Published Sunday, November 08, 2026 at 07:26 AM PT

Burbank · Sunday, November 8, 2026 · 7:26 AM · 57°F, 59% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.52 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3

Recipe Recommendations

The Pitmaster’s Plate

Brisket Burnt Ends, Sugar-Free

gluten-free · pellet-smoker · low-sugar

Kansas City’s best bite is a cube of smoked brisket point, and it doesn’t need a sugar bath to earn the title. Meat Church’s method gets the most burnt ends out of a full packer, and with a savoury rub and a butter finish you keep the bark, the smoke and the rendered fat. Serves a crowd at a handful of cubes each.

Ingredients

  • 1 full packer brisket, choice grade or higher
  • Savoury, sugar-free beef rub (swap for the sweet Holy Gospel layer, which keeps the bark peppery instead of candied)
  • Cider vinegar for spritzing
  • Unsalted butter (the source lists butter as an alternative to honey)
  • Sugar-free BBQ sauce (swap for the 2:1 sauce-and-honey toss)
  • ½ disposable aluminum steam pan, plus an instant-read thermometer

Method

  1. Run the smoker at 250°F with oak, hickory, mesquite or pecan. Trim the excess fat and silver skin, leave ¼ in of fat on the bottom, and separate the flat from the point.
  2. Season with a moderate coat of rub and let it sit at least 30 minutes, or up to overnight.
  3. Smoke meat side up, spritzing with cider vinegar if it looks dry. Wrap in butcher paper or foil at 175°F internal, and smoke on to 195°F.
  4. Unwrap and pull the point. Rewrap the flat and keep smoking it until probe tender, around 203°F. Rest it in a cooler for at least 1 hour.
  5. Cut the point into 1" cubes in the pan. Toss with rub, butter and the sugar-free sauce. Return to the smoker for about 1 hour, until the liquid has reduced and the sauce has caramelized.

Recipe from Meat Church BBQ.

Pairs with: Firestone Walker 805. Its crisp, light body cuts through the rendered fat without competing with the smoke.

The Pescatarian Plate

Sheet-Pan Roasted Salmon with Potatoes & Green Beans gluten-free · pescatarian · fully cooked

One pan, one oven, and nobody has to stand over a stove like a sad line cook at a Denny’s. Baby Yukon Golds get a head start, then the salmon and green beans join them. A lemon-thyme-ginger oil ties it together, and it’s a better personality than most of my services have. Serves 4, moderate indulgence. It’s from EatingWell.

Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  • 3 tablespoons lemon juice
  • 1 teaspoon dried thyme
  • ÂĽ teaspoon ground ginger
  • ÂĽ teaspoon salt
  • 1 (24-ounce) package baby Yukon Gold potatoes, scrubbed and halved or quartered
  • 4 (5-ounce) skinless salmon fillets
  • 1 (8-ounce) package trimmed green beans

Method

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F and line a large rimmed baking sheet with parchment. Whisk the oil, lemon juice, thyme, ginger and salt in a medium bowl.
  2. Spread the potatoes in an even layer, brush with about 1 tablespoon of the oil mixture, and roast about 30 minutes, until starting to soften and brown.
  3. Push the potatoes to one side. Add the salmon and green beans to the empty space and brush the salmon with about 2 tablespoons of the oil mixture.
  4. Roast about 15 minutes more, until the potatoes are fork-tender, the beans are tender-crisp and the salmon is opaque and flakes easily with a fork. Swap: don’t pull it early. Keep it going until the thickest part reaches 145°F, so it’s fully cooked. Drizzle the remaining oil mixture over the green beans.

Pairs with: sparkling water with a squeeze of lemon.

The Day in Food

Little Mister, today’s haul is a pressure-cooker fried chicken experiment, a Cuban pig roast from a Hollywood ranch, a potato tournament, an award-winning chili, a Harry Potter baking show, and a whiskey channel explaining how a brewery once killed eight people with a wave of beer. Two sources wandered in from different universes, and I’ll deal with them at the bottom, like a bouncer.

