098 Inside Out Cookie

We sit down with Nick, founder and head baker of Inside Out Cookie, to unpack the double meaning behind the name, what makes these big filled cookies different from anything you grab at the grocery store, and why in-person events and festivals became a turning point.

Nick walks us through flavor development and the realities of small-batch baking at scale, including why Dubai Chocolate became the breakout best seller, and how he keeps costs and quality in check by making pistachio cream from scratch. We also get nerdy about ingredients and freshness: from locally milled flour to packaging choices that make freezing cookies actually work. 

Then the conversation goes deeper. Nick shares how he learned to bake while incarcerated in a federal minimum-security prison, how purpose and community changed his trajectory, and why he’s committed to hiring and supporting others who are rebuilding their lives. 

Plus, we round out the Pittsburgh food talk with a Strip District Vietnamese recommendation for banh mi and pho at Maiku, and a quick, bold curry idea from Priya and Glen of Anar Gourmet Foods featuring eggplant, optional beef, and tangy tamarind.

Subscribe for more Pittsburgh food stories, share this with a friend who loves cookies, and leave a review to help more listeners find the show. What part of Nick’s story stuck with you most?

Transcript

Meet Inside Out Cookie Founder

Doug 0:00

Welcome to The Pittsburgh Dish. I'm your host, Doug Heilman. What is an Inside Out Cookie? And what's the double meaning behind its name? Owner Nick shares the story. Do you appreciate a great Banh Mi sandwich? Ana Anthony discovers the quality of Maiku in the strip district. And if you're craving an easy recipe when short on time, that's bold in flavor and can go either vegetarian or for a meat lover, Priya and Glen come back to the table to share a favorite. All that ahead, stay tuned. Thank you so much for coming over and for being on the show. Thank you for having me. Would you introduce yourself to our listeners and what you have going on in the world of food?

Nick 0:52

My name is Nick. I'm the founder of Inside Out Cookie and head baker. Are you the head baker? Yeah. I don't often bake our regular products anymore unless I'm working a new recipe or new formulation or new crazy idea, of which I have a lot. Yeah. Um, but yeah, just running running that company and learning as I go.

Doug 1:13

How long has Inside Out Cookie been in business now?

Nick 1:16

I just started my fifth year.

Doug 1:18

Wow.

Nick 1:19

Congratulations. Yeah. It's so much has happened in that amount of time. Um the first year I didn't really do much because I didn't know what I wanted to do. When I started, it was my intention to be an online cookie company because those I had seen online cookie companies doing really well. And I was just like, okay, well, that's that's my plan. That's what I'm gonna do. When I started doing that, I realized I really didn't like it very much at all because it it was at the time me by myself making cookies, putting cookies in a box, sending cookies, and that's it. I didn't interact with people at all. Yeah, lonely. Awful. Yeah, it was awful. If you're a social person, yeah. Uh if you're a recluse, that's perfect. Yeah. Right. Um, so I signed up for uh a local farmers market, which was once a week in the in the summer, and one sort of semi-large event um that was like a three-day, three-day kind of festival. And I loved it. Yeah. Even the farmers markets. I mean, at the time I might sell you know 50 cookies in a day, and I was ecstatic to do that. Um, and then the big event, we sold 800 over a weekend, and it was just wow.

Doug 2:23

You're like, okay, this is it.

Nick 2:24

Yeah, but I get to talk to people, you know, out in a crowd at an outdoor festival, and everybody's happy and having fun, and I get to, you know, see people's reaction when they buy and try the cookies and get some feedback, what they like, what they might not like. Right. And that is much more beneficial and a whole lot more fun than just sitting and coming up with ideas by myself. I can totally understand that.

Doug 2:45

I have to say, uh, this is how I've met you is at some festivals or expos. You were just at the home and garden show, is that right? Yeah. Um, that was great. How did that go? Yeah.

Nick 2:53

It was really good. That was my fourth year there. The first year was pretty good, the second year went down, and the third year was so much better than the first two years. Like a hockey stick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was great. And I didn't know what to attribute that to. Maybe it's just luck, the economy, who knows what. But this year we did just a little bit better than last year. Wow. Yeah. And it's fun. It's a long, it's a long because it's it's two consecutive weekends and the week in between.

Doug 3:17

Yeah.

Nick 3:18

Um, but still, I mean, it was so many people go there. Um, and KDKA was there the first weekend of both shows. They had like a live thing there, and uh, so that was fun.

Doug 3:27

And I knew you from KDKA. I think you were on Talk Pittsburgh a couple years ago. Yeah, right.

Nick 3:31

Yeah. They invited me uh two years ago to come do their show, which was amazing. Yeah, they put me on the map, um, just invited me.

Doug 3:39

They sort of have that power.

Nick 3:40

Yeah, they do. I was shocked how many people watched that show. Um, a a promoter that I do that I do events for who doesn't look like a guy who would watch a daytime TV show called me and said, Hey, I saw the show. Like, really? Okay, that's awesome.

