Hacking Your way to good eats on the road

great all right looks like we're finally ready to go morning everybody my name is chell silk pants this is hacking your way to good eats on the road one quick thing standard disclaimer as given most talks my views represent nobody but myself not my employer anybody else do with it as you may have your own risk if I don't think there's kind of anything really that's going to get you into trouble here but might as well give a standard disclaimer so jumping right into it why on earth would you want to make life a little bit more difficult for yourself and try to upend the way most people go about getting food on the road there's a couple of major reasons

why I think first is quality if you are a foodie of by your own definition whatever that may be if you just don't like getting whatever random fast food you run into you know this is a way to control that and get something that's going to be better second reason is control whether it's a dietary restriction or anything else for me personally keeping kosher because I do keep kosher that was a major motivation for me to kind of delve into things and find alternative ways to get something that was better than let's say a power bar and you know Red Bull going to vegas for a week you know you're if you're stuck in a in and around to hotel you're

going to want to kind of you know mix it up a little bit at least another reason is savings not necessarily the most major thing but if you're eating out if you forgo let's say fast food and are going to a nice restaurant that's going to start to add up real quick if you're on vacation so you can get that quality but you're going to sacrifice something that turns the cost and the last one is convenience and although it's it's going to depend on the individual but I believe if I'm on a vacation or at a conference or something I don't necessarily want to drag out to somewhere off-site if I you know at the

end of the day or in the middle of the day in between sessions I'd like the ability to run back somewhere quickly grab a bite to have it be something that I would actually enjoy and then move on with my day so in terms of what we're going to do and how we're going to accomplish it first thing to do if in any situation is think ahead first question is what can I bring with me if you're flying obviously you need things that RTS a friendly thinking about things that are as simple as let's take a pouch of tuna fish versus a can of tuna fish that solves a couple of different problems one is we don't need

to break necessarily a can opener the other thing is it is I don't believe it's going to be a problem in terms of liquids and bringing back through TSA so just kind of thinking about things in general like that can help you along if you are traveling and you have to go and your take a flight enough to go through TSA maybe you might want to consider replacing the couple ounces that you that you have that's going to reserve for things like shampoo with sriracha or barbecue sauce or something like that take those same little bottles put something in there that you can use to augment whatever else you're bringing and you can really improve something

that may have been you know even if you're buying it from a mobile source bring up a little bit of flavor bringing spices and anything else might also want to bring me some camping items traditionally used for Kathy that pack up small their light they'll fit in there as long as you're not dealing with you know some knives or anything should be able to bring that again on a plane without problem what can't you bring with you okay it's going to be a lot in any situation you can't bring your entire kitchen with you but even just knowing what things you're going to be missing can help you along the way and just plan it out ahead of time when you

go to choose where you're going to stay so I say choose your lodgings wise going ahead and making sure it has a hotel if you're saying a motel will have a little fridge that goes a long way you can actually bring either print stuff with you buy stuff there keep long-term they may have other amenities whether in the rumor that you can call up to delve a little deeper you can find out a lot of times there's stuff that you would not necessarily imagine that they have in most hotels that if you just call up and ask you know you get things like microwaves pretty easily out a lot of hotels and you may want to think about

choosing something other than hotel Airbnb not just for cost savings or anything else but was well most the time they'll be a kitchen and that will be stopped with things like you know just condiments and general utensils and other things that you can take advantage of another option is ship stuff out ahead of you pack it up ship it to where you're going to be or just buy stuff on Amazon and have it shipped directly there that goes for a number of small items things you might be able to pick up at a convenience store that will be a little bit more expensive they're a lot more expensive they're violent amazon if you got amazon prime have a two-day ship

there it'll be there ahead of you and potentially you might have be able to just leave it there and won't cost that much think on your feet once you get on the ground hotel amenities they can be used for a lot of different purposes you may forget you know you may forget if you're cooking something it's going to need to be bound up I'll get some floss and use it as twine gets get some shower caps and use them to the to hold things kind of think about it in not just the traditional amenities that they have but what else they can be used for there's a lot of stuff that they offer in hotels and in

other places you can really take advantage of take advantage of the staff you catch me out there some happy go into detail about different things that you can get just by being nice and you know social engineering your way into an event venue whether it's a conference venue or hotel or anything else they have a back of house they have a lot of stuff going on and they are trained to help people so you can use that tremendously to your advantage just think about the social engineering aspect of it a little bit and they'll take a very bar also one thing to keep in mind a lot of time the back of the house it's more or less fokin not

