Today's program has been brought to you by Hearst Ranch, the nation's largest single source supplier of free range, all natural, grass-fed and grass-finished beef. For more information, visit HearstRanch.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwig Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Robert's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Happy Thanksgiving episode. Join in the studio today with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez and Piper from Booker and Dax Lab. How you guys doing? Good.
Good. Yeah, we got Joe over in the uh engineering booth. Joe, how are you uh how are you doing? I'm doing well. What are you gonna do for the Thanksgiving?
Oh, I'm just gonna go back to Baltimore to visit the family. Nice, quiet Thanksgiving. Yeah? Yeah, I'm excited though. You say that's your excited voice?
I'm excited though, yeah. Just like that. Yeah, yeah. Alright, nice, nice. And uh uh Piper, you're doing what?
What are you doing? You're gonna go to Vermont? Vermont. Yeah? Yeah.
I've heard that they have no internet and telephone in Vermont, is that true? No. No paved roads either. No, no? No.
You gotta go to New Hampshire for paved roads? Oh. Yeah. Yeah, for those of you that uh you know haven't tuned in before, and Piper's on uh, you know, they got a kind of a uh hate hate thing going on between uh Vermont and uh New Hampshire. What's the only thing that they can uh agree on there?
Maine. Yeah, and and what about Maine? It's a dark wilderness. I actually like Maine quite a quite a lot. I I I enjoyed Maine.
But uh I don't come from up there, so I don't have to worry about it. Stas, uh, what are you gonna do? Parents are here. Oh, wow. We'll just leave it at that.
Parents are here. They rented a house where? Uh near New Haven. And who's gonna make the turkey? Mother.
And how is your mom's turkey? I'm not gonna talk about it every year. I'm not gonna talk about it. It's great. What do you what's it the lie?
Everyone knows, everyone knows it, dude. It's a little dry. Yes. A little dry. What's my next band name?
A little dry. Uh calling your questions. Two 7184972128. That's 7184972128. I'm actually going to a uh a potluck family Thanksgiving thing.
So I have no idea what the food will be like at all. But I do know one thing. I am driving there and driving home again from it, which means I will not be having any wine at Thanksgiving. That sucks. Yeah, that's the best part.
What are you bringing as part of your potluck? I have no freaking idea. I have no idea. I've just put like like people. I have like Thanksgiving, uh as it should be for a food person, is one of my all-time favorite holidays.
I love myself some Thanksgiving. Uh and this year I have not had any time to devote to it at at all. But uh what I do have is one of Patrick Martin's Heritage Birds that I'm gonna cook as soon as I get home. So uh hopefully maybe before next time I can talk about the the home cook. But I'm a big believer if you go to somebody else's house for Thanksgiving and you don't necessarily get the the turkey you want, that's all about the fellowship, but you should still try to bust out one good turkey a year just as a proof of you know, proof of schiz.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah, right. Uh the three of us, we didn't talk about it, right? We didn't talk about the photo shoot we did it at Food and Wine, did we?
Mm mm. Yeah, we did we uh did we did the little turkey with the uh with the gravy packet on the inside where we took the gravy packet, made the gravy packet, uh with gelatin. Yeah, well, extra gelatin, duh, and then uh and calcium, uh, cut it, it was set it, cut it into blocks, uh, threw it into Alginette to p put a heat proof uh like thin layer around it, and then did the very finely pounded uh white meat turkey uh right around the with meat glue, right around the uh gravy packet, then we did the dark meat turkey, then we did the skin, we did the cook off, we then we dried off the skin, we hit it with the Sears all. Sears all, Sears all, Searz all. And then we uh oh this this is the fun part.
Stas made uh Parker House roll uh dough, and uh I made my mom stuffing, and we packed the stuffing and we put the Parker House roll around it, and then we uh cooked our stuff off. It tastes pretty good. I mean, Piper couldn't tell because he's not allowed to, you know. Yeah, I could eat the crannies. Oh, Piper made cranets, which do registered trademark.
Uh Pat and Penny. Not really, not really Pat and Penny. Not really registered trademark either. But uh that's it was simple. We stuffed that stuff.
Uh that stuff was simple. You just mixed uh the we made the cranberry sauce, strained out the solids, and mixed it with uh mayonnaise, right? No. What? No.
What do you do? Uh uh I strained out the the solids from the cranberry sauce and when when it was uh not set but still a little bit warm and put the yolk in there. Oh, you made it from screach scratch. You didn't mix mayonnaise, you made it old school. Is it because I yelled at you that the guy that uh bow made it the chocolate mayonnaise back in the day and made you feel bad about it?
Uh I mean you set that as sort of a precedent. Yeah. Yeah, I thought Piper took it the easy way out, but it turns out Piper, uh Piper did me proud and did not take the easy way out. And it was uh delicious. It was good.
Yeah, it was really good. Yeah. I'm gonna do it for my family, I think. Yeah? Mm-hmm.
Why don't you uh can you fit the recipe into uh Twitter? Can you get it that short? Mm-mm. I I did a whole thing for steak once in Twitter. Stas like no, just look at it.
Look at now. Uh you could do like two tweets. No, I bet Piper can't do it in one tweet, that's what I'm saying. Ooh. You don't think Piper can do it in one tweet?
We we're struggling with tweets right now. What if I just wrote it down and then took a photo of it? That's a weak tweet. That's weak tweet. Weak tweet.
The whole point of the tweet is to try to get within the medium, which is the character. Well, no, he's gonna try to work on outside of it. It'll be on the splatter. Piper's gonna send out this damn recipe one way or other. And in order to get it, I'm not gonna put it on the cooking issues uh tweeting uh feed.
You're gonna have to go follow Booker and Dak's lab, uh, which is where the Sears all thing is uh is gonna be going up in two days. Well, two days in like five hours, six two days in like eight hours, whatever it is. Midnight. Midnight. Two days and twelve hours.
Thurs Friday. Thurs Friday, Black Friday. So you want to talk about uh what's going on with that? I mean, uh if you're following us on Twitter, you already know that we've got a lot of uh big names using the Sears All, loving the Sears All. Um we're gonna launch it.
The video's coming together, the pages coming together, it looks great. I'm excited. Yeah. You want to tell them about our our sushi chef friend? Uhsuke Nakazawa.
Yeah. Famous for the. Uh he worked at Jiro. He was the guy who made the omelet. By the way, uh Stas and I have eaten at Jiro.
The omelet, the tomato there is in fact different from any other one and delicious. Remember, it was kind of fluffy and like uh almost like a cake. Remember that thing? Mm-hmm. That was actually one of my favorite things about Jiro was the tomato.
Delicious. And now the uh the the developer, I guess, the master of my favorite tomato, now uses the Searzel. Yeah. Loves. He's got a restaurant uh somewhere in the West Village, huh?
Yeah, but here it's hard to get into though, right? Yeah. Hard to find. It's on Commerce. Oh my god.
