- Why am I getting so tired already?
This is fun.
Whoa, that's cool!
This is about 40 pounds worth of stuff.
There's like, so many
different textures in here.
I don't think this is doing
anything but it's fun.
- Oh, wow. Wow.
(triumphant music)
- Welcome back to Tasty's Making it Big.
This is the show where I make giant food
for my friends and special guests.
Today I've invited in Kalen Allen.
You guys might have
seen his viral reactions
to these really awesome food videos
and I'm really excited because
I've always wanted to see
how he'd react if I cooked for him.
So, let's go meet him.
Hey Kalen.
- Well hello, hello.
- [Alvin] What's going on?
- How are you?
- Good, big fan.
- Oh, well thank you very much.
- I know a lot of people out there
probably know what you're famous for.
But in case some people
don't, what do you do?
- So essentially, my main job is
I react to food videos.
- How did you get into this?
Like, where did did it all start?
- I was on my way to work,
and I was like, laying in my bed
and I was going through the news.
Actually a Tasty video came up
and it was of this
cornbread and I was like,
"Oh I should make a video to this."
And I put it in my phone, pressed record,
and the rest is history.
- I've definitely learned a
lot from watching you react
to other people's videos.
I've definitely been more cautious
about the way I approach
the stuff that I make.
And I would love to cook for you today
and make you something
really, really giant.
What sorts of foods are you into?
- I am into a lot of food,
but I love Italian as well.
- Are there any dishes that you think that
maybe you would like to
request for me to make for you?
I mean, the door's wide open.
- Spaghetti.
- Oh, like spaghetti and
meatballs or just spaghetti?
- Spaghetti and meatballs.
- Okay so that means,
- I need some meat in it.
- Like giant spaghetti
and giant meatballs.
- I actually like to,
and a lot of people get mad about this,
I like sugar in my spaghetti.
- Oh, interesting.
- I like my spaghetti to be sweet.
- I'm wanna get working on the food,
but I might call you back in,
'cause I would love to
see you react real time
to some of the stuff near the end,
'cause that's where all the
food is coming together.
So, I'll get to work and then
I'll call you back for
some reactions later.
- Okay, All right,
let's do it.
- Sounds good, dude
appreciate it.
- Boom!
(upbeat music)
- Okay, we're gonna make some
giant spaghetti and meatballs.
In giant spaghetti and
meatballs the first thing is,
well, the spaghetti.
So, we're gonna start with fresh pasta.
We're gonna go in with
eight cups of flour,
and some salt.
And then we're gonna mix
this together with a fork
to evenly incorporate
the salt with the flour.
This is eight cups of flour.
It's actually a quarter of the total batch
because if you do it all at
once it'll be kind of crazy,
so the amount of dough we're
making here seems like a lot
and that's only 1/4 of the whole thing.
So, that's pretty cool.
So once the flour and the salt are mixed,
you wanna go and make kind of like
a little well like you do.
After you get the well we're
going in with the eggs.
So this is a dozen eggs. That's 12.
We have a little bit of water,
to also help this come together.
You don't really wanna
go in and mix everything,
you kind of wanna whisk
all these eggs and water
and get it to a nice mixture first
so that it's more evenly incorporated.
That's why we made the well.
The whole entire pasta batch
for Kalen's giant spaghetti and meatballs
is going to be 32 cups
of flour and 48 eggs.
Also known as a lot of stuff.
It's like a yellow whirlpool.
Why am I getting so tired already?
(breathing heavily)
It doesn't all have to
come together in the bowl,
you just need to get it to a consistency
where you can dump it out,
and I just wanna stop doing this so,
we're gonna dump this out
and continue to knead.
The goal is to shimmy it
into a workable dough.
Yeah, this is it's own unique workout.
If you make pasta from scratch every day
you're gonna be really jacked in one arm.
And then the great thing is that
this is also your sponge,
so you can just do this.
It's been about 10 minutes and
I think the reason why you have
to go for so long is because
it's a pretty large portion of dough,
you really work the gluten in,
gotta get the liquid from the egg,
all the fat from the egg to
really combine with the flour.
But, it's looking pretty good now.
(slapping dough)
This is fun. So, that's looking cool.
