Is it custard? Is it cake? Is it sausage? Is it porridge? No, baby. It’s pudding. This is a hot dog is a sandwich. Ketchup is a smoothie. Yeah, I put ice in my cereal. So what? That makes no sense. A hot dog is a sandwich. A hot dog is a sandwich. What? Welcome to our podcast, A Hot Dog is a Sandwich. The show we break down the world’s biggest food debates. I’m your host, Josh Sher. And I’m your host, Nicole Inay. And today we have a very special guest on the pod. He’s a chef, a founder, and the ring leader of a merry band of culinarily chaotic comrades over on the YouTube channel Sorted Food. Please welcome the incredibly talented Ben Abil. Awesome. What an intro. Quite the tongue twister. Nicole Nicole Nicole wrote it. That was her. That was her. I do that on purpose. Um, we have been meaning to do this podcast for years. For literal years. It’s been on the same Google doc that we’ve had go been that we’ve had going since like May of 2020. thoughts. Pending thoughts and also pending a real life British person to come on show. And now that we No pressure then now that we’ve captured one. He is real. I touched his shoulder. He’s like I I know leprechauns are Irish but you’re sort of like the spritly like a hobbit I think is the British version of leprechaun. The hairy toes give it away. You can’t call a guest a hobbit. I’m so sorry. Part of his culture. I’m so sorry. But we are discussing what is pudding because from the American perspective when we see black pudding and Yorkshire pudding and figgy pudding and hasty pudding which is my favorite pudding by the way. Know you have a favorite pudding that leads me to believe that the term is a little bit too nebulous and might need some explaining from somebody who has a deep culinary and cultural understanding of it. Yeah, it’s it’s loose. It’s loose and I just feel like it’s a vibe. It’s a pudding is a vibe. It’s a feeling. Okay. It’s a mood. Sure. It’s a comfort blanket. Pudding is all of the above and probably is still waiting to evolve into more things. Um, welcome podcast is over. See you later. I feel I feel good about that. Do uh the American the American version of pudding. Do you confuses me? It confuses you. What do you think American pudding is? It’s like a custard or a something set with starch and egg. Right. Correct. Always cold. Always cold. Always cold. Have you ever had warm pudding before? Like purposefully. I used to. So our our pudding either it comes in two forms. You’re dead correct. It’s similar to a custard, but depending on what I feel like the French would not call it a custard. It’s generally not set with eggs. You can make pudding. You can, but we t the American way is with cornstarch. Is with cornstarch. It’s just milk, cornstarch, and sugar. And yummy. And it’s generally either served in a little cup that you rip off a foil packet on the top and eat it uh during school lunch. You forgot to lick the top. Always always. Yeah. But then once that top is going to kind of paper cut your tongue and you’re never going to do it again. It happens to us all. Uh and then the other form is it comes in a little box of powder and you put that on a stove top with milk together. But you’re talking about the like capitalist commodification of pudding, which is like the way that you know the only American food culture is that of commodification, right? And so I convenience. Yeah. And so that’s where we’ve ended up with pudding. And don’t get me wrong, like custard I think is a human right. I I feel like it’s one of those things like it’s it’s whether it’s hot or cold, whether we’re talking trifle layers of custard sponge and jelly or hot and steaming over a pudding. It’s it’s just something that everybody should be entitled to enjoy. I agree. And I also the the condimentification of custard is something I didn’t know as a thing until I was in South Africa. Okay. And any uh dessert that we had like um cook sisters or these like delightful uh you know like fried pastries but they just brought out what to me you know there’s the Mexican brand of fruit nectar called Jumx. Yes. And they’re in like I call it humx. It’s probably you call it Jumx. I call I like the Jewish mix confusion. It’s probably a mix. I don’t know. But it’s it’s in these like quart-sized heavy cardboard containers with the powder waiting to be turned into pudding. Well, no. I thought it might have been But it was just a giant carton of custard that you go and you squeeze. Do you have that in Britain? Yeah, we have tinned and canned custard. We have cartons of custard. We have pots of custard. We have dried custard. We have frozen cust. Obviously custard is important. It’s not pudding, but but it’s it is a component part of pudding perhaps. So my question is where does creme glaze go into the conversation? Is crema glaze a thinned version of custard? It’s a bougie cheffy version. French for sure. It lacks the, you know, the food coloring you get in birds custard that makes it yellow that is like school canteen and family dinner vibes. Instead, it’s looser and softer and more vanilla and delicious. Right. But that’s Yeah, I just put that together. Is that like the French saw an English custard and then said ah English cream glaze like that’s is that where it just sort of Yeah, creèmeong glaze is Yeah. English cream or English custard but just refined. Interesting. I don’t know which came first. So So like from the American pudding point of view, we would see your custard and we would say that is our pudding. Sure. But then we get a a mass of coagulated uh pork’s blood inside of an intestine cooked until it is nice hard slicable and fried and served with eggs for breakfast. For breakfast. Yeah. A little starter with some scolops. Yum. Yum. I love that. And then you