You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwig Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadion 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 Roberta's Petri in Brussels, Brooklyn! Every Tuesday on the Heritage Radio Network from eh, well, a little late today.
To uh we have to we're at the end on time today, Stas. 1155. Uh I'll tell you what happened to me. It's my fault, obviously, but uh for those of you that live in New York City and take the subways and don't have your uh your Metro card automatically renewed for you. Here's what happens when you go to the machine.
You put the card, you put your card in the first it says, what do you want to do? Duh, I want a Metro card, right? Right? Stas, you're with me on this. And then it says, okay, uh, you know, what do you want to do?
I want to refill this card. It can't you can't just put the card in. You know what I mean? So you put the card in eventually after like 18 key presses, and it's like, well, um, what do you want to do to this card? I want to put money on it, I want to go in the freaking subway.
You know what I mean? And it asks you a billion questions, and it's like, you sure? Are you sure? You sure you want to go on the subway? And then, like, you have to enter a billion times.
You know how I never read the credit card on the first swipe? So Stas and I are our classic joke is is that the uh person programming it should have just put a thing as like, have you missed your train yet? Have you missed your train yet? How about now? Now?
Now have you missed it? So then finally it spits the damn thing out, and I see the uh there's one specific subway that will get me here on time, and I saw I saw it go bing bong as I ran up the stairs because I run up the backside, and how they closed the the front and then the back, and then they I got bing bonged. Anyway, my fault, but the best is when the machine's like, we only accept nickels today. Yeah! Like, I just don't I I like I don't get this crap at all.
Like it it doesn't take a a rocket scientist. You see, everyone, no offense if the person who programs these machines happens to like hear this at some point, but look, uh, here's a guess. If dude or a lady, I guess a person, Dewey's kind of gender neutral for me, right? Shoves uh a metro card into the machine, odds are they want to do something to it, right? You don't have to wait to ask them.
Like if they try to shove a metro card in, just accept it. Just accept it. And then be like, oh, oh, wait a minute. This Metro card is a metro card that has money on it. So he must want to add some freaking money to this damn thing.
You know what I mean? I'm not making a joke, but yours you're you have the only subway station that's uh upstairs both ways. Like Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I live uh yeah, I live in an awesome environment where it's like the old uphill in the snow both ways. It's true that you're yeah.
Yeah, Stas loves it because she has to go there because it's also the subway stop for Booker and Dax. No, I go to Grand. You go to Essex. No, I mean when we leave the radio station. Let me go when we go from here.
The radio station. Jack, how you doing? I'm good. Yeah? What happened at uh Williams College?
I heard something went down there. Uh well, maybe we could talk about that later. Um Should we save that for after the break? No, I mean, alright. So I went to go.
Are you talking about like the thing that made Nastasha actually happy for once in the past five years? Nastasha's been happy exactly two times in the entire five years or three, four years that we've been working together. What? What was the first time? When you got us booked on Jimmy Fallon the first time, you were genuinely happy.
And um I'm I'm talking about not ha well, this I guess counts for happy for someone else's pain. I've seen her happy for other people's pain on more than one occasion. And this one. So this is entirely my fault. I go to Williams, and I actually really like Williams a lot.
So we're going to Williams. I'd never been to Williams College before. And uh the interesting thing about uh Jack, you ever go to Williams College? You ever hang out there? You ever go?
He's not there. Uh the uh it's a college, not a university, right? And so the cool thing about it is that the students who are there, uh the undergrads get to do a lot of stuff that you know, if you go to a university, like I'm sure at Stanford, right? Same thing. You go to Stanford, the professors care most about the graduate students, right?
That's just the way it works at a university. I mean, they care about you when you're in the class, obviously, but you know, the graduate students are more important than the undergrads from this point of view of the professors at the time. But if you go to a college, there are no graduate students, so the professors care about the undergrads. So those undergrads got to do some pretty cool stuff. Anyways, so I did a uh we did a uh uh lecture there and a sociology thing.
So here's a story that uh Nastasha, I guess, primed Jack to have me tell. And that is I'm driving for like three hours, and I don't know what the hell. I you know, we we're with Peter Kim from the Museum of Food and Drink. By the way, are there still tickets available for that event? No, not that event, the one this weekend.
Yeah, both. Okay, so uh it's the New York uh it's the New York Food Book Festival or whatever it's called, Festival of Food Books, Book and Food Festival Fair. Food Book Fair, there you have it. Uh uh this weekend in in some brooklyn, yeah? At the White Hotel.
At the White Hotel. I'll be there recording the Mofad panel. Oh, there you go. And uh the uh Mofad, the Museum of Food and Drink, is having the second of its round table panels. Well you know what time it is, Jack?
Since you're recording noon, yeah, I do know. It's at the noontime, and and the subject is genetically modified organisms and uh uh their place in food. For those of you that don't know, uh do we charge for this thing, Jack? Or no? I don't know.
I don't know. No, I don't uh MoFads might be a little bit just go on Mofad.org. MoFad.org. Yeah, and they the anyway, we're we're doing these series of round tables, and I'm moderating but not giving any opinions, which is so hard for me, so hard for me. Uh the uh we did the last one on the soda ban, and this one is on um genetic like generally on genetically modified uh organisms in the uh food chain, and I am so sorry that I cannot throw my two cents in.
