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Cooking issues. Cooking issues! Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Burda's Pizzeria in the back of the Well, no, coming to you from Roberta's Pizzeria, actually. Not in the back of anything.
We are in the back of uh Roberta Petria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Uh back from Senegal today. Uh sorry I wasn't able to do it uh last week live from Senegal, but uh you know how sometimes these things work. Uh we are down. Two of our crew members today, Nastasha, the Hammer Lopez, uh is in Philadelphia attending uh a conference uh by our good friends David Michaels, fo uh flavorists and food chemistry folks down in Philadelphia, and they are hosting a food innovation seminar today.
And Nastasha is there. Uh also Jack is MIA today, but we do have Joe, thank goodness. Hey Joe. How's it going, Dave? Doing well.
Uh and we are joined in the studio, I think by the first time ever, maybe in the studio, with uh Peter Kim. Yo, what's up, y'all? How? So Peter Kim uh is uh what's your title over there? Executive director.
Really? Yeah. Okay. Is the executive director. Uh Peter Kim is the executive director of the Museum of Food and Drink, uh, which is a 501c3.
Uh when do we get our status there? We got it last September. Right, and uh we uh it uh oh yes. Uh I'm uh the founder. I also have what's my other title here?
You're also the president. Well founder and also the president of Visionary. Yeah, nice. Great. Uh and uh you want to give them the mission?
I'm sure you have it uh memorized. Our mission is to change the way people think about food and inspire day-to-day curiosity about what we eat and why. Yeah, and uh and you know, just uh I'm sure I've already spouted this a million times, but j why do we need a brick and mortar museum devoted to this? Because uh you can't eat food in a in a book. And uh, you know, watching TV is always unsatisfying because you see people eating food, but in a museum you could actually be tasting things as you learn about it.
Right. So in this museum, it's not gonna be as someone once asked me uh, you know, a long time ago. Are are we just gonna be looking at uh you know shellacked pieces of bread or some sort of plastic sushi or stuff like that? Is that we're gonna be looking at here? No moldy sandwiches and you know, little boxes.
Uh this is gonna be like I mean, sometimes I describe it like like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, but with an educational focus. Right, right. And uh, you know, and and why have most other food uh museums this concept? Why why do you find them uh lacking? Why are they lacking there?
I think two things really. One is that they often have too broad of a focus, and so they try to cover everything in food and drink, which you know, as you know really well, that covers that's a that covers uh a lot of ground. And so MoFed will be actually focusing on very specific topics instead. And the other is I think you know, uh a lot of uh a lot of food museums really end up being corporate sales, and that's something we're really not gonna be. Sweet.
Uh so you know, it's good to hear uh good to hear these words out of uh out of Peter's mouth. We hope to have this museum in an actual brick and mortar location in how many years? Around five years, yeah or take. Five years. So it takes time to build a museum.
It it it turns out it does take time to build a museum. In fact, uh, you know, most museums um start with a large donation of money, uh or a large donation of a collection, right? So they start with that kind of uh that kind of a uh nut. The uh the the genesis of this museum simply is an idea. But I think uh, you know, uh the the great part about this idea is that uh a lot of people like the subject, and so we're hoping to we're gonna be I'm gonna be pestering and uh soliciting for the museum uh more and more uh as time goes on.
Uh just wanted our listeners to know that uh the project is still going uh great guns, slamming forward, not in a way that um people outside might see, but that there is actually uh a lot of work going on and hopefully you know can't talk about it much right now but hopefully good news in three four months maybe yeah possible fingers crossed and i if it's not good news in three and four months I'll tell you what the bad news is that it wasn't good news and we'll figure out what our next steps are. But the other reason I have uh Peter in the studio today is because I just got back from Africa and since Nastasha can't be here I want to talk a little bit later about my trip to Africa and Peter's a good choice because he was also a volunteer uh in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, correct? Yeah that's right. Almost two and a half years there. Yeah yeah and uh interestingly if we have time I don't know if we will because of course I'm horribly late uh we'll get in also to uh Peter's experimentation with uh cot over on the in the east of Africa.
Right I don't know what you're talking about Dave. Yeah it's legal over there. Right? I mean I don't think you're gonna get prostate I don't think you can get uh Peter aside aside from being the uh executive director of the Museum of Food and Drink and a uh an accomplished uh Spanish uh style guitar player uh is a lawyer and so you know probably shouldn't cop to illegal drug use in uh in this country and I mean I guess technically if it's a schedule one narcotic you're not allowed to consume it in any country is that true? I'm not sure how it works.
Well maybe you could talk about the experiences of some guy named Meter Mim that you were sitting next to in Keter Pim. Yeah Keter Pym in uh uh in East Africa later to discuss it. 'Cause I think it's uh it's an interesting um it's an interesting story and uh we'll get into it later. Anyway, should you have questions, feel free to call them in too. 7184972128.
That's 7184972128. Okay. First question in from William about milk. My cousin had an interesting question on her face on her Facebook page. She's come across whole milk being sold for a dollar fifty-nine a gallon at her local store.
That's crazy. Milk should not cost a dollar fifty-nine a gallon. You know what I mean? That's insane. I mean, like, I mean it shouldn't happen.
It's got mean like I hope I hope the store's losing a lot of money and that they haven't figured out a way to sc you know screw the system and the people making it in the cows so hard that the milk is actually only worth a dollar fifty-nine a gallon. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe maybe someone like mislabeled it.
I've done that. Like, I walked into a store once and uh passion fruit were labeled uh per pound instead of per each. This was back when I was, you know, just graduated from college, I had no money. And so I bought every passion fruit in the store for like an unbelievably low price. And the person I was like, say so on the pricing, you have to honor the price, you put in the thing.
And they did. I was even more of a jerk than than I am now. I should have just purchased two passion fruit at that price and then let them recoup their mistake. But instead I bought that's not you, Dave. It's not me.
I bought every passion fruit in the store. That's right. I was like, it doesn't say limit. I was a real jerk. But you know you when you're when you have no money and you and you love things, like it's you know, you feel more of a justification for jerking people around like that.
And you taught them a valuable lesson in precision with their pricing. I did. I'm sure they didn't give a crap. Uh that was a stopping shop back in New Haven. Oh boy.
Going back to the super yeah, I haven't been back to the super stopping shop uh in New Haven in a bazillion years. And I don't think I will. No? No. You you a shop and stop?
I've never no, no. No? No. Uh okay, question was: are there any drawbacks to freezing whole milk? Will the texture, consistency, or taste be adversely affected?
I would think, since it has much less milk fat than cream, that the ice crystals wouldn't affect it so much. Thanks. Can't wait till the Kickstarter torch is available. Neither can I actually. But um we're working on that as well.
So it's an interesting question, William. Now, there are uh a lot of studies out there. Uh what happens, I haven't tasted, I didn't have time to actually do the test and see whether you could do tasting. What happens is that the um the the uh fat globules in homogenized milk are altered by the freezing process. And so it's possible that you will get different, and in fact, there are some studies, I didn't have time to sift through them all.