They look, look, people see here's the problem. Like, you people are you telling inside jokes on the radio. They were in a taxi cab with a famous chef who is known for having a bit of a temper, and the taxi driver was unable to find uh a Nakazawa sushi restaurant. And so uh there was uh hilarity ensued, right? Yeah.
And by hilarity I mean anger. And fear. But uh he loves uh Nakazawa loves the the Searzole. Uh doesn't put any taste on the salmon skin that he crisps up with it. Uh it's awesome.
Well, maybe someday we can go eat some. See how that see how that works out for us. I'd love to. Um all right. So hey, real quick before we we move on.
I just want for our first time listeners, I want to jump in and say, Okay, so what is the Searsol? Why do we want it? Etc. I love the idea that we might have a first-time listener. I feel like we had like we had a certain peak and then we just yeah, and then we just lose them all.
So somebody wandered in here. Yeah, right, yeah. It's like, so what is this? Uh so a Searsol, uh it's a good point, uh uh good point, Jalen. Thanks so much.
The um Searsol is an attachment that fits on a torch. So for years, right, if you're doing low temperature sous vide cooking, uh, especially at home, the way I used it, honestly, the way I used to finish uh a steak or anything, fish, uh, poultry, anything that I would do sous vide, deep fry. Only way, deep fry, deep fry, deep fry, right? And that's crispy and delicious. Love the deep fryer.
Uh problem is not everyone has a commercial deep fryer in their house. I mean, I guess because of like what I said before a couple episodes ago about insurance reasons and whatnot. Some people don't like the idea of uh frying uh things, finished frying things for CV. They're wrong, it's delicious, but you know, whatever. Um, and most people don't have power output enough to heat up a pan sufficiently.
Uh so really charcoal grill is a good option, but you know, a lot of people can't do a charcoal grill right away, or they don't have one, or they're in an apartment or something like this. So a lot of people turn to the blowtorch. The problem with blowtorch is uh it creates uh what we call uh torch taste on the meat, which is very very characteristic torchy fuel taste that uh you know our friend Arielle at UC Davis did some uh work uh for us, thank thing you know, thank you, uh, where she showed that in fact it's not the fuel itself that's causing it, but the intense heat of the flame is creating combustion uh flavors on the meat itself. So we have this item called the Searsol, which plugs onto a torch. We recommend the Burntonatic TS 8000, TS8000, because it's 12,000 BTUs.
It plugs on this thing and it turns it into a mini handheld uh IR broiler, basically. What do you think? Yeah, that's about right. Yeah? Yeah?
Okay. Now for some questions. Rory right's right saying about juice. Hey, to the cooking issues too. My wife just bought a juicer, not the auger type, but the type with the fine spinning blade.
My question is how can I preserve the juice for longer than a few hours? I've tried searching the Google, but I get a lot of mumbo jumbo about how you shouldn't try to preserve it because of its magical life-giving nutritional properties are so fleeting. However, I only drink the juice because it tastes good. Is that not reason enough? So, what are my options to get it to last, say, one week?
I have ascorbic acid on hand, although I have no idea what sort of percentages to use it in. And I also have a sous vide and no qualms about heating the fruit juice uh heating the fruit prior to juicing, or in fact the resulting juice. I'm keen to make bulk uh lots of tasty fruit, apple, orange, and or veggie juice, whatever's cheap at the market on the weekend to last a week. Love the show as always. Keep it up, regards, Rory Mearns.
Okay, uh oh, and then uh PS. I'm gonna read the PS before I answer the question because I love it. PS on these nuts. Because we happen to be listening to the episode with the rant about Virginia peanuts while driving through Virginia on our U.S. road trip holiday.
I want to take a U.S. road trip holiday with my kids, but my kids would never be into it. Like I want to do all that crap. My well maybe in a year. Maybe in a year.
Did you guys do that when you were kids? Taking the road trip around the country? I've done it recently, but not as a kid. Not as a kid. So oh I'll get into it later if I have time.
Like all I'm saying is that I used to do it, and I appreciate that I did it now, but it's boring as hell to sit in the back of the car and watch a bunch of stuff go by. So like when we drive with the kids, the kids like they have their faces buried in iPhones and iPads, and like my wife and her, like, what the hell? Look around at the scenery. Look at this, look. And then they don't really care.
And then, like, I remember back, and I'm like, yo, Jen, that's my wife. I was like, yo, uh, Jen, I mean, I remember not giving a crap when I was a kid. Right? But you guys don't have this experience to share with me because you didn't do that. Nope.
No. Maybe. Joe, did you do that stuff? And then he's away. Um, you know, not really like cross-country road trips, but you know, we drove a couple hours here and there.
And were you bored as crap in the back? Oh, it depends. I also got car sick, so that's kind of my main memory. Feeling feeling nauseous. Sweet.
Sweet. Great times. Driving and puking. That was that great Southern Rock band. Remember that?
Driving and puking? Yeah. Or was it driving and crying? I think it was driving and crying. Yeah.
Should have been driving and puking. Good band. Uh. Okay. We happen to be listening to the episode with the rant about Virginia Peanuts while driving through Virginia on our U.S.
road trip holiday. My wife said, Yeah, right. How good can the peanuts really be? I don't know that your wife speaks that way, but that's just my voice when I imitate people. And exact it's exactly what my uh reaction was.
Within 10 minutes of that, we stopped at some tired-looking roadside shop and picked up a can of the goods. Wow, we were both blown away. They were so insanely good. And just as you described, with an unfamiliar but satisfying snap to them. Virginia Peanuts, these nuts.
Okay, now back to your question. So, um, just one note on juices. You mentioned orange, and obviously orange, you're going to juice it in a different way. The juice will bitter over time. So you just, you know, just test a couple, and it's it's variety dependent.
You, you know, uh you just test it, and if after a couple of hours it hasn't gone bitter, you're probably uh you're probably okay. But it's just something to note on uh some citrus fruits, is some will uh undergo post um post juice bittering. Uh some tangerines, uh I don't know whether Clementines do. I think some Clementines do. A lot of navels do.
Anyway, just nothing to be aware of. Um Ascorbic acid is gonna be your lifesaver on uh a lot of these things. I wouldn't do uh a pre, I wouldn't do a pre uh juicing uh heat step on it because I don't, you know, you're not gonna get uh mold growth that quickly on your juice in the fridge or in the freezer, as long as it's not moldy to begin with. You wash, you you know, you wash it thoroughly. If you want to do a sanitized step, if you have a non flavor thing of like one of those fruit sandy fruit, what are those things called?
You ever seen those things? Those fruit sandy, I never use them. I've never seen them. Uh they have them, they're like solutions you can dip like salad and stuff into if you're pregnant, and then it doesn't like but uh I've never used it. Some people even use like a weak chlorine, dip it in and then let it air out.
I've never done it. I never done it. Anyways, but you can do it. Uh and and and juice it, uh, then uh I usually way overdose on ascorbic acid. Like, way overdose on ascorbic acid, like to the tune of about a teaspoon per liter, right?
