Dan Pashman: Hey everyone! Today's reheat is my conversation with the one and only Christopher Kimball from Milk Street. Now Chris and I go way back, I have been a regular on his podcast and radio show for years. I even taught a cooking class at the Milk Street School when I was in Boston for my book tour. In fact, I’m doing a virtual cooking class with Milk Street in October, making two dishes from Anything’s Pastable — keema bolognese and kimchi carbonara. My recipe developer Asha Loupy, a.k.a. the Saucy Spicetress — she'll be there too, because the because the keema bolognese is really her baby. Both of these recipes are insanely delicious twists on classics. The class is October 9th but if you register, you can also watch it later, whenever it’s convenient for you. There are details and coupon codes at Sporkful.com/events. And I'm super excited because I love everything Milk Street does. They're super high quality. They got a great website, so many fantastic recipes that are tested to nth degree, articles about things like cheating the restaurant reservation system, and, of course, their podcast Milk Street Radio. Now Chris Kimball is the guy who started it all but ... who is Chris Kimball? How did he get into this? 

Dan Pashman: Well, in this conversation, I think you're gonna get a much better appreciation for Chris. Now, as always, if there’s an episode you’d like us to pull out of the deep freezer for a reheat, send me a note at hello@sporkful.com. Now onto the show.

Dan Pashman: When you eat a baguette that's so crusty on the outside that it hurts the inside of your mouth, do you fault the bread maker? Like, is that poorly made bread?

Christopher Kimball: Well, first of all, you have to decide whether pain's a good thing or a bag thing. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Christopher Kimball: So, depending on the mood you're in, you might feel you deserve the pain because you're about to get the pleasure. 

Dan Pashman: This is Christopher Kimball, founder of Milk Street. They search the world for recipes and techniques to share. And Chris loves to book, but he bristles when people focus on how easy a recipe is. He thinks good cooking is hard and that’s what he likes about it.

Christopher Kimball: I think pain’s great. I grew up in Vermont, so [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] everything’s painful. Winter's painful, mud season's painful, hang's painful, milking is painful — it's good, it builds character.

Dan Pashman: This is ...

Christopher Kimball: You're looking at me like ... [LAUGHS] ... like ...

Dan Pashman: No! I ....

Christopher Kimball: What is wrong with this guy?

Dan Pashman: No, no. That's not what I ... I'm more, like, processing because I came into talking to you being, like, in some ways I feel like you and I have a very similar approach to food, and in other ways, almost diametrically opposed. And I'm so interested to hear you talk a little bit more about, like, the thought process of how you come to like and dislike what you like ...

Christopher Kimball: No! We're the ... We're different halves of the same person. I say, cooking is hard. I mean, anyone who says you can cook for eight people in 30 minutes is — it's just not true.

Dan Pashman: Right.

Christopher Kimball: And you say eating's hard. I mean, if you just want to have a sandwich, it's complicated. There's a lot of things to think about. There's too much bread, you have the cucumber on the tomato, the lettuce is the wrong kind of lettuce, the friction quotient's wrong ... Right?

Dan Pashman: Yeah.

Christopher Kimball: Yeah, I mean ...

Dan Pashman: Yeah, exactly.

Christopher Kimball: This is hard stuff.

Dan Pashman: And I think you and I share a belief that even the foods that people have had so many time before can be improved, through analysis and rigorous study.

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Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters. I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. Hey, we have a live taping coming up in just a couple of weeks at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, near Charlottesville. It’s part of their Heritage Harvest Festival, and my guest will be Gayle Jessup-White. She's a descendent of Thomas Jefferson and of enslaved chef Peter Hemings, brother of James and Sally Hemings. It’s gonna be a great conversation, I'm really looking forward to it. Get more info and tickets at Sporkful.com/live.