go, “Well, that’s pudding.” Yeah. Because it comes from bud, right? Which is a French word. So like literally pudding I think is more the shape of the thing which is why over the years a pudding cooked in a some kind of uh sack sack intestine or or bladder of a pig or something um like that that shape was a pudding and therefore various puddings sweet and savory that were cooked in pudding bowls were also pudding shaped. So pudding became I think a shape. Oh, so the etmology is from the shape of with which you are cooking a filling of something I think. So I I’ve heard that the etmology had to do with not the shape but the slurry that is put into a shape that is put into the way that’s the way it was explained to me and I think we talked about this we may have talked about this together with Max Miller from Tasting History and he of course knew he was like well you don’t know about the great pudding flood of 1838. Of course I don’t Max. Um but I I’ve heard it has to do with the idea of like a slurry cuz if you look at like I don’t know like when you steam a pudding like a Christmas pudding I mean it is kind of loose and and runny right in the same way that if you’re making budan or black pudding you’re starts off wet then wet. So, a pudding is kind of anything that just kind of starts off wet and then is maybe given a shape by something like a pig’s bladder. Isn’t for confirmation. I don’t know. Looking at you to save me. But I mean, it’s literally so so iconic in the UK. I mean, Pudding Lane was where the Great Fire of London began. Um, and that was literally, you know, it’s it goes back so far, but it is still evolving. Mhm. Is there a difference between a Christmas pudding and a Christmas cake? Is there a difference? Yes. So, a Christmas pudding is pudding shaped. Okay. A cake is cake shaped. So, it’s a shape. Okay. But but they are also different ingredients. One would be sort of steamed whereas a Christmas cake is generally baked. A pudding is norm a pudding is almost always steamed. I think a Christmas steamed or boiled. So, it would be in its container and then like a white pudding or a black pudding is boiled um or steamed. Steamed in a pudding bowl in a steamer. A white pudding. So black pudding is pork splud. White pudding is that just pork fat. Yep. With her and spice and delicious. It is really delicious. We we had Do you remember having that one? Many times. Many, many times. What a delight. Um there’s something called a steak and kidney pudding which I’ve never had. I’ve never heard of that before. Steak and kidney pudding. Ah. So again, I think it’s pudding shaped. It’s cooked in a pudding bowl, but it’s made with sew it pastry. Okay. Okay. I know about sewing is obviously a beef fat in flour bound together. It’s quite soft, but you can mold it around the outside of the pudding. And then you fill it with things that need long slow cook. Usually, possibly already stewed. So, beef, beef and kidney or steak and kidney, sometimes oyster. So, beef and oyster pie. Um, and these go in lid on top and the whole thing gets steamed and sometimes baked as well. That’s a a savory sew it pudding. Interesting. Steak and kidney pie also exists. also exists, but that’s in a pie tin and the crust is and the crust is different. It could be a different but actually I think the difference being pies are baked whereas puddings are generally steamed or boiled. It’s a it’s a dry cook as opposed to a violently wet cook for the pudding. Uh which is interesting because like if you look at pudding is the sort of pudding and pie are are like the nouns like the large scale descriptors. There’s like dumplings that are like steamed versus fried, right? And that doesn’t change the fact that they’re dumplings. Uh even like like like yoza, right? Or like like what is it? Jouza. Um like you know just your like average dim sum dumpling, right? You can get them either fried or steamed, but they’re still dumplings. It’s like a steak and kidney pie versus steak and kidney pudding. They’re they’re pretty close to each other in terms of fillings and it is literally just what’s outside. But I I would hate to draw the line at saying all puddings are boiled or steamed cuz then you have Yorkshire pudding which which is a wet slurry of sorts. that’s baked and it’s also kind of shaped. It’s just three ingredients and it’s so delicious and no roast beef dinner should be without one. I I do agree with that. I agree. I um I had something that felt very American and in fact when I ate it in London I think the entire line was Americans. It was called a Yorkshire burrito. Yeah, I have seen this before on the internet and intrigues me thoroughly. Not a single Queen’s accent in that line, but a lot of Americans holding iPhones, including me. Tell the people what was in it. You can get several different kinds. All I made sure to ask for was an extra. Do they call it a parcel of gravy? What do they generally call jug? A jug. Yeah, jugs of gravy. Gravy on the side. But it was it was some sort of like stewed and shredded beef. Um, there’s a large Yorkshire pudding that they sort of flatten out to be roughly the shape of, which is a real shame because the beauty of a Yorkshire pudding is the way it rises and the crisp edges, but you can’t do that if you need to actually roll it. So, you lose some of the nuance of of a Yorkshire pudding by rolling it. If you’re eating a Yorkshire burrito, you’re not there for nuance. How big? How when I think of big, but not as big as like a Chipotle burrito. When I think of Yorkshire puddings, I always think of them in these really beautiful like tins. Yeah. Yeah. Like the shape of our muffin cases or tins. And the thought of someone making an XL one and then flattening it and then putting a bunch of [ ] in