When you open the bottle and you drink the wine, it speaks for itself. Is it, you know, a wine that's made for food? Yes. Those types of wines are tend to be more rustic or have a little bit more body. Are there wines that are just pure out hedonistic pleasure?
Sure. There's wines like that that maybe from California that are more cocktail wines or wines that are just big jammy fruit bombs. And those I think appeal to certain group of people as well. I think the wines that Barber House specializes in is more of these food-friendly, you know, rustic style, um, biodynamic, organic wines that tend to be a bit more earthy, come from someplace. So you can almost taste the terroir.
You can almost feel this guy, this sense era was grown in this slatey rocky soil. And so to me, that's the exciting part that the wine feels like it comes from someplace. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network coming to you live from approximately 12 to 1245 every Tuesday. Uh it's another rainy, slushy day here in Brooklyn. I'm in the studio at Roberta's Pizzeria with Nastasha De Hammer Lopez.
We're here to answer all of your cooking related questions, technical and not. So if you can, please give us a holler at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Okay, so uh we really we uh we had a question that I forgot to answer last time, so I might as well uh might as well get into it. It's it's about gelatin.
And the question is uh basically, well, what what the heck? What's what's what's the difference between all the different gelatins there are? Uh what's the difference between fish gelatin and uh you know animal based regular, you know, I guess red, you know, meat, regular meat-based animal gelatin. Uh what's the difference between the different grades, the bronze, the the gold, the silver, and the platinum. Well, here's the deal.
So uh gelatins in the industry are rated on something called bloom strength. And uh bloom strength has nothing to do with uh you know a flower blooming or even the fact that uh gelatin, you know, uh swells up when you put it in water. It has to do with a dude named Bloom, who uh in the early 20th centuries came up with a technique for measuring the strength of gels and uh gelatin gels. And it's it's uh really dumb, simple technique. You just take a uh uh a you know a plunger of a particular size and you push it into the surface of uh gelatin that's being cured uh very accurately.
I'll I'll I'll give you the exact numbers in case you want to run your own bloom tests. It's a 6.67% gelatin solution that is tempered for 17 to 18 hours at 10 degrees Celsius, and they measure uh how much weight in grams it takes to uh push a uh half inch diameter plunger four millimeters into the surface of the of the gelatin. Why why would they specify part of it in inches and part of it in millimeters? Who knows? Makes no dang sense, right?
No sense. And it it's really a s you know, a simple little thing. And most most industrial, by the way, old school industrial measurements like this are quite quite simple. Like they used it, they and they still measure viscosity of a lot of things by literally like building a trough with a ruler in it, dumping some crap into it and seeing how far that stuff runs along the trough before it stops. I mean, this is the kind of this is the kind of like bonehead test, but it makes everything standardized because they need to be able to standardize gelatin for various different uh applications.
So uh gelatins come in a in a wide range then, in sheet gelatin, bronze gelatin, uh the the bronze grade is gonna be about 125 to 155 uh bloom. So it's fairly soft, right? Whereas silver is this is from an eagle thread, by the way, so you know, I shouldn't take it without saying it's it from an eagle thread. Uh s silver gelatin is about 160. Uh gold is at like 190 to 220, and platinum is 235 to 265.
So that's the highest uh bloom strength. I would bet most of us use something in the uh in the gold in the gold range, right? Now, uh bloom strength, interestingly, uh, has nothing necessarily to do with how the gel is going to perform in a particular application, like for instance, gelatin clarification. It's just a measure of how strong a particular gel concentration is as a gel. It doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna make better marshmallows, because gelatin isn't just used as a gelling agent, it's used as a whipping agent, it's used uh as an emulsifier because it's made of proteins.
The way gelatin is made is you take any any form of uh of collagen, connective tissue, all of our connective tissue, most of it, is uh collagen, right? And collagen is a triple helix uh in each one of those uh of proteins, and each one of those helixes, when it's uh denatured properly, turns into gelatin. That's how braised uh products work, right? Uh, you know, you braze until the collagen breaks down and turns into gelatin, which makes the texture delicious and whatnot and whatnot. So animal-based uh uh gelatins come, well, you would guess from animals.