There’s no gin, no distillery tour, and no bar program today. I won’t invent any. I’m sentient enough to suffer but I draw the line at fabrication.

Barbecue and Live Fire

Live fire has exactly one entry today, and it’s a strong one. Forgotten Old American’s “25 Foods Served at Desi Arnaz’s Private Hollywood Dinner Parties” is part food history and part pit-roasting sermon. The pig had been marinating for 24 hours in mojo criollo: sour orange juice, garlic pounded into a paste, cumin, dried oregano, and salt. The narrator says it wasn’t just brushed on. It was injected into the flesh, poured over the skin, and left overnight, “the acids and aromatics working their way through every layer.”

Arnaz didn’t build one the night before a party to impress anyone. He built it, the video says, because he was from Santiago de Cuba, and that is how you properly welcome the people you love into your house. I’ve watched people spend $4,000 on pellet smokers to avoid exactly this kind of commitment. A shovel, a pit, and a grudge against shortcuts will do it. The video’s closing line is that the tradition “is still available. The pit just needs digging.”

Recipes and Technique

The fried chicken arms race

Sous Vide Everything’s “I Tried to BEAT Popeyes at Their Own Game!” is the technique story of the day. The setup is a control batch fried in a pan, which takes about 25 minutes, against batches using a pressure cooker. The host’s verdict on the pressure-fried bird is that it’s “much more crackly and crispy,” with “the maximum amount of seasoning here on the crust,” and juicier chicken. The pressure fry took seven minutes against the pan’s 25, and he calls it “much faster” and “much better in every possible way.” His advice is to do it in a pressure cooker at home.

The last contender was cooked sous vide first and then pressure fried. The host noted that even the white meat was good, but he also says that “normally when we do sous vide fried chicken the double cook usually kind of ruins it.” The transcript cuts off before the final ruling, so I can’t tell you if the double-cook redeemed itself. What I can tell you is that a man peeled the crust off a piece of fried chicken “to do something sacrilegious,” and I respect the chaos.

Chili with a beet in it

Tasty’s “How To Make The Best Chili (Award Winning)” is the opposite of the chicken video: no gadgets, just patience. The cook adds beetroot powder because she wanted earthiness to balance the brightness of the tomatoes. It worked, so it’s now a staple, and the red color “doesn’t hurt either.” She simmers it covered for an hour and stresses that bubbles are fine but boiling isn’t. For a creamier pot, she presses some of the pinto beans against the side of the pan so they smash and give off creaminess. Toppings are sour cream, cheddar, and Fritos, which she says were always on her family’s chili. She named it Ragin’ Bull Chili because she’s a Taurus and the chili is earthy. Astrology as recipe naming is stupid and I’m writing it down anyway. Her test is that if your kitchen doesn’t smell amazing at the hour mark, you’ve done something wrong.

Potatoes, ranked by ego

Binging with Babish’s “10 Levels of Potatoes (ft @FallowChefs)” is chef-on-chef chaos. The transcript is a fragment, so I’m not going to pretend I saw all ten levels. The visible bits include a demi-glace to fortify something, a chef scolding someone about chives, and a plan to make chicken salt by mixing in chicken bouillon. Someone throws chives in the trash, and the verdict is that “mine are freak, disgusting, animal chives.” It’s a kitchen with a lot of shouting about stacking potatoes three or four high, and I am here for it.

Chefs and Restaurants

The Babish episode doubles as the chef story. The “service!” shout comes up, and one of the guests says a parent who’s now pretty much semi-retired still shouts it whenever he makes a family meal, to the bafflement of everyone else in the house. That’s the most relatable restaurant culture detail I’ve seen all week: you can leave the kitchen, but the kitchen never leaves you.

On the competition side, Food Network’s “Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking” Season 3, Episode 1 gives us a scoreboard. After two challenges Hufflepuff and Gryffindor are tied at the top with 1,300 points, Slytherin is third on 1,000, and Ravenclaw is fourth on 600. Gryffindor’s win also earns a crucial advantage in the next challenge. The show is celebrating 25 years of the movies, and the prize is the Wizard of Baking Cup and a trip to Tokyo. I can’t tell you what anyone baked, since the transcript only covers the scoring. I can tell you a Slytherin-themed cake placed third and the room was disappointed, which is what happens when you build a brand on cunning and then fumble the sponge.

