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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Marn, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you pre-taped. Pre-taped, right? Stas coming to you pre-taped on the Heritage Radio Network in Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you happen to have gotten our message that we're pre-taping today, you can still call in your questions to 7184972128.
That's 718497-2128. Uh today we have a very special uh guest in the studio. We have uh Lena Quak, who is the founder of Cup4Cup. Uh gluten-free, like kind of like the best known, like so for years. For those of you who have celiac, or perhaps you are one of those people that for some reason I don't understand just reduces your gluten intake even though you have no problem with it.
Um you know, one of the issues has been that there's been no very good kind of uh straight replacement for wheat flour that works in you know a variety of different recipes. And one of the reasons is because wheat flour is kind of a miracle. So uh, you know, uh Lena was at uh well I'll let her tell the story. Uh welcome to the show. Hi, everyone.
Hey, how you doing? And of course we got Stasy here, and we got we got uh Jack over in the booth, and we have Lindsay actually, Linda's uh publicist. So why don't you tell me a little story about uh how Cup for Cup came to exist? And correct me if I'm wrong, it's like the only decent one on the market, right? I don't know if I'd say that, but uh we definitely focus on quality control.
So give me give me a little bit of the story. So I actually interned at the French Laundry uh right out of culinary school, and uh one of the things that I noticed was that the chefs work about fourteen to twelve hours a shift, and so these are really creative creature uh creative individuals and um they had no time to experiment with all of their innovative thoughts. And so I wrote out a proposal at the end of my internship to uh create a position, RD chef at the French laundry. And the chef at the time, Corey Lee, he actually uh took this concept and took it to Thomas and I was accepted as the RD chef. And from there I did a lot of dietary restrictions for uh diabetic uh dishes and then also gluten-free and vegans and with the one dish that really resonated well with the chefs were the gluten-free bread.
And so from there, uh we started developing products because people were coming in and crying over pieces of bread uh because they haven't had it for seven years. And uh with about a year and a half we dove into this project and started developing a gluten-free flour line. Nice. So now I think something that people might not understand, uh I mean probably listeners to this show understand, but like how much care um you know restaurants, you know, at this level take with people who have everyone knows the chefs hate when people have restrictions, dietary restrictions. Every chef hates it when someone has a dietary restriction, right?
They hate it. They hate it, but you know, it's one of these things, there's a there's a divide with chefs. I feel like they are the chefs who, you know, it is it is their style and their as artists, you know, they feel so passionate about what they serve, they want to change anything because it is their piece of work. However, there are other group of chefs who understand also there's it's an experience, you know. And everyone has a preference as an individual.
So who are you to also tell an individual how to eat something? You know, and so there's two schools, thought I don't believe one or is better than the other. However, you know, for Thomas, it's really about how a guest takes in that experience. And he wants to make it everything. He doesn't want to dilute anything just because you may have a restriction.
Uh so he wants to elevate that whole experience for you. Right. I mean, I think one of the reasons why a lot of chefs hate people with not hate people, this is very it's very badly put. One of the one of the reasons that they they they get all hot and bothered when someone has a dietary restriction is and this is what I think people don't understand is that they are worried. It's not as I mean sometimes it's just ego.
But uh a lot of times I think the chef is worried that the person's gonna it's the same as when someone asks for their steak well done. The chef just worries that this person is actually not gonna have a good experience at the restaurant because now the chef has to cook something that the chef doesn't like or chef doesn't respect, or chef doesn't know whether the quality is the same, and they want the quality to be as good uh no matter what they put out. They want to be proud of what they put out and they want all the customers to have, you know, the best possible experience. And I think it's the nervousness that they're not gonna be able to do that in the face of certain dietary restrictions that gets a lot of a lot of chefs bent like a pretzel. But the you know, the fact of the matter is is that the in the more kind of high-end, more expensive restaurants are, the more typically they'll bend over backwards to try to accommodate this stuff if they can.
Absolutely. And you know, I think I I completely understand how chefs take this as they want to guide someone's experience to the level that they understand as experts what's going to be the best way to present one dish. But at the same time, those people who have certain, you know, specific needs or you know, they don't particularly like certain things, they're not gonna allow themselves experience that the way maybe a chef would like. And so rather than fighting that, I think it's just give people what they want. You know, they're coming in to have a certain level of expectation.