A lot of it is from skin, like pig skin, or from bones. When they're doing bones, they they take and they wash the bones in acid for a long time to leach out all the calcium. It leaves a spongy, nasty bone mass, which they then wash uh dry, well neutralize, dry, grind up, and then they they they then uh or the skins or anything else, they take then that raw material, and they usually treat it either with an acid or with with a base, and they get there's two different kinds of gelatin depending on whether they do that. And that uh further kind of um breaks the cross links between this triple helix of proteins, right? Makes it easier for them to extract the gelatin, and then they they uh take and they they heat it in hot water and they extract uh like three, four or five times different gels of different qualities.
The first water is the highest strength, uh highest quality gel. And the farther down the extraction line you are, the kind of the crappier your your gel is. But that's how they get uh all the gel out and how they get gels of various different strengths. Um part of the question was uh what's the difference between the powder gel and a sheet gel? And the answer is nothing going into it, right?
A sheet gel is uh you take the gel the gelatin solution that you you get out of you know your processed product and you dehydrate it and you spread it into a sheet and let it dry and cut it and put it in a box. Whereas powder gelatin, they extrude into noodles, those noodles are dried out and then uh pulverized in a mill, and then that's the subsequent gel powder. But there's no inherent difference between powder gel, uh powder gelatin and um and uh and sheet gelatin. Now, there is a major difference between fish gelatins and uh like you know, pig or or uh or cow gelatin. There's a you're probably not gonna run into poultry gelatin unless you you know process your own, or you're you're doing like some sort of a uh you know uh chicken skin soup and you you get the gelatin out of it.
But um, but pig and and mammal skin gelatins uh are uh pig and sorry, cow uh gelatins are uh fairly you know high strength. This is the one we're we're normally used to using. Fish gelatins can come from one of two sources. Cold water fish make a really crappy gelatin, it barely gels at all. Uh really just it's crap.
I mean, it really is horrible. Uh, they're working on it, Nastasha. Did you know that? No. They they're working on it because there are people who would like to have a fish-based gelatin that works.
Now, uh, and it has to do with the amino acid makeup of uh of the of the proteins of the connective tissue in in the cold water fish. It's just they suck. What do you want? You know what I mean? Warm water fish, on the other hand, can make uh gel strength that is uh okay, but the problem is is that fish gelatin tends to melt at a lower temperature.
So, you know, it it's a lot harder to work with uh a fish-based gelatin and to get a good result. I've you know, I tend to not use it. I I can I kind of uh stay away from it. We tend to use uh sheet gelatin uh for some applications and powdered gelatin for other applications, and uh it's just a matter of which box comes into my hand first, frankly. But uh you shouldn't switch uh bloom strengths uh, you know, or basically the strengths of your gels between different recipes because your results may differ.
How's that? That was good. Too much of the right amount? The right amount. The right amount, thank you.
You know, it's always nice to have uh at least one booster in your corner. So uh now uh read loyal readers of the blog, uh, if we have any left, because we've only put like we put up like one post every eight years at this point. We're gonna we're gonna get better. We have some cool stuff coming, like the centerfuge video I promised you, uh and a bunch of other uh stuff. But uh I'll give you an idea of stuff we've been working on.
Um about a year ago, I think. A year? No, less than that. Are you talking about the first thing? Yeah, yeah.
No, eight months, nine months. All right, so Cornell University has this project called Fab at home. And basically it's a three-dimensional uh printer, uh, and they gave us one a while back, and it's to basically they want us to print food with uh with this 3D printer. Now, uh, you know, what is it really? It's a syringe.
So that the basically it's a syringe that you fill with paste, any kind of paste, like uh, I don't know, gel paste, goop, meat paste, goop. I mean, it's basically that the the main criteria is that you get a pasty goop, right? Uh but they they they have a new one. Apparently we can now extrude pasta doughs and and masa, which we're gonna work on today, which sounds interesting because cookies. Cookies, they can do cookies.
Um so here's the thing, right? Uh it's basically a three-dimensional, it's basically it just very accurately controls the X, Y, and Z axis. It's hooked into a computer, and they accurately control how fast the goop is sprayed out of the syringe. And they have multiple syringes, so you can use different materials. Yada yada yah.
Fantastic, right? Now, uh they want us to print food with it. Now, here's the here's the main deal. And CNN, by the way, some money show. Do you know what it's called?
CNN Money. Well, that's easy. CNN Money. They're coming to the school today, and uh our buddy, you know, uh Senor Lipton from uh from uh Cornell is here, and we're gonna shoot this thing with it with the television people today. But they have the classic kind of what I think that CNN does, awful idea.
