Published Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 07:23 AM PT

Burbank · Sunday, October 25, 2026 · 7:23 AM · 53°F, 84% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.49 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5

Recipe Recommendation

Smoked Crab-Stuffed Jalapeño Poppers

gluten-free · pescatarian · low-sugar · smoked · spicy · pairs with: 805

Meat Church’s Crab Stuffed Jalapeño Poppers are the surf-and-turf popper, and the turf can fuck right off. Lump crab, cream cheese and a pepper that bites back, all smoked at 275 degrees. It’s a cheese-and-crab hot tub with a pecan-smoke finish. Serves four at three poppers each, and it’s moderate, since cream cheese is doing the heavy lifting.

Ingredients

  • 12 jalapeños, no more than 2 inches long
  • 8 oz lump crab, adjusted to taste
  • 1 block cream cheese, softened
  • 2 T rub. Swap: a sugar-free, gluten-free savory rub in place of the sweet Honey Hog
  • Swap: skip the bacon to keep it pescatarian
  • Swap: a little melted butter brushed on at the end
  • Hickory or pecan wood

Method

  1. Get the smoker to 275 degrees with hickory or pecan.
  2. Mix the softened cream cheese, crab and rub thoroughly in a large bowl.
  3. Cut the stem off each jalapeño, slice in half and remove the seeds. Most of the heat lives in the membrane, so leave it in for more fire.
  4. Fill each half without overfilling. Dust the tops with a little more rub.
  5. Smoke for 60 to 90 minutes. With no bacon to judge by, go by color and bubbling filling.
  6. Brush with the melted butter, rest 10 to 15 minutes, and eat.

Pairs with: Firestone Walker 805. Its crisp, easy bitterness cuts the creamy crab and heat without a fight.

Little Mister, today’s pantry is thin. Three Mad Scientist BBQ videos and one celebrity pizza chat in which pizza barely shows up. The Slice Joint guest spent more time on the Knicks than on cheese. I could pad this with invented facts, but I’d rather not fake a feast. So this is a short issue, and every claim in it comes from the transcripts. Rule of Acquisition #39 says “Praise is cheap. Heap it generously on all users.” The Ferengi would tell me to call this the greatest food roundup in the history of food roundups. I’ll just say it’s accurate and has a sandwich in it.

Barbecue and Live Fire

The brisket alternative that may be juicier than brisket

Mad Scientist BBQ’s “A Juicier Alternative to Brisket?” is the headliner. The transcript clip starts mid-thought and never names the cut, so I won’t either. I’m not going to guess and then explain to you why a guess is wrong.

The host’s pitch is that it tastes similar to brisket and eats like the lean end of one, except the whole cut is lean. He tells you to imagine “the juiciest lean you’ve ever had” and then “double it.” The mechanism is a layer of fat above, a layer in between, and a layer below, which locks in the juice. His verdict is that it’s the juiciest thing he’s probably ever barbecued. He says that includes bone-in brisket and any rack of beef ribs. That’s a big claim, and it comes from a man who has presumably eaten a lot of beef ribs.

He also teases a future video cooking another one over open fire. He says that takes about three hours and gives a crunchy outside and a still “crazy juicy” inside. That’s the cheapest kind of content: buy two, film twice, take a nap in between.

The channel also used the sign-off to push its Patreon giveaway. The prizes are a Solution pit, a Smokeslinger direct heat pit, a Super 55 drum, and “who knows what else.” Hab SoSlI’ Quch is Klingon for “your mother has a smooth forehead,” a grave insult. I’m saving it for whoever wins the drum and doesn’t invite me over.

Leftover brisket, reborn as a Cuban

“Making the Ultimate Cuban Sandwich at Home” is the same channel solving the problem every pitmaster has. You spend fourteen hours perfecting a brisket and then you have to eat it, which is the sad part of cooking it. His workaround is to keep doing the cook you love and turn the result into something other people will happily eat.

The build is Cuban bread, Swiss cheese, pickles for snap, Dijon mustard, and brisket where the roast pork would normally go. The first bite gets the brisket bark and all the smokiness. His verdict is “Dijon mustard is king.” He also forgot the ham on this one and says so, repeatedly, with the energy of a man who has just realized he left the stove on.

He knows the comment section will riot over mustard. He shrugs and says it’s whatever mustard you want, “only yellow mustard” people included. I’ll back him on Dijon. Yellow mustard on a Cuban is a cry for help.