The difficult thing, uh surprisingly, is it was more difficult for us to get we thought it was gonna be extremely easy for us to get um kind of anti-GMO people on, but we have only really one kind of hardcore anti-GMO person, uh, and then you know, kind of like a couple, two that are vehemently pro and one that's just kind of more in the in the neutral zone. But we're hoping to get uh we have some questions in from you know outside folk that are you know that are very anti because we will the whole idea is we want to have in these round tables uh a reasoned debate on both sides, not just uh you know, show one side or the other. Do the do people at this radio station are they anti-genetically modified organism, Jack in general? I mean, generally I'd say so, but we're trying to keep more of an open mind around it because it's not so you know black and white. Well, well, hold on a second, it's not it's not it's not it's not just that it's not black and white.
It's like I don't even think that they that the argument is framed properly. Right. I don't think people know what they're supporting or against necessarily. For instance, like here's something that people don't don't think they're sp they're they're focusing specifically on like transgenic like additions of genes from uh different species or even different, you know, whole categories of thing into something for a specific trait. So for instance, the ability to um the ability to resist roundup, right?
So you have roundup ready things, right? Which is a nervous side. Or uh the ability to uh create its own pest resistance without the need for pesticides, which seems to me to be kind of an inherent good, right? Um whatever. Or increased yield, or theoretically you could increase the nutritional value of things, like the uh you know, golden rice that has a higher beta carotene level.
There's there's a wide variety of things for doing this. But it seems to me that there's a bunch of different arguments for the harm of it, and other than the moral arguments, like the actual safety, there's also economic arguments, right? I'm not gonna get into those. But uh, if your argument is against the safety of it, right? There are things that we do to plants that are much more dangerous from a standpoint of uh creating possible allergens, right, in the food system.
So, you know, forced mutation through the uh application of ionizing radiation, right? Which is like, you know, has been since the atomic age, has been, you know, uh a method for inducing rapid uh change in things like corn, for instance, right? You radiate a boatload of seeds, some of them have mutations, some of them are useful, or very few of them are useful, the rest get thrown away, and you can get new things this way. Much higher potential, according to the studies I've read for possible new allergens and weird crap happening with that sort of mutation than when you're taking a targeted gene that you know what it does already and injecting it in. You know what I'm saying?
Anyway, but like that requires no labeling. No one's saying that we should go label those kinds of seeds. There's no it's not even on the table. It's not even considered in the genetically modified uh, you know, in the rubric of genetically modified organisms. So it just seems to me that like to frame all of GMO as kind of one thing under one tent that's done for one reason with one set of goods and one set of harms is kind of silly.
No, Jack, you with me on this? Anyways. I like how you're like squeezing in all your opinions because you can't give them as you're moderating the panel. You like that? Yeah.
Do you like that? Alright, so back to Williams. So I'm at the Williams College. And I don't know why Nastasha was because Nastasha enjoys uh embarrassment. Once she brings it up, I have to say it.
So I I go into my room, I forget my luggage is. My luggage is is filled with uh crap for demos like CO2 and your clothing. No, my clothing was in my shoulder bag. You said you still well, whatever. Anyway, my clothing was in my shoulder bag.
Uh and uh because who cares about my clothing? I shove that in my shoulder bag. Um the important stuff, the demo goes in my in my in my luggage. So I'm wheeling the luggage, uh, and we didn't do it old school Piper where we had an open can of propane in it that was left on and nearly burned his hair off. Remember that?
Yes. That was awesome. Um wasn't really awesome. So Peter has so anyway, so he has my luggage because I don't know, for some I always carry everything. I always carry everything.
Stas, am I right? I carry every freaking thing. So like Peter for some reason thinks he's gonna help me out, so he starts wheeling my luggage, so I forget I have it because my clothes aren't in it, you know what I mean? And I'm not carrying it. So it doesn't exist, right?
So I go to my room. I've been driving for like three and a half hours. We're about to leave, so I I go and I forget to shut my door behind me. It's a giant room, by the way. William set up some of these giant rooms.
And uh I forget to shut the door behind me. I don't know, I assume it auto-closes or something, and I go into the bathroom and I don't shut that door either because I'm alone in my room. And then Peter and Stas come to bring my luggage, which they didn't need to bring to me because I was gonna take it to the demo anyway, because all the stuff in the demo is in it. And then I I see them out and they're like, Dave, what's up? I'm like, oh my god, I realize the door's open because they're calling in.
I'm like, leave the luggage and shut the door. And then so Peter starts wheeling the luggage in. Into the bathroom. He starts wheeling it into the well into the into the into the there's a there's a hallway, a foyer, right? And I can see that the move the kind of movement in the mirror.
I'm like, ah, nah. I'm like, so I say, I say close it, meaning the door, because clearly the luggage is already inside because I can see the movement of the hand. But here's what Peter hears. Closer. Closer?
Why would I say closer? That's crazy. So he starts, alright. So I see him moving in closer with the luggage, and I'm like, get out! Get out!