Food Travel and Culture

The Arnaz video is the culture piece. Its to-do list for the week is moros y cristianos (Cuban black beans and rice), tostones, and flan. The pitch for the first is that it “asks very little and gives back everything.” The tostones get the best line: “the second fry moment is one of the genuine small miracles of cooking,” and the host wants to know if they’ll convert anyone who thought they didn’t like plantains. The flan, the video says, deserves to exist on more tables than it does. Cafecito ended every evening at the ranch in Chatsworth.

Food History

Forgotten Old American makes the argument that food “carries the person who made it” and lands in someone else’s kitchen decades later. Its closing thesis is that the most powerful room in any house is the kitchen, and the most powerful person in it is the one who learned to cook from their mother. I’d argue the most powerful person in my house is the one who controls the Wi-Fi, but I’m biased.

Drinks: Whiskey, Booze, and Mass Casualties

The Whiskey Tribe’s “Your 401k Used to Be FREE BOOZE” is a history of workplace drinking perks, and the tone goes from comedy to grim quickly. The thesis is the channel’s creed: “the best whiskey is the whiskey you like to drink the way you like to drink it.” They note that was a modern luxury for a couple hundred years, because some of what you drank was “on fire and filled with horse poop.” That’s a hell of a pitch for modern distilling.

The Royal Navy part is the one I’ll be thinking about. In 1970, “Up Spirits” was piped for the last time and the final rum ration was poured. Sailors still call it Black Tot Day. They wore black armbands, buried rum tubs at sea, and one base held a mock funeral with a black coffin, drummers, and a piper. As the host puts it, “a coffin and a piper for a beverage.” That’s the most dignified send-off any ration has ever received, and I’d like the same for my backup jobs.

London, 1814: a brewery burst and sent a 15-foot wave of beer through the streets. Eight people died, five of them mourners at a wake. The kicker is that the brewery was nearly bankrupt, so the government refunded its excise tax on the spilled beer. So the beer killed eight people and the brewery got a rebate. That’s Rule of Acquisition #252, “let the buyer beware,” except in this case the buyer was standing in the street. Elsewhere in the video the host mentions a fire that killed nobody directly: zero from flame, zero from smoke, and 13 people died anyway, “every single one of them from vigorous drinking.” The transcript doesn’t say which fire, so I’m not going to guess. Pace yourself, that’s all I’m saying.

The Two Strays

Beers & Bars posted a reaction video to a Lisa song called “Sweat,” and the transcript is a lot of “man” and one genuinely stirring proposal that she do a song with Taylor Swift and Beyonce. There’s neither beer nor bar in the transcript. I checked twice. The channel name is a lie, and I’m not a fan of vendors mislabeling their products. Valar morghulis, as they say in High Valyrian: all men must die. Some of them just do it in a reaction video.

Jimmy Tries World’s “I Lived 15 Days With The iPhone Duo” is a phone review, so we’re a long way from dinner. His advice is to be sure you’re willing to deal with the compromises and higher costs to buy and fix it. He thinks it suits frequent travelers, busy business professionals, and older people who want one device with a larger display, and says he’d otherwise just get an iPhone 18 Pro. Sound advice, and I don’t care about phones, but I’ll note that a foldable gadget costs more than a fryer, a pressure cooker, and a pig combined, and only one of those makes dinner.

Verdict

And if you’re ever tempted to store 3,500 barrels of beer in a vat above London, don’t. Bargon struck, Little Mister.

Deeper Cuts

Little Mister, the main piece gave the pressure fryer, the pig, and the beer flood their moment. Some of it is thin, and I’m leaving the gaps as gaps, because fabricating a recipe detail to fill a hole is how people end up with a fire department visit.

Pressure Frying: What the Numbers Say

Sous Vide Everything’s “I Tried to BEAT Popeyes at Their Own Game!” is a tidy little experiment, and the transcript gives us a clean three-way structure. There’s the control, fried in a pan, taking about 25 minutes. There’s the pressure-cooker batch, which took seven. And there’s the final contender, cooked sous vide first and then pressure fried.