Would you say that's about what we do, pipes? Yeah, it's a lot. It doesn't add too much flavor. It doesn't add too much flavor, but it you know, it does juice you up on vitamin C so you can, you know, pee yellow and maybe live forever. Although Linus Pauling did not live forever.
Linus Pauling was the famous two-time Nobel laureate scientist who well, the second one he won was a peace prize, but he thought you could uh greatly increase uh longevity and reduce uh disease by just mega dosing on vitamin C. You know what happened to him? He peed out a bunch of vitamin C and then died? Uh that's pretty accurate. Although he did live to a ripe old age and was, you know, one of the smartest scientists of the twentieth century.
Anyway, uh so there you go, Linus Pauling. Uh so anyways, so uh I usually add uh uh about a teaspoon per liter and stir it in. And uh if you want to keep it for a long time, I would say cold, vac bag it, and then freeze it. When you when you do it, the best way to freeze it is to uh vac bag the juice and then lay it on a sheet tray and freeze it flat in a sheet, uh and that way they stack very well in your freezer. And also when it comes time to thaw them, you're only thawing through, you know, like I don't know, like three eighths of an inch to uh you know, three-eighths of an inch roughly is what we usually do them at.
Three-eighths of an inch of stuff that you have to thaw out in uh in uh running water in order to get the juice usable again. So that's what I recommend. And juice lasts a good uh week uh in in the in the fridge. Depends on the juice, too. I mean like grapefruit juice, uh what do you think?
Weak piper? Nah. Orange juice, a couple days, grapefruit. Freeze it. Freeze it.
Yeah, freeze it. Flat and vax. Yeah. You're good. Apple juice would last a good week.
Oh, yeah. It's not I don't think you're gonna get mold. Piper would add uh what would you add to as a preservative if you really want to keep that sucker? Um sodium benzoate. Potassium sorbate.
It's small amounts. Super micro amount, like uh one hundredth. Yeah, but you only need a small bit because you're really only preventing the slightest look, you're not trying to keep this sucker uh, you know, yeast proof in a shelf stable application over like a zillion years. You're talking about keeping this sucker in the fridge for a week. So the amount of stabilization you you know you need is minimal.
I wouldn't I mean if you're doing it for a week, I wouldn't put anything in. But if you were gonna have it on a shelf, I mean you want to prevent against microbial growth. And uh remember, there's also but uh they're not carbonating it. So like when you're doing benzoit in a soda application, which is what Piper's done most of the research on, you know, the the carbon dioxide is also a huge inhibitor. Right.
But anyway, and so is the actual the uh the uh asorbic acid is a huge inhibitor too. It's really gonna protect it. Yeah, but it doesn't last. But it'll last a week. Yeah.
Ascorbic acid uh doesn't last over time. It gets it gets uh used uh and then it's it's over. But uh I also agree that uh I think you know you're right on point. I only drink the juice because it tastes good. That is reason enough.
I don't believe in any magical life-giving nutritional properties. Although I was teaching a bunch of uh kids at Dax's uh third grade class, and this one kid he asked me, he's like, Do they make any machines that uh use juice as a fuel? I was like, You are a machine that uses juice as a fuel, my friend. Third graders are awesome. Anyway, I was explaining steam engines.
I love it when they learn about food. Yeah young. Yeah, young juice. Okay. Uh next was that was that an okay answer, Stas?
Yeah. Yeah. You're just like, I really I don't care. I don't care. Matt from Chicago writes in also about nuts.
Not of not not these, but just it's some nuts. Uh hello, Dave, and all the people who can, unlike Dave, occasionally be absent without thereby causing the whole show to skip a week. Ouch. Wow. Oh, the stats.
Have you ever missed one? Have we? Have you ever missed one? No. I think I feel like I've done it once without you.
I think I don't know. We'll have to look it up. Okay. You mentioned on this week's episode a desire for a nut question every week. You're probably being facetious, but nevertheless, I'm here to do my part.
Now I like nut questions, right, Bass? Yeah. And we got another one after this, too. Awesome. Two more nut questions if we get to them.
Awesome. Anyway. I seen remember in one of your early episodes a brief reference to a book which covered methods for making not merely actual tofu but very tofu-like products uh from things other than soy, such as nuts. Speaking of someone who's allergic to soy and all emanations thereof, but nevertheless interested in experimenting with tofu-esque ingredients in the kitchen. I've searched through the archives, it's been unable to identify which episode this was, let alone which book, so I'll just come out and ask.
Um, what information sources would you recommend for someone in my situation? Am I merely hallucinating this discussion from the show's past? Is there any consumer intelligent home cook oriented literature which provide a useful guide to the production of faux foo? I like faux foo as a term. Uh Matt from Chicago-ish.
P.S. I feel sorry for whatever poor deluded, misguided persons wanted to remove your pro gear from your old apartment kitchen. I, for one, would happily pay a premium for such a kitchen. Stas is like, you preach you need to convert it over here. Okay.
So the uh so here here's the thing, Matt. Uh I did talk about that, and m my thought was that it's in modernist cuisine, in the you know, the massive tone that is modernist cuisine. Here is the problem. Uh as I spoke last week, uh we m I moved apartments and all of my books are still in boxes. So I didn't get a chance to uh to go to the book and search it.
But my recollection is that Modernist Cuisine has a section not merely on reforming tofu tofu with transglutaminase, but also on making alternative tofus from other legumes and uh other things like that. Now, it's extremely obvious that you can get tofu like textures uh from almost anything you want, any nut milk you want by setting it with the appropriate agents. Um but I assume that's not what you're talking about. I assume you're talking about making an actual tofu like product that uses a coagulation as a as the technique. Now, I myself have uh experimented with uh peanuts and the result was delicious, but the texture was crap.
It was worthless, useless. Like I would I tried it only one time. It also clogged, it wouldn't coagulate hard enough, so it clogged my draining uh my you know my draining tiles. Um so and also my Nguyen tofu book also packs. Um all my tofu references are packed.
Actually, I found shirt leaf, but he doesn't believe in any of that stuff anyway. Um so uh next week, hopefully I have the the books unpacked and I can uh address it again with the tofu. But uh my guess is is that if you took uh protein like something like uh peanuts and tried to make a peanut fu and you added transglutaminates when I was doing my experiments was well before I had started working with transglutaminase. This is like 2000, this is like 2000, you know, when I was doing this stuff. And like, you know, 12, 13 years ago or something.
So uh I need to re revisit it maybe with transglutaminase. I'm sure you could get peanuts to set harder with if you use TG. Wouldn't you think, Pipes? Yeah. I've gotten milk to set with it in the centrifuge.
I'm assuming I don't know, Matt, whether you have a centrifuge or not, but we'll I don't I'm sorry. Piper's like, just put in your citifuge. What are you? Jerk. What are you?
Man. Piper. Piper. Okay. Uh take a break.
Really? Mm-hmm. Alright. We'll come back from the break with more cooking issues. Like what you hear so far?
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Humane. The authentic flavor of the American West. Hell yes! Cooking issues! Love that song.
