Joshua Weissman Hacks In-N-Out, Chick-Fil-A, And Remembers Brie Larson - Exclusive Interview

You've made a name for yourself by rejecting all things store-bought, and making things from scratch. Is there anything you have not been able to make yet? Take me to your fridge. Is there anything that you secretly prefer buying?

To answer the first question, no. I don't think I've never come across a single thing that I wasn't able to execute almost identically to what I wanted. I know that maybe comes across as a little bit egotistical. Genuinely, it really comes from a place of the years –  I spent my whole life trying to figure out stuff and I've reached this nice apex in my career where I feel like all of the knowledge and repetition has reached a point of mastery where now I understand how to diffuse problems. If I don't understand something, I know how to get over that hump because of all the other past experiences. That's what I'm getting at by saying I've never really run into [something] where I never figured it out. I figured out almost all of them.

I'm sure there will be something that comes up when I open my first restaurant where I'm like, "Ah, I want to do this fancy thing, but can't quite figure it out." Hopefully, there'll be something there because I like challenges.

With the secret ingredients in my fridge, I always have general ingredients. I always have butter, milk, eggs, all the necessities. I will say that on average I usually have about four to eight pounds of butter sitting in my fridge no matter what. I know that seems excessive.

Store bought butter or self-churned?

Store bought, yeah. I would say things that I prefer to buy from the store are those really raw essentials like butter. I guess you could count cream if you really wanted to go crazy and buy raw milk and extract your own cream in a way. I would say butter. Ketchup, I do prefer to buy. I think it tastes better when you make it yourself. Anyone who eats ketchup knows the nostalgia of it. Therefore, you can't have that without Heinz. It's the OG. Ketchup, sriracha, those are probably the top three. Butter, ketchup, sriracha. Oh, and Cholula hot sauce. Most other things I'll make myself though.

I usually have a big jar of [homemade ingredients]. The benefit of making your own ingredients is oftentimes, not all of them, but oftentimes if refrigerated, they last a long time. If you make a hot sauce or you make a ketchup or you make an infused oil, that's going to stay good in your fridge for probably a year.

You avoid eating a lot of fast food yourself these days with the exception of In-N-Out. What's your go-to In-N-Out order?

It depends on how hard I want to go. If I'm starving and I don't care at all, I want to eat and go to sleep, it's going to be a Double-Double with cheese, always cheese. Why would you get a Double-Double without cheese? [That'd be] dry. Double-Double with cheese and then animal-style fries on the side. This is important, a side next to the animal-style fries of another order of fries ordered well done.

In–N-Out fries notoriously are awful, unfortunately. I love In-N-Out for their burgers, not for their fries. I genuinely think In-N-Out produces the worst fries in the entire fast food world. If you get them well done, they're a little bit more crispy. The problem is that they're soft. They're not crispy like they're supposed to be. That's how I would do it, and the reason why I do it that way is you get those crispier fries. 

Once your animal-style fries have gone soggy, after about two to three minutes of them sitting there, you then transfer the sauce onto the crispy ones and eat the crispy ones. Then, the soggy ones are there. If you want to do something with the soggy ones and you want to get really gross about it, you can totally add it to your burger and it's good. Just because I've worked in all these fine dining restaurants and I know the techniques and I like to do things fancy doesn't mean you can't eat something dirty, too.

You are so well-established now. You've made a name for yourself across all social media channels. Between the time you published your first book and you rededicated yourself to social media, you worked for a few years at Uchiko. Before that, you were in other restaurants, and you had mentioned that you got fired from one of them. What happened there?

It was one of the first restaurants that I worked in.  The restaurants prior were ... I was young. I didn't know what restaurants I wanted to go to. There were the really high, fine dining ones. At the time, I knew I had the gumption and the ability, but I was like, "Maybe I'll start easier and then work my way up. That way I have past experiences so I know I'll get the job at these other places." That was my thought process. I worked at a couple of them, and ... unfortunately, I would work for a couple weeks and then be like, "Nope, don't like it," and go to another restaurant.

[I would] work for a couple weeks, [go] "Nope, don't like it," [and] go to another restaurant. I won't name the restaurant, but I found this one restaurant and it was a very well-known place in Austin. I loved the food that they were doing. I thought it was nice. I tried to get a job and they didn't want to give me a job because I didn't have really a ton of past experiences that were longer than two weeks. I had maybe six restaurants, but each one was one to two weeks of jumping back and forth. Prior to that, I was doing recipe development for magazines and stuff like that because I wasn't able to work in restaurants. This was when I was 17, 18 years old. I worked there as a stagiaire, which is basically a free intern, for a month.