Doug 3:54

Nick, I'm thinking as we're talking, we should probably pause for a second and tell some of the listeners if they haven't experienced your cookies, the name of the company is Inside Out Cookie. Inside Out Cookie, yeah. Why don't you describe to the novice person what what that means and what are you doing here?

Nick 4:13

So the the name was intended to have a double meaning. So there are, as I said, a lot of online cookie companies. Certainly, I didn't invent the cookie. And my thought was okay, if I'm gonna make cookies, they need to be something that's out of the ordinary, something that you can't just go to the grocery store and buy because you can get really good cookies in many different places. And that was my focus. I was playing with mixed mixed methods and different formulations, trying to get something that that I was one proud of that I thought was a standout as far as the quality and flavor and all of that, but also something that people would look at and say, hmm, I really want to try that because I've never had anything like that before. Yes. Um, the cookies that I'm selling now are all the result of a very fortunate accident. I made a bad batch of dough. It was way too wet and it wouldn't bake right. So I put the dough ball in an egg ring, those silicone rings that you make egg like egg sandwiches with to hold it in place long enough to get it baked. And I took it out and it was great. Oh, the texture was so good.

Doug 5:09

I know what you're talking about. When you fry an egg in a pan, you can get these rings that keep a fried egg looking like perfect. Right. So you use that to bake up the first batch of cookies, and they also looked kind of perfect. Right. Yeah.

Nick 5:21

And so they all look like that now. So all of all of the doughs are based off of one base recipe and a variation of that.

Doug 5:27

And I I also want to just add there are things inside the cookies, at least in some of them, right? Most of them.

Nick 5:35

Most of them. I have one cookie that doesn't have a filling because some people just want chocolate chip, it's the number one most popular flavor, right? So we don't need to mess with the classics. We'll we'll have one. Everything else has a filling of some sort, be it peanut butter, marshmallow, caramel, um, uh Nutella, some fruit fillings. Something to complement the dough. Did I see cheesecake? Yeah. You still doing those? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Pecan pie. Pecan pie. That is my personal favorite flavor of everything that I make, and it's nowhere near the bestseller, but I don't care. It's still my favorite.

Doug 6:05

Well, I think it's so, I mean, for our region, Western PA, I think if you're a southerner, pecan pie is huge, right? Sure. Yeah. But up in our parts of the world, maybe not as much, but I think that's so unique as well. The Brookie.

Best Sellers And Dubai Chocolate

Nick 6:16

Tell me a little bit more about a Brookie. Yeah, that's not my idea. I did that, that is a thing that you know somebody else came up with somewhere. Generally, it's half chocolate chip and half brownie. Okay. And so I do two versions of that. One is just plain. We only sell those wholesale, uh, because they're they're sort of off-brand being just a basic. Um, and we have another one called Brookie Monster, which is a brookie. It's got a Reese's cup inside, it's got uh crumbled Oreos and MMs on top.

Doug 6:43

Amazing. Yeah. Let me just ask, is chocolate chip the biggest seller, or what is the top, you know, right now?

Nick 6:50

Uh my well, my number one flavor right now is Dubai Chocolate. Oh, of course. Which I I love and sort of resent that flavor because it's my best seller and I totally copied it. Oh, well, it wasn't my idea.

Doug 7:01

It's uh listen, it's everywhere. You have to do one if people haven't tried it. It's sort of a crunchy filling and pistachio cream. Yes. Yes, yeah, okay. Yeah.

Nick 7:12

So those chocolate bars are so expensive. So expensive. They are they are expensive to make. They do not, they are not the $20 a bar expensive.

Doug 7:20

No, they're not expensive.

Nick 7:22

They're they're the most expensive cookie for me to make by like 60 cents more than the other ones. But they are super popular. Um, the only way that I could make that cookie affordably to keep the prices the same was to make the pistachio cream myself. So I'll buy pistachios, I bought a nut grinder, I grind the pistachios, make that from scratch, because if I do that, it costs half as much than buying it pre-made, and it's better anyway. I would say I like that even better.

Doug 7:43

Yeah. Yeah. People love scratch-made things. I mean, cookies already feel like scratch made, but knowing that you're doing that extra step, you know, to your point, it's a cost savings. But for the consumer, it's like better quality.

Nick 7:56

It's better quality, yeah. And most of the pre-made things, there's a lot of extra stuff in there that really we don't want it to be there. Preserve preservatives, um, emulsifiers and things like that that we really don't want uh or don't need necessarily. So I can control what is in there and what's not.

Doug 8:10

I I think I noticed on your website, you're trying to use the simplest ingredients possible, local when you can. Right. So I think that's just like an ethos that a lot of people appreciate nowadays.

Nick 8:21

Yeah, and it's it's not that hard to do either. I mean, certainly that they're not gonna start growing sugar cane or cocoa in in Pennsylvania. This doesn't work. We can't do anything about that. But um butter, flour, the flour mill is like 45 minutes from the bakery. Really? Yeah. Wait, what flour are you are can you tell us? It's called Stavely. Okay. Yeah. So I I use unbleached, unenriched. Um, so many people have a problem with the folic acid. Yeah. My and I'm one of them. So I don't use it because I assume there are other people that would rather not eat it too.