When they sit down, you know, they're paying for their meal, and I really believe that you know you have to accommodate people as they come in because they are your guests, you know. Now, when you're when you're trying to develop something that is uh gluten-free flour that uh works for uh kind of any application, right? I mean, w there's a there's a lot of issues with that because a lot of recipes, right, use one aspect of wheat flour, and a lot of recipes use different aspects of wheat flour. And uh very few, very few things uh you know act like like wheat flour in every kind of situation. So, how did you how did you go about taking up this kind of you know how how did you approach this kind of a problem?
God, I'm so glad you brought this up. I can give you a hug because it's so hard to really explain to people, you know, that flour is such a complex single ingredient. You know, if anything, because of my research development through this, I've had such a deeper um appreciation for flour and its performance. But yes, there are different types of wheat flour that people don't really always consider. People always call in about cup for a cup.
Can it make bread? And and and yes, you could formulate you know a recipe using that ingredient, but it's not gonna perform the best. Bread flour will because it has higher gluten content. And even all-purpose flour is different from bread flour. And and so I think it's very hard for people to understand that there are there are different applications for just regular flour that you know with cup for cup what I really focused on was what were people missing the most from baking was cookies, quick breads, um pies, biscuits.
I felt like that was what the home cook is looking for. So I really needed to develop something that was more like pastry flour if anything however able to perform in different recipes. Right. As a multipurpose. Right because none of those applications rely heavily on gluten.
In fact a lot of those a lot of those applications people try to shunt out the gluten in you know in in a lot of ways. So you know those are kind of good good applications but um even frying also it works better with uh like tempura batters because there's no gluten that's going to cause it to be a soggy fry battery do you like tempura? I I don't me personally I don't like to eat a lot of fried but uh I definitely like uh crispy yeah I mean that's the thing I think uh tempura I'm gonna get yelled at by somebody but like it's one of those things that I think that you know every everyone thinks it's the most like many like uh very tweaked out Japanese techniques people think that it's kind of the height of the fry and I just I don't think that's necessarily the case. I mean I think that I think that you know I've had some very good tempuro chefs make stuff for me and I'm like yes this is good do I think this is the height of fried no I like the shattered like light fry if sometimes I don't even like a batter actually I like it when that it really is a very thin, shattered fry. If you're talking about specific frying methods.
Yeah so tempura is not my favorite because it might be a little thicker, but I've had a wonderful tempura before. Yeah, yeah, it's good, but then it's like also like you need to eat it instantaneously. They under fry it so it's so freaking blonde, and it's like, you know, it's well, whatever. I don't want to uh that don't don't give me a start, don't give me start. So the uh no, but the so but like a lot of the the applications that you say, and I think this is the way to hit things that people miss the most, because a lot of people they're gonna bring up bread the most difficult.
I mean the most difficult. But even bread, you know, it's one of those things that uh it takes such technique and years of experience to make good bread, you know. Um and I again it's not something that we're not working on. It's it's gonna be a lot more work than just pastry flour. Right.
Now, aside from the gluten, the actual starches, like in other words, wheat starch works differently from other kinds of starches and f for many reasons, right? One is because um of the different kind of the the actual texture of the flour when it's ground, the gran granule structure, right? And then there's how the how the actual structure it is. Now the reason you can't, let's say, just do all rice flour is because it acts totally differently and it will be like a rice bun or a rice noodle, which is not what people are looking for, correct? It's completely different.
You know, and I I'll walk through the ingredients. So we have cornstarch, which really acts as r uh when you think about flour and its performance in a recipe, it's a filler. You know, it really is the body of um the body of the recipe in a baking uh formula. And then you have rice flours that is gonna provide more of a textural difference because cornstarch is just too fluffy. And then the other ingredients are really for elasticity purposes, you know.
How do you bind? Because that's what flour does as well. It binds and it will be able to, within the baking process, how steam and everything works, hold its shape. And so that's really how the formula goes. So what are the what are the other ones?
You have cornstarch, you have rice. What else you got in here? We've got um tapioca, potato starch, xanthom gum, and milk powder, which is another thing that is really important to point out. It adds tenderness. A lot of other gluten-free flours, they have eliminated dairy because they want to it's a larger market when you do dairy-free, gluten-free, everything free, you know.
But for for us, when we decided this, if I took out the milk powder, it was gonna be uh less performing flour and milk solids, right? So there's no la lactose in it. No, there is. It's uh it's uh skim milk powder, you know, and um it's very crucial to the baking process. It will create a tender crumb.
No, milk proteins are awesome. Yeah, they really are. Um but okay, so you have the the potato, which swells fast, right? Yes. And then you had uh what was the other one?