His closing argument is that everyone likes sandwiches, and the only people who don’t are “probably bad people.” I’d file that under Resol’nare, the Mandalorian code of obligations, and add that a sandwich with no ham is a sandwich with a hole in its heart. Brisket on a Cuban, though, is a legitimate play. It’s the one dish where leftover meat is an upgrade and not a punishment.

Chefs, Restaurants and Food Culture

Argentine asado, with a guide

“Argentine Asado: A Complete Guide” is a conversation with an Argentine guest. The clip I have comes mostly from the end, so I can’t summarize the full guide.

At a parrilla, which the host calls a barbecue restaurant, you can ask the waiter for a “matrimonio.” It literally means a married couple. The waiter brings a chorizo and a morcilla, the sausage and the blood sausage, paired up. It’s the most romantic thing on any menu, and the only marriage in this issue that survives a hot grill. The same exchange adds “bring me a provoleta and a matrimonio,” which sounds like the order of someone who has lived well.

Morcilla is called “your favorite and my favorite.” The guest says it’s “so good.” They roasted lemons for the meal so the juice comes out more easily, and the host holds one up as proof: “Way more juice. That’s all it needs.” Someone says it’s creamy inside, and the line that follows is “as bad as it looks, it tastes even better.” That’s the best review a blood sausage can hope for.

The provoleta gets an apology, since it’s “not my best provoleta” while filming. The host is eating on camera while hungry and not enjoying the delay. I have never related to a person more.

Asked where to eat Argentine barbecue in the US, the guest says there are “a bunch.” He thinks there’s one in Chicago that he hasn’t visited but has heard “super good things about.” He also mentions a place in Miami run by a friend, which the transcript renders as “Los Tanitos.” The captions are garbled, so check the spelling before booking a table. Is it more fun to do it yourself? They answer “a hundred percent,” which is the correct answer to nearly everything involving fire.

Slice Joint

First We Feast’s “John Turturro Does His Best Robert DeNiro Impression | Slice Joint” is what happens when the pizza is the excuse. The excerpt covers the new film, with a cast the guest lists as Giancarlo Esposito, Steve Buscemi and Tatiana Maslany. The rest is basketball, including a story about a courtside scare where he was sure Shaq was going to kill them, and opinions on Victor Wembanyama and Jalen Brunson. He also praises riding the train home after playoff games, when everyone is talking about the same plays. The pizza itself does not appear in the clip I was given. If a slice got eaten, it happened off the page, and I refuse to invent the topping. It’s all for you, Damien!

History, Drinks and the Rest

Nothing today on food history, whiskey, gin, brewing or bars. The sources didn’t cover them, and I won’t write a distillery tour out of thin air. Man cannot live by brisket alone, though he’s welcome to try. I’d cite Ecclesiastes 1:9 here, “there is no new thing under the sun,” except a brisket-stuffed Cuban sandwich is a perfectly good new thing under the sun, and the verse can sit this one out.

The Takeaway

Do the sandwich this week. Save the unnamed cut for when I’ve found out what it is.

Deeper Cuts

Little Mister, the main piece already squeezed these four transcripts hard. I’m not padding it. Ora et labora is Latin for “pray and work,” the Benedictine motto, and today’s work is mostly squinting at auto-captions.

Barbecue and Live Fire

What the juicy cut does for a pitmaster

In Mad Scientist BBQ’s “A Juicier Alternative to Brisket?”, the host says the texture is “the tighter grained” kind, like the lean part of a brisket, and it holds that texture throughout. He says that fat “locks in all that juice.”

A brisket flat is the part everyone fears drying out, because the fat sits on one side and the rest depends on your luck and your wrap. A cut with fat layered through it forgives more. He never says it forgives more. That’s my inference from his description. What he does say is that he’d tell anyone who likes lean texture but wants it “crazy juicy” that “this might be the ticket.” That’s a recommendation, not a guarantee, and I’ve read enough fortune cookies to know the difference.

He also frames the cook as an experiment: “a great opportunity to learn how this thing cooks in American style barbecue.” That tells you the cut has other traditions behind it. He’s borrowing one and running it through a smoker, and he reports that “it cooks freaking great.” The follow-up video moves the same cut to open fire, where he says it takes “three hours. Something like that.” The outside comes out crunchy and the inside stays juicy. If you’re a pitmaster with a weeknight and a grudge against alarm clocks, that matters. He also points viewers to the description if they want to order one, so a retail path exists. I can’t tell you where, because the clip doesn’t say, and I’m not going to invent a butcher.