Doug 8:50

When people think about having gluten intolerances, a lot of times if it's not real celiac, it's how the wheat was treated or bleached or you know, added vitamins that we maybe didn't have in that product initially from nature.

Nick 9:04

Right.

Doug 9:04

Yeah.

Nick 9:05

I don't understand, maybe for some people, I don't understand why that the flour needs to be enriched. No. We get we have access to most of what we need nowadays.

Doug 9:13

Right.

Nick 9:14

Now, yeah. Maybe, maybe in a bygone era that's you know.

Doug 9:18

We we got way off track. I want to come back. Uh I want to come back to uh after Dubai chocolate. What are some other flavors that are really moving right now, or some of your your proudest or favorite ones?

Nick 9:30

So my favorite ones are mostly the ones that I make start to finish. I make the filling, I make the dough. There's no can, I'm not leaning on candy. Like one of my best sellers has an Oreo cookie inside. Oreo is carrying a lot of the weight on that flavor because people know and love Oreos. That's great, but I didn't make the Oreo. So I would prefer the things that I'm most proud of are the ones that I had a hand in the entire process. And I've been told those are the better ones too. One, those are the cleaner label ones because I can't control what Oreo does, but I can control what I do. Right. Um, so so the extra things aren't in my fillings.

Doug 10:04

Yeah.

Nick 10:04

Um, I love fruit desserts. The the chocolate camp is way bigger than the fruit camp.

Doug 10:08

Oh, okay.

Nick 10:09

Um, but I like the fruit-filling ones. Uh, strawberry-filled, amazing.

Doug 10:13

Do you have a chocolate cookie filled with a fruit filling? No. Well, maybe that's the next step. I know. I've done them. Give me a little something with raspberry or cherry. Chocolate cherry is really good. Yeah.

Nick 10:24

We do a chocolate cherry usually on Valentine's Day. Uh-huh. This year, Valentine's Day, I didn't run any special flavors because we were redoing the bakery. It was, it was torn apart, getting new equipment installed, and there was just no room for them. So they'll be back on the roster next year.

Doug 10:38

Now we see you throughout the region a lot. But can I ask where the bakery is located, where you're manufacturing? The bakery's in State College. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Up at Penn State area. Penn State area.

Nick 10:48

Yeah, not in town. It's outside of town. Um, my mom lives there. My brother lives here, which is what brings me to Pittsburgh so often. I wanted to do more events, and you got to go where the people are. Right. The population obviously is way higher in Pittsburgh than State College. I have had it in my head to move the entire operation out here for like three years. Okay. The logistics of it, the bigger I get, is getting harder. The timing needs to be right in that we're during a slow time, so I can close and move. And also when the money's good to afford the move, and those things don't typically happen at the same time.

Doug 11:20

I haven't aligned. Yeah. Well, you're you still, let's just say this you know, you're up in the state college area, central PA area, but you're getting down here a lot, and we appreciate it. Thank you so much. I mean, also it's a regional food, and you're, as you said earlier, you're using a local flour mill. So, you know, you're still supporting like the whole Pennsylvania economy. I love that story. Yeah.

Nick 11:40

I I tried to get PA preferred status, but the sugar won't let me. It's tough. Yeah. It's got to be 70% of your ingredients have to be grown and processed in Pennsylvania, and I just can't do it because sugar cane.

Doug 11:52

You said earlier, and I just kind of want to circle back to the the origin of this stuffed cookie type. You had this dough that didn't work out right, and you baked it in the silicone mold. When did you start adding the inclusions? I don't know what to call that. The thing that you're putting in the middle. The fillings? Yeah. When did the fillings come up?

Nick 12:10

They were always that. They were. Yeah. So doing a test dough, I probably wouldn't fill it because I want to see the characteristics of it, how it behaves in the oven and what the outcome is, of course. The filling we can put in later. Now, sometimes the filling does change the dough. If it's a wet filling, some of that's going to migrate into the dough.

Doug 12:25

I imagine like cream cheese or something might be tricky, right?

Nick 12:28

It can be. Yeah. Yeah. So in I have a very long bake time. We have a 25-minute bake time on these. On a cookie, yeah. A lot can happen.

Doug 12:35

Now, these are big cookies, though, we should say too. Like this is a solid cookie. Yeah. It's not like, you know, your your your little like two-bite Christmas cookie.

Nick 12:42

No, no. Two bites of this, you'd have to be a very large mouth. Can you freeze them?

Doug 12:47

Absolutely. I know because they they're big. I don't you brought me a couple today. Thank you. I don't want to eat them all now, but I might.

Nick 12:55

Yeah. So I I package them with the in with the expectation that they're probably are going to get frozen because generally we sell them at six or more at a time. Yes. Which is a couple of pounds of cookies. So if someone comes to an event or orders a dozen cookies online, unless they have a massive appetite, they're not going to eat them before they start staling. Yeah. Because with no preservatives, I don't have a very long shelf life.