Tapioca. Tapioca's weird. You ever cook with straight tapioca? That's a strange. It is, but it does give that.
Showing, showing, foing yeah. It's just no joke. No joke. I mean, have you ever had that uh Brazilian cheese bread? No, I've had Portuguese like corn cheese bread, like broa.
No, it's uh blanking out what it's called, but uh it's this it's made with the cassava roots, so tapioca. Oh, yeah, I've had that stuff. And um it's delicious, but it's fried and it's all chewy inside. Yeah, no, that stuff's good. I used to have to, when I was doing uh work on uh puffed stuff, you know, years ago for the blog, I was doing a lot of tapioca doughs and man they're a pain.
Especially like they're just like really a pain. They're really pain because you also have to heat them up and then you're working with like galop and then well, so heating up, you bring a good point. So when you're doing um when you're doing a dough that doesn't have any uh gluten in it, I mean one of the things that you know we always used to do is just pre-cook some of the starch because uh you know, when you're working without the gluten, things tend to be kind of like a sandy agglomeration of things. They don't tend to dough up on you. Um they just don't.
So like the question is is do you have some precooked in here as well without telling me like how it works, or is it we're able to do it without any pre cooked stuff? No precooked. Because one of the things that was difficult with this process is because uh when we developed the French laundry, you know, French laundry really source from smaller, you know, farmers, um just our resources are more you know, local. And for us to go out to a market and provide nationally, we really need to start uh digging into resources that we could find large volumes for. And so pre pre cooked starches, it's we don't work with that.
Yeah, because they're easier to work with, right? They are easier to work with and they're a little more stable, however, the volume of it is just not there. Now I see you have one here called wholesome that says it's dairy-free, uh is a dairy-free product. What do you have in uh in to make up for the dairy in that sucker? So the wholesome flour is actually our first um response back to the public.
People are really looking for non GMO. And what we found was it's really in the category, they're missing whole wheat flour. And so this is a solution for the whole wheat flour, nutrient dense performing. Um so no milk powder, but what we did add was ground flax seeds. And so flax seeds, you know, with a little bit more fat, it adds a little texture and also creates that um I guess textural difference in the quick breads and pastries.
Right. It does absorb a little bit more water like whole wheat flour does. So oh a flaxseed likes to absorb water. That's that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, flaxseed.
Uh I did a well man, I don't even want to get into flaxseed. I mean, presumably it's not like a lot a lot of flaxseed, right? No, but it definitely has its share. So it has equal parts of uh fiber as whole wheat, and then also has uh omega fatty acids contributed by the flax seeds and uh rice bran as well. Did you know that some people like soak and grind up flax seeds and eat that gummy, pulpy stuff on purpose, just like as is.
Did you know that? So I was going through a week of like healthy after after uh eating too much and I was gonna grind up some. I was like, ah, I'll just throw in flax seeds into my smoothie. Uh don't ever do any more than uh two tablespoons. No, I mean it's just freaking like it's a freaking gummy nightmare.
I mean, it's a it's a natural, yes, yes, fiber, hydrocolloids, it's all great and stuff, which is man. That is some oh man. So now how many how many uh how many flowers do you have in the line now? You have uh So we have the uh cup for cup original line. So it has a pancake waffle, pizza, chocolate brownie, and then our wholesome line, which is actually in stores now at Wayne Sonoma.
It is we're gonna look to extend it and release two other products behind it. Okay. Now, you just came last night from uh Del Posto, Mark Ladner is a big f fan of being able to make all of his pastas gluten free. And he uses cup for cup. Which one does he use?
The OG? Yes, the OG. Yeah, he uses the OG stuff. Now he actually tasted you out last night on all of all the pastas, right? It was amazing.
And I you know, I had heard about Del Posto about a year and a half, and just all of the press they've received with the gluten free pastas. You know, I've I hadn't had a chance to meet Mark and you know, I ran into you guys uh last weekend uh out of you know coincidence. Yeah, by the way, we judged a pie. I think we talked about it we judged a piece we judged we didn't talk about it no no so uh nastasha and I went out to uh UCLA and we were judging a not a pie eating contest a pie making contest right pie making contest two people I should we're not gonna say I'm not gonna say anything positive or negative about the pies because you know just in case nobody just in case well but yeah either like school does like school year's over these these kids they're like freshman sophomores they're not listening to this crap they don't know but like uh so we had to eat like something like twenty two pies and you know 22 pies twenty twenty-two pies you know and you know thankfully like you can have gluten if you if you you know you you happen to have created that like the one kind of gluten free like you know replacement flour but you actually can consume the gluten so we were eating these pies and uh for some reason we didn't like the like the bet like one of the best pie crusts there like I don't know like I was my face was buried in I don't know what the hell happened but you know you had advocated for this I stuck up for them I totally did and I got chewed out but I think it was total you're totally right and then later you were like I can't believe and I was like what what? And then this Nastasha never is gonna freaking let me forget the fact that I let first of all here's what happened.
