Hey, what's up? This is John Norris, and you're listening to the Heritage Radio Network. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from actually we're starting on time today, 12. Yeah.
Yeah. To about 1245. Actually, next week might be a problem. Go into Germany next week. Last time I was in Germany, we did cooking issues live from uh a street corner in Germany.
You wanna you want to see whether we can do uh the live German cooking issues again? Yeah, more off the wall than a street corner. Well, I mean like look, honestly, if I'm gonna do it, I probably have to do it in the hotel with Skype. Otherwise, I mean like we were just lucky that my phone didn't get cut out or I didn't get beat over the head by some sort of angry uh you know ex East German. Uh last time I did it, but uh we love the the angry ex East Germans, by the way, so no offense.
Calling all of your cooking questions to 7184972128, that's 718497 2128. So Stas, uh last week on the show we had uh our friend Ariel from UC Davis and Brooks Headley, the the the pastry chef that more people need to know about from Del Posto restaurant. Uh he got a call or a question in uh asking about the seven course vegan tasting menu that they do at Del Posto. Mistaha made her vegan face, which by the way, uh now I I I can relate to you all. She would not let me take a picture of it.
Literally, like I I pulled up the camera maybe eight, ten times. I caught her once as she was exiting the vegan face, but uh I couldn't get the full vegan face on camera because she refused to let me uh get it. But if you've ever seen uh uh either the Sopranos or uh Steven Van Zant on his new show uh Lewis Hammer, his angry his angry gangster face scowl, like the the kind of bulldog frown, that's pretty much that's pretty much the vegan face right there. So you can just pretty popular, I see even on iTunes, one of the reviews was referencing the vegan face. Really?
It's blowing up. Really? And I suspect maybe Nastasia can't even make the real vegan face anymore. No, I can. Well you can see anything.
It's when she doesn't mean to do it. That's when she did it. So like you could see her true reaction to the vegan lunch. It's like I don't need to actually ask her. I just look over and see, you know, is is Steven Van Zandt sitting next to me?
Or is Nastasha sitting next to me? And you know, that's basically how uh how you do it. So uh by the way, I'm I'm gonna get probably in big I'm about to get in big trouble with uh our good friends over at Del Posto, Mark Ladner and Brooks, because here's what they said. They actually enjoy making the V. They said, first of all, don't publicize the uh the the vegan thing.
Thank God our cadre of listeners is loyal, but you know, we're not there, you know. Well, whatever. We don't have enough visitors to blow up blow up Del Posto, right? Right or wrong. So I'm not gonna get in trouble.
Well well, we'll see, you'll find out. So here's what they said. Um any good cook likes a uh likes a challenge and likes a set of constraints uh in in which they can work and try to get new ideas to try and push their skills, push their talents, right? And this this could be anything, like so when we did the uh museum uh event last year, uh also at Del Posto, uh, you know, we pushed the bartenders and the cooks into areas they wouldn't normally uh work by giving them a set of constraints. You're gonna work with you know, this set of ingredients or this time, you know, this time, or like you know, Nils, we gave fad diets, etc., etc.
And and uh without exception, every single cook and bartender who worked at that event took uh the challenge in the exact way that we wanted to and use it as an opportunity to do something uh creative and interesting. Wiley, in fact, put the dish that he did there, the bone marrow. He put that on his New Year's menus. Uh Brooks did his uh artichoke thing, I think, for a while. So uh it it it's uh it's a great thing for any cook to do, uh maybe not all the time, but you know, uh on occasion to take a challenge, uh take a set of constraints.
And cooking something vegan is just at a set of constraints. And so the guys at Del Posto uh really liked uh they really they really like cooking this kind of thing, and it actually is on the menu all the time. They have a customer they said who comes in quite often, and whenever that customer comes in, they revamp the vegan menu for them so it's not the same every time it comes in. This time, unfortunately, also macrobiotic, which listen uh you know I find it very difficult to not offend uh offend people, but uh not eating nightshades is crazy. No tomatoes, you're gonna go vegan.
Now you're all of a sudden you're not gonna have tomatoes, potatoes, or eggplants. I mean, please. You can do without the eggplant, you said. Well, you said, and I agreed. You said and I agreed.
I said, Do you like Baba Ganoush? And you said no. I said, Do you like do you like anything with that kind of no? She said no. Doesn't like bacon barda.
Uh she likes eggplant parmesan, but mostly for the fry, the mozzarella, and the uh anyway. Uh one thing I'll have to say is that is that they should have shifted into liquor earlier. Oh, yes. I I emailed uh what's his name and told him that. What's his name?
It's a nice shout out. Jeff Porter. There you go. See? See how much nicer it's it is to use somebody's name instead of I was like Mark.
Okay. So anyway, I'm here to report. Uh oh, uh so they said don't popularize it because even though they like cooking it, uh, and this is a challenge to uh vegans uh out there, or anyone with uh like that there's wine glasses right here in a stash. Oh, hello. Uh they to to with dietary things out there.
You have a uh reputation among chefs as being difficult human beings with which to work. And uh so the the their issue isn't that they don't like cooking the menu, their issue is that in general, to gener to generalize, the customers who order it can be problematic because they tend to not be people that are interested in food primarily. They're just there to get some you know, to to have a meal, and they have these restrictions in which they're working, but the food isn't the primary focus, and cooks prefer to cook for people who like food. Fair? Right.
And that's why they told us not to publicize it. Am I saying that without getting anyone in too much trouble? Yeah, you didn't use the exact language of what they called those people. Now now they're those people. What the vegan, so you say it then.
No, no, no. I'm not gonna say what they say. They did not insult vegan people. Anyways, my point is it was very good. Unfortunately, it was also macrobiotic, which to me, I mean, someone please call and tell me why macrobiotic stuff is not a bunch of hoo-ha.
Anyone, anyone call in. I know there's a lot of people out there who love microbiota. I had two shots of green of green stuff. I do not drink actually, we make a very good drink green drink at the bar. Yeah.