Doug 13:16

Yeah.

Nick 13:17

Um, so the packaging is made for freezing. They're super airtight. There's the bags are nitrogen flush, so we don't get any the freezer burn is really reduced because there's no moisture in there.

Doug 13:27

Can we just say that for the common person? You're removing the oxygen. Right. So, and and people do this in the potato chip industry to really keep things from staling. So you're you're going the extra mile to make sure that these cookies stay as fresh as possible. Yeah. I love that.

Nick 13:41

It's um it's not about the presence of nitrogen, it's about the absence of oxygen. Absence of oxygen. Right. So the fats can't get rancid, um, and you don't get as off flavors and stuff like that. Yeah. Nitrogen is very dry, so freezer burn happens because of moisture loss and moisture changing places, and that doesn't really happen as much. We're getting our scientific lesson today.

Doug 13:59

I love this. But I think the point is you're you're doing an extra step that maybe some folks don't do. So these cookies are good now and they're good later. Right. You know, whenever you're ready for them. Yeah. There's a very interesting sort of backstory to it.

Nick 14:13

Yeah, you could say that.

Doug 14:15

If you don't mind, I would love to talk a little bit more about that. I mean, clearly, you're a great baker now. You know a lot and you've experimented, and you're still doing that, as you were saying earlier. How did all of that get started in terms of this path into baking?

Nick 14:32

Sure. Yeah. So it's well, I mentioned the double meaning of inside out cookie. Inside, there's something inside the cookie. Inside out refers to me as well. I learned how to bake in federal prison. So inside out. And it was, it's, it was and still is my intention to hire other people like myself. Um, the temptation is always there to use a copacker, don't manufacture stuff anymore. I want to be an employer. I want to provide a place for people to have a good job, people to have opportunities like I had. Um, I will say the prison that I was in, it was a federal minimum. It wasn't like a super dangerous place. It was the kind of place that you can go and do things like learn to bake and stuff like that. Okay. Okay. I think your average um when someone thinks about a prison, they're probably not thinking about the place where I was. At the prison, there was uh a program called Culinary Arts, which was general like institutional food handling, food safety. And the output of that class was what the staff ate. And it didn't have a baking component because we really didn't have much for baking ingredients there. The the ingredients that we used had to come from the general stockpile of food that made the inmates' food. Um, we had a lot of cake mix because almost every meal there came with a piece of cake, so they could get the calorie count and the meals up, but we didn't have a whole lot beyond that. Um, but the man who who was, you know, over me, the the CO who was um uh my supervisor there, very, very good man. We're still we're still friends today, sort of said to me, you know, we need we need a baking thing for this. Um this is this is what would make the program better. And I had an excess of time for some reason.

Doug 16:08

I guess you could say that. Yeah.

Nick 16:10

So I wanted to to use what was given as a punishment and make it into an asset. Well, how do I do that? Learning. I've got nothing but time, I'll learn as much stuff as I can. I ordered the Culinary Institute of America's baking textbook and a bunch of other ones. Um, and I worked my way through the processes in that book that we did have the components for. And it was very basic, but it didn't take a whole lot in that environment to to up the game a little bit. And as I got better, that meant the staff started eating better. And so the next time we got a budget, they gave us a little bit more money. The first thing we got was chocolate chips. I was elated. Yeah, I was so excited to get chocolate.

Doug 16:46

Crazy though. Yeah.

Nick 16:47

You know, the little things um got cocoa powder, and that that just kept happening. By the time that I left there, we had everything. I mean, they I cultivated a sourdough culture. I was making facaccia and and bread. Um, I was hand tossing sourdough pizza. Um, the cheese we had wasn't very good, so they bought us better cheese for the pizza. They got us a two-deck pizza oven. I was hand tossing, uh, spinning pizza in the air and making making the staff pizza. Okay.

Doug 17:12

Okay, I I do need to ask a couple questions.

Nick 17:14

Who was eating the end result of your your work? Well, us, the the few inmates that worked there uh sort of full time. Okay, uh myself in the program. Yeah. And then, you know, all the correctional officers, the staff, the medical staff, the wardens, all of them, we made their lunch.

Doug 17:28

So they're benefiting from upping the ante too. Okay, I like this.

Nick 17:34

But it was my goal to leave the place better than it was that when I found it, because now I'm not just in there biding my time. I'm actually accomplishing something, and more importantly than that for myself, I'm accomplishing something that's benefiting other people.

Doug 17:47

Yes. I mean, you're building your own skills in a way to transition back out into the world that has plentiful jobs, typically in the food, food service, baking, cooking industry. What a incredible story. Yeah.

