780: David Lebovitz Live From New York. On Chocolate, Acid at Chez Panisse, and Blowing Up on Substack.

22:49I did a video with my friend Carlos in Paris last week. And I made the cookies. And he's a Mexican chef, wonderful guy in Paris. If you come to Paris, eat at Comer. Even though you have good Mexican restaurants here, go to Comer. He's great and he's really sweet. And he loved the cookies too. Everybody loves those cookies. So I kept them in the book. But it's good to like revisit things in your life that you're not sure about because then you're sure. Well, it goes back to like revising recipes. Sometimes you just have to redo it and update because of availability of products, et cetera. Make the case for the chocolate mug cake.

23:27David Lebovitz:Oh. Because you have a recipe and you really are like full, open-hearted towards suggesting this. This recipe that's much maligned, I think people think it's too simple. I'm not, people, not me. Okay. I like the mug cake. Don't look at me like I'm - He's maligning my cake. No, I love the mug cake. No, the idea of this cake that you put all these ingredients in a cup and you put it in the microwave oven, and people hate microwave ovens. It's like, well, they have their place. And mug cakes, you can have a cake in like a minute and a half. Yeah. So you just stir these ingredients in and then put it in the microwave for like a minute and 10.

24:06It was funny because it was like, I was like, is it a minute and 11 seconds? Or is it, you know, like regular ovens, like nine or 10 minutes. Yeah. But with a microwave, like 15 seconds can make the difference between really overcooked and not. So I came up with that cake. And when they were shooting it, you know, Betsy Stromberg from 10 Speed? She's in the, she came, the designer of the book, who's wonderful. She's a really good designer. Lots of her books are here. She's the one holding the cake. Oh, cool. Very fun. When you talk about the components, not all mug cakes are equal, right? Oh, really?

24:44I don't know.

24:45David Lebovitz:I mean, what are the components that you're talking about? Well, cocoa powder, butter, eggs, things like that. And just like a quality cocoa powder? Yeah, but you know, I'm one of these people that but like use what you can get. I only, there's a whole thing because there's two different kinds of cocoa powder. Well, there's four, but basically Dutch process are natural. And I realized a lot of people, even in New York, you don't have grocery stores anymore really. We have the internet. Yeah, you have the internet, but you want to make brownies, where do you go? You go to Whole Foods, but you might not live.

25:24So anyhow, people might have Hershey's or something in their bodega, whatever. So I used that word bodega in a book once. Oh, yeah. The editor was from New York. She goes, that's a bad word. People don't like bodegas. I'm like, well, in Spain, bodegas, like, because I was referring to Spain.

25:40David Lebovitz:Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I guess, no, they're amazing in New York. Well, but, yeah, but they're kind of not known for, like, you know. Having premium, yeah, chocolate products, right, perhaps. Some maybe, though. Our bodegas have gotten better, man. Okay, I don't like it. We've got good bodegas. I went to college in New York, but upstate. Oh, where at? Oh, CIA? What? No, CIA? No, Ithaca College. Oh, Ithaca College. Yeah. Were you baking then in college? I was working in a restaurant. Okay. I was working. Hello. Ithaca. Are you from Ithaca? All right. All right. I went last year. It was fun, but I took the Flix bus.

26:16There's no way to get there. What's the Flix bus? It's like a discount bus. Oh, cool. But they give you like seat assignments. And you can actually buy the seat next to you, which I did because the seats are like, you know, you're sitting like this for seven hours on this bus. And we had this bus driver who was incredible. She like yelled at everybody right off. She goes, everyone needs to be in their assigned seat. If you're not in your assigned seat, get up and get in it now. Rules. Anybody lights a cigarette, I'm going to pull over right on the highway. Did you take the Flix bus? Are you a driver?

26:49Okay.