There's a bunch of studies uh out there on this, but a lot of them are older, so I couldn't get the full text of them. They weren't in the in the date in the database that I was searching, so I couldn't get the actual nitty-gritty of it. But uh, yeah, so when you freeze, especially if you're going through multiple freeze thaw cycles, which is gonna happen unless something's totally frozen, so it depends on how much of abuse you get in the in the fridge, you're gonna alter the fat globule size. Now, if you alter the fat globule size, you will alter uh mouth feel and you will alter um you know uh possibly uh you know how how it works or whether it's gonna you know the fat's gonna agglomerate more when you when you heat it. I would think that it's going to be relatively small effect uh you know, when you're using the milk in in in cooking situations where curdling might not be a problem uh and it might not even have an effect in in a curdling situation.
Uh but yes, technically it is affected. And although I apologize that I don't have uh more information on that, I came across, and this is one of the reasons I'm actually late, is because when I'm researching something, I in just like in my real life, when I'm researching things, I go off on tangents and found a very interesting tangent. Um it's actually gonna tie in later. We have a question about uh pregnancy and in eating later. But um there was a study on freeze freezing and thawing human breast milk.
And this is uh actually very important because um uh m you know most mothers who breastfeed um also at least that I have met, you know, will also um express some of their breast milk and freeze it for later use. This way, if they're uh at work, you know, uh the caregiver can uh feed the actual breast milk to the child, or uh an alternate thing is that you know the mom then can sleep a little bit longer at night and the dad can wake up in the middle of the night and feed uh the already expressed breast milk, you know, natural breast milk to the the baby, right? So, and and you know, you can either refrigerate the the milk or you can uh freeze it. Now, uh so the question is does freezing the breast milk do anything bad to the milk? Uh and and oh, this is also important in other countries actually, because uh there's a thing called uh human milk banks.
And in a human milk bank, you know, uh mothers who are lactating uh continue to lactate and express milk and then donate it to um donate it to hospitals so that um you know uh um babies that are born early, let's say, and maybe the the the mother's milk doesn't come in right away, they can feed this you know actual human milk to babies that couldn't otherwise have, which is a great idea, right? Fantastic idea. Right. But you but you have to freeze it to to preserve it. Okay, so so what happens?
Well, it turns out that uh aside from the the structure of the fat, you know, uh changing like I said, I said it would, the actual fat level in the milk as it's fed to the babies decreases substantially on freezing. And uh along with that, the protein available in the milk decreases, not as much as the fat. The fat can decrease significantly, uh, you know, but the the protein in it as well can. On thawing, right, the fat preferentially sticks to the relatively hydrophobic walls of the plastic vessels that breast milk is invariably stored in. They didn't, and they didn't touch test test glass, because it's not usually stored in glass, right?
So the fat uh the fat um sticks um predominantly to this those side things, and so the remaining liquid is relatively depleted in fat, and that some of the proteins also are bound in with the fat and adhere to the fat layer, and so you're also somewhat reduced in the protein levels uh as a result. And and turns out that it's statistically significant. Interesting, right? Yeah. Yeah.
So uh there you have it. Yeah, I mean, I don't know really what to make of that. The name of the study, should you choose to look at it, is and uh my iPad decided that it I should no longer be able to read, so it turned off one second. Is uh it's in a uh the magazine Early Human Development, and it's called Analysis of the Influence of Oh, they also tested pasteurization, uh, but I didn't read uh that section as much, pasteurization of it. Freezing thawing and other processes on human milk's macronutrient concentrations by Viera et al.
in 2011. Um, yeah, you don't here's a reason not to pasteurize. I did read a little bit. A reason a reason not to pasteurize uh human breast milk uh is that it inactivates the bile salt stimulated lipase, which is greatly responsible for the digestion and absorption of fat in newborn infants. So pasteurization decreases the maximum utilization of the delivered human milk.
That's a basically a direct quote. So anyway, there you have it. Yeah, regardless of what you do, it's probably better than powdered milk. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm just saying that, you know, uh it's not saying that you that you're not getting, you know, all the benefits.
It's just that there's, you know, that there's not going to be quite as nutritive in terms of fat quantity. Anyway what I thought it was interesting. But here's another interesting thing I researched as a result. I'll tell you I've tangents, right? So recently, I here's my story about uh that I've always had for years and I've never gone back and done the hardcore research, which is of course we what you should always do before you make a statement.
People say, well, uh should I consume uh breast milk should I who should I consume breast milk? Should I consume alcohol while I'm lactating, right? That's a question that a lot of people ask. And my you know kind of pat response has been, well look, you figure that uh human milk, although it has fat, is mostly water, you know, vastly mostly water. And therefore you would assume that the uh alcohol content of breast milk is relatively similar to the mother's blood alcohol level.
Blood alcohol level, let's say you know, they they were you know on the limit there five percent, right? So assuming that the blood that the milk has a roughly similar alcohol concentration of 0.05% alcohol, in my mind from a uh from an actual ethanol level concentration, that's roughly zero. Zero point five percent. That would mean 50 milligrams per milligrams per hundred uh milliliters, as opposed to uh a glass of wine which is uh you know like let's say it's 12% alcohol that's um twelve thousand milligrams per uh you know per milliliter, right? So roughly zero we're talking about twelve thousand milligrams no no no sorry a hundred and twenty thousand milligrams yeah so thirty five you know milligrams would be roughly zero right okay so uh turns out uh I might be wrong.
So tip the bottle. Yeah. So well no no so here's the story, right? It's uh it it it what is true is that human breast milk does roughly correlate with blood alcohol level right and so that uh for a woman that uh that consumes roughly uh three you know uh thirty five th you know three or so or a little more a little less uh grams um of alcohol per kilogram of body weight right is that true a little less anyway that gets a blood alcohol level of like 0.3 your milk will be roughly 0.3.35 somewhere in there right percent so the uh so the the deal uh the deal is is that that was right what I said however it turns out that i there's a study that was published in 2000 that shows that that small amount of alcohol in the breast milk can actually have an effect what they studied was um sleep the sleep patterns of babies and so uh that were fed and the study was they they had mothers uh and they expressed breast milk you know with a medella and then over the course of two different testing days they either took that milk and added thirty five milligrams per hundred ml of alcohol to the breast milk bottle or didn't and it turned out that the ones that they fed the um alcohol to did not uh sleep as well and didn't have as much uh activity during their uh waking hours as the ones that didn't. So, you know, uh it's only one study.
Uh I haven't seen it replicated since 2000. I don't know whether the information is still there. Uh, but it's interesting to note that um that that's out there, right? Yeah. Anyway.
All right. So uh Alex from Toronto writes in, Dear Dave, Nastasha, Jack, Joe, Indy Jesus, Carlos. We going back. And whoever might be working in the booth now, uh, I'm still catching up on back podcasts. I was finally prompted to write in because of Dave's story about the person rapping out loud in episode 83.