(lively music)
It's been about an hour.
I've made a total of four
giant pasta dough balls
and they've all been
resting at room temperature
for at least 30 minutes.
This is the one I most recently made,
her name's Gertrude,
and we're gonna cut
Gertrude into 16 pieces
to roll through this pasta machine.
Go straight down the middle. Oh yeah!
And eight. Look at that, 16
totally not even pasta triangles.
And we're gonna get this
into a rectangular shape.
A little bit of flour.
We're gonna turn on our pasta machine,
right now it's at the thickest setting.
This is a one setting,
and because it's on a stand mixer,
the stand mixer is going to do
a lot of the work for me which is nice.
I don't have to do it myself.
All right, the stand mixer is also
on the lowest power setting
so it doesn't just shoot
out pasta everywhere.
(quiet mechanical whirring)
That's nice.
We're gonna do that a couple of times
so we can get it to be a little thinner.
It's so nice having someone
else do the rolling out for me,
I just kind hold and
caress it and let it go.
So that looks pretty good,
it's gotten a lot longer than we started.
At this point we're gonna
go to the second setting
'cause if you go from one
to like three too fast
it'll bottle neck in here
and there's gonna be a big traffic jam,
and nobody's gonna be coming out smooth.
Everybody's gonna be pissed.
I feel like "Swan Lake"
should be playing right now.
(Swan Lake gently playing)
All right, 15 more Gertrude pieces to go.
(lively music)
So now that they're rolled
into these long sheets
I wanna to cut them into
really wide and thick noodles.
We've got a really cool
toy, this is a pasta bike.
It's kind of like an accordion.
It could almost be like an
old school torture device.
Whoa, that's so cool!
We have essentially these really,
really nice pasta noodles.
Look at that, This is one noodle.
It's like two feet long.
That's awesome.
Even pressure, even pressure
all the way through.
Nice!
I think that's why they
call it a pasta bike,
it literally feels like
you're riding a bike
through a field of pasta.
That's kind of a dream.
This is Gertrude now reborn into a
almost like flour-like Picasso painting,
but this is only one of
the four dough babies
I have to get through, so.
I'm gonna go put this in the back
and I'm wanna go ride my bike for
probably another hour or so.
(inquisitive music)
So, I have to make a giant meatball.
I'm not really sure how.
If you just make a ball
that big and you bake it,
it'll kinda flatten in the oven
and I really want a nice
spherical kind of shape.
So I'm gonna try and search up
giant sphere ball mold.
Yeah, these are all sphere molds,
large ball molds for cocktails
like three inch, four inch.
That's not good, okay.
Okay, so apparently there's like these
cake pans that are hemispheres
that apparently they use
for those dome shaped cakes.
They say "sports cake pans"
I'm assuming it's like those cakes
where it's like a soccer ball,
a basketball, a big one,
that's how they make those.
And I think if I can
actually get two of them,
I could potentially put meat
and make like a big
sandwich and then bake it?
Oh! There's like a specialty
bake shop a couple miles.
I'm gonna to put my eggs in one basket
and hope that they have it.
So I'm gonna go shopping and
I'm gonna go get those bowls.
(jazzy music)
Well I found these at the store,
these are nice big hemisphere molds.
I told the guy that I was
gonna be making meatballs
and he was like, "Yeah,
we use those for cakes."
and I was like "I ain't making a cake."
We're gonna put some sheets
in, crimp it around the edge.
We're gonna use this guy to press it down,
make a nice little shape.
Let's try to make things
nice and even here.
Look at that. A nice meatball vessel.
We have 27 pounds of ground beef.
I think this is gonna make four meatballs.
We have 48 eggs.
(verbal blooping noises)
Have a lot of Parmesan cheese.
We have 12 cups of breadcrumbs.
Fun fact, every four slices of bread
is one cup of bread crumbs
so we just threw in 48 slices of bread.
And with the amount of
eggs we just put in here,
plus the amount we used in the pasta,
this is close to 100 eggs.
Two onions, Italian seasoning, salt,
garlic powder and pepper.
This is about, I'm gonna say
40 pounds worth of stuff.
Whoa, this is wild!
