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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave On, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Robertus Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn! Every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. Joined as usual by Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, Stas?
Good. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Got Jack in the booth today.
Hey. Good old fashioned, good old-fashioned uh cooking issues. Last week my tires blew out in my car. For real? Yeah, that's actually why I wasn't here.
For real, your tires blew out. For real. Like while you were driving? Yeah, I was kind of flat, two of them, and I was like, let me drive to the gas station and fill them up, and then you know. Was it like uh was it like kaplow?
Or was it kind of yeah. Well, did were you able to keep control of the car? Yeah, I I I made it into a repair shop and got it replaced. Yeah, I had a little bit of a car corridor today. My uh old school, like you don't think of this happening anymore with uh your car, but battery dead.
Battery dead. Is that way you're late? Dead. Yeah. We're I was going to work on the puffing gun, which we'll talk about in a minute, but the battery was completely uh muerto.
And so I haven't had to have a jump since I was in like high school, you know? Uh, but yeah, it works. Turns out I still know how to jumpstart a car. Uh also joined in the studio today. Emma Boast.
Emma Boast from the Museum of Food and Drink. Hey, what's uh so what's your title there at the museum? I am the program director, so I work with uh Peter, who's the executive director of MoFed and uh a whole slew of amazing volunteers. Yeah, yeah, nice. So uh so Emma's here today.
Uh actually I forced her to come on because uh I'm a little bit late because what we're doing this morning, as some of you might know, uh last summer we uh got a kick we had did a Kickstarter and uh we paid for this uh puffing gun. Now puffing gun is uh an ex explosive puffing device that uh was used to make breakfast cereals, one of the big I like to call it the big three of the initial breakfast cereals, right? So you your initial big three were uh your flaking rollers, right? Three, right? No, two, three.
Well, I guess you had your your crumbled, your granula kind of granola-esque cereals. Right, that's the or that's the or cereal, right? The or cereal, and uh by the way, remember, started by uh kind of uh religious uh health zealots. That's a fair term. Zealots, yeah.
Uh so that meant to kind of taste uh bad and be dry and just kind of you know one of the original cereals names was uh Pablum. Pablum. I've got a caller. Oh, caller. Well, we'll get back to the puffing gun in a minute.
Caller, you're on the air. Hey David and crew, how y'all doing? Doing all right. Howdy. Very well.
Cool. I had uh uh two part questions. Um one of them was I had recently seen a video that Jose Andres had done, and he had made a mimosa with Clementine air, he said. And he did it with uh soylectin. Yeah, he loves that stuff.
Yeah, and uh I tried to do it at home and I just modified it by doing it with blood orange. Right. But since we didn't have any fresh blood oranges I used, uh just regular um like it was it was already pastures. I got it from Whole Foods, but it was blood orange juice, and for some reason I just couldn't make uh the air the same way that he does it ended up being real goopy. Yeah, what was he what was he using?
Uh well give me give me his whole technique because I haven't seen the video. Yeah, it was uh he was making kava and then he used fresh squeezed uh clementine juice, and I don't know if that's why one of the effects that mine didn't work at all. Yeah, I mean what was he what he what what was the procedure with the soy lessine? He was making mimosas. No, what was the procedure with the soy lecithin?
So he used the immersion uh not the immersion circuit the uh like a stick blender? Yes, the stick blender. Right. And uh he just put like about a spoonful or so of uh soy lectin inside of the uh clementine juice and just made like an air. Right.
Like an air out of the clementine juice. Okay, so put that on top of it. And what did and uh and he was using presumably the powdered stuff, right? Because there's also the granular stuff and there's the powder stuff. Powder stuff much better.
Hopefully you had the powder stuff. Uh okay. So you can add almost any kind of uh kind of uh you know he he added no extra whipping agent, right? Just the uh he added just the soy lecithin to uh to for the for the bubbling effect, right? No, no whipping agent.
All right. Yeah, yeah, just that. And and you've had luck using this uh the stick blender technique in the past, or do you need some pointers on the stick blender technique in general? I mean, probably a new techniques altogether because I definitely just tried it bad. Like I I just tried to attempt it on a brunch and it was it was not as a year just off of looking.
It didn't look as hard as it wasn't clearly was. Right, okay. So there's a trick. It's possible. I'm not a huge fan.
I'm not I've never I've never like been like a soy uh less than guy. But what you should do is practice on something that foams naturally. Like I was wondering if you've used this kind of technique in the past, like carrot juice is a natural foamer. You don't need to do anything to it at all. Just use carrot juice, you know, juice carrots and and do it.
But the trick with uh with any of those kind of uh foam ups uh with a stick blender is you want to uh have not like you you like a uh you know a s qu small quantity in the bottom of a container, stick the stick blender in it, and then you go on a and here's the key that I don't know whether they tell you about in the video or not, but you need to turn the entire thing at an angle such that a portion of the stick blender's blades come out of the liquid on every revolution. And then when you're holding it at that angle, you turn it on high, and as it flips up and out of the thing, it's gonna be whipping air and creating a froth that will rise above the surface. So that's why when they're doing that technique, you'll see them all the time, and it's not just because they want to look jaunty, they need to have that that container. I usually do it in quartz or whatever, on on uh on uh an angle, usually pretty steep, like 45 or better, so that the blades can whip in and out. But you did that or no?
No, definitely didn't do that. I just held it directly in there. Almost like a reverse blender as it usually is, you know. So I definitely didn't get any air into it. Right.
