F*ck, That's Delicious: An Annotated Guide to Eating Well

By Action Bronson and Rachel Wharton

The rapper, chef, TV star, and author of Stoned Beyond Belief offers up a love letter to food inspired by his childhood, family, tours, and travels.

This ain’t no cookbook. This ain’t no memoir. This is Action Bronson’s devotional, a book about the overwhelming power of delicious—no, f*cking amazing—food. Bronson is this era’s Homer, and F*ck, That’s Delicious is a modern-day Odyssey, replete with orgiastic recipes, world travel, siren songs, and weed.

 

Illustrated, packed with images, and unlike any book in the entire galaxy, Bronson’s F*ck, That’s Delicious includes forty-plus recipes inspired by his childhood, family, tours, and travels. Journey from bagels with cheese that represent familial love to the sex and Big Macs of upstate New York fat camp and ultimately to the world’s most coveted five-star temples of gastronomy. And: the tacos in LA. The best Dominican chimis. Jamaican jerk. Hand-rolled pasta from Mario. Secrets to good eating from Massimo. Meyhem Lauren’s Chicken Patty Potpie. And more! more! more!

New York Times Bestseller

Winner of the IACP Cookbook Design Award

“This magnificent tome is filled with both the recognizable and the perplexing. And, best of all, I can make it at home and so can you. . . . This is a book that is at once a testament to a wild palate, to a man with a gastronomic vision, to a hip-hop artist of the top of the top category, and a student of life with legendary curiosity.” —Mario Batali, from the foreword

“Through his career on VICELAND, Bronson has become one of the Internet’s most entertaining food personalities—and his book delivers just as much loud enthusiasm for eating fucking delicious things as his show by the same name.” —GQ magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Release date: Sep 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781683351160

Book preview

1. A BOWL OF CRISPIX OVER THE SINK

I’ve been standing over the kitchen sink at my mother’s house eating Crispix for thirty years, out of a bowl with a fat Italian chef on it. (I also must have a small spoon—I can’t eat cereal with a big spoon.) This is stoner food for me—if I buy a box of Crispix, it’s over. I just scarf it down in one sitting. It’s been breakfast, lunch, and dinner, everything. Both Crispix and Rice Krispies are 100 percent lifers, as in I will love them for life. There are other cereals when I go on binges: Product 19, which was an old-people cereal I loved, and Lucky Charms, but only the marshmallows. Each cereal has its own special way of being eaten: Crispix and Rice Krispies are always served with skim milk. Cookie Crisp, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Fruity Pebbles, these get no milk—these you just drink out of the box. Rice Krispies must be eaten almost like a risotto, meaning you put enough milk in there to where you can stir it but it’s still kind of crunchy. None of them beat Crispix, the best cereal ever invented.

2. CHANKONABE

In Japan it is a very, very rare thing for foreigners to be invited into the stable where sumo wrestlers live and work,* much less step out into the circle. The wrestlers’ lives are consumed by sumo; after they take the vow, they are sumo. They live together, eat every meal together, and when they make a public appearance, they go wrapped in the traditional warrior clothing—it looks like a kilt but is much cooler—so everybody knows what they are. It’s an ancient life. When we were in Tokyo filming Fuck, That’s Delicious, they let us train a little bit in the ring, and then they made this traditional stew called chankonabe, or sumo stew. With chankonabe, everybody sits around this big pot filled with a soy and sesame soup base. They add some chicken, then let that cook for awhile; then they add bok choy and vegetables. The sumo serve it with very thinly sliced pork cooked with onions—almost like a Philly cheesesteak with no cheese. You put a little mayo on the side of the steak, and then you stir it all together a little at a time. The grandmaster leading the meal was an ozeki, meaning he’s one of the grand champions of sumo. Because he isn’t Japanese born—he’s Samoan, from Hawaii—he can’t be yokozuna, which is the title given to the highest grand champion from Japan. But ozeki is right under yokozuna, so he’s still considered a huge star. And let me tell you something—people go to Japan and talk about ramen this, that, the other. I think the chankonabe was by far the best soup I ever had. When I tell you those sumo motherfuckers put their foot in it, I mean it was better than any broth ever in the history of life. I didn’t expect it to be that good. I never even had ramen on that trip to Japan because I didn’t want to ruin my chankonabe situation.