There's so many different
textures in here,
I don't really wanna talk about it.
An average meatball is around one ounce.
So 27 pounds of ground beef
is equivalent to 432 ounces of beef.
So these four giant meatballs
will be the size of 432 meatballs.
I'm like, punching it.
I don't think this is doing
anything but it's fun.
The goal here is to make sure
that we don't have any lumps
or pockets or clumps of any of
those individual ingredients.
We wanna get all of this
into one homogenous mass,
so we're gonna be here for a long time.
(magical music)
We're ready to put the mixture
inside of those foil balls,
but we do need to spray those molds first
because we don't want them to stick.
This mixture makes four meatballs
and this is one meatball,
so I'm gonna try to divide
this up into a quarter.
And try to compress it.
I kind of want this to
also come above the lip
of the meatball because meat's
gonna shrink in the oven.
And if you cook it and
it's below it'll just like,
(shrinking noise)
and it'll become smaller,
and it won't be fun anymore.
Massage the meat into the corners.
Okay lets just do this,
and we're gonna squeeze hard.
It's like a meat sandwich.
It kind of looks like a piranha plant.
(growling noises)
That was one.
I'm gonna make three more,
use up the rest of bad boy over here
and we're gonna bake them all off
for a very, very long time,
until they're cooked and pray
that they retain their sphere shape.
(lively music)
It's been about three hours,
the meatballs are almost
ready, they look crazy.
There's like four giant
death star things in there.
We're just trying to time it so that
by the time the meatballs come out,
the noodles are coming out.
So we're gonna boil the
noodles that we've got.
But the first thing that we have to do is
we have to obviously salt the pasta water.
So, here we go here. it's really hot.
We're gonna go in with these noodles.
Go in here.
Okay, so because this is fresh pasta,
it cooks very quickly but
these are thicker noodles,
so we're gonna cook them
for about 4 to 5 minutes.
Hopefully we'll have
some delicious, bouncy,
al dente, thick pasta noodles.
Okay, so these are pretty much ready.
This big spatula, this big spider we got..
Whoa! That's pretty awesome.
These are going in here.
I'm gonna throw some oil on it
so that they don't stick,
and then just to taste.
Mmm, these are really good!
(slurping)
This is a great first batch,
we're gonna go with the second one.
The key here I think,
is to keep the water going in a vortex
as the noodles go in so it don't stick.
All right, second batch
is ready, it's coming out.
Nice and bouncy and springy.
Hit it with some oil,
just like Gordon Ramsey.
"Olive oil in, perfect."
Please don't be mad, Gordon.
I'm gonna go cook 20 more of those
and then Kalen will be here.
(upbeat music)
All right, cool. Welcome
to the set, Kalen.
How are you doing?
- Thank you, I'm excited!
- You're hungry?
- I am very hungry.
- What do you think of all
this stuff we've got so far?
- Okay, so I notice that those
aren't spaghetti noodles,
what are those called? Pen,
it starts with a P, don't it?
- It starts with a P.
- Pappardelle or something
like that? (laughing)
Ain't that what it's called?
I think that's what it say on the menu.
- Popadelli.
- Popadelli.
- Yeah, I mean we cut them
and we made them by hand
and then we just cut them
really long with a pasta bike.
- Oh, y'all fancy over here, okay!
I like that, that's bougie.
- I'm gonna start by putting
down the pasta noodles.
- Now where'd you get
these big ol' pans from?
- I don't know, our department got them
from the hardware store.
They may or may not be pans.
- What kind of pans,
what would you need that
for in a hardware store?
That's a big ol' saucer.
Now, when you boiled them
noodles did you season the water?
- I seasoned the water-
- Okay, 'cause folks just be
throwing it up in the water,
just bland noodles. That is not cute.
- How many eggs do you think it took
to make this batch of pasta?
- You know what? I have
never made fresh pasta.
So, Imma guess, I'm gonna say 15.
- 48.
- 48? That's a lot of eggs!
- That's a lot of chickens, huh?
- Oh yeah!
(laughing)
They was busy. How long you been cooking?
- I've been cooking since
I was in high school.
- Did you go to culinary school?
- No, not at all.
- So you just did it.