So the trick with with any of those foam things is he's adding a little bit of the soy less than to stabilize the bubbles a little bit. You're praying that there's a kind of enough uh solids in the in the in the juice to kind of hold those bubbles once they're formed with with with that. And then you just tilt it at an angle. You give it a try. Carrot juice is a good one to do it with.
Tills it at an angle and you hold it and it'll it'll make like a froth on the top. And then you pull out the stick blender and I'm sure you saw this part on the thing is he then they take a spoon usually and they harvest the stuff off the top of the liquid and then you can do that a bunch because there's extra stuff in there before it's really depleted of the surface act the stuff needed to make a foam. So they'll sit there and they'll just rehit it almost to order and then harvest each time the it'll settle down after a while and then you can just zit zitz zit hit it again. But if you look if you look at the video I'm pretty sure you'll see uh him holding that thing at an angle. Okay.
Yeah I'll definitely check that out I'm kind of surprised though that they didn't uh I'm kind of surprised didn't uh uh mention that 'cause it's kind of key aspect of the technique. The you know other things you might want to try um is uh it be but it depends. If like so those kinds of foams are usually extremely airy like extremely airy right if you want something a little bit uh denser um a methyl cell F50 uh is really cool that makes more of like a shaving cream or a Guinness y kind of head and you're gonna want to use like 0.8% so like eight grams per liter and then you you blend that in in like a in a blender to hydrate it. Let it hydrate for a long time. Sometimes it takes a while to hydrate.
And then you can whip that thing in a kitchen aid and it and it foams up. Now you need to have enough solids to get it to work right. So if you don't, you can add some um maltodextrin, uh, you know, not like a crazy one, like enzorbit, just something like a bulking agent or uh or a whipping agent like that. You can get the like an orange juice to to come up into like almost like a shaving cream, but it'll be a little bit denser than uh but much more persistent than the one that you were um dealing with with there. You know, what like a good one for that would be actually do they make pureees of that?
They do make purees of that, but I don't know how dense they are. You need a little bit of pect and a little bit of structure in uh in the with the methyl cell to get it to work. Oh, well. And then I mean that's that's great. I'll definitely try that for next time.
And the other one that I had, the other question was I am trying to make a healthier, I guess, ice cream for my parents. They I really have a sweet tooth, obviously. And uh the one that I was trying to make was out of a coconut milk. Right. Instead.
And the issue that I had is everything flavor-wise came up comes up good, but when I put it inside the fridge, it gets really hard. And I'm trying to see whatever commercial techniques because any regular uh ice cream you put inside there will stay uh still airy and fluffy, and I don't know if it's a combination of gums that it should put in there. Or what I mean, it's it's just coconut water substituting I'm sorry, coconut milk substituting traditional milk or whipping milk. Right. But so but it's substituting for both the cream and the milk, right?
Yeah. Right. So a couple of things. Probably your your fat concentration is probably a little low. Uh and um, but you know, you can obviously sorbet's work, right?
So the other thing is probably your sugar level might be a little bit low. Is it is it is it a lot less sweet than uh typical ice cream? Uh I would say per quart uh uh I put about a cup typically as a sweetener and sugar. Now I have to do some math here. Uh so like I I can't I can't think of it in terms of see quarter cup.
A cup well weighs roughly eight ounces, and so a quart is four. So four sorry, I'm doing some stuff in my head, right? So you're so you're saying you're putting in eight ounces of uh sugar into um thirty-two ounces of product. That gives you a total weight of forty and eight. Yeah, so that's like sixteen.
That should be sweet enough, right? Right? That ta it tastes sweet enough then, right? Yeah. Huh.
Because usually like overly solid things are due and like textural problems like that are due to um lack of sugar, uh or you know, especially if it's good when it's soft, it means it's free. It's you know you say it's good when it's soft, right? Yeah, yeah. Definitely taste wise before I I make it hard, it tastes great. Yeah, but in other words, when you initially churn it before you before it turns hard, that it it tastes fine when it's before it's been aged, right?
Exactly, yes. Yeah. Okay. So t typically o overly hard on storage is going to be uh just uh it's get getting too solid and you control the solids by controlling the meltdown rate, and you control the meltdown rate by how much sugar is in it. So I mean um I I guess it's hard for me to do the numbers on the fly.
Uh I got to I have to go back and remember exactly what my target bricks for is for a sorbet. You want to treat it like a sorbet basically. Uh even though it has the addition of the 'cause it's easier to calculate. Uh that's how I calculate. I do my s all my sorbets with coconut milk.
Um but uh I usually they're fairly sweet, right? So I tend to use coconut cream because it's got uh sugar in it, and I it's so easy for me. Like I can just buy like a package of puree and then like a package of coconut uh I mean a can of coconut cream. I know this sounds like real, like like I'm not working, but it you know, but it's easy for me because I do it at home for the kids and uh mix them together and it works fantastically well. Um I think may I just have to recalculate.
Do the recalculation on the sugar uh and go uh look up because I don't have it off the top of my head, like the uh target bricks for like a sorbet. Ignore the fat content of the um the fat content of the coconut milk to start with because it's not gonna hurt it's not gonna hurt you in terms of your calculations, and figure out a target bricks for it and then see whether or not you're going a little bit too low on the sugar. Uh, because did it taste kind of less sweet than normal? Good but less sweet than normal. No, I mean it tastes like everything was good.
It's usually more so, like you said, just in the age and it gets too hard inside the fridge, or nothing for it as a uh commercialized kind of now. Yeah. And it will still go soft. But I mean you could add some whipping agents to it to try and uh increase the uh increase the air. Um commercial coconut milk already has some uh usual usually has some some product in it to stop it from breaking because regular coconut milk will break when you heat it, and canned stuff usually typically doesn't.
