Today's program was brought to you by Fairway Market. Check out Fairway Market.com for more information. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live from the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. Calling all of your questions to 718 497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. Is that right, Jack? Did I get it right again? Uh yeah, that's right. Man, I have this thing right all the time.
I know it's like it's like uh once I forgot once I remember it, I never forget. Yeah. I'll wake up when I'm 90 and just start screaming that number out to people. Don't change that thing, because I know I'll never remember it again. Never, never change that.
Um I am not joined right now in the studio by Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, but Jack and I don't know where she is. She should be here, so she probably got caught on that L train. Damn L train. So we're gonna have to play that uh shootsey groove L train song to make fun of the L L train later again uh in one of our one of our favorite uh songs, right? So, uh what's going on here?
We have a oh is this a new question in? Yeah. Okay. Uh so while I'm waiting for Nastasha to come in, uh so I can shoot the poop with her. We'll go into some of the questions I missed from last time.
Uh Jonathan Rogers, actually his name is Jonathan Woodruff Rogers the Third. I did not know that. He uh is one of our former interns, actually, nice guy, uh at the FCI. Uh writes in a question about equipment. Hey Dave and Nastasha.
Uh nice bumping into you the other afternoon. I'm following up regarding at the bar, by the way. Um uh that's Booker and Dax, our bar. Go visit. Uh I'm just following up regarding some questions I have uh uh in my new gig.
I'm catering lunches for a few tech startup companies Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, uh, through the company City Grit. Since it's only three days a week uh plus prep, I have some free time to experiment with some food, which is good. Very few uh people who are cooking for a living actually have the time to do a lot of experimentation, which is why uh you know my job uh director of culinary technology at the French culinary, especially when I was there full time was so great for that because I didn't have a service to worry about. So that's yeah and that's why Farran shuts down his place for uh you know or you know for a half the year or whatever it is so that he has time to they have time to do experimental work. Um anyway um okay also the companies allow me to pretty much cook whatever I want uh with a six item menu that changes weekly I have roughly $7,000 to spend and was wondering what you recommend I get some information on brands andor recommendation uh recommend locations to purchase the products things I'm interested in having in my life are a deli slicer a dehydrator a meat grinder a chamber vacuum sealer a fryer a smoker or any other cool gadgets within the price range they're getting a combi oven and I currently have a circulator thinking about getting another one.
Any information or advice will help thanks again. Looking forward to stopping by and letting you know how it's going. Thanks again JW. Okay. Now $7,000 is gonna get eaten up pretty quickly.
I love a delis first of all I'll just get another circulator. That's another like $800 right there. Just get another one this way you have two and you can keep one running while you use the other one for service or you can have you know you're never gonna regret having two circulators around. Now something like a smoker I would go cheap on the smoker. The smoker nobody really likes it but the smoker that everyone gets is only like a couple like a $150.
It's like the uh I forget that there's like a little chief or a big chief or something like that. It's basically just like a quilted metal box, you know, that little fine quilt pattern, metal box with like a with a heater in the bottom. And uh the guys over at Somme have modified it by drilling a a hole in the side and putting a smoke generator with a little heater in on the side to cool the smoke down. But, you know, that's basically all there is to it. In a restaurant situation, or even in this catering situation in New York City where you don't have the space for a big dedicated smoker, these things are light, they can be moved around very easily.
And again, nobody loves them, but you know, Wiley uses it at WD50. Um they use it at Sombar. A bunch of people use this because it's cheap and it's easy to stow away when you're not using it. So that's why I'd recommend for the caterer there. Uh dehydrator, get the Excalibur.
There's no question that you should get the X caliber dehydrator, and dehydrator is a great thing to have. Uh Excalibur is the reason you want to get the Excalibur one. I've used some of the round ones that where the stuff goes through and all this other nonsense, and I've used uh I've used some various ones. Unless you can have a lot of money to or to custom build one, the Excalibur is great because it gets a lot of racks in it, and the racks are square, which means that they you can lay things out in a way that makes sense. Those round ones with a hole in the middle, what the hell are you gonna lay out in that?
It doesn't make sense. Plus, the dehydrator, it's easy to use flat sheets and dehydrate liquids to make leathers or or sheets or or papers. It's also easy to dry things on the perforated racks. It's just, you know, it's also the dehydrator is really good, the X caliber because it's very even throughout. So the top rack is gonna dry just as e evenly as the bottom rack.
You can use it for fermentation experiments. I mean, you know, I have one. Uh I've always, you know, have one. We have one at Somme, we have one at the FCI. You know, that's the one that everyone who anyone who buys a different dehydrator for a restaurant regrets it.
So uh go for the Excalibur. Uh, which I guess, you know, I guess that I'm I don't really usually recommend brands like that, but there you go. I actually paid for mine straight up on Amazon. Anyway, they're not that much. Uh for the deli slicer.
Now I've been very spoiled in my life. I don't have one right now, but uh the Hobart model 3000 is a thick slicer. I did a video for them and they gave one to me, but I left it to school. I don't know why. I should have taken that thing with me because I love that dang thing so much.
But it's it's like, you know, it props up like a car so you can clean underneath it. The blade pops out so you can throw it in the dishwasher. Uh it slices like a freaking dream. Uh, but and it slices really, really well. In fact, prior to the Hobart Model 3000, the slicer that uh always recommended people get was the Berserba SE12.
Uh slicer, meat slicer, by the way, just on meat slicer basics. Uh the average meat slicer that uh we get here in the United States is a gravity slicer, meaning they're on that angle, and you see them, if you see them at deli, they're on an angle, and you're supposed to use gravity to uh basically force the product into the blade and then slice as you go, right? And it has that little handle that you push down. Rookie mistake, i i if your slicer is not very good or your slicer is not very sharp, you have to apply a good bit of pressure on uh the item to get it to slice properly as it goes through. Uh this is a horrible practice and causes the bottom of your meat or whatever you're slicing to kind of wedge out as it's getting cut.