Not macrobiotic because you can't have distilled distilled liquor. Uh but uh yeah, those kind of like wheat grassy, like you know, uh one one of the drinks, no offense to Jeff there, because I think he was they bought it and they did it on purpose just to shaft me. Tasted like I had latched my mouth onto the uh exit chute of a lawnmower and was riding around the grass uh, you know, with a lawnmower attached to my mouth. But the meal itself uh was very, very good. What do you think?
It was good for what it was. So, what the hell is that? I would not go there and get it. Like people who want that get what they want. Get get a great meal, right?
Well, I thought I mean I thought it was a really good meal. Nastasha, first of all, is prejudice in this sense. When she goes to an Italian restaurant, if she doesn't leave with her gut busting open, she's like, it's not Italian. Italian food's supposed to be haughty, it's supposed to be a hearty food. You know what I mean?
And my point is that's not necessarily the case. It's it's sad. But so my point is that you you have a preconceived notion of what Italian should be and of what Del Posto should be. So you can't divorce yourself from that notion and just look at the food at which as it was presented. Sure.
What about you know, uh I thought that the flavors were very, very well balanced. There was nothing that I thought was lacking. There's a a lot of use of uh Hayumami um and like pro protein based things that weren't meat, like uh nutritional yeast, which was quite good. Um obviously a lot of mushrooms uh brought into it, a lot of uh very, you know, uh reduced root vegetables, things like that, things to and I thought everything was was delicious, I thought the textures were good, I thought it was well balanced. The one thing I don't didn't like were the uh raw snap peas on it because even though everyone everyone finds them delicious, except for me because of the raw, the raw starch taste, I do not like uh pea shoots either.
And I might be the only person on earth who does not like pea shoots. And uh because I don't like that raw, I don't like that raw taste. Well, part of the problem with me doing that raw diet last year. Yeah, I don't like it. You know what I mean?
Uh uh anyways, so I thought they did an amazing job. I liked it. Oh, yeah, we had an orange wine that was, I guess, uh, you know, which we'll we'll research more. I didn't research it uh a lot. And uh Nastash at that point was was dying for a drink.
Speaking of that speak speaking of dying for a drink, we have uh a wine here. You're gonna have to ask uh translate this. What's uh land of what's uh Chietti? Don't know. Thought you spoke Italian.
Now you forgot Italian too. I don't know, we can look it up. Oh my god. Anyway, it's called Passetti and it's pecorino. Now, pecorino, for all of you out there, obviously means goat.
So is this wine, Jack? Is this wine literally passed through a goat before it's put in a bottle? I can't confirm or deny that. Yeah? You can't, but I'm excited to try this.
It's from the barter house, though. Remember those guys? Uh I was about to say, these are from our good friends at the barter house. And uh I said this before. It's a province in Italy.
Really? There you go. Land of that province. Yeah, Chietti is a province. For uh for people who've been listening to the show forever, they're the same people who brought you booze.
Boozer! Yeah, so they're also bringing you wine passed through a goat. This is a uh a white wine. What's the what's the grape? Is there a grape called goat?
What the heck is this? And looking at it. So here's the deal. So the Barter House, for those of you that uh they haven't sponsored our show in a while, mainly because uh Modernist Pantry has been sponsoring our show for a long time. But we like the folks at the Barter House, and what they are is uh uh kind of a a s like a a specialty importer that imports wines, kind of unusual and interesting wine.
So they're not gonna carry a lot of the wines that you know that we're familiar with. Uh but uh one of the uh one of the good ways to see whether or not you should try a new wine in the store, and it's not just a barter house, find uh uh uh you know an importer, someone who brings in wines uh that uh you like, and in general, these people choose wines that they like that are interesting. So if you don't know the producer, you don't know the grape, you don't know the style, sometimes looking at the back and seeing who's bringing it in is a good indication of whether or not it'd be something interesting to try. And it's uh uh I think it's something that we don't do enough in wine stores. People don't think about the importers or the houses that choose wines that are the curate you know, the other selections that they're gonna bring over.
But I think it's a good way to try a new wine. So we're gonna uh Nastash and I, because it's so hot, we're gonna have this uh white wine that's been passed through a goat. Uh Passetti doesn't actually mean doesn't mean past pa Passato means past, right? So what does Passetti mean? This is their last name.
Oh, that's the name of the people? It's a m uh for a husband and wife team, Franco and Mima. Mima Passetti. So they so well hand me my glass so we can try this stuff, and we should get to some actual cooking issues here in a minute. Otherwise, this is gonna be a show just based on uh nonsense and drivel.
Let's try it. No offense to nonsense and drivel. Wait, what do you what do you think, Stas? It's really sweet, huh? It's not actually sweet, it's just not like hyper dry and crisp.
It's fine. Fine. What do you think, Dave? And what would you pair it with, Stas? I would pair it with uh with actually with peccarino cheese.
Uh you're such a low what? Whatever. That that brings me to another thing. Before we get into real stuff, you know, we've been there's been a lot of play recently, uh, on of recently like uh uh it on our show and nowhere else. On um on um the taste pairing hypothesis and this hypothesis where uh you know things that have similar molecules, not necessarily similar.
Nastasha apparently believes if you name something after a goat, it should go well with goat cheese. It's it's stuck in my head. But yeah, I think it would go well, don't you? Um I think almost everything goes well with peccarito. I like pepperato.
I don't know, like you know, it's one of those things that has enough acidity to it that uh it could go well with uh spicy or like an Asian thing. It's not gonna get totally cut down, it's not the structure of it isn't like a red that's gonna get obliterated. So I could I could see it with that. Asian thing. What the hell is that?
What the hell is that under your breath Asian thing? We go back to the biggest thing. Like a spicy thing. I'm thinking about it because we were at uh Pac Pac uh That was a New York Pac Pac Brooklyn. Yeah.
So now we become a review show where we're reviewing restaurants that we've been to over the past year. Well we only we only went to two in one day. It's like we don't do anything together. We don't go out to restaurants. Thank God.