I don't know if you're making it yourself or not. Um but if you're using canned that typically will have some stuff in it. But you could add um some sort of a uh thickener like uh locust bean or or or a flavor free guar to it and see whether that uh helps you helps you out a little bit. But if this sucker tastes good um uh when it's soft, it's probably not an overrun problem. So like if it's overly dense when it gets hard and and but it it doesn't temper out nicely either, like it doesn't when you pull it out of the freezer for a little while, does it scoop nicely eventually and get back to good texture, or does it just turn like a rock and stays a rock until it's melted?
No, I mean it densely goes back to a nice texture, you can definitely scoop it again. Right, so it could it could be density. It could be density, in which case you might want to up the solid. So it's coconut milk and what? Coconut milk, I definitely put the coconut cream in too, like you're saying, and I do use the can.
Right. And then um every once in a while I'll throw some liqueur in there as well, depending on what flavor I'm doing. Right. That'll make it softer. But I wonder whether you need a higher solids content, whether it's not it's just not uh churning enough.
You know what I'm saying? Like you might want to sometimes I'll put in like um I'll put in coconut nectar to hopefully make like a what it's definitely nectar, like a syrup instead of actual sugar. I don't know if that could be a problem, perhaps. No, I mean like if you added too much sugar, it would get too soft, right? And it wouldn't freeze properly, it wouldn't get too hard.
So if this stuff does come back to being uh kind of in good temper again and it's sweet enough, then it could be that you're just not getting enough overrun, and so you need to add some um something that's gonna increase the uh the actual overrun, the whi the the whipping ability of it, in which case that would be more solids probably. Um and then maybe something uh that aerates it more. You know what? Like if anyone's listening that has a good kind of uh uh a breakdown on this, because usually when I'm doing uh coconut milk it's not straight coconut milk it's coconut milk and a fruit puree and the pectins that are in the fruit purees are helping me with um with solids with body and I think maybe that's what you know what's going on if you see whether or not you have the same problem when you do um when you do like um a flavor that has more solids like I've done uh really good uh coconut milk uh sorbet style stuff is with uh chocolate like chocolate coconut milk sorbet is is fantastic so you take like coconut milk uh and andor cream and uh you know melt chocolate into it and I usually also add uh cocoa powder because I want really dense kind of chocolate flavor and that texture comes out pretty pretty nicely so you might want to um see whether or not it's just a solids issue whether you just don't have enough actual solids in it. For sure excellent I'll I'll definitely try that out.
But again this is off the top of my head so hopefully I'm not off base and people like that guy does not know what the hell he's talking about. No not at all. I mean as a matter of fact I was just gonna say that I've listened to as many of your previous podcasts that you've done have become neutral and you'll be a fan that's all I've I've watched two hardware talk and uh I can't wait for the the cocktail books to come out and then your shears all donated a few times over waiting for for the millin to come out. Cool well appreciate well it's uh we're uh we're actually talking to our suppliers right now uh styles right we're looking we're looking we're hopefully gonna be on time we might be a couple weeks late right a couple I hope not we'll we'll we're gonna we're gonna update more as we go but I'll tell you something I won't be talking out of my behind in the cocktail book that thing has been thoroughly vetted thoroughly vetted uh in fact like you know what the one of the weird things that we had uh uh uh recipe change on was um with the comparian soda like so we have on the bar now we have a a recipe that's the Booker and DAX take on comparian soda and um you know the the benefit is you can carbonate the whole thing so although you know Nastasha here likes any comparian soda variant right no matter regardless of like how uh well or poorly it is carbonated uh you know at Booker Index we like to carbonate everything right and uh we're also kind of people rib us because uh our drinks tend to be like everyone claims that our drinks are high in alcohol even though they're the same amount of alcohol that you have in any in any beverage so we do the uh compare and soda and we use uh champagne acid so champagne acid is a mixture of lactic acid and um tartaric and the reason is is because although the grapes have a balance of tartaric and malic acid most champagnes one of the notable exceptions is Krug did you do you are you you like Krug you ever yeah so you notice how Krug Stas is shaking her head she's think so happy thinking about champagne that she can't like words can't even come to her mouth. But she uh uh Krug has a kind of uh an appley note on it when you kind of like a green fresh appley note on it and that's because of the malic acid because Krug does not go through malolactic fermentation whereas um most champagnes do and when they go through malolactic uh fermentation the acids turn from malic to lactic, and so the champagne acid we use is a blend of uh lactic and tartaric.
But the weird, here's where it gets weird. So we add that instead of a tw uh squeeze of lime, we add that to, and and we did this by the way, before the lime craziness where the lime prices are so high now. Uh, but um, we do it because so that the the compari uh and soda alike drinks more like uh a wine and less like a cocktail. Uh crazy thing is it turns out that if you bottle the stuff, add the acid, carbonate it, and let it sit overnight, that the bitterness, the inherent bitterness of the campari, is amplified like greatly. So it tastes delicious when you make it, and then the next day it's kind of unpalatably bitter.
And it's not unpalatably bitter in that it's like so bitter, it's like it's like the bitterness lingers, just lingers. And uh, and we did a test, we did a test with adding it before, you know, we we we ran a test in putting Aperol in, because Aperol is you know less bitter, and Aperol also gets you know, Aperol for those of you that don't drink Aperol, Aperol is like Campari's slightly sweeter, slightly less alcoholic cousin, and um we did it with uh Aperol, Aperol also got bitter. So it now, and we don't know why. I have no idea why, but we tested it without the acid in it, and it was fine, it was stable. So something about storing diluted campari or aparol in the presence, and I don't know whether it's any acid because we didn't test it with um you know malik or like a lime acid blend.
