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Fresh, healthy Bonnie veggies and herbs. Get growing. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwig Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cookie Ashley coming to you live from a birth 33 in Bushwig Brrrrpled on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245, something like that. Guess who we have in the engineering booth with us today, Stas? Joe. Hello. Joe, how you doing?
I'm doing great. So it's so filling in for Jack today. Joe coming back for a guest slot in the engineering booth. Turns out we thought that he just hated us, and that's why he left. But turns out maybe that's not the case.
Yeah, I'm here to say I'm sorry. That's what I'm here for. Oh nice. How's the the you know Joe's uh Joe's front man for a band Big Ups? How's Big Ups doing?
Good, good. That was part of the reason why I was gone. I was on tour for a whole month in Europe, and uh it was great. But uh so now I'm now I'm here. Tours over and I'm I'm back where I started.
So hello everyone. Where's the uh where where in Europe did you tour? Um it was UK for a week and then the Netherlands and Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Belgium, yeah, all over the place. Oh, so a couple things. One, were the Dutch as tall as there as everyone says they are.
There were a few very tall, slender Dutch men that I met, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what they it's one of the things they're known for. That the wooden shoes, the licorice. Yes.
Um actually probably the best food also that I ate. Really? Yeah, surprisingly. They actually uh most of the countries we went, they didn't really eat green things at all. So uh so that was good to get some nice fresh vegetables.
All right, now when you played in uh in Belgium, did you cover Bedlam in Belgium? No, unfortunately. Yeah, next time. We're going back. So yeah, that's that uh I think uh for all you A C D C fans, I believe Bedlam in Belgium might be what is that?
Is that on flick of the switch? What's that on? I don't know. Anyway, it's not one of the better loved or better known AC D C songs, but I love any like anything where, you know, AC D C is like crap on the cops in Bel in Belgium stopping me from playing a show. Yeah, they they wrote a whole song about it.
So Bedlam in Belgi and they don't pronounce it Belgium they're like Bedlam in Belgium. Unfortunately we're not allowed to play that for you since we don't play copyrighted material anymore, but for you AC DC fans out there. You know, uh a lot of people give A C D C crap because like a lot of their music sounds the same. I mean, assuming, you know, all right, Bon Scott, the original singer died, and then you got your you know, your Brian Johnson afterwards, right? But aside from that, like we're just like, Whoa, all the music sounds the same, but then you know, Angus, who's you know, you know, uh, you know, their guitarist there, and you know, one of the guys that's been there the whole time, he's like, Well, if it sounded different, it wouldn't be an A C D C song, would it?
You know what I mean? Yeah, it's what do you what do you want from A C D C besides A C D C Yeah? I don't want I mean I don't need A C D C to do a Neil Young song or a Neil Diamond song for that matter. Neither of those things needs to happen. A C D C can just be A C D C all the time, and I think that that's uh, you know, that's kind of good enough, don't you think?
I agree. Yeah. Uh all right. So uh calling your questions to 7184972128. That's 718-497-2128.
Oh, hey, I didn't say hi to Stas yet. Hi. How you doing? Good. What's going on?
Nothing. That's a lie. I was just uh doing our expenses and I saw the smoke detector expense. Oh yeah, we had to in order to get insured as a company, even though it's just Stas and I work in there, and really no one cares if we go up in a puff of smoke or not, but uh in order for an insurance company to uh to you know rate us, we had to put uh smoke detectors in our in our space, right? And unfortunately well, fortunately, our ceilings are like what, like twelve feet t tall or something.
They're tall, you know. I mean it's typical New York, like, you know, tall storefront kind of situation. And uh so I was like, oh this is gonna end poorly. So I install one downstairs, it has like a three foot ceiling, and then upstairs where you have a twelve foot ceiling, I put one in. And like literally the very I'm not twelve feet tall, by the way.
I'm not a slender Dutchman. That's not how it works. But uh so literally the very first thing we tried to cook, right? Like I turned on the Searzol was like ten seconds into putting a sear down on a steak. Weep beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
Stas and I're like, yeah, yeah. Cooking detector, freaking cooking detector. So we we smashed it off the ceiling in about two seconds. We put it back on. If an insurance company is listening, we put it back.
Yeah. We did. Ish. Ish, ish. I'm telling you, what what needs to happen is uh i there needs to be some we've had this discussion many times on the radio before, but I think one of the main uh one of the things okay, here's why a lot of people don't cook, right?
Uh especially apartments here in the city, right? One, uh they don't know, they're busy or they don't know how to cook, right? That's one. Two, they don't know how to shop in a way that makes it effective or easy to cook, right? I guess maybe that's changing with the whole uh you know online delivery stuff.
Do you use that stuff? No. Just for parties? No, I don't. I don't use it at all.
I thought you used Fresh Direct. No, I don't use it. Yeah, it's like an eight hour window. Like, uh I I buy what I need. I I'm very efficient when I shop time wise.
Like I know exactly where all the stuff is in all the markets that I buy. I know like how to, you know. Mm-hmm. Hmm, sh efficient shopping. Anyway, so they don't know how to shop efficiently and cook efficiently.