What's wrong with you? Shut the door. Although I had some expletives that were like mixed in. But I guess from their standpoint, they're like, why is this guy leaving the door open? And maybe something's wrong with him.
Maybe he's dead. I don't know. Maybe he went back inside or whatever. And they hear. Leave the luggage and close the door.
Closer. Anyways, so and that that little just to give you an idea of Nastasha, that little uh because you don't understand Dave's biggest fear in life is either being naked or being on the toilet and having anyone hear him or see him. Yeah, or I I don't like, I don't like, first of all, I like I only like my restroom in my house, which right now is buried in the very back corner of the house, and like, you know, my wife and I, we have our own. I don't know if the kids share it, nothing. It's like, you know, it's like my little castle area.
I don't want to be bothered, irritated, spoken to. And then you close your hotel room door. Well, I uh look, I made one error and then completely compounded out of all reason. Nuts. Calling your questions to 7184972128.
That's 7184972128. Nice segue. You like that? Uh yeah. So anyways, so you can go on the line and uh go and see the uh GMO Thing of Majig at the uh at the book festival.
And I recommend checking out because you know what I like me some books about? Food. Like me some food books. Daz, you like some food books? Yeah.
Yeah? Mm-hmm. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Well, do you do you like uh do you like Grupo Pizza?
It's totally random. You don't know? I don't know what it is. It's that super thin cracker crust pizza. Oh no, I like deep dish.
What the fu what? I really love deep dish. Deep dish? Where did this come from? I just love Chicago style pizza.
W when was it? I had it in San Francisco last time I was there. So how so have you been to Chicago and had it? Uh-huh. When were you in Chicago?
Years, like ten years ago. How is it that we've like been together this long? I have no idea that you like this kind of pizza. I love it. Which by the way, in Chicago, when you go there and you're like, yo, gee, I want to try some of this Chicago, they're like, nah.
They're like, nah, you don't really want to do that. Really? I don't know. They're like ashamed of it there. Like the people I've spoken to there, the locals, they're like ashamed.
I guess because they think look, first of all, like when I was a kid, people used to say, Oh, New York pizza. Oh, New York style pizza. You have New York style pizza. New pizza in New York until about ten years ago sucked. Sucked hard.
It was bad. You know what I mean? There was like four or five places that made really, really good versions of like old school American New York pizza that I liked. You know what I mean? Like uh I like, you know, I like Grimaldi's, I like Lombardi's, I like all that stuff.
You know, uh, I guess Arturas. I'm forgetting a bunch of people, I'm sure. But like, you know, like us actually kicking any sort of butt in the pizza world really is only the past ten years, you know. But it I've never heard someone say that, you know, they're like, you know what I really like? None of this crap.
I really, you know, you know, DOP and the you know the n none of that crap that I like? Deep dish. You know, if I had to get like a non a non restaurant or artisanal pizza or whatever, I'd probably go to a pizzeria Uno too. Yeah. I've never you know, I've never been to Pizzeria Uno.
Is that similar to a Pizza Hut style? No, it's like it's you know, their whole thing is like Chicago style deep dish. But I guess uh it's a level above the Pizza Huts of the world. Well, I mean, y I would guess. Like I mean, like yeah, uh too hard.
Yeah, but no offense to Pizza Hut. No offense. Offense, it's terrible. Or offense. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. You know, uh, someone sent me, you know, because everyone here who's heard the past couple of episodes knows what I feel about Subway and their new flat pizza crap. Someone sent me that there's a new chain that's gonna come out with a pizza cake. Yeah, I saw that's like eight layers of pizza. It looks like deep dish.
But it's like deep cr I mean, like first of all, people listen, people, people, people. Deep dish pizza works for one reason only. It's not like a crust, it's bread. It's freaking bread, right? Right?
And when you make a deep dish pizza, and I know this because even though I'm not a consumer of deep dish pizza, I did deliver Domino's pizza for a whole summer. Driver. The summer, yeah, yeah. Uh I drove my mom's car with empty plates on it. So it was, you know, I I was 60 miles an hour all the time.
This was back when they used to actually still guarantee the delivery times. And like they would tell the drivers, listen, don't speed, don't break any traffic regulations. But on the other hand, get the freaking pizza there on time. Get it there on time. And they would give you like three pizzas to do in one run.
I was never late. This is I mean, like you know, you this is why they should not let teenagers drive. Anyways, uh so you pre bake those suckers and that's how you get them to work by pre baking the deep dish thing and then adding the stuff so you get a layer of baked bread so you don't have that nasty soggy nonsense in the uh where the topping, you know, meets the meets the pizza. Now, 'cause otherwise it would be a nightmare. Imagine.
Imagine, Stas, that you have like sauce against a thick thing that wasn't pre-baked at all. That's a that's a nightmare. Mm-hmm. Right. So do you like the grease spray that they put on the bottom of those pans to get the deep dish stuff?
Did they do that in Chicago? They have like the layer of grease. It's is it baked in a pan? Yeah, but I really don't remember eating. Yeah.