Thank God. But uh uh my wife and I were at the table next to uh Nastasha Mark Ladner from Del Posto, Brooks, and her friend from Juilliard, Pat Patrick Posey. Uh and uh so uh this was this is Andy Rickers uh not Rick Tur, the comedian, Andy Ricker, the uh famous uh Portland, formerly Portland, now Portland and New York based uh chef who uh does Thai kind of uh in a different way than I've ever had it in New York and because I've never been to Thailand, so I can't call it authentic, but extremely delicious, extremely great uh food. And I I'd only ever had uh Pacpock Wing, which is his takeout joint in uh the Lower East Side, and his food at events. So it's the first time I got to go to a basically a full-scale restaurant uh of his, and I was uh frankly blown away.
I thought it was great. And um what do you think, Stas? Yeah, it was amazing. I hate Thai food. Well, okay, when Nastasha says she hates Thai food.
Those of you that have ever listened to this show knows that uh they know that Nastasha's crazy, basically. Uh here's what she doesn't like about here's what she says she doesn't like Thai food, here's what she means. I don't like lemongrass and I don't like coconut milk, right? And peanuts. I don't know, so what?
So there wasn't a lot of that in this food at all. Right. Anyway, but uh that's not my point. My point is is that Nastasha's crazy. And that this restaurant was great.
For instance, the thing that uh like uh the thing that blew me away is that he served an extremely spicy uh beef dish, I forget the name of it. Uh, you know, kind of ground uh meat, and next to it was just a plate of herbs, hoebs, uh, that were, and these herbs, they look like you know, a plate of herbs. And I uh I was starting to taste them, and they were unlike any herbs you'd ever tasted. Like when he came over, I I basically I had the waiter call him over because and Mark 2 was like uh you look. If you're in the business that I'm in or the market, you're not no one's supposed to be able to in New York City hand you a plate of herbs and have the first four things you taste off of be unlike anything that you've ever had and completely foreign to you, such that you have no idea what the hell's going on.
That just doesn't happen. Do you know what I mean? Like one or two new ingredients, whatever, uh or new ingredient, but something that's just totally foreign to you like that is crazy, right? Didn't you agree with that, Sas? And uh, like this one had the kind of tartness of a sorrel, but like a completely different taste.
I want to use that in a drink. He get like Andy gets it some guy in Florida, some basically I guess who smuggled seeds from Thailand to Florida and is growing these uh kind of insane Thai herbs in Florida and then shipping them up uh to uh Andy, and he he guess he gets them on consignment from this guy. I'm gonna try to get some for the bar for Booker and Dax. Uh but it's just uh just cra crazy stuff, good stuff. I recommend going.
Uh okay, enough with the restaurant reviews else, right? Oh, one more piece of news from Booker and Dax Land, and then I guess we should go to uh yeah, Booker and Dax. Well, it won't be ready for about a month, but we now have Booker and Dax, the company, not the bar, has its own space in the lower east side. So look out for us coming in uh doing some cool stuff in the lower side, correct? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. It's a small space. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. It's a storefront, which is awesome.
It's our own space. So those are you you can stop by, like wave vegetables and at Nastasha in the window, and she can make her face for you in about a month. And with that, call your questions to 718-497 2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. And welcome back to Cognities.
By the way, today's show is gonna be brought to you by the Barter House. Yeah. Jack just told me. Oh, I didn't wouldn't pay attention. The Stoch's like, I don't know, I was playing Tetris.
Anyway, uh before I go on to some real issues, I want to talk about um the this uh book, Taste buds and molecules, about the flavor pairing hypothesis. So I've been basically saying for a while that I think that this flavor pairing hypothesis is bunk, whereby you know you take uh, you know foods that share specific flavor compounds, and therefore you can decide that they actually go well together. And it's uh it's a you know it's a technique that's gotten a lot of play recently, and so I kind of thought I'd go buy, and I you know, I I bought it. Uh a book called uh Taste buds and molecules, written by Francois uh Chatier, and I think it's how he pronounces his name. I don't know.
He's Cabacla. Uh, but he's done a lot of work in France, and uh he is like a true master sommelier. Like nobody argues the man knows his wine. And uh sometime in the early to mid uh 2000s, he um started working on this working on the idea of uh flavor pairing, looking up what components were in a wine, the aromatics of wine. And a lot of that stuff is readily actually available because a lot of studies have been done uh on it due to wine quality issues, and so a lot of uh food studies have been done on it.
Uh and also uh what uh when those same molecules appear in foods and has built a structure of uh tastings and and basically food pairings based on uh what you know what he calls his his res his research into those into those things. And the result uh is this book, Taste buds and molecules, which also has like a lot of crazy kind of graphical elements. And so uh I bought it thinking that I was going to uh hate it, right? Uh and there are many things about it that uh that I uh disagree with, but I have to say that he uh I mean he clearly uh you know understands and he clearly you know from everything I've read about him, I've never had dinner with him or anything, but has a very good palate, right? So this isn't in other words, it's not something where someone is just saying, hey, look it.
Uh here's a bunch of stuff that I saw on a piece of paper, and therefore they're gonna go well together, even though I haven't developed a palate. He's coming at it from the direction that I think is a good one, namely uh he had spent years and years developing his palate, right? His nose, his palate, his senses, and then after those years, uh then used uh these kind of pieces of research as a further tool to uh f to get inspiration in areas he hadn't already looked. Basically to to ha uh something to help the light bulb or the chime in his head say, Yes, these two things would go well together, and to give him kind of the confidence to put two things together that wouldn't ordin ordinarily be put together. And so, uh to that extent, you know, yes, I think it could be used as a as a valid uh valid thing, and I actually ended up liking um like liking like what he was saying more than I thought I would.