26:50David Lebovitz:Okay. I mean, the Flix bus. Yeah, but it was like$50. Yeah, good. And the flights are like$800. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'll take the Flix bus. Take the bus, yeah. But what were you baking early when you were at college? What was that like? Well, I worked in a vegetarian restaurant. Oh, yeah. And we weren't allowed to have any machines in the kitchen. And we used, like, honey. There was no sugar. We had carob, too. Oh. Carob's getting better. I know, I know. Well, there's, like, these new, like, chocolate alternatives. It's getting better. That have carob. It's a different thing. It is. This was not moosewood, was it?

27:26David Lebovitz:Oh, no, no. They were the competition. They yelled at me. I went there once for dinner, and they were mean, those people. Oh, really? It was just being recorded. I mean, career's over. Anyway, no, it was another restaurant called Cabbage Town Cafe. Okay, cool. But we had better. Everyone in town liked our food. The tourists and the college students' families went to Moosewood, but it's been sold. Okay. So it's no longer. Moosewood is no longer what it was. To be clear. For the recording. Yeah. Yes. Okay, so. They were mean. Just like not. Well, I ordered, I went with some friends, and, you know, we ordered a bottle of wine, and, you know, it was wine country, and we're eating, and I said, excuse me, could we get our bottle of wine?

28:13And they didn't bring it, they didn't bring it, and finally we're done with our meal, and they bring the wine. And I said, well, we're done, we don't want it. And the woman yelled at her comrade across the restaurant, she goes, oh, now he doesn't want it oh god listen for you on the podcast if you're a server and and these these interactions last 30 plus years sometimes so be careful isn't it funny like you can't remember what you had for

28:40David Lebovitz:breakfast right you can remember a bad server 30 years ago somebody yelling at you so you have a word you have a recipe a chocolate cake recipe that includes sauerkraut and you know there are recipes for chocolate cake that include mayonnaise and what, you know, what are your thoughts on these unexpected additions to chocolate cakes? Cause it seems like it's kind of a, well, a lot of them, um, like, I don't know if you know, Heidi Swanson. Yeah. She has a recipe for black bean brownies. Exactly. Great example. And people always think, oh, that's weird. Well, it's like, well, it's starch, which is basically, um, what flour, I mean, flour is a, you know, it's a, Pete, you can use starchy whatever.

29:21I don't know if wheat is technically a starch. Any food scientists here? It's a grain. It's a grain, but could that be a starch?

29:29David Lebovitz:Good question. Okay. Well, if we post it on the internet, someone will... The scientists in the room agree that it is a starch. I did study food science a little bit. Yeah. But anyhow, so it's not like a far stretch. The sauerkraut cake was pretty interesting because it was a recipe from Made a Hater, and a lot of people might not remember her, unfortunately, and you should know about her. But she was this amazing baker. She had this amazing hair. She was always well made up, lovely woman. And she had this sauerkraut cake. And apparently it came about, one of the stories is like a high school cafeteria back in whatever, the 60s.

30:10They had too much sauerkraut and they're trying to figure out how to get rid of it. So somebody baked it into a cake. If you think about it, well, it's basically sauerkraut's vinegar. You have acid. You put acid in cakes. Not acid at the kind you hallucinate, but like vinegar to activate and salt and cabbage.

30:32David Lebovitz:But the cabbage, is it like blended? Like kind of the structure of the cabbage breaks down to a point where you're not even – It's more of a flavor. You chop it. Yeah, and it's a little textural. It's like carrot cake. The first time I made one in France, everybody was like, I'm not eating that. They were like, jamais. But I learned in France, if you tell people something's good for them, then they'll eat it. So I'm like, c 'est très bon pour la santé. It's good for your health. It has cooked carrots in it and nuts and everything. They're like, okay, okay, David. Anyway, cream cheese frosting.

31:06David Lebovitz:French people love cream cheese. Oh, yeah. But can you find Philly? Yes. I feel like you probably had something to do with that. bringing Philly to... Because you've written about this in the past. Well, it's funny because I go to the wholesale. I have a license to go to wholesale stores and there's this one giant store. And they have like four kinds of cream cheese. I'm like, I didn't know there were four kinds. One's like Australian style. What? Yeah, I was like, what is... That's cool. But you can get... Philadelphia is better because it has whatever the gums in it. People go, it has carrageen.