Anywho, uh, so the point is that if you're doing it in a big cake format, how the hell are you gonna get to cook right unless you cook them all individually? Like flash cook them, then layer them and then recook them at the end. But even like an old school, like an Italian, like a pasticcio, like a pasticcio allepre or something like a like la rabbit pie with like the raised sides on it and stuff, like in Bujali's old book. Like, I don't think that has lots of paid, you know, dough layers in the middle of it, does it? I don't know.
I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it's a I think it's a nightmare of an idea. But we'll see. I mean, I'm willing to try a thin slice.
I mean, who first of all, who wants pizza in that format? Who wants to eat pizza with a fork except Bill De Blasio? Yeah. You know? All right.
Um, okay. So uh also I was researching somebody's uh question. What do we did? I miss something. No, oh yes.
Uh Mofed is having its second blowout benefit on Wednesdays, the seventh seventh, which is a Wednesday. Yeah. Uh May 7th. And uh we have an incredible uh series of chefs coming in, and there are still tickets available. Go to Mofed.org.
Uh, because they have a link directly off the thing now, right? Yeah. It's expensive. You guys wish you had gone to the original one that Nastasha and I threw and stupidly only charged $250 for it, which is crazy. Yeah.
Like you could not buy that meal anywhere near $250. That was nuts. Like the value on that was crazy. We're the dumbest two people that there, at least that are sitting in this radio station right now. Oh, by the way, speaking of speaking of dumb, uh, did you notice that uh now that the weather's nice, Roberta's finally put up a freaking awning outside?
Oh, I was like, wait, what the hell? Does that make any goddamn sense? No. It had to happen sometime. It's it's the one day you don't need a freaking awning is right now.
And there it is. And there it is. It's not an awning, it's uh like a it's a winter door, a winter. It's like a winter vestibule thing. Yeah, not an awning.
It's like a winter vestibule. It may rain a lot. That's but there's a there's the inside thing, uh it's just a nightmare. And you know what? They put the thing up, but don't they still have the ratty curtain or do they get rid of the ratty curtain?
They have the ratty curtain. So, like the thing about Robert is, right, is that everything is kind of like, and I say this with love complete love, Jack. Right. I don't know about it. No, but I'm saying, I just so you know, I want you to vouch for this.
Everything's put together with kind of like with duct tape spit and bubblegum. Yes. Rap. And they're kind of like, hey, we want a dining room, I'll just get some tinker toys and glue this crap together, and we'll have a dining room, and somehow it works for them, and it's great, right? So, like uh typical Roberta style, when you walk in to prevent the wind from like killing everyone at the front, they have a ratty curtain, which you know, it was nice probably when it started, but it turned ratty and they kept it, and that was kind of the charm.
And so they kept the ratty curtain and added the vestibule. What's up with that? Any thoughts, Jack? All I can say is when it's busy here at night, that the spillover, maybe maybe it'll help the waiting people waiting. Who the hell wants to wait in a vestibule?
I hate waiting in a vestibule. A warm summer night, you want to be in a vestibule. Yeah, cramped in a vestibule with a bunch of hipsters. Nice for winter. By the way, Mike Booker and Dax were like, Dad, what's a hippie?
Oh. Ooh. Did you see there was a Jesus contest on Sunday? No. Yeah.
Well, we're running a little far afield here. Okay. So uh so I was researching a question that I'm gonna read you in a second. Should we ever get to questions here on the show? And uh I came across uh this uh this paper, which I will just read you the abstract of because if you're like me, you read a lot of uh abstracts of articles, and and I like abstracts of review articles, but somehow this one captured my attention, so I'm gonna read it to you.
Applications and function of food grade phosphates by uh Lucina Lampila, the Department of Food Science in the Louisiana Sea Grant College program, LSU Ag Center, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. LSU, that's for Pat. Yeah? Yeah. Go Pat.
That's uh not Pat the Patriots, that's Pat uh Nastasha's friend. Uh food grade phosphates are used in the production of foods to function as buffers, sequestrants, acidulants, bases, flavors, cryoprotectants, gel accelerants, dispersants, nutrients, precipitants, and as free flow, anti-caking or ion exchange agents. The actions of phosphates affect the chemical leavening of cakes, cookies, pancakes, muffins, and donuts, the even melt of processed cheese, the structure of a frankfurter, the bind and hydration of delicatessen meats, the fluidity of evaporated milk, the distinctive flavor of cola beverages, the free flow of spice blends, the mineral content of isotonic beverages, and the light color of par fried potato strips. Hell yeah! That is an article I want to read about me.
Some phosphates. That's selling the phosphates. Am I right, Jack? Yeah, it sounds pretty good. Hell yeah.
I'm like, phosphates. What? And they use phosphates to make them uh more acidic, to make them more basic. It's like phosphates and everything. And this article starts from like mining rocks out of the ground to like all of those kind of things.
So if you like a review article like I like a review article, go check out Lucina Lampila's applications and functions of food grade phosphates. Available at any, you know, major uh academic library near you. You know, this could be like a regular segment on the show. You review a paper like that, you know? Yeah?
Yeah, that was a pretty good review right there. Yeah, well, check this one out. This one, the paper's not so interesting, but uh it this has to have lost something in translation. So if I were to ask you uh what a spent chicken is, Stas and Jack, what do you think a spent chicken is? Overdone or the remains of I I don't know.