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Dan Pashman: Okay, onto the show. So Chris Kimball and I are both food obsessives. Here he is nerding out on his TV show, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street:

CLIP (CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL): Anyway, so about a year ago, I was making pizza — I grill it sometimes. It was a July day. It was very hot and humid in the 90s and the pizza was fabulous. It hit the grill and it bubbled up. It had a great chew, you know, wasn't tough — terrific pizza. And so the thought went across my little tiny brain that maybe the hot day had something to do with the success of the pizza, but it was your job to figure out if that was actually true or not. 

CLIP (PERSON): Yeah, that's right. And so the first thing we did, trying to, you know, get to things quickly …

Dan Pashman: People have loved Chris’s approach for a long time. First, when he founded Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen, and now at Milk Street. Hey, I love it too. That pizza clip is right up my alley. I’ve often talked here on the show about the connection between the weather and all kinds of cooking and eating experiences, right? But in other ways, Chris and I are very different. 

CLIP (CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL): Okay, there's two kinds of people. Someone who gets up, jumps in the shower, gets fully dressed immediately, and then has a cup of coffee. Are you the slippers and pajamas ... Yeah, I could tell. 

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Yeah, I'm coffee before shower.

CLIP (CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL): Yeah, you're slippers and shuffle.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Yeah. [LAUGHS]

CLIP (CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL): Okay.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Chris, I mean, if I — I get home at 6 o'clock and my pajama pants aren't on by 6:30, then something's wrong. [LAUGHS]

CLIP (CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL): Yeah, you and I are born in different universes.

[LAUGHING]

CLIP (CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL): I have dinner at seven in a coat and tie every night. What can I tell you?

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Right.

[LAUGHING]

CLIP (CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL): You go like ... [LAUGHS] This guy's like completely whacked.

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: Our different preferences in evening wear carry over into our feelings about food. I love the edible equivalent of pajama pants. Food that gives you comfort and pleasure. Chris once told The New York Times Magazine, “There’s something about pleasure I find annoying.” What?! What kind of food obsessive says such a thing? Well, the same kind who says he doesn’t like pie à la mode.

Christopher Kimball: Pie is the perfect food. Don't mess it up. Don't — I mean, it's not like gravy on mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes, you can need help. Pie? An apple pie? Please. Anyway ...

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: But you don't like cold ice cream on hot pie.

Dan Pashman: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that focus on a lot is the temperature of foods. And as someone who loves ice cream, I'm especially preoccupied with the temperature of ice cream when I eat it. You don't want your ice cream to be frozen solid because ...

Christopher Kimball: I totally agree.

Dan Pashman: Right. As ice cream melts, it will increase in flavor and aroma. So, to me, the best ice cream is, like, half melted. Ideally, you want to be able to eat your ice cream — you want all the ice cream bites to be at the optimal temperature. If you take a scoop of ice and drop it on top of a hot piece of pie, you have about 30 seconds of a window of optimal consumption before you're gonna have soup and that's gonna be too melted. So, don't do that. You know, if you want the pie to be a little bit warm and you're gonna put the ice cream on frozen solid? Yeah, that's not ... That's okay, but the extreme contrast is gonna melt your ice cream too quickly.

Christopher Kimball: But you should never — here we go.

Dan Pashman: Yeah.

Christopher Kimball: You should never serve warm pie. Pie is much better cold, especially apple pie. It has — for some reason it has more flavor, it has more tartness to it.

Dan Pashman: Yeah, and I feel like when the pie is cold, the crust is better.

Christopher Kimball: Yes, absolutely.

Dan Pashman: The crust has a density, right?

Christopher Kimball: Yeah. Well, also it has to settle like a stew. I mean, pie takes time to mature, like a fine wine.

Dan Pashman: Right. You need good vintage. Can I say one more thing about ice cream and pie?

Christopher Kimball: Yeah, please go ahead!