necessarily access is restricted coffee shops bars you know if you're if you're doing something offend anybody here is familiar with like Tim Ferriss anybody heard from album he has for our body for work week for our chef one of the things he does in his for our chef is his he has a whole thing on cooking salmon in a hotel sink so let's say you go to that that kind of situation your cup of salmon hotels sake then you got it you want to get lemon okay go down to the bar it's it's not necessarily going to be the most traditional thing that they're asked for but if you go down to bar and ask them for a you know when to

lemon they're probably going to oblige they probably also have a couple other things that you might be able to grab their coffee shops as well often have utensil you don't have utensils might be able to scrounge things just by whatever's around convenience stores dollar source if you're going for longer periods of time don't want to bring a whole lot of stuff with you stop by again I've done this in vegas instead of loading up my bag of old stuff i'm going to youth of the week take a cab or rent a car go to the dollar store for 10 15 bucks you can load up on everything you're never going to need that's going to be disposable

items etc so one thing I've tried to do over the past few years is kind of condense everything down into a kit that i can bring along with me and have it be its own self sufficient thing it's kind of like you know pen testers back of doom or a briefcase of doom or whatever backpack of tune you're going to pull it take the same idea and apply it here I'd like to have separate bag self-contained I want to keep it going back and forth a bit over the years but now I try to keep it separate from my normal carry-on bag I don't like to check things at all but I want to have something that will fit

onto the seeds that I can put all of the food that I'm going to bring along if it's dry goods or anything else and anything cooking apparatus or anything else in that one bet that helps me grab it and go if I need to it also helps keep it separate if anything spills out or anything like that in that bag I want to take I don't want to take everything I want it takes the hard to find stuff if there's going to be particular probably not to be able to find special sauces and maybe even something like olive oil extra virgin olive oil or some like that you know you find some pepper but finally Oh stuff is gonna be harder

so it might put that in there try to make stuff that shelf stable with that smaller versions of tools even if you are not necessarily going to need it I've found that I've started to acquire you know kind of you know travel versions or smaller versions of tools not that I'm going to need them in every single situation but having them there means okay it's in my bag I know I'm not going to have to even worry about it always there to always ready to go one time I spent like an hour and a half in a major casino looking for a corkscrew and instead of that point forward just I'm not going to bother with that

anymore actually one thing to keep in mind of something like a corkscrew you can bring it on an airplane but you can't bring a standard corkscrew because it has that little blade that acts as the foil cutter but if you go to a lot of places like go to walgreens you can find a little collapsible corkscrew it's like three bucks i think specialty items if you have I don't know particular things uncommon tools that you're gonna that you might want to use could go into a little bit later on but the sous-vide machine God sitting over there right now tengo you've never seen one or also know more about it so like that's something that I'm not gonna not

going to buy it there i'm not going to find it there it's just not going to be there so that obviously has to go on my back so bad guy like right now is this guy it's it's like 50 60 bucks on amazon but if you go to costco it's three bucks it is sitting down there it is a bad that is about half the height of the global carry-on bag and it will actually fit under an airplane seat so you can carry a lot in there that is what i like and that's what i use right now some things just kind of moving on rainbow bleep gaffers tape anybody here know what gaffers tape is if i use it okay

anybody here know what duct tape is ever done gaffers tape is basically duct tape a little more awesome it's got cloth backing gonna stick to itself but it's easily removable if we're going to try to pledge stuff together we don't know what we're going to encounter I need to fix something to a platform I need to do it keeping that around keep it's a paracord of stuff around that's going to help out tremendously as we go along I mentioned before having a corkscrew this one's lot smaller than even travel one it you know just having that around is nice can openers and I not necessarily take canned goods knowing I can bring a can opener with me is great by these

these are military catheters is familiar or not they're pretty darn cheap you buy a bag 10 of them for like five bucks at a surplus store throw them in any bag keep it around i'll always be able to open up okay i'm not think you're going to need to that often but keeping around this good idea sporks I don't like the traditional sports I like this guy it is made by canyon river and knife and tool I think that's called the eat-in tool they make a large version that's more of the size of traditional sport but you can see it's kind of it's got the normal spork stuff it's got a bottle opener it's got some wrenches and