So I was talking about how you know people are rapping out loud and how they suck. That's what I was talking about. Uh anyway, uh Alex Right said, My wife and I recently visited New York, and probably the strangest thing about our trip was how many people we saw singing as they walked the streets or waited for subway trains. Nearly all of them had earphones in and seemed to be singing along with recordings, but we're also clearly practicing rather than just casually singing along. We wondered if this was some kind of special New York thing, the Broadway equivalent of LA waiters hoping to be discovered by an agent or director.
Judging by your reaction to the rapper, apparently not. But we saw at least a dozen people doing this on our four-day visit. Our favorite was a girl practicing her ballet moves in the subway, totally unself-consciously waiting for a train. Weird. Yes, it is weird.
And and it is quite common here, and I don't know what the hell it is. You know what I think it is? I think it's that uh when you live here, uh first of all, I remember years ago, and I might have mentioned this in the other episode. Like I was learning to try and play bagpipes, and they told me, just go outside and play because just you know, because what else are you gonna do? You live in New York.
You know what I mean? So there's the fact that you can't practice anything in private New York. There's no private place in New York you can do anything. You have an apartment, you probably have a family or roommate there, uh, you know, you don't have a basement, you don't have a garage, you don't have a backyard. Uh what the hell are you gonna do?
You know, if you're gonna play bagpipes, you know, what are you gonna do? You know, it's like it's there's no real choices, you know what I mean? And so same thing goes with uh bad rapping or bad singing or any of that stuff, is that since you have no place to do it, you go outside and you do it. And furthermore, I think they're like uh living in such a big busy city uh strangely dehumanizes all the people around you, and they become like trees or shrubs. You tend to stop thinking of them as people, and then so you're not embarrassed about singing in front of them because they're they're not human beings to you.
Are you positing that there's a correlation between population density and bad public rapping? Possibly. Possibly, yes. I also think that everybody is just crazy here, too. Like there's a there's a lot of crazy going on in New York City.
Do you think there's more crazy than normal, or it's just like like you see it more because you see more people every day? I think that's uh I think that there's just so many people around, there's just gotta be more crazies. Right, right. And like I say, like, you know, we have our we have our kind of you know, zone out blinders on when you're walking around the city, and so you know, you tend to just view everyone as this kind of like a like a blur. Right, you know, anyway.
Uh so uh anyway, uh they went to New York and uh and and they made it back. And here's the story. When we got back from our trip to New York, we found that after three years of trying, uh, we are expecting a baby, which is nice. So New York did that did the deal. Uh the calendar doesn't quite uh back this up, but I give partial credit to the Bangkok daiquiri and son of a peach that we drank at Booker and Dax bar.
Good times. Well, thanks. Thanks. Uh you know, I'll take that, I'll take that credit. Uh, you know, we're we're the I mean I wouldn't say that we're yeah, I would I'm not gonna go into it.
Okay. Uh we don't seem to have anything like the awesome New York bar scene here in Toronto, but perhaps I'm just unaware of the best stuff. Dave Chang just opened three restaurants in Toronto. Any plans to expand the Booker and Dax Empire? I let's put it this way.
I don't know. Won't say no, and I won't say yes. Okay. Very ominous. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I hope it's not ominous. I hope if we do it, it's a good thing. It's not like, you know, the evil empire coming in. I mean, maybe it is, I don't know.
That'd be awesome. I wish I had some sort of like evil, evil emperor vibe that I could bring to whatever I you know what I mean? Someday. That's my goal now. That's my new goal.
Evil Empire vibe. Okay. Uh but I guess it's time for some cooking questions. Now that the wife is up the spout, she is no longer able to enjoy her favorite drinks. By the way, that's a phrase, and I I I pride myself on kind of being well versed in slang and idiom.
I mean it's kind of, you know, I do. I ne I never heard that before. Have you heard that one before? Never. Uh up the spout is a British informal, this according to the uh Oxford English Dictionary, for one, broken, i.e.
no longer working, which hopefully is that's not what we mean in the case. Or uh two, of a woman pregnant. But according to this, it's possibly related to the other thing, like somehow you're broken by getting pregnant. Because I think it was maybe an unwanted pregnancy in the past. Clearly not in this case, and it's lost that meaning.
I'm not even gonna try to start analyzing that one. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, but an interesting phrase, and and uh I like it when anyone gives me a phrase that I'm not uh familiar with. Okay, or or I should say with which I'm not familiar. Okay. Uh she usually drinks white wine and Caesars.
Caesar's a possibly a Canada specific drink. Basically it's a bloody Mary with clam juice. Uh no, that that's a drink, uh also known as Bloody Caesar or a clam digger or a bunch of other things. Clam digger is the one I normally hear it by. You know, it's clamato, which I love saying that word.
A clamato. It's not clemato though. Like it's tomato tomato is fine, but it's not clamato juice. That just sounds weird. Clamato.
Yeah. With the accent. Yeah. Well, yes, yes. I won't do it again.
Okay. Um Dave just put a monocle on while you said that. I I wish, I wish. We all know that the Mr. Peanut with the monocle is one of the most dashing figures in all of in all in all of uh uh whatever those people are called, spokes spokes characters.
That's right. Right? I mean like Joe, what do you think about that? You like the Mr. Peanut with Monocle?
Simply dashing. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. You know, I was talking about this with Labor, who's uh the uh design the uh our graphic design team for the museum, and they took a freaking peanut, which is it's a it's a ridiculous looking thing. You know what I mean? A peanut.
It's like it's like if you squeeze the hell out of a golf ball and like colored it beige and made it dirty. That's a peanut. You're like, put a pop hat, give it a monocle, and all of a sudden it's like Classy. Classy. Amazing.
And on the far end of the spectrum, I think uh that very same conversation was Grimace, who is the opposite of classy. There's no class in Grimace. Grimace and nobody knows what what the heck Grimace is. Now listen, by the way, I don't want to get any negative calls here. We're not hating on Grimace.
He's just not classy. Just not classy. Yeah, he's he's like the he is like kind of prototypical schlub. I mean, I am also a prototyp pro prototypical slub, so not hating. Yeah.
Alright, yeah. No hate. No hate on the grimace. Just not classy. Okay.
Uh okay. Uh she usually drinks white wine and Caesars. Uh I finished whipping up a batch, uh so the by the way, if she's not gonna drink alcoholic drinks and she likes Bloody Marys or those kinds of things, uh that's terrific because they uh don't have that much of a perception of alcohol. So like the hardest drinks to uh to you know, master are the ones that are heavily alcohol flavored, like bourbon drinks or things like that. So, you know, if she likes things that are um if she likes things like that that are relatively strong flavored, you know, you could easily make uh, you know, a uh a virgin version of that.
Uh if you're gonna use any sort of fresh clam product, obviously you pasteurize the shit prasurize the hell out of it. You don't want to get uh, you know, anyone uh sick, but the clamato juice that they sell has been you know heat pasteurized, and so it's okay. So you know, so you can use it. Uh so I mean that'd be an ideal. The white wine, obviously, you can't, you know, drink the white wine, but you could do any sort of um uh you know acidic uh product.