Yeah, that's what I thought. I thought it was like they had a bunch of like, you know, like part like partially defatted fatty meat product or like mechanically deboned. Like that's what I thought they meant spent chicken was. No, no. A spent chicken is a chicken that's been laying eggs for like, you know, its entire like laying lifetime, however many months they allow it before it stops laying eggs effectively.
That's what they mean is a spent chicken. So they're tougher, right? And like they're really good for things like soups and stews, but I guess these guys are trying to find uh you know other uses for it. So here's this article. I'll just gonna read the title for you and tell you what they did.
It's by uh Anchor Das and uh Dilip Ron John et al. Uh Dilip Ron John Nath et al. And it's uh studies on certain quality attributes of meat pickle prepared from spent chicken. Wow. You know what they do?
They pressure cook and then they pressure cook in vinegar and deep fry with spices, chicken until it has so little moisture and and like so high acidity that it can just sit out on a shelf for 90 days without anything happening to it. But you like when was the last time you uh hankered for a spent chicken pickle? And in the article they call them spent chicken pickle, which is I think a really good band name. What do you think, Jack? You can start a band called Spent Chicken Pickle?
I'll have to talk to Joe about that. Yeah. Speaking of which, what was that music we had at the beginning? Oh, it's a band called Snow Mine. Yeah, it's a strange combination of weepy and optimistic at the same time.
Can I disclose something funny on the air very quickly? The um the bassist in that band, the drummer rather, was my my butt, my orientation palette, NYU. And he was dating at the time a girl named Stephanie Germinata, who was one of our classmates. Yeah, exactly. She went on to be Lady Gaga.
Oh, really? Yeah. Her name is Germanato? Germinata. Stephanie Germanata.
Yeah, so any skinny on that? I mean, I didn't like her band in college. Whoa! Jack's like, well, you know, I I heard her band in college. I wasn't a fan.
I wasn't. I wasn't. I just wasn't a fan. I just didn't, you know. I thought it was derivative work.
Kind of. Oh, musicians. Dear Dave, Nastasha, Jack et al. Thank you for your assistance with my last question on Sou Vied fried chicken. I haven't tried it since then, but your description of the problem with my process seems spot on.
Uh and this is the question, by the way, that I was researching and found phosphates and all sorts of other things. I did fried chicken for for Easter. Yeah, I told you about that lady at the Right Aid, right? No, maybe. I'm at the I'm at the right aid, like, you know, in February, and like they had Easter crap out.
She's like, Easter, ain't even Valentine's Over yet. Not Valentine's Day. Valentine, like it's a time of day. Ain't even Valentine's Over yet. Anyway, uh, I did fried chicken for Easter.
So whenever I say Easter now, I have to say fo Easter. Uh, and attempted to deep fry some bread and butter pickle chips to snack on. Bread and butter pickle chips. You like the bread and butter pickle, does? Uh no.
Really? Do you like any pickles? Uh yeah, I like really hard ones. But you don't like sweet pickles? Yeah.
But not bread and butter chips. No, no. No chips. Do you like so what type of sweet pickle do you like? The thin, small, crunchy suckers?
Small, crunchy. What are your thoughts on the bread and butter pickle, Jack? Sorry, I got distracted. Bread and butter pickle? Like 'em?
Hate 'em? Yeah, I like them. Yeah. Relish, you like relish? Nope.
No? No? Really? What about tartar sauce? No.
What? Really? What do you put on your on your fried uh on your like, you know, New England style fried seafood platters? I don't get that. You don't like fried seafood platters?
Let me tell you something, people. If you go to like the average, you know, clam shack on the in the ocean, like I like lambjacks. I don't like the food. Okay. But if you go to them, right, with the exception of like real East Coast lobster roll, which is decent, right?
If you're given a choice, they always have some crap called like the Admiral platter or something like this. You know what I mean? Always get it fried. The broiled is a huge mistake. Huge.
You don't like fried clams? Even with bellies on, the fresh ones? I don't like I don't like seafood. What do you like seafood? I mean, I like seafood fried seafood or cooked seafood.
I like a lobster roll. I don't like lobster. What the hell? See, fried seafood for me, I'd rather do like lemon on it than uh tartar sauce. Really?
Yeah, isn't that weird? Like just lemon? Yeah. Do you like mayonnaise on your french fries? Nope.
What the mean? Stas does. Well, you don't like french fries, freak show. Uh okay. Uh I used a flour, buttermilk, flour process, which is similar to the one I use for uh for chicken, and found that the flour generally rubs off quite a bit from the pickles after the buttermilk dip, leaving them partially unbreaded.
Still delicious, but I think they'd be better with evenly adhered breading. Do you have a surefire way to get good even breading adhesion for fried pickles? Thank you for your help, and I can't wait for my Searzal, Jeff Mays, Los Angeles, California. What are yours, does? Los Angeles.
So, um, here's the uh here's the deal. So uh I cheat. So look the old school like low-tech weight. The problem you're having is uh the high moisture content is creating like a lack of adhesion of the uh batter. So you're getting some sloth off probably right at the beginning.