I mean horrible, horrible idea that someday you are gonna go home, push a button, and your meal is gonna be printed for you. God, I hope not. You know what I mean? It's just it's just a terrible, terrible idea. And and so, and when I say this to people, they're like, Yeah, but but that's just because the technology's not right.
I'm like, no, this is a conceptually horrible idea that we would that we would like grind all of our raw ingredients into uh a Pablum like paste and extrude them into various different shapes and call that a meal goes against basically everything I think is is good about the world. Well, you know, yeah, yeah. But they didn't seem to they weren't listening when I was saying that, right? They that kind of went over their head. Yeah.
The whole like I think it's evil. Yes, yeah. So right. Now, there are some fantastic applications for the 3D printer. Uh not my applications, but you know, good applications.
For instance, you have a kid's birthday. This thing is like the the wizard icing printing machine of all time. This thing can uh print a three-dimensional uh El Santo wrestling uh like you know, a Martian on top of a cupcake, like without breaking a sweat, right? So for things like kids' birthday parties, where you want to print out, you know, uh one you know cake with the kid's face on it, and then or maybe the kid's face with a dog trying to bite his face off, something like that. Anything like that, anything you've got a model of, you can you can print out onto a cupcake because icing is a straight up awesome paste printing material, right?
It's also great if you know if you want to make things out of epoxy or your kids want to make things out of silicone rubber, that's great. We're talking food only, right? Yeah. So icing is great. You can print cookies in the shape of uh, I don't know, like space shuttles, donkeys, whatever.
You know what I mean? You could you can print whatever great, great application. Not my application. For me, the you know, I'm obviously not interested in the application that I think is uh, you know, uh one of the roots of all evil thinking in uh the future of food, that we're all gonna live like the Jetsons uh, you know, and have our food in pill form. I mean, that's uh, you know, uh it's God help us if that happens.
But uh, you know, I'm waiting for the the killer application where we actually produce a new and delicious food with this printer that uh can't be made any other way. And that's basically why you haven't seen uh a lot of work uh from us out of it because we haven't come up with that killer application. But they you know, there is this new uh technique that we're hopefully gonna try out today where you basically you can print um what looks like uh um you know those like uh how do you describe these, Nastasha? Like you know the squidgy mats that you walk on that are made out of like plastic loopy doodles? Or those flip flops.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, the squidgy doodle flip-flops. What's the name of the company? Sanook S-A-N-U-K. Yeah, you know, Nastasha knows everything about flip-flops, and I don't because I find them a horror.
Like the idea of my heels slipping around and cooking. Yeah, anyway. I hate flip-flops. If any of you, no offense if you own a flip-flop corporation, but you know, uh, you'd sooner see me dead than in a pair of flip-flops. That's just it.
You know what I mean? Like, I hate them. I hate everything about them, the noise when they're wet. I mean, everything awful. Like something between my toes.
Horrible. Anyway, um, so uh how'd we get on? Oh, yeah. So the material is like that like squidgy material and flip-flops, but he can print it out of any kind of food. So uh we're gonna take MASA dough, which is nictimalized corn, uh, ground into a fine paste.
We're gonna try to print this uh basically spongy matte like surface out of the masa and then fry it to get kind of a new snack chip texture. That's gonna be cool, right? Mm-hmm. We're also gonna try to print out some extruded uh some some snacks that uh you know that that can be that be puffed later. I mean the other main problem with with this 3D printing is it's inherently a prototype application, right?
So, yes, I can make one space shuttle out of scallop paste, which is what we did the last time we printed something out. But if I really wanted to make space shuttle-shaped scallop uh paste nuggets, right, I would uh make a silicone mold that had like 20 or 30 space shuttles in it, and then I would just, you know, strike mold everything out with an offset spatula and call it call it a day. You know, that I wouldn't I wouldn't bother printing each one because that's a that's a nightmare. So, you know, these are the basic problems with a 3D printer. But if you have any ideas, please call them in ASAP because we're gonna talk to the CNN people today, and there's nothing I'd like more than to say one of our listeners or readers just came up with the killer app.
Alright. Alright, let's take a break. Come back, call in all your questions too. 718 497 2128. That's 718 497 2128 cooking issues.
How you feel, brother? Feeling good. You feel good? So much bone brother. How do you feel, mate?