Some people say like white cranberry juice, it's altered with a bunch of different things. I mean, I think the the the key thing, well I'll I'll continue reading the question, maybe, right? Yeah, good idea. Uh uh he's uh he says, I've just finished whipping up a batch of your coriander syrup recipe, which is very tasty with the one I use for the coriander old fashions. But I was wondering if you suggest either some other recipes or somewhere to start looking for serious drinks which happen to contain no alcohol and are easy to make at home.
I tried making a peach sipping vinegar based on recipes for other fruits that I found online, but that was a bust. It just tasted gross. Uh any thoughts? I'm hoping to find something with enough complexity that will make it satisfying to uh sip for a long time. And I think that's the key, by the way, uh, is the sipping for a long time because that's what uh you know kind of separates uh uh an alcoholic drink that you don't pound too hard, at least you're not supposed to.
I mean, I might, but you're not supposed to, uh, versus you know, uh uh, you know, like a thirst quenching drink. Now, on the one hand, the reason why coriander, uh the coriander syrup, especially if you make it spicier, if you increase the spice level of uh a drink or the kind of uh spice impact of the drink, it tends to shift uh towards a more sipping drink, right? So that's why the coriander syrup, which is more akin to like take ginger ale, right? I love ginger ale. Uh you don't pound ginger ale as hard as you pound Sprite, right?
I don't pound Sprite either. Well, let's say you were going to. Yeah. You know what I mean? You don't pound it as as hard as you pound seltzer.
Yeah. Right? Right. You don't pound ginger beer as hard as you pound ginger ale. Right.
Right. So uh ginger beer, good candidate for uh non-alcoholic drinks that you can sip for a while because you are going to take it in small doses. But the other key is that you can't do that by making something that you the reason you're taking small doses is that you don't want to drink it. Right. Right.
Which is why ginger beer is such a good candidate. Uh and that, you know, if you know properly done, uh the coriander syrup uh without with uh with um making it into a soda with like some lime is a good candidate because it stays good tasting, but you take it in small doses. You're not like sh bang, knocking it back. Um so you know, you could do that. Um the but the the other thing is uh that I think you you know it's very difficult having tried to do this for you know my wife, you can make special drinks.
The other thing you can do to make make drinks uh more sippable, and I hesitate to do this because I don't like these kinds of drinks myself, but is to make them physically thick. So drinks that contain uh pureees uh tend to go down slower, but if you like them at all, tend to be enjoyable. Uh and it's especially good in the summer months as they as they come up. Uh so you can do like frozen things, things like smoothies, and you know, she'll feel good about the theoretical health benefits that she's getting from them, and uh and and also uh be sipping them uh slowly. So I hope I hope this is somewhat helpful.
What do you think, Peter? Did you have any uh Bisop while you're in Senegal, Dave? I had a whole boatload of uh of uh Bisop. That is one of my favorite summer refreshing beverages, and I'm wondering whether if you concentrated those flavors, that could become something more sippable. Oh, yeah.
Well, so bisop is good, it's a good good point. Bisop is uh uh known by a a bunch of different names Roselle, uh red sorrel, not to be confused with uh wood sorrel or the herb sorrel, uh it's hibiscus flour. And uh, you know, it's used in Africa where it's native, it's used a lot in the Caribbean and Mexico, where it's naturalized, uh, and uh makes a fantastic uh beverage. Uh the bisap that I had in Africa was of higher quality than the dried stuff that I get here. Uh, but I have used the stuff here and it's good.
You make like you make a tea. They actually make a delicious, also, they make a delicious bisop jelly in uh in West Africa, at least in Senegal, and it's amazing because it has the texture of apple butter, but with that really tart, acidic, fruity thing. So I think bisop would be great. Make a tea out of it, sweeten it. Uh, and then uh actually bisop and ginger works, and also bisop and mint works.
Or all three. Yeah, or all three together. And so, like a combination of mint, uh bisop and ginger could make a really great um um drink that could go on the sipping. If you make it a little bit weaker, then it's a pounder, and if you make it a little bit, you know, uh heavier in flavor, then it's more of a sipper. But the great thing about it is is that if you're a fan of the flavor, which I am, you don't tire of it when you're drinking it.
You know, you can drink uh you can drink a good bit of it. Good call, Peter. Right on. Good call. Uh all right.
Uh my other question is about uh coffee. Uh I do not have an espresso machine and would not be able to justify the expense of buying any new equipment. But would love to be able to make phone milk for our weekend coffee. I've tried to look for solutions on Coffee Geek and various other websites, but I've had no luck. I did find a video where someone seemed to be able to make a decent foam with the little wands you can buy at IKEA, but I've been unable to replicate this either uh uh either with the identical gadget or by the slightly more expensive one that Cooks Illustrated recommends.
What am I missing? Is steam an essential part of the process? Am I not getting the right temperature or just using the wrong uh vessel to hold the milk? Is there a stabilizer that might help? Uh I seem to be able to get a good foam when the milk is cold, but I can't seem to heal heat the milk up to even moderately drinkable temperatures like 60 uh Celsius and keep the foam or to foam the milk at higher temperatures.
The coffee geeks just laugh at me and say, I am SOL. Uh any ideas? Uh yeah, I think you're SOL. But here's the issue. Uh like many things, uh by the way, uh, you know, uh Alex has another question on on uh on coffee makers, but I'm gonna have to put that one off till next time, Alex.
But the the the deal is this. Um so the coffee coffee geek was one of the early websites that introduced uh I mean, so you know, those of you that have been making coffee for a while, uh, you know, know that's like the latte art movement kind of that came out of Seattle in the late 90s, I guess. 1990s, is that right? I mean, it's hard for me to look back. Uh, you know, David Schomer from Vivace was the first person I knew about who you know was widely talking about it, and I bought his book, you know, uh what's whatever it's called, professional barisa techniques, whatever, where he you know explains it.
Uh and uh, you know, amazing stuff. But to get that, the lot, you know, by the way, latte art, everyone knows what I'm talking about here, latte art, the pictures that you make by by you know doing the milk. And the highest form of it, you don't even touch the cup at all. It's just how you pour the milk makes it. But in order to do it, you need a very specific texture of milk, right?
Now the theory is that that texture of milk is also the most delicious texture of milk, but it's called a microfoam. And so uh there's a lot written in Coffee Geek about how to ch achieve microfoam. And that particular type of microfoam is produced by steaming, right? And trying to create that in any other way, I mean, you might be able to come up uh, uh or I might be, or you might be, someone might be able to come up with it with a similar textured product by doing a host of other things to it, but there's no simple way, right? Now here's the question.
Is that the best tasting foam? I don't know. It's a taste of foam. Is espresso the best taste of coffee? I think it is, but other people like other forms of coffee making.