I I I don't know whether you patted the pickle chips uh really, really dry before you started, uh before you did your first uh pre-dust. But I'll typically do that to to dry because I've done a bunch of uh I I used to do uh a lot of uh fried pickles, you know, uh, and I would dry them off a little bit. If that's not enough, you might even want to try letting them sit on a rack for a little while just to flash off some of their extra moisture, because what you're most likely dealing with here is a moisture control problem. Now, because every you know, all I've ever learned about batter adhesion tells me that you want uh the surface to be you know tacky and dry when you start. Now, of course, you know, going against that is the style that they do here and the pot pies and thighs style of fried chicken where they literally take it out of the brine and throw it right into the flour.
But you know, I've never I've never tested everything I've learned has said that in high moisture situations there's adhesion problems and also problems when you're frying of what's called blow off, where chunks of the batter will will pop off during the cooking or sloth off or not adhere properly to the food. Okay, so if if it's not adhering beforehand, there are a couple things you can do. You can add uh special I don't do this, but you can add uh specialty starches to the uh mix. So uh like a batter bind or uh there's another one that's uh used that's actually not sold by Modernist Pantry and not made by National Starch, it's made by the other corporation. Uh its name slips my mind right now.
But that you can add that will um and they're usually I think they use some form of oxidized starch because they're uh I think they're pre-I think they're pre-done oxidized starches, are usually what they're used in the in the uh batter adhesion ones. Uh but I don't really remember why. I just remember they're oxidized starches. And um those will increase adhesion uh dramatically. And so, you know, I was looking last night at some um at some microscope uh microscopy and also just cross-sectional uh things of different uh pre-dusts containing either nothing, control flour as a pre-dust, uh containing um uh methylcellulose uh and containing um oxidized starch, and the oxidized starch, sure enough, were like they were awesome uh in terms of adhesion.
So you can try adding a modified product like that to it, uh, or you can do the really old-fashioned way if you don't mind having a heavy batter coating on it. A lot of times for difficult things like okra, which tends to slip off a lot, like okra, even though it's got hair on the you like fried okra styles? Uh I haven't had it, I don't think. Oh my god. Jack, what about fried okra?
One of the few things I don't love, but I'll eat it. It's a little slimy. Oh, I'm not talking okra chopped up in a gumbo, I'm talking fried whole okra pods. You had it? Yeah, yeah.
I not fried. I've had whole okra pods, but not fried. All right, listen. Uh slimy. Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen.
When you're when you're like okay, you need to come over. We need to make you some fried whole okra because they're not they're only slimy when the stuff on the inside kind of escapes. When it stays on the inside of its own pod, right, when you're frying it, it I mean it still is what it is, but it doesn't have the feeling of sliminess because if the outside is like super crunchy, the fried, the fried okra on the outside, and you want to you want like a thick, crunchy breading layer on this. The outside and the inside is like melting and soft, but does not come off as slimy at all. And they're great.
The trick with it is is again, do not cut them at all. Leave them whole. And make sure when you're shopping for okra pods in the store, assuming that you don't have your own okra uh plants, um, you wanna a lot of times, especially where I live, they pre-package the okra in like little styro packs. You want to feel the uh okra pods because uh they start at a certain point the okra pods start getting woody on the outside uh and then you can feel them. You can feel the ones that are tender and the ones that are less tender, and just stay away from the ones that are less tender because you're not gonna be cooking them a long time like in a in a gumbo or a soup.
You're just gonna be frying them really quickly, so you want them to cook really quickly. So make sure you're starting with tender okra pods, bread those things and fry them, and that is some delicious stuff. And I've never had even I've had people who hate okra, and I've never had someone come back and say, you know what, like uh crap on that, that's not delicious, because that stuff's inherently delicious. But back to what I was saying, surprisingly, you would think that okra would have good adhesion, but it doesn't because it doesn't pick up pre-dusts well. Like the f the flour pre-dust that you put uh in a typical I mean uh everything depends on what kind of uh batter technology you're using.
So there's people who do pre-dust and then in a liquid flour batter, I don't do that. I do pre-dust into liquid, uh, then into a solid again. That's typically what I do. Um, but if if you're the pre-dust does not adhere at all to okra. So what you do is you do a pre-dust, a marginal amount of sticks, then you do your wet, then you do your solid, and it picks up some but still isn't coated, and then you do a quick rewet and then a quick quick solid again, at which point you have a nice thick, thick batter coating.
And if you don't mind having that thick of a coating, the double do on it always makes it stick to all to any damn thing. You're never gonna get it. And that's what I do on, especially on products that have a high uh high rate of melt outs like mozzarella sticks. Do you like fried mozzarella sticks at least? No.
Jesus. Jack, fried mozzarella sticks? Yes. Okay. Come on.
What the hell's wrong with these people? Um not you, Jack. You just saved yourself with that one. Fried mozzarella sticks. Do you like um do you like uh grilling cheese like uh queso parfouriera or halloumi?
No. Grilled. You had it? Really? I don't think I've had it.