We tested it just with uh lactic and tartaric, the champagne acid, but something about it causes the liquor to change overnight. It's very odd. I wanna I have no idea why. I just know it empirically to be the case. Um so that's a recipe that was in the book that now I'm gonna have to add a little footnote because once we had tested it for stability in the bar, we'd noticed this phenomena that we completely didn't um anticipate.
Because the acid itself, unlike uh lime juice or lemon juice, which is known to go bad over time, you know, uh it's not the acids that go bad and it's not the product, it's the actual juice that goes bad. So I had not expected that in a uh in a compari situation. Uh so should we take our first commercial break? Come back to some cooking issues? Yes.
Let's do it. Hello, do it yourself or ever thought about gardening? If you can build that window box, you can build a raised bed in your backyard. Bonnie veggie and herb plants in raised beds make a fast weekend project with a big payback. Fresh, grow 'em yourself tomatoes and peppers, kale, basil and thyme, and so much more.
Bonnie plants are healthy and strong and help jumpstart your garden. So get growing. Plans and how-tos at Bonnie Plants dot com. Are we back? And we're back.
And we're back with cooking issues. I never can I never can tell. Like sometimes like it ends abruptly, sometimes we we you know kinda keep you on your toes. I know it. I know it.
Even though we're sitting on our duffs here. You mentioned the lime shortage thing before it's crazy. I was reading all these articles people like yeah I'm just gonna sub lemons. I mean, that's crazy, you know? Yeah, that won't work.
That won't work. So, you know, just you know, well, I mean, if you don't care, if you're an enemy of quality, you know, then it won't it won't matter. Then, you know, it's fine. You can do whatever you want. You could substitute, you know, I don't know, swill.
I don't matter. But if you want it the stuff that like lemons and limes don't taste any they don't taste the same, they don't function the same way. And strangely, you can tell more once a drink is made that you like so some people make the mistake of tasting just lime juice and just lemon juice and thinking like it's yeah, you know, it's like because it something that's that acidic, like those the differences between the two are only gonna come out more as when they're used in a in a drink. We ran a test. So both uh lime juice and so much more than Jack was hoping for.
Uh we ran a test with uh lemon juice and uh lime lemon juice and lime juice are roughly six percent acidity. Uh lemon juice, the the acid, uh predominantly just forget the vitamin C because the scorpic acid doesn't really affect the flavor of it that much. Uh is is uh citric. That's the the bulk of the acid in in a lemon and in a in a lime, it's uh instead of six percent citric, it's more like and it's a give or take, right? It's uh like four percent citric and two percent malloc.
And it's that citric malloc blend that creates the natural acidity of um lime. Now the the trick is you know, uh we wanted to do uh we wanted a fake uh we want we tried to do a fake thing where we took lemon and then doped it with malic acid and water so that it was still six percent, uh, but it had the correct blend and it wasn't quite uh right. Part of the thing when you're shaking most of the time when you're using uh a citrus like a lemon or lime, you're shaking a cocktail. When you're shaking a cocktail, it's not just the acidity you need, you actually need the the the the surface active properties of the of the juice itself, the the pectins, whatever else is in it, that cause uh um the shaking cocktails to hold air better, right? And become you know, kind of better shaking cocktails.
So I don't know whether it just tasted not as good or whether or not you know we could just tell because it didn't have that kind of peel note that's in lime juice. Of course, that I could have faked it by adding a little bit of succinic acid, which is the secret ingredient in lime acid, uh, and also hard to source. But we weren't able to get a good thing, even when we were specifically trying to do a sub out. So during the shortage, we have um we have mo less uh lime juice shaking cocktails and more of our lemon juice shaking cocktails on the menu. Well, luckily we are not uh you know forced to use one uh or the other.
But I you know the the thing about it is, Jack, is that even though limes are ridiculously expensive now, like a factor of four, I think. I forget what the recent numbers are. It's crazy like that. Yeah, it's well, and and you're so you're you pay by the case, which is a certain case count, but the the amount of juice that's in the ones we're getting now is nothing. So it's like you know, we're in that time of year anyway, where when you juice the lime, like two drops of juice come out of the lime, and so they're expensive and useless.
So the actual price difference isn't even enough of a factor to factor in how bad they are. Um but still, relative to expensive liquor, it's still, you know, and relative to the use rate, you know, you can kind of you can kind of uh afford it. Although the issue is just you know, you don't want to order too much because we throw it away at the end of the night. So it gets expensive if you make a lot extra and then you have to throw it away at the end of the night, or s we don't we don't actually throw it away. We give it to the kitchen because the kitchen can use it in cooking applications that uh you know we can't use it for in drinks anymore.
But yeah, it's a pain in the butt. It'll hopefully I'm told uh that all of that nonsense will be over in May. At the at the end, well, at the end of May. What's the uh the definite? There'll be another crop coming in.
Um this one would is shafted by a number of things, so everyone says it's the cartels. I like to say it's the cartels, but you know, they had a uh uh a spot of weather, as we say. Uh it's the cartels, come on. All right. Well, I mean, like I want it to be the cartels, right?
That's what we all want. A better story. Yeah, you know. It's like but but but if it was the cartels, right? Avocados come from a similar area, don't they?