So what I would do is stop trying to make latte art style foam in any other technique, and just find a foaming technique that you like that makes a taste that you like. You know, I you're I I've have very severe doubts that you're going to be able to without a lot of experimentation. And we could stabilize it and whip it, uh, but you know, the microfoam is a very specific, very dense, bubble-sized, very wet foam. And, you know, right? I mean, uh, you know, and just because you're different just because you get a different result doesn't mean it's necessarily worse.
You're just gonna have to use it in a different way. But I will think more about it and maybe talk about it more when I talk about your coffee questi coffee maker question later. Uh uh John Riper uh came in and he uh uh last week, unfortunately I wasn't here, I was in Senegal, and he gave us some really interesting hazelnuts. So I'll just read a little quick thing. So hazelnuts, we all know hazelnuts, a little round, but they're not all around.
There's a variety called the Ducilli uh uh hazelnut that is long, almost looks almondy and looks like woody on the outside. So uh John dropped by some, these are like these are like super like uh old cultivar heritage uh heirloom variety of uh hazelnuts. And uh he dropped by some roasted ones and uh unroasted ones and was talking about the um what happens to the development of flavor in hazelnuts as as they're roasted. So since I just got back yesterday, I tasted them, but I haven't had time to do a lot of experimenting. So next week, John, I'm gonna go more into about these different things.
But you guys should take a look at these Ducilli uh hazelnuts. They're supposed to have a thinner skin and therefore be less bitter than uh their their smaller, rounder uh berethrin, but they're uh susceptible to certain diseases, and that's why they're not grown much. If you want to research it well, I'm uh until before I can get back to you guys. Go to Homequist uh orchards where they grow them in uh in Washington. Okay, um Robin writes in about meat grinders.
Dave, please say some words about meat grinders. I'm primarily using a meat grinder for making dog food from chicken, turkey, and rabbit parts. So I need something uh powerful enough to not bog down uh grinding soft bones uh and uh with a fill hole that will accommodate something as large as a chicken leg without me having to further invest in a meat cleaver to cut up the parts so they're small enough to fit in a chute. I made the mistake of purchasing an LEM number five 0.2 horsepower motor grinder sold by your local sporting goods big box store. It is underpowered.
It is underpowered. The fuse had to be reset frequently, even though I'm not forcing the meat through, and it is overheating and smoking. It requires disassembly to unjam it and was a waste of money. It is going back to the store tomorrow without breaking the bank. What do you recommend?
It will serve me well. Thanks for the brilliant radio show. Uh all y'all, Robin. Okay, here's the deal. So, Peter, you might be asking yourself, why would they want to grow grind the bones?
Oh, I am asking myself that very question. Well, remember, they're making dog food. So the thing is dogs uh calcium supposes. There's a movement called the barf diet, which the acronym can mean different things, but like bones and raw food diet for dogs, and you grind up the the bones whole, so the dogs take in the whole thing. Cats also.
Have to be careful not to do uh not to do it with cooked bones because uh cooked bones uh are very sharp and can damage the uh insides of the of uh you know your animal. And then there's the debate of whether or not there's microbial problems doing a raw food diet when you feed it to an animal, blah blah blah. But I'm not getting into that. We're getting into whether it grinded. Now I've never thought about this problem, uh, but I did some I did some research.
Turns out that the LEM that you looked at uh that you have, the LEM um uh number five uh quarter horsepower one, which sells on uh Amazon for 1969, uh has a quarter horsepower power motor, it's pretty small motor. The good news about that grinder that you have that you hate is that uh the gears are all metal and so they're really tough and it's all stainless, so all that's really tough. But that motor is underpowered, and so it's gonna jam, overheat, and the fuse will blow. Or it's not really probably the fuse, it's probably the thermal overload in it. So that's probably what's happening.
So the solution to that is they do make a larger motor one. Uh they make a 0.375 horsepower, which is only $70 more, $267, you can go get, and that might be a solution. I've heard other people say that that one grinds chicken bones better. Uh, you know, then you like, you know, if you really without breaking the bank, that's the problem. The larger ones can do it.
So the Weston uh the Weston number 22 professional on the Amazon for $551, everyone says that grinds through chicken like nobody's business, right? Uh but uh, you know, that's well over twice, almost three times the cost of the one that you had. Um if you go on the on uh it's still on eBay now. If you look at the STX TurboForce 3000 series, you like that? STX Turboforce 3000.
They say it's uh it's 150 bucks. They say that it is uh 3,000 watts. And they admit, if you look at the, it's really interesting, actually, if you look at the things. The thing with with motors of all types is people you have to ask someone how they rate it. So I'm assuming that when LEM is rating their motors, they're actually talking shhaft horsepower, power at the shaft, right?
Which is different from the input power into the machine, right? Because motors aren't 100% efficient. So it's a question of how you do it. One 740 something watts is one horsepower, right? Uh so these guys say that the STX Turboforce 3,000 is 3,000 watt, but that's a load of malarkey.
That's you know, that's the motor, as my dad would always say, that's the motor, like as it's about to explode from burning out, like when you're holding the shaft and plugging it in and drawing all the current that you possibly can and everything's blowing up and dying, right? Uh or peak impulse death power as he calls it. I'm imagining back to the future uh dock, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like bolts everywhere.
Yeah, exactly. So uh in reality, this 3,000 watt monstrosity is is actually closer to three quarters of a horsepower in real life. But that's still significantly more powerful than the one you have. It has uh some plastic gears, but they claim that these plastic gears uh don't break. It does have a guarantee.
It also has something you might be interested in called a reverse switch, so that you can reverse the machinery to unjam it without disassembling it. So if you do jam it, there you go. Now, there are a number of people on the reviewing things that say they've ground chicken bones, and then there's a number of people who call BS on that and say sucker doesn't grind chicken bones that well, right? So, what those guys say is that to really grind chicken bones, you gotta freeze the debone your thighs or legs, freeze the thighs, break them with a hammer, and then grind them in, which is what they say to do. But clearly you don't want to do this because you don't want to cleave it up, you say, with a meat cleaver.
So, you know, I'm not sure where to go with that. Uh, but it is on Amazon, it does have a return policy, so you might be able to, you know, test your luck, and it is even cheaper than the one you already had. Uh okay. Alex uh wrote in uh different Alex wrote in with questions about uh mocha pots. You know mocha pots, Peter?
Yeah. Yeah. You know, the ones that you put on the stove and they're little, they're like made out of aluminum usually and they they make coffee. Actually, you know, I used to use them. They're they're again they're not espresso.
People make that mistake. Mocha cup is its own kind of cup, it's not an espresso. So uh Alex has questions on the mocha process. But I think what I'm gonna do, Alex, is fold your question on mocha pots into the other question on coffee that the other Alex asked, and we'll talk about them both on the next show. Since apparently my time here is drawing nigh, right?
Yep. Right? Okay. So to quickly to rip through, uh, got some Twitter questions in. Uh Elliot Pabanow writes in, any problems with infusing chopped hazelnuts?