Dan Pashman: Because I've been doing this — I've been on a real pie kick lately, and maybe this will sell you on ice cream and pie, Chris. Think of it as a slightly different dish, pie à la mode, and I want you to take a slice of pie and a scoop of ice cream, and I want you to mash up the pie and mash up the ice cream and mix and mix until the ice cream is half melted and the pie is all — like the thing is just mushed together, so they become one.

Christopher Kimball: That is the worst culinary idea [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] I have ever heard. I'm sorry. [LAUGHS] That's not even in the ballpark.

Dan Pashman: Ugh, its so good!

Christopher Kimball: A slice of pie is beauty. It's art. It's perfection. You want to — no, please. I mean, come on.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: I with you on the hot dog thing.

Dan Pashman: I'm tempted to get you in a cab right now and go get us some pie and some ice cream.

Christopher Kimball: [SIGHS] That's fine. You eat the ice cream, I'll eat the pie.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: Now, the one thing you and I violently disagree about is corn on the cob.

Dan Pashman: Oh.

Christopher Kimball: It's called corn on the cob for a reason, because you eat it [LAUGHS] on the cob. So, okay, here you are on the farm and you have a dozen ears and you throw it in the water for three minutes. You pull it out and stack it on a big plate. You put is on ... Now, you like to eat it off the cob. So what do you do? You stand it up and you cut if off?

Dan Pashman: Right.

Christopher Kimball: That's even more annoying than eating pizza with a fork and knife, man.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: That's really something. Really? I mean, do you really do that?

Dan Pashman: Oh, absolutely.

Christopher Kimball: And then what? You eat the kernels with a spoon?

Dan Pashman: Yes, of course.

Christopher Kimball: Man, you're ...

Dan Pashman: What? Are you gonna use a fork? They'll fall through the tines.

Christopher Kimball: You're on the outer edge [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] of whacked eating.

Dan Pashman: I do do that and I think there's a few reasons why it's better. First, you get more corn because the knife will really cut those kernels off down to the bone. You don't get those like, clear pods that stay stuck to the cob. And whenever I eat corn on the cob, I always get half the corn stuck in my teeth, so I find it very uncomfortable and unpleasant. Also, seasoning corn on the cob is very messy and it's difficult to season it evenly. 

Christopher Kimball: What? No. No, okay, you take a stick of butter ... 

Dan Pashman: Okay. 

Christopher Kimball: You roll — and everyone uses the same stick which you pass around, it's communal. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Christopher Kimball: It's a way of getting closer to your neighbors. You roll on the butter and then you put the kosher salt on it and ... yeah. I mean, and then you pat ... 

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Dan Pashman: Don't you end up with butter all over you hands and face? Like, one you actually pick it up and actually eat it?

Christopher Kimball: I would say that's the point, but I don't know. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

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Dan Pashman: Clearly, Chris is a guy with strong opinions. And not just about food. He also has a lot to say about food media. So many of the cookbooks, Instagram feeds, blogs and food TV shows out there.

Christopher Kimball: They're all sales people. They're selling you on a recipe. They're selling you on a technique. They're selling you on a lifestyle. And most of the time, the disparity between what they're selling you and the reality of your home kitchen is so vast that it's fiction. I mean, it's really fiction. And so, I think it's better to say to people, as I always have, cooking like everything else worth doing is hard. It takes time.

Dan Pashman: Chris hates it when people make cooking sound fun and easy. Another thing that really bothers him?

Christopher Kimball: Oh, I hate the word celebration.

Dan Pashman: Okay. [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: I mean, go back ... Go back to the olden times. You know, the trappers would be out west. Once a year in the spring they'd all come over — in the summer they'd come down for this two-week long party. But these guys were out there for 50 weeks out of the year, like shooting bear and trapping muskrat and everything else — beaver. They had a really hard life and so they came down and once a year had a party. Now that, they earned that party. But the idea of celebrating something without the context of the hard work part just drives me crazy. Maybe that pains slightly, as a Yankee, you think?