It's got like healing out at the bottom, and it's uh you know, it's a sign that you're that A, you're not Slicer's not great, B, it's not that sharp. Uh, and C you're pushing too hard. A properly s uh sharpened slicer should not you shouldn't have to push on it at all. Uh and part of that is having very good sharp blades. And prior to the Hobart Model 3000, the slicer that I always recommended was the Berserba SE12 because it had a really good blade and pretty solid um a pretty solid uh carriage mechanism.
Uh is but you know nowadays I recommend the Hobart, but you're gonna be able to get the Bazerba a lot cheaper than you're gonna be able to get the Hobart 3000 and the Bazerba is a great machine. It just doesn't clean uh quite as easily. The uh you might be able to get the berserba used I haven't priced one in a long time but it's gonna be a lot cheaper than the than the 3000. The 3000 though is primo. In Europe they actually use something called a vertical slicer.
And a vertical slicer is great because instead of using gravity to force the product into the blade, the the product just sits like it normally would and the carriage literally moves and feeds the uh stuff in slice by slice. And these make perfect slices again and again and actually the first slicers that were made by uh you know Burkle Van Burkel back in you know when he invented the meat slicer were vertical slicers and in Europe they continue to be popular and they make fantastic slice quality. But for some reason or other we tend not to use them in uh in the US. I don't know if you wrote down uh vacuum machine but if you I can't remember if yeah vacuum sealer if you're gonna get a vacuum sealer I mean uh go for one you can get a good price on if you're gonna get a smaller one I like the mini packs because they have a bigger chamber size. Just look at the chamber size.
I mean uh all of the hooha programming and stuff I don't know that you're gonna use it that much in your application but get one with a big chamber size. The mini pack and the smaller units especially have a good chamber size and their price uh seems to be okay. For catering I would stay away from any of like the really cheap ones because they're gonna break when you least want them to break. Get one with a with a with a the actual good German or equivalent to the German, which is um the name's out of my head. Oh my gosh.
I I speak about it all the time. The name of the pump uh starts with a B. Anyway, uh the um the pump in that is what's serious, and you gotta make sure you get the good hardcore German uh vacuum pump, oil based pump in that, otherwise you're gonna be asking for problems. Um get those. Uh make sure you have a vita prep or two.
Um and that's really you know, all the really other super high tech stuff. I mean, it's kind of like gilding the lily. You know what I mean? Mean like all the other stuff. I mean, that the the core stuff I just told you is the basis of almost everything that we use, with the exception of liquid nitrogen.
Get yourself a liquid nitrogen doer. Did I mention that? Get a liquid nitrogen doer. You're not gonna regret having liquid nitrogen. All right.
Stuck in grandma. Here we get over the microphone so people can hear you. So apparently, as we uh well, don't push my microphone away. You could climb over, go under anything other than pushing the microphone away from me while you're talking. She does not know where her body is in space, by the way.
Like the stasha has no idea where her body is within the space around her. So I'm not gonna blame her. Like I don't think she literally did that on purpose. Same way that she doesn't understand where doors are when she slams them in your face, which is a constant thing that Nastasha. Yeah, you slam.
You walk through doors and then like look like you're gonna hold them open for people and then slam them on their faces or on bicycles and stuff because you don't really pay attention to people or the world around you as you're walking. Wow. Well, I was stuck in the Grand Street station, and no one could find Phil Bravo this morning. So I was no one knows who Phil Bravo is. No one knows who Phil Bravo is.
You've talked about him before. Oh, who's Phil Bravo? He's a friend of mine, and he didn't go to work today. So and he he was last scene with me. Wow, well, that's so did you kill him?
No. No, I he was actually he was with Tristan all night. Uh Phil Bravo is very cheap, man, so I'm sure he followed wherever the uh liquor was cheapest. By the way, for those of you not hanging out in New York right now, it's James Beard kind of week, and everyone's going out crazy partying except for me. I was home uh asleep with my family last night.
I was home by midnight. Yeah? So Phil went out with Tristan until it got. I heard Harold McGee was partying like a rock star last night with Daniel Patterson and Chris Constantino. Three of our good friends uh out there uh hanging out, having fun.
Oh, speaking of James Beard, congratulations to uh Tozy, Christian Tozy, yeah. Our our good buddy went won that PDT. Uh, you know, great bar, won uh best bar. Who else won? Do you remember Daniel Hum won?
Yeah. I'm sorry for all of our friends who were up for awards that did not win, but congratulations out to those people who did. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right?
Mm-hmm. Okay. Uh so great how long were you sitting at the Grand Street station? It was stopped for like 15 minutes. I was gonna be right on time, and it was we were stopped there with the doors open, and I was like, could I walk from here?
But then you know that minute when you're like, what if we go right now? I I do know that minute. Yeah, I know that minute. It's like, but you always get burnt by that minute. There's nothing worse than sitting in mass transit, not being able to control your destiny, thinking at any minute this sucker might move again.
And you with the door with the door was open and every second every second you got to decide whether yeah, every minute that and then it was one of those electronic things. So they just said train traffic, ahead. I was in the Grand Central the other day on Sunday, going to the Bronx Zoo, which by the way is not an eating zoo. You don't get to eat any of the animals that are at the Bronx Zoo. My kids were joking about that as we were there.
Anyways, the uh when you're the trains were not running out of Grand Central, the whole thing was shut down. It was incredibly calm. No one was flipping out, no one was anything. I've never seen Grand Central that calm. Metro North train?
Metro North trains, all of them shut down for like two and a half hours. Whoa. The only person not calm was my son liquor. Freaking out. Okay.
Uh question, another question from last week. Don writes it about soda. You may remember that I met you at the BAR, that's Beverage Alcohol Resource School in September at the Astor Center. Uh I'm in the planning phase to open a bar, and sodas slash carbonation has me uh at a conundrum. I don't want soda guns.
I wouldn't mind bottles, but that's a very high cost and a storage problem. I love the look and ease of ISI soda bottles, but the cost of chargers is stratipheric. I like the work you've done with carbonation systems using the compressor and plastic bottles, but how practical are they in a working bar? It seems to make a huge sticky mess pretty quick. What is Booker and Dax doing for carbonated beverages?