Nick 17:59

I mean, there's I I could tell the whole story. If I did that, I would use up every bit of time that we have. But there's a there's a section on the website under the about me with a link to my personal website that gives all the anything somebody wanted to know about all that. But um, happy to tell the story. We just don't have time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, but that's that's the nuts and bolts of it. Um, so I've hired a few people out of halfway houses, and whether that's gonna be a career for them or not doesn't make any difference. What I want to do is give them a place that they're gonna feel comfortable with a place to start. Right, just to start. Um, I've started this year doing some public speaking. Um, I have a couple of prisons that I'm gonna go speak to, uh, some groups of inmates that are gonna be released within two years. I spoke last week um at the Department of Corrections training facility for the their probation and parole officers, and there was a group of inmates there. They have a culinary program there. I got to I got to visit with the guys in that in that program a little bit. Um that was pretty cool. That's incredible.

Doug 18:52

Yeah. I mean, you have come sort of full circle in this journey that you started for yourself. Right.

Nick 18:59

Hi, this is Nick from Inside Out Cookie, and you're listening to The Pittsburgh Dish. Did you like to cook or bake before this? Nope. Some of my earliest memories as a kid were cooking with my mom. I remember her teaching me how to level a tablespoon, baking little stuff, but that doesn't mean that I liked it or that I did it very often. Yeah. Um, I mean, before I went to prison, I was rolling in money. I ate at a restaurant pretty much every meal. I didn't make much of anything. But I I did know some basic principles. Um, and I knew that I liked to eat.

Doug 19:30

Yeah.

Nick 19:31

And so that was what originally drew me to that program because the the inmates that worked in that program got access to way better food. So when I went in there, that was my intention, it was just to eat. But it was so so much more uh rewarding a way to pass the time. And when I left, I was working two shifts a day, seven days a week, because I wanted to. Yeah, I woke up at five o'clock in the morning and I could not wait to get in the kitchen.

Doug 19:53

You had something to do and you had a purpose. Absolutely. And you're learning, building skills, using your brain as well as your hands. So I can't imagine.

Nick 20:00

And teaching other inmates was I mean, teaching something helps you learn it, master it better too. Um, I would keep uh two students for five weeks at a time to teach more in-depth baking once I once I figured out what I was doing to be able to teach it at all. Um, but I hope that was beneficial for some others, and I hope that I can do more of that. Incredible. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, absolutely.

Doug 20:21

You know, and and just for anyone that is curious, because they can go to your website and read more about your personal story. It it was mainly fake IDs that got you where you were.

Nick 20:31

Technically, as far as the federal government was concerned, I was a counterfeiter. Yeah. Um, but when I was uh taking college classes, I was making fake IDs for college students.

Doug 20:39

And you were pretty young at the time. Yeah, I was in my early 20s.

Nick 20:43

Yeah, so we do sometimes young, dumb, foolish things to get some money. I I think what I was doing was beyond just young and dumb. Okay. I I knew it was illegal and I chose to do it anyway, and I own that a hundred percent. But you know, uh I I saw other people in college dabble in fake IDs and stuff. I did it for 13 years straight as a profession. Okay. So there's not, I can't, I can't pawn it off when I was young and stupid.

Doug 21:07

This is how you went out to eat all the time. Yeah. And had lots of money. Yeah. But on the other side, I mean, how do you feel about it now that you're here where you are? You wouldn't be here if you hadn't made those other early choices.

Nick 21:20

I know, and isn't that weird? And there's so many things in life that you can that you can say that about. Like this was a horrible experience, and yet the woe the road that I walked to get to where I am was horrible, and yet I walked it, and here I am, and I like where I am. Yeah.

Doug 21:35

You have a successful business that people really like, and you're helping others, and you're still helping others that are in the prison system by these talks that you're now doing. And I mean, I just think it's an incredible full circle event in life.

Nick 21:50

It's it's definitely odd to look back and wonder what in the world was I thinking. But I can't I can't expect my old self to have had the same. Life experiences and knowledge that I have now. Right. I I'd like to think at the time that I was thought I was doing the best that I could. In retrospect, I wasn't. Um, uh it's bizarre because I had at the time, I had probably a dozen friends who were police officers. And I think I was generally regarded as a pretty good guy. Um, I had you know a lot of close friends. There was a long list of things that I would not do. I wasn't robbing houses or things like that, but that doesn't make what I did do any less serious. Serious. Yeah. Right.

Doug 22:30

Um the law's the law.

Nick 22:32

Yeah.

Doug 22:32

Yeah.

Nick 22:32

I think you know, I'm I had good, conscientious parents who taught me to say please and thank you. A lot of people don't have that.

Doug 22:39

Yeah.

Nick 22:39

So there were some morality things that I certainly never would have been comfortable with based on the fact that I was raised not to do horrendous things. Um, it was just the money. And I think a lot of lack of confidence. I never knew that a person like me qualified to be very successful or have a business or have employees. Those were always things that someone better or smarter than me did.

Doug 23:03

You didn't know how to believe in yourself yet.

Nick 23:04

No, yeah, not at all. And I people I've people ask me, okay, where'd you grow up? But I my answer is always now. I experienced childhood around Harrisburg and State College, but I grew up in prison because I learned one, I that I can I can go through something like that and come out the other side without getting broken.