some other stuff on their hands a little carabiner they're pretty cheap flip them onto a bag put it throw it in your bag and you pretty much won't have to worry about you know basic utensils as we go delving it's a little bit more preparation for something obscure stuff keeping a couple of zip-top bags around is really really handy made one thing want to keep a little longer thrown set up bag one of if you want to mash something up and if you make potatoes somehow want to make mashed potatoes throw it in there give it a couple bashes type it out if you cut the corner off do a lot of interesting stuff just

with the bags themselves and they'll be useful we get to assume feeding can't bring a knife on a plane but I believe it I haven't tested it but I have heard that you can easily bring a lettuce knife lettuce knife is all plastic so it's not metal and therefore you can bring it along in addition to the lettuce knife itself obviously cutting board I don't like flexible cutting boards I'd rather advise like this which is something to find more in a food service type operation you can cut it in half and throw it in a bag nice stable surface to work off of and do a lot of interesting stuff length moving on to the more interesting and

less basic things which i assume is probably more what you're all going to be into coffee soon everybody here has had their daily caffeine intake at least to get them going getting good coffee on the road can be a little bit annoying aeropress anybody ever heard of the arrow leave those flying discs so the guy who invented that's also invented this thing it is the design for coffee espresso tea you basically put a filter in the bottom here put your grounds and slaughtering here and then you press down on the plunger and it pushes the fluffy out into a cup there are like competitions each year for people who can make the best coughing the base best

espresso using these things you can also use this if you don't have hot water in a in a hotel room what I'm a cup coffee may not always have that you can actually do cold birth cold brew is for puffiness you just take your grounds put them in the bottom portion of yours if you're going to make a conditional cup of coffee add to water put it in the fridge for 68 hours in the coffee will you'll actually get coffee out of that it will be less acidic and it'll be you know for some people that is the primary purpose why they will go for a cold brew but it will also be just a simple simple

way in a very compact way because I think the whole thing the whole Aeropress like should fit inside of a mug so you can carry this whole thing very compactly and you know stick some some grounds in the body of it and get yourself a really really good cup of coffee on the go sous-vide machines anybody here here are soothing machines know what they are and if I understand the principles involved now okay subang machines are one of these things that show up frequently I want these chef competition shows they it's billed as this really really fancy way of cooking meats and vegetables and other things perfectly the basic idea is this machine just has a little loaf and

that's using to circulate water and it has a coil that uses to heat up that water so it keeps water at a constant temperature and then you place items in that water and they will poke to that exact temperature so you can precisely define exactly where you want to cook an item you soon normally when you're cooking something you put it in pan that pan is getting up well above what the temperature that you're looking to cook something to so it's kind of you're putting it on waiting until it's enough time has passed so that the inside of a steak has heated up to the right point and then you'll flip it and the other

side so it gets all the way to the middle and then you pull it off before it overcooks but this you don't have to worry about it you've just put it in and we'll cook to that temperature sous vide recipes wrigley will have the target temperature and a maximum time at a minimum time it'll be like put it in there for at least an hour and not longer than 12 hours and that's something I think you could really use to your advantage if we're cooking in a place where we don't have the tradition kitchen it's right now my preferred method of cooking so in terms of what the difference is in the items in your

coat so this is from the bottom that I've here and the one I like right now sancerre this is on their website they have kind of meat cook the traditional leg meat cooked soupy so you can see okay because we put it on the heat get a little bit of great band there and then we have the nice center this cooks all the way through that's great it's fantastic food but the cool thing is we don't have to worry about that time you don't have to bring it up to temp you could leave it going the whole day now we got to figure out though how do how do we get that to a point where I can

use it in a rumor I don't really have much else traditionally suvi what you do is you vacuum seal the food before you put it in so if we're going to bother with it how are we going to deal with that well as sous vide machines have become more mainstream a lot of people have been playing around with different ways to to cook things and avoid using a you know commercial vacuum sealer or even a home vacuum sealer on very compact first thing most people do when they get a sous-vide machine is cook eggs obviously you got eggs you don't need to vacuum silicon already is contained in the shell throw it in set the temperature your egg will be cooked

absolutely perfectly every single time you can leave that in there for a couple hours if you like eggs great that's you know you want to XXL whatever that could take you a long distance you can even potentially start it off in the morning have a soft-boiled egg turn up the temperature bit and then get your hard-boiled eggs for lunch if we're not going to use a commercial vacuum sealer or or home vacuum sealer we can use water displacement to vacuum-seal items that were gonna put into this water bath all you have to do is handy zip top bag put your protein in the center add a little bit of oil or anything just offset some