But uh uh on the flip side, I mean, and I think this is part of kind of like the, you know, because the book was published in French first, that that kind of writing. It's a little more kind of florid and it kind of takes things a lot a lot further than I would like and kind of makes much more sweeping comments about uh, you know, what he's doing and w the the the concepts behind it uh than I would I would like. And so, you know, when I'm working on the cocktail book, I gotta guard against that too, not making these kind of sweeping statements. My problem is when any of these things become sort of dogmatic or almost become a a religion, the way you know what I mean, the way that people kind of treat the uh new concepts. But uh interesting book.
Um so there's there's that. It's my last word on on uh on the flavor pairing uh hypothesis uh for today. Now, on to some uh questions we come in. Hello from Osaka, Japan. We're going to Japan soon.
Nastasha and I going to Tokyo to work in the park Hyatt. We're gonna be working there for four days, right? Plus a fifth press day. Yeah. And I'm hoping to get the like I want the most butt kicking Japanese stuff.
I don't want any stuff that I can get here in the States. I mean, I do. I want to see like how much better all the stuff that they say is better there. I want to get all that when I'm there, but I want some stuff that you cannot get here. I mean, you know what I mean?
Mm-hmm. You with me on this? They're taking you, they're taking us to the market. And there's a big fruit market next to it. I'm gonna go bonkers.
And they're with their credit card? Yeah, yeah. Oh man, I'm a dangerous person with someone else's credit card. That's as soon as you arrived. We're going straight there.
So I better sleep on. I can't sleep on planes. I'll have to drink like eight loads of espresso, just make like an hour trip to the bathroom and then uh and then we'll go off into it, right? Okay. Hello from Osaka, Japan.
I have two questions. I'm interested in buying a refractometer to use in the field as well as in the kitchen. Some things I would like to be able to do are measure the salinity of a brine to know when it has reached equilibrium, measure the sugar content of produce in the field to know when to harvest, measure the sugar quantity of produce to determine which provider has the best product. Can one refractometer be used to measure salinity as well as bricks? Do you have any recommendation for refractometers?
Are electronic bricks meters better than optical refractometers? Okay. Uh here's the thing. I've used both uh uh electric ones. We have uh one manufactured by the Hannah Corporation, uh, as well as manual ones.
The for the field, I mean the thing is you don't want to be caught out in the field with one and have it break. I mean, the the the the optical ones are fairly bulletproof. I mean, Nastasha did break one of mine. She like shattered the uh the I don't know how the heck she did it. She broke it.
No one else has ever broken. She broke the little flip down screen that goes on. Uh the handheld ones, the ones that are not um electronic, are uh a lot cheaper. They're like thirty, thirty-two bucks to get the ones on eBay. They work fine.
You need light, you know what I mean? And you need to be able to see through the product somewhat to be able to do it uh, you know, to use them properly. Uh those ones, I've never seen one that'll do both salinity and uh bricks. However, well, you know, you can get um just uh a bricks one and which measures sugar content, and uh get one that is for salinity, and they're fairly small and they're fairly cheap. So you can get two of them, right, for much less than the cost of one good electronic one.
I really like the electronic one for just speed of use and not having, especially in the bar to worry about light. You do have to with the electronic ones hold your hand sometimes over the measurement uh device so that you don't get errant light problems. If there's too much ambient light, uh you can't uh work with it. The electronic ones are better for just crushing up some juice, even if it has particles and throwing on because they're not as thrown off by that and they're easier to read. You can read something in an electronic one that there's a really cute kid looking in through our window, by the way.
She's pressing her nose against it and we're waving to the window. Uh there's a uh she's wearing some sort of purple flowery thing. Yeah, very cute. Anyway, uh the uh so the electronic ones are better at measuring things that you couldn't necessarily because in a handheld one, you have to be able to flap the glass down. Uh the the the plastic piece that goes over the reading prism.
You have to be able to flap it down and get good contact before you can get a good reading. And you don't need to do that with the uh with the with the handheld uh electronic ones. Uh I do think that the handle electronic ones might break a little easier. The Hannah ones that I have are only calibrated for bricks, right? You could, you could and mine is what I like about mine is that especially if you're going to be using something for a long time in a lot of different fields, and you might be measuring juice one day uh or sh or fruit one day and syrups the next, is that mine, my electronic one goes from zero bricks to eighty five percent bricks, which is really nice.
And there are handheld uh optical ones that have a very wide range, but the problem is is that those wide range ones, it's hard to get a very accurate reading because the scale is the same length no matter what you do. And so then you have the issue of not being able to uh to to discern fine differences in bricks. Now there are also triple scale manual uh refractometers. I've never used one, uh, and those apparently you can get the accuracy you want in in several different scale ranges, but uh they tend to be more expensive. So instead of like $32, you're talking about $100, $150, and you can get a decent uh uh electric one, electronic one on eBay for not eBay on uh Amazon or whatnot for you know around that price.
What do we pay? Two sixty two sixty for a zero to eighty-five. Now, there is a company I don't have theirs, unfortunately, called uh I believe Spare is the company, but you can look it up that has um different uh different ranges in the same refractometer, and they will actually program three custom ranges into your refractometer for you so you could get a zero to eighty-five bricks uh refractometer, and at the same time get a salinity meter, and all it's basically doing is changing the calibration within the unit so that you can measure using the same instrument. Another thing you could do is use your bricks refractometer and then carefully make uh uh things of the proper salinity, right? Measure what the bricks is on it, and then you can hit that number every time, even though you're using a brick scale.
So you can correct bricks to salinity. Uh and it's hard sometimes to find the published papers for that on the internet, but you can also do that. Um the last thing I would caution about refractometers in general is that you you know you're going to have a uh a lot of people make mistakes on refractometers and they think that you can measure uh bricks and other things in mixed medium. Remember, all that the all that the refractometer is measuring is uh how what the difference in uh refraction is as light is passed through uh a liquid. So what happens is different liquids have different refractive indexes, they bend light a different amount.
And refractometer is measuring uh typically how much uh your liquid bends light relative to water. And so um they can only what bricks is measuring is dissolved sugar, but it anything that changes, any solute, anything that's dissolved in it is going to change it. So if you have alcohol, which changes uh the angle of refraction, right? If all you have is alcohol, then you can use a refractometer to measure how much alcohol is in the water. If all you have is alcohol and water.