I mean, so it's a hazelnut show. It's always happens, man. Uh chopped hazelnuts into cream with an ISI. I mean, I don't know how much of a flavor your uh impact you're gonna get off of uh just infusion without heat and an ISI because nuts aren't that porous. Usually you do a heat infusion or better yet, grind them and make like a nut milk.
That's the way I would do it. Grind and make a nut milk and then strain this stuff out. I think that's the best way you're gonna go. I don't know that ISI is gonna be the technique to use with that. But of course, uh I'm probably wrong as usually um.
Terry Tinton writes in, hey, have you ever tried creating your own aero chocolate bar? No, I have not. Although, actually, that's not true. I mean, I've made the aerated chocolate before with uh with a vacuum machine, but uh what I would do is go look at uh Heston uh Blumenthal has done uh a lot of work with that. He has a recipe online.
Uh you need a uh a vacuum machine and a way to set it uh set it in the freezer, but it's not technically difficult. I've never actually done it though. But Heston's recipe is out there for all to read. So uh, you know, go check it out. If you have more questions or problems on it, uh hit me back on it.
Peter, you got uh the Tony uh Harrion has a question in there about uh on the Twitter feed uh about uh freezing and thawing to increase or change the flavor of juice extraction. Uh freezing and thawing ruptures cells, and so therefore will theoretically increase the yield of juice, but I've never done an actual test on it. I will look up over the course of the week uh hopefully whether or not um whether or not there's any studies that I can publish, and then I'll talk about my experiences of the differences in flavor of for instance like frozen thawed lemons and also uh its effect on uh astringency and tannin and things like persimmons, where you can clearly reduce the tannin and the astringency by freezing and thawing. But that's slightly different from what it does to the juice. That's just the flavor change from overall freezing and thawing.
Any other questions there you see on the Twitter right away? Uh we got let's see here. Uh Alvin Schultz. Give me some. All right.
I want to make large format clear ice at home. Have a chamber vac, rotovap, liquid nitrogen, and a crappy home freezer. Okay, no problem. Go buy an igloo cooler, uh, you know, a square one, rip the top off of it. Uh use hot water, pour it uh if you can use relatively pure hot water, right?
Pour it in to the uh warm water. You don't have to you can let it cool down. Don't put it hot into your freezer, you're gonna screw all your stuff. The reason for hot, less dissolved gases, right? Right?
Right. Uh it's not strictly speaking necessary, but you know, do it. Warm water even. Then uh put it in the freezer and let it sit for uh you know a number of days. Uh should take like two days, maybe a day, day to two days, test it, right?
What's gonna happen is is that the uh the energy is gonna go into the ice uh preferentially through the top, and so you're gonna freeze from the top down. Therefore, all the stuff at the top will be clear as you expel out uh the various impurities at the ice uh water layer that's in the bottom. Then uh pull it out of the freezer before it totally freezes solid, or you can let it freeze totally solid, but the bottom of it's gonna be crappy. Uh let it temper out, pop it out of the igloo, saw off any bad parts that are on the bottom only when it's tempered, and there you go. Should work.
Yeah? Yeah. Okay. Uh now, uh, how long do I have? Like three minutes.
What do I have, Joe? Three minutes? Yeah, you've got like three minutes. Yeah, exactly. 1257.
And we need and we need to go off right at one? You can go a little bit later. All right, so here's here's what we're gonna do. I know I didn't take any commercial breaks today, but because it because we're I'm running late. So what I'm gonna do is is that on the out of the show, can we go to the actual commercial break so we can play our sponsor?
By the way, the our sponsor today is Joe. Uh it is the chef's step from Chris Young. Right. So Chris Young, who has been a guest on this show before, is one of the authors of Modernist Cuisine, uh, but not Modernist Cuisine at home. But it's an interesting little dig that he had to save the 500 bucks.
That's kind of an interesting little dig. I just met with our friend Michael Natkin yesterday at Booker. By the way, big congratulations to all of our friends who are winners at the James Beard uh last night, including uh Wiley Dufresne, brother in law, Brooks, Brooks Headley from Del Posto, Del Posto itself, and then a bunch of other people. I didn't uh I don't have the full list in front of me, but a bunch of good people uh won. That's great.
Anyway, so uh Michael Natkin uh talked to him at the bar yesterday, the writer for the uh Herbivracious uh website and cookbook. Also working with Chris on this project. And uh so I was talking to him about it. You know, maybe maybe we'll do some work with them at some point. But I found out that they were a sponsor of the show.
We love them. Uh great guys, you know, all all best, all love. So but I love that little dig, right? Yeah. Save 500 bucks.
I figured they're targeting two very different markets there, though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.
Uh just thought it was fun. Anyway. So uh and uh and uh by the way, I hope I Michael I wanted to force him to come on the show today, but he had to go back uh back home. But I hope to get all of those guys maybe back on the radio here at some point, uh, and then you guys can all ask questions of them. Okay.
Uh before I go to the last question, since I can go a little long, let's talk a little Africa stuff. So when I was in uh Senegal, I think the most striking thing I'm just talking food now, right? Yeah. The the most striking thing uh about the food was there seems to be a uh much more of a continuum b uh between uh the uh unfermented and the fermented in West African food than we would get in the States, right? So a lot more fermented grain products, like a lot more products of uh fermentation in all of their grays.
Was that your experience down in Cameroon as well? Yeah, man. At those temperatures, everything just starts fermenting, you know. Right, but it's all done in other words, like it's like part of the flavor. So, you know, like porridges will be fermented.
Yeah. Uh, you know, so you they have like uh they have a this awesome millet um porridge called Flamday in uh in Senegal that is um you know it's fermented millet porridge and it's served with fermented kind of thin milk yogurt on top and like a little bit of sugar. And it's great. Yeah what I mean. And is the flavor that you don't uh get here.
Or you know, the the main starches that uh, you know, will be made into uh gruels, uh you know, or batters fermented and then uh and then cooked off, you know, so like various fermented uh foo foos and things like that. Oh yeah. But one of the interesting things I had that's from Cameroon, and maybe you remember the name of it, uh 'cause I can't remember the name of it because I I couldn't write it down. I had it was very interesting, and it was uh it was manioc, cassette. Oh, I love it in sticks like gummy like a rice cake?
Yes. Had the texture of mochi but it's fermented. Yeah. Do you have this? Yes.
What's the name of it? Well in Cameroon there are a lot of different names but the most common was one was just baton de manioc which just means manioc stick. Right? Yeah. Okay.
So uh they have a real bouncy texture like mochi, right? I love it. And they're fermented and they're th like the first bite you're like, am I gonna like this? But they're s freaking addictive. Amazing.
Yeah. So but here's the interesting thing. The particular one I had had been you know made by the cook was house made. And the particular fermented flavor of this one was unlike most of the other fermentations that I had had in that it didn't taste like a lactic acid bacteria to me, the one I had. It tasted the most similar uh fermentation taste I could put on it was salt risen bread.