But uh also there's no ventilation really in most in most uh most apartments here, and even most houses, the ventilation is bad, but and and that leads to smoke and that leads to the fact that smoke detectors go off and people freak out about the smoke detectors. They freak out about it, like that the smoke detector's gonna go off. They flip. There has to be some legal way that you can push like a duration button, right? Like a button that says, for the next two hours I'm gonna be awake and cooking.
So shut up. You know what I mean? And then it automatically goes back into like full vigilance mode, you know, so that when you're sleeping, you don't burn up in you know in your sleep. You know what I mean? It's gotta be a way.
Uh but I was talking about for new things, Mark's Kickstarter, which you can talk about in a minute. Maybe we can get him on next week. Anyway, caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, uh hey Nastasha, everybody. Um got a question.
Uh this is Drew from Virginia. Um I got a question about um you you talk about adding calcium to uh to like pickles and different things you want to keep crisp. What kind of calcium are you adding? I mean, just calcium chloride or there are other types? Right.
So calcium chloride, as you know, tastes bad, but it's the cheapest form of calcium and also the most available form of calcium. So I think a lot depends on on what you're what you're gonna do. So if you're gonna do like uh a calcium uh like a calcium treatment, um you can you can do uh calcium chloride for uh soak it along with let's say an enzyme like Novo Shape, which is the pectin methylesterase, the strengthening enzyme. You could do a soak for you know, like a day or two and then take it out of that, right? Or just add a small amount of chloride.
If you want to add more, you can add the calcium lactate gluconate, but you're gonna run into solubility issues, but it has no taste. Whoops. Well, well I'll I'll answer his question, maybe he'll call back. Um so you want to switch to, I mean, most of the time industrially they're using chloride. It's a you know very small, it penetrates quickly like salt.
You can leach it back out, which is what they do uh when they, you know, when they're when they're doing those things, they they they set things in a very high solution of calcium or they strengthen things in a very high calcium chloride solution, and then they take it down to a much lower calcium solution for uh maintenance on uh on things. Um so you can add a small amount of calcium that way in form of calcium chloride, but it does taste terrible. Um you can also use pickling lime, calcium and pickling lime is picklin is uh calcium hydroxide. Uh also you want you wanna do what they do with that one is they add a small amount of it. Uh, you know, well, they actually you add excess because it's not very soluble, it's self limiting.
You soak the uh the cucumbers in it for a while, and then you rinse it in um in in in fresh water and then put it in fresh water, let it soak, then put it in fresh water again, let it soak, and then put it again probably in fresh water and let it soak to get rid of the excess calcium uh and calcium hydroxide because they turn really if you're just soak uh cucumbers in uh excess calcium hydroxide solution, pickling lime solution for like a day or two, they're just really gross, just really nasty. Remember, did you taste that that time we did that or did you refuse after the look on my face? Because of the look on my face. See I I I believe you should taste everything even if it's bad, just so you know how bad it is. But Stas doesn't play that game.
She's like, no, I don't care. I just don't care. I don't care. I don't need to know how bad it tastes. It tastes bad.
So uh yeah so anyway so like uh in pickles if you're gonna use uh they add if you're gonna cook something you can add like a chloride because then as you cook it the the uh the actual natural um enzymes the um the uh pectin methylesterase enzymes that are natural in the in the fruit will activate along with the chloride as it warms up so that's that what they do in I don't believe they add extra enzymes to uh tomatoes. I think they just peel them and then can them with a little bit of calcium chloride and that's why tomatoes are so firm in canned tomatoes. That's why they don't break down the way who are we talking to Stas someone who didn't like canned tomatoes because they didn't like the fact that they didn't break down. I don't know. It was someone I forget who it was it was someone who got all bent bent.
All bent. Bent. Anyways Oh you're back? Good hey so uh did you hear that? Were you able to hear what I was saying when uh we were talking or no?
Well I'm gonna I I'm not I'm not I w I'm not listening live so I'm gonna catch up with it um on the on the archive which is cool. Yeah what I said was uh you know uh i i chloride I'd use chloride if you're gonna put use like an enzyme uh um uh you know additive like uh like a novo shape or something like that or you could use uh pickling lime calcium hydroxide which you would soak it uh for a for a while. Um I think it's there's a bunch of procedures on the web for it. And then you soak it for a little while in that, but then you soak it for a couple of fresh changes of water to leach out the excess um calcium hydroxide, the cal excess calcium. The good thing about calcium hydroxide is that um it's not very soluble and so it releases calcium into the solution as it's being used by the uh as it's being used by the the pickles so it kind of like self-regulates that way and then you just rinse out the rinse off the excess when when you're done.
So that's why I think you know pickling lime is fairly easy to work with. But if you're going to switch to uh you know a less crappy tasting calcium like lactate or lactate glucanate you'd obviously you're gonna have to use more of it. Okay. All right. All right um I have one more question if you got time.
Sure. Um I've got some uh I I rented my low lard in the fall and this this year was kind of screwy and I and I've got some leaf lard that's in the freezer and it it's not vacuum sealed so I'm kind of wondering whether it might be rancid or not. But I didn't know if the lard rendering process would wouldn't would just remove the rancidity or was is it just done. I mean it's just over. Yeah no it's uh if it's rancid uh it's over unless but well but look it's only going to go rancid where it's in contact with oxygen right so like I don't know how you packed it down.