it. I don’t know what else to say. There was a period of time uh it was the rise of the gastro pub in the UK. The smoking ban kicks in. So suddenly pubs have to offer a bit more and and food improved broadly speaking. Um and there were a lot of pubs and pub chains that were serving entire roast dinners or bangers and mash inside of a large Yorkshire pudding. The Yorkshire pudding filled the entire plate. I think that’s the ones they now roll. Yum. There you go. There’s the Yorkshire burrito. And and it it began in uh in Yorkshire in York, but now you will see them in street food vendors all over. And I I was in Camden Market, which I was not prepared for the crowd density of Camden Market. Market’s dope. I’ve heard a lot of bootleg system of a down t-shirts from little place there covered in Yorkshire burrito stains. But the York or Yorkshire pudding, um, if it’s that large, it kind of it’s more of almost like a Dutch baby. Yeah. And I agree with you. I agree. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. But I I don’t know, man. It’s just so nebulous. It’s like salad because it’s also a time of day. It’s it’s also it’s a course, right? It’s like you’re certain and I think it’s it it ascends class, right? The queen used to love pudding, but also, you know, the miners will stop and have pudding in their family meal for the working class. And it basically transcends the whole generation. Pudding is have you still got room for pudding? When you finished your main course, have you still got room for pudding would always be like a a thing and it’s a it’s a time of the meal time as well as the specific thing you’re eating. Yeah. When you like when you said like custard is a human right, I I think like pudding is a human right, there is almost like an actual like class pro labor element to that in a way, right? Certainly cantens, whether they be school cantens or office cantens, government cantens, they would always always have two courses. It would be the savory and then pudding. And pudding would often be a steamed sponge or a roly poli or something that was sew based lashings of custard. Um, as times move on, menus change, but that was kind of always the staple. Well, even even the modern dessert, right? It’s like um God we got to go back in history for this but but like post French revolution like dessert comes from like service roose which was like in the kind of Louis the 14th royal court where like deserve means to clear the table and to give you like a a sweet course that kind of transformed into these like very ornate sort of like fruit displays where they would have a court cook who would make these insane sugar sculptures and dessert was considered this like very highass ariodite thing but it like sort of started democratizing leading up to the French Revolution with more like flour, refined flour and sugar available. And so then like these democratic desserts became like very important symbol of the revolution of like everybody should have access to these sweets now. This is what we fight for. Which is very much like a French thing. I feel like holding space for pudding is I think it’s also the sentiment like dessert is plated. Yeah. Pudding is a memory. It’s like it’s like it’s like it’s a nostalgia. It’s like it takes you to a place that’s like pudding was always a place of comfort. Whether that was around the family table or at Christmas with Christmas pudding you have everyone around. Pudding is a a moment whereas dessert is something that’s plated and delicious and refined. In school in school they serve your pudding as well. Yeah. What was that about? Tell me about your favorite school. Jam rolly poli steamed puddings. I mean like a crumble. So hot fruit with crumble and custard um would be a pudding. Although not technically a pudding but it would be pudding the course. Um, I I can see your confusion. Um, yeah. Can you pudding question marks? You can have pudding for pudding or you can have not pudding for pudding. You have pudding for breakfast. Pudding is to the UK what salad is to the US. That’s all this is. Cuz didn’t you guys just have something called Snickers salad? Like Yeah. I am so sorry you didn’t get you came in with your spoon. The whole crew had just ascended this. I know. It’s fine. I’ll just make it myself later. But basically like salad is such a nebulous term because you have like strawberry pretzel salad from the south. You got Snickers salad and then you have something like a garden salad or a salad bar at Sizzler. So it’s the same exact thing. Pudding is salad. That’s actually I think it’s a pretty reasonable. It’s a catch katch. Yeah, I feel good about that. What would What would you say links American salads? Also, do you use those like constructions like the salad construction in the UK? Like surely you have potato salad and pasta salad and like these are just heavy carbs bound with mayonnaise or um we’ll have a like egg salad sandwich which is just hard eggs mashed up mayonnaise not a salad but hey it falls under the salad bracket. I think it might be you salad something, right? You’re salading something. So you’re taking it. Let me explain. So you take like for example chicken salad and a Greek salad. You’re chopping up things relatively fine. You’re throwing it in a bowl with some sort of binder and then you’re mixing it up in a bowl and you’re feeding it to someone. That’s what constitutes a salad. And it has to come back to your your phrase of sort of ethmology and words like salad comes from salt. Celery, salami, salad. So, you’re right. It’s that seasoning of chopped up things. Yes. Yeah. Anything you ch sometimes the Snickers and the apples can be seasoned with cool weather and that sort of still follows seasonal, isn’t it? Was there