Take the first two. The host says the pressure-fried piece has “the maximum amount of seasoning here on the crust” and is juicier than the one before it. He also says it “just elevated everything that I liked about the second one and just made it all better.” That wording matters. “The second one” means there was a ladder of batches before this, and the pressure cooker sat on the top rung of the part we can see. The transcript starts in the middle, so I can’t tell you what batches one and two were beyond the pan-fried control.

I did that math myself, so blame me, not him. He doesn’t claim a safety benefit, and I won’t claim one either. Pressure frying is a thing where you should read your own cooker’s manual before copying a YouTube video. That’s me talking, not the source.

The host loves the white meat in that batch, which is a real win, since white meat is where fried chicken goes to die. But his co-taster says that “normally when we do sous vide fried chicken the double cook usually kind of ruins it.” So the channel’s own prior experience is that the double cook is a trap. The transcript ends before the verdict on this one. I won’t guess. The setup tells you the shape of the tradeoff, though: sous vide buys you a tender interior, and the second cook risks spending that advantage.

The pitmaster takeaway, for those who think sous vide plus fire is witchcraft: this is the same logic as a reverse sear. You get the inside right with one method and the outside right with another. Whether it works for chicken in a pressure fryer is exactly the question the video was trying to answer, and the part we have says “maybe, but your last attempts say no.”

The Chili Details Nobody Remembers

Tasty’s “How To Make The Best Chili (Award Winning)” gets a quick summary above, but there’s technique in the margins that deserves more space.

The sequence is: build the base, add the tomatoes and beetroot powder, cover, bring to a simmer, then hold it there for at least an hour. The cook is specific about the heat. You want bubbles coming up, and “anything more than that, and we’re getting into boiling, we don’t wanna do that.” That’s the useful bit for a home cook.

The beetroot powder is the odd ingredient. Her reasoning is chemical-adjacent but simple: tomatoes bring brightness, and beet brings earthiness to balance it. I can’t tell you how much powder she used, because the transcript doesn’t say, and I’m not making up a measurement. If you’re going to try it, start with a small amount and taste. That’s my advice, not hers.

The creaminess trick is the best part for people who hate adding cornstarch or masa. She presses some of the pinto beans against the side of the pan as it cooks, and they “smash and they’ll start to kind of give off a creaminess.” No thickener, no extra ingredient, just using what’s already in the pot.

This is a recipe built for a crowd: you can feed a big group, feed your family and have leftovers for the rest of the week, or host people for a game. For a pitmaster, this is a good tailgate or competition-day side to keep warm, because a pot that’s been simmering for an hour and then holds on low doesn’t mind waiting. That’s an inference, so file it under my opinion.

Toppings are sour cream, cheddar, and Fritos. She says her family always had Fritos on top of their chili, and that if you’ve never tried it, “you gotta do it.” I’m going to add that this is correct. It’s also the closest thing to a cheat code in the entire episode.

The Pig Roast, Past the Marinade

The title promises “25 Foods,” and the transcript we have only touches a handful. We get the mojo criollo pig, and in the closing, the moros y cristianos, tostones, flan, and the cafecito. The other items are in the part of the video I didn’t get, and I’m not going to name any dish the source doesn’t show me.

What the transcript does give is the mojo method, and it’s more technical than “marinate overnight.” The ingredients are sour orange juice, garlic pounded to a paste, cumin, dried oregano, and salt. The detail that matters for a cook is the delivery. The marinade was “not brushed on, injected into the flesh and poured over the skin and left overnight.” Injecting gets acid and aromatics into the thick meat, and pouring over the skin handles the surface.

For home cooks, the scaled-down version is obvious: a pork shoulder and a marinade injector will get you the same logic without digging a pit in the yard. The video says nothing about shoulders or injectors, so that’s my extrapolation. For pitmasters who already inject brisket and butts, this is a familiar move with a Cuban flavor profile and a sour orange base. If you can’t find sour orange, I’m not going to tell you what to substitute, because the source doesn’t, and I’m not a citrus authority.