Like avocado prices haven't spiked as much as limes. Of course, you don't need armed guards for uh I mean like you for your I mean lime trucks now require armed guards. I think the last time I read an article and it's good I'm again I'm talking out of my behind, so I could be wrong, but what I you know, the article I read was that a tractor trailer limes had like, you know, a value of uh street value of over a hundred thousand dollars now. So it's like you know. I mean, not it's a lot of freaking limes, but you gotta remember, like, you know, I'm used to limes being like, you know, seven eight for a dollar, you know, at the Essex Street Market where I buy limes and cheap avocados and Anne's delicious but not inexpensive cheese.
Uh and it's that would be Anne Saxoby. Uh but um isn't that weird that market they have like like like people who are selling the cheapest possible avocados in bulk and then like Anne Sax will be. It's a strange market setup, right? It's a cool market. Yeah.
That's wonderful. Unfortunately it's only gonna be more of the latter going forward, I think. More of which one? Which one's the latter? Of the delicious but not inexpensive items.
I don't know. The th I think that they're obliged to keep the avocado vendors there. I mean, there's like five or six I mean the reason is there's five or six people that sell uh very similar styles of produce there, and so they're beaten uh their prices get beaten down pretty pretty hardcore. Anytime someone who's there who has something that isn't duplicated three and four times, the price tends to rise a little bit. But I don't know.
Jack, you used to work there every once in a while, right? At the market? No, but I mean the heritage meat shop's there, so I've spent some time there. I just I just saw you when you hung out at the you 'cause you used to hang out occasionally at the Heritage Meat Shop in the market. Yeah, totally.
Yeah. It's a great spot. Yeah. Someday someone will tell so Heritage Meat, there you well, whatever we won't get won't get won't get in, won't talk. If you're in New York, go to the Essex Street Market and get a heritage pork chop and some sacks will be cheese.
How about that? There you go. And you can eat I've never eaten at Shopson's. You eaten there? Oh, I haven't, but he's uh apparently a crazy guy.
Yeah, again, we're just a little like an in inside inside ball for uh for New Yorkers, but there's a lunatic there at Shopson's. That's his second location, right? You ever eaten there, Emma? No, I haven't. He's a l he's like an old school lunatic.
He's like the soup Nazi for breakfast. Is that accurate? I mean, we have we had the menu in our office for a while, just as a kind of piece on its own on the wall to look at occasionally. He has a book, right? He won't serve you if he doesn't like you, right?
That's how I've heard. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't wanna I don't want to have to be judged. I just want to eat breakfast and then go in peace.
Stu what about you, Stas? What do you think? Do you like being judged when you're having breakfast? You just want to eat? Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Do you like judging while you eat breakfast? Stas, do you like judging while you eat breakfast? I don't usually eat breakfast out. I don't eat breakfast actually.
Really? Mm-hmm. Really? Mm-hmm. M most most important meal of the day.
Which brings us back to cereal. Yes, which brings us back to uh cereal. But she does judge when she we both judge when we eat. Like we're both pretty rough. Like we're both pretty neat.
What are you really rough? What? Especially to women, you're really rough. How am I rough to women? That's a lie.
I'm I'm first of all, I'm way rougher on men than on women. Emma, back me up on this. You hung out with me before. I'm not sure I've had enough meals with you. Certainly I've eaten here.
What women am I rough on? Oh my god. Besides you. Like any woman that he sees online, like instant in like anything, like a Twitter follower or like anything that you see on your computer that's a woman, you're like, look at her. She's busted.
What? Are you kidding me? That is not true at all. That i that is a straight first of all, not only is that like I am actually offended, that is a freaking lie. That's a freaking lie.
I what I show you is when people on Twitter follow me who aren't real, who clearly are not real people, who are out there trolling to get men to look at at them to like trade some sort of pictures. It's the fake people that I point out. I don't point out any real people. Okay. People that I think are fake people.
Okay. You know what I'm talking about. Jack, you know what I'm talking about on the Twitter, right? Yeah, I look at him like that that's not real. You know what I mean?
Like they you know, and then they're like, you know, email me for the picture. I'm not gonna email you for pictures. What do I need with your picture for? I don't need picture. Well, we've got a call.
Caller, you're on the air. Hey. Um so since you're Mofad person is here, I was gonna ask you, is there any update on the boom serial? Are you guys gonna be able to make that? Oh, on the actual serial.
Alright, Emma, why don't you say what we're uh what we're up to? What a segue. So indeed, yeah, we were actually just at the machine today, and uh it was kind of in hibernation over the winter and uh needed a little bit of of care after the the long rough winter that we had in New York. Um but the gun is in beautiful working order and we've been puffing a lot of rice and kind of trying to perfect the recipe on on that front. Uh I think we may also be testing out some various wheat varieties.
We had stayed away from wheat and and gluten-containing grains initially, but I think uh there might be a possibility to try those out actually after all. Uh sorry to everyone who is celiac, but there's just too many, too many possibilities out there. So um I think we should be able to get those bags of puffs to everyone probably by the end of the summer. I know it's a year later, but uh there was just a lot of downtime uh when we couldn't use the gun over the winter, so that's that's fine. That's going to be very exciting.
We're gonna fire the gun at our nave. What do you say? Uh I got a question for you. Uh a few weeks back, uh you were talking about the merits of Vitamixes, and you mentioned something about blending a pound of bacon into pasta sauce or tomato sauce or something. Oh yeah.
Is there a recipe behind that? No, it's just what happened. And um luckily my wife does not listen to this show because she hates when I tell this story. Um but the um I I hate it when people pick things out of food. I hate it.