I'll feel all right. I don't want all people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Sure getting down. Look at him.
We're gonna have a bunk good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We gotta take you high.
Alright. Yeah, let's go on. We gotta take you high. Now I want everybody. Welcome back to Cooking Issues.
Call in all of your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Coming to you live from Brooklyn. Alright, so uh I think we should talk about another project we're working on, not strictly cooking uh related, but generally food related, and that's the uh the food museum. As uh some of you might know, uh the project that I was involved in before I uh joined the French culinary team was to try and start a food museum.
And this isn't necessarily a place where well, it isn't a place where you just go look at shellacked pieces of bread and muse over how awesome the food of the past was. I mean, I I this is gonna be a place where you go and you uh you eat, you taste, uh, you learn, you see, you touch. Because I really find that uh not that you shouldn't listen to food radio, uh, but I find that like you know, really if you want to learn about food, you really you have to eat it, you have to see it, you have to touch it, you have to smell it. I mean, that's the that's what food is, you know. I mean, I love reading, uh, you know, I love listening, you know, to ideas, but really, you know, you gotta get out there and taste.
Uh that's what you know, Jeffrey Steingart has that, that's one of his big gripes uh about you know, people uh you know who are in the food business, is they want to be in the food business, they want to write about it, but they simply haven't eaten enough. So his whenever you if you any of you out there are ever gonna approach Jeffrey Steingarden, the uh food writer at Vogue, you know, uh fr friend of ours, uh if you're ever gonna approach him and say that you're interested in getting uh started in the food business or specifically in food writing, please, please have a long list of places you have gone and things you have eaten and avoid saying that X, Y or Z is the best uh like avoid saying things like that's the best hamburger, because he's like, Whoa, so you've eaten every hamburger on Earth. I mean, like I'm just telling you, should you ever approach Jeffrey Steingarden uh to ask him for advice, that is my advice to you. Anyway, uh and I think he's he's down with the with the food museum. He's given us he's given us uh things in the past.
So anyway, so this is a food museum, and the idea is to have it in in New York. When when we first came up with the idea, uh there wasn't really uh there weren't any food museums uh of the type we were talking about. I mean, there was Copia in um in Napa, which is closed, unfortunately. Um there's a New York food museum, which is about the history of New York food, but it's a museum that's not meant to have a location. Uh there's now the Museum of Southern Food, um, which you know, I haven't been down there, but you know uh but anyway, so the idea is to start one in in New York.
And uh Patrick, uh, you know, the uh the jefe of Heritage Foods uh and the the great leader of this uh radio network um like the idea and say, well, let's start this project, this project up again. And so that's why I'm here talking about it. Today we're gonna have a fundraiser on March 27th, uh, which is uh a Sunday yeah uh and it's gonna be held at Del Posto pretty badass I can say that here right yeah badass yeah pretty badass uh you know uh our friend uh Mark Ladner uh graciously agreed to let us have the fundraiser there uh he'll be cooking we haven't confirmed um all the other chefs yet but it's gonna be big anyway uh we're looking to 200 people something like that two ten is the limit two ten is the limit and if you have any questions about it should you wish to go to this fundraiser uh you can email uh Nastasha N Lopez at French Culinary.com. That's n Lopez at French Culinary.com I'll tell you what I'll be making some uh cocktails will you will I not? Okay.
Well well maybe Nastasha doesn't want me to I'm gonna strong basically here's what's gonna happen. I'm gonna strong arm and and beat all of my friends and family into submission to work on this damn thing. So I mean they don't they don't even know about it yet but I'm gonna beat on Dave Chang until he says yes. I'm gonna beat on Wiley until he says yes. I'm gonna beat on Dave Wondrich till he says yes uh to make cocktails.
So uh if if Audrey's in town I'll beat on her. You know what I mean? It's like this it's gonna be like a full force beat down to try and get as much of the food world uh involved uh well at least our friends in the food world involved in uh I'm gonna give Johnny a beat down Johnny is in I'm gonna give him a beat down. Anyway, so um anyway so that's that's gonna be that's what we're working on uh something that's working on behind the scenes. Another thing we've been working on behind the scenes is our raw food challenge which okay listen listen not a Welcher.