pockets that might be there or even don't put it into water as you put it into the water the water is going to displace the air if you bring the lip of the bag down to the water level you'll actually squeeze out all the air and you always have at the top of Babel a little bit of extra room so you can seal it up get something that is you're not perfectly vacuum sealed but definitely vacuum-sealed enough for our purposes and then you can leave it in the bath to cook so this i have used on a number of occasions I've done big cuts of meat of this past summer I actually around death calm want to go to toxic BBQ want to

bring some stuff there I took a bunch of ribs and I cooked them for 48 hours leading up to the BBQ wrapped it with me went out and it was just there and ready to go in terms of what you need to actually put on this stuff this is stupid simple cooking the this is I think from America test kitchen or something they're just doing I think salmon with some oil and maybe an herb in there and that's it there is nothing else that they're putting in there and I'm making a row so I'll put some salt pepper maybe one or two other things I'll throw it in the bag and equal takase amazing because the

meat itself is cooked perfectly I made ribs all identities take the ribs add a tiny bit of barbecue sauce throw it in let it sit for two days let it sit for three days let sit for one day you're getting if you don't have a ton of equipment you can substitute time and add a little bit of extra time that is not active time this is all passive you're setting it up and then just letting it go and you get some fantastic fantastic stuff this doesn't mean to be highfalutin stuff this is something that's easy to accomplish and easy to take with you one thing that isn't compact though is the vessel there they're using one of these

polycarbonates things that you'll find enough and of restaurants are in a big kitchen it's not really that compact and can't easily bring it on a plane throw it in the back of a car easily pick able to bring it on plane so what do you do for that what I've been doing is getting a five gallon bucket stop by home depot they're like 23 bucks you're staying somewhere go to go to any restaurants or kitchen or anything everything comes in 5 gallon buckets and commercial settings I'm sure you could scavenge a 5-gallon bucket but if you really really can't it's two or three bucks at Home Depot and get a lift from Home Depot also kind

of hold it if you really want to go so that you know again that's knowing ahead of time I'm going to need it not going to bring it with me but it's super easy to source once I get on the ground I've been playing around with trying to find something that i can bring with me my currents thing I'm actually have in my bag right now testing out this weekend it's cami bucket this guy is designed to hold water on its own and stand upright I'm not quite so sure how it's going to work out for me when I tried to throw the sous vide machine in it but this is a situation where I might

use a combination of this bucket which will stand up on its own and will hold the water along with us and gaffers tape maybe some twine or something else to a fix Mississippi machine so i know will tip over keep it in place use the bucket have the water in there according to everything I've read about at this bucket can stand up to some pretty high temperatures and we're not going to hit those high temperatures when we're looking to sous-vide items we're going to prom we're going to actually be at a pretty low temperature I mentioned earlier Tim Ferriss has a thing about cooking salmon in a hotel sink where he does water displacement to seal salmon

in a bag and then uses just the tap water at its highest setting in a hotel bathroom to cook salmon that's really on the edge it's it's going to be the lower edge of what you're going to want to cook it too but this isn't going this is going you know 10 degrees 15 degrees hotter than that we're not talking about you know tremendous temperatures and this stuff is designed to be you know sanitized but throwing boiling water and bleach in it so it'll stand up to a fair amount of abuse I don't know / 24-48 hours we will stand up to but but you know certainly for 68 hours of time I think this is probably going to be a

pretty good if you're not interested in investing in something like a sous-vide machine so these machines right now start at about 150 200 dollars so it's a little bit of an investment you get fantastic stuff both on the road and at home but it is a little bit of investment you want to go a little bit of a cheap around a little bit of a cheaper route pick up a rice maker rice makers are super super cheap you go to a walgreens or CVS or something like that buy one for 10 15 bucks they usually come with a steamer basket that will sit on top never use a rice maker all you got to do is put rice

on the bottom add some water push the button and it's done you can go ahead get some frozen vegetables put them to give the seamer basket on top you'll get a little bit of stuff coming down from the vegetables as they steam get that into the rice you can bring some sometimes I brought like a hard salami in my bag and take so limitless awesome hard salami or something that's a vegetable sleeping on the top you get a whole meal going and you're out a couple bucks if you decide to leave that rice paper there but if you want to vest anything else you just buy a small of rice maker throw it in your bag bring it