31:42I'm like, that's seaweed. It's okay. We've all swallowed seawater. If you've swallowed seawater, you've had seaweed. I mean, it is truly a unique product that can only, it's one thing. It's the Philly, bless you. It's the one Philly. It's like the thing. Well, we did this test of cheesecakes once in San Francisco. I was part of this group called the Baker's Dozen. And once we saw it like it was professional and home bakers. And we would have these things where we would all make the same recipe and bring it in. And there'd be like 60 cakes. 60 cakes and it was like everyone was completely different.

32:16But we tested a lot of the cheesecakes with different cream cheeses and Philadelphia is... But the artisanal ones, the taste was better. But Philadelphia had that. It's basically, the texture, it's like stable. It's a little more stable than like the place... What's Richard's denser? Densers. I have a gap between my teeth. So when you bite into it, you want to see the gap. That means it's good because it's that stickness.

32:48David Lebovitz:Because you brought up acid, I have to ask, did you ever drop acid while cooking a Chez Panisse? I just have to. No, I never took acid. We did mushrooms, not a Chez Panisse. Chez Panisse, it's been well documented. A lot of people did drugs there. Not a lot, but there were stories and stuff. I drank a lot of coffee But I did not Drugs while I worked there That's just sad ass I was too busy So it wasn't your performance enhancing drug We drank a lot of wine We drank a lot of wine Once they calculated how much wine Was Employee loss There's probably some word for it And it was huge It was like over$100 ,000 a year We would just drink wine.

33:38And the owners would open the bottles. I mean, there you go. Fringe benefits. Okay, so tell me the world's best hot chocolate. Where is it? We have hot chocolate fans in the room, I'm sure. Define the world's best. That's a great question. I mean, what...

33:58David Lebovitz:Do you have a hot chocolate that has made you rethink the way you think about hot chocolate? No, but I came up with a recipe. It was on my website. At first it was Parisian hot chocolate. People always think, oh, it's so rich. It's so creamy. There's all this cream in it. I'm like, there's no cream in it. It's milk or nonfat milk or low fat milk. Everyone's like, no, no, it's got to have cream in it. I was like, no, they don't. And John Scharfenberg was one. He goes, you know, the best hot chocolate is made with water. It's water and chocolate. Because then you get pure chocolate. And there's a place in Paris called Plaque Chocolate.

34:33It's a bean to bar. And they do a hot chocolate with water. You can get it with milk, water, or oat milk, of course.

34:39David Lebovitz:Did you ever have the City Bakery hot chocolate? Yes. Their City Bakery. I was in Kyoto this fall. There's a City Bakery. Really? Yes. I was going to pour one out for them here. I mean, no more City Bakery. It's very sad. It was really good. It was really good. I keep thinking, I keep chasing that hot chocolate every December that would come out at City Bakery. The pretzel croissants. I had one in Japan. It wasn't the same. Oh, man. Does everybody remember the pretzel croissants? Yeah. Yeah. What a legendary place. It was a pity. Such a nice guy. Yeah, nice people and just kind of like the way that they had that hot bar and cold bar upstairs.

35:19That was a really unique thing for New York to have that on like 18th Street. Very sad. It's closed. Yeah. I mean, anyways. A few more and then we'll have some questions. I do want to talk to you about Substack, but let's talk about on the ethics side. You know, chocolate is – It's the gotcha moment. No, it's the gotcha. We're cool. We're all cool here. You know, you have like this transparency moment. You've had a lot of moments since this first book came out, right? Being to bar, you had the Mass Brothers moment. Oh, yeah. Which was interesting. You know, ethical and responsible is on every label of every chocolate bar.

35:59And there's a lot of greenwashing with chocolate out there. There's a lot of like – chocolate is very loaded, right? It's a very – and like I mean how do you like square the reality from the marketing in the chocolate industry?