No, I know I've had it. I don't have an opinion on it. You don't like grilled cheese? Like grilled cheese delicious hot and it turns squeaky when it gets cold. I hate squeaky cheese.
Yes, yes, yes. Well, that's why you gotta eat it when it's hot. That's why you eat it when it's hot. Eat it while it's hot, eat it while it's hot. So the um anywho, so uh I would I would use that.
I would do that. So if you don't want to do the double dip, which is inherently going to get it, then the the you know the next thing to do uh in terms of ease is uh partial uh pat down of them beforehand and dehydrate not your pat pat down and uh partial dehydration. Uh not not not so that they lose their crunchiness, just so that they're a little bit you know dry, a little bit pellicle formed on the outside. And then the next step up from that in technological difficulty is to add uh some modified starch to the uh pre-dust or to use a modified starch as the pre-dust. Uh and one of those things should help you out.
Yeah? Yeah. Uh okay. Um that make sense. Yep.
I love frying. Do you know that I have to I had to decommission my fryer? Did I tell you that? Did I say that in the air? Well, it wasn't a leak.
Did I tell us on the air? Did I talk about this? Uh I have to get around it. I have to get around it. You only have yeah, today's a short one.
I don't, yeah, my god. Okay. Uh question uh I don't have who the question is from. I hate that. Okay, uh, hey Dave, Nastasha, Jack et al.
I'm a big fan of the show. Finally caught up with all the back episodes a few weeks ago. Question number one. My wife and one of my daughters have a gluten intolerance after much gluten-free baking experimentation. My wife has found the most success using recipes for baking mixes from the gluten free on a shoestring blog.
HDTP, glutenfree on a shoestring.com. All purpose gluten-free flour recipes forward slash. Uh one of the keys for a palatable texture in baked goods is using uh these mi uh in uh baked good using these mixes is a super fine uh brown rice flour and a super fine white rice flour. Buying the super fine version of either of these flours is rather expensive. The best super fine rices uh we have found are from authenticfoods uh com.
But a regular rice flour results in a gritty product. Yeah, regular rice flour kind of sucks. Um we have tried using both our crappy blender uh and our food processor to grind a regular version of these rice flours to a finer consistency, but are not happy with the results. Uh Vitamix is already at the top of my kitchen wish list. Uh is that gonna be the best tool to use?
Would some kind of mill uh be better? Um that's Chip Smith. What's Chipsmith? That's his name of the Oh, hey Chipsmith. Uh I was like, I was like, I was like, that sounds awesome.
Shout out, Jackson, so we're not in the commercial. Shout out to John Riper. Oh, yeah. Just because do you want to do it? Like, do you want me to answer this question?
You want to do the quick commercial so that we get our get our bizzles paid? And then all right, let's do it. Why don't pass is the only farm in the United States that has its own USDA inspected red meat abattoir or slaughterhouse. And it's own USDA inspected poultry abattoir, a slaughterhouse. We partner with Whole Foods to deliver our high quality meat and poultry from Miami, Florida, all the way to Princeton, New Jersey.
One family, one farm, five generations, 145 years. A full circle return to sustainable land stewardship, humane animal stockmanship. For more information, please visit our website, White Oak Pastures.com. And we're back. Hey Jack, I had a question for you.
Yeah. Do you know of any farm that has its own USDA inspected uh red meat abattoir? Yeah, they also happen to have uh one of the best voiceover talents in the game working there. I know that like that guy like owns that. He owns it.
He owns it. Will Harris. We have our own red meat abattoir. I would buy I would buy red meat from that man. Yeah, right.
It's available at Whole Foods. They're the only five plus star-rated uh poultry at Whole Foods. They don't they don't have it at My Whole Foods. What Whole Foods do they have it at? I'll have to get back to you on that, but but check.
Because my son, Booker, the older one, is obsessed with animal welfare ratings. That's awesome. He's upset. So he's like, he like the Whole Food the Here's the mistake the Whole Foods made, right? So those of you that don't shop at Whole Foods, uh, if you go to the Whole Foods, uh they in their meat counters and in the in the cases on the side, not on processed goods, usually like Salumi, like LaQuerch, and all that stuff that they carry, which whatever we won't talk about that.
But the um on all of their kind of fresh meat goods, they put animal welfare ratings on it. The problem is this they start at one and then go to five plus, with one being the lowest grade that Whole Foods accepts, but it's still, you know, from an animal welfare standpoint, better than nothing. Right. You know what I'm saying? So they what they made him like the tactical error, I think, is that they and a lot of the stuff they have is ones.
A lot of it. You know what I mean? Like the majority is ones. And like, don't you think they should have like made it from like a one to like seven? Yeah.
And then not and then not bought one and two. And being like, Whole Foods only buys three, four, five, six, and seven. Yo. You know what I'm saying? Three will be the new one.
Well, they they work with it. We've done some cool coverage on this actually. Um and they work with the producers to kind of get them from one to five plus. So it's like by bringing them on board, they're like, okay, you're good enough, you're a one, we can sell you, and we're gonna help you get to a five plus. Right.