Doug 23:22

Yeah.

Nick 23:23

Um, I learned that there are things that I'm very good at that other people can benefit from. And moreover, I learned how important it is to have a strong community, be involved in that community, and to give back to other people. At its base level, every business owner, we're all dependent on everybody, each other and and the greater community that you're in. Right. Yeah. I don't have a flower far wheat farm, but I depend on someone else's hard work to provide those things for me. If we're selling a product, we depend on there being people around us to buy the product. Any skill that we have, we learned from somebody along the way. Even if we read it, someone wrote that book. Um, the value of community and reputation were the most important lessons that I learned in prison. And it would seem like in a horrible place, reputation would just be the toughest guy is the best. And that was not the case. Being dependable and keeping promises was priceless in there. Yeah. And I learned the value of that.

Doug 24:20

I have to wonder, too, once you uh exited prison, started this business, were there any other big breaks or mentors or moments that have helped you leading up to today?

Nick 24:35

More than I can possibly recall. Um I not a terribly religious person, and yet I wonder sometimes why things keep working. And if we don't attribute it to a higher power, I would like to think it was it's now because my intentions are in the right place. My goals are not all self-motivated. My goal is not to get rich. If that happens along the way, great. But my goal is to one, of course, I need to sustain myself, but I want to bring other people up as I do that. And if I'm not doing that, I feel like I'm failing. Because so much has been given to me by so many people that if I don't give back, I might just be the scumbag that some people used to think that I was. It's it's a it that is the debt that I'll always be paying, and I'm happy to pay it.

Doug 25:25

Helping others helps yourself at the most. Right. It really kind of grows the heart, so to speak. Definitely. It's therapeutic too. It is so therapeutic. I mean, it makes you feel so good to give, right? So much better. I mean, yeah, I still want a cookie here and there. By the way, how how are cookies and and like the health of your of your life? Are you like, do you eat the cookies? Do you avoid the cookies?

Nick 25:48

Oh my, I have eaten thousands and thousands of cookies.

Doug 25:51

Have you? Oh yes. You've made a couple fun videos saying, like, yeah, okay, day one, not eating cookies. Yeah. Okay, 20 minutes later, day one not eating cookies.

Nick 26:00

That was definitely life experience. Um I am a junk food junkie. Yeah. Um, sort of falling off of my old routine, but still pretty much a fitness guy. Uh-huh. Um, but ice cream is gonna is gonna happen. Cookies are gonna happen. Yeah, that that video was that was something else.

Doug 26:17

Have you ever done an ice cream sandwich at an event like with the cookies? No.

Nick 26:22

Um most of my events are in the summer.

Doug 26:24

Yeah, and it would be tricky, it would be hard. You need to do a collab with somebody that does ice cream. Right. Well, okay, so I put it out there.

Nick 26:31

I just took Penn State's ice cream class.

Doug 26:34

The short course.

Nick 26:35

Yes. Yes, and I want to, it would, it would destroy me if I tried to take on something else, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I did learn it, and I'm gonna try to take their longer class next year. Okay. Um, but I love ice cream. Oh my gosh. Until I took that class, I didn't know that there was a quantity of ice cream that I could eat that would be too much. I I found that part with that class. We just ate ice cream all day. But I do want to get into ice cream, but it's a whole lot, it's a lot more difficult regulatory, regulatory different issues, and it's some expensive equipment.

What's Ahead for Inside Out Cookie

Doug 27:04

Of course. And then like shipping and all the logistics around it are way different than the cookies I'm sure. Well, I would love to kind of bring us forward and ask. We're heading into, as we record, we're heading into spring and summer. Yep. Do you have anything on the horizon locally in terms of events or festivals here in the Pittsburgh area?

Nick 27:24

I've got some small ones. Um, I've got an arts fest on uh Shady Side. Um, my biggest one coming up is Little Italy Days, which is always a blast.

Doug 27:31

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Nick 27:32

It is a very hectic, high-energy show, and it's super fun. It seems to always rain on us like one day. We we hope it won't be on a Saturday, but um, that's my next big one coming up. That's in August.

Doug 27:42

Yeah.

Nick 27:43

Super fun.

Doug 27:44

And and the website's always open. People can always be getting cookies. But also, um, I did I notice that there are wholesale opportunities, or if you own a corporation and you wanted to buy cookies, there's there's like sort of other things there, right?

Nick 27:57

Yeah. So the the events are amazing, and I will never give them up, but it's difficult for me to manage the bakery all week and also be gone every weekend. That was fine for a few years. But I'm of course, yeah. Um, I decided that I wanted to move in a wholesale direction a couple of years ago, but that requires some big expensive equipment because on wholesale you might be making 20 cents a cookie. That's fine if you make 10,000 a day. But for a while there, the the most we ever made um until I got my new equipment was like 900. And that was a very long, hard day. All of the equipment needed to do that, I now have, which opens the whole other set of problems because now we can make as many cookies as fast as I want. So now I have to start pushing for the wholesale accounts that I wanted. We've got we've got quite a few.