mayonnaise in that at all? No. Some people do add Go ahead. Some people do add mayonnaise to cool whip based salads, but for me, the mayonnaise salads and the cool whip salads are different. Diagram should not overlap. Also, do you do you know what Cool Whip is? Do you guys have that? Honestly, I kind of glossed over that cuz I presume that everyone at home knew what it was earlier and I was just like, “Yeah, sure.” I was God, I was just talking to someone about Cool Whip. It um it was invented in god I think like the 1950s very space age kind of stuff where American food companies were trying to figure out how do we produce food as cheaply and readily available as possible right so like what if instead of whipping cream we could use like hydrogenated vegetable oils up when margarine was coming you know it’s literally like butter is to margarine as whipped cream is to cool whip and legally they’re not allowed to call it whipped cream so they call it whipped topping uh and it kind of I I love cool whip but it also definitely tastes like shaving cream. I don’t like oil. It has that It has that kind of consistency where when you’re shaving in a little bit. Yeah. It says on the package, do not mix cuz it completely deflates and it turns into this globby hydrogenated oil mess. So, I don’t I don’t really deal with cool whip that much anymore, but I’m glad that we have at least a little bit of a consensus of what salad is and what pudding is, but what what do you call something like rice pudding whenever you like get it somewhere? I know you probably don’t eat a lot of rice pudding or tap at a lot of rice pudding rice pudding like because all of these things they’re just it goes back to a feeling and a vibe and a mood and a comfort blanket. It’s the same reason why the term pudding can be um a term of endearment. You might call your loved one a pudding as you might do sweet cheeks or dumpling and they’re kind of they’re a bit like backhanded but they’re kind of it’s a term of endearment that you could call someone my pudding. I’ve never been called someone’s pudding, but I’m open and available to being called someone’s sweet cheeks. I’m trying to think other ones, right? Sweet cheeks. Like the idea of pudding and kind of like institutionalizing pudding as a time something for everyone. Is one of the things I wish American food culture had more of are these sort of institutions and like holding space for it. And y’all do tea pretty seriously. Do you think those two were kind of related? Like do you hold space in your own life for tea? I’m more of a coffee kind of guy, but I I tea time drink. Tea is a time. Tea is a time and a drink. And depending where you are in the country, it’s a meal. Like you stop for tea, which is actually dinner. Um it’s it’s a confused land that we live in. Um but tea is so important. Yeah. Cuz my my so my grandma is South African, right? She’s a Lithuanian Jew whose family like escaped the pgrams in the Russian Empire and ended up in South Africa and she was educated in very like Victorian schools. And so it’s weird because I grew up with you know my grandma sort of like lionizing the monarchy and like making like making me tea even though I was like granny I don’t like this because she had these very kind of like British tendencies but that was always a thing was like we’re sitting down for tea which means we’re sitting down for conversation she’s going to drink a cup of tea. I might be eating a chips a holoy cookie or something, but that was still tea. To spill the tea is to to gossip and you know even those phrases. And yet it’s relatively recent before tea it was coffee houses in London that were doing the rounds for like big thinkers and then hot chocolate when that first came across. Um and it was only quite later that tea afternoon tea became a thing and it became an occasion as well as a drink. Do you have pudding houses? More recently there are people rebranding it. The pudding stop is an amazing dessert place where you just go for dessert. So you have to kind of you go to a restaurant, you excuse yourself after the main course, get the check, and then you go to the pudding stop just for dessert. It’s kind of cool. America needs a pudding stop. Are they taking franchise opportunities from America? That sounds incredible because there is something binding most British dessert puddings, most British sweet puddings that I do really love that I think we miss. We were talking about it earlier. Check out our episode on Mythical Kitchen, by the way. It’s one of the most fun things we’ve ever done. But, uh, we had wet bread and you initially made the claim that I do not like wet bread. We had like a pueblo slopper. I’m sorry. PBlo slopper. That’s our term of endearment in America. We’ll put the pueblo slopp. It’s uh, we’re trying to fool him with fake regional American foods. Okay. He was trying to fool me with fake British foods. And we had a pblo slopper, which is very real, but it’s a whole burger dowsted in green chili. So, everything’s just soggy. Sounds like a good But even for me, like a French dip sandwich, I I while I I get it and it tastes amazing, it’s just the texture of soggy bread. I just soggy bread, soggy scones, I I don’t mind like uh I mean, you guys would call them biscuits, but like scones baked on. We don’t we won’t go there, but like uh like cobbler baked on top of a stew and there’s a little bit of stodgy in the bottom, but most of it is nice and crisp and fluffy and light. I just don’t like the soggy scone bread biscuit vibe. But then we brought up Trifle, which is pudding, which is a pudding, which is different. So, trifle is pudding. It is. Or does it contain pudding? It’s an option you can have for pudding and it contains because pudding is what? A