, but I also care a lot about aroma.
And a wider rimmed glass has that increased surface when you go to sip it, if you breathe in while you're sipping.
For instance, like this is why coffee, when you get coffee to go, if it has a lid on it, you don't get as much flavor when you're just drinking through the little hole as you do if you take the lid off.
Good point. Because then you have aroma.
So I lean towards the wider rim glass for the increased aroma.
That's a good point, Jen.
Yeah. I think that makes sense, especially for coffee.
Are you switching to my team now?
Is that it? Because when you're both over.
You're convincing me.
Yeah, let me think about it.
I actually have to measure.
You've put me down a path.
I'm going to report back to you.
All right, all right, all right.
We'll keep an eye on your Instagram feed to see the next video on this very important question.
Yes. All right, well, thank you both so much for joining me on this Salad Spinner edition of The Sporkful.
Amanda Mull is a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek.
In her Buying Power column, she covers consumer goods from cars to clothes to weight loss drugs and so much more.
You always got to read what Amanda's writing.
Thank you so much, Amanda.
Thank you so much for having me.
And Sweta Sivakumar, follow her on Instagram at Upgrade My Food.
She is a food science nerd and expert, as you've heard here today.
She posts so many good videos and so fun and interesting.
You can also find her writing in Serious Eats, The Hindustan Times and others.
Thank you, Sweta Sivakumar. Thank you so much for having me.
Next week on the show, if it's summertime on the Sporkful, it's time to play Two Chefs and a Lie, our annual game show episode in which you're going to hear from three guests, Two of whom are chefs, one of whom is a liar.
So you can play along at home, but this year in a twist, I am not the contestant.
We're going to bring in Rachel Hampton, host of the podcast Normal Gossip, to see if she can figure out who the liar is.
This is always a great time.
Get psyched for that next week.
While you're there for that one, check out last week's show with a very special update to our story on the Aleppo sandwich. After 12 years in exile, Shadi Martini is finally able to return to Aleppo and eat at his beloved sandwich shop, Sergia.
you make sure you listen to this story it's up now and hey did you know you can listen to the sporkful on the serious xm app yes the serious xm app it has all your favorite podcasts plus over 200 ad -free music channels curated by genre and era plus live sports coverage does your podcasting app have that and there's interviews with a -list stars and so much more it's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one and right now sporkful listeners can get three free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXM .com slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O 'Hara.
Our engineer is Jared O 'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
This is John in the Kitchen telling you to eat s'mores, eat batter, and eat more butter.
We'll be right back.
Your job title, as I translated it, is basically that you're a nerd who explains appliances to regular people.
Sometimes we've got to take the complex technology and get to really what's the brass tacks.
Why do you want it?
Well, one reason to want an induction range is that it's a lot more energy efficient than gas and electric stoves.
With induction, 90 % of that heat is being transferred directly to the actual pot.
Your traditional electric is about 70%, and gas is actually the least efficient.
It's about 50 % of the actual heat is escaping.
So when you use a gas stove half the heat from the gas is heating the thing, and half of it is just like heating your home.
Keeping you warm. Yeah, right.
So yeah, we did an episode of induction on the Spork for a while back about all of its benefits.
But for people who missed that one, just like what is induction?
How does it work? The biggest thing is just to know how it's a little bit different than traditional cooktops.
So your traditional cooktop, you're used to the actual cooktop itself getting hot, and then it's going to be able to heat up that pan.
So sometimes that takes quite a bit of time.
it maybe isn't as responsive sometimes you get super hot and then it's not hot enough so the beauty of induction is it's very responsive to the temperatures that you're putting in but it works actually very similar to what most consumers are familiar with which is like a wireless charger on your phone oh so like when you lay your phone down on one of those pads and it starts charging right honestly i still don't totally get how induction works i think there are magnets involved but i don't know how my phone works either what i do understand about induction is why it's special.
So the beauty with this is you're not going to have to worry about the actual cooktop itself getting hot.
So this is a lot more efficient when it comes to the cleanup process.
So because the actual cooktop isn't hot, it's much easier to be able to clean up spills and you're going to maintain that cooktop a lot longer.
Because the spills won't get like burnt and caked on.
And then it's also like it's a totally flat cooktop.
So that also makes it easier.
100%. You know, if you have kids or if you have pets, the idea here to not have a hot cooktop like that just gives you that extra peace of mind.
What do you think is the coolest thing about an induction stove?
For me, it's just how fast it actually is able to get things to boil and how accurate the actual temperature is able to get.
All right, I'm calling it.
We just watched this pot boil in a minute and 41 seconds.
You can even hear it.
So an induction range is efficient and convenient.
But Samsung's taking it a step further with a whole bunch of additional features, like the way it works with their SmartThings app.
so part of it would be able to monitor the cooktop itself maybe accidentally left a burner on that you didn't know about you could actually turn that off so if you're on the couch and be able to see how things are going in the cooktop and then as we have in some of our other products this also does have a camera as well to be able to kind of see how things are actually cooking inside there you get a camera on the range on the range what about the AI home setup like what can that do over here yeah so this particular screen here is our AI home has a seven inch screen maybe Maybe you want to be able
to listen to music while I'm cooking.
I can access the recipes that are here, but just helpful notifications as well.
And get this, the range can communicate with the family hub on your Samsung bespoke fridge.
So if you pick a recipe off the 32 -inch screen there, it'll send the recipe to the stove and it'll appear on the screen here.
Yep. And then you don't have to walk back and forth.
So you'd be able to see kind of exactly what the recipes are and it gives you those step -by -step instructions.
Thanks again to our sponsor, Samsung, for inviting us to test out their new product features.
And let me tell you, this induction range has even more than we could cover.
An anti -scratch matte finish as opposed to a glassy appearance, so it looks great and it's also not as prone to fingerprints.
Also, there are more and more induction -ready pots and pans on the market.
They're so easy to find.
Many of the ones you have already will work.
They do hybrids. There's a ton of options.
I really think this is the future.
You can boil two times faster, enjoy precise temperature control, and get the benefits of energy savings and easy cleaning, all from the Samsung bespoke induction range.
And it's got this ambient edge lighting so you can tell even from a distance if your cooktop is on or if your food is still cooking.
Samsung's new line of Bespoke AI appliances simplifies your time in the kitchen.
Visit Samsung .com slash Bespoke to learn more.
The SmartThings app is available on Android and iOS devices.
A Wi -Fi connection and a Samsung account are required.
Boiling speed and energy efficiency compared to Samsung non -induction models.