On a related note, I tried to carbonate a Nagroni using the ISI soda bottle, and I just got a glass of foam. What can I do to prevent that? Love the show, Don. Okay, carbonation in a nutshell. The only thing that's really currently available on the market right now that does really good carbonation, my level of carbonation, what I think is an acceptable level of carbonation, is um is using soda bottles with the uh carbonator cap manufactured by the Liquid Bread Corporation coming out of a five or twenty pound CO2 tank.
You need to pre-chill it much colder than refrigerator temperatures, right? Like until it's almost frozen. And then you need to uh you need to carbonate it three times before service. Uh a one liter bottle is what I recommend. A one liter bottle will hold roughly five pours of drink, and so you do a bunch beforehand and they and they get going.
The reason that you're foaming is several fold. One, you probably don't have enough water in it, right? The first mistake people are making when they're doing uh drinks is to um is to not add enough water to the carbonated drink. They they treat it like you'll make a drink by shaking, which isn't actually shaking, might make a drink cold enough to carbonate. In fact, shaking will make a drink that's kind of barely cold enough to carbonate.
The problem is shaking a drink will make a drink that's too alcoholic to be really successful over the long term as a carbonated drink. What do I mean by this? If you take a drink, a strike uh like Negroni, first of all, instead of stirring the Negroni, if you're gonna carbonate it, you must shake it. Because stirred Negroni, A, is nowhere near cold enough to carbonate properly. You're gonna foam all over the place.
And B, it's nowhere near diluted enough to carbonate properly. So the first thing you're gonna have to do when you when you make a Negroni carbonated is to shake it. Then you're gonna uh it's still gonna be too alcoholic and it will taste good for the first sips, but the problem is is that you can't have like three, two or three of those because it's gonna get not just because it's gonna mess you up, but because it's going to be uh somewhat cloying over time. If you just take that Negroni that you made that way, and just as the test, uh, and you know, I was talking to Tobichini about this, and he was saying the same thing. It's like add a little bit of soda water to that and see how much more kind of delicious and refreshing it is, just lightening it a little bit.
If you are gonna make uh a carbonated drink, I'll tell you what our ratios are at the bar. Our ratios for a drink for a five-ounce uh pour, uh, our ratios are 1.75 ounces of strong, that's of straight liquor, and 3.25 ounces of uh of water or a week, like including like simple syrup and juice and all that. And everyone's like, oh my god, that's so equal. Listen, it's not. I've done tests again and again and again and again and again and again and again, and those ratios are the ratios that make, in my opinion, a good drink.
If you have more alcohol than that, you need to get it ridiculously cold to carbonate it properly, and you're really gonna put people on the floor, right? I mean, I've done straight uh you know, 40% liquor carbonated stuff before, but they have to be basically minus uh minus 18 Celsius to work properly. Uh they don't balance well, and you can't have that very many of them, and they hit people like a ton of bricks. You're much better using the ratios that uh I just told you, getting it cold till it's almost frozen and and and doing it. The way we do it at the bar is I have a very special refrigerator, uh the Randall FX, right?
Uh, and what it can maintain very, very accurate temperatures. So I set that thing to be 23 Fahrenheit, 22, 23 Fahrenheit, which is what I think is the good place between 20 and 23 Fahrenheit, which is where I think that carbonated drinks should be. Uh, I think it's like twenty-three is what we said it at. And then I let them chill in there until they're chilled, a couple hours. Uh, and then before service, I carbonate them and they stay in there and I keep refluffing it after I do every one.
The the ISI chargers is gonna cost you too much, it's not gonna work out. Uh most people's carbonated drinks, I think are only very lightly carbonated compared to what kind of I want, and one of the reasons it is because they foam too much. It's because their drinks aren't cold enough, or they're putting it through a keg system, which causes a lot of foaming. Alcohol in general foams a lot, uh, and so you're kind of you know barking up a hard tree. Plus, you need to carbonate alcohol more than you carbonate water for the same sensation of carbonation.
So not only does alcohol foam more, but um it also needs to be carbonated higher, so you get double the foam, and so everything seems very, very foamy. Your solutions are reduce the alcohol proportion slightly and uh chill it much more than you're chilling it now. But to me, bottles are the way to go in a bar until we finish our system and get it done right, right? Right. Which I'm working on right now.
I just ordered I built one that works, and I'm building another one that works, which hopefully we're gonna take to Japan with us. Mm-hmm. You want to bring that to Japan? Because we need another thing that can break when we go somewhere, right? Yeah.
Right? Yeah. Nothing's better than stuff that breaks. You like breaking stuff? Yes.
It's awesome. Awesome. Okay. Uh that answered that show that question, right? Alright, why don't we take our first commercial break and uh come back with some more questions?
No hour rock the hot party at the drop of a hat. Yeah, I need a bite now with the Luna back. A lot of people maybe told you that they hear me rock the mind. Maybe staring at the radio, staying up all night. Today's program was brought to you by Fairway Markets.
Whether you are cooking for one or for a craft. Fairway market literally has everything you need for a fantastic meal. But if you don't feel like cooking, no worries. They cater. Check out Fairway Market.com for more information.
And be sure to check the new blog on our plate for weekly specials, health tips, and recipes. It's the joy. That's a baseline right there, huh? Oh, yeah, but it says that's your homage to MCA, huh? Yeah.
You know, I didn't even know. It sucks. I didn't even know that he died until a couple days afterwards. But that's the end of an era, right? Yeah, indeed.
Uh, and uh an interesting tidbit there is a Tibetan doctor advised him to go vegan in uh the last month or so. Yeah. So who so okay? What's the meaning of that? I'm just putting that out there.
I know. Well, you know, they were saying when Steve Jobs passed that uh he was he was vegan stubbornly, and and then it may have not been the best idea. Really? But look, it it turns out that uh turns out that we all die eventually. Like this is one of those things that happens.