vibe. Pudding is a vibe. And trifle is But my grandma used to make a trifle. She’s terrible at cooking. But big trifle bowl, but it would just be some variation of like fruit, jam, custard, cake, all just sort of sitting and soaking together. Yeah, I love that. A lot of British sweet puddings are what I would just call slops. You know, they’re quite stodgy. They’re quite dense. I jam roly pololi. They’re made from sew it pudding. It’s, you know, it’s 15 beef. Oh my god. And I love that. Like these are literally my ideal desserts. What’s my favorite uh dessert that we had recently together at a restaurant? It was given to us for free. We just talked about it recently. I don’t know. I don’t remember anything. A Vietnamese restaurant. Oh, Ja. Ja. Have you ever had like these Vietnamese kind of it’s a Vietnamese pudding j it’s pronounced like jad but it’s kind of ch with a diitical but they will just make any sort of like sweet kind of stodgy pudding out of like taro or mung bean or sweet corn and it’s just it’s just dense and it’s sweet it’s appetizer with sugar like pretty much that is what it is and I feel like that same just like dense sweetness exists in a lot of British puddings that we don’t have and that frankly like a French pastry program is a bit too light for days, but there is I I just feel like it’s coming back as well. There’s and it’s been around for a long time, but there are literally things called the pudding club, and it’s a group of people who meet once a month, like the first Thursday of every month, and they just have multiple courses of pudding. Um, and it’s to keep it’s to keep it alive cuz some of these desserts are quite old-fashioned, like the spotted dick, classic, but it’s a it’s a classic pudding. It’s pudding shaped. It’s steamed or boiled, steamed. Um, but no one’s making that anymore. So, you kind of need these institutes, the pudding club, to to keep them alive, right? Right. Because otherwise, you guys turn it into custard. That’s a fair point. We’re going to turn it into custard. What What do you think the top British puddings are? Like, if you were to rank your favorites. I mean, my favorites versus the ones that are probably most iconic. Um, it’s definitely a crumble would be a good pudding, but then the actual puddings themselves, um, a spotted dick or a jam roly pololi, um, they would be pretty classic. And then you’ve got rice pudding, hot or cold. I’m having so much fun. I’m having I don’t think I’ve ever said the word pudding so many times. I feel like I’m learning so much as someone who’s only been to the UK once. I’m really really learning a lot about the dessert culture, but also like why is beef sew it utilized so much? Like like I know it might not be utilized now as much, but why was it so common? Why not just use butter or something else? Hugely calorific, delicious, and readily available as a byproduct. It was back when nose totail cooking was a necessity as opposed to a trend. And I feel like it would be nice to go back to some of that, but it’s using every part of the animal. So, why not use the fat from around the internal organs of a cow? And it wouldn’t make it taste any like particular way, right? Like it’s fairly tasteless unlike a tallow where if you melt it down and that’s absolutely delicious and cook everything in tallow, but um so it doesn’t make your pudding taste beefy. Got it. Got it. See, that was always one of my like anxieties whenever we would make like pudding for the show or something that I’m like, I don’t want to use the beef sew it. I’m going to use the I think it’s called a tora or a tora. I’m going to use my dream basically. Yeah. Yeah. I’m going to use the vegetable sew it, which is just these little like uh little pellets that just melt into But also insane that they call it vegetable sew it. You know what I mean? Cuz sew it is such a wildly specific, you know, visceral fat product and like we’ve done it vegetarian style, you know? Right. Right. Right. Right. But then gelatin like all the set like whether it’s bl or trifles or or just jellos like that’s just pork gelatin. So like we we like throwing meat and dairy at our desserts. Yeah. So the way you pronounced blong made me think of something recently has nothing to do with pudding but it has to do with Well, no, because I was thinking about this. How do you say the the Mexican dish that’s like a tortilla with meat and you fold it? Well, no. It’s the simpler one. Oh. Oh, a taco. Taco, right? Taco. That’s everyone ends up texting somehow. But no, I was thinking about this recently because um I didn’t realize that British people pronounce quasonant as quasant generally. Quasant. Yeah. And how do you pronounce it? How do you pronounce it? Croissant. Croissant. But like we put the T on the end of it. Yeah. We very heavily like Americanize it. Just like croissant. Give me a croissant. And for us to say like croissant, you’d be you’d seem so posh, so pretentious. But we pick and choose because we’ll we’ll say cross on for sure. But then the moment you say I’m off to Lari this weekend, everyone thinks you know you’re a bit of a wanker. Like that’s the where is the line of which words do you anglicize and which do you not? But we we say it the French way. But even just like the proximity to France from England versus like say our proximity to Mexico because anytime a British influencer says taco then everyone gets mad and I’m like no. Do you get mad? No, of course not. Because when we say taco, you probably hear an R in there. Yeah. Taco. We the we we speak with a rodic R. He don’t. Okay. And so when we say pasta Yeah. pasta pasta. P A R S T A. But pasta you would say with an R in there. Oh my god. I feel like I’m getting a linguistic. But then we we we have a north south