Lady me and baby dogs playing to the call, the cops call us the California honey drops. A little young a little whole with a little bit of soul. Here's a little something you ain't heard before. We played on the street, we made a little coin, built the time machine, and picked up Mr. Boyne.
Everybody's having fun, and we only just begun, we gon' party till the morning come. Today's episode of Cooking Issues has been brought to you by Wilma Jean restaurant, serving delicious fried chicken and other Southern Comfort Food Classics, plus great burgers located at 345 Smith Street. For more information, visit Wilma Gene 345.com. I'm Damon Bolte, host of the Speakeasy. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn.
If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. A little bit later. As later as we can push it, you see, we get kicked out of here because you know, we got people coming in. They gotta get ready for their program, all this other stuff, so we get Heidi Hoed out. Sometime around 1250, somewhere in that.
In that general region, calling your questions to 718 497 2128. That's 718 497 2128. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing? Good.
Yeah, I haven't seen you a while because I was in the Chicago. Mm-hmm. Yeah, nice. How you been? Fine.
Oh, I that was not the You didn't see it. You know how like when someone asks you something and you're about to say something and your lips close and your mouth inflates like you're about to say something, and then you're like she's about to say not fine. Yeah, shake shake it off. And then say fine. Like yeah, fine.
That's what that's a yeah, just for you if you can get that visual image. And Jack Insley, Insley, Insley in the booth. How you doing? I'm great. That was awesome.
Um how did you like the hams? Oh, the hands are delicious. Yeah, we did a handsome. It was Wednesday, it was the Wednesday. Uh so you know, last week we were at Harvard, uh, which is why we didn't do the show, unfortunately.
We wanted to, but the problem is it's scheduled for right before, and uh so I couldn't. Anyways. Uh so uh Sam Edwards, who, as well as Edwards and Sons, is uh sometime sponsor of our program, uh, and of the radio show radio uh network in general is a is a you know a well-known uh sponsor. Uh set up along with Patrick uh Martins the uh uh a ham tasting, which is actually like a very expanded new version of you know something that I think he's done a couple of times, and I did once in 2004, showcasing American uh country hams tasted side by side with uh their European uh counterparts. I had a lot of interesting people there.
How many did we taste, Jack? Like 14 or something? I think it was like 20. Twenty. It was a lot.
It was a lot of things. I made it to about fourteen or fifteen. I ate m I f ate fistfuls of ham more than other people did because that's just how I rolled. But the next day, I was like, uh I was like, oh that's my I need water. That night, that night is that was like that.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh my god. Oh my geez. And uh some interesting uh Virginia apple cider from uh that was good.
But anyway, but so is there a write-up of this whole thing somewhere on the on the uh Heritage Radio uh archive? I'll I'll post it on Twitter. Uh some information. I don't know. Yeah, but go check it out just because like I I could sit here and go, you know, blow by blow, but you know, I think Stas, you were there.
What do you think? Uh I thought it was good. I didn't say a woman of many woods. It was good. Yeah, anyways.
Uh a lot of interesting hams, including one of the interesting developments over the past oh eight, nine, ten years is uh American uh ham producers using uh controlling the feed of the animals. So we had some uh acorn fed uh American not acorn fed uh peanut fed American uh hogs and some other interesting stuff. So uh very interesting tasting. Uh I have Michael Macken on the line too as well. Oh, yeah?
All right, hey Michael, what's up? Hey Dave. Can you hear me? Yeah, what's going on? Awesome, man.
Hey, uh called to give you a hard time. Uh okay. Let me guess. Okay, so uh, you know the person who had the dust mite allergy, and you were talking to them about how uh when you start to feel a reaction coming out, a lot of times you'll just take some Benadryl and see what happens. At least for me, that's true.
Yeah, yeah. So I I have some experience with this too much, in fact, because my wife has an anaphlactic reaction to peanuts and tree nuts, and I I've been to the ER with her probably 15 times in the past ten years. Because restaurants are really shitty about knowing what they have nuts in, unfortunately. Right, right. But uh she's been this sort of the same advanced.
Like she's been having these reactions since she was a little kid and she's gotten pretty casual about 'em and would often just take some Benadryl and kind of wait and see what happens, and you know, maybe we'll go in and maybe we alone. And then uh just last year there was a uh 13-year-old girl at a camp that it was in New Jersey or something like that, who did exactly that. She's been having reactions her whole life. She kind of knew how strong they were or weren't. I had a rice crispy bar that turned out to have peanuts in it, took some Benadryl, thought she was fine, went to bed, and never woke up.
Oh my God. So it's it really is as tempting as it is to become casual about it. What can actually it it like one reaction can just get out of control and you don't even know, and it's not even necessarily dose specific or whatever. So you really should just always use that epithet and go in. Sucks.
Yeah, it does. Yeah, that sucks. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, I guess that's true, and s my reactions could get worse, and I guess I wouldn't know it either. I mean, I've never had luckily for me, it's simply that my throat closes up.
It's not that um it's not that I go into full body shutdown, you know, or uh or you know, but yeah, no, that's ex ac excellent, excellent advice and very sobering. Any good news to give me, Michael? Good news, uh yeah, we're having all types of fun back here in Seattle. Yeah, come see us. Oh, next time uh, you know, I need some reason.
Maybe maybe the book tour will send me out that way. Who knows? That's right, yeah. I ordered my book and also Lorraine, the uh social media person here at Chef Steps has told me she ordered a book for our in-house library. So we are excited to see the cocktail book, man.