Like regardless of whether you eat vegan or not, turns out you're gonna die. Uh it's one of the hard things to kind of like kind of get a handle on, but it's true. Uh and uh uh one of the things that bothers me is uh any sort of health claim related to uh diet. While it's true that I think I could construct pretty unhealthy diets out of any sort of uh uh food taste or food thing, like I could construct an incredibly unhealthy vegan diet. I could construct a healthy vegan diet.
I could construct an incredibly unhealthy meat-based diet, I could construct a healthy one. I mean, in other words, it's like it's uh you know, the idea that you could I mean, first of all, when you're really sick, uh I know I would be grasping at anything to try and make myself uh be better, but my semi-healthy self telling myself now in the future is uh first of all, when you're sick, it's already too too dang late. I I'd like to hear someone not too dang late. I mean, obviously if you have a long-term chronic thing, you change your habits, you get better, right? I mean uh I just I I'm very uh I don't like in general the notion of people selling dietary cures to be able to do that.
Yeah, that was my point kind of too. Yeah. I mean, I'd I would love to hear someone call in and tell me that I'm the world's biggest jerk off for saying that, but in general, uh my philosophy, not backed by science, but my philosophy is that uh the healthiest diet is to eat a wide variety of uh interesting foods in moderation that make you happy and sated. Mm-hmm. Yeah?
Yeah. Now, if you're happy and sated, uh eating vegan because you don't want to take in animal products, then you should eat vegan, right? Yeah. You know? Um speaking of which, go on the uh Amazon and look up uh Michael uh Natkin's book.
I'm curious to see how how it's how it's doing. Hopefully doing quite well. We'll give you a follow-up on the thing. Uh we talked about his book last week and uh his uh kind of slap across our face for um talking about uh people's dietary choices. Okay.
Uh long time listener Ken Ing Ken Ingber writes in uh two things. One, he wrote uh an article about a coffee trip that he took to um you know New York. Uh we read it. We couldn't read it online, uh, you know, on the air because it, you know, it was long, right? Uh, but apparently he's gonna get it published in Coffee Geek, maybe, which is nice.
Yeah. Right? But uh just to give you a preview in case it comes out on there, he had enough shots of espresso during a day to to basically turn him into a Christmas chihuahua. Just like, you know, shaking, caffeinated. I'm sure he did.
I mean I didn't see him afterwards, but I'm assuming I know if I had that much caffeine in me, it would be uh a nightmare. And I'm a very caffeinated fellow. Okay. Uh Ken Right in. I'm making a French dinner this week, and of course it's two weekends ago, so we missed it.
I'm making a French dinner this weekend. I wanted to end with good humor. Good humor is a pun in this case. Uh, in particular, my dessert will be a creamsicle brulee, uh, creme boulet with blood orange foam. I aspire to get my guests weeping a la alinea over their childhood memories of a good humor creamsicle, but I will settle for an appreciative groan.
So, how do I make uh foam with juice? I combine the juice with li liquid less than and put it in my espresso milk frother. I got no foam and lecithin did not mix with the juice, but instead stuck to the spring coil frothing device and it's next to impossible to clean. Liquid lecithin is nasty. Nat lessanthan in general is pretty nasty.
I only I very rarely use lethicin, by the way. Have you ever seen me use it? No. No, I don't use it. I imagine Modernist Pantry has some magic powder, but the dinner is Saturday, so I do have a lot of time.
I have agar agar in the house, but don't think that's suitable. Can I just use a little egg white and live the guests use uh ask if I'm using raw eggs? Uh uh follow up to that. Cancel my request on the foam unless you find it interesting. Uh I was unsuccessful using the lecithin uh despite multiple assurances on the internet.
I'm throwing it away, I'm throwing it away as it is not pleasant to work with. It is as pleasant as roofing tar. Uh I used egg white and gelatin, uh, the foamer, hot and cold in immersion blender, and had some success with gelatin, uh, but it was a lot of fuss and uh didn't do it because it was a pain in the butt. Okay. Uh I assume something like VersaWhip would work.
As I said, I did not have time to order from Modernist Pantry oh well. Well, Ken, you know Modernist Pantry has quick shipping to anyone in the world. In fact, someone else wrote in, we'll get to it later, basically saying that it was quick, but um VersaWhip, you're quite white, right? Versaw whip is uh what you should probably use for that. Uh and uh Ebon Freeman, our friend Ebon Freeman, uh had a blood and sand recipe with an orange foam on top that was in fact made with uh versa whip.
And uh his recipe is 200 grams of orange juice and 2.5 grams of versa whip. Uh he doesn't say what kind of versa whip because that's like Ebon, he just won't tell you what kind. You know what I mean? Thanks, Ebon. Anyway, uh 2.5 grams of VersaWhip, which is a lot of Vers Whip.
It's like a you know, it's a lot, right? Uh it's over a percent. In general, I try to add gums in in the percent or less range, but in this case I don't think it matters because it's gonna be whipped up. And a half gram of Xanthan gum. And the Xanthan is there to provide body to it and to hold once it whips up.
The VersaWhip's a whipping agent, but the VersaWhip's not gonna hold the foam, right? The Xanthan is there to hold the foam uh uh after the Versawhip whips it up. Okay? And then using a immersion blender with a whisk attachment to whip it into a foam and laid it all on top. Another thing you can do that's incredibly simple and doesn't require ordering anything online and creates a very dense orangey, orangey foam.
It's you're gonna want to uh acid it acidify it a little bit. So orange plus a little bit of uh of lemon to make it uh you know more like a sour orange, right? Set that into an agar gel, pretty stiff, like 0.8 to 1% agar gel. Blend it in a blender, now you have a fluid gel. If you mix that with straight cream in a whipper in an ISI whipper, uh when you squirt it out, you get a dense, dense foam, and the agar fluid gel uh stops the cream from breaking, and you actually can have the a really dense creamsicle like fluid gel, and we've done that many times, and that's my favorite kind of citrus foam because it has that awesome mouthfeel of whipped cream, which you can't beat.