How'd you pack it down? Well I just put it in uh Ziploc bags and I just tried to squeeze as much air out as possible and as I say it's been there since probably middle of December so it's been there for a solid five months. So yeah in the freezer yeah in the freezer yeah so I mean the good news is there's probably in the in the leaf lard there's probably very little moisture uh so and and you got rid of most of the oxygen so there's a good chance that um you know that it's not rancid but obviously the you you'll know when you open the package and and it comes up to temp whether or not it's it's rancid and if you're lucky it's only you know going to be uh have you know i it won't have traveled you know uh a long distance and m what I would do is just trim out if you see that some of it's rancid or you smell that kind of r you know 'cause everyone, you know, if you cook with lard, you know what rancid lard smells like. If you if you if you have like a some of it, I think you're gonna probably be able to trim away because it was in a big frozen block and the air probably didn't get into you know, you squished it down. The air's not gonna get everywhere.
You'll be able to trim out the places where the air got to it. And as long as it was fairly low moisture to begin with and you know like there's not a lot of like uh you know trimming stuff on it right 'cause it's leaf. It's not like, you know, it's not trimmings, right? So uh right, so it's meat free, right? Right.
Yeah, well i I mean it was the full pieces and then I and then I kinda cut them down. I was gonna process it in the middle of and Christmas got in the way and it just kinda everything got put off. So I just put it in the freezer so it is chopped up so it but but you're you're pretty much saying that if it's rancid I will know it when I smell it. Oh yeah, hell yeah. Yeah.
And then you could trim on and you like if you're lucky you can trim off the same way that you know I mean it's it's a in a liquid the whole thing's gonna go rancid, you know, but in a in a solid like that you have a good chance that uh you have a good chance that the it didn't you know travel all the way through it so that you can probably do some localized trimming. But you'll definitely know, you know, it's that cardboardy have that cardboardy rancid you know off. I don't know that I've ever smelled rancid big pork fat or you know so so I mean I'm just not sure but I the way I'm hearing it is I'll know when I smell it. Alright, so you you know how like okay so you know how like uh when you like cook bacon fat, right? And then you and then you pour the bacon fat off and then you keep saving it, but you d you don't use it fast and it sits and it takes on that smell that's not just an overheated smell.
It's that extra added smell, that like kind of off kind of cardboard y kind of smell. Like that's the rancidity in it. You know what I mean? Right, okay. And so if you if you you get that sort of or like you know how you know, if you uh corn oil is a real good one to tell rancidity on.
You know how when you get like corn oil and you uh and you you use it once and then you pour it back in the bottle and then it sits there and it's only half, you know, full, and then you open it a couple months later and you smell it, it's got that s that smell, that kind of dusty, cardboard y kind of thing. Like that's the rancidity on that. And so uh you know, you're not gonna get, you know, even if there were a bunch of meat stuff in there when it's frozen, it's not gonna go bad on you. It's not gonna go, you know, it's not gonna be and it's not gonna get that funky, it's not gonna get that funky age smell that you get off of like aged fat either. It's gonna it's just gonna be uh, you know, it's either gonna be fresh or it's gonna have that kind of rancid uh, you know, kind of uh aroma and and taste.
And you know what you could do also is just take a 'cause it's gonna be a lot easier to tell on a uh 'cause a little bit of rancidity is good on like a cured meat, you know what I mean? Like we're used to it. So I would I would you know trim off anything that obviously looks kind of discolored or messed up and then uh cut off a small piece, render it out, and then the best way I can tell for measuring oil is uh get a piece of not flavorful like white bread and soak up the oil with the white bread liquid, you know, a little bit warm and taste it, and if it tastes fresh, you're good to go. Okay, good. All right, thanks a bunch.
Alright, good luck with it. Alright, thanks, Bye. So Stas, Mark uh Mark Lanner just came out with his uh Kickstarter. Kickstarter. Yeah.
How's he doing so far? Good. Yeah? Yeah. What's he asking for?
He's asking for eighty five and he has 35. Yeah, what does he really want though? Uh 85. Oh come on. I think he wants I think eighty-five is fine.
What he really wants is, you know, a lot. But yeah, here's the thing people don't know about the Kickstarter is like when when people do when we do so when you do a Kickstarter, you know, as we know because we did it we and by the way, not for nothing. We're getting close to getting the stuff shipped in. It's gonna be we're very close to getting the Searsols uh on the water. We're gonna give big updates on the Sears all when they actually uh are on the water, uh which should be very, very soon.
Um but uh that's not what I was talking about. When you're doing a Kickstarter, you you like the the worst thing to happen is that you don't reach it. So you have to set your goals low enough so that you know you can reach it, right? And it's also like somehow like in terms of the the mentality of it, people really like uh people really like it when you go way over. So you actually like you know, we were trying to choose a number that we thought we could beat rather handily, you know what I mean?
Uh but then it's like this weird thing where you won't choose a number so low that people are like, oh they they got already, I don't need to go on. It's like a really weird psychology with Kickstarter. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah.