along with you and you can cook a whole bunch of stuff that way it can't cook things like pastas but you know if you want it to go again with super cheap super simple stuff it's not necessary the healthiest but those box rice tissues or side dishes and stuff anything that's kind of just bring to a boil you can throw in one of these and it will cook it and you'll be good to go if you wanted to go a little bit more traditional but go very versatile and get an induction cooktop a lot of people are familiar with kind of your standard coil metal coil little burners those electric ones those electric burners don't necessarily transfer a lot of heat

to a pan makes a little bit difficult to cook getting something like this which is a little more expensive but not tremendously so this this cooktop is I think forty dollars and it uses my man conduction to heat up the heat up the pan and it will actually transfer that heat very evenly and very effectively a lot of high-end restaurants well it will have very clean setups where they'll have instead of traditional burners they'll just have blank countertops stainless-steel countertops and they'll have a bunch of these that they can reposition move around so you can use this and just cook anything that you would in Pam if you want it to go a little bit you know keep

it compact and you know keep things pretty small you can get pans with Google handles pack that up small you can cook your standard stuff your eggs vegetables means whatever in this thing but you can also do if you think about it a little bit more you know off the side you can do things like the Harold McGee talks about making pasta has some weird ways to make pasta so he the way he recommends making pasta is actually putting possible bottom of the pot adding some water out of your salt all while cold and then bringing it up to a boil by the time you bring it up to a boil maybe you'll need to leave it there

a minute but the possible of cooked the whole time so you could do something like take some spaghetti break it in half fit it into the pan fill it up with water until it's about maybe an inch above the above the pasta cook it in there add in so whatever extra stuff you've got sauces or just it on its own maybe if you want to go here to add an egg or something in there you can make a pasta dish just in one pan dump it out right onto a plate you don't have anything else to clean up so there's a lot of different things that you can do using these these materials a lot of different interesting ways that

you can go afterwards I after I usually do a trip I do course more I'll take take a look at what I made figure out okay what was successful what was it becomes even with a couple other people what did you like about that is there anything any ideas that you have that becomes kind of you know fairly important just to not necessarily keep a detailed record but just generally know what's going on nothing I do is if it's something I'm going to visit a number of times I'll make a lot of different places I went to see if there's anything around that's going to be useful the future think place I visited place that

didn't visit you know if there was anything that I was doing research on the area was going to be ahead of time and I didn't see it but then when I got inside oh yeah maybe I should have stayed across the street because that had whatever that was near whatever making out of that a lot of stuff same vein isn't necessarily gonna be on a map we're going to be on a website so you know even if I'm not necessarily don't you think about afterwards since I'll just wander around the area seeing if there's other stuff near there and with a lot of this stuff I think you know I kind of tried to give a broad overview

but I think the most important thing that you can really take away from this is you can grab these tools these are great tools to use but really the best thing you can do is learn about this stuff even if you're not going to put into practice on any given day there are a lot of great ways to learn about cooking actually the next talk is covering a lot of a lot more traditional cooking stuff this stuff even if you're not into it as a foodie there's a lot of entertainment that you can consume they'll back door that information in I'm a huge fan of Alton Brown if anybody's ever seen him like that is the way I got into cooking was I

was just out of college living in a pretty rundown apartment building in New York and we had because it's in New York City didn't really get much over the air so the building had coupled hardwired cable channels basic cable was pretty much I think it was MTV Comedy Central of the Food Network Santa I'm watch a lot of food network watch a lot of alton brown stuff his show good eats is actually entertaining and he is I find it to be incredibly fascinating and a real real point of access but people like us because he delves into the science behind it and isn't necessarily focusing on the individual particular recipes you understand the reasoning behind him and you're able to once you

go through that apply the theory the next time you encounter something because it's not just ok now we're going to add ingredient a DC but to understand the science involved you could really you know take it one step further he also has a lot of great books his first book is basically just applying heat to proteins so if you want a basic internal cooking that's a great great place to start he has a couple other books these other books at the bottom those ones are basically promptly every single episode of his show and every recipe in every one of those shows then ran for it was it was I think was 11 or 12 years in

like 14 seasons over those years I just saw this live shirts fantastic are you he did homemade ice cream using a.m. fire extinguisher sure yeah yeah you can do that you have to fight although I think he probably wouldn't recommend using a fire extinguisher in a home setting but you know there are people who do that with with all sources