You know what I mean? Like, unless you're actually allergic to it, like I detest when things get picked out of things. I don't like when sandwiches get picked apart, like when someone gets a sandwich and they rip it open and they take all the guts out. And my kids do it all the time. It's like a constant source of irritation to me.
But I I uh it just gets to me. So I used to make sauces, right? And then with bacon, right? And then at the end of the night, there'd be a little pile of bacon in the in the bottom of the bowl because the bacon had been, yeah, I don't know, picked around or whatever. And it's not because my my wife is not one of these people, by the way, who is you know afraid of eating fat.
You know, in fact, one of the reasons I knew that she was the woman for me was because we once went to a Popeye's fried chicken and she wasn't paying attention to what was going on. She took a whole bucket down by herself. I mean, this lady knows how to eat. Uh so it's not that, but it was just something about it. And I was just like, uh, and so then I got the vita prep, and instead of having the bacon maintained in the so it was a visible thing, I was like to hell with it.
After, you know, you normally I would cook out the bacon, remove the bacon, sweat out the uh whatever alliums I'm using in the bacon fat, add the add the tomato, whatever else, cook down, blend, uh, add bacon back at the end for crunch and texture, and um, and then you know, one day I was like to hell with it, and I just blended it into the sauce, and it was so smooth, so smooth. And uh so there was no way possibly to pull the bacon out anymore. I was like, when I've I've noticed that I have that problem when I'm making like pots and sauces with bacon that I can't incorporate the bacon. It it tends to stir out, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.
And uh ends up at the bottom of the bowl when you're tossing. It ends up at the bottom of the bowl when you're tossing is what you're saying with separating out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, the the bacon is is a fun part. I I don't know how much we would lose in texture by doing it that way, but uh I I I'm gonna give it a try anyway.
Yeah, here's what you should do. Blend blend it in for flavor and then maybe save some and then sprinkle over top uh like a service. Yeah, like garnish bacon, but then most of the bacon will be multified bacon. Yeah, that's the way to go. Yeah.
All right, thank you very much. All right, tweet tweet on in, let me let tell me how it tastes. Cool. Cool, thanks a lot. All right, so going back to the the gun for a minute, uh, and then I got a uh a question on the thing I have to hit before we go.
But okay, so we're we're at the gun today, and it's gonna be it's actually gonna be at our benefit, right? Yes. So you want to talk about the benefit for a second? May 7th. Right.
It's gonna be here in New York at a awesome place called the Foundry, which is in Long Island City. And one great perk of this venue that we found, it's an industrial area, so we can drive up the puffing gun, unlike you know, some sort of gala hall in Manhattan where you know space is limited. So we're gonna pull up the puffing gun and uh hopefully do uh a couple of preview shots for people. Um so that's why we were there today. Uh the benefit is um gonna be a huge, huge affair.
I mean, we've got eight of these amazing chefs lined up, each of whom is tackling a different museum-themed course. So for example, uh I was recently uh emailing back and forth a little bit with Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy, a vegetable-centric restaurant in the East Village. Uh and her theme is Korea before the chili, i.e. uh pre-Columbian Korean cuisine. Um and for that matter, you could do that with a number of uh South Asian or Southeast Asian cuisines that rely heavily on chilies.
So uh I think she said she's making a few different kinds of kimchi that are chili free. The old the old white ones. Yes, yeah, I think so. Nice. Yeah, sounds good.
What else we got? Why don't you tell them why don't you tell them who's and you can still buy tickets if you've got the cash. Uh you should go to mofad dot com uh or dot org, right? Yeah, benefit.mofad.org is the place for tickets. So uh we've got individual tickets and then also if you got a group of buddies or colleagues, you can buy a table.
So why don't you run through the uh chefs and what they're doing? So we've also got uh Franklin Becker of the Little Beat who has what Masaswap brought to Thanksgiving. Now this is a bit controversial because uh the idea of a first Thanksgiving is pretty contentious historically. I think most food historians would say there probably was no first Thanksgiving in the way that we have idealized it here in the US. That being said, there is a primary source uh one or two letters that mention that this one pinag chief Masaswa brought five deer to a gathering with colonists in Plymouth.
So deer taste good. Um would be in keeping with the Native American cuisine theme. What else we got? Let's see. Uh oh, Wiley Dufrain, WD 50, uh long time supporter of Mofad, is tackling the four humors.
So the sort of extremely outdated notion that uh human physiology is based on these four substances. The black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood, I believe are they that's not true. Not sure when it was debunked, but it was quite a while ago. So he's gonna be uh kind of exploring this theme of food as medicine, the intersection between food and health through this theme. Right.
Uh I'm not exactly sure what his what his uh what he's gonna do. It's an i it was an incredibly influential view in um medieval cookery. And so uh, you know, a lot of medieval cookery is based around um you know, the the idea was is you want to center yourself not too not too phlegmatic uh or moist and you know cold, not too hot, not too dry. So yeah, you're you're phlegmatic and you're cold, you're hot and you're dry, and you gotta get and it as represented by the different actual bodily humors, the biles and whatnot. Uh but as it's a very interesting and demented uh every food had its own uh sort of rating, and every cooking method had its own sort of rating.
So roasting would be hot and dry. Uh, you know, and there's all different and so like kind of balancing all that um interesting idea. Who else we got? Uh let's see. Also uh I'm really excited about this one personally.
Dominique Anzel of of Cronet Fame, although I'm sure he hates to be cast in that light, uh, is taking on uh food on the battlefield. And apparently he used to actually for a short time was a cook for the French military. Um and so uh he's got some actual hands-on experience uh doing this kind of food. Um and I think he's he's gonna be doing a a pastry course as far as I know. Um and I think the presentation will be will be very interesting there.