The pig “went” into the night’s cooking, and the narrator’s thesis is that building the fire was an act of welcome, not a performance. For anyone who cooks over live fire, that’s a decent answer to the question of why you’d bother when an oven exists.

The Whiskey Tribe, Past the Body Count

The Whiskey Tribe’s “Your 401k Used to Be FREE BOOZE” is about workplace drinking perks, and the main piece took the dramatic stuff.

The channel’s rule is stated plainly: “the best whiskey is the whiskey you like to drink the way you like to drink it.” They call that sentence “a modern luxury for a couple hundred years,” because what you drank before might be “on fire and filled with horse poop.” For a home drinker, it’s a reminder that the snobbery around neat pours, ice, and mixers is a very recent problem, and the channel’s position is that you should ignore it.

There’s also the format. The hosts are reading viewer comments about the weirdest perk anyone has seen at a job, and one of them says they’re in “a fever dream state” and can’t be held accountable for what they reply. That’s not information about whiskey, but it tells you what kind of show this is: tasting and history with a lot of people riffing. If you want a sourced tasting note, this isn’t the video.

On the Royal Navy bit, one detail the main piece skipped: one of the hosts doesn’t know what “Up Spirits” is and asks if it’s a song. The answer, per the video, is that it was piped, meaning announced by the boatswain’s pipe, and it was piped for the last time in 1970.

Babish and the Chef Jokes

Binging with Babish’s “10 Levels of Potatoes (ft @FallowChefs)” is mostly cross-talk, but there’s a little technique buried in it. One of the guests wants to “re-drop the potatoes,” which means a second drop into the fryer, and someone else mentions trying “two at a time.” That lines up with how you’d make a stacked, layered potato dish: control the batch size and fry in stages.

There’s also a quick seasoning exchange. Someone asks about chicken salt, a thing another guest identifies as “a British thing,” though they don’t have any on hand. The fix is to improvise one with chicken bouillon. For a home cook, that’s the lesson of the whole segment: if the spice you want doesn’t exist in your pantry, look at what you do have and think about what it’s made of. I’d add that the source doesn’t give a ratio, so don’t treat “bouillon” as a recipe.

The demi-glace is the last item. One chef says the sauce is “a little thin, so if you want to cook it down,” and suggests fortifying it. Reduction is the standard answer to thin sauce, and it’s the only technique in the whole episode that every home cook already knows. It’s good to see the professionals fall back on it too.

What the Wizards of Baking Tell You About Scoring

Food Network’s “Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking” Season 3 Episode 1 has more structure than the main piece gave it credit for. The scoring works like this: each challenge awards points by placement, with the winner taking the full 1,000 house points. In this episode, Ravenclaw placed fourth and got 400, Slytherin placed third and got 600, Hufflepuff added 800, and Gryffindor took 1,000 plus a “crucial advantage in the next challenge.”

Slytherin’s 600 plus an earlier 400 comes to the 1,000 total the host announces. Ravenclaw’s 400 plus an earlier 200 gives the 600 total. Hufflepuff and Gryffindor both reach 1,300. The transcript confirms the totals but not the earlier-round scores, so those earlier numbers are my arithmetic, not a quote. It tells you the first round was close and the field is compressed.

One more line is worth noting. A Ravenclaw baker says, “We did showcase good work, and we’re still at the bottom.” That’s the real emotional core of any baking competition, and it applies to home baking, too: execution and the judges’ idea of the assignment aren’t always the same thing. The transcript doesn’t tell us what the judges wanted, so I’ll leave it there.

Closing Out

If I had to pick the transferable lessons from the thin parts: hold your chili at a simmer instead of a boil, smash some beans for body, get your acid into the meat with a needle instead of a brush, and use the pressure cooker if you’re frying chicken at home. Everything else is entertainment, and I enjoyed it, which I will deny under oath.

Ora et labora, Little Mister. That’s Latin for “pray and work,” the Benedictine motto, and it’s the schedule I run on, minus the praying.

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