So you want to tell do you want to have him on? How long is the Kickstarter? It's till July fourth or fourth. Does he want to come on and uh do a talk about it? Maybe.
But you can see it at Pastafly.com. Pastafly.com. Pastafly. This is the most difficult Kickstarter I've ever seen. What do you mean?
Well it's like 'cause it's a concept. Ours was really good because it was a uh thing, you know, like an actual product. And this is so what's it's like content? Well, the concept is gluten free pasta quick served. Like the the like almost truck style, right?
Well, yeah, almost truck style. I think. But are they gonna be standalone locations again it will be someday but he's gonna do pop-ups first in colleges around the northeast so gluten free pasta for college kids that is of high quality yeah because his argument is that pasta most pasta sucks right yes yeah yeah and but it's like it has like some old grandma right yes is it the grandma of those of those kids from UCLA that we insulted I hope not. Yes. Yeah well Dave I've well Dave that's my lark voice will Dave up I found the grandma of those pie kids that you insulted.
Yeah. But it's not that grandma. No. Is it his grandma? No I think he based it off Cesare's mother so who is a grandma.
Who is a grandma, yeah. Yeah yeah yeah so yes fair fair fair. My my grandma not such a good pasta cooker. Okay. What?
Is it okay? Yeah. I mean okay. Rob uh Traws wrote in about fiddleheads we're finally getting to it. Uh from Portland not Portland over in uh Beardland, Portland, Maine.
Not that you can't grow a beard in Portland, Maine, but it's a different kind and probably it's more although they're both kind of lumberjacky, right? Portland, Maine and Portland uh you know in in Oregon both kind of lumberjacky. Yeah oh speaking of before I get into this question, Rob, I'm getting to your question in a minute. But uh Port when I think of Portland uh Oregon I think uh uh oh by the way Jeffrey Morgenthaler bar out there just came out with a cocktail book you gotta check it out you know Portland. But uh you know Andy Ricker of uh Pacpock who uh you know was before he became also a New York guy Portland guy uh I was just thinking of him because I was thinking of Thailand uh and it came to my attention last week.
If you go to the Guardian in UK, Guardian dot UK they did some research. Came to my last uh attention that the largest uh farmed shrimp producer in Thailand who ships all over the world, including to U.S. at like Walmarts and Costco's and you know, all the big box joints like that, and like I think in the UK and like Tesco, all the big places in there, that they um unbelievably use slave labor, literal slave labor. Now they don't directly hire them so that they you know they can't get necessarily caught. But here's how it works.
And I was completely shocked. You can go watch an 18-minute video online. And I I didn't even, you know, you think about a lot of stuff when you buy food, you think about sustainability. You like some people think about you know, um, you know, that like whether it's local or not. You know, I remember uh you know Patrick came on saying, don't think about local, local's not important.
That's what Patrick Martin was saying uh the other day uh here, uh Martin's. But the uh, you know, people think about that, they think we think about the health, we think about um economics. We tend not to think that our food is made by slaves. You know what I mean? We just tend not to think about you tend not to think that, hey, maybe my food's made by slaves.
So what happens is is uh like human uh smugglers, traffickers, uh they go to Burma and they convince people that they're gonna get a job in Thailand because the unemployment in Thailand is very low, right? So, and you know, in Burma not not so low. So they they go, they find people and they're like, hey, we're gonna take you over to Thailand where you're gonna get a good job, right? And they smuggle them into Thailand, and when they get to Thailand, instead of actually giving them a good job. They sell these people to uh ship captains, boat captains, fishing boat captains.
And uh what they said in the Guardian was it's like 400 pounds or 450, you know, British pounds. Because British. So like I think I think it was pounds, not dollars, but something like that. So uh a ship captain, this is these are real, this is real, literal, thousands and thousands of people are literally being purchased for like four hundred pounds sterling, right? And then they're on these boats uh and they theoretically have to work until it's paid back.
But since they're not paid anything on the boat, they can't ever get it, it never gets paid back. And so they sit there and they are they are treated like slaves in that they are beaten, and if they try to escape, they are beaten and sometimes shot, beat to death, worked uh, you know, every day, seven days, like you know, uh sometimes up to you know 20 hours a day. Uh if they you know uh horrible conditions. They're underfed because they you know they just work them until until basically until they escape or they die. And uh they f they catch trash fish on these boats, and the fish is then uh taken ashore and sold and converted to fish meal, and that fish meal is what's sold to the uh shrimp farms uh and fed to shrimp.
So, you know, the the entire industry, the shrimp farming industry is supported on the catch of these trash fish, and a lot of the boats that supply that are uh slave labor. And the and the big the big folks, the you know uh the the the big producer there, I think it's CP, I think I forget, uh, is the doesn't really care one way or the other where the fish meal comes from. So if it comes from you know the sweat of slaves, then so be it. So I encourage all of you to go online, the guardian.uk and look at uh their expose on that. And I did some research, it's not anything completely new.
In other words, it's not it's not horse crap, it's real. Like a couple other people have reported on the same thing. Uh and I was just kind of shocked, you know. Kind of shocked uh that that kind of stuff still goes on. Anyway, so uh Dave, we have a caller on the line right now.