I don't want to give away the the secret entirely, but we we got uh we got uh Brooks Headley's doing um food of future past, right? Yes, so a more conceptual theme. Um I haven't checked in with him, so again, not sure what that course is like in terms of its development. Michael Anthony got TV dinners. Yes, another one where the presentation is gonna be critical.
And the idea there is we'll do a uh short video pitch on Mofad, um, since we're gonna be announcing some big plans for the coming years, uh, along with Michael Anthony's TV dinner. Nice, which is hilarious. Uh that's everyone, right? Uh no, we've also got Nils Nurren. Oh, Nils, yeah, what's Nils?
Nils, oh my god, the best. He's doing ital cuisine. Rastafarian Ital cuisine. Oh, I love Nils. Nils is a huge reggae fan.
What else we got who else we got? Let's see. And that's it. Sweet. Oh, and then on the I'm gonna hit this question real quick.
Uh also uh we've got uh Sean Gray of Momofuku Co. Oh, beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See the thing is whenever you're listening at things out of order, it's better to list things in order. What's his topic?
He's got Pennsylvania Dutch food. He actually hails from uh Pennsylvania, as I think. Right, right. So this will be hitting close to home for him in some way. Sweet.
All right. And that's everyone, right? Yes. You got everyone now? All right, nice.
All right. If we have a second on the way out, we're gonna do a pitch for the round table too. Mofad round table. But uh we got a question in from Alex in Santa Barbara. Um Dave, Nasasha, Jack, and maybe.
He gave you a maybe, Jack, right? Maybe, wow. Wow. And everyone else that's there today. Once again, thanks for the programs.
Greatly appreciate it. The question is a bit long, so please feel free to edit for your show. Uh I believe we all do uneconomical things in or for the kitchen. For example, last summer I grew $25 tomatoes because I only managed to grow four of them. The it uh so spent a hundred dollars total, got four tomatoes, twenty-five bucks.
Uh the year before I was giving them away and figured I could repeat my success, but it didn't work out. I would have been much better off uh buying farmers market tomatoes uh for ten bucks and saving ninety bucks. The only reason I tried to grow them was because the tomatoes the year before were very good and very plentiful. Uh this came up because my friend was just getting into home brewing. I immediately thought back to my tomatoes and figured he was about to spend a lot of money, time and effort to produce a product far inferior to what he could purchase easily.
I understand the journey is part of the fun, but sometimes the cost isn't worth it. I do not brew my own soy sauce, roast my own coffee beans, smoke my own bacon, or keep a sourdough starter. The time, energy, and cost are not worth it compared to what is readily available. On the other hand, I never order something at a restaurant that I can pull off almost as well, if not far better at home. A New York strip steak is a great example.
Instead, I try to order something which takes much more time and energy at home. Additionally, I never purchased a half quart container of diced onions or jar of crushed garlic. That crushed garlic is gross. Uh no offense to who people who make it. Uh, I cannot believe those products sell well enough for the stores to stock them.
I refuse to believe I'm alone in thinking this way. Like I said above, I can understand the journey and the experience as part of the fun. That said, what do you think uh are the uneconomical efforts put forth at home? More more importantly, what are the products that should never be purchased because the cost quality effort are such that making them at home is the uh is the uh uh should never be purchased because uh because the cost quality effort are such that making them at home uh is is a bad idea. I think I I I went ahead of my brain.
Uh hopefully the spirit of the question came through this email. Some of the things off the top of my head, uh peanut butter, right? He only buys it and he has friends that object. I buy peanut butter because commercial peanut butter is delicious, and you don't have a mill. Nine I guarantee you don't have a mill that can produce peanut butter with the same texture as the stuff uh that you you ever had any natural like home ground peanut butter you thought was really good?
No. I know people who like that kind of texture. I'm not one of them. I like good old-fashioned emulsified emulsified sweetened, sweetened U.S. peanut butter.
Hell yeah. Hell yeah. That stuff's good. Uh hot sauce, I always buy it. I think uh here's the thing.
I'm gonna answer in general and then I'm gonna go over some of these things. So, for instance, learning how to do everything, like being a brewer for a while, if not for your whole life. If you like brewing, you should keep doing it because it's rewarding if you do it right. It is a pain in the butt to do all grain brick grain brewing. But I think doing anything once or twice is worthwhile if you want to know how things work, even if you're not going to make the kind of best product.
The only thing that I haven't done really in this list, I mean I haven't done soy sauce, but uh wines, because I can't like you don't have really control over the raw ingredients to even get kind of usually a reasonable expectation of the highest quality on wine. So one reason I haven't hit it yet, because I don't have a lock on the really high quality inputs. But like beer, you can get extremely high quality inputs and you can make good beer. So do I brew beer anymore? No.
After my second son was born, I don't do anymore because it was a huge mess, but I I did it for a while. Uh, same with roasting coffee. I used to roast all my own coffee beans, and I think it's really good. Uh other people can do as good a job or a better job than I can do, but uh I enjoyed learning about it, and I feel like I know much more about coffee for having done it. Uh ditto sourdough starters.
I, you know, I'd no longer maintain one, but I maintained one for uh a long time, and I think it was worthwhile uh to kind of feel what it's like to have something um on a continuous basis that you have to take care of in your kitchen that made delicious bread. So I think that there's it's often worthwhile to go through the effort to do it, but not necessarily worth the effort to maintain it for your whole life. Does that make sense? Make sense? All right, let's go over these one by one.