36:13David Lebovitz:A friend of mine who is a cocoa bean buyer and he worked for a chocolate company for a long time. I once asked him about that. He goes, you know what? He goes, these bags come out of the jungle. and we actually have no idea what is in them. So he's like, all that stuff about fair trade, organic, he's like, you can't really trace it. And maybe it's changed. He told me this when I was writing the book originally. Maybe that's changed. But I look at all that stuff really skeptically and I think we should in general. There's this whole thing about natural products. And what is natural? and there's like ultra processed foods that are natural.

36:58So a lot of these labels, once again, it's like buying your food at the farmer's market here. It might not be organic, but I'm pretty sure the people that I see behind those strawberries that pick them and grew them are not spraying them with pesticides.

37:15David Lebovitz:They just can't maybe afford the organic stamp, which is like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah, and a lot of it's all, there's a lot of socioeconomic questions about what people can afford. Should people, you know, if people can't afford, you know, little$10 bars of chocolate, you know, six of them would make like a cake. What should they buy? There's this ethically sourced chocolate company. And somebody said, that's Calibut. A friend of mine in the chocolate bag goes, that's Calibut chocolate. But it's not labeled as such. And Calibut's good chocolate, but it's like. It's basically just like a white, like Calibut's doing the white label and they're just putting this ethically sourced.

37:50David Lebovitz:Oh, well, this is colorful, pretty label on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, you know, interesting. And I bought some. I was like, oh, it's okay. It's hard to make the call on those things. Yeah. You do your best, I guess. Well, there was a show called The Good Place a few years ago, and there was a line, and he said, like, he was talking about how humans have such problems. He goes, you can't even buy, like, just buying a tomato now for humans is such a, you know, there's so many concerns. Yeah. How many of you subscribe to David's Substack? Raise your hands. Yeah, we've got like 90%. So let's talk a little media here because I think you really, if you didn't know, like you launched your first website in the 90s, 99, right?

38:321999. 1999, you launched your first food blog. You were really one of the original food blogs. And now look what I've done. Now look what you've done. Sorry. So Substack was a natural fit for you to like migrate over there. But you've really, really taken off on Substack. And it's, I think, a combination of your dedication to posting a lot and doing high-quality work. It's recipes plus writing is good. How has Substack particularly changed you as a creator, as an author?

39:03David Lebovitz:Well, two things. One is that people don't realize when you have a website, especially like a blog, there's all this technical stuff that you have to learn. You have to learn how to put things in these editing software programs. And then the server goes down. And you have to deal with all. and Deb's like rolling around and it's just like all this stuff and you just want to and it got to the point where just posting a recipe 90 % of it was dealing with all the technical stuff 10 % was actually the recipe and then so that just finally reached a boiling point for me I was like I don't want to do this anymore and Substack reached out to me they um they said smart yeah well yeah by And they were like, you know, why don't you join us?

39:46And I was really, one thing I did, they did say it never would amount to anything, but I started a newsletter in 2006. And everyone's like, why are you doing that? I was like, I don't know. And then it got to the point where I was paying$400 a month to send out the newsletter. And then I was like, that's a trip to Hawaii. Like, why am I sending out a newsletter for free when I could be in Hawaii drinking Mai Tais with Matt and my other friends?

40:12David Lebovitz:And you weren't really monetizing it, right? I had ads, and people would go, oh, you have ads. But it's like, well, someone's got to pay. I have a mortgage. You're paying$400 a month. I mean, you're in the hole. Yeah, I have$400 a month. I've got to go to New York and eat$40 pizza and stuff. And$56 pizza. So you've been to Ceres. You have had the$45 pizza. No. So just to close on the sub stack, but what has the community been like? Because it's very much a social experiment network where people can comment. very different than having your own. Well, also, I was spending a lot of time answering comments on my blog.

40:48And, you know, you get people that just stop by. They've never been to your site. And they would sometimes leave, like, inane things. I never got, like, bad people. I didn't get, like, well, there was some couple times. But I was, like, first of all, I was a line cook for 10 years. So, do you want to say something to me? You've heard it. Be careful what you do. Okay, I see. I'm not nice. So, you know, I wanted, like, community. I wanted people who already knew me to be able to come to my, you know, make a concerted effort to come to my place. And I do restrict comments to only paid subscribers just because I answer almost every comment.