Okay. Yeah, sure. Caller, you're on the air. Hi. Hey.
Um, so hard to follow up on that conversation, but I have a more benign question about uh kitchen ventilation. Okay. As you mentioned earlier. I was wondering I have a about a 90 square foot apartment kitchen. It's separated from the rest of the apartment.
Uh and there's a window in it. So the natural ventilation as these things go isn't awful, but obviously it's exit air. It's still a problem. What is is there a cheap solution just to just be getting a exhaust, you know, building an exhaust van and then opening the window and you can intake air when it's operational, or is this sort of system a lot more complicated than you know than just getting an exhaust fan? Okay.
So here so I have some experience with this because in my new in my old kitchen, I actually installed an illegal restaurant hood, right? Uh and and piped it directly out of my window. And that worked great because the then in my current kitchen I have uh I j I have a an extremely powerful window fan. Extremely powerful, uh like a huge blower that I have uh you know attached with a register right at my window so that the window, in other words, it looks like a big block is coming out of the top of my window and the window's always a little bit open because the fan is permanently installed there, right? Uh but you can't see it because it looks like Louvers.
But it's it's easily twice as powerful as my old as my old fan. Um and quiet. Because when you're when you're buying a fan for ventilation, uh the mistake people make is they get little fans, and little fans spit have to spin very, very quickly to uh get the exhaust flow out. And the faster that a fan spins, the more irritating and loud typically the uh the motor is, right? So you want if you can to figure out a way to get a larger s like a larger fan with uh slower moving um uh blades, and also they like every decent fan is rated on the decibel level, so like they can do a lot of stuff with the geometry of the blades uh to get uh fans that have a lot lower noise rating, and believe me, it's worth spending twice as much on a fan with a lower noise rating because you're gonna be running it for hours and hours and trying to hold normal conversations in the kitchen, and you know, like a bad fan is irritating even like way outside of the kitchen.
Then beyond that, you can insulate fans to try and get them, but that's a whole separate thing. So your question was specifically can I just put a window fan in? Here's the issue. Is you where is your stove in relation to the f window? Uh stove is about uh six feet, six, seven feet from the window.
Right. So the the issue is is that in a in a hood, you have uh it's a hood over the stuff that's crew that's creating the smoke. Smoke tends to go up, right? And then because the suction is directly over that hood, it tends to gather, suck, and shoot it out the window. So you actually are only evacuating a fairly small amount of space, right?
So when you're trying to when you're trying to do a whole room, even if it's contained, you now have to contend with the fact that the you have to evacuate that entire room. So that the capacity, the airflow that you need to get is all of a sudden a lot bigger. So here's how you can help it, right? You can get a fan directly in a window, right? That's going to create some movement away.
But the issue is that the smoke is going to go up, and then it's only going to evacuate at the rate that it can evacuate, and then it's going to roll over into the other areas of the house, just because the fan in the window is not sufficient to create an actual movement of air across out of your window. The other problem is that you're going to have is that houses have or apartments have a natural kind of draw to them. So for instance, you need to check to see whether it like like an apartment can either naturally be kind of uh be sucking air out of the hallway or pushing air into the hallway depending on how the airflow in the building works. Also, you know, if you have cross ventilation depending on how the layout of your apartment, you could have cross-ventilation that naturally wants to go one way or naturally wants to go the other way. So you kind of need to figure out what wants to happen in your apartment naturally.
So but once you decide to install a window fan, then you need to get air moving out of that window. You need to figure out how to get the best breeze that's floating from the one side of your kitchen towards the window and out. So one way you can do that is install a secondary fan, like a ceiling fan pointed towards uh your vent fan, and that's gonna help create movement such that the entire mass of air wants to move out of your window. Uh or you know, you might be lucky and have a natural draw out of your window, uh your kitchen window anyway, in which case you go into into a different room like the bathroom and open a bunch of windows, anything that's gonna get good cross-ventilation out, and that's gonna assist it out. But it's easy to tell, just make some smoke, open that window, make some smoke and see where it goes, right?
And then try to figure out a way to get it just moving out the window in an efficient uh fashion because uh it's harder when you're just putting something in the window versus installing a fake hood. Now you can install a fake hood, and the reason why it's illegal though is because um well, first of all, it's a big pain in the in the butt to do it, but it's illegal because uh uh you know, in a hood, you get a lot of grease going into the hood, and you could have a fire, and they're worried about you ejecting a fire through a vent duct out into the uh into in you know, and that's gonna catch fire, go up and catch the apartment above you on fire. With a window fan, that's not an issue because it there's not a ducting system that they have to worry about. And that's so there's no rules when you have a window fan versus uh a hood. You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, yeah. I mean I thought one one other one other thing to consider, and it's you know, it's in favor of the window fan is that it might go stuff like it's one of the apartment really low output gas though. Right. So thinking of getting an induction, you know, one induction burner at least, but that's portable enough that you could place it closer to the window, if not next to the window, and have a shorter path to the exhaust. Does that make sense?
