Last year Doctor Who’s the Chef and Mr. Moe created live on stream, in defiance of God and man, the “Earthmeal”. Our editor Will the Great spoke with Doc to find out what could possibly have provoked such a display.
So, Doc…explain Earthmeal?
The idea for Earthmeal came around because, one day Tex was contemplating in chat, as he does, various “constructions”, various items, and he thought to himself – What would constitute an earth-meal? And someone asked, what do you mean earth-meal? And he replied, you know, like layers. Like as you eat it, it goes down, with different layers, but it’s round. Like the Earth. So then Moe, our resident uh “Captain of shenaniganry”, pinged me in this conversation and said, hey Doc, I’m coming down and we’re doing this. And I was initially skeptical, but Moe and I started talking and we were like – we can do this right? This giant…meat-orb thing? And we started talking and talking and we were like, okay, we can figure this out. So that’s how Earthmeal got started – Mr Tex was like, what if meal but everything was round, and Moe was like we can do this. And then it became a stream.
Okay, so, how much – I hesitate to use the word – planning went into this?
Oh not much. laughs From initial ping to construction of Earthmeal I believe it was about two and a half or three months between, with probably a dozen messages exchanged between Moe and I, and about six of those were just “hey Doc I have some vacation time, we’re doing Earthmeal.” The planning was mostly on Moe’s part as he does not know how to half ass anything – oh god this was literally just after his pirate cruise too, we discuss that in the VOD. Moe was like well okay, round meal – well they make round cakes so if I can get two round cake molds we can make round meal. So he got cake molds that were about the size of a basketball, and then was like okay, given the volume of ground beef we need about…fifteen pounds of meat? And then from there, okay no this is just Giant Meatball now, so Moe buys round cake pans, fifteen pounds of meat, and meatball spices. And that’s literally all the preparation that came down into Earthmeal, everything else was ad libbed.
So we start actually, properly discussing the craziness/insanity that is “how the hell are we going to do this?” Moe brought his meat thermometer, and he says okay we’re going to properly temp check this thing because we don’t want to poison ourselves, and that was a very good idea – although I will explain the folly of that soon – so we figure essentially this is just giant meatball, what is the outer layer of Earthmeal? Bacon? Yeah bacon, so we decide to crust it with bacon, and then do a couple of layers – bacon, meat, then what? More bacon and cheese, so we layer some bacon and cheese under there, then some more meat until we have room for maybe one more layer. So we’re like, what is the core of Earthmeal? So we got a big ol’ hunk of Gouda cheese, wrapped it with bacon and stuffed it in the middle. Then we did the other half of the mold the same way, then stuck it together and put it in the oven and said okay, we hope this works.
Molten cheese core, yeah checks out.
Molten core of gouda cheese, yeah. So we get prepared on stream, and – do you know that mixing fifteen pounds of ground beef and pork by hand is very cold?
I can imagine it is yeah.
So we took turns mixing the meat because A, it’s a lot of meat, B hands got very cold. We had got a lot of onions to chop up and put in as well…that we forgot to chop up and put in.
Where would the onions have gone?
As a sort of filler into the meat, this was essentially a giant cross of a meatball and a meatloaf.
A loaf-ball if you will.
Right. So we mix it up on stream, the stream is going well, people are redeeming cursed things, Moe brought along cursed soda flavour like “Carolina reaper” and “pickle” and “butter” and “hot dog water”.
Okay – I might regret this but – talk us through those.
Uh, so the Carolina reaper soda was just soda that was flavoured with Carolina reaper, it was spicy. Now, given my association with Madducks it is somewhat known that I am a bit of a pepper-head – and it wasn’t bad, what was bad was the soda burps afterward because they were capsaisin soda burps – so I had to be very conscious to burp through my mouth and not my nose, because the one time I didn’t I pepper sprayed my sinuses from the inside and that was not pleasant!
The pickle wasn’t bad, it was…dilly? Salty? I like pickles, it was fine. The butter soda – and there is a quote of this on the channel – “Why is the soda slippery?” I don’t know how, but the butter soda was slippery and oily.
I can imagine that, because I experimented with buttered rum last winter, and I found it was oily – so I can imagine the butter soda.
Yeah exactly. Anyway so the hot dog water soda was made with hot dog water, and had chunks of hot dog in it.
Oh I don’t like that, no.
I think I almost threw up drinking it. It was not good. Then Moe brought along some challenge candies so we were playing candy roulette every time someone redeemed, and Moe kept getting hit with the pickle rope candies. I don’t think I ever got one, some how Moe just always got them.
So we started the stream relatively early in the day because we knew it was going to take a while. I think the stream ended up being like six hours, and I normally only stream for three or four, because we wanted to make sure that all of the meat got cooked through – this is where the meat thermometer comes in. So we plug the meat thermometer into a gap in the meat orb, and we’re like okay, cool now we can get readings and check the meat without having to open it up. Moe what’s the temperature that beef has to be cooked to? 150, 160? It’s reading 95. We got very very concerned, for a long period of time that the meat thermometer kept reading like 70, 80, 60 for some reason – nothing close to what it was supposed to be, so we’re like let’s stick it into another spot, let’s flip it over, let’s try another – actually no we didn’t flip it over, that might have helped with a more even cook and the juiciness…hah, juiciness of meat, hand eggplant.