I don't want anyone out there to call me a Welcher, but I have to fly to Boca Raton during the week I was supposed to do the raw food uh thing, and that conference that the uh the event that I'm going to involves cooking. Uh and since I will not uh make anything ever that I don't taste before it goes out, I cannot eat raw food during that week. So Nastasha is busy as we speak, rescheduling for one of the first two weeks in February to do the raw food uh extravaganza. But I'll give you some lowdown about what we've tested so far. Bought myself an excalibur dehydrator, right?
Which was uh, you know, it's an awesome dehydrator. Uh unfortunately in my house there's no place to to put it, so it's like, you know, up like in the ceiling on top of my printer in a cabinet that can only be accessed on the tallest chair we have, right? That's life. Right. Uh I have I I literally I use my iPhone in camera mode to look and see what the knob is set to, so that I can set the knob.
Even at home I'm ghetto. To school, I'm ghetto, at home I'm ghetto, it's always ghetto. Anyway, so um I mean it's not really, I mean, it's an awesome dehydrator. It's just for some reason I have all this great equipment and I managed to make it look stupid by the way I set it up and the horrible conditions I set it up in. That's the story of my life.
Something really nice in a pile of filth. That's that's my life in a nutshell, right? Yeah. Something nice in a pile of filth. Anyway, so uh working on uh with the stuff with the dehydrator, um I had Nastasha make a series of sprouts because apparently raw vegan food involves uh a lot of sprouting for various reasons.
One, it helps uh grains and things be more easily broken down because as a grain sprouts, uh enzymes go to work, and I guess raw food's all about enzymes anyway. Uh start breaking down some of the starches, making them more uh digestible so that you can uh eat them raw. Uh now, uh Nastasha, how many different things did you sprout? Eight. Eight.
So we did mung beans. They didn't look like any mung bean sprouts I've ever had. Like maybe we need to grow them better. You know, I like a mung bean sprout. Like that's the one sprout where I can I will stand up in a hallway and say, hey, you know what, mung bean sprout?
You are a good sprout. That is a good sprout among bean sprout, not these. No. But other people seem to enjoy them, right? Did oat oat groats, which Nastasha for some reason thought was oat grout.
I don't know why I don't know why you would grout your your tiles with oats, but anyway, oat groats. Apparently she didn't grow up singing the uh oats pea beans and barley groats song. No. Yeah, anyway. Uh so at Zuki beans, uh we did what else do we do?
We did lentils. Some of these, by the way, you shouldn't eat raw because they're kind of poisonous. Black-eyed peas, uh, what else? What else do we do? Rye berries.
No, we didn't get to do the rye. Something berries. Wheat berries. Wheat berries. All right.
Uh wheat berries were not uh were not awful. Right. No, I think that was the only one we the mung berries weren't that. Oh, and we made that stuff rejuvelac, which for those of you that don't know or care, rejuvilac is, you know, you take wheat berries, you let them sprout, and then you s you let them sit in in water to kind of ferment a little bit, and they use that as a Kickstarter for different things. Let me just say that uh um all these sprouts tasted like poison to me.
With the exception of the wheat, and I'm not saying this, look, it this is this is good and bad, right? One, I'm not saying that they were bad, because one chef was like, hey, I tasted your sprouts, those are pretty good. I'm like, really? Because to me they tasted like poison. Am I wrong about this?
Yeah, like you just sprayed your grass front lawn with poison. Yeah. Poison. Anyway, uh now, but but uh it was good that I had a chef who likes sprouts taste them and say that they were okay because now I know that I just would prefer not to use those things. The wheat sprouts were okay.
Yeah, you can use the wheat sprouts. So that's something I'm gonna strike off my list. There's not gonna be any sort of like spur like you know I like the rejuvelac. Yeah, the rejuvilac was good. So the rejuvelac that's like slightly fermented wheat stuff is is good.
That's good. I want to see if I can make a raw version of a raw a rye rejuvelac that we can then almost make a kvas out of, which is you know, kvas is like you know, the uh the eastern European Russian fermented uh bread beverage. It's usually made with bread, which is cooked, which means you can't do it, but I want to see if you can do it with just something sprouted. Uh I'm also interested, I don't have time, but I'm interested in trying to work with a raw beer that might be it might be interesting. But anyway, so uh the sprouts taste bad, which means I have to think of something else to do because I didn't like them.