41:31It's a lot of work. And I have other things to do in my life. But I like, actually, one thing, you know, I do like free. I like the fact that I like free content. and that I can produce it. And, you know, the paid people pay. That's what keeps the site. The newsletter, I can do it. And I have an editor, a copy editor. I have an assistant.

41:55David Lebovitz:And I have an audio editor for my podcast. It all adds up. I mean, so it's like self-funded essentially through the subscription model. I actually like having people. I like paying people. I'm one of the rare people that, like I put one of my newsletter posts in AI to correct it for typos. And I said, point out all the typos. And it did. But I like having a person. We have a few more minutes and we'll take some questions. I have to do, on this podcast, you're on. Did you prepare? Yeah. You prepared? I think so. So on our podcast, This is Taste, we ask guests about their discerning taste. So to close this conversation, here's a little rapid fire, Fast and Furious taste check.

42:38You prepared. Is that the wrong notes? It says, remember, don't talk about politics. Wrong notes. The best fruit. Ren-clawed plums, these little green plums in France. And then you're still like associating anything green with sour and unripe. They're the best things in the world. They're like super sweet. Oh, man. The worst vegetable.

43:04David Lebovitz:Everybody knows this. Green bell peppers. It's facts. It's facts. It's really bad, especially on pizza. I don't like to tell like yuck on people's yum, but... It's not a good one. Green peppers are bad. Well, they're unripe peppers. Yeah, they're vegetal. What is your typical breakfast? Oof. Actually, it's a cafe au lait, a bowl of coffee. Roman stopped drinking coffee in the morning, so he has this coffee substitute. So we have that. I have orange juice and he has carrot juice. in the morning, which is funny because I'm the one from California. And then we have toast with salted butter. And I usually have chestnut honey or bitter honey on it, buckwheat honey.

43:54And sometimes I have jam. And then in the middle of the morning, I snack. I'm the only, well, Romain's father once saw me snacking. He's like, what are you doing? I'm like having snack like mid-morning. It's just the American. I have a bowl of fruit. I have to have fruit every day and yogurt or fromage blanc, which is like goat milk.

44:15David Lebovitz:I usually get goat milk and homemade granola. I asked this to everybody, so you got to answer it. The best dessert? Il Flotant. I love Il Flotant. Applause in the audience. Why? It's just, I don't know. It's really, it's a creme anglaise, really cold creme anglaise with like a poached meringue on top with caramel sauce and nuts. and the crème on glass has to be really cold. That's the best. I love, I just love it. I don't know why. A restaurant you wish you could bring back from the dead. Oh, the Auberture of the Flowering Hearth. The Flowering Hearth. That book is so amazing. But did you read the New Yorker article that John Burjall wrote?

44:56This is the most amazing book ever. It's the best food book ever written. This guy went to this inn. He was blind, which he doesn't talk about in the book. He wrote about these two women that would go to, They would get grouse from the neighbors and homemade liqueurs to serve. And he wrote about all these meals he had over the years. And a lot of it was made up. And there was a New York article, this woman who worked with the author, she goes, he went like once. It's a wild story. That's crazy. But it's the best. I mean, the writing is so of a time and it's very. It's the best food book ever. And say it one more time.

45:35They may have it here. So one more time, the title.

45:37David Lebovitz:The Arbeige of the Flowering Hearth. Yeah, it's a really cool book. A few more. When you're craving fast food, where are you going? You know, I don't eat a lot of fast food just because I don't feel good after I eat it, but I do love fried chicken. So I would say Popeye's. There's Popeye's in Paris now and I haven't been. Oh man, I bet they're great. Your favorite city in the world to visit for food? In the world. You know, I have to say I had really good food in Tel Aviv. That was a really good food city. There's just a lot of different cultures there. San Francisco is pretty good too. Yeah. Honolulu is great too.

46:19I love this.