If all you have is sugar in water, then you can measure how much uh the sugar, how much sugar there is in the water using a refractometer. If all you have is salt and water, same. If you have salt and sugar, you cannot, because there's no way to figure out what the what uh each component is doing to the refractive index independently unless you can measure one of the variables. Same thing with ethanol and sugar, which is why you can't use a refractometer to measure uh something like Quantro, uh, because it's got both sugar and alcohol in it. So uh there are uh you know limitations to what uh a refractometer can do for you because it's only measuring one quantity, how much uh uh light is bent as it travels uh through uh your medium.
So uh I mean I hope that helps. But if you know, if I could go back, because the spare one's only like an extra fifty dollars, but it wasn't on Amazon, I would get the multi-range uh electronic bricks unit that does zero to eighty-five. They have a wide scale one. I'm I think it's spare, but you know, whatever. Uh SPER, I think.
I'm not sure. Uh uh, I would get there one that that does the full range from zero to eighty-five. That's gonna do 99% of any of the sugar work you want. And and they will also do a custom scale. So if you wanted to do I don't know what you're doing for a living, but let's say you're a distiller or something and you also need to measure or a wine fermenter and you also need to measure glycol.
You could have a glycol scale in there so that you can make your glycol solutions, which you would use for anti-free when you're using like chilling. If you have a chiller and you need to do glycol, you could put a glycol scale in and a salinity scale. So you could choose any three scales. If it was me, I would have bricks, salinity, and uh ethanol percentage uh for distilled spirits. I would have those three on it, and then you'd have one refractometer and you'd be good forever.
But you might want to back it up with uh a manual one. The manual one, most people get a zero to thirty-two bricks if you're doing fruit, uh, and uh much higher fractomer, much higher bricks level if you're doing um anything like sugars or or syrups. Because remember, simple syrup, one-to-one simple syrup is running about 50 bricks, right? So you can't measure it on a standard zero to 32 bricks uh uh refractometer. Bricks is basically just percentage of the solution that is sucrose, right?
Uh and if you're doing uh two to one simple syrup, you're up at 66 bricks, and so it you can get uh you know the zero to thirty-two is of limited use in a bar, right? Right, Saz? Yeah, that's why you bought the zero to eighty-five for us. Yes. And we're quite happy with it, yes?
Yes. Yeah. Another piece of equipment we have at the bar, we're very happy with now is we bought uh best $65. That's not true. What the fuck?
I'm just lying. It's a good $65. Not the best $65 I've ever spent. The best $65 I ever spent was on my wife's wedding ring. Boom!
Kidding. Uh he's not lying. Yeah, I'm a cheap bastard. Uh but uh, yeah, no, it's a good sixty-five dollars. Uh, I bought a zero to five milliliter um basically micropipette, and it's just it's super accurate.
So we use it to dose all of uh our uh like our our wine finding agents, Kesel Salt, and Kito San. And also uh when we're making small batches of things to correct things for salinity and whatnot, we can add small amounts that we can then reproduce when we scale it up. So I really like the micropipette uh and we stole that idea from our friend Tony Connigliaro, not the famous dead baseball player from uh you you know the story of Tony Cunliaro? Very famous Tony C, they call him because also Americans. Oh in in America, it's Canigliaro, by the way.
So Tony, the baseball player was Tony Canigliaro, not Tony Connigliaro, the bartender, right? But he was like one of the like slated to be one of the best baseball players of all time, was in fact very good, played for the uh for the Bosox, and got he crowded the plate all the time and got hit in the head with a beaner and like almost like I think I put him in a comb. He's in the hospital for a long time, never the same. Never the same. By the way, what Nastasha is actually doing, the the work she's doing is looking up pictures of the chauffeur from Downton Abbey on uh I'm look- I looked over to see like what kind of thing she's looking up about the event I'm doing in Germany that we're gonna talk about after the next break.
And she's looking up, she's looking up the chauffeur, kind of like the the least sympathetic character on Downton Abbey. Because not the least sympathetic, but I mean no, no, no, it's not what it's it's what the stars look like out of costume. That's true. But you've already seen that. I know, but I was crazy.
This is what I deal with people on a daily basis. All right. The second question from Osaka from John is are there antioxidants that are fat soluble as well as temperature stable up to temperatures around 180 degrees Celsius? Failing that, what is the best practice when storing fats to keep them in their best condition? Two applications I'm interested in are we using very expensive tempura oil and keeping schmaltz without oxidizing.
Any thoughts? Schmaltz, I love schmaltz. Chicken fat is delicious. I've never been to one of the old school restaurants in New York that has schmaltz on the table, like one of the old closure restaurants. Because you can't have butter on the table.
Because you can't serve butter in a steakhouse. You can have schmaltz. I have I freaking love chicken fat. Um so what could you what can you do? Well, uh I I meant to I forgot that this question had been asked when I saw it last night, so I didn't look up the specific things that are added.
But typically uh if you buy uh commercial fry oil, they have uh an antioxidant um in them, uh some sort of like vitamin E tocopheral based thing that's fat soluble that prevents oxidation in the oil. Uh and that is very helpful and stable up to frying temperatures. Uh I'll I'll try to look it up during the break, or Nastasha can try to look it up now instead of looking up uh Downton Abbey's before and after pictures. Uh but the um uh and and that's why I say commercial fry oil is uh much, much better than any of the stuff that we buy in the supermarket, uh, because it lasts just a boatload longer and tastes a lot cleaner. They also in commercial fry oils do something that you can't do in a home oil uh, which is they they uh specifically and temporal oil might be like this, they specifically tailor the fatty acid uh um mix in it to have uh only those fatty acids that are fairly temperature stable and oxidation uh resistant.