Nice.
So we’re very very concerned and we start discussing, if this doesn’t cook all the way, and we’re coming up on four and a half hours – what are we going to do about this? Well I guess we take it out into a pan and roast it like a normal meatloaf to try to get it up to temperature. We finally make the call at the five hour mark, we pull it out and flip it over and we pull it off and go…hey that’s cooked. We poke it with the thermometer and the core is reading 180 – why is the core reading 180? And if you can see from the pictures, that’s literally the Earthmeal cut in half – I kept half, Moe took half home, because it’s a lot of meat. So what we think happened is because 1, we didn’t put onion filler in, and 2 meat is known to shrink as it cooks – there were air pockets in the meat, and the thermometer was in one of those air pockets. Every time we must have just hit an air pocket. So we look at it, we test it with the thermometer and it’s reading 170, 180, and we’re like…holy shit we did it.
Getting it out of that mold was a pain in the ass, we kind of broke the Earth-crust there. The outside bacon turned into such a really nice bacon crust, we were very surprised at that, it turned out very good – I’m making myself hungry here man.
I am literally ordering lunch right now as we record this.
You son of a bitch – So yeah we take it out, we flip it, we measure it, and we’re like oh all the meat settled, we’re getting a good temperature, and we start cutting into it. So we made up beans, we had long Asian beans beside it because we went to an Asian grocery store and thought you know what would be funny? Long green beans. We also made up Brussel sprouts, because this was after the subathon where I discovered that I like Brussel sprouts. How did I discover this? I cooked them in a toaster.
Brussel sprouts are great, man.
Brussel sprouts are amazing, I know.
The problem is most people boil them. Ugh.
So we plated it up, we had some curry ketchup that was really good. We’re eating it and we go, this is a little dry, and we both turn to look at the counter and go – we forgot the onions.
Anyway we’re eating the Earthmeal, we’re discussing everything we’ve done, our process and everything on the stream, and – if this were say, a high school science project, I’d probably give us a B. Maybe a B+. Because we have demonstrated mastery of the knowledge of the subject, but we had a few hiccups in the process – the meat sticking to the cook container, the spilling of juices, the air pockets, forgetting the onions – so if I was to grade us, B+. Good knowledge, room for improvement. And we immediately started discussing how we’d improve it. We’d put parchment paper in the mold for easy release, we’d include the onions, and we started thinking what about a falafel layer with dino nuggies?
….uh?
A fossil layer, if you will. So we post this and send it to Mr. Tex, he is very impressed with our work, and since then Moe and I have been hankering to attempt Earthmeal 2. We have discussed at length the refinement of our process, and we’re very eager to attempt a second time. We were improvising the entire time, but now that we’ve done it we can start tweaking and perfecting, knowing what worked and what needs refinement. I think the biggest thing would have been actually properly rotating the orb every maybe forty five minutes to get an even cook, then some kind of release aide like parchment paper to be able to remove it without breaking the crust as it adheres to the tins. And then yeah, dinosaur fossil layer, why not?
Do you have any notion of when we might expect Earthmeal 2: The Sequel?
This is going to be entirely dependent on Moe and his work schedule, I can bug him and we can maybe…I make no promises but, summer 2026 we might be able to have Earthmeal 2, electric boogaloo, dino nuggies and the land before time.
What sort of variations did you try for plating and serving?
Well you can see from the pictures, this one here, got a big ol’ chunk of meat, slathered in curry ketchup, toasted a bun and put it on there – that is like an inch and a half thick, about six inches arc length and about three inches wide slab of meat.
That looks great.
It was amazing, I had to do jaw acrobatics to consume it. Burger was the most popular consumption method, but also plated up alongside some veggies was the other way. I don’t really know how else you could consume other than just taking the ball and…burying your face in it.
I don’t recommend that one.
Just eating it like an apple.
The Galactus method, just take a bite of planet.
This meal, I ate my half for practically breakfast lunch and dinner – for eight days straight.
That’s a lot of meat.
It’s a lot of meat, it was very good meat, but it was a lot. This could be the centerpiece for a gathering of people, this could feed like twenty people-
Wait a minute, Doc are you thinking what-
I am thinking what you’re thinking, this is going to be cooked at the meetup.
Oh dear….
But we’re very proud of it, and we’re very excited to attempt again – and given it has been a year since Earthmeal construction Moe and I definitely need to get started on Earthmeal 2. Then once we perfect Earthmeal 2, look out BPL – we’re going to make it at this year’s meetup. Soft target, summer, Earthmeal 2. Meetup 2026, y’all gonna get you some Earthmeal.
Something to look forward to then.
Or dread.
Any final remarks?
Eat well, make something tasty.
But don’t eat the mould.
Unless it’s bleu cheese.