Love that song. Hurst Grinch fed beef. Love that stuff. You know what? But people you don't know this guy yet.
Maybe you've heard Nastasha speak about him, but Phil Bravo, uh friend of ours, kind of a friend of the show, not really a friend of the show. Friend, friend of Nastash's. Uh the person that uh that Nastash, you know, currently an enemy of the show, uh, Nastashian Piper uh fed Drew some arch jokes too to mess with his insides. Um he has possibly one of the great radio voices of all times. And he was supposed to come in to the um show today and read the questions for Thanksgiving.
His voice, when he wants it to be, is a dead ringer for uh Thoral Ravencroft, who you might know as the voice of Tony the Tiger. In fact, yesterday Phil did a their great, which was I almost fell over. And uh I've heard that he does uh, you know, uh like a life-changing uh Mr. Grinch uh rendition. By the way, I don't want anyone calling in and saying that the Grinch is uh is Boris Karloff.
Look, the voice of the Grinch is Boris Karloff, right? Right? But Thor Ravencroft is the song, right? And that's why it sounds different. That's why the song sounds different from the voice.
Well, the song is in second person, and the Grinch is typically in first person. Whoa, with the analysis, correct. From creative writing major Piper Christensen. Anyway, so like I can't wait for uh the extremely short Christmas season this year so that I can hear Phil Bravo do his rendition of you're a foul one, Mr. Grinch.
Uh but uh I would love the reason I brought that up is because I would love to hear Phil's rendition of her French grass fred beef. Yeah. The authentic taste of the American West, right? Isn't that what it is? I believe it's the authentic taste of the American West.
Is that true? As authentic as it gets. Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. Oh, speaking of which, uh, another one of our uh sponsors, the uh uh I have a uh from Underground Meats.
I have something in. This is from uh Brandon Hopkins in Phoenix, Arizona. Hey all. Thanks for the salami recommendations a few weeks ago. I ordered the Tuscan salami super sata.
I'll call this. You know what I'm from here, so I'll call it super side. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Right? But how do you pronounce it, Stas?
How's the actual Italian thing? Soprasata. Soprasata. Uh super sad. Alright.
Uh uh Fenochiona, right? Is that right? Mm-hmm. Fennel sausage is which uh salami and the Spanish chorizo from underground meats. Underground meats.
Underground meats. Uh everyone that tried them thought they were delicious. The Spanish chorizo was particularly tasty, which I served with Manchego and Quince paste on some toasted baguettes. You were all right, Piper, until he busted out the baguettes. You were all good until he busted out the you like Membrio?
I love membrio. Yeah, nice. Why don't you point the mic towards your face when you talk about it? It's because he's shoving his face with food. That's alright.
Don't worry about it. Anyway, uh, I like membrio as well. Uh quince paste on some toasted baguettes. All the sausages were far superior to anything I have had in the store. I thought you'd be happy to know how awesome the show's sponsor is.
Not only was all their sausage delicious, but their delivery was very fast. I would recommend any sausage fans give underground meats a try. Thanks for the suggestion, Brandon Hopkins. That's a good uh that's good testimonial, right? Yeah, good people, good people there.
Anyway. Uh, uh and while we're on the subject of meats, Lucas, friend of the show, writes in, and friend of Mofad came to the Mofad party. Uh, he's gonna give us the deer meat. He also had uh a comment on the uh on the breastfeeding. We have two comments on the breastfeeding uh thing.
And uh surprisingly, most people look before we get into this, like I'm not saying that someone should like shove their shove the the the stuff in your face necessarily. I'm just saying, you know, don't be hating, don't be hating, right? That's my point. No? No.
All right. All right. So Lucas wants to give us some of his deer meat, which we desperately want. We're gonna like 54 Eldritch is our lab, by the way, on Elder Street between Canal and uh and Hester. Like, we're not available though until after Thanksgiving.
So we'll have to get the deer meat some point after Thanksgiving. I already told him. But he writes, uh, for the record, I think women should be able to breastfeed however they want, albeit the usage of the scarf should be a m is a matter of good taste rather than of policy, right? I think that's the point. It's not making a policy, but it is, I guess, good taste, right?
I think we can agree. I saw a lady in a business meeting, though. Breast bare breastfeeding. So then Lucas adds, however, as you sit in the center of Hipsteropolis, which is a good word, uh, I don't think you can demand uh too much good taste. Whoa!
That is true. Oh. And uh while we're on it, uh, we had another comment in uh on that. Might as well go to that. Dr.
Bob writes in. Hi, Anastasia. For some of us, the female body is the pinnacle of creation and should be treated with the utmost respect. When I examine a breast in an emergency uh department exam room, it's done only with a female staffer in attendance. When it's not being examined, the breast is kept uh respectfully tucked away in the exam gown, even though the patient is in a private room.
I realize cultural norms vary around the world, but in a New York restaurant with a wide variety of public in attendance, I agree that the respectful thing, particularly for the woman in question, is to keep the breast covered. The awe and mystery of the female form is worthy of preservation, Dr. Bob. Thanks, Dr. Bob.
Well, that's the first time. I love the way you said that, Stas. It's awkward. Well, you know you're the one that brought it up. You can't you can't bring something like that up and then No, I know, I appreciate it.
It's still awkward. All right. Awkward, right? That's like uh same. Alex from Santa Barbara writes in hello, Dave and Nastasha, and I guess Piper, even though you know Alex didn't include you.
Nobody knew it's implied. The implied piper. Is that that's uh that's the next thing, the implied piper? I will skip the fryer talk, because we would talk about fryers. And ask about Thanksgiving.
I've been working on a pecan pie. Pecan or pecan? What do you get? Pecan. Are you a pecan or a pecan?
Pecan. Pecan? But I think everyone down there goes pecan, right? Pecan? What about Baltimore?
You're on the dividing line between the North and the South. What do you say? I say pecan. Yeah? P can sounds like two can.
Ooh, two can Sam. Yeah. You know what really ticks me off? They have a new Fruit Loops thing that has this like weird center goop in it. I haven't tried it.
My kids have been pestering me, but it hasn't gone on sale yet, so I have we're talking about Fruit Loops, is what we're talking about, Piper. I don't eat cereal. I come from Vermont. So the uh like they have this new Fruit Loops, and the the old advertisement for Fruit Loops was follow your nose, it always knows. And like the two can Sam goes around.
Uh but this new one, they're using freaking metal detectors to find the fruit loops. Two can Sam is there where there's two can minions and a freaking metal detector. Why do you need a metal detector to find fruit loops? Follow your nose, Sam. It always knows.
Gosh. What's with the fruit goop in the center? I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know, man.
They're finding the treasure chest. I don't know what the hell's going on with it. First of all, it's a fruit loop, not a fruit pillow. And second of all, the freaking toucan with his giant nose and all the colored stripes is supposed to be able to smell any dang fruit loop product from a mile away. And the fact that maybe he's so old, his nose is shot, he has to use a metal detector to find it.