You can't beat the mouthfeel of whipped cream, right? Mm-hmm. In fact, it's even denser than whipped cream. It's like dense and creamy, but also orangey and acidic without breaking. And that'll hold for a while.
So next time you do it, or if anyone wants to do it, like I think that's a good uh that's a good way to do it, right? Yes. Yes, Nash is like, yeah, I don't really care. I don't care. No, so this his book, Michael Natkin's book, got 10 five-star reviews.
Wow. It's beautiful. Yeah, it is beautiful. So maybe we should buy it. How much is it?
1629. 1629 Prime on Amazon. You know what? I'll I'll make sure we book him for one of the other shows where we do more uh, you know, authors of books and stuff like that. And he used to be a an engineer on the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
What? Whoa. What do you mean? Where is it? He was a software engineer making dinosaurs for Jurassic Park.
That's Baller. Yeah. You know, my wife was saying, should we let the kids watch the Jurassic Park or is it too damn scary? I think it's the guy gets eaten. Yeah, that's the postman from Seinfeld gets eaten.
Right. I was pretty young when I saw it, and it was pretty awesome though. Well, how young is young? I think I must have been like s I'll have to look it up. I'll actually go look up the release date.
Yeah. Yeah, anyway, so uh everyone should go out and buy his book. We're gonna buy a copy of the book, and uh Jack's gonna try to get him booked onto a show. Yeah, and let's have him build it down. I was seven years old, sorry.
I was seven. Seven? Man, I was like eighty-five when that movie came out. Okay. Uh Chip writes in regarding circulators.
Uh he misses the hammer and Dave and Jack, but does not miss Carlos. Wow. Really? Yeah. Hardcore.
Man, I like a guy who respects the loyalty. Miss the hammer, like Mr. or Mrs. Oh, maybe Miss the Hammer and Dave. Yeah.
And Jack, but not Carlos. He does say but not Carlos, but he's messed up. He's not saying hello. Or he's not missing. Anyway, anyway.
Alright, regardless. Uh he says, I know you're not the biggest proponent of DIY thermal circulators, but my wife won't let me drop a G on one yet. So I had to do my best. I'm familiar with this problem, Chip. Uh I made the version on Seattle Food Geek a while back, but quickly found that the pump being submerged was the slash a problem.
Well, I was cooking potatoes, uh I guess it went south on him when we was cooking potatoes for the modernist cuisine yuckey recipe. So I wanted to move it out of the water. Finding a pump that would A handle the heat and B would be self priming was a bit of a challenge. But if there is a need, it is sold on eBay. So I found one there.
That's that's fact. There's almost every dang thing on eBay. Almost, almost every dang thing on eBay. I used an uh an SSR, which is a solid state relay for all you folks out there. By the way, in case you're the person who listens to our show doesn't know what a circulator is.
Uh it's uh a device that uh keeps water usually or any other liquid, but with a DIY, definitely only use water and try to keep it clean. Uh uh at a very precise temperature, which is invaluable for doing kind of modern low temperature cooking, which is you know, I I I use it all the time. They're about 800 bucks now uh at the uh at JB Prince or at the William Sonoma. Um and so a lot of people have been making their own. Uh by the way, uh I am not against DIY uh circulators.
In fact, I applaud anyone that wants to build something themselves. It's just usually you end up with something where you've spent a lot of hours building it and it's not quite as functional. I think there's so many people working on the DIY circulators that I'm pretty sure they're pretty good by now. But he's quite right. The main problem is the the pump.
Uh let me go on to keep on going. Uh I also uh this is chip again. I also had the uh the case for it, laser cut on Pinocco.com. Pinocco.com is pretty cool. You just send them like the pictures and they can laser cut stuff and they ship it back to you.
Uh so it took a little more, so it looks a little more like a retail product. I still need to address some of the visual issues with it, but what is it works for now? I like what is Victoria says that. Uh our our our uh our former enter works with us a lot. Anyway, uh anyway, I thought I'd share.
Thanks for the great show. Modernist Pantry does have fast chipping. Thanks, Chip. I looked at uh at Chip's Circulator. I don't know if it's available online.
Damn thing does look pretty good. Uh, one thing I'm gonna say: if you're gonna build a circulator, the main parts are a controller. Controllers can now be had for $30 or less uh in that range on eBay and at Auburn Instruments. Uh some people buy controllers with relays in them. I don't recommend using a regular relay because it's another failure point that I don't enjoy having.
I don't enjoy failure points. Uh I use a solid state relay, which he uses. They're not that expensive. They can be had for very cheap at this point. Um, and a an immersion heater, which you can basically crib from almost anything.
A you know, a hot water heater, whatever. I don't know what these guys are using, DIY. A temperature sensor, again, only a several dollar problem now. And then the case, that's the hard part, and the pump. Pumps break a lot.
And real circulators basically uh have a long shaft, and they just sit there spinning a stainless steel blade to do the pumping, and it ends up being good over the long term. I've had most of my plastic uh in and out pumps like the one you're using here fail over time, but uh, you know, good luck with it. It looks like a good job. Looks like you did a good job, right? Yeah.
Yep. You want to take one more commercial break? Let's take another commercial break. Call your questions. 27184972128.
That's 784972128! Hey! Hey ladies in the place of calling out to you! I never was a city kid, true. Talk pushman on the foolery!
Women on TV with the heavy tough rulery. We're throwing out just like critics. And I'm always not looking for the female cut. I'm ready! I'm feeling on time, you might feel it.
Then I can crack some back up on ceiling. Such is sucked to me the waste that I'm doing. I'm talking to the girl, telling her I'm well going. She's talking to the crib, crib it to the city. I'm telling her every line that you know that I never did.
Ladies! Nice one, Jack. Nice one. Uh Nastasha, for those of you that don't know, likes to just kind of like make weird judgments about things. Decided.
Parrots are like this too, by the way. Just decide does not like uh my shirt. Right? Uh and the reason is I'm wearing one of my favorite shirts, which is a hunting shirt. It's Blaze Orange.