Doug 28:41

Okay.

Nick 28:42

Um, I had some conversations with uh grocery stores a couple of years ago, but those conversations happened way too early. They were talking about they wanted to buy a pallet, we would need to be, you know, have this many. And I told Giant and I think Shop and Save no because I couldn't do what they were wanting to do. I can do that very easily now. We ship pallets all the time, but I have to reopen those conversations or make make new contacts, which is fine. Um, but I want to get into some grocery stores, I want to have more wholesale because we're not they're not weather dependent like the events are. We can have an awesome event coming up and then it rains the whole time and it's over. Um, that's hard. Definitely want to do a whole lot more wholesale. We do do corporate gifting, and then the e-comm is always around. I'm getting ready to do a lot more e-com because the capacity is better now. Yeah. For a long time, all the e-com that I did was people that found us at an event just reordering. And the e-comm was kind of difficult because it wasn't consistent. So if we got a huge influx of orders off of a viral reel or something, I had to do it myself and I was already underwater. Um, but I hired someone to manage the bakery, someone just to do online orders, and the the equipment can put out as much as much product as we need.

Doug 29:52

Wow. Yeah.

Nick 29:52

That's so good.

Doug 29:54

Yeah. Are there any new flavors or anything you can talk about?

Nick 29:59

Yeah. Okay. So the I just I bought a machine that stuffs the dough automatically. So we don't have to hand stuff anymore. That sounds like really impersonal. It's not not handmade anymore, but that machine can make the cookies so much better that we can do it by hand. They're all exactly the same. Consistency. And I can get more filling into a dough ball than I could before. So it's more efficient, so we make them faster, but instead of dropping the price, I upped the quality of the cookie. So now there's more, the filling is always more expensive than the dough. Okay. Now there's more filling inside. And I can put fillings in dough now that we physically couldn't do by hand. So the machine can put two different fillings inside of one dough ball. Those are the new flavors that I got that are gonna come out. I'll have some with a cheesecake filling and a jelly filling. Yes. Um, I've got one uh coming up that'll have more that'll have like this more, like kind of like a cream filling inside. Okay. That if we tried to do that by hand, it would just be everywhere.

Doug 30:53

Be a mess. Yeah.

Nick 30:54

That I'm finally excited about these cool new things again. Yeah. Um, this is exciting. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. That machine was intimidating to buy, but it's it's pretty neat.

Doug 31:04

Can I ask how many folks you are employing right now at your facility?

Nick 31:08

I've got four right now, and then there's a few people that do events, but they're more cash. They mostly independent. Yeah. Um, some buy wholesale and then just go do events on their own. Okay. So they're certainly not my employees. And I've got a few people that come in as needed. If we have a heavy, a heavy day or a heavy week, they'll come in now as well. Yeah. The halfway house people just kind of come and go. And if someone from there reaches out, I'll find a place for them no matter what.

Doug 31:32

So you're still providing opportunities when you can. Definitely. Okay. I love it. Well, Nick, I I've so enjoyed hearing the whole story, the business, but your backstory. Thank you for sharing all of that. Why don't we remind listeners, if you've now got them hungry for cookies, yeah, of your website, your social handles, where can they find you and where can they follow you?

Nick 31:54

Yeah. So the the social handles are at insideout cookie on Facebook and Instagram or at insideout cookie co. on TikTok. Somebody else already had inside outcookie. How dare them. I know. And they don't even use it. Uh insideoutcookie.com. Um, and it's cookie, not cookies.

Doug 32:11

Yeah. Um singular. Singular. All right. It's a good cookie, so it's okay. Yeah. Well, I'm excited for these new flavors. I will be looking forward to a double filling cooking. All right. Nick, I always have an ending question for our guests on the show. The name of the show is the Pittsburgh Dish. What's the best dish you've had to eat this past week?

Nick 32:40

This past week. So God, there's so many. So my favorite pizza is caliente here in Pittsburgh. Okay. When I was doing the home show, I ate I got pizza from there three times last week.

Doug 32:51

Nick is happy about that. He's been on the show.

Nick 32:54

Really? Yeah. Uh that one called Space Balls and one called uh Motor City Madness.

Doug 33:00

Motor City Madness, I don't think I've had. No? No. It's it's good. It's square, it's very unique. Okay. It's awesome. What are the toppings? Do you know?

Nick 33:08

It's uh like a hot honey.

Doug 33:10

Oh.

Nick 33:10

Um, and I I don't know if it's I think it's ricotta.

Strip District Vietnamese Pick Maiku

Doug 33:13

Oh yeah. Yeah, I like that combo. It's good. So good. Nick of Inside Out Cookie, thank you so much for sharing your story. And thanks for being on the Pittsburgh Dish. Thank you for having me. It's a privilege for me. Up next, if you appreciate a quality bon me sandwich, Ana of Anna Eats Pittsburgh shares a favorite spot. Hey Ana, on your travels, uh going out and exploring the region, is there any restaurant that has really hit your radar that you're like, mm, this is like a new favorite?