And salt risen bread, which was talked about on the show before is like a very kind of like weird old like kind of rare bread technique from the Appalachians where the main fermentation agent is Clostridium Phringens which normally is a foodborne you know illness pat you know it's pathogen caused a lot of problems. But um when the one time I made salt raised bread one or twice it this had a s that similar fermented flavor but I haven't had time to research it yet. But did you notice in Cameroon that they had a different kind of fermented flavor from other things or is it the same or it's hard for me to say man. It's just uh it's just a great taste man I love it. Alright so I'm gonna go back and do some research on that.
Uh the other thing you know that they they have there's so many fermented products over there. And my one of my favorite fermented products in the world it was in Cameroon. Which one? Palm wine. Oh yes.
You know what? The palm wine and first of all, Senegal is predominantly Muslim, right? And in fact, they had me serve an alcoholic beverage at this event and didn't put a French translator next to me. And so I was in a position, my French isn't my accent's not good enough to immediately tell people. So these people descended on us and then people started picking up the drink and drinking it.
It was made with mod which is an ama M A D D or M-A-A-D or M-A-D-E, which is an amazing fruit from Casimance, which is in southern Senegal. It's an amazing fruit fruit. It has like kind of like it tastes like kind of passion fruit and like kind of got but a lot of acidity more acidic tart in the way lime is tart, not in the way that Pash food's tart, but like passion fruit and a dump bunch of different other tropical fruits, like maybe some Guanambana flavor in it. And I made a juice out of it. You know, I tried to do Booker and Dax but like low text style, so like I strained it.
It was really pure and mixed it with rum. Fantastic. I wish we could get this fruit here. Anyway, so they're picking it up and like one person does a spit take I'm like it's got alcohol in it. And then like they eventually posted a like a hostess next to me who literally just stood there like wagging her finger back and forth like no no I'm like well you know don't do that.
It's not poisonous. You know and some of the people here aren't aren't aren't you know Muslim. They can have it but I I was like I was like what what what is going wrong with my life that I'm here in a Muslim country trying to serve alcohol to people. Like it's exactly like the worst thing it could happen. But the drink was in fact delicious.
Do they have netatu in in Cameroon or no? I don't know what netatou is Cameroon. Uh netatu is the fermented uh seeds of uh some uh acacia tree and uh it's amazing stuff uh the I forget the the genus name but the species of it is big lobosa big lobosa name uh sick name. Netta too big lobosa. Like uh but it has a taste that's it's used in a lot of stews like oh and like other things like Tibu Gen, which is like the traditional, you know, national Senegalese dish.
But it has um in it uh it has the flavors of like coffee and chocolate and black bean. So it's like really kind of and it's it's uh boiled and fermented. Uh you know, boil the boil the uh the seeds and the pods, ferment them and then salt them and let them dry. Uh fermented onion that that's used in things that put in balls, fermented fish is famous like geg, fermented conch, yet, which is amazing. But like all these fermented things.
But what people don't uh I mean the smells in the market can be overpowering, but the foods aren't at all like that overpowering. They're just really, I thought really delicious, uh really interesting, unique flavors, and I'm definitely gonna be working with them in the future. You know what I mean? Yeah. And the camera the one Cameroonian restaurant I went to, the food was amazing.
I'm can't wait to go to the Cameroon uh area there. I've heard it's like just the the fruits and vegetables and stuff, just good stuff, yeah. There's an insane culinary diversity in that country. Yeah, I mean, there's just a lot going on in West Africa in general. So I just had the the very like the smallest taste of it going to uh Senegal, and I hope to be going back at at some point.
I think it's one of the the most uh undiscovered collection of cuisines in the world. Well, West African cuisine. You know, that's in in part, you know, and all of sub-Saharan Africa, frankly, you know what I mean, is like that. And that's the reason uh that we were doing this thing. Pierre Cham, uh, you know, uh friend of friend of ours who uh you know had a restaurant Grand Dakar in uh Brooklyn is from Senegal, and uh, you know, uh I I'd spoken to him about organizing a series of trips a couple years ago and he finally made it happen, even though you know I I have you know I've been too busy, I haven't done it.
But the the basic idea is is that in Africa when foreigners come they feed them non-traditional food because they assume that you know that you know, Western or you know, with like Euro Euro and American style folks don't want the traditional food. Yeah, right? Which is as far as like people nowadays, like people like myself or other like gastro tourists or you know, uh gastro tourism, which is a big thing, they don't want fake food. You know, like I say, if you if I want French food, I'll go to France. If I'm gonna fly somewhere, I wanna learn about the food that's from there, right?
Uh so there's that. They're showing people there that outsiders respect the indigenous stuff and that that's what they should do. And then there's the flip side is that we don't know hardly anything about it, and there's a lot to learn. There's as much diversity and interest and amazing stuff going on there as, you know, any one of the Asian cultures that everyone here knows all the minutia of, or any one of the European cultures that everyone knows all the minutiae of the food products from, right? And yet there's not the exposure uh to it and therefore not that level of interest.
So when I went there I did a talk actually, and I tried to point out like, look, you know, in uh in here in the US, I was like, take a look at Sean Brock, who's been doing like high level work with you know, specifically South Carolina stuff, right? And so he's doing some amazing work, but that's you know, not that much of a stretch because he's you know here and people, you know, respect that's going on. I was like, okay, well, you know, look at uh, you know, twenty years to ten years ago even, ten years ago, who thought about Danish food? Right. Did you?
No, no. Now all that stuff's now all the rage. Why? Because of Rennie Radzepi. So I put Rennie Radzeppi up and I put Alex uh Atla from uh DOM in uh Brazil, who's like, you know, everyone in South America looks at what happened at that restaurant and how he's using uh incredibly local products to do this really high end work.
So he's not doing French work uh that happens to have a couple local ingredients. He's like using modern cooking techniques and using incredibly local ingredients. And the advantage is is it can't be copied. You can't copy that restaurant somewhere else because you don't have access to the ingredients. Same goes for Noma, same goes for uh Sean, you know, down in uh in uh South Carolina, is they have cuisines that are respected the world over and that can't be copied, so you need to go travel to have it.
And you know, I said that this may seem irrelevant to you, as it says to people, in a country where you know, a huge percentage of you know your population is suffering from problems like iron deficiency, you know what I mean, uh and other things. But in fact, we can you can you know you could generate some good revenue if you you know if you do it. I don't know. Uh and of course, introducing people to these these culinary sort of treasures around the world is one of the major goals of the Museum of Food and Drink. Oh yes, oh yes, so much so, yes.
Um anyway, so we'll talk more about maybe some of the other like Baobab. Do they have Baobab stuff down here? Oh, it's my favorite tree in the world. That's a good tree, right? That's an awesome tree.
Baobab. It's it's called something like bouilly or something in Wolof, but I don't know what it's called down on the camera. But it yeah, it's a guy they use every part of the dang tree, and plus they're just really cool looking. They're amazing. Yeah.