Is that you know you could build lock battle cooking or steering on that closer to the X. Do you have 220 in your apartment? No, it's pretty primitive wiring, actually. There's only a couple outlets in the whole mission. Yeah, so uh, you know, even like a decent induction burner that runs off of a standard 120 circuit puts out uh you know enough power to be better than most uh than uh than a crappy home range, right?
So yeah, you could win that way having a burner under there. Uh you know, but one thing you could do is, and you could even make it, you know, you know, non permanent if you want, is just uh, you know, put like a, you know, above your window, because you don't want to get rid of light for good, you know, for God's sakes, but you could have like a like almost like a little hood thing over the window that's going to help suck up and out the window. It in other words, yes, cooking right under the window is going to be helpful. And then if you have that fan going there, like uh having like like a bonnet over the top that captures the the the smoke as it goes up and helps funnel the air out the window might also be helpful. You know, otherwise otherwise if it doesn't directly get sucked out by the fan, it'll hit your ceiling and then roll in both directions and then you know down and you're gonna lose some.
You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So you could try that and that'd be uh fairly fairly easy. Um you know you're still going to run into problems when you're using the oven as opposed to the the you know the the range. I mean in the fan this sort of fan you're looking at something that an industrial and not a consumer you know what's what is there a best you know place to look for something like this for a apartment window.
Well also a lot depends I mean if if it's your only source of light in the kitchen, natural light, you have to always uh you know it's a it's a you don't want to take up too much of the window because then you've taken up a lot of the window. But then if you have to do a lot of rigmarole like install the fan every time you want to use it well then you're never going to use it, right? So what I would say is that um you know the the best uh benefit ratio benefit to losing window ratio might be um I don't know how wide your window is but a lot of times you can fit something like two eight inch fans in and then you just want to get the quietest eight-inch fans that you can. Uh, and sometimes they even make ones that are like double fans, and you'll see them in a lot of uh like restaurants will get them uh and they kind of fake use them as ventilation, you know, like uh you know, especially like down in my neighborhood, like in Chinatown. They make fairly small ones.
They're not quiet, but they're kind of industrial, and they're on shock mounts so that they're not vibrating like lunatics, and they're just big enough that they're don't have that irritating jet jet engine noise that like the little hood fans do. Uh you know what I'm talking about? Like they have like they look like almost like the one of those things called those oscillating fans that you have on your desks, like that size fan, but the the two of them are mounted on like uh on like a steel on a like a steel plate, and you mount that steel plate in the top of your window and you kick those suckers on and they move some air. That's it, that seems like the best. I mean, I've I've dealt with you know, I've had like plastic versions of those that are pretty limpy.
Yeah. And frankly, it's sort of like there's not it's only with like steering and lock hooking where the smoke is actually a huge problem. So I feel like it's you know, it's not like there's you know, the fire on the whole time than just creating smoke constantly when cooking most things. So it's also that's good, like like in early in like late spring, early summer, like when you just need to get some airflow in the house, you like open the you know, it depends on your apartment, but you open the bathroom window and then you open this guy, turn this on, and you suck the stuff through, and you can get a good breeze through the house. You can build up an airflow if it's getting stagnant.
So I use my hood for that sometimes too. Yeah, and it it's it's in the there's a smoke detector outside the kitchen on the other side of the wall, but it seems to be sealed enough that you know the smoke detector never goes off, even if the kitchen is you know completely full of smoke, even though the smoke detector's working. So it seems to be a pretty, you know, it it has good cross ventilation through the bathroom, but it's you know, reasonably here, it's like the rest of the apartment. They're just getting a mild amount of exhaust. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If that's the case, then yeah, I mean, uh I would just you want um for sound like for a given uh number of CFMs, uh the smaller the blades that you use to get that level of CFMs, the louder it's gonna be. So it's it but uh the bigger the blade that you use, the more window space you take up. And so that's that's kind of the bargain you're gonna have to drive with yourself. Um you know what I mean? Yeah.
Well, this is it this is super helpful. All right, alrighty. Good luck with this. And uh and when you when you install it, give us a call back and uh let us know uh how it worked out. Okay, thank cool.
Uh okay, Rob, I'm getting back to your question. So, fiddleheads from Portland, Maine, right? And I'm not gonna get lost in a tangent on Thailand and slave shrimp. You ever used listen to a public enemy? No, you said you were gonna get into it too.
Yeah. They have a song about slave ships, and it's like shick slave ships. And now all I can think of is slave shrimp. Um that song, the public enemy song is going in my head with with sl uh with uh uh slave shrimp. And then you don't know that song?
Tangent fiddlehead. Fiddleheads, oh my god. Joe, you listen to Public Enemy? Oh my god. No, you don't have to.
I I do, but that's all I'm gonna say. Thank you, Joe. Maybe later we can get into it. Okay, I'm not gonna get into it. Great album, though.
Okay. Uh I was recently up in Portland, Maine at one of my favorite restaurants and was presented with lightly uh pickled fiddleheads as a garnish to my sandwich board of charcuterie. It was awesome. I was always under the impression that fiddleheads were to be cooked for ten minutes. There was no way this little uh violin was cooked for more than two minutes before being shocked.