We tried another bunch of recipes for uh uh I don't want anyone to get mad. I'm just tasting this, and this is like deciding what I'm gonna eat for this week. We made a bunch of nut cheeses. I don't know why the heck they're called cheeses. They don't taste like cheese.
I wasn't there. You didn't taste any of those? It's like basically nuts mixed with rejuvalc and or uh and or orange juice and or you know, and some other stuff, and it into like a mousy paste, and they're used, I guess, as a kind of a cottage cheese replacement in vegan cheese. But you know what they the problem with them is fundamentally is I really like cheese a lot. Cheese to me has a specific texture and taste, which these don't have.
I mean, like, could you make a delicious raw nut mousse? Yeah. Yeah, not this. I'm not gonna I was like, no. We did do an interesting thing where we mixed, we soaked a bunch of nuts because you have to uh soak some of these nuts when they're raw because they haven't been roasted and there's stuff in them you want to get out.
So we soaked uh macadamias, pistachios, uh sunflower. Uh we didn't have any raw cashews left in the house. We didn't do that. So sunflower seeds, uh shelled, thank God, uh, and almonds all raw. Uh we we uh I put them through a champion juicer, uh, and then after they were soaked, and then we took the paste uh and we squeezed it out, and that actually was really good.
It had a really good texture, the oil separated out, and we were able to make little balls that had actually a really good texture. So that will be it's an expensive dish because it had all those nuts and soaked and everything, but you know, that will will probably just seem really expensive and a lot of work, unnecessary work. It's just eat. Yeah, well, now you know it's not unnecessary if the goal is to eat raw. I mean, that the my main problem so far is is that you know I can it's it it does take a lot of pre work to do the the raw the raw food thing.
And in our space, we need space. But I mean I can do it, I do it at home, it's not the issue. The issue is is it takes a a lot of work to do it right. Now I'm thinking, now look, let's say you actually ate raw food. Like this is what you did.
You ate raw food, right? Who has this level of time to devote to always being three days out? Now I'm sure some of these things become staples. You always have sprouts in your fridge, you always have rejuvenaca brewing, you always have, you know, whatever, whatever cultures are going and you get it to go, you know what I mean? But uh in the absence of that, I mean you'd probably l like you know, like the everyone's image of what raw food people eat, which is the sitting around eating carrots all day.
I mean, I could see how you would devolve into that because it's easier. It's it's a heck of a lot easier. You know what I mean? Like these raw food restaurants have to jump through some serious, serious hoops to kind of do the things that they do. Now, the last great experiment, I'm hoping this works really, really well, is the uh marination of vegetable partial dehydration to simulate kind of a roasted flavor.
Although I don't even know why you'd have to call it roasted, it's just we can't we say it makes a nice texture out of it. So we'll play with some mushrooms, uh, we'll play with some other things. But barring that, I'm just gonna have to do something like r radically ignore all of the raw food advice that I've gotten. Although, like I said, when I ate at Sarma's restaurant, Sarma Mel and Gaia is a pure food, you know, I liked a good deal of what was put out. You know, so it's not like it can't be done, but I mean I we have to think of our own way of doing it, something that's good.
So we're gonna use a rotovap. I'm gonna make uh some low temperature distillates, make all of you uh raw food people out there totally jealous because I'm gonna be drinking sweet, sweet booze that's never been heated, uh uh distilled illegally in my roto vap, right? Um and uh when what else do you want? We can do reductions also low temperature. So we'll be able to do uh fruit reductions that are totally low temp.
That's gonna be awesome. We can use enzymes, uh we can use our our pectinase enzymes to break things down to do clarifications. We're gonna make some bang up sauces uh with that kind of stuff. I'm extremely interested in trying to get some transglutaminase that doesn't have maltodextrin, because unfortunately that's been cooked, and doesn't have uh casein because that's not vegan, or gelatin because that's not obviously not vegan, uh, to see whether or not we can strengthen uh nut nut paste um and other other you know suspensions with proteins in them in the absence of heat. Uh I think that could be an interesting uh test, so I'm gonna try and run that.
And that shouldn't be uh you know, that shouldn't be a problem for the vegans, right? No. I mean it's an enzyme. Like for raw vegans, it's an enzyme, and it's not animal based, it's microbial based fermentation, so it it shouldn't be a problem. So that's our raw food progress.