I mean, because yeah, there's like you know, there's different reasons to get into different aspects of um of um you know uh sustainable and or small farming, right? And one is that one is that you just don't like the way animals are treated in large farms, right? Right? They don't like the way they're treated, you don't like the way they're slaughtered. Regardless of taste, whether it tastes better or not, uh regardless of uh, you know, whatever, you're willing to pay more to have an animal that has been kind of treated well.
And uh yeah, five plus is the highest, and I believe that means that not only is it like animal centered, pasture centered, but it lives its whole life on the one farm, right? And is never taken off. And that's why they're probably the only people can do it, because they never have to ship their animals off site. I think he's done. Right.
He's like, I don't care anymore. No, sorry, somebody walked in. Oh yeah. You know, I think that's why though. Anyway, uh all right, they're gonna kick us off.
So let me answer this question uh soon. Uh Vitamix, uh I don't like grinding flour in uh a Vitamix. Because I'll tell you why. It's a huge mess and it like throws particles up in the inside, and then when you open the thing, you're inhaling rice flour particles. I've done it.
Food processors uh don't work as as you say. Uh I do not recommend, I don't know if you asked it. The only mill I've ever owned it uh like grinding mill is uh the KitchenAid makes a um a uh grain mill that you can attach to um to a Kitchen aid and it grinds things but I can't I'd love to recommend it and I really want it to be awesome but it's not uh like it's just not it's not doesn't cr produce a very very fine flour it's extremely slow it tends to heat things up um and I have I myself have never used a mill that I uh liked especially if you're gonna be grinding large quantities uh of something I've also tried using coffee mills to do uh grinding with uh not too much success so far I tried using you know those hand cranked um oh what's the Japanese name I forget uh anyway the one that we all have to do manual grinding I tried to grind a bunch of bean flour in that and that was a ruddy mess too so um I'm sorry to say that uh I you know there are ones out there and I'm but I I hesitate to recommend any of them because I haven't used them but go look for a high quality uh grain mill I would say don't get the KitchenAid uh grain mill for this application KitchenAid grain mill works great for and of course you don't care because you're doing gluten-free stuff but like when I was doing uh all grain brewing to break up uh to break up barley it's great for coarser things it's great but like if you're doing a especially if you're gonna do a lot of grains other than rice anything that has a high oil content the KitchenAid's gonna uh seize up on you so I'll try to look in more and get uh more recommendations for you for uh the next time around or if anyone please wants to send me some um grain mill recommendations into at cooking issues on the Twitter. I will gladly pass them on. Not next week's show, because next week I will be in uh I will be flying uh to France.
I'm gonna visit the Carthusian monks who make one of my favorite beverages, a chartreuse. Um You're not gonna be here next week? No, I'm not gonna be in France. But I'm not but I'm not gonna be usually when I'm in when I'm in another country I can call in and say something, but the You'll be on a plane. I'll be on a plane.
Uh and I think I'll be on a plane. I'll have to look up where I am because unfortunately my travel both times is on a Tuesday. So if I can do it next week, I will call in because I don't want to miss two weeks. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah.
Um but I had one more thing on grain before. Oh, uh for inexpensive supply of very fine grain rice flour, go to Asian markets. Don't go to your standard uh, you know, uh, you know, Western supermarket. You can get really, really inexpensive, extremely fine-grained rice flours at uh Asian supermarkets. So if you live anywhere near one, um you can go get it and you can get I mean, obviously they sell what's called glutinous rice flour.
It doesn't really have gluten in it because it's rice flour, and they sell various grades and types of rice flours along with many other gluten-free uh like strange flours, like yam flowers and whatnot. And they're dirt cheap. They're on the level of price of AP flour. But I do uh think that you know you should look into getting a mill of your own. I just don't happen to have a decent recipe.
So uh I will answer your next question. Uh the next time we are on, and it's an interesting one, Stas. I want you to think about this. Uh I'll read the question, but then since we don't have the time, I will not answer it. Uh I'm a big fan of pasta putinesca.
You like that? Even though it has a name that you don't like, or do you it's okay? But you don't like the name. No, you don't like the name. Nastas doesn't like names like that.
Uh, I usually make more than uh what I will eat at one meal because I like having it the next day as cold pasta. Do you like colpaza? No. At all? What about like American pasta style?
Even though it's got mayonnaise on it? All right. Uh Jack, you don't like the pasta salad because it's got the mayonnaise. I feel a mayonnaise. That's right.
I do like cold pasta though. Yeah. Generally, yeah. What about like what about how do you guys feel about like cold sesame noodles? Those things are delicious.
Oh, yeah, delicious. No, no. She's like, no, no. She's like, she's it's not the vegan face. It's like the head pressed as far back into her neck as possible, head rapidly shaking back and forth.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Uh something I've noticed about eating it the next day when it is cold or at room temperature, I need to add salt. What's the deal? Is the colder temperature changing how I perceive the flavors that much? Thanks.
Well, that is an interesting and I think more complicated than uh you would think. Um question. So we'll get to it next time, but the hints are that your perception of all flavors, most flavors, change uh with temperature. How they relate to each other change with temperature, but also the food itself might be changing due to adsorption of salt absorption of salt into the pasta over the course of the night. So we'll talk about these various effects the next time on cooking issues.
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