The fern was bright green, crisp, and appeared to be an ostrich fern. Was definitely not a bracken. Is it safe to eat ostrich-filled heads lightly blanched? Does pickling or pH play a role? I would love to be able to eat ostrich fiddleheads blanched or is crisp refrigerator pickle where the fresh flavor and texture predominates.
It seems the bracken fern gave the whole lot of fiddleheads some bad press, resulting in overcooked ferns across the board, but there's little information that I could find on the internet. P.S. can't wait for my pair of Sears alls to arrive, regards Rob Trapas. Uh who, by the way, Rob always very good at providing the pronunciation for his name, which I would uh I would not be able to pronounce uh otherwise. There, you know, I try to appreciate because everyone knows that I cannot pronunciate uh uh pronoun pronunciate.
Did I just say pronunciate? Okay. So the issue is this uh a lot of ferns when they're coming when fur you know, the a lot of ferns when they're growing, when the uh fronds first uh come out of the ground in the springtime, they are curled up and they look like uh fiddleheads. You like fiddle studs? Mm-hmm.
Okay. So uh so the one like the most common fern in the U in the US, and maybe I don't know, around the world, I have no idea, is uh a bracken fern, right? Bracken ferns um have been eaten for since forever. Like Native Americans eat it. They you know it's eaten a lot in Asia, it's eaten all over the world, bracken ferns, right?
But bracken ferns contain uh a uh uh poison, and there's uh you know, uh several of them. Uh and the one that they you know is most prominent is called uh taquilicide, right? And so then there's a huge question of, you know, and and different bracken fern populations, and maybe even plant to plant within a given population have wildly different uh amounts of these poisons in them. They are somewhat water soluble, so they leach out. They can actually leach into groundwater.
It's well known that animals that feed on bracken ferns um can have problems, you know, pr you know, pretty bad uh problems. Um, you know, uh blood, anemia problems, things like this. I believe it's also carcinogenic, although I'm not sure. So, but you know, there are a lot of people eat it uh all the time, and so there's a lot of question as to whether or not that's a problem. Now, ostrich ferns are different from bracken.
So uh the way you can tell an ostrich fern is uh a fiddlehead is that there's a U, there's a deep U-shaped groove in an ostrich fern. So if you think about fiddlehead stars, when you buy them in the store, like if you imagine them in your head, the inside uh curve of it has like a deep U channel in it, right? So you can obviously tell when you get an ostrich fern, because it's like that. Also, ostrich uh fern fiddleheads aren't hairy, and if you're picking them, there's like a little scaly thing of majig over the curly doodle part of the uh of the fiddlehead, right? So it's pretty easy to tell whether you have an ostrich fern or a bracken when you're when you're getting it.
Now, for many, many years, no one had problems with ostrich ferns, uh, or at least not that anyone knew of. And then there was a case in uh in in I think it was either upstate New York or or in Canada, where in 1994 of an actual poisoning incident that happened, food poisoning incident that happened with um ostrich ferns. So uh this is from the um from the I believe this is a CDC, yeah. This is a CDC talking about this original 1994, which was the first time I was able to find any records, and everyone points back to 1994 as the first time there's any problem with fiddleheads, and it goes like this. Fiddleheads, cruisers, of the ostrich fern are a seasonal delicacy, we know this already, uh uh harvested commercially in the northeastern United States and coastal provinces in Canada.
Although some common ferns may be poisonous or carcinogenic, this species has been considered to be non-toxic. However, in May 1994, outbreaks of food poisoning were associated with eating raw or lightly cooked fiddlehead ferns in New York and Western Canada. This report summarizes the investigation. So what happened is in 1994, a restaurant in Steuben County, New York uh had uh an illness among 20 people who had eaten at the restaurant, and they determined that it was the people who had eaten these lightly cooked fiddleheads. They were, I think, steamed for a couple of minutes or sauteed and then and then sent out.
And the vast majority of people that ate these fiddleheads got sick. And peep no one who hadn't eaten the fiddleheads really at the restaurant got got sick at all. So it was pretty clear that it was this. And it wasn't a bacterial problem, right? Uh, and it was very uh like the the on the there's the good news.
The onset of the illness was uh fast, very fast, uh, I think within a day, and also it only lasted for a day and and no nobody died, right? Uh then the same thing happened uh in Quebec in 1999 and in Anchorage, Alaska in 2010, right? So what it appears, what everyone seems to say in the literature is there is some sort of um there is some sort of toxin that's being produced uh by some fiddleheads, some ostrich ferns, right? Not all, but they don't know what it is yet. They know that if you cook the hell out of the ostrich fern, that you're not gonna have a problem.
If you cook it for 10 minutes, they know you're not gonna have a problem. They have no other way, since they don't know what it is in the ostrich fern that causes this thing, they don't know how to get rid of it, right? Other than by cooking. They don't know how to test for it. They don't know any of this.
All they know is that most of the time a raw ostrich fern is not going to hurt you. And then occasionally you'll get a batch of ostrich ferns that if you eat them undercooked lead to a short-lived but nasty case of gastroenteritis, but not, you know, cancer or you know, some sort of like, you know, uh actual poisoning where you where you know you you die or anything like that. So it looks like, you know, uh you're kind of on your own there. Like if you want to eat them raw or lightly cooked or pickled, you probably won't uh have a problem, i.e. you didn't when you had it in Portland, Maine, but you just never know when you're when you're gonna get a batch that might cause uh this kind of an outbreak.