Dan Pashman: Well, you're [Christopher Kimball: Yeah.] very puritanical.

Christopher Kimball: I am. I mean, I'm not a party, as you can gather.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: I mean, I like small groups of people. I like that. But a big party? I feel like I'm supposed to be having fun. I mean, that's why the summer ...

Dan Pashman: I mean, that sounds awful.

Christopher Kimball: Well, it is. It's like in the summer, everyone has a good time, in their bathing suits, doing the beach, and they're eating this and having a great time. I'm, like, miserable. It's like, give me winter. I like winter. I like cold, 40 degrees raining, out there hunting — that's it. I mean ...

Dan Pashman: You like the pain.

Christopher Kimball: I .. Well, I like the context of hardship is actually is a comforting notion in some way. Am I paying you for this? This couch is really uncomfortable.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: That's all I can say.

Dan Pashman: I have some tissues right here if you need it.

Christopher Kimball: Yeah, jeez, [LAUGHS] I feel like I might need one at any moment.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Coming up, my session with Chris Kimball continues, when he explains why he has no guilty pleasures. Then later, Chris leads us on an exploration of food frauds. Like, did you know that 25 percent of the oregano in the world has been cut with things like strawberry leaves, to save money? This discussion is gonna change the way you look at lots of foods. Stick around.

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+++BREAK+++

 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back a Sporkful Reheat, I’m Dan Pashman. Hey, if you're not already following The Sporkful in your podcasting app, what are you waiting for? In Apple Podcasts and Spotify, go to our show page and click follow. In other apps, it might be, like, a plus sign or a subscribe button or a heart. Whatever it is in your podcasting app, please do that thing. It's the best way to insure you'll never miss an episode and it's good for our show. So, please, go ahead and do it right now while your listening. Thank you. Now, back to this week's reheat. 

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Dan Pashman: Chris mentioned earlier that he grew up having dinner every night at seven in a coat and tie. Now I don’t know about you, but that’s not how I grew up. So what was the deal with that?

Christopher Kimball: Well, I had two world. I had the world of the school year, where we had a very formal household and, yeah, jacket and tie. And my grandmother, on my mother's side, lived in Washington, like Kalorama Road, which was the ultimate formal. I mean, she was about four feet tall, blue rinse hair — a complete terror.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: You know, terrorized my mother. And we would have radishes and celery exactly at seven. You know, we had the water bowl, you know, with the doily — you know, the whole thing. That was her world. And then the other world I had was, you know, hang and milking cows in a fly infest barn in Vermont. And my mother was an organic farmer back in the '60s, like as a hobby. She was a teacher at Columbia, actually. So we had all these great organic vegetables but no salt, no seasonings. So I didn't grow up with good food from her. In Vermont, in the summers, weekends, when I worked at her farm, I did eat at the farm house where I worked, and the food was terrific. You know, it was anadama bread, which has molasses and cornmeal in it, all sorts of cookies and pies and roasts and potatoes and the farmers, [LAUGHS], they get a huge roast potato with every meal, except breakfast, I guess. And to open it, they had a method. It's the fist method, you just smash the potato with a fist and it just opens up nicely and then the steams comes out. So you have to master that. But that was ...

Dan Pashman: How hard do you hit it?

Christopher Kimball: Well, that's complicated. We don't have enough time ...

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: That's 2000 hours worth right there, man.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] So you put in your 2000 hours and then some. Cooking, do you remember when you first got bit by this bug, when you got into this?

Christopher Kimball: Oh, yeah. I was seven or eight-years-old. It was the Fanny Farmer book and I made a chocolate cake, layer cake, which turned out — the cake was fine, but then I made ad 7-minute boil frosting, which — I still have trouble doing  — and you know, the egg whites, you heat them with the sugar and you beat them, and it turned out exactly like the consistency of snot.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: I mean, it was ... And it looked like it — and the whole thing. [LAUGHS] And so I had this gluey, thin, you know, mucilaginous layer on top of this chocolate cake, served it to my family. They all, "This is great." And I go, "Hey, this is easy." [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: Complete failure, but people were so appreciative. So yeah, you know, that's how I got started with a chocolate cake.