Ana 33:46

Yes. So it's funny. I was in the strip district and I posted a video about like a Steeler Sunday in the strip district. Or no, it's something else. I I'm always posting in the strip because it's one of my favorite areas.

Doug 33:58

Me too.

Ana 33:58

Yeah. But I went to a Vietnamese spot down there and I posted about it. And then in my comments, I had a follower of mine say, You really need to try this other Vietnamese place in the strip district. And they were spot on. Like it's really, really good. It's called Maiku, I believe that's how you pronounce it. Okay. It's closer to is that the 16th Street or 16th Street Bridge? Yeah, down near that smoothie bowl place. Oh, it's far down. You probably won't see it on your regular foot traffic in the strip, but now that I know about it, it's becoming one of my more regular spots in the strip district. New favorite banh mi from Maiku.

Doug 34:35

That's saying something.

Ana 34:36

Yes. I love a good banh mi, but it's all about the meat quality for me.

Doug 34:40

Yeah.

Ana 34:40

And their meat quality. It's there's no gristle to their pork or their chicken. And that's something that is really important to me. So Maiku in the strip district.

Doug 34:50

Oh.

Ana 34:50

Yeah.

Doug 34:50

You know, I feel like maybe I've been there. Did they have pho?

Ana 34:54

They do have pho.

Doug 34:55

I've actually been there for a year.

Ana 34:56

And their pho is fantastic too. Pho is like one of the best things that you can have. And theirs is top notch too.

Doug 35:02

All right. So go to Maiku in the Strip for your new favorite banh mi.

Ana 35:07

New favorite banh mi anywhere.

Doug 35:08

Great Vietnamese food.

Ana 35:09

Perfect. Yeah.

Fast Curry Recipe With Tamarind

Doug 35:10

Anna, thank you so much. Thank you. You can follow Ana on Instagram at Ana Eats PGH. Now, if you're short on time and still want a home cooked meal that's full of flavor, Priya and Glen Anar Gourmet Foods share one of their go-to dishes. Folks, when we were together last, we talked about your spice company, how you're bringing amazing Indian dishes to the home in such an easy way because you have these spice blends and a curry powder that help people do that and sort of take all of the effort out. I was wondering when you're cooking at home, is there a particular dish that is a go-to or a favorite of yours?

Priya 35:54

Absolutely. So one of my go-to dishes when I'm short on time is my potato and eggplant. Or you can use the same ingredients to make eggplant and beef curry. Okay. So it's either eggplant and potato or eggplant and beef. And um, this is my mom's authentic recipe that you use simple ingredients like curry powder salt, turmeric.

Doug 36:20

Okay.

Priya 36:21

And then the the kicker for this that really gives it that extra sort of tang is the tamarind. Tamarine is an ingredient that is used primarily in like South Indian cooking, and it's almost like a a little bit of a tangy flavor that just gives it that extra punch. Yes. And it just transforms the flavors of the curry. And it's super simple to make because literally you chop everything, put it in a bowl, and the only thing you really fry up is the onions and um the peppercorns. Okay. And then I put it in the pressure cooker and it's done quick. Oh. I only use a pressure cooker, obviously, if you're cooking the meat. Otherwise, you can, if it's just a plant and potatoes, you can put it in the stove. Yeah, in a pot. But it is quick and really, really flavorful.

Glen 37:07

Glen, is this one of your favorites? It really is. And our son loves it as well. It's our go-to. Is he a picky eater?

Priya 37:14

Oh, yeah. He doesn't eat all the spice blends?

Glen 37:16

Oh, he eats everything. Oh, he does.

Priya 37:18

He he eats has except for the fish, the seafood curry, which Glen absolutely loves. He doesn't care for fish. So he's, you know, and that dish is really good because it's made with coconut milk. So it's almost like a French, spicy French boulevard sauce that you can even eat with the crusty, crusty French bread.

Doug 37:36

Well, now you're giving us a twofer. That's right. But the go-to that we were talking about today is a potato and eggplant or eggplant and beef dish. Yes. And this is a curry.

Priya 37:46

It's a curry. It's simple to make. The recipes on our website, so you can just look it up.

Doug 37:51

Well, we'll link to that for our listeners. Yeah. Priya, Glen, thanks so much.

Priya 37:56

And thanks for being on The Pittsburgh Dish.

Doug 37:58

Thank you for having us. You can find more products and recipes from Priya and Glen at their website at anargourmetfoods.com. If you enjoyed the show, consider buying us a coffee for this episode or supporting the show monthly. You can find links to those options at the bottom of our show description. And if you want to follow my own food adventures, you can find me on social media at DougCooking. That's our show for this week. Thanks again to all of our guests and contributors, and to Kevin Solecki of Carnegie Accordion Company for providing the music to our show. We'll be back again next week with another fresh episode. Stay tuned.