- I learned to cook from my mom
- You're self made.
- Yeah, my mom taught me over speakerphone
while she was in China.
- Come on, mama.
- Yeah, she literally yelled
at me and told me what to buy.
So this is our nest of pasta
noodles, if you can tell.
It's making a nice landing
zone for the meatballs.
- Beautiful. That is impressive,
they look like planets.
You know, you could tape those together
and put that in somebody's solar system
for their science fair project.
(gasps) Oh, wow! Oh, Wow!
Wow! Oh quad wow!
(laughing)
Great color to them too.
- Yeah there's a good sear on here, right?
- Uh huh, uh huh.
Wow it's juicy too. Wow.
This is insane.
- We've got the sauce here.
- Beautiful.
- Per your request, there's a
little bit of sugar in here.
- Oh thank you so much.
- Do you wanna taste it?
- That's perfection.
Where'd you get a ladle that big?
- It's a restaurant supply store.
- What kind of store is this?
- I don't know but it's made
- Is this in like the super size section?
- It's the Area 51 section.
- It must be.
- Here we go.
- Oh wow.
Oh wow, it's like a
volcano. Look at that smoke!
It's hot and ready
baby. How many tomatoes?
- I don't know. I think the whole farm.
How do you feel about
this amount of sauce?
- I think it looks great!
- All right, cool, because
we're not done yet.
- We're not done?
- We've got to garnish it!
- Oh! Okay, what are we garnishing with?
- Well, we've got some cheese.
- Amen.
Now listen, when I go into Olive Garden
I'm always the person,
you know when they be like "Tell me when,"
we'll be sitting there for five minutes.
Keep going, go ahead, garnish
that thing with that cheese.
- You want one?
- Yeah, hand me one of them.
Oh, this is good cheese!
Oh yeah, keep putting that on there.
- All right, I got you.
How do you feel about parsley?
- I'm a little, you know,
I think less is more.
A little taste of the parsley.
Oh yeah, less is definitely
more with this parsley, Jesus,
this almost took me out.
- A little bit.
- That's enough.
- Okay, that's enough.
This is it. This is the final dish.
- Thank God, so we can eat now?
- How heavy do you think this is?
- I would guess this would
probably be around 50 pounds?
Yeah, that's heavy. That's
heavy. That's real heavy.
- Okay are you ready to eat?
- I am ready.
- All right, what would you
like to start with first?
- I feel like we need to plate it again
because we need to grab
some noodles first.
Look at this, this is crazy.
I'm gonna come up here, in this little
crevice right here.
- Yeah, me too.
- Get me some sauce. Look at that! See?
- I was like "Table side prime rib!"
- Mhm, wow!
- Look at that.
- Look at that oh, it smells so good!
- Here you go sir.
- Thank you so much.
- Table side meatballs. Ala carte.
- Thank you so much.
- I'll just cut myself
a slice of meatball.
Nobody ever says that.
- Yeah because they don't have to.
- All right, cheers.
(slurping)
- You outdid yourself with this one.
This is the best damn
meatball I've ever had.
- It's moist. You would
think, you know, with that big
- It's not dry!
- It's not dry, you'd think
- It's not dry at all.
- No.
- And it's seasoned very well.
- Thank you.
- There is lot of flavor in this.
I'm gonna need you to
open up a restaurant.
Only giant food, that's it.
And you know it's L.A.
so all the Instagrammers would go crazy
'cause they can go in there
and take pictures and (bleep).
- I'll put a big pink wall.
- Yeah. That's all you need.
- With a sign that says
"Go big or go home."
- Okay.
- That pasta's still got
a bit of bounce to it
and it's not overcooked. It's fresh.
- Ain't that crazy?
Now people will take an ounce
of pasta and over cook it
and you done made all this
pasta and it is perfect.
- Well, thank you.
- They make Tupperware this big?
- I don't think they make
Tupperware this big but
we can go to Bed, Bath and
Beyond and find a bathtub.
- Okay, that works.
- Thank you so much for coming today.
- Thank you for cooking this for me.
- I appreciate it.
I'm glad you like it, feel
free to keep on eating,
but see you guys next time.
- Bye y'all, I'm still eating.
(lively music)