That said, obviously the things that cause oil to break down uh most are if you get a salt in the oil, which is you know sometimes you know unavoidable, uh allowing uh burnt particles to stay in the bottom of the oil while you're cooking, if you don't have a commercial fryer with a cold zone at the bottom, which tempura doesn't work that way, by the way, which is crazy. Uh but whatever. Uh or um if you um so those are those are the main things. You also like it's best to use, and this again goes against the way I've seen most tempura done, but you really want uh a very low surface area to uh volume ratio on uh on your um on the oil because then you have less uh air contact. You want uh as little foaming as possible, so not a lot of like uh a lot of high water stuff dripping in.
Anything that basically is gonna promote a large large amount of oxygen getting into the oil. Also, clearly you don't want any uh reactive metals like iron touching um the stuff because that's gonna that's gonna mess with you. Uh and you want to, as soon as it cools down enough, filter it. And you could you could uh you know, vacuum, you guys you could vacuum pack it or like put it in bottles and then like suck the air out of it to prevent any any sort of oxidation from taking place. Uh but those are the kinds of things uh that I would do.
Uh the the worst thing though, I see breakdown on oil, especially when it's done in a home fryer is temperature cycling. And there's just very little you can do to prevent temperature cycling, except for you know the commercial fryers are really what's going to stop you from doing a lot of temperature cycling. Other than that, you could get an induction unit that keeps the oil at a relatively even temperature that has like basically a temperature controller in it that's you know keeping the oil tolerances fairly tight, and then not overloading the oil so that you don't have to get the um you don't have to have as much of a temperature drop, so you don't need as high of a thermal input to do the instant recovery, and that's gonna cause you to have less thermal cycling on your oil, and that's gonna increase the uh the lifetime uh significantly. In a home frying situation, it's crap floating to the bottom, burning and destroying the oil, salt, but most importantly, temperature cycling that is really killing your oil at a ferocious rate. Uh and those are the things I would do.
I don't know about are you looking up the uh the vitamin E, the tocofurol based stuff? Or are we still on down adding? No, no, I was doing the Germany stuff. Alright, well, okay. So why don't we do this?
We'll take a commercial break and we'll see whether Nastasha can find that stuff on the internet's cooking issues. Am I back? Yeah. Alright. So uh it turns out that uh I wasn't able to look it up over the commercial break, but we'll try to find some specific thing that you can go buy in a store to drop into your oil to add as uh an antioxidant.
So Nastasha, what's this event that I'm doing in uh in El Germany next week? It's called Academia Del Ron, and it's uh the Havana Club event. And you will be there from you arrive Monday morning and you leave Thursday. Well, I don't I don't know that people need to know my schedule. What am I talking about there?
We're talking about yeast in alcohol. Yeah. So here here's the deal. So they asked me to do uh they asked me to do this uh event on uh rum and I said fine, but they they like I you know I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to become like well versed in in several things, but the effect of yeast on rum, like I can think of at least five other people that I know personally who know more about this than I do, right? Yeah.
But yet that's what they wanted me to talk about. See, people make the mistake of uh and I'm not saying anything against it, but people make the mistake of thinking that I'm a scientist. I'm not. I'm like a gearhead cook that can read science papers, right? So like I don't feel like I'm the guy to sit there and talk to you about uh like any sort of actual research that I've done or anything because it's just not the case.
So over the past week and a half I read, I don't know, several hundred pages on the effects of yeast on different uh uh uh different you know on fermentation products, and I've learned a boatload about it, but I still am not an expert in the field on this. So what we what I had to do was I just basically took a bunch of molasses. I couldn't get the molasses I like, which is Crosby's molasses, which is a They never got back to me. Those bastards that email that you were like they never got back? Crosby's molasses, for any of you who have ever been in the uh in the in Northeast New England or Maine, Crosby's molasses is the one molasses that I've had that you're like, my god is that delicious molasses.
Like I would pour that. You know how like you ever listen to Louie Jordan? You ever listen to Louis Jordan? Mm-hmm. Louis Jordan, you know the song Is You Is Is You Ain't My Baby or Caldonia or Beware any of those?
That's Louie Jordan. Like big in the forties, you know, kind of uh kind of cocktail, kind of like, you know, like, you know, whatever. Like uh anyway, like uh uh musician. Uh you know, musician, anyway. Beans and cornbread, you know that song?
Beans and cornbread, you know that? Anyway, Louis Jordan. So uh Louie Jordan, what the hell was I talking about Louis Jordan for? What were we talking about? Fermentation.
Yeah, but how the hell do I get on Louis Jordan? Molasses. Molasses. So he's like uh in the beans and cornbread song, it goes goes together like hotcakes and molasses, and you're like hotcakes and molasses. Who the hell would put molasses on pancakes?
And then you and then once you've had Crosby's molasses, you realize why. But those dumb bastards from Crosby's, they're up in Canada. And by the way, I love you Canadians, but you're a lazy group of people, just kidding. Kidding! He's not.
Just kidding. Anyway, uh, but they won't distribute outside of uh New England. We had to mail her, so I couldn't. So we wrote them a nice well, you wrote them a nice email from me in response to how great their molasses are. Yeah, sell it down here.
No response back. Crosby's molasses is so delicious. Like when you next time you're in Maine or wherever, over there, up up there in New England Way, get some Crosby's molasses and tell me you don't think that's the most delicious molasses that you've ever had. I mean, I don't know, maybe in the Caribbean, they maybe they have some delicious molasses. I don't know.
But as far as in the continental US, it's the most delicious molasses I've ever had. Anyway, so we didn't use that. We used some sort of like molasses, and we're distilling our own I distill I fermented using two separate yeasts. Now, when you're when you're actually doing rum and you're using wild yeast fermentation, there's it's not just uh saccharomyces uh cervace, which is the normal beer, you know, brewer's yeast, of which there's a bazillion strains, each of which have different uh produce different flavors. Uh but there's like uh uh I forget the names of them, like schiz schizo, you know, schizosacros sacramises cervesi.