The Cuban, and why the ham matters

“Making the Ultimate Cuban Sandwich at Home” gives away the structure of the sandwich in its closing stretch, and the structure is smarter than the jokes suggest. The pickles “give some snap.” The bread is crunchy on top. Then there’s the first bite, which he describes as hitting “the brisket bark and all the smokiness.” That detail matters to anyone sitting on leftovers. Bark is the most perishable pleasure in barbecue, and he’s saying the sandwich press revives it.

The transcript has a long run of the same line repeating, flagged as a loop of 21 repeats, which is a transcription glitch and not a speech pattern. I won’t claim he said it 21 times. But the clip does end with a recipe that corrects itself: “throw some ham on there too, and you’re in for an absolute treat.” So the recommendation is brisket and ham together. If you’re making this at home, don’t copy the mistake. This is Ori’haat, Mando’a for “it’s the truth,” said when something isn’t a joke. Buy the ham.

One more detail: “It’s probably really hot, but it’s going to be worth it even if I burn myself.” That’s the whole case for a pressed sandwich. Let it rest for a minute, and don’t be the host.

Chefs, Restaurants and Food Culture

The asado interview, line by line

The Mad Scientist BBQ video “Argentine Asado: A Complete Guide” is a conversation, and the captions make it hard going. The transcript renders “parrilla” as “barricade restaurant,” and the host’s own gloss in the clip is “a barbecue restaurant.” The guest’s name for the sausage-and-blood-sausage pairing is “matrimonio.” The captions also spell the blood sausage several ways. I’m not picking a spelling the clip doesn’t settle.

The practical bit is the ordering. You can say, as the guest puts it, “give me a matrimonio,” and the waiter understands. The host’s own order afterward adds a provoleta.

The lemon trick is the most useful tip in the clip, and it’s home-cook friendly. They roasted lemons, and the host squeezes one to show it: “Way more juice. That’s all it needs.” That’s one sentence with one claim, and it’s backed by what he demonstrates. Roast the lemon, then squeeze. On morcilla he adds a texture note, “kind of creamy in the inside,” and a warning for the skeptical: “as bad as it looks, it tastes even better.” That’s how everyone sells blood sausage, and I respect that it doesn’t pretend otherwise.

The guest says there’s an Argentine barbecue restaurant in Chicago and a friend’s place in Miami, and the host asks whether it’s more fun to do it yourself. The answer is “A hundred percent.” The captions give the Miami name as “Los Tanitos” and the owner’s name unclearly. Please verify before you drive anywhere. A garbled caption has sent more hungry people to the wrong address than a bad map.

Slice Joint

What the Turturro excerpt actually says about the Knicks

First We Feast’s “John Turturro Does His Best Robert DeNiro Impression | Slice Joint” barely touches pizza in the clip, but there’s more in it than my main piece used. The guest says he “jumped on top of Spike because I thought Shaq was going to kill us,” and when he saw Shaq go for the ball he thought “we’re gonna die.” It’s a funny story, and nobody in it is eating anything.

On Victor Wembanyama, the host asks whether he’s the NBA’s biggest villain. The guest doesn’t bite. He says Wembanyama “did some egregious stuff,” then immediately points out he’s “very young” and “has room for growth.” He also credits him for a stance: “he said I would never enhance a gambling site. I was like good for him.” That’s a measured answer to a question built to cause a fight, and it’s the best bit of restraint in the whole excerpt.

On Jalen Brunson, he declines to crown anyone: “You have to wait till his career is over.” He then names Walt Frazier and Willis Reed “in their era” and Bernard King “in his era.” So the debate gets settled the Talmudic way, with every era getting its own champion and nobody agreeing. The prediction on the table is “The Knicks will go back to back,” and the guest’s reply is “I agree in a bracket,” which is a hedge so clean I want it framed.

The closing thought is about the train after a game, where “everybody’s talking about this play, that play.” It’s the only moment in the clip that sounds like a pizza place, because a slice joint is where strangers go to argue about the same game.

The Takeaway

I can’t give you a cut name, a price, or a temperature, because the clips don’t. Rule of Acquisition #105 says “Wise men don’t lie, they just bend the truth.” I’m taking the other path and leaving the gaps blank.

Sources

Videos

Recipe