And her opinion is that it makes me look like a uh prison uh work gang. Who the reason prisoners wear orange is the same reason hunters wear orange is to be seen easily. The hunters do it so they don't get shot, and the prisoners do it so that they can get shot if they try to escape. See, slightly different. But uh, none of that has anything to do with my shirt, which uh I'm not neither hunting nor hopefully going to prison today.
So uh I don't really understand uh Nastash's problem with it. Anyway. Derek Bodkin writes in uh about uh a popcorn machine. Dave and Co. recently I learned about Chinese popcorn in uh Parenz.
Uh not Prince, quotes. Why I say Prince, I'm a quotes. Uh apparently a method where colonels are seal kernels are sealed in a container and superheated, then allowed to explosively decompress, popping them all at once. Here is a link. And you look on like look for explosively awesome on the internet's uh and boing boing and whatnot.
In your humble opinions, is it possible to hack together a setup to do this in a home kitchen? Thanks for your help and insight and keep being awesome, Derek Botkin. Okay. You have asked a question uh that I actually do know something about because I actually have tried to do this at home before many, many, many years ago. Like uh before I had kids, so it's more than 10 years ago, probably 12 years ago, 13 years ago.
Um so I have been interested in a long time for uh in a piece of equipment called a puffing gun. Now, when uh when they were inventing breakfast cereals uh at the beginning of the 20th century, and end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, and you know, in that range uh was when all of the really butt-kicking breakfast cereal concepts were invented, except one. Except one. So uh flakes were invented back then, and the way they were made is with a giant oversized basically pasta machine where you like you temper out uh actual whole kernels and you feed them through these incredibly, they're cooled and they're incredibly massive uh and sturdy roll rollers, and it just boop smashes them into flakes, and the flakes shoot out onto uh onto a mat, and that's it, they're done. That was invented back then.
The shredder to make shredded wheat was invented back then, and that's basically the same concept, but the roller has ridges in it, so it extrudes them into shredded wheat shapes, right? Um also uh at that time was invented the puffing gun. And the puffing gun, right, is an amazing piece of equipment where what you do is so corn you can pop normally. There's really no need to do this with popcorn because corn, you can pop, you know what I mean? But you can't pop wheat, uh, and you can't pop rice the same way.
You can puff it by frying, but you can't puff it the same way popcorn does. And the reason is is that the uh the outside, the skin of the popcorn, is so uh it seals in the water so well that when you're uh heating it in oil, water pressure can build up on the inside of the kernel in the endosperm to the point where it explosively decompresses and you get popcorn, right? That's what's happening. When you do wheat, it's very hard to do regular wheat because uh the moisture leaks out of the uh out of the outside, right? Because it's not as uh hard, the outside's not as like no leak proof.
And so it won't pop explosively the same way that uh popcorn will. So the solution to this, right? Same with rice, the solution to this is to heat these uh these items under a lot of pressure. What's a lot of pressure? Uh like 175 psi in that range because they're trying to get it up to the same temperatures that you would get when you're frying popcorn, like 360, three in that range, 350 Fahrenheit, 360 Fahrenheit, around there, right?
And so you start with uh grain that has the proper amount of moisture in it, which I forget what that is, I can go look it up. It's something like 10% or something in that range, right? You then seal it, you heat it under a massive amount of pressure, and what that means is is that the water inside is uh hot, right? And it's also under pressure so it won't boil. Then you release the pressure very suddenly, and all of a sudden all that water expands all at once and it pops.
It doesn't need the outside of the grain to hold the moisture in the way that you would uh with regular popcorn. Uh so the unit that you pointed to on the video that the guy is using on the street corner, I would not walk anywhere near that sucker. That sucker was so freaking ghetto, that thing could blow up at any second. I happen to know that when he's puffing that stuff, it's under at least 150 PSI, probably higher, right? So you don't want to and basically what you do is is he literally has uh a like a like a like what looks like a homemade boiler that he's spinning, and that's good because you need to you know get the heat evenly transferred throughout it, right?
So it's spinning over a fire that he has stoked with coal and with like what looks like a modified hairdryer, right? And and what looks like a freaking vice grip holding the whole damn thing together, right? He looked like happy. He looked happy because he's not dead. Every second that he works and he's not dead, he's happy.
Then he sticks it into uh you know this what looks like a long windsock, which was incredibly dirty by the way. I don't know that I'd but I mean it was incredibly dirty. Uh and then puts a stick in, pulls the pin, bam, the thing blows up. Now maybe this thing is actually manufactured by somebody to some sort of specifications, but the idea of heating something over an open fire with no protection that looks homemade to 170 PSI, 150, 170 PSI, and then explosively decompressing it time after time outside, it uh freaks me out. Put it that way.
So, how did I attempt to do this? I bought uh some pipes that were rated to 150 uh PSI or higher. Actually, I got like an 80, 80 um schedule 80, which was rate rated higher than 150 PSI, uh made out of steel. I uh put them all together uh with uh heater, water heater on the inside, which was one of the weak points, and an overpressure valve so that it wouldn't go above the pressure that I wanted to, and a thermometer, all done with pipes, whether regular pipes. Uh filled it with uh corn, which is my first test because I was trying to I was I was working on a on a um on doing a nuclear explosion uh out of candy and popcorn, and so I was trying to actually do a puffing gun thing for that.
Uh and uh the problem was is that the piping system that I had didn't seal properly and so I was getting venting and steam out. I did get it up to like 120 psi before I and I literally like like I said, I used vice grips with like a with a pull string to pull it, and uh I what I successfully did was spray burning hot popcorn kernels all over my all over my house. I didn't actually I popped maybe four or five of them, but I didn't get it to be done the way uh the way you'd want. And I think my main problem was is I tried to have a little bit of water medium in there to heat it. I tried heating it internally instead of having an external fire with rotation, which is the way that it's always done, is external heat and agitation.