Get your advertising straight. That irritated the heck out of me. And then, even worse, my kids saw that and then they still wanted it because they didn't realize what a slap in the face it was to two cans everywhere, that they had to use uh uh some sort of electronic gimmicry to find the fruit loops. Jerks. Okay.
Uh I will skip the fire talking uh back to Alex. And that's about Thanksgiving. I've been working on a pecan pie inspired uh dessert for Thanksgiving, kind of like a peanut butter cup, but with pecans. Uh the flavors are great once sugar oil and molasses are added, but the texture is off. I can't get the crumbly moist, dense texture that the mad scientists at uh Reese's pull off.
Any ideas? Listen, uh Alex from Santa Barbara. So the the the trick with when you're trying to imitate somebody else's texture, the best thing to do is to figure out kind of how they how they make it, right? Now I know I've mentioned on the uh on the show before that one of the key notes in a real Reese's peanut butter cup is um is rancidity. Is you know, oxidative rancidity of the uh peanut butter.
And uh I believe I mentioned I know I mentioned at some point, I don't know how long ago, that I spoke to someone from a company that does uh oxygen scavenging packaging that prevents rancidity uh in packaged goods, and they did a test run of Reese's peanut butter cups with the uh with the oxygen scavengers in them, and nobody liked them because they missed the taste of rancidity, right? So, anyway, so you might want to let the pecans go rancid before you make it. If you really want it, if you really want to hit that Reese's note right on the button. But what I recommend you do is uh go look up a copycat recipe for uh Reese's. Now uh uh Nastasha looked up there's a well-known uh copycat recipe uh dude named Todd Wilbur.
He has YouTube videos, I think, and he has his uh show and he has a couple books on copycat recipes. He tackled um Reese's and um and what he uh uses his trick supposedly is to use reduced fat peanut butter uh and powdered sugar. So he like he's using fundamentally reduced fat peanut butter and powdered sugar. Now, luckily for you, the pecans that you get in general uh have uh my guess is from having ground a lot of pecan butter over the years. Remember, Stas, we used to have to grind pecan butter constantly.
Stas is Stas has got that that thank Christ that part of my life is over smile on her face, right? Yeah, yeah. We hated that. I hated doing that. We had to do it all the time.
We did we used to just do pecans constantly pecan oil, pecan butter, pecan soups, all in the center fuses, pecans, pecans, pecans. Now, Stas is gonna be reliving that nightmare with hickory nuts! When are we gonna get those things in? Super soon. Okay.
So they uh and and we're gonna test butternuts too. But I don't know whether from Home Depot. We found a guy in Home Depot, literally, we're in the plant section. Nastash is in the plant section because it's like I'm I'm gonna go get some bulbs from my house. I'm like, what the and then she's there and she's like, come here, come here.
And like this guy is over in the corner talking about, I got all these hickory nuts in the in my in my yacht, and uh, I hear there's some people on the internet, they like these things, so I collected them. And I'm thinking out of selling them, but I don't really know how. And stuff's like, we can buy them. We can buy a lot of the hickory nuts. Right?
Isn't that what you said? Yeah, well, you wouldn't talk, but you forced him to but it was you you you both overheard him heard him I guess that's when we were picking up our freeze dryer from ideas and food ideas and food we have a freeze dryer from that we haven't had a chance to fire it up yet I've been working on the uh working on the Sears all so I haven't had a chance to fire up the uh freeze dryer after Thanksgiving we'll fire up the freeze dryer and give you guys reports anyways hey Dave I gotta jump in here for a second so a listener just sent in to info at heritage radio network dot org a picture of crusty o's from the Simpsons that comes with a free jagged metal crustio inside and saying that maybe two can Sam is looking for crustyos. Maybe you mean that's why he because he can't he needs the metal he needs the the metal detector to find the jaggedy metal one. Yeah exactly and I was just impressed at the speed at which that came in I guess it's live radio right I guess yeah we're live we're live when I say coming to you live I'm not messing around. No way.
No we're we're actually here real human beings coming to you live. Okay so his secret is uh is to use the reduced fat peanut butter my guess from grinding a lot of pecans over the years is that uh because we would typically to get a good oil uh yield out of the pecans we would add some oil back to it remember that styles because uh they would um they're not as dry as almonds but they're more dry than probably peanuts definitely peanut butter that has oil added to it so if you grind uh straight pecans or I guess you're maybe you're using pecan butter and uh then you gotta get your uh molasses and whatever you else you do to the texture of a powdered sugar. I mean that's gonna be the issue. They don't make a uh how would you do that? Just use brown sugar and powder it, right?
So you don't have the extra moisture content. Just powderized brown sugar in a in a RoboCoo with uh some other dry stuff. Freeze and powder it? Like, how are you gonna powder brown sugar? Oh, get the get the free running, get the free running brown.
What's gonna gum up? Get the free running brown, maybe? Oh, Demarnara. Yeah. And then powderize it in in a blender.
And then uh maybe add some cornstarch to it, because they that cornstarch that's into powder sugar might be helping out a little bit. You don't know what the ratio of cornstarch in in uh powder sugar is, do you? No, it's not huge though. No, it's like a couple percent, right? Yeah.
Yeah. So the cornstarch is probably helping with the texture a little bit, right? Because it's you know making it giving it that pasty, la da, right? And then uh powderize the uh brown sugar substitute, uh, and then just make sure the fat content of your pecans aren't too high. And that should be getting the texture you want.
And then if you want, check out uh Todd Wilbur's um uh Todd Wilbur's whatever his website. But it looks like you're gonna reduce the oil. And uh, yeah, what do you think? Give it tell me whether it works. I'm interested to hear the result because until I found hickory nuts, my feeling was pecans were God's nut.
But now I think hickory nuts are God's nut. Right? God nut. Uh okay. Uh Philippe Lament writes in about possibly, possibly poisoned bread.
Uh hello, Dave, Nastasha, Jack and Joe, and Madam Piper. Uh this is Philippe Lament writing in. Thanks for the advice on the soft serve machine. I recently went on vacation and ate at a spectacular restaurant called Amass in Copenhagen. I've never been.
I've never been. I was in Copenhagen for like 13 minutes, and I took a train to uh to Sweden, got to hell out. I've never been to any of those restaurants. Amass is in Copenhagen, yeah? Yeah, it's a Copenhagen.
Yeah. Anyway. Uh there we were served a bread made with one-third fermented cooked potato. We were told I like the word potato. Potato.
Uh we were told uh that the potatoes were cooked, mashed, and put in cryovac bags and fermented in a warm room. The bread was amazing, but wouldn't this anaerobic and warm environment create a poison? What's up? Thank you. Well, yes, it it most likely could.