46:20David Lebovitz:You have great taste in cities. Nice job. A plus on that one. Okay. Last one, your favorite sandwich. Corned beef. I never had pastrami until I was like 45 years old. Because I always had corned beef on rye with Goulden's mustard. Yes. It has to be Goulden's mustard or batompe. Is that what it's the other one? And then half sour pickles on the side. This episode is brought to you by Wayfair. I've been thinking a lot about outdoor cooking lately. I've updated my backyard smoker and had my eyes on an Aaron Franklin recipe that I want to tackle. I've also been thinking about my outdoor furniture setup.

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48:18That's R-U-L-A dot com slash taste. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. Expedia and VisitScotland invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in Scotland. The sweep of wild coastlines, quiet locks and untamed landscapes. Fresh cuisine that feels rooted in the land. Come experience the kind of stillness that stays with you long after you leave. Plan your Scottish escape today at Expedia.com slash VisitScotland. You guys have been great. Let's do some questions. Thank you. Yeah, applause for David. David Lebowitz. Lebowitz. All right, first question from the audience.

49:08Yeah, don't be shy. There's somebody here. Oh, thank you. First one's always the hardest. I like that. I'm a big fan, and everything you bake is great. So it's so much fun to hear you. Thanks for coming. Okay, well. And everyone. You're welcome. So my question is about cocoa powder. Okay. I had a recipe that demanded black cocoa powder. Yes. So I bought black cocoa powder. I used black cocoa powder, but now I have a big bag of black cocoa powder. And I've been just using it as if it were a regular old cocoa powder, but I'm reading it's much milder. It doesn't have the same flavor. Do you have an opinion about black cocoa powder?

49:49I love black cocoa powder, but people have a hard time getting it. and I remember I was in New York City once and I was like, I'm going to shop local. So I went to New York Cake and they didn't know what it was. Yeah, I was like, what? They're trying to sell me these little balls of chocolate. I was like, what? What you can do is just, when you make any dessert that calls for cocoa powder, just put a spoonful of that in and that will boost the flavor. King Arthur actually makes a mix. It's called the triple cocoa mix because people always go, what cocoa powder should I use and what should I use?

50:20I'm like, well, that is like all three cocoa powders. So use that. There's a brownie recipe on my website. It's a salty chocolate brownie. It's got black cocoa. That's really good. Also a huge fan. Been reading you for at least 20 years. Oh, okay. So there's a fun thing on Instagram, which is the last meal. And they get really varied people. So Christian Valtz did it. Okay. And Post Malone did it. and your order here asked you what your best dessert is. But I want you to, if you would, say what your last meal is, but the dessert has to be chocolate. Okay. It would definitely be fried chicken because I only eat it once a year.

51:00And if it was my last meal, I would just eat like the whole thing. It's so good. It's like, it's just, yeah. So I'm bad. I would like eat the whole, like if I didn't stop myself, I would just eat fried chicken every day. so it would be fried chicken um dessert um actually i love chocolate pudding with the skin on it yeah i love that i'm like when i was a kid my my mother made like mighty fine and it would just and they were like the package said something like if you don't want the skin put like plastic wrap against it i'm like that's the best part so but some people don't like the skin i love the skin So chocolate pudding with whipped cream would be my dessert.

51:46David Lebovitz:Great question. And I would want like Boulevardiers too to drink cocktails. Wow. There's one in the back and we've got one there. There's one there. There's one there. Three questions, yeah. So one of the things that has always stopped me from ever making chocolate is tempering chocolate. Yes. So is there like some secret or is that no? I've tried all the, you know, there was like the New York Times, It was like, here's how to temper chocolate. Melt chocolate, add a handful and stir it. It's tempered. I'm like, no. That's not the New York Times. I'm just making that up. There was a machine you can get, and this guy invented it like 20 years ago, called the Sensation.