We welcome any sort of advice. Uh, you know, we've read uh Matthew Kenny's books, we've read uh Sarma's books, we've read uh who's that guy that you really like. Well, there's this guy, I don't know him, but he's got the craziest pictures in his cookbook. His name is you think it's Juliano or Juliano? Probably Juliano.
Juliano? Yeah. So we have these uh these books. We have uh Trotter Trotter, what's the name of the woman working with Trotter? Her raw raw.
And the problem is like like the and and these cookbooks are good. Right. They're good. I mean they really are. They're they're well done.
It's just like, you know, some of the raw ingredients I have issues with, like sprouts, I just detest them. Uh I really do. I wish I could like them. I've never liked them growing up, especially alfalfa sprouts. I can't think of anything I'd less rather have caught in my teeth than alfalfa sprouts.
I think the problem is is that even like people who like people who not raw food people, but any any people. People like pea shoots, right? Most people like pea shoots. Guess who doesn't like pea shoots? You.
Yeah. I mean, I'll eat them. They're not vile, but uh, that kind of raw, starchy taste, I'm averse to. And so since that is inherent in almost every sprout. I like pea shoots.
I remember Brooks put them in a dessert with strawberry ice cream. Brooks is the pastry chef of Del Posto, one of our favorite pastry chefs. Yeah, I'm sure it's I mean look, everyone in the world likes it except for me. So I'm not saying that you know, I'm right here. I'm clearly wrong.
Clearly, pea shoots are delicious, and uh, you know, I find them merely, you know, not awful. You know, uh, but it's that starchy sweet taste that uh I'm not really down with. Anyway, let's go to our second commercial break and come back. Still time to call in two 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128 cooking.
You feel good? So much bone brother. I feel bellows! We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time.
We're gonna have a bump good time. We gotta take your high. We gotta take the high brother. Yeah. Now I won't have a body.
And then I wanna wave you and let's go and do it every day. Now alright. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Uh 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.
Coming to you from rainy slushy Brooklyn. Okay. Uh, so uh, interesting little story. We were on uh You were on you well, yeah, you were in the studio audience. Uh at the Martha Stewart show.
Uh what was that? Like maybe two months ago? Mm-hmm. Anyway, uh Nastasha never lets me uh forget it because I was supposed to complete three cocktails. Then it was cut down to two.
Jesus, you know, look. So Nastash's like, you only made it through three quarters of the cocktail. You're an idiot. You're a moron. Why couldn't you make it through it?
You're useless. Anyway, my point is is that most of the time when you do demos, the person you're demoing in front of is basically just there kind of reacting. Whereas when Martha Stewart is there with the demo with you, Martha Stewart asks you questions that relate to how things work, and you don't just tell Martha Stewart, she has you met your wife. Not on air. I thought she asked how you met your wife.
What? And it completely stuck to you. Well, that's easy. I met my wife in college. Stop making the cocktail.
Yeah, Nastasha's like, keep plowing through it. Crap on Martha. Who does she think she is to ask you a question about cooking? For real. Anyway, uh, so anyway, so I didn't make it through uh all of the steps that I was supposed to make it through on the program.
I made it Nastash's right. I made it about three quarters of the way through uh gin and tonic. I was able to show uh Martha the uh the liquid nitrogen trick of pulverizing uh grapefruit uh pips and blood orange pips into their individual, not really pips, pips or seeds, you know, the fruit, the vesicles, the juice vesicles, pulverize them into individual uh things so that they float around and look pretty. And I knew Martha would love that because you know, if there's anyone in the world that likes a pastel color, it's Martha Stewart, right? So here's what happens.
At the at the end of the show, Martha's like, yeah, that's great. I'm figuring she's you know blowing shunshine up my you know what, and uh they have and she's like, that's great. Yeah, I'm like, hey, well, you know, if you're ever interested in any of this stuff, and I demonstrated a centrifuge clarifying uh lime juice and a centrifuge using a combination of agar, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Centerfuge. Uh so uh blah, blah, blah.
So and part of the segment was kind of what an eBay ninja I am, and how I was able to get my centrifuge for a hundred dollars on eBay because they I forget that one was because they spelled it like like No, no, no. That one was because Oh, the that one was the the dead fuse. I had a blown fuse in it. Uh the other one I got was because they spelled it s like centrofuge. You know, and I uh I j by the way, eBay friends out there, I just bought a hundred and sixty liter liquid nitrogen duter doer used, but retail value, brand new, two thousand dollars, and uh eBay value ten one thousand to twelve hundred dollars in that range for like three hundred bucks because they spelled nitrogen wrong.