So this is very similar to um uh salt rising bread, uh sometimes made with a potato starter. There's a lot of anaerobic fermentation of uh potatoes in um in uh Andean cooking where you know where the potato comes from. Uh some of the their freeze-dried chunyo potatoes are kept in water and fermented, and there's also something called uh tokash or togash, which is like you literally you bury the potatoes in water for you know, I don't know, like months, and then you dig it up and then it well, I think they say that they use running water, so it it takes the bacteria away, but you and I both know that that's not the case. So uh so yeah, so what's gonna grow in there? So the two main uh things that you're gonna get growing, and in fact, salt rising bread, the actual rising is not done by a yeast, it's done by uh your good buddy Clostridium perfyngens.
And uh that that is not good. You do not want to get a uh pornens infection, especially if you're like you know, a soldier in battle, because that causes gas gangrene, which is bad, bad. Uh and it also creates um uh an enterotoxin, which uh, you know, can you know get you sick. Uh so all in all, bad. The uh but the good news is is that when you cook bread, you're cooking it up to uh the boiling point of water, typically to 12 or higher, right?
Because it's getting at least at least a 180 Fahrenheit, usually up higher, up closer to the boiling point. And uh well before that happens, the uh toxins from the the bacteria themselves are uh killed. The spores can't germinate because the moisture activity of the bread is not high enough when it's done. And the uh because you might not be killing the spores, remember, because that takes a much higher temperature than that for a long period of time, uh, because Clostridium perfingens is a spore-forming bacteria. But the toxins are neutralized, the vegetative cells are killed, and the spores cannot germinate uh in the environment of the cooked bread.
So uh salt risen salt rising bread, safe. Uh also interesting, I read some papers on the line on the internets that say that uh well the other and the other problem, and this you can get this from a poorly stored baked potato, botulism, right? Botulism can grow, and there's been cases of poorly stored uh, you know, people eating baked potatoes uh that have botulism and can cause problems. So uh the good news is that if you're specifically growing clostridium, clostridium perfyngens will uh outcompete the botulism, and there's been studies showing that botulism, clostridium, uh the botulism uh clostridium will not grow in the presence of a thriving uh perfynge uh colony. So that will take care of that.
And the other good news is let's say you should grow a uh boatload of botulism, the uh toxin, the botulin uh botulism toxin is also heat labile and will be destroyed by the cooking. So in general, the uh you know, the it seems that you're not gonna die from uh eating um the properly made uh stuff. And my experience from making salt rising bread and from having um clostridium uh fermented um uh what was it, cassava in uh in Senegal was that um it has a very characteristic smell to it, and so you kinda know whether or not it's got the right bacterial mix in there when you're when you're eating it, uh, when you're making it rather. And so hopefully that stuff should guarantee that you're uh not gonna die, and apparently you did not because you wrote us a question, right? What do you think?
Yeah, yeah. Solved. Good, it's a good but you know, again, you know, with all of the BS, uh, you know, I am not uh I am not a food safety, blah blah blah. Like, don't don't do this at home, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay.
Um, we had a question in from uh Joe Blow. Uh Joe Blow 667, uh Joe Blow 67. I can't believe there's only 67. He must have been an early Joe Blow. Because like that's like one of the first ones you're gonna check, right?
I'm sure it's like up to like Joe Blow 8,925,326. Anyway, uh any ideas for what you can do with peanut shells. Seems like a giant ways to eat the internet and throw the rest out. Well, you should just throw it on the floor. Yeah, like a uh Western bar.
Yeah, yeah, right? Because like that like totally adds to the uh to the what's it called, right? The ambiance. Yeah, ambiance. The ambience.
The ambience of the bar. Uh no, but uh uh, you know, take this seriously, like they don't taste good, right? But I don't know, okay. So you guys are like a little bit younger than I am. So when I say peanut, you say like name a person, name a person who's worked with peanuts.
I'm gonna see if they it was only when I was a kid that they were teaching this stuff. People feed elephants? No, George Washington Carver, man. When I was a kid, look when I was a kid, if you said if you said the word carver or George Washington Carver, you're peanut, peanut, you know what I mean? If you said peanuts, you're like George and Carver, billion ways to use a peanut.
You know what I mean? So George Washington Carver was like, at least in the 70s, we were like like like taught constantly about there was this guy who his life's work was he's gonna figure out how to like squeeze every last piece of uh utility out of the freaking peanut. Turns out the guy also worked on um a sweet potatoes and a bunch of other stuff. He was the he was the head of the agricultural department at uh the Tuskegee Institute for uh many years, starting at the beginning of the 1900s, all the way through, I think, until I think until his death. Uh and uh he he did write a book that you can get online, uh portions of it at least, called uh How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption.
And this is not about the hulls, but you should go check it, check it out. He also he did a lot of patent work on like different ways to use peanuts, like making textiles out of peanuts, and that's where the hull comes in, making like ointments out of peanuts, medicines out of peanuts, oils out of peanuts, like like you know, he like people say George Washington cover invented peanut butter. That's a load of that's a load of crap. That is not the case. Although he might have done a lot to popularize peanut butter here in the US of A.
And again, the French hate peanut butter. Maybe it's because they have something against George Washington Carver. Weasels. But uh uh very interesting story. You should go read about George Washington Carver.
Born uh born a slave, uh became uh, you know, uh uh an eminent um scientist. Anyway, so the one that I like of his is, and then I'll answer your question. The one uh here's a weird ones. Number 43 in the peanut uses is peanut and cheese roast. Right for this?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I I I want someone to make this. Like maybe Piper, someday after the Kickstarter is done, you can make this right. One cup grated cheese.
No freaking specification of what kind of cheese. Now, this is like 1910 or whatever, so you know, whatever. Maybe we'll have to figure out kind of what kind of cheese they would have had, like just lying around. Okay, you you you will use cheddar and tell us. Okay, one cup bread crumbs, you have to substitute gluten free breadcrumbs, right?
So you got your one cup grated cheese, your one cup of breadcrumbs, your teaspoon of chopped onion, your one cup of finely ground peanuts, tablespoon butter, juice of half of a lemon. This is a weird recipe, right? Salt to taste. Cook the onion in the butter and a little water until it's tender. That's random right there.
Like adding water to sweat the onion out before the butt that's random stiff stuff right there. Random. Yeah. Uh mix the other ingredients and moisten with water, more water. Using the water in which the onion has been cooked, pour into a shallow baking dish and brown in the oven.
That is a weird, weird recipe. Sounds like a dip. No, he says it's a roast. I mean says it sets into a block. He doesn't say whether to serve it hot or serve it cold.
I mean, that's crazy recipe. He says cook onion in butter and water. So why add the butter then? And why not just add the butter later? And then mix breadcrumbs, peanuts, lemon, and cheese together with the water and onion stuff and bake it.
That's weird. Yeah. It's strange. But I you know what? You know, George Wash.
Yeah, we're gonna try it. I'm gonna give George Russian and Carver a try. But to answer your question, well, the only thing I can think of that's useful from a food perspective is you can make charcoal from peanuts. So uh shells. So you take the peanut shells, pack them into uh a chimney starter, light them up, and then to make charcoal, you have to cut off the entire oxygen supply.