Uh and the piping system, it was just hard to get it to seal very well, that thick pipe, because it was like two-inch pipe. It was hard to get it to seal accurately at those high, high temperatures because uh the I used Teflon tape, but it I don't know, it just didn't work. So uh I'm gonna build one eventually because for the Museum of Food and Drink cereal exhibition, we're gonna have uh a cereal exhibit in the Museum of Food and Drink, which we're working on now. We have our first we have our well, we have a new full-time uh employee at the Museum of Food and Drink, even though he's not getting paid. So he's not an employee, I guess, because he's not getting paid.
But Peter Kim, formerly one of our lawyers uh at uh Devil Boysm and Big Plympton. Uh big Plumpton. Anyway, so like they uh uh he quit being a lawyer. He believes in the museum project so much he quit being a lawyer and he is now working in the museum full time, which we're very, very excited about. Uh so the museum will have one.
There are small commercial machines that that are not quite so uh wonky in Korea that actually make puffed rice cakes, alimine newt. And I forget the name of them, but it's something like like bing like bing bjing the noise of the actual thing working is what it is in Korean, but I don't know what the noise is, so I can't tell you what it is. But you could go look that up. Uh the third and uh and uh the third kind of uh machine, by the way, for cereal, uh and it it was the one that was not invented early on in the game is the twin screw extruder, which basically was a piece of equipment that was invented for the plastics industry, and that's how they make Captain Crunch uh and all things like that. They basically have a screw under enormous pressure that takes in grains uh or whatever, under enormous pressure, and then it heats up the pressure and the and the actual screw mechanism of putting it through the thing heats it up so that when it comes out of a dye at the end, much like a pasta dye, like a pasta extruder, but it's under such heat and pressure that when it comes out the end, it whoop puffs up into Captain Crunch or Kicks or whatever, and that's how they make all of those cereals.
And so we're gonna have one of those at the exhibit too, because that's pretty badass, right? It is. Yeah, I've always wanted one of those. I went to uh I went to visit Cornell years ago and they let me look at theirs. They have small pilot ones.
Shouldn't we get one? Yeah, we should. Right? Let's get Peter on that. Let's get Peter on that son of a gun.
Right? But we want a big one, like that's the thing. Like, if we got anyone out there who has used cereal equipment, I called up the Pure Manufacturing Corporation, by the way, is the corporation that used to make all the old puffing guns. They no longer use uh those puffing guns um in commercially in the US. They've moved to a system called a continuous puffer.
That's a batch puffing thing. Uh and you know, but they've moved to continuous puffers, and so all the old ones get sent back refurbed, and now most of them are are used in factories in Mexico. So I wasn't able to locate someone with an old uh puffing gun that wanted to donate it to the museum. So if anyone out there uh can get their hands on an old Puritan manufacturing uh corporation puffing gun, the museum would love. And we are now 501c3, right?
We're still pending. We're still pending. We're still pending, but believe me, we're gonna get that 501c3. So you'll be able to write off that Puritan puffing gun when you donate it to the museum, and the little kids are gonna be so happy when we're exploding cereal in front of their parents. Imagine that.
Like 10, 9, 8, well, all the way down to one. Boom! And like cereal spraying everywhere, goggles and bowls, and we're gonna have like better than the um what was that store in Times Square, your kids liked? Oh, which one? Uh Pop-Tart.
Oh, the Pop-Tart Pop-Up? The Pop-Tart pop-up. They weren't making Pop Tarts. Here's the thing. No, they weren't making it.
Yeah, no, they had these machines that you could make pick your own pack and it would do it, but it's not like I mean, and they charged a lot. Charged a lot. All right. Finally, uh in from uh Elliot Papanot writes in, uh, longtime listener. Uh Dave, Nastasha, and Jack.
What book, and he I got this over Twitter too, actually. Cool. I'm on the Twitter now, by the way. You know, if people keep addressing me in these questions, I'm gonna have to try to answer one of them. Well, you mean try, Jack, don't try.
What do you mean, don't try? What the hell's that? Thanks. Nastash is so rough. By the way, by the way, by the way, before I get into this question, uh, I'm gonna run, you know, a minute late, like I always do, or three or four.
But like uh, so I say to Nesta Nastasha, like she she says that she never answers questions here when I ask her because I don't give her the time to answer. I think okay. What do you mean? Is that what you n is that not what you say to me? I I just remember what David Chang's explanation.
We'll get into that in a second. Okay. We'll get into that in a second. My point is we're on the radio. It's not like Nastasha wants me to ask her a question and then pause for like 35, 40 seconds and wait for an answer.
And I'm like, you know, we're on the radio. It's not like at the dinner table where like, you know, they can see the thoughtful pause. You know? You know what I'm saying? So she she says I don't give uh enough uh time.
And she's referring to another time when Dave Chang was laughing at me. Nastasha, this is Nastasha's favorite comment of all times. It is. Is it basically uh and he's talking about like a uh uh a demo I was doing with McGee where I will ask a question, then answer it, ask a question, then answer it without letting the other person. Well he's like, Harold, what color is the sky today?
And Harold's like Well I and David's like, it's blue, it's blue. I'm not first of all, I'm not like that. I'm not like that. No, I guess. I'm not uh whatever.
We can have more more discussions about this later. But the final question in what book do you recommend about Alliums? I just ordered Having Your Ramps and Eating Them Too by Glenn Facmeyer Jr. Hopefully it does not suck. Now, first of all, I think Facmire is an amazing name.
Do you love that name? I like it. Facmeyer. 'Cause it sounds like you're mired in facts. Like like you don't even like facts, but like you're stuck in 'like quicksand, you can't get out.
You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. I like that. But you want to talk about how much you have we already talked about how much you hate ramps on the on the on the show? Yeah, we have.
We have. Yeah? I think they're good. I don't like people's like of them. See, this is classic Nastasha here.
The actual product is good, but the people the fact that people like them is no good, and therefore she does not like them or does not want to see them. Same is true with weather. Uh she doesn't like good weather. What? You feel the same about weather.