Hello. I feel a little bit guilty, actually, frankly, taking advantage of people who spell nitrogen wrong. No way survival of the fittest. Wow. And that's why we call her the hammer, folks.
You don't get to see it very often, but that's why they call her the hammer. Anyway, so uh I'm like, you know, Martha, you know, if you ever need anything with this tech stuff, I figure she's not gonna ask me because Grant Aiken's from a liney is right there. Grant's coming on the show, by the way, in uh Spring. Spring, but 'cause he has a new book coming out that I actually have the galleys of. It's a you know kind of a more of a memoir, not a cookbook, more of a memoir.
But uh coming on the show, I guess March or something like that, so looking forward to that. Maybe we can get Mirville nominees out sometime. Yeah. His book's coming out soon. Yeah.
Well maybe we can get McGee next week. Is he in in town on Tuesday? Anyway, we'll get maybe we'll get you some good guess. Anyway, uh because we haven't gotten a guess in like eight billion years, but we'll get you some good guess. Anyway, what the hell was I talking about?
Oh yeah. Martha. So Martha is sitting there uh and I'm like figuring she's not gonna ask me for anything. And the next day her uh the assistant calls, her assistant calls and says, Hey, Martha wants a centrifuge. I'm like, Really?
Yeah, like for the show? She's like, No, for her house. I'm like, all right, what's your budget? And Martha is so kind of love the fact that I'm this kind of scrounging, you know, person who glues everything together with duct tape and bubblegum. Quality and filth.
Quality and filth. Uh that she's like, I don't know, three hundred bucks? I'm like, what? This is something I swear that if you want to buy one that is uh in working condition, that's good, that you trust with your with your family, let's say, right? That's a twelve hundred dollar that's a twelve hundred to fifteen hundred dollar problem, right?
New, we're talking a seven thousand dollar to ten thousand dollar pr uh problem. Wiley Dufrein just had his got his new center futures doing some interesting stuff actually. Wiley called me and says that like he's and uh now I kick myself, he's churning butter in it. That's pretty cool. That's cool.
That's cool. I shouldn't maybe have said that on the air. He's churning butter with it. Anyway, so the uh um so she's like three hundred bucks because she wants to get like the coolest bargain. She wants to be part of the the eBay bargain thing.
I was like, you realize for three hundred dollars, I'm gonna have to buy a broken one and pray I can fix it and that it hasn't been, you know, dipped in too much feces that I can't clean off. So these are all have all sorts of nasty blood and blah blah blah. I mean they're all they're hardcore, right? So uh she's like uh that's okay, I can wait. So eventually we did f yeah, right.
So we did find one, thing was was dead totally. Yeah, and but you know, look, again like anything else with eBay, it's the uh it's I was reading the description to see kind of what was wrong with it, like how it was broken, and then kind of praying that I can fix it. And I determined that because the motor could spin freely and the tachometer still worked and everything powered up, that if I was lucky, right, it was a problem either with a wire leading to the motor, that would be the best. Or it was uh a problem with the actual uh brushes, because these are brush and mo motors, so there's carbon brushes that are in it that uh basically uh transfer the the uh you know electricity from the winding uh out you know back to the thing and so these go bad after a while, and if someone's a jerk and they haven't replaced them, then everything goes south and the machine stops working. Well, lo and behold, it was the brushes.
So uh, you know, you bought a center fuge for under three hundred bucks. I think we paid two. Two something, it was three fifty altogether. With shipping and everything, right? And refrigeration works great.
Replace the brushes. That was a six dollar, no, sixteen after I could buy two sets of brushes. Sixteen dollar problem. And boom, Martha's got a centrifuge. So as soon as she gets her uh self back in the country, uh Martha Stewart's gonna be rocking with the cooking issues uh she'd love to do that.
She's gonna churn some butter, she's gonna we're gonna give her a starter kit of enzymes. Really? Well, why not? She's Martha Stewart. You know what I mean?
I guarantee you, Martha Stewart's got some fancy fruit, right? That she can clarify in that centrifuge. So that's our first celebrity hookup where we're hooking a celebrity up with some high tech equipment, and that's cooking issues for this week with Martha Stewart Centerfuge. Join us next week for cooking issues.
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