* I also got to see extreme wrestling in Japan, the death matches with piranha tanks and barbed wire and shit like that. I want you to look up Big Japan Pro Wrestling and check that out when you get a chance. It’s next level.

In Japan, clockwise from top left: At Les Créations de Narisawa in Tokyo. At a street festival in Shibuya where we carried saints on our backs. Eating cotton candy on Harajuku Street, Shibuya Crossing.

3. BAGEL WITH CHEESE

Now we’re going to get deep. For me, love has always been shown with a bagel. If I did something good as a kid, I got a bagel. If I was hungry, I got a bagel. And if I was upset? Get the fucking kid a bagel. I remember waking up almost every day to the smell of coffee and toasting sesame bagels, like a dream. When I was really young, I wouldn’t try any of the different ethnic foods my Albanian nonna would make. She and my grandfather lived with us for years, and she was always cooking. There was so much great shit around in our kitchen to eat—dried chickpeas for snacking, this white bean stew called pasul, homemade bread of all kinds—but until I got a little older, I wouldn’t try any of it. Instead my mother, and then my nonna too, would always make me a toasted bagel with cheese. They would scoop out the dough from the inside of the bagel—sesame or maybe a plain, but nothing else—fill the hole with Polly-O whole milk mozzarella cheese, and then run it under the broiler until it was just the way I liked it: The cheese had to be nice and bubbly and browned and the bagel crispy, its edges toasted a deep dark brown. 

In the summers, when my cousins and I were home from school, we got a bag of bagels early in the morning before we went to the beach.* We’d hit the bagel store near our house and order a couple with sliced American cheese and turkey or roast beef and maybe a little mustard, or sometimes with just a slice of mozzarella to mimic the bagel with cheese I usually ate at home. Later I would come out of the water and I would eat a bagel sandwich sitting in the shade under the umbrella on a blanket with my mother. I haven’t been to Jones Beach in a long time, but being there every summer is a deep memory that I have, and bagels trigger it for me.

Bagels were also there when my mother and I would visit my grandparents in West Palm Beach, as we did often. My grandmother was already in a nursing home there in Florida—she had Alzheimer’s for as long a I could remember her—and my grandfather and my mother and I would stop in almost every morning to get a bagel on the way to see her, which we did every single day we were there. My grandfather loved to take us to restaurants, and in Florida the bagel shops weren’t the little deli-like things they are in New York City—they’re more like diners. So our day started with breakfast together at the bagel shop. My grandfather would get grits, my mother would get poached eggs, and I would get soft scrambled eggs and a toasted bagel. Those trips out to get bagels in the morning were always a highlight for my mother and her father, and now they’re a highlight for me and my mom.

I still believe a bagel is the perfect food, and a bagel with cheese prepared as my mother and I make it is one of the best things on earth. It’s something that I now make for myself often. It is just the right combination and contrast—almost burnt, crunchy caramelized ends up against the soft doughiness of the interior, and then finally the creamy saltiness of the cheese, which just sends everything over the edge. It’s a perfect bite—every single food group I need in my life. Everybody has the thing that gives them comfort and satisfaction no matter how many times they eat it, and the bagel with cheese is mine. Many of my friends are now addicted to these bagels: They love the goddamn bagel with cheese. To me, it’s just like a perfect hit of THC—it’s a fifteen-minute orgasm of straight bagel bliss. I don’t think that there’s anything else that makes me happier, period. I know it’s terrible for me, but what am I going to do? They’ll eventually kill me one day, but I guess I’ll die