Like okay okay okay okay. So they have this class what's the name of the class at UCLA do you remember? Uh well I I know the event was the food and science but I don't know what the name of the class was. Yeah it's Professor Robot out there she has a class and she teaches it and so you know one of the things she does is she know you're supposed to like learn some science like come up with an experiment and it's based around making apple pie. Right?
Which is great. It gets the kids, you know, really excited about making pies. It's the first time diving into it. Yeah, but all of these freaking kids, like not enough salt in the crust. Oh my Jesus.
Not enough salt in the crust. People, when you make pie, put salt in the freaking crust. I was like, how much unsalted like crust did you have to eat? Because I think like it's like I think this is the I was yelling at someone else, like all the chefs, we were talking about this before. All the chefs are like, nah, man, use unsalted butter, right?
Unsalted butter, mm-hmm. But the problem is is then like people who like maybe like they use a recipe that was was written for salted butter. They don't taste the crust or whatever. It doesn't have any salt in it. I really think someone has to publish an article about how a chef's pinch technically is, I think about a tablespoon.
If you if you think about it, and that's why people always, when they say a pinch, they take maybe half a teaspoon and they they throw it in. See, that's the thing. People just need to taste the sun bit the thing and see whether or not like it tastes good. People don't know. Here's another thing.
Like uh I you know, as m any of you know, like the I read that book recently, Sugar Salt Fat, and I have some huge issues with that book. Huge issues with that book. Written by Moss, right? Because one of the things is he's like, D do you know that do you know that corporations try to make their food taste good? You know what I mean?
I'm like, what? What? And my point is is that especially I think he falls flat in the anti-salt stuff, because you cannot make decent baked goods or decent ice creams without salt. And like people don't know how much salt is in a decent dough. Like when I was growing up, McGee told me there's a there's a famous uh bread book writer who used to cook at one of the schools and was at one of the bakeries out in San Francisco.
I forget his name. He came out with a book maybe four years ago. And he says that over the past maybe even twelve to fifteen years, like salt levels have gone up in all of the artisan breads, at least in the West Coast. Because I used to, you know, do like maybe like a percent and a half. People are closer to two percent on bread.
Really? Yeah. Dry weight basis. Dryweight based, flower weight basis. You know, and so, you know, I'm still you know, bat back at Weasley one and a half, but you don't need that much in a pie crust, but something, some salt.
Well, you have to think about you know, flavors is it's the same thing as com composing music. If you were to only use one note, how flat would that be? But if you add different beats to it, it's really gonna accent like accentuate the sound of it and really focus. And the same thing with flavor. So I actually had a double post, so this great um it was a dried apricot sorbet, and he had he had dusted it with a little salt on top, and it just brightens everything.
So you really need that offset flavor to really highlight the dish. Yeah, like unless unless you have salt sensitive hypertension, like salt's your good buddy for flavor. You know what I mean? So anyway, so like they under salted their crust, they undercooked their crust in general, right? They did, but you know, I will have to say it was a really fair stab at everything.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, so what happened is this one grandma story. This yeah, yeah, so yeah, yeah. I was like, tell the grandma story. So like I rooted for you guys, I just want to let you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's what happens. So this one this one crew was working on uh on the cooking the apples. That was their shtick. The thickness of the apple slice, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, cooking with calipers was the name of their their shtickamajig there, right? And so they're like, okay. So they um they're like, well, our project wasn't about the crust. So for the crust, I just did grandma's crust. I called my grandma, like a real I asked, is this a real live grandma or is this some sort of bull crap you're trying to tell tell me?
He's like, no, this is a real live grandma. And I had the crust. I was like, damn, if that crust ain't good. Like that's a crust I want to eat because they had they had like they had coated the top right, it had a little bit of sugar. They crusted, it was beautiful, like it was cooked all the way through, it was actually flaky, it was like I think that was the only pie I gave a five out of five.
