Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Fabio Fidanza asks, are you into cooking?

While I could answer this question with a simple yes or no, the actual answer is a bit more involved.

From about 2007, when I started traveling full time, to about 2020, when the pandemic started, I rarely cooked a meal for myself. I didn’t have a kitchen to cook in or store food. Even when I was staying somewhere like a hostel that did have a kitchen, I didn’t find the idea of storing food in a communal refrigerator and waiting in line to use pots and pans very appealing. Especially when I could just go get a cheap, decent meal somewhere nearby.

When I did finally get a place that I could use as a home base, I kept doing what I had been doing for years. I ate out pretty much every single meal.

Eventually, I slowly started preparing my own food, but I was doing it with a George Foreman grill. George Foreman…. great boxer. One of the greatest heavyweights of all time, however, I found the gill to be horrible.

Eventually, I got to a point where I was making almost all my meals at home, and I was becoming more adventurous with what I was making. I’ve been working on particular recipes, experimenting with them, and working on making incremental improvements.

One of the things I’ve worked on is perfecting the recipe for Scotch Eggs. Scotch Eggs is pretty simple. The first time I made it, I just used a standard recipe.

With that starting point, I began making incremental improvements. I realized that you couldn’t just use any hard-boiled egg. You had to have one that was medium-boiled, such that the yolk wasn’t hard but also not runny. That took me down the rabbit hole of trying to find the perfect eggs as well as determining the perfect method of cooking them that could be replicated.

I’ve switched from ground pork to a ground pork and beef mixture and experimented with seasonings, coatings, and other things.

I’m currently going through a similar process with crispy pork belly. My first attempt was a solid B-.

I’ve also recently become a devotee of cast iron. It turns out a cast iron pan that I use, that my father used to use to fry fish with, is actually around 80 to 90 years old.

So, to answer your question more directly, I wasn’t into cooking, but now I am.