No, no, I'm a little bit. No, I but I still like the you do not like weather, good weather, because other people like it. Because they get overly happy about it. Like with ramps. Overly happy.
Crazy. Okay. I feel you on the ramps thing. Thank you, Jack. Well, of course, you work in Rampland.
We're here at Roberta's. Like Roberta's is like, you know, happy feely, forage, growths. Yeah. Okay. Hopefully, Senor Fackmeyer's book on ramps does not suck.
Uh, with ramp season ending and green garlic and scape season beginning. Can you talk about some things uh to do with alliums, nitro muddling maybe? Uh, and uh by the way, he also has a separate question which I'll answer, which is what are some good books on uh alliums? I'm also having uh do you understand what this is? Is that a hoe?
It's like a oh, he's also having a really nice hoe made by red pig uh is that what do you call that? A hoe? Some sort of garden implement there made by uh red pig tools for my mom for Mother's Day. Hopefully your mom doesn't. Of course your mom doesn't listen to the show, but it looks like a very nice thing.
I'm sure she'll be very happy. Have you ever considered using Twitter or Facebook for questions for the show? Well, I did get from you this question, so I am gonna answer uh both parts of it. On I don't own any books on onions exclusively. I own two books on garlic that address onions somewhat, uh, and I'll talk about uh both of them.
The one I've spoken about on this show before, which is um uh it's called uh Garlic and Other Alliums by uh Eric Block, and it is kind of it's supposed to be a compendium of lore and science and all this, but it's it has some of the lore and a lot of the history and a lot of the bibliography on garlic. Uh but the science is fairly in-depth, and it serves really kind of as a review from time immemorial of the science behind the chemistry of alliums, which is quite complex, and some stuff on on like its cookery and its use, but it's strongest on the science and on taxonomy and things like that for garlic and other alliums, onions and whatnot. Uh it's dense, right? Uh the other book I have is called The Complete Book of Garlic, A Guide for Gardeners, Growers and Serious Cooks by Ted Jordan Meredith. And that book is uh fantastic and you had mentioned on the Twitter that uh you were interested in books that talked about cultivation.
And that book is a nice book to read. It depressed me because I don't have the ability to grow garlic. I don't have the ability to grow anything uh where I live because I don't get light. I can't even have a window box because I don't really get light in my apartment. Nastasha has a plot of land.
I do. Where's that second? 48th Street. It's in a community garden. They gave me another plot because they were so impressed with my plot.
Yeah, or no one else wanted it. I guess I w we'll choose to think that it's because you did such a good job. They told me I did a really good job. But you had that Latvian lady tell you that your job sucked. That was when it was all seedlings.
Now it's all out and it looks beautiful. Better than the people next door? Oh yeah. Yeah? Mm-hmm.
Nastasha, by the way, has a feeling that she's great at all the things like this. But I I tend to think that she probably has a good garden. I do, I do. I do. I'll bring a picture.
Yeah? Yeah. Maybe you'll post it on our post on the Twitter account. Okay. Uh okay.
So uh the the the point is is that this book is depressing for me because I can't grow garlic, but it doesn't even have recipes, which I love. What it is is it's a book about garlic varieties and uh some history and some lore and uh how they're used in a culinary sense, what makes a great culinary garlic and uh and all the different varieties and planners' notes and how to grow them and where they respond best, uh, with lots of great pictures, uh, but without recipes and clearly written by someone who cooks with them all the time and knows how to cook. Uh and these kind of books are rare. Usually you either have books that are basically recipe books that have something about the actual product, right? Like garlic in this case, or you have books that are exclusively about garlic with that aren't written from the perspective of a cook.
This is you know fairly rare in this kind of field, in that it's a book written for uh uh people who are gardeners, but who garden with garlic not because they're interested in garlic as a theoretical thing, but because they're interested in garlic the cooking item. Uh and it's a good book for that. It's great. If you are planning on growing garlic, uh go ahead and get it. Uh one of the best discussions of it is uh he has it goes to a very good discussion in that book about um about why you would plant different kinds of garlic, and it's because different kinds of garlic are good as the season progresses, very much similar to kind of what I say about apples, that apples uh there's an apple for every time and for every place.
So, you know, he goes through uh what I thought is a very great discussion of kind of the usefulness of having different varieties and also of kind of the challenges of growing garlic and the fact that garlic uh over the first couple of years that you planted in your in your garden is going to climatize to your garden. It's just really I think it's an interesting book. Uh I would I would go with that. I don't have a good uh onion onion book for you now. Garlic start as a seed?
You plant the you put you plant the the one of the yeah, you plant the clove. Yeah. Yeah. Uh anywho, um and it talks something about using he hasn't used the bulbills that much, but it talks about using scapes and all those other things and what he uses. But it's not a recipe book, thank God.
Um as for uses, I mean, other than the ones that we always I don't have any new onion uses. I mean, other than the ones we always always harp on, which is pressure cooking onions, uh, which you know Nils used to make ice cream with. Uh, I like pressure, I like uh doing like dual onion soup, like pressure cooked massive amounts of pressure cooked onions into a beef stock or veg, I guess, and then uh, and then sauteing onions regularly and adding them for like mega onion soups. I like that. Straight up pressure cooked onion soup is a little light on onion flavor, right?
Um because but it's incredibly sweet. Um I mean, garlic, the same thing. Most of my tricks are pressure cooking, like pressure cooking massive amounts of garlic to make sauces for pizzas uh that are like half garlic. I mean, I I do that, you know, pretty much all the time. I make a lot of sauces that way.
Do we have any other good onion tricks? No? Ice cream you said? I already said that. Anything?
No? No? Go get yourself some Chinese chives. They're fantastic to cook with, wilted, sauteed with uh bacon. They're delicious.
Um anyway. So uh that is that. That is cooking issues, and come back next week. Uh thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network. You can find all of our archived programs on heritage radio network.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows.
You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes Store. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up to date news and information. Thanks for listening. You got my head all twisted. And I guess can't get it straight.
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