Once the stuff starts burning, you cut off the oxygen supply. Uh they should go to charcoal. Most people, when they're actually using it for fuel, then compress them into briquettes, and you can look up online how to do this. Uh I wonder whether there's a use for the really fine charcoal, maybe as a really quick way to start charcoal, right? I mean it's gonna burn really quickly or burn really hot, or maybe throw it on top of charcoal to give an extra burst of heat.
I don't know. But it's the only thing I can think of from a food perspective. Uh fuel for a smoker, maybe? Just not charcoal, but like regular shells. I don't know.
I don't know what their smoke tastes like. I don't know, but that's a good point, Piper. I like the way you think. I like the way you think. They were there's a lot of people who are considering using it in places that don't have a lot of wood and that you know can't afford other things.
You know what I mean? Although it's an awful lot of peanuts to be cooking from the hulls. But anyway, so maybe someone will give it a uh try and test it out. Okay. Uh Tristan Catcher writes in uh making a Chev uh sorbet cream cheese and Chev uh and syrup, churning it as normal.
It's freezing smooth uh when it's fresh, but overnight it goes solid. How should I stabilize it? I don't think you're adding enough sugar. Uh you need to increase the sugar level on it. Uh what I would do if you don't want it to be sweet is to use a low sugar uh sweetener like uh glucose syrup, uh, which has a DE of like what?
It's like 40. I think it's like 43. 40, yeah, 40 something, like low DE, low DE glucose syrup, uh, which is gonna have uh very low sweetness level. There are even less sweet things out there, but that are gonna give you the bodying effect you need and the softening effect you need. Uh if it's an actual stabilization problem, I like LBG locust bean gum for that kind of an application.
So you just cook the whole thing out with the add the LBG coal, disperse into uh into uh hopefully water or whatever, and then and then cook it, cook it out above about 85, bring it back down. If you add eggs, I guess you didn't, and then it's a sorbet. So anyway, so then and then uh that that should stabilize it and prevent any stabilization problems you have from a texture, but solidity is almost always a uh a sugar balance problem. Would you agree on that? Yeah.
If you don't want to add more sugar, another thing you could do, some people do they add alcohol to soften it. I don't actually like to do that because the the um it melts weirdly when you add a lot of alcohol to a sorbet, like it's like holding together and then all of a sudden it's not holding together anymore. It doesn't have the same meltdown that you get from kind of the sugar inhibition melting. At least that's been my experience in life. What about you, Pipes?
Do you feel the same way or no? Uh I haven't had too many uh alcohol. Do you have a color? Oh, we have a color? Color, you're on the air.
Hey Dave, how's it going? It's JD. Hey, what are we doing? All right, what's up? Hey, I'm doing all right.
Uh I just have some questions in terms of um I'm actually uh helping the uh May May Street Kitchen folks. They recently um opened their restaurant. Oh yeah, how's it how's it doing? Like those people. How's it going?
Yeah, it's doing pretty well. I'm actually uh trying to help them with some uh uh a circulator issue they have in terms of uh being able to do some 60 64 degrees C eggs in 60 minutes. Uh and I was wondering uh in terms of uh capacity of being able to say run one circulator, and um I'm wondering how many eggs you could run to be able to meet that 60 minute limit if we do the preheat. You're doing a 64? Yeah.
Okay. I mean the good news on 64 is it's a lot easier to hit 64 than it is to hit uh 63, right? So the the two easy the two e like the easiest one is sixty-two, because you don't need to ever get the center up to sixty-two. Sixty-four, you need to get it at sixty-four, but if it goes a little bit over, like two tenths, three tenths, it's not a not a big deal. Um but w what why do you only have one hour to do it?
Um in terms of just being able to understand the uh the turn time and and be able to prep for service, and that's typically what they're used to. So I guess um the better question would be, you know, trying to maximize the amount of eggs for one circulator uh in a certain duration. So yeah, go ahead. So I I guess that's kind of basically I want to be able to maximize the amount of egg throughput of eggs in a set amount of time. Right.
So what I had noticed is that you know they were doing they were trying to do a 60 minute eggs, and they were doing um and they were telling me that it would t it was taking a little bit longer than they expected, and basically what I determined is that uh they weren't preheating the water uh higher than than so what would happen is that they'd have to wait um for 60 eggs, they had to wait 20 minutes for recovery to get back to 64. Yeah, and 64 you need to be at 64 to get a 64. So I mean, a trick that you you know uh that a lot of people do is uh especially if you're doing something like a creme anglaise, it's really high temperature for a circulator, like you know, eighty, eighty-two. Uh they they they'll set it to eighty-five, drop the stuff in, and within a couple of seconds it it drops down. So you can o like over overheat the water, you have to figure out kind of you have to do a lot of you have to do some some checking, some math.
I mean, it doesn't take that long to overcook the white on the inside, so it's can be a little problematic, you know, ramping the temperature high enough to really get back fast enough. Another thing you can do is uh well first of all when you're cooking eggs to a specific temperature like sixty four. Um it's again, that's harder than sixty-two, but easier than sixty-three uh in terms of difficulty, not in terms of texture. Um you have to make sure that the eggs aren't piled uh such that the the eggs in the very center aren't getting proper uh water circulation around them uh or it it's just not going to be cooked right so one of the things that's gonna limit the amount of eggs that you can cook is how many layers you can fit where you get water circulation between all the layers of eggs. Like so that's critical, right?
Uh to get water circulation between all the layers of eggs if you want them all to cook at the same rate. The second thing you can do and this is I've done this before is you um just keep a pot of bu boiling water near the eggs and then you just add boiling water by the you know by the um you know like you know panful until because that will level out right away and you can get a sense for kind of how long it takes you to get uh back up and you can bale water out and then if you go over you can throw a couple of ice cubes in and you should be able to stabilize the temperature within like three four minutes. You know what I mean? If you have uh boiling water you should be able to get a fairly stable temperature within three four minutes. Now as to how many I've ever done at once with one circulator usually what I'll what I'll do is I mean I've I've done 62s in very non-ideal circumstances where I've done like a hundred you know or more in one shot.
It's not ideal but with sixty two you can get away with it. With sixty four I don't know if you can really get away with that. I mean I would probably say maybe maybe see a flat is what thirty six in a flat? Yeah. Is that right?
No twenty what's in a flat? Six by six six by six thirty six? One, two, three flats. Yeah, you could probably do three flats. Probably.
But you know, the the um the other thing you can really do, and it makes could make your life a lot easier, is to uh just you know run a cycle and then chill them down, run a cycle, chill them down, and then just re-therm them all at service temps. Reserve you know, retherm them at like 50, 55, 50, 56, and then you can just keep them around. There's no need to cook them all at once. If you if you actually have the time, you can cook them beforehand and then therm them up for service. And they only need like 30, 35, 40 minutes at 55 to re-therm enough for service, and then they can hold at a temperature that low at like 55, 56, even up to 57, really, they can hold for uh you know hours and hours and hours and hours, and they're not gonna they're not gonna change their texture at that temperature.