So we'll talk more about this. Uh, you know, I have some I don't even bring it with me, the bailo bab candy. I'll bring you some. I I still think I still have some left. I'm not sure.
Okay. Last question on the way out. Uh, and then on the way out, remember Joe, we're gonna play uh our commercial uh break sponsors because I didn't go to a commercial break today. You got it. Uh SB writes in, says, Greetings from Paris.
Alright. Yeah, Paris. The uh fourth season of Top Chef has just ended here in France, and I wanted to get your views on culinary competitions in general. So already it sounds like a good question, right? Right?
Yeah. Uh more specifically, do top chef or iron chef like shows really crown good cooks, or is it more of a mix of luck, contestant personality, etcetera? What do you think of the professional competitions, such as the beaucoup d'or that's the uh the Bokus of Gold, as we say here in the in the US of A the Pacry World Cup or the MOF which sp stands for uh oh something may you know something over your francaise the the anyway like butt kicking of Frenchness which by the way isn't just for chefs it's for any sort of there's a whole list of crafts that you can have MOF in France uh and others also feel free to say bad things about Hervé Tisse okay SB well uh he is actually one of the very few people in the food world that I don't have a compunction just saying bad things about because he uh A doesn't care whether or not Americans say bad things about him and B he is a huckster charlatan uh and says crazy false things all the time and I always hold up against him Harold McGee who is uh you know uh awesome so they're kind of like opposites you know what I mean yeah yeah Ervete who thinks that uh cooking an egg in an oven is a good way to measure how it responds to temperatures which whatever don't don't you know what SB don't get me started don't get me started because then you know I only have a couple minutes to answer your your regular question. So my thing on this is is that uh contests contests clearly measure something the question is what do they measure right so you know one thing you can look at is uh you know which ones do chefs watch right so chefs uh used to I don't know if they still do uh watch Iron Chef like they like it right that was one of the very first uh contest shows that chefs actually wanted to be on, right? So Wiley, uh, who you know didn't was like I don't food TV, I hate food TV.
He doesn't talk like that. But anyway, but he said that uh why do I always use voices that aren't people like anything like the people that I'm talking about? Is it just I don't know why? I don't know why. Uh anyway, uh uh when he got the opportunity to do Iron Chef was like, yes, I want to do it.
Everybody has respect for the uh uh or you know, again, I haven't spoken to people about it in a while, but respect for the Iron Chef brand. Um and it is a mixture of personality, right? Because a lot of it's about uh, you know, you have to talk to the judges. It's you know, there's some sales shit, you know, sales, you know, selling that's going on when you're talking, but it it also is real cooking task, and you know, you do interesting stuff and it's and it's respected. Um, you know, uh a lot of chefs have done top chef masters, and the reason they do it isn't necessarily because they like the format of the of the show.
I mean, to be very um, you know, kind of blunt, uh, you get a big pop in the restaurant after you do the show, whether you win or you lose, right? So it's good for business to do it, and it's good for in and it's a it's kind of a mark that you've done it that allows you to then do other things. So it's there's an advantage to doing it. You know, and what does it measure? I don't know.
You know, like you know, does it measure like how much you would like the food that someone cooked had were they thinking about the food beforehand? You know what I mean? So when you're put in a situation where I so Iron Chef, for those of you that don't know, okay, iron when you do Iron Chef, it's not like someone's like uh walks up to you and says, uh widgety grubs, and then it's the first time you've heard that this widgety grubs, and then you have you create all these amazing dishes in an hour from widgety grubs, right? Because if those iron chefs could actually do that, then I would, you know, I would quit my job and spend all of my time just bowing at their knees. You know what I mean that's in fact not what happens on Iron Chef.
What happens on Iron Chef is you're given a list of of three or four I forget what it is possible uh things that it could be and you practice those recipes a bunch of times to make sure you can clock in in under an hour that's what happens now uh it there's an extreme advantage to the Iron Chef because they're used to the kitchen and a lot of inefficiency comes from not being used to a kitchen but that but there you have it so uh so like it but still you know it it's a lot different from cooking in your own element with ingredients that you choose yourself and these things like chopped where you'd have no idea what's going on are extremely different. So someone winning in that circumstance isn't the same thing as someone who would make them necessarily the most delicious food at their restaurant or even at your house because at your house time management isn't as important as it is in Iron Chef. Iron Chef is as much about time management as it is about anything else. Because in Iron Chef the goal really is to produce a bunch of impressive crap in an hour. You know what I mean?
So it's like really a time management thing which is actually a fantastic measure of a chef. Chef needs good time management. Not necessarily uh the best indicator of who is in absolute terms the best cook right so I mean these are they're all measuring different things and you have to look now things like the I also you know think that most outside accolades are kind of absurd because again they're also not necessarily measuring things that might be important in the real world that said MOF is pretty badass. You know what I mean? Yeah, anyone that has an MOF, you can pretty much guarantee that they're a badass.
Saying Boku's door, if you win the Boku's door, you're a badass. I mean, like, that's all there is to it, just because it's incredibly, incredibly difficult, right? So if someone climbs Mount Everest without oxygen, right, are they the world's best human being? No, but it's pretty badass. I mean, I think it's I think it's personally dumb to try and climb climb Mount Everest.
And I also myself wouldn't want to spend the amount of time in my life it would take to get close to uh uh winning any one of these competitions, if I even could. You know what I mean? But they are a measure of badassery. What do you think? Uh I don't know if you know about this, know this about me, Dave, but I actually competed in a cooking competition once.
Yeah? Almost 100,000 making a burger. How what how was the burger? Uh I mean, the thing is, this speaks to your point. I'm not a great cook.
I'm you know, I can practice something and do it well eventually, and that's precisely what I did in this situation. It was actually a Sutter home burger competition. The prize was $100,000. I came in second place, like lost by one point out of the 235. So what do you get?
Just like a boatload of Merlot? I got nothing. No, nothing. Actually, the second prize was $500. So it's a hundred thousand first pri first place, then five hundred dollars.
Third prize you're fired. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But you know, I basically I think it's it's how a measure of how well you play the rules of that particular game. Yeah, also, yeah, in bar competitions, a lot of it's about the pattern and the speech and kind of what you do and how well you can smooch the judges.
And to be honest, like it depending on like some things are, you know, uh judges are incredibly biased, you know, and you could just have uh a bad judge and you can have this. So, you know, they yes, they do measure something, uh, but take take you know anything like that with a grain of salt. I personally detest competitions. Unless they are unl like the only competitions that I that I kind of enjoy are ones that are quantitative in nature that you can win or you can lose. You know what I mean?
Like who's in contest? Juicing Contests, which I lost, unfortunately last time I was in one, and embarrassed myself in front of my kids, and my kids have vowed to uh revenge me later. I was embarrassed myself, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See?
There you go. And uh, you know, or you know, soccer game, who gets the most goals. Anyway, but that that's me. Uh, but I'm a curmudgeon and a weasel and uh and a hard person to to deal with. Uh so uh more next week.
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