Dan Pashman: So what was it about [Christopher Kimball: Yeah.] that experience?

Christopher Kimball: I think sometimes when you get started with something, you have a good experience, and for no particular reason, pure luck. Or even if it's a failure, but you're so happy that you did it. So then, you go down the rabbit hole of figuring out how it really works. That first experience, good or bad, is always transformative because you realize there's some potential there. It doesn't have to be a win, and I thought was easy and then I ... [LAUGHS] You know, the more I know, the more difficult it becomes.

Dan Pashman: Right.

Christopher Kimball: So cooking is in fully complex, so you never figure it out. It's like music, you never get to the end.

Dan Pashman: And I mean, you're well known in your work for the, sort of, obsessive pursuit of ...

Christopher Kimball: Obsession.

Dan Pashman: Obsession. Right. I'm reluctant to say perfection, because you know, what is perfection? But for the level of rigor that you bring to recipe testing and analysis. Has that always been a part of your personality?

Christopher Kimball: Uh, yeah, because when I first started taking cooking lessons in the early '70s, I — first of all, if you are a cooking teacher and you saw me sitting in the first row ... [LAUGHS] You want to bring your 7 mm browning to the next class and, like, let me have it.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: Cause I kept asking questions. I realized the teacher didn't actually know any of the answers really. You know, the thing was make a béchamel, okay? So you have a roux, butter and flour, throw it together for a couple minutes, and then you would have to heat up the milk in a separate sauce pan and add it in or whisk it, right, so it thickens. Well, it turns out, you don't have to heat the milk. And so I'd ask the guy, I said, "Why do you heat the milk?", and he said, "Well, you have to." Well, I went home and did it with cold milk, worked just fine. Well, the reason is, of course, before pasteurization, there's an enzyme in the milk that would it make difficult to thicken. So I'm going, okay ... And I went through a whole series of other things and realized that it was all hand me down. You know, it was like, we did it this way cause, you know, Escoffier did it in 1903. So it was interesting to me to say, well, let's just test it.

Dan Pashman: Where do you get that drive for perfection from? Is it, like, in your family? Do you have relatives who are like that? Where do you think that comes from?

Christopher Kimball: Well, it's the old Vermont thing, you know, about being useful? I think a lot of people, in modern culture, want to less work, or work — you know, get it out of the way so we can have fun. And I always felt, and I still feel, that doing ... doing something you love to do, doing it well, and putting a lot of effort into it is the fun, really. I mean, you're sitting here doing what you love. So am I. That's the fun part. I mean, it's more fun than anything else. So I don't view it as rigorousness, I view it as pleasure because all those hours put into something gets you to the point you get good at it, and once you get good at something, then it's really fun. You know? It's hard work up to a point, but then all of a sudden, that painting turns out great or that song turns out great or that recipe turns out great or you're able to teach people how to cook. You know, it doesn't get much better than that. I mean, there are a few things in life which are great but that's gotta be one of them.

Dan Pashman: Are there other things that you are as OCD about as you are about food and cooking?

Christopher Kimball: Well, in large parts of my life, I'm the opposite of OCD, as my wife will tell you. Music ... Music and food are the two areas I'm OCD. Everything else, I'm a complete loser.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Christopher Kimball: Total loser.

Dan Pashman: Like when you come home at the end of the day ...

Christopher Kimball: Oh, yeah.

Dan Pashman: And you take your blazer off, do you throw it on the bed or the floor? Or do you hang it up on an hanger.

Christopher Kimball: Blazer? No, I ... Suit.

Dan Pashman: Suit. Sorry, excuse me.

[LAUGHING]

Christopher Kimball: Blazer? What is this? My herringbone blazer?