Style's like, I don't care. Uh tofu. Uh you said you liked uh yours homemade, but I read up on the process and now testing out everything the local Japanese market has to offer because I can't see myself going through all that effort. Here's another thing. Tofu is only hard the first four times you make it.
As soon as your kitchen is streamlined and you have all the stuff ready and you've gone through the procedure, so you're not wondering what's going on, it's actually not that difficult to make uh to make tofu. Uh you just have to remember to soak the stuff uh beforehand is the only is the only big whoopty crap. So a lot of these things that are difficult are only difficult because we don't do them often. Uh cheese. I always buy, but I'm starting to think I should try my hand at my own ricotta at the very least with McGee's book in hand.
What about you, Emma? You make your own cheese? No, actually, I think I've only done you know simple kind of fresh cheeses, paneer, things of that sort. Yeah, and I'm not very good at it. What about you stuff?
Do you ever make your own mozzarella or anything? See, I think there's a huge art to making something like a mozzarella. Ricotta I could try. But like real whey wakata or like the whole milk recotta one mix. I don't know.
I don't know about that. Puff pastry dough. I buy the frozen sheets. I've made it in the past and cannot tell the difference, which might say more about my pastry skills than it does about the quality of the frozen sheets. I make my own puff paste, but I like making it.
I enj I enjoy the process of making it. Yeah, I like laminated doughs. They're um they're time consuming, but they don't actually take a lot of effort. You just need to be able to take it out of the freezer, you know, over the course of a day, ten times. I would say mine's probably worse than the stuff you can buy, but I enjoy making it.
What about you, sir? You ever do laminated doughs like that? No, not your jammy. Yeah, are you much of a baker or more of a cook? You don't like to bake much, right?
No. Even cookies? No. No. Especially cookies.
Uh cake mix. This one's a tough call because uh the the box is so very easy, but I like to think from scratch cakes are better. I don't like cake mixes. I never use cake mixes. I think it's an insult because it's literally like the stuff that they put in that box you can just buy and measure out.
Same with pancake mix. I don't get it. Uh I don't like that hyper uniform texture that they provide. I never I never use them ever. Yeah, well, and particularly when you read about the history of the development of cake mixes and how they initially had made them so it was really almost just add water, and then found that through kind of consumer research, uh housewives were um didn't really enjoy the the process of making these cakes.
There was there was too little to do. So they reformulated them, so you had to add egg and add a little bit of, you know. Yeah. But in a tiny bit of effort. So yeah, so what the hell?
It's like I also I don't use bisquick, no offense to bisquick. I don't use self-rising flour because I know how baking powder works. You know. Uh tortillas. I buy them, have made them both corn and flour, but the local shop makes a fine product.
I think it's very look, it's a huge pain in the ass to make uh tortillas, but I still think I'd rather have I use the uh store-bought ones like in a pinch, like for us for a normal weekday meal uh and heat them up. Uh if I don't have time, it's been a while since I've done the full nixtimalization. I think it's definitely a worthwhile road to go down, but it's a pain. But like if I if I'm really in a hurry, my seca is not that much slower. So you buy maseka to do the the tortillas.
Dried pasta. I've made my own pasta, but fresh is definitely different than dried, not necessarily better depending on the shape for things like spaghetti, the dried is preferred. Yeah, dried pasta is delicious. I like dried pasta. I like making fresh pasta, but to make fresh pasta well, you need to mean uh, you know, uh efficiently to have it not be a pain in the butt, you need to have your kitchen set up to do it.
So I used to always have my pasta uh my rollers clamped onto my work surface and everything was there, and by the time water was boiling, I could almost have fresh pasta done because I didn't do what you were supposed to do. I didn't give it the rest periods you're supposed to give it and all this, and it still tasted good, you know. Uh and so I used e I used to make fresh pasta two, three times a week. Uh my kitchen's not really set up for it uh right now. And then finally, mayonnaise.
This one's a tough call. If I'm gonna make a dressing such as ranch or blue cheese, oh my god, Dax looks ranch dressing. Uh then I will put forth the effort, but for sandwiches and the like, I go with the jar, though lately I've been enjoying the Hamptons Food Alternative. I think you get the idea. I'm looking forward to your information on the things I could I could buy, uh, but shouldn't.
I'll have to come back next week with other ideas, and I'll think about this, but I'll tell you this. I I like mayonnaise in a jar. I like jarred mayonnaise. I enjoy commercial mayonnaise. I think that stuff is delicious.
Now I still know how to make mayonnaise, and I make mayonnaise from time to time. But I like mayonnaise in a jar. Jack, you? I actually mayonnaise one of the few things I don't like, so at all? Yeah.
Weird, right? It is weird. Yeah. I mean, if it's on something, I'll take it, but I'm never like I don't know. Never reaching for the mayo.
Stas, what's your net what's your mayo thoughts? I like it. But do you like it from a jar or you like fresh? Anyway. Yeah, I mean they're two.
Pretty different things, I think. But I I mean I'm pretty partial to QP myself. But oh, Cupie is delicious. They yeah, yeah, the uh yeah, you get that in the in the Asian marks, Cupie in the little thing. Well, I wish uh I got such a high note with the anyway.
I wish we were still allowed to use commercial music, then we could leave on any way you want it. That's the way, you know, the uh the journey song. You like that one, or is that one of the ones you don't like? I like it. Yeah.
All right. So anyway, we'll come back with more things that you should or should not make at home next week on cooking issues. This is Chris. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network.
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