52:22And it was like this little machine that would temper chocolate. And I was like, this is kind of cool. And I bought one. It was like$500. Yeah. But it had this temperature. It works. But actually, you know, basically now it's really easy to get like an instant read thermometer and just you just stand there. And there's a recipe in the book for Rocky Road. And I always I don't like complicated recipes, but it's really, really, really good. And I had these two food stylists and usually food stylists don't eat the food when they do a photo shoot. They're just like they eat everything and they were like taking it home with them.

53:01Usually you're like trying to get, and they were like, they couldn't stop eating the Rocky Road. So that's tempering chocolate. But really it doesn't, it's like you just, you know, heat it up, melt the chocolate, then watch the temperature go down, and then slowly bring it back up to a certain temperature. Well, Alice Medrich, who writes about chocolate a lot, she's sort of the chocolate expert of the world. She actually, we were talking once, and she said, you know, untempered chocolate actually tastes better because it melts at a lower temperature. So when you put it in your mouth, it explodes in flavor.

53:35So that in the book, I say, you know, if you don't want to temper chocolate, just put the Rocky Road in the fridge and it's fine. If Alice Medritch said it's okay, it's okay. So, and it won't bloom in the fridge. Hi, I'm a pastry chef in the city. Do you know 50 pounds? And I use your ice cream book a lot. like I've probably made 75 % of the recipes in there I would say and I adapt them a lot also to suit like different fruits and stuff so it's not really chocolate related but I was wondering if you have a favorite ice cream flavor and somewhere to that's exciting in Paris right now to get ice cream what was the last in Paris if there's somewhere that you're enjoying you know it's funny because I always wanted to open a chocolate ice cream shop in Paris and it was like French people don't eat ice cream in this, in the winter and it's not going to work and blah, blah, blah.

54:29So I didn't know. Um, and then these like fancy pastry chefs open like ice cream shops, but I went into some of them and it was like, you know, you didn't want to touch anything. They were like, bonjour monsieur. Yeah. You're like, it's one of the ice cream cones. Um, so this, the best ice cream in Paris, Bertillon's great. It's still great, but there's a woman, Julia Bell and she has a shop called JJ Hings and she puts stuff she she makes these ice cream cones with a spelt flour and they're like 50 cents extra like that's the best deal in Paris they're delicious and all her flavors are really interesting she had a peanut butter and jelly one but she was like fig jam homemade and you know she used like fresh peanuts and everything and And she's really good.

55:18So JJ Hings. And it's big lines. Not big lines. Not like compared to New York. What's your favorite flavor right now? Ice cream? Well, if I was going to a shop, I always order chocolate. I do like chocolate coffee. Like, you know, two different flavors. I learned in Italy, you don't order one. Never order one flavor of gelato. You always order two. But I also like flavors like flor de latte, which is like ice,

55:45David Lebovitz:like milk ice cream. Love that. Great question there. We have time for one last question. She's had her hand up too. So we have two questions. Okay. You're behind the post. As someone who wants to write about food in the future, what was the transition like from cooking and baking in the food industry to cooking and baking for yourself and writing as a career? Well, I thought, you know, when I worked in the restaurant kitchens, we all used to dream about being food stylists. Because we're like, oh, they just like sit around and arrange food and they make like$1 ,000 a day. And then I did food styling and I'm like, this is not for me.

56:27These people deserve any whatever money they can do. The woman who did the cake, like the cake on the cover of the book, Elizabeth, she was like incredible. the thing the transition wasn't that hard for me because when I started my blog in 1999 nobody read it there was nobody reading stuff on the internet literally no one read my blog until 2006 or 2004 maybe people started reading it so I wrote basically because everyone was like oh how do I get people to read my visit my blog I'm like do it for 5 to 10 years and then it was like, what? I don't want to do that. So it was a slow progression and I became a better writer just because I was writing all the time and I'm not technically a writer.

57:18I wasn't trained or anything. But also the public is a very harsh critic. So when you put things out there, I could write the most brilliant essay in the world and if I put an apostrophe for its, that would be what everybody points out. They wouldn't, you know. So, but it makes you more careful and more, and also writing's all about editing. On the internet, there's a lot of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You see a lot of these, that's the whole thing, like get to the recipe. It's like, well, give people a reason to read your story, but realize they're only going to spend a minute or two and that's fine.