Then they gave me a job when there was an opening. Some guy kept not showing up and I was like, "Well, I'll show up." I would literally get up at 3:00 AM and drive all the way over there. Because I would sometimes be in San Marcos, which is almost an hour long drive from the restaurant. I would wake up, they would call me at 3:00 AM and be like, "Yo, he didn't show up. Can you come in?" I'd be like, "Yeah." I would just get up at 3:00 AM, drive there, and show up. It was great. 

Now you're cooking on YouTube with Brie Larson. Tell us about that. She had a very big zucchini –

Yeah, she did. I was very proud of her. I noticed she was very, very proud of her zucchini, which is, I would be proud of it too if I had a zucchini that big. I wish I did. I've been trying to grow my own vegetables and nine times out of ten, they die. I can cook. I can't grow food, though. Yeah, she was great. Brie Larson is amazing, super sweet. She still keeps in touch with me. We still chat from time to time, which is great to see. Sometimes, when you wrap a shoot with somebody that's higher up, sometimes they never hit you back up again. They  wanted to do a little thing and never speak again, which is cool. I get that, but Brie Larson's been great. I'm a big fan of hers.

And how did that colab come about?

I think a friend of a friend knew her and knew she wanted to get into food. Somehow, we got connected and managers did their management thing and got us connected. We had a pre-call where I was like, "Well, here's my idea." She said she wanted to do a crunch wrap, but vegetarian. I was like, "Let's do it. That's a great idea." We literally just did it.

You've previously said one of your favorite personal things to cook when you're not inventing something for social media is a steak. What's your number one tip when cooking steaks?

Make sure your steak is thick enough. I keep seeing this happen where people ... get a steak that's three quarter inch or [a] half inch. That's too thin, unless you're planning on doing something else with it. Maybe you chop it up and marinate it and make, I don't know, Kalbi, or a marinated beef stir fry or something. That's fine because you're going to cook it well done anyway, but if you're looking for a nicely cooked medium rare steak and you don't want to have a hard time trying to get it to medium rare, then get a steak that's at least one to one-and-a-half inches thick, ideally in between those two numbers. Because it's a lot harder to overcook it that way.

Okay, follow up. Why medium rare?

Multiple reasons. Texture, juiciness, maximized flavor. Those are the top three. When you cook a steak to well done, you lose 60 to 70% of its original flavor because all the juices [are gone] ...  Texturally, [a well-done steak is] more tough and it's drier and overall [the] experience [is] no good. I will say one thing about a well-done steak and this is something, this is a hot take. I'm not sure that everyone will agree with me, but the masters out there, a true master in cooking will understand this. It depends also on the fat-to-meat ratio of the beef. If you have, and this is a deadly sin, but if you have something that's marbled like Wagyu and you were to cook it to medium, that might be okay because its fat-to-meat ratio will sustain the texture. It'll sustain the flavor, it'll sustain the juiciness. It won't quite kill the steak like you would with maybe a prime steak.

If you have a tougher steak like shoulder cap, that's actually better texturally if you cook it medium because its intramuscular fiber is more broken down because it's reached a hotter temperature internally. If you served it rare, it would be much chewier, because again, intramuscular fibers.

This is our last steak-related question. Can you really cook a steak in a toaster?

I would never do that. I would rather go to jail, but probably you can. It would be horrible and, also, I'm pretty sure that's a fire hazard. I saw that TikTok and I don't know how her apartment is still up and standing.

Is there a chef that you want to cook for you?

It would be in between two different chefs. I would like to cook with them, collaborate, cook a meal together. Either Gordon Ramsay or Rene Redzepi of Noma, one of those two guys, [who were] huge influences on my life. When I was in restaurants, I used to watch both of them all the time and look at what they're doing. It always inspired the dishes that I was putting on the menu, and some people might have called me out and been like, "I'm pretty sure I saw something similar on Rene Redzepi's Instagram. Josh, that sauce looks pretty similar." I'm like, "Yeah, dude, it is similar because he inspired me." At the same token, I will admit, I put up a couple plates that were inspired by Rene.

You've been in the public eye now for quite some time. What advice would you give to your teenage self who rocketed into the public eye after publishing "The Slim Palate Paleo Cookbook"?

At that age, I would advise myself to stop trying to control absolutely everything, and instead, focus on each footstep in front of you, instead of everything at once.

And what's next for you now?

A lot of things. I'm working on my second book and we're going to launch my first restaurant, which I'm very excited about. That has quite a timeline to it because as many people probably know, it takes some time to get everything set up, get the land and all that stuff. We are going to launch a restaurant and there's more that I probably shouldn't say. I can give a rough implication that there might be something happening outside of YouTube that is also a show that isn't on the internet.

That's really exciting.

Yeah. We're firing on all cylinders here. It's good stuff.