divide on any word that’s bath and bath. Like I would love grass and grass. I would love to also ask you about cookies and biscuits. What’s the deal with that, man? Because they got cookies now, too. That’s the thing that trips me out. Well, yeah. Like something like an Oreo, like whenever you have something like an Oreo in like the stores, what are those called? Are just called Oreos? I think that’s a cookie. And the reason it’s a cookie is I think it’s a American thing that’s come back. Whereas I think biscuits are very British. Um, we have biscuit tins. We love the classic biscuit. Um, good for dunkers. But then you guys have the cookie. Okay. And we’re happy to take your cookies and love those too. Uh, but if we give you biscuits, you mess it up and put it on like casserole. Oh yeah, wait. Let me let me rephrase. So So a biscuit, you guys call a biscuit, we call a cookie. Yep. And then what we call biscuits, you guys call scones, basically. Yeah. And what we call scones? What are those scones? I think it’s still But there’s like a sweet scone. Yeah, cuz you guys can make like a plain scone, right? For us, a scone, it’s always going to have some sort of like sugary glaze inherent, right? But we we’ll make cheese scones as well and herby scones as well. We have those two. We have those two. We’d understand it. We have those two. We don’t understand it. We We have it, but I don’t recognize it. You know, so a chocolate chip biscuit y is a It’s not a chocolate chip. And yet we’re still not doing it correctly cuz a biscuit literally means twice cooked. Most of our biscuits we look like a biscotti. Most of our biscuits we only cook once. What are you showing us, Josh? We should have made this. I don’t know if you’ve had this before. Biscuits and chocolate gravy. Oh, I mean I’m not against it. Looks like pudding. It’s It’s pudding. This is American pudding. Biscuits and chocolate pudding. And see, I even said it myself. No, it’s chocolate gravy. Chocolate gravy, which is We’ve made this from scratch. And as I was making it, I went, “Oh, it’s really just pudding, huh?” What did we learn today, gentlemen? Pudding has to be eaten with a spoon, and it feels like comfort. And I think America should institutionalize more pudding breaks. You know, in in every workplace, in every municipality, in every school, pudding breaks. It’s Nicole and I for president 2028. I’m not running the pudding party. I am not running for president. [Music] All right, Nicole and Ben, we’ve heard what you and I have to say. Now it’s time to find out what other wacky idiots are rattling out there in the universe. It’s time for a little segment we call opinions are like casserole. [Music] Do you use the term casserole? Yeah. What does it mean? Yeah. What do you a little bit? What does it mean to you? A slowcooked stew. Like a a casserole for a casserole is lots of things in a pot that casserole the verb to casserole to casserole to pudding to salad from the French casserole maybe or just Oh my god. Hi guys. I love your podcast. Uh, I am calling because I have a question to see if uh what you guys think of cream of wheats, cocoa wheats, or uh just plain white rice with milk, sugar, and butter. Wait, hold on. She said cream of wheat and then what was the other thing? Cocoa wheat. What is cocoa wheat? Are these cereals? Uh, are you familiar with cream of wheat? No. So all of them are we have various different kinds of fina fina farina. Okay. Okay. Fina. Oh, it’s just cocoa cream of wheat. Uh moltomeal. Oh, okay. So this is literally just coarse ground wheat that you mix with like water or milk. Generally you end up with a porridge. I mean porridge is any grain or a hasty pudding. Or a hasty pudding. Is that what hasty pudding is? Yeah. It’s made in a haste, right? Yeah. Something quick. Wait, what? So I think the closest we probably have is something like palenta which obviously is corn maze based but I don’t think we have a wheat based version. Interesting. Yeah. So we have cream of wheat, but this is like a little old-fashioned. Like I don’t know a ton of people who would eat cream of wheat these days. I was raised on cream of wheat. Um it was actually the specific Persian one called shir neeshast. Oh, funny. Which is called just called wheat starch and my mom would make it and then she would sprinkle nesquick on it. or she would do honey. And let me tell you, if I were to eat that now, I would instantly go I would have a ratatouille moment of going back to my childhood. It is absolutely delicious. Any sort of like creamy, soft, spoonable and that has to be warm, right? It has to be warm. If it if not, it just solidifies into like a brick. You got a skin on the top and you know what you do with the skin is a challenge. 10 out of 10. Do you scrape and leave or do you chew through? I mash I mash it in. I just if I get skin bits, I get skin bits. It’s fine. I would love to eat that now, actually. Like right now, immediately. But then she went on to say rice with like milk and butter and sugar. That’s just like rice pudding. Like I’m on board with that. Yeah. Yeah. But also like like grits. You can just take any grain that you roughly process and then mix with like a milk or water in something sweet is like a delight. I just I’m in on all of it. some loose grits which are different from palenta because they’re nixtomalized. Mhm. The color is different in my head. Whenever I think of grits, I think of white. When I think of palenta, I think of yellow. But that’s not always the case. So grits are I believe I believe homony grits which are like the white southern grit are treated with lie which or or lime lime lime like an alkali solution to break it down. And I love grits. I like sugar and butter and grits. I’m Yeah. So we we do