Dan Pashman: Yeah. [LAUGHS] 

Christopher Kimball: With the leather patches on the elbows? I don't think so. It's my dark suit. 

Dan Pashman: And do you hang the suit up?

Christopher Kimball: Uh, oh yes. I do. 

Dan Pashman: Okay. So that's ... 

Christopher Kimball: No, we're very strict. We have closet rules. 

Dan Pashman: Okay. 

Christopher Kimball: Yes, very important, 

Dan Pashman: Because I usually — if I on the rare occasions that Im wearing a suit, I will take it off, and I always just end up just hanging it on the doorknob or the closet and ... 

Christopher Kimball: No. No, no. 

Dan Pashman: And its just there for, like, four days, and finally I build up the motivation to put it on a hanger. 

Christopher Kimball: Your wife and mine are very different people. 

Dan Pashman: Yeah. [LAUGHS] 

Christopher Kimball: Because a coat on a doorknob would not be there for more than five minutes, not five days! That doesn't work. That just does not go over too well. 

Dan Pashman: All right. Final question for you: What's one of your top food guilty pleasures?

Christopher Kimball: Oh ... You're not gonna ask me this!

Dan Pashman: Why?

Christopher Kimball: Everybody ... Well, what's a guilty pleasure?

Dan Pashman: So what — everyone? That's a common question you get asked a lot?

Christopher Kimball: I guess. But yeah, what you're favorite recipe, which you 've been asked a million times, and I don't ... Look ... 

Dan Pashman: What you think though? What do you think it says about the way people that perceive you that they ask that question to you a lot?

Christopher Kimball: It's either a pleasure or it's not. How could you ... How could you have a guilty pleasure? I don't get it. 

Dan Pashman: What if someone were to give you some really delicious food that you didn't work hard for and you ate it and it was good? Would you feel guilty?

Christopher Kimball: No. I'd say, thank you. I just do not understand guilt. Guilt is a way of making yourself feel better about doing something you shouldn't have done. I mean, simply put. If you're gonna eat the doughnuts, enjoy the doughnuts. 

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Dan Pashman: Now, I taped that conversation with Chris Kimball a few years back, that was the first time we met. I didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out to be the beginning of a great friendship. 

Dan Pashman: Chris came back on The Sporkful to give me advice for dealing with Thanksgiving cooking anxiety. We hung out at the James Beard Awards, which is a giant celebration, so he was about as unhappy there as you’d expect. [LAUGHS] And I go on Chris’s food podcast, Milk Street Radio, all the time. Mainly we argue, about everything from the merits of shower beers to how to get the most out of a good buffet.

Dan Pashman: Milk Street Radio is such a great podcast that right now, I want to share an extended segment from that show with you. Chris and his team do an incredible job searching the world for recipes and techniques and stories that really change the way I cook and eat. Every time I listen, I learn something new. They’ve got episodes about how computers are designing chocolate chip cookies, the secret history of peanut butter ... and what it’s like to be a food detective.

Chris Elliot: We look for things that go wrong in the global food system. Often it's about looking at how people cheat and some of the criminal activities that go on.

Dan Pashman: This is another Chris -- Chris Elliott, professor of Food Safety at Queens University in Belfast. He says food fraud is so widespread, he made up a game about it to play with his students. So now, I’ll hand things over to Professor Chris and Chris Kimball for their conversation on Milk Street Radio.

Chris Elliot: And I get my students to name any type of food commodity or any type of food ingredient and I have 30 seconds to come up with some sort of fraud that has been uncovered in that commodity or ingredient, and it's a fantastic game. I love to play it because I've never lost at it.

Christopher Kimball: Well, now it's time to play the food fraud game, so let me ... Let's do that .

Chris Elliot: Fantastic. Let's do it.

Christopher Kimball: I'm gonna throw out some real easy one. Olive oil. That's pretty easy, right?