58:00Um, so how do you tighten things up? I'll spend like hours or days writing something and like two days or two weeks later, I'll just delete the whole thing. And then I'm like, oh, that wasn't interesting.

58:12David Lebovitz:Maybe advice, but you have to do it. Yeah. Last question. There was someone you saw with their hand up, right? On the back side. Yeah. Right there behind you. Oh, you will not be ignored. Yeah. Thank you so much. David delighted. Um, I've been reading you since study abroad in Paris, which was I think 2010. so when everybody else started reading your blog I was there with them and I think a good follow up question hopefully to the last one that was asked about food writing it's changed a lot in the last 30 years and you were one of the pioneers as one of the first really successful food bloggers so where do you see recipe writing or really like recipe sharing going in the next 5-10 years I mean next year we'll say or if not where do you see it going where would you like it to go what do you want to stick around Well, everyone's talking a lot about AI.

59:01And if you're not watching the comeback on HBO Max, you should watch it. Start from the beginning, though, because this season, it's like they film the three seasons, one season every 10 years. But now it's about AI. And there was a lot of talk about a year ago about AI is going to take over food writing, recipe writing. But you know what? you really need a person to make a recipe. A machine cannot create a recipe. It could create a recipe, but you only know it's going to work if someone makes it, a person who makes it. I mean, a machine could make the recipe and add the flour, but it needs to be made.

59:42So I don't think that is going to affect our industry. One thing I learned about being on the internet, I was kind of fortunate because when I started blogging, I had a little bit of cred because I was a pastry chef. So I was, I knew how to bake and cook. And, you know, no, no, whatever. We saw all these other voices that people who weren't cooks coming forward, and they were really good, you know, a great mix. And it still is. But you want to be a trusted source. One of the things Facebook did, speaking of trusted sources, but they made people use their own name, their real name. And that changed a lot when there's somebody, you know, Deb Perlman sitting here in front of me, but also Rachel Simons is over here.

1:00:32She owns Seed and Mill. But you know, there's a person behind this recipe. Rachel wrote a book called Sesame. There's a person who made the recipes. She sat down and figured out what to do. Deb does that too if there's other writers in here. So I think trust. You see someone like Dory Greenspan who's been doing this a really long time, and you don't last that long if your recipes don't work. So I am actually very positive. I think I do like the fact that we have had a lot of new voices coming in who are really interesting people. and I think the good thing about things like Substack, it provides people a platform.

1:01:14There are a lot of, there are too many newsletters. Cosign on that one? No, there's just a lot of really good newsletters but for me, I can only read like 10 a week but I feel bad. It's a great way to end. I feel there's optimism and realism and kind of blend it together like a great cake. Well, remember everyone was saying bookstores are going to close, or e-books are going to take over. It hasn't happened. And even though everybody has Amazon Prime now, this bookstore, the rent here is probably phenomenal, but they're able to exist here. So people are still buying books. Absolutely. And you have this Kitchen Arts and Letters.

1:02:02David Lebovitz:Yeah. And they've been there for, what, 40 years? And you know what? We talked about Wild Sorrel. Yeah. Yeah. It's Bonnie Slotnick still. Bonnie Slotnick's around, but Wild Sorrel on 13th Street. This is a great bookstore, too. You're giving him a lot of business tonight. Wild Sorrel is great. 13th Street, go there. Opened a few weeks ago. Really terrific bookstore. Another hand for David Liebowitz. You've been a great crowd.

1:02:29This is Taste is hosted and produced by Eliza Abarbanal and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is edited by lead producer Clayton Gumbert and supervised by Pat Stango, director of media production and development at Penguin Random House. Thanks to Shalia Harris and the production team at Penguin Random House. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Episode portraits by Louise Zergon Pomeroy. Logo design by Ellie Skrzat and Ian Dingham. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com And make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on all cool things in the world of taste. Good energy in. Good energy out.

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