the same with oats. So, our porridge would just be classic oats. Yeah. Yeah. And then palenta we think of as a very Italian thing. Um and grits for sure. Love that. More gr in 2025. More gr up top. Grl. Give me a high five. Hello. I have one of you. I have shoulder issues. One of you high-fiving for gr. Sure. Yes. Thank you to my rot. Hey, girl. Sexy for your your sandwiches. I’m My name is Sam. I’m from Victoria, BC, Canada. Bananas and mayonnaise. Oh, shut up. Oh, shut up. Toasted. No. Try it. That sounded like a dare. A challenge. Ben, what say you? Bananas and mayonnaise. I’m trying to get my head around it and ask why. Um, but actually like mayonnaise on bread before you toast it. Delicious. Works. Uh, banana sandwiches we used to have as a kid, which is a very odd thing. Banana and honey sandwiches, but it was never toasted. Yeah. Although occasionally you’d put those in those toast machines, maybe a little bit of chocolate spread or honey and banana. So, yeah, it’s the mayonnaise that bothers me. I don’t know why. Uh, this is a this is a very southern thing. Mhm. Uh, my I dated a girl whose family is in high school, family from Louisville, Kentucky. Not Louisville, Louisville. So, it’s officially pronounced. and her mom made me a banana crunchy peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich for the first time and I was like utterly blown away. Like the slight acid and salt from the mayonnaise with like the creamy crunchy of the peanut butter with the sweet cakey banana toasted I I wouldn’t do. I just I love untoasted bread. I think I don’t like toast as much as people. I think I just want to experience the bread, you know? But it is a delay. And like when you ask why bananas were such a new thing in like the early 1900s that so many of the early recipes people are like we don’t know what you’re supposed to do with these. So what if we wrapped them in ham and baked them with Holland days? Yeah. Yeah. People like why not? Sure. Was that a Maryland thing, right? Is it a Maryland thing? It might be wrapped in bacon and grilled off. But yeah, we made we made a banana and mayonnaise cake once. Did you really? It it worked fine. It’s like a cheat cuz basically you’re adding eggs and oil into a cake. It’s already done for you. That makes sense. It’s a hack more than anything else. Adding mayonnaise to cake makes a lot of sense to me. I actually this morning I had a Nutella, banana, and peanut butter toast and it was delicious. I could never imagine putting bananas and mayonnaise on that toast. So, I’m going to politely decline. Sorry, bestie. It’s just not It’s not my wheelhouse. It’s just not where I’m at. It’s not where I’m at in my life. Thank you for suggesting it. I’m just not there. I think on my last me, like my last meal, I might have a whole wheat sandwich with peanut butter, banana, and honey. That might be on there. It’s one of my favorite foods in the world. Still no mayonnaise. Still no mayonnaise on a special. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, but it’s not one I’m going to be hastily jumping to. Yeah. Hi Josh, Nicole. Nicole Masleto on the baby. Matt here. Just want to share my latest food hack and it is not the jalapenos but the pickling juice of Trader Joe’s hot and spicy jalapenos. It’s been working wonders for me in the kitchen. Use it for a little bit of acid. Use a little bit for a little bit of heat. Little bit of the sweet and the heat kind of mellow things out. I’ve done it in everything from tacos to soups to uh barbco. It’s absolutely delicious. Hope to hear your thoughts. Bye. Good thoughts. Yeah, great thoughts. Pickle brine’s a great ingredient. It’s like using the beef sew it. Use every part of the pickle. If you went to uh what’s our fan William Sonoma? We have no correlation to Williams and Sonoma. What do you mean? You did one of these. Like we love William. No, like you seem like a William Sonoma person. Do you know William Sonoma demo? Yeah, it’s fancy. Another compliment. Love it. If you went to William Sonoma, I’ve just gotten so many gifts cuz people like he likes food. Let’s get them an $18 weird little thing of salt that is too crunchy to put on any of my food. Right. Right. Um but we love William Sonova. Sponsor us. But anyways, uh they’ll sell like these nice glass bottles of like vinegar that have been infused with like a single chili and a single piece of garlic or something. Like $15. Yeah. The jalapeno juice is just the same thing but better. You know, it’s been well seasoned. It’s good to go. I would say that is the biggest difference between home cooks and chefs is seasoning. Yeah, when you say season something, home cooks will throw salt at it. But actually, we always talk about the seasoning triangle and actually it’s a combination of salt, sugar, and acid. And actually, those three things all exist in a pickle brine. So, with a little tingle. True. You ever hear the You ever hear the Hannibal Burrus joke about how sometimes he wants pickle flavor on his sandwich, but he doesn’t want the whole pickle, so he just dips his fingers in the juice and flicks it. Is that the joke? I never finger the pickle jar when you see it. That’s the one thing I hate. What? Fingering the pickle jar. Oh. Oh, I hatch your pickles go soft because of your finger. Yes. And then sometimes there’s a weird white film and I don’t like the white film around it. Use a fork. Use a Use a fork. Your flora and fauna gets in the pickle brine completely ruins the stopped. I high five. Not the grill, but I’ll high five that one. She She like got on me about that. Gave me the whole spiel like maybe a couple weeks ago. I didn’t even tell you this. I was like, “Okay, Nicole.” And then I went home. My jar of Bubbies pickles. Just a full white layer of