There's like uh there's uh there's a whole bunch of different yeast strains, like five or six uh not strains, uh you know, actual genus species, uh, and then a zillion strains all of which produce different flavors it turns out most of the flavoral difference in a fermentation a lot of the fur a flavoral difference is due to um the yeast right so think about it this way Nastasha if you've ever had have you ever had wine grapes yeah like to eat yeah yeah yeah wine grapes don't taste like wine right it's very difficult to like if you taste like uh pinot noir grapes you're not like oh I get it you know what I mean that all of the like the the most of the flavors that are in there in Pinot Noir are there as precursors right that that you can't taste then the fermentation and the different yeasts that are used bring out the real character so a lot of the flavor is due to the due to the uh the yeast it's just I don't happen to be an expert in that but that's what I'm gonna be talking about in the I think people ask you to talk about these things because you're able to understand it and explain it in an interesting and exciting way. Well that's very charitable. So the that's your special thing for the week. Yeah so uh that's that's that's the one nice thing Nastash is gonna say to me all week so anyway so over the course of the week we're gonna have to uh go out and illegally distill the uh the molasses fermentation we have by the way molass fermented molasses tastes horrible though this black strap molasses stuff tasted horrible tasted like iron I was told by uh our friend Chris who's opening a new beer bar in New York called proletariat proletariat well Nastasha gave the the proletariat face she hates the vegans and the people about your MTV uh your MTV Belvedere drink did you guys talk more about that yesterday? No.
Do you tell me about it? The Red Bull that you're gonna make. Oh, Nastasha signed us up to do a jersey jersey shore. For those of you that don't have the don't have like uh haven't been outside. There's a show called Jersey Shore, which I actually haven't seen, but I saw the thing on YouTube where the guy punched the lady out.
That's Snooky, right? Yeah. Anyways, I haven't seen the show. Have you seen the show? Small.
You have I actually watched an episode. This is serious. Like last week I watched an episode for the first time. It's good. It's a funny show.
Yeah? It's a funny show. I'm pro. Well, one of our favorite lawyers is from the Jersey Shore. Yes.
Vadim. Good guy. Yeah, good guy. Anyway, um, so um Nastasha signed us up to do an MTV party with uh uh Evan Freeman. Uh and uh it's gonna be a Jersey Shore party, and so Nastasha wants us to do a high-end vodka Red Bull.
Yeah. Yeah. So we're working on it, but I don't know what Red Bull, I don't I don't really know much about Red Bull. No, we need a look, we need a we need to look it up. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, we'll we'll take that stuff up. Anyway. Uh oh, by the way, uh we got some shout out from uh John who asked the two questions on Osaka says, uh loves the show, thank you. With so much, and this is uh in general about the world. Here we go.
Uh with so much knowledge, this is John talking. With so much knowledge being spread around, I don't think there's uh ever been a more exciting time to be a cook. In Japan, it was commonly accepted that the price you pay to become a cook is your youth. That's kind of nicely said. Uh in five years, I've been able to learn what would normally take ten, and on top of that, I know the why behind the how, which seems to be a very uncommon thing in Japan.
Whoa, boom. I'm gonna have to have some talks about that when we're in Japan, huh? Uh how uh behind the how uh seem to be very uncommon in Japan. So here is a thank you for you guys and everyone else sharing what they know. And it's true.
The week would not have what's going on today without the increase in um kind of sharing of information that's been made possible by you know the it's not it's it it is the internet, like obviously it's obviously it's the internet, internet, but um I think it's other things. I think that um and I have had some conversations with some European chefs, uh, especially in America, but also among uh Spanish, just an ex like this extreme desire to share what people know and to be generous with ideas that it it is in the cook community. You know what I mean? Yeah. Do you agree?
Yeah. But for instance, uh Tim Raua, the Michelin starred chef in uh in uh the Germany, which is where I'll be next. Hey, he's in Berlin. Maybe I should see him when I'm in Berlin. Anyway, he uh he um he said in Germany the chefs don't like they don't like hang out and give each other ideas.
Weird, huh? Too bad. Too bad, too bad. Okay. Hey, Dave, Nastasha, and Jack.
Jack, you got the shout-out on this one. Uh this is uh uh you know something know who it's from, Nastash, you gotta look this up. Oh, from Tony Harrion from Mixing Bar in Brazil. Uh I read a post on Alcademics, our good friend uh Camper English, the uh blogger. Uh I read this post on Alcademics about the production of Quantro, because he visited the Quantro distillery that says, uh when they add water to reduce Quantro to proof, the essential oils in the peel, because it's Quantro's orange peel uh distillation along with neutral grain spirit, cause the liquor to loosh to get cloudy, like when you add water to absinthe.
They centrifuge the quantum to make it clear again, which I did not know. Uh the same happens, and this is uh now it's it's uh Tony talking. The same happens when we rotovap citrus peels and other spices and dilute it to proof. Other than the centrifuge, what can be done to separate the compounds that fall out of solution when you dilute liquids with high concentrations of essential oils? Can you think of any other way to stabilize or avoid the precipitation or loosh without the centrifuge?
Uh and then how good does your centrifuge need to be to achieve loose separation in G's or RPM? Uh lastly, to make liquors in this fashion, do you recommend adding water to reduce the proof and then adding the sugar, or use a weak sugar syrup or both at once, with or without the centrifuge as a step? Love the show, keep up keep up the great work. Cheers, Tony Harry, and from Mixing Bar in Brazil, which when I go to Brazil, we got well, we gotta find someone who will pay to get us to Brazil. And then after we do that, we'll visit them.
Yeah? Yeah. Okay. One, by the way, uh, this is anyone who wants to get the cooking issues crew down to uh Brazil, keep this in mind. I don't know what it costs for a plane ticket down there, but uh poly science circulators are twice the cost uh in Brazil as they are here.
So, what we can do, if you want a circulator, right? If you can find some company to pay for us, we can buy the circulators here, bring them down uh as personal equipment for the events, and then do a swap down there. Just saying. And you might need help carrying them, so you know I'm here. Yeah, yeah, just saying.