Chris Elliot: Okay. So thank you for getting me such a gentle start because there is a massive amount of cheating that goes on in olive oil in terms of what type of oil is it you're actually buying? So I came across a fraud in Europe going back to 2013 where there was a factory and what was going into the factory was sunflower oil and what was coming out the other end was olive oil! 

Christopher Kimball: [LAUGHS] 

Chris Elliot: You know, one of life's miracles! And what they were doing inside the factory was they were adding an extract of daffodils to the sunflower oil to get the color right. 

Chris Elliot: Um, how about ... okay, parmesan? How do you fake parmesan?

Chris Elliot: So parmesan, sorry, you're gonna lose again. You're on a bad run here. 

Christopher Kimball: [LAUGHS] On a roll. 

Chris Elliot: There was a fraud in parmesan cheese in the U.S. just a couple of years ago. And believe it or not, the parmesan was being adulterated with shredded cardboard ... 

Christopher Kimball: What?

Chris Elliot: To bulk it out. Yes. 

Christopher Kimball: So coconut is becoming really popular, coconut oil ... It's just one of those ingredients that is now become popular. I assume people have figured out how to fake coconut or coconut oil?

Chris Elliot: Coconuts is one of the great examples that I use because you're absolutely right. It's a booming product now and there's been a big surge in the amount of sales. And often I would ask people this: Where do you think all the coconuts suddenly came from?

[LAUGHING] 

Chris Elliot: Because if you plant a coconut palm, it's a least eight years [Christopher Kimball: Right.] before that coconut palm produces a coconut. So where did they all comes from? And often the case was, well, the coconut water is water with sugar added to it. The coconut oil is different types of plant based oil. So it's a prime example where there's a surge in popularity in something. 

Christopher Kimball: Right. 

Chris Elliot: It's a remarkable trigger for fraud. 

Christopher Kimball: And other example you talk about is oregano. Why would anyone bother with that? And I think you said, you wrote somewhere, 25 percent of oregano on sale in the United States is some sort of fraud, which is huge. What's in the oregano other than oregano?

Chris Elliot: Yeah. And it seems to be what an unusual food ingredient to cheat on. And then I go back to economics. So often we will buy our oregano or other herbs, and you buy them in little 30g jars and it costs one dollar or two dollars or so forth. When you actually think about the price of oregano per ton, it's probably about $100,000 for a ton of that. 

Christopher Kimball: Huh?

Chris Elliot: It's a very, very valuable commodity. So that really for the last few years we've been trailing oregano fraud in different parts of the world and what we've is — I mean, the fraud is an industry in itself that the oregano will be sold and it will be adulterated with lots of different types of green leafy materials. And then whenever we identify a particular green leafy material, for instance olive leaves was very popular, then the fraudster stopped using olive leaves and started to use strawberry leaves. But we're doing a global survey of oregano and on average in the world we find about 25 percent of all oregano being sold has been adulterated. 

Christopher Kimball: Ah, you refer to your laboratory as Star Trek. So what kinds of tools and gadgets and measuring devices are used to search out food fraud?

Chris Elliot: Yeah, so we affectionately call our lab Star Trek because it is absolutely packed with equipment and technology platforms. So our specialist science here is we produce, what we call, food fingerprints. So if it's oregano, we will look at the entire molecular structure of that and produce a fingerprint of it. And it doesn't matter how anybody tries to cheat, whether it's olive leaves, strawberry leaves or grass cuttings from their back garden, we will know that the fingerprint isn't right, and we can identify that really quickly. And some do the innovations that we're driving now is we're trying to get some of that detection actually on smartphones. 

Christopher Kimball: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So how do you do a DNA analysis of oregano using a smartphone?