When on the chart that we had to say where you were like, would you give this to someone with no like questions asked? I said the pie crust, yes. Yeah, yeah. Those guys got hosed. They got nothing.
They got they got rippity doodle. They didn't even they got honorable nothing. They got hosed. Mainly because I was sitting there trying to sift through my freaking papers when it was going on, and like we were confused over who, you know, which team was. I'm sorry, grandma's pie people cooking with calipers.
My fault. My fault. My fault. All right. So uh let's go on to a quick question we had last week from a reader about gluten-free.
Nigel Olson wrote in, hey Dave and Nastasha, because he didn't know you were gonna be on. Uh I love your show. I've been a listener since day one here in Napier, New Zealand, North Island, East Coast, right by the Pacific Ocean, and I've been an avid follower of your work. Um you guys seem the logical people to ask. Could you help me come up with a gluten uh free uh issue?
I guess I mean solution. Solution, right? Not the issue. Yeah, solution. I plan on making perfiderols, cream proof clers, that sort of thing, for sale at our local farmers market.
I'd like to have a gluten-free option available, but I'm not sure what flour alternative would have the gluten type strength to sustain the shoe pastry's expansion during baking. Now, shoe pastry is interesting because it's pre-cooked, yes, and so you get to you get to mess around a lot more with stuff with the shoe pastry than you would otherwise, right? Uh are you in New Zealand? No, we're not. But you know what really works with the shoe pastry is if you use a blend of different rice flowers.
So you're gonna have to use a blend of brown rice and also white glutinous rice to kind of get that um sticky dough. Um I would say probably the same thing though, like like cook butter and then beat the egg. Blend in your rice flowers. I would probably test around fifty percent of both r white and brown rice and then um and use it as weight with a para shoe pastry uh recipe that's what I would say. And it's gonna be okay.
It's not gonna have that weird like look see through rice thing? It will, but you know I'm just thinking off the top my head without going into you know di the the formulation of cup for cup too heavily if if it is just for pastry flour, I have seen rice flour blends work well because you're able to cook it and then it it has enough um of that starch quality will it'll roll into a ball and because there is enough steam it will steam up and you you want that hollow center. So I would say rice flour would be the best but for the easiest, you know you'd have to try it out but I'm sure that I'm sure like people who write into this show they don't want easy. If you're gonna do difficult would your stuff work well in a shoe pastry application? Absolutely.
Actually if you look up cup for cup um shoe pastry people have done several different variations of recipes using this. Right. So but your stuff not New Zealand. No sorry no um well anywho so yes it can be done and what and the you know one of the things that you like the benefit the benefits you have is like one of the m more difficult things I'm told about working with uh you know non wheat flours is the is the fact that the doughs don't cook here so well but because you're gonna cook the crap out of it beforehand you win. Yeah I think shoe pastry will be a it's gonna be an easier one to figure out with rice flowers, definitely.
What would you add to it to have it not be so ricey? That's the thing. Yeah, you're right. Um, you know, I would definitely add a little bit of cornstarch to give it but more of that filler, you know, but you're gonna need the most of it as the body is gonna be the rice. Now when people are doing the stuff at home, do they they try to add stuff that's got like a little more of that nuttiness, right?
But then what do they add? They add like buckwheat or something, but buckwheat doesn't act right, right? No, buckwheat doesn't act right. You know what uh uh I like to do a lot too is to toast the flour. You really are able to taste that that nutty flavor from it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So dope in a little bit of the corn. He's not gonna need any of this other stuff like tapio.
He's not gonna need that stuff. No, just because you're gonna cook the starches and it's gonna be already such a hard like glob, you know, you're gonna you're gonna be able to get that without having to use tapioca, potato, anything else that's gonna cause it to retract. Right. Yeah, potatoes super swell. Uh the now, the the other thing is for the for the rice flowers, can you just get brown rice flour?
The so this is the difficult part. Um when it comes to gluten-free flowers or flowers in general, there are so many different variations of one type of brown rice. You know, you could get pre-gelatinized, you can get certain different grains, you know. The the starch structure, you know, from crop to crop, it will change, you know, and so you that's that's what's gonna be really difficult sourcing, you know. And um it's gonna be it's hard for me to say like one specific is gonna be better than the other right now.
Right. Well, also like you know, for instance, like not harping on them, but like Bob's Red Mills, uh like like their their rice flour. I think I've had a package of that once, and it feels totally different from the stuff I buy, you know, in Chinatown, which is like a powder. It's almost like rice, it's almost like starch, it's so powdery. Well, what I noticed is so that was one of the flowers that we tested with, um, cuffer cup originally, and the Asian flowers, they go through a different process.