Just saying, just an idea for all you people in Brazil. If you're trying to get around the tax problem of getting a circulator into the country, and you know a company that wants to ship a bunch of tech knuckleheads down there to talk to them. About a thousand dollars a person to get down there. Which about the break even. Yeah.
You break even. You're fast. Yes. Well, uh, with that, when it comes to getting a Nastasha trip to Brazil, blinding speeding. Blinding!
Ask her about tocoferol. What? What's that? Crickets are in the background. Jesus.
All right. Uh here's my feeling, Tony. Um, I have this happen a lot. Uh, with uh, I mean, we do it we do a uh distillate because Thai basil is like my one of my favorite beverage uh flavors. So we do one that's Thai basil, orange, cucumber, and uh and a little bit of cilantro, and that thing looses out and goes white like very quickly.
I think it's uh not so much the orange peel now, because we don't add a lot. I think it's uh probably the uh anethal, which is the same thing that's causing loosing and a pastise because there's a good bit of that in Thai basil, you know, that licorice flavor. Uh by the way, in that ta taste buds and molecules book, like one of the interesting things is that there's a uh I think it's Estragol is a compound that that shared that's in fennel. Uh actually one of those compounds is in apple to a certain amount. Maybe it's this is the thing that the book actually gave me some interesting concepts.
Harold McGee and I, years ago when we went to uh Geneva, he Harold McGee's gonna be in town later this week. Harold McGee. Uh we're gonna eat Surstrawing with Nils, gotta set that up. Um on my wife's birthday, though. It might be problematic.
Uh the um so we had some apples that grew on the tree that had a huge fennel note to them, and then the fennel dissipated very quickly, but probably due probably to that volatile molecules. Anyway, so like that book actually brought up some interesting stuff in my head, brought back some taste memories I had, so anyway, kudos to that, whatever. Uh uh I when you dilute them to proof, they're gonna loosh out. Um I've had ones that I I've done that to and then let sit for several months, and they uh they basically they separate over time as well. Uh my feeling is I don't know it uh here's the thing.
Whenever I've tasted these uh these these things straight out of the centrifuge, I mean sorry, straight out of the roto vap. I love the flavor of them fresh so much that I wouldn't wanna kind of I wouldn't want to change them, and I don't mind the I don't mind the the looshing, I don't mind the pastise effect. I kinda like it. It's kind of a signature of that you made this product and that it has so much like of these essential oils in it that they can't be held in solution when the proof goes um up. Instead of diluting to proof, I would I almost always keep my, unless I'm gonna serve it straight, like an Aka Vit, uh I almost always, and that I I've had Akavitz that go go white on me because we get so much uh so much essential oil in them from the rotovap.
I almost always keep them at rotovat proof, which for us is between um a buck and a buck twenty, so about sixty percent. And we keep it there uh until we're about to use it and then let it loosh out, and uh it it's more stable on the flavor. If you don't want to do that, I don't know how I don't think it would take that many G's, but I think it would take quite a long time because the particles when you're loosing are very, very small. Uh and so you have to wait for them to kind of coalesce aggregate and become larger before you can get them to settle out. So I think probably centrifuging and time um are needed.
Another hard part about throwing in the centrifuge is that you remember these are these are oils and they float to the top. And so you um that's my guess, it would float to the top. Uh and so when you spin them, you be in this position of siphoning them off the top or getting the stuff out of the bottom, which may or may not be a difficulty because they're not going to go solid if you freeze it the same way that I can do with nut oils or coconut oil. Uh so anyway, so uh those are those are my those are my thoughts uh on that. Okay.
Uh last question in, because apparently we have to wrap it up because you know, Jack's got other things to do. Other shows. Other shows. Okay. Uh five.
Five fifth questions, apparently today. Although, why do you number them? Because I don't ever do them in order anyway. Like, why put numbers on them? What do you want instead?
I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, this does people don't care. I don't know why I asked. Okay, Andrew writes in and says, uh, what is your I have actually two things.
Uh what is your recipe for pressure cooked mustard caviar? I cannot seem to find one online by you yourself. Thanks, Andrew. Here's my recipe. Uh pressure cooked um mustard seeds are awesome.
They pop like caviar, they're delicious. Even Nastasha likes them, and she hates everything I cook. Uh it's not true. You don't know, I'm just messing with her because I can. Okay.
First thing with the mustard seed, I use the yellow mustard seeds. I blanch them uh quickly in a couple of uh like two two times or three times in boiling water for a couple seconds apiece to get rid, it does get rid of some of the pungency, so much so that um you can almost get away with not pressure cooking, but it's not the same thing. We've done the test, right? Um, but it gets rid of some of the dirty, musty taste that I don't really like in a mustard seed. Um we blanch horseradish as well beforehand to get rid of some of that earthy uh taste.
Then you pressure cook them afterwards in straight vinegar. I use distilled vinegar. I pressure cook them for between 15 and 20 minutes at second ring in excess vinegar. They're gonna soak up a lot of vinegar, so you don't want to go light on the vinegar. Then you drain them, and while they're hot, you stir in.
Uh I use white, you can use whatever you want, but I use white granulated sugar to taste. The sugar will dissolve in with the vinegar that's still on the outside of the mustard seed. Don't want to add the vinegar beforehand, it's going to become a goopy mess. Uh add the vinegar after it's cooked and drinked while it's still warm, hot, but preferably, and uh, and just keep tasting it. Then you pack it in its residual juice.
You can see if you save a little bit of vinegar, you can add a little bit in a quart container, and it lasts for a long time. So that's that recipe. And we have one other suggestion in before I leave because I'd be remiss. We had a question last week regarding uh thermocouple probes, and uh our good listener, Elliot Papineau, uh called in a response and said, I use a dual probe alarm meter from WW dot thermoor uh thermoworks.com. Uh and it's a cool dupe dual probe uh thermocouple thermometer.
Uh, and they have some cool looking probes. The probes aren't cheap, but the thermometer is, so there you have it. Elliot likes it. Tell us whether you like it too. See you next week, hopefully, from Germany, Cooking Issues.
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You got my head all twisted.
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