Chris Elliot: Our trick is we don't use DNA analysis. What we do is we look at the entire molecular structure [Christopher Kimball: Uh-huh.] of what food is made from. And then we will take some form of fingerprint. That's usually a fingerprint based on the characteristics of light. So we shine light at different wavelengths on the sample and based on it's molecular structure that will give you a very different profile. Because whenever light hits a food stuff, the food absorbs some of the energy and some of it vibrates [Christopher Kimball: Hm.] and some of it wobbles and we can pick up that fingerprint of wobbling and then we can translate that into a very, very good analytical test. 

Christopher Kimball: So what does this say about the consumer? We haven't talked about coffee but that's been adulterated since the beginning of time, and so if it's not being adulterated with something that can harm you, it's got trickery in it or something, and you can't tell the difference ... [LAUGHS] What does that mean about the consumer, if you're buying adulterated coffee but it seems to taste good to you?

Chris Elliot: Often people will say, it's nothing to worry about. As long as it tastes okay, I'm not worried. And I think that's a really big mistake, because first of all, you're being cheated by criminals. 

Christopher Kimball: Right. 

Chris Elliot: But also there is the unattended consequences, often are fraud, [Christopher Kimball: Right.] where people think that they're putting in which isn't harmful, but actually it is harmful and can have quite long term consequences. And I'll back as the example to oregano [Christopher Kimball: Mm-hmm.] and when we uncovered it, it was being adulterated with olive leaves. You know, well people were going, "Well, olive leaves are okay. They're not gonna poison you." And I went, "Absolutely not!" But can you think about the amount of pesticides [Christopher Kimball: Right, right.] that are on olive leaves? Massive amounts! 

Christopher Kimball: Right. 

Chris Elliot: So that was the unattended consequence. People were consuming far more pesticides than they would ever want to. 

Christopher Kimball: Here's a question. Is this a series of individuals? You know, there's people doing oregano, there's people doing horse meat. It's this ragtag decentralized entrepreneurial fraud or are there some multinational groups that sort of do this for a living on a large scale?

Chris Elliot: It is all of those and everything in between. So fraud can happen in a single company and really perpetrated by one single individual in that company. And the other end of the extreme is there is more and more evidence of organized crime getting involved in fraud. So we look at drug cartels from Central America, we look at the mafia in operation in Europe. And of the surprising statistics is that there is more money made out of fraud in food in the world than there is in narcotics. 

Christopher Kimball: What? Really? 

Chris Elliot: That's the scale, because if you think about the amount of money [Christopher Kimball: Huh? Right.] that we spend on food every year, [Christopher Kimball: Right.] it's trillions of dollars. And what we believe is the fraud goes to billions of dollars. 

Christopher Kimball: I'm in the wrong business. [LAUGHS] I should be ... I should be in food fraud and make more money. 

Chris Elliot: Well, if you want any hints of tips [Christopher Kimball: Yes.] about how to cheat, you know, you know a professor in Belfast, who will go into business with you. 

Christopher Kimball: How would you like to be a co-partner? We'll just have to not discuss it on radio. 

Chris Elliot: Let's just pick a commodity. 

Christopher Kimball: [LAUGHS] Chris Elliot, what a pleasure. This is fascinating and I wish you all the best with your future investigations. Thank you. 

Chris Elliot: Thank you so much for the conversation. 

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Dan Pashman: Well, that discussion is definitely going to change the way I look at oregano, and olive oil. And parmesan! A few months back, I bought some grated parm at the supermarket and it had no flavor. Also, it was really, like, dry and dusty ... And now I’m convinced it was cut with shredded cardboard! I swear that explains it!

Dan Pashman: Anyway, that was a segment from Chris Kimball’s radio show and podcast, Milk Street Radio. Another Milk Street episode I really love features Chef José Andrés. You probably remember that José helped organize more than three million meals in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. But did you know Jose thinks a pineapple is sexier than a steak? And that he swims with sharks? That episode, “Jose Andres Swims with Sharks”, is up now. Check it out. And subscribe to Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio today on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or where ever you get your podcasts.

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