And they like I say, it's not as far as they know, it's not bacterial in nature, so you can't like you know uh use some other technique to get rid of bacteria. Uh so it's interesting problem. And if any of you uh I looked at the most that was the most current research I could find was from 2010, and still nobody seems seems to know what the hell's going on with it, so there you have it. Um they're gonna kick us off pretty soon, right? Yep.
So do you have uh do you have your email? I had the question from all right, let me get let me get this up. We had a question in uh from uh long time a listener, uh um Ellie Nasser, right? And saying, Hello, Dave and crew. I was hoping you might be able uh to save me some bucks.
I would be and I spoke to him on the Twitter a little bit about this, but I figured I'd read it on here. Uh I would be eternally grateful to you and the cooking issues crew, my poly science immersion circulator, the creative series. Which one's creative series? You remember? Is that the original one?
Anyway. Stopped heating the water. It's only about a year and a half old. It only has one year warranty, of course. And poly science wants eighty, of course.
That's like something your mom would say. One year, of course. And poly science wants, she doesn't talk like that. Uh poly science wants $85 to look at it plus shipping. The circulator powers up, the pump works perfectly, and the icon for heating, which looked like wave, shows up as if it should be heating the water, but the heater is definitely not actually coming on and heating the water.
Any ideas of what I could look for to make it work? Maybe a burnt fuse or something, or should I go ahead and ship it and eat the cost? Well, since it he did that. What I said to him was let's open it, look at it, and seeing, you know, see whether or not you see anything loose or broken. Uh he opened it, and what he saw was that there is the wire or that connects to the heater element was kind of fried and gross looking.
And so what I said to him, which is true, is that a lot of circulators, I haven't seen this problem on a modern circulator, like you know, when I say modern, like you know, less than like eight, nine years old. But a lot of the old circulators have a lot of mechanical connections in them between wires and things like heaters, right? Where the the wire is crimped around the heater. Here's what happens in a high moisture environment. So if you store your circulator in a very moist or humid environment, or if you if your kitchen is extremely humid, or you run your circulators in a closet, even though there are fans that try to keep moisture and air outside of the inside of the circulator when it's running, you can get a high moisture environment on the inside of the circulator.
What happens then is that the metal contacts uh between, let's say the heater and the uh and the and the heater wire. I've seen it happen in fuse connectors where the fuses pop in because that's a physical connection that's not soldered, uh, those things can corrode. When they corrode, they become a resistor, right? And what resistors do when electricity passes through them is they heat up. And so what you can get is very, very, very hot, locally hot uh spots, and they can be hot enough some places to uh I've had them melt fuses, uh, I've had them uh burn through wires eventually, melt, uh, melt uh you know the insulation around it.
And so what you need to do in a situation like that is first of all, like take stock of what happened and try to figure out what like why how it got so humid on the inside of a circulator, but you have to cut off the section of the wire where it is uh is is oxidized because that part's ruined. You don't want because it's hard to solder to it if it's completely ruined like that. Cut that part off, strip a new section, take the old end of the heater where it was all burnt and mangled, take a nail file and cover everything else up because the last thing you want to do is get a metal filing dust in the inside of your circulator. You need to completely cover everything so that filings cannot get into your circulator. And you want to take uh a like a nail file and file or sandpaper the end of the heater so it's bright and clean.
Then you can get uh soldering iron and solder because that and that part of the heater doesn't get that hot, and you can solder onto the spade terminal, which is on the end of the heater, you can solder the wire onto it and then wrap some electrical tape or a little heat shrink around it and put it down. And once you solder it, it will not corrode because you've now made an actual connection that air cannot get into no matter what happens, and you're good to go. Um so that is how I would solve uh that problem. And on the way out, we had a question from uh at Clef's on the Twitter, and it was let me find you, Cliffs. Uh cooking issues.
Have you tried pulling a vac a vacuum on a Vitamix while it is blending? Is it worth it? Interested in reducing oxitation, oxidation, and cavitation. Uh also good because a lot of things that you blend, like hydrocolloids, and this is why I originally did it years ago, is that when you're blending a hydrocolloid, you whip air into it, and then you either have to suck a vacuum on it or do a lot of stuff to get rid of the air that you blended in, right? So, yes, I've tried to suck a vacuum on a Vitapep, and here's why it doesn't work, Clefs.
The bearings in a Vitapep are not completely airtight under pressure. They're airtight under normal circumstances. But when you suck a vacuum on it, which is roughly 15 PSI, you suck air and also like whatever nasty crap is in your bearing up through the bottom of the bearing and into the unit. So it's not possible to suck a good vacuum on uh the Vitapep. If you wanted to, you'd have to install a special sealed bearing on the Vitapep bottom or buy what's called a vacuum whip or vacuum mix, I forget vacuum, which is a dental tool that's used to mix and whip plaster for dental molds without introducing any air into it.
But unfortunately they're small now, but it's maybe something we can work on. It's something I've always wanted. And that's it for this week. Cooking shoes.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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