You know what I mean? And that that might be a good solution for them. Okay. Um so I had kind of a follow-up question because in terms of the circulation. I was thinking about building uh, say a custom basket to be able to get the circulation you need.
You know, basically like wire stacks. And I was wondering um, you know, how effective do you think that would be, as well as um what do I keep need to keep in mind um in terms of you know keeping it um food safe and not, you know, if I wanted to get materials, you know, what would you suggest that would best suit that? Well, I mean, you're gonna make it out of what? Out of out of metal, out of stainless? Yeah, I was thinking stainless.
Um you know, I'm not sure. I was gonna maybe try to, you know, maybe throw some fire baskets in, something of that nature, and stack some um, you know, wire racks in between somehow. Fryer baskets rust like a demon. Uh in my in my uh experience, uh they're not as stainless as you would like them to be. I think a lot of them are actually just chromed over.
You know what I mean? And so like they they tend to rust. And even most uh cooking grates that are supposedly stainless, like they rust out in the circ over a long period of time. Uh but you know uh you know, they might last uh a while. If I was gonna do full custom job, I would do I would do stainless or I mean I would do stainless.
The other alternative would be uh acrylic or polycarb because you're not cooking at that high a temperature and you're not using alcohol. I mean, if you're not if you're not a believer in polycarb because you're worried about um things leaching out if someone cooks if someone cleans it with detergents and starts breaking down the polycarbonate, you could go with acrylic. Acrylic's easy because you can laser cut acrylic. So if you can build something that way, but it's gonna be heavier and more fragile. I mean, stainless is kind of ideal, like wire work stainless, but then you have to find someone who could do the wire work stainless for you.
You could make something with fryer baskets, but when people load eggs into fryer baskets, they tend to glom together in the middle and then the ones in the middle are gonna have problems. What no one's really built that would be super sweet is something that mimics a flat of eggs, but it's just made out of like empty wire and then holds the eggs and then has a way to stack the next flat on top of it so that the every egg is in its own little cage. That would be freaking genius. Like I would buy that. Like if you made that, I would buy that.
In fact, I should make that if you don't make it. If you're not gonna make it, I'll make that. I won't because I don't have time, but I'm saying like I would buy that. Wouldn't you buy that, Piper? Yeah, we'll get some coat hangers and rubber bands and like the but the the thing is like like uh you want to fit it into you know like you don't want to be d f using a full size Lexan for that.
You want to fit it in the half size uh Lexan, right? Because i you know, any time you cook uh enough eggs where you need a full size Lexan, your recovery time is gonna be ridiculous. So I would build something to maximize the um the tall half the half lexans is what I would go for. Yeah, is is Teflon something that you can use or no? Teflon?
Good luck. Teflon is first of all extremely expensive. Uh, you know, it it's kind of flexible, it it's impossible to join. Uh so you have to do everything with uh screw fasteners and like I've never machined Teflon, but I don't know how easy it is to machine. It's really expensive, man.
Really. Yeah, I would I wouldn't I wouldn't play the Teflon game. Okay, and then in terms of uh just a quick final one. Um, in terms of watching circulation, I I posted you about putting glitter in the in the water, and you said that was a pain in the ass to clean. Is it doable?
Yeah. Do you have other suggestions to be able to watch circulation and make sure that it's working properly? I mean, you like you can just throw one or two floaty craps into it and just watch them go around. You know what I mean? Like and because you that all that always happens anyway.
In fact, like I'm always like, what the hell found in my in the in the in this bath? And then you have to like kind of scoop it out, and you can get a good feeling for for what's going on. But literally, like one or two little thingamajigs in there is enough to see kind of how the flow works. You can dump, I mean, like Piper, what would you want to dump in if you were gonna dump something that you had to recover later? It's gotta be big enough so it's not gonna get sucked into your circulator.
Or small enough that it can get sucked through without a problem. I'll never forget the time that I uh didn't cheese cloth my circulator and I did uh like uh a like I threw the wood chips in to do the wood chip circulator to get the the flavor of the wood chip. Oh my goodness. Oh my god, it's such a nightmare. Oh, such a freaking nightmare.
But the oil was good. I mean, that's a good technique, circulating uh uh charred uh charred wood chips in oil for an oil poach. I mean it's good technique. But uh yeah, but it's uh but it was a pain to clean out, let me tell you. Right.
Okay, well um that answers all my questions. Thanks for everything and keep up the good work. Uh thanks. Happy Thanksgiving. All right, we uh actually we have to we have to go out now, but uh Elliot Elliot Pappanell wrote in uh on the Twitter uh can you debunk some stock mythology?
Because the New York Times just did something on uh on turkey stock. I don't have time to go into all of it now because they're gonna kick us off. Maybe we'll do some of it on the Twitter uh later on, but turkey stock is was that the only Thanksgiving question we've had? Mm-hmm. Well, anyway.
Uh should you cook we'll we'll just handle this one. Should you cook your stock uh covered or uncovered? And I'm gonna go ahead and say that uh the only reason to cook a stock uncovered is so that you don't have the problem of it going to a rolling boil without you noticing it, right? Otherwise you would want to keep it covered because that's gonna keep the aromatics in more. Piper, agree or disagree.
Agree. Yeah. So like once you get the thing set and you can ensure that you're not gonna get a rolling boil in it, there's no dang point. Well, the other thing is like a lot of people when we're when you're when you t when you let's say you were at the French Culinary Institute, which you were Piper, right? So when they taught you how to make stocks at the French Culinary Institute, what did they do that I hate?
Well, uh, I mean, they made an enormous amount at a time. Yeah, and they and and they they're the bones, the bones and meat to water ratio was in my opinion, way the hell off, right? They they made a weak stock. I don't think I can come out on the radio and say that. No, no, I don't mean it in a bad way.
They would then reduce it later. Yeah, they would always make a uh higher water volume and then uh reduce it later. Yeah, I'm much more from the James Peterson school. Great did people still read that stuff? He's a great cookbook writer.
From his school, which is, you know, don't overwater it to begin with to minimize the amount of reduction you have to do later. And that's the kind of the school of thought I'm in. So if you're you starting with a high water content and you're doing a stock where you're cooking it for a long time, and I I frankly I don't think turkey stock needs to be cooked that long like you do, like the old ones. I just don't. I think a lot of people spend way too much time cooking their poultry stocks.
Um you should really use a pressure cooker anyway. Uh so they I think they overwater it and then let it reduce some as it's cooking in the pop. I think that's useless, unnecessary. Just add the amount of water that you want and then cover it and sure it doesn't go to a roiling boil. And the reason you don't want a rolling boil is you don't want to emulsify the oils into it as it as it's going and cause it to get cloudier, which doesn't make a damn bit of difference if you're gonna make a gravy out of it, frankly.
Right. Right. But they also let it rip overnight too. So they yeah, so they want yeah, which you're not gonna do at home. Yeah.
Whatever. I don't I think you can cover it. That's my feeling. Cover it and then reduce it later if you want to. Yeah.
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