fill. I told you. You think it’s Bubby’s pickles that I too many fingers. I finger every single night. You think I’m just doing it for a power play? I’m literally trying to improve your life. I’ve officially stopped. I’ve officially stopped. Hi guys. Hi Maggie. Maggie is my favorite. Um my opinion is that meat and fruit are not paired together nearly enough. Yeah, you can rais chicken salad and yeah, you can you can do this and that, but I’m talking I’m talking ground beef. Ground beef and frozen blueberries. I’m talking my personal favorite, grilled chicken breast and overrite banana. I’m telling you fruit, please and thank you. Eating like a bear. Put the meat back in mince meat. You know what’s good pudding. The um It’s so right though like but I maybe not on a grilled skewer grilled. I always think of it as slow cooks like a a nice tine or like Persian food loves that meat sweet combo. Pomegranate molasses tamarind things. That’s so good. I agree. Please and thank you. Agreed. I was 100% with it because I I agree with you. I love that kind of like North African, Middle Eastern. You even see it a lot in like dishes from kind of the Middle Ages across Europe. Sugar was such a luxury. It was like when you’ve got it, put it in everything. Yeah, 100%. And like almond milk was in everything. Um but uh Oh, what was I talking about? Oh, um the the grilled chicken with the overwrite banana though. That took a little bit of a turn. That’s why I went down here. The blueberries and ground beef. Yay. That’s an interesting one. I’ve never tried that. Chicken and bananas. Yay. Uh, but no, I guess maybe like a like a fried plantain kind of situation like like maduros. Good again. Yeah, good again. But yeah, the the blueberries are a bit of a a turn. There is though, there’s some steak restaurant in Florence that like makes a blueberry sauce for their their bistca florentina. Yum. And so I don’t know if that’s a canonical thing. All of our roast meats are nicely accomp we have or chicken we have with cranberry sauce, roast pork with applesauce. Like that’s where the fruit meat, the roasted fruit meat combo does work. More fig jam with your meats. I mean, I’m more figs. Full stop. Sure. Sure. I agree. Figgy pudding. There’s no figs in figgy pudding. Correct. Put the figs back in figgy pudding. We’re all being back and mince me. We’re all being duped. Hey, this is Matt from Orlando, Florida. And my wife just told me yesterday that when you’re eating a burrito, the proper way to do it is to cut it in half. Yeah. And eat both halves down to the butt and throw away the excess tortilla. What? That’s what you think. Wasteful. Wasteful. No mame way. No mameus. That sounds like that stems from a a pasti. a Cornish pasti or or the empanadas where the crust was deliberately because you had mucky fingers, right? Maybe that’s the same with a burrito. You you eat and get rid of the mucky ends. But I kind of like the ends. Yeah. Wait, what’s what’s the deal with the Cornish pasti? The way that is folded and crimped the the crust traditionally was for the miners who would have incredibly dirty um coal uh ridden hands basically would eat the pasti and they it was almost like the the bit you hold on to and then you would never eat the crust that would just go. But it was the way you would hold on to a pasti. Yeah. It’s like the corn cob. It’s like you eat around it and you throw it away. Yeah. Um, no, I can assure you that burritos are not are not meant for that. Um, and actually the one of the reasons you can know this is if you go to the progenitor of the burrito in the in the city of Warez in Mexico, they’re actually served open. So, they don’t they don’t fully close them. Um, that seems to be like the first burrito. So, there would be no sort of end to throw away because the fillings throughout. I find the best way to eat a burrito is you move to it. Don’t bring the burrito to you. You go to the burrito. Yes. Especially if you can sort of stack it on the table and let it you can just You guys have never hit the top. Vivid. You guys have never ripped like the the bready top of a burrito and spit it out like a cigar. Am I the only one who’s done that? If it’s a bad if it’s like if it’s a bad burrito, if it’s if it’s like a fast food burrito where the first bite is like cold cheese and lettuce. That’s what I’m saying. Sometimes you got to you got to the ratios are wrong. Yeah, sometimes you got to do the pouy. That’s just me. [ ] us. Spit out that burrito. Uh I do think the single best bite of a burrito is the buddy end. All the juices. We’re going back to soggy bread if we’re not careful. We No. Oh, I am not careful. I am going soggy. I am soggy with a band in here. I love wet bread. It’s almost like Shaolong bao. It should be like a soup dumpling where you can just right. And on that note, Ben, thank you so much for joining us. It’s a bit of a delight. Good fun. Ben, where can people find you? Sorted Foods. You can find us all over socials and YouTube. That’s right. If you want to be featured on Opinions or Casserles, give us a ring and leave a quick message at 833 DogPod 1. We got new audio only episodes out every Wednesday. New videos out on Sunday over at the Mythical Kitchen channel. And if you like seeing our faces, check out our YouTube show also here or there depending on where you are. Where are you right now? Orlando could be. We did a fun episode with Ben over on Mythical Catch. Check it out. See you next time. Mirror, mirror on the wall. What’s the best pudding of them all? Head over to Spork’s YouTube channel to watch Jordan and Link’s pudding taste test. They tasted all the Jello Box pudding classics and a few you haven’t tried to find the very best. Check it out and remember to subscribe while you’re there.