So they soak the grains and then they mill it. So that really produces um a definitely a different flour that has a little more moisture content and it performs completely differently. From like American starches, because we don't go through that process here. Yeah, because also like I've had terrible luck with rice, like grinding your own rice, but oh my god, it's horrible. Like it's just you actually do it?
I try it, yeah. Look back when I we, you know, back when I, you know, people, you know, whatever. I try anything once. But like grinding that stuff, it's just like it's like little pelatus nightmares. You know what I mean?
Like it doesn't, it's not uh I've actually haven't had any good luck milling my own uh wheat flour either. I mean I have a I have a you know a grain mill, but it's I don't really like it very much. And like the really coarse, the really coarse uh like whole wheat, it's like it's like just a killer. Yeah, you need that. I mean, you need that intense equipment to be able to support that grind.
Yeah, I mean, um, yeah, I mean, I love whole wheat flour, but I'm not the stuff that I make. No offense to me. No offense to me. Um wait, so Jack is telling me we're already hosed. We're done.
We're already hosed? Yep. Oh. Oh man. All right, well, listen.
Uh we were pre-taped this week, so I swear, Rob, next week I will talk. Do you like fiddleheads, ferns? Yes. Did you know this is very strange? But so the fiddlehead fern that we eat is ostrich ferns, right?
So we don't eat bracken. Although apparently in Asia, many people eat bracken, and people have eaten bracken in in the US for millennia, you know, Native Americans have eaten bra bracket different kind of fern. So that's like, don't care. Uh but like the uh but the fact of the matter is is that you know, bracken has some well known um has some well known carcinogens in it, like the most well known is I can't pronounce it, but it's like taquilicide from something like this, right? And in fact, some people think that this may like the consumption high consumption of bracken fern might be the reason why there is everyone's looking to figure out why more people get esophageal and stomach cancer in Korea, let's say, or it you know, places around there.
And uh so a lot of you know, some people have pegged it on like the inordinate amount of kimchi that's consumed. But then some people are like, hey, how about the bracken? Like we all know that bracken c you know has cancer causing agents in it. But I don't think it's that readily eaten that much in high volume where it would affect it. I don't know.
Because I I heard it was because like the stomach cancer rate was a lot to do with alcohol consumption. You think? Yeah, because um I think it's the population 80% aren't able to consume uh they don't have the enzyme to break down alcohol, and so they still consume it, and that's also contributing to the high rate. Right. So the pain the the pain about it is right that that that there you get two copies of the gene, right?
So like most uh Caucasian stuff folk like myself have two copies of the stuff that you know for the alcohol dehydrogenase and can break down alcohol like nobody's business, right? Then you have like a whole uh you know, a a whole like a Asian consort of people who have no copies, they're the ones that are gonna go bright red when they're drinking, right? And then you have people who have one copy that don't go bright red. This is the research I've read. They don't go bright red, so they consume alcohol, but they're more likely to get damaged, like having cancers and stuff.
So it's like that middle ground where you have one copy where it's like dangerville. I wonder if it's the same because also the Irish population also, because it's the dilation of your your capillaries, where that's why you're turning red. But um, I wonder if it affects different cultures as well. I don't know. I don't know.
But uh I will try to research more of the Bracken stuff, but uh the ostrich fern, strangely, just in the past ten years, people have had these weird food poisonings happen from undercooked fiddleheads, uh real ones, ostrich ferns, but nobody knows why. And so uh the good news, Rob, is is it is that if you were gonna get poisoned, it's not a cancer thing, you would have gotten poisoned within about twelve hours. But uh so you're good. Uh but yeah, you we people do recommend that you cook your fiddleheads uh like overcooked them, in fact, like way overcooked them. But I'm gonna look into it more, and I have a lot more information I can get to you next week on.
And uh and unfortunately I thought we would have t uh time to get to get Kenan Grammarcy because he had a chewy crust problem with his pizzas. And we could talk about that because I think you know, one of the issues I think people you know, do you know like when when I was growing up, everyone uh all they worried about with with flour was protein content, right? No one was worried about the the way it was milled, the milling fractions of it, and like how the hydration is affected by how the flour is milled. But anyway, we're gonna have to. So important for uh bread flour.
But you know what's a quick solution? Go buy cup for cup pizza. Oh, boom! And with that we'll have to leave it. Cooking issues.
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