Oh, nice. Hey, speaking of in-house library, did you hear that food arts closed? Sad. Sid, you know, you know food close food arts Magazine, which was kind of like, you know, uh, it's actually my first yeah, my what made you think of it was in-house library. This morning, when I heard they closed down, like they had a huge because they were sent every advanced cookbook, you know, advanced copies of cookbooks for reviews for the past probably, yeah, for the past like thirty years.
And uh I used to go into their uh their conference room was uh the library where all their stuff was, and this morning I've been thinking about how kind of sad it was because Michael Batterbury, you know, and Ariane, the two founders of it, uh they got me my first job in food. And um uh and they've been very helpful for you know, millions of people, not millions, but many people like Patrick, for instance. And uh, and I was just thinking this morning when I got up, I was like, I wonder what's happened to all those books. I hope they're donating them to some, you know, library or culinary school or something like that, because it's an amazing connection I had, yeah. Maybe you better get over there.
You could put a you know library wallet booker and docs. Well, I would feel I would feel a little bit mercenary being like, oh hey, and your books, you know what I mean? That's something that's that's something that Nastasha would accuse me of doing, right? She like Nastasia likes to think of me as this kind of just evil person, so she would that's how she would hope that I would do. She like thinks of me that way, right, Stas?
Yes. Well, you you distract them and Nastasha can make off of the books on the dollar. Wow, now Michael's calling you uh Stas is like the sneak thief. That's kind of right though. I guess the more you know her, the more she's a sneak thief.
Well, anyway, well, thanks for that word of caution, because I definitely don't want to be responsible for someone not going into the hospital when they should. And it is true that these things, your severity can change at any time, correct? Yeah, that that seems to be the truth. Sad the truth. Yeah, someday the doctors will figure this out and kick we'll kick the whole dang thing.
You know, they're doing a lot of really interesting work on where they sensitized you with absolutely microdoses over a long period of time, and and they can at least get you to the point where you don't die. Yeah, I mean, McGee's gonna keeps on saying he's gonna work on that with because he's shellfish allergies, and he's gonna he's keeps on saying he's gonna work on it. I mean, mine are so you know specific and mild that I don't think it's worth you know messing with. Um but if I had something as pervasive and dangerous as a nut allergy, maybe I'd give it a shot. You know what I mean?
Yeah, I suppose you don't really run into cherries randomly being in things, huh? Yeah, no, not so much. I mean, at certain times of year I do, and then if they're cooked, it's fine, unlike you know, peanuts, which don't appear to be destroyed by the processing. No, not at all. Yeah, like a c I've had cooked cherries and not died, you know, so so that's uh that's good.
And again, like I say, for me it's like a you know, it's fairly mild, it's just like the throat closing, which is only not mild because you can't breathe anymore and you need the oxygen, but it's not the you know what I'm saying. It's like you need the oxygen, but other than that, I'm fine. Yeah, to me the the throat closing doesn't sound mild. I'd be I'd be upset if my throat was closed, but uh I I hear you that you you feel comfortable, so that's good. Yeah, well people would think it's people think it's hilarious because I have like a sweet, sweet Donald Duck voice when it happens.
I sound just like Donald Duck until just before it starts to fully close up. So it's it's an amusing way to go for other people. Well, uh let's uh let's keep you around for a few more years if possible. All right, thanks, brother. Thanks for calling in.
All right, buddy. Take care. Thanks. Hey, Jack, do you have a reverb button over there? Yes.
Sweet, keep it on for a second. We're doing a new session called Cooking Issue Shout outs. Uh yes, uh, that's it. That's all I needed. Uh we have some shout-outs that we have to do.
Uh we gotta use that more often. We gotta do like a monster. Can we announce like a monster truck rally? Yeah, yeah, just give me the heads up. And we'll do the Sunday, Sunday, Sunday for all of those who do they have those stuff, do they have Sunday, Sunday, Sunday in California?
I don't remember. I mean, and it's been too long. You don't well, you would remember. I would remember me. Sunday.
We gotta do it. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. No, no, you don't remember that? No. Jack, you remember that, right?
Yeah, of course. Yeah, okay. Uh anyway, that's when monster truck rallies always are. They're on Sundays. Yeah, I'm saying I've heard them.
I don't think that they were in California. You know, there's two kinds of monster truck rallies. Well, there's probably a billion now, but when I was a kid, there's there's two kinds. I went to the wrong kind. Like there's the one with the monster trucks that drive over things and crush things, and that's what everyone wants to see, right?
And then there's ones where they just pull crap. And that's the one I went to. And then there's also the demolition derbies where a bunch of beat up crappy cars just like crash into each other. Do you know I've never seen one and it's kind of like a dream. Really?
I would love to see. I mean, they just they still do the same thing that I knew I used to know about. They used to f they fill the doors with concrete and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. So sweet, so sweet.
Anyway, uh, okay. So uh our shout out back to our shout outs. Our good buddy Daniel Rosenberg, who uh you know, I don't know his exact title over there. I don't know. He's at the Harvard, and he's in the there's a building over there called the Science Center, which is kind of cool because they have all the sciences are in there and they have a demonstration services thing, and Daniel's the guy there, you know, and so we're we go there all the time, and he has control over all the sweet, sweet, sweet demos that all of the science classes have uh at Harvard.
There's like one or two like you know, moron programs at Harvard that don't use the science building, and I'm sure they feel incredibly weak and stupid because they don't have Daniel doing their sweet sweet demos because he can set up he can set up anything. You're like, hey, I want to throw some uh some sodium into some water and like you know, have it explode. He's like, gotcha covered. Remember that when he did that for us? Oh so sweet, so awesome.
Uh he was a little mad at us last year when we didn't give him the information for the demo we were gonna do, and then set off the fire alarm and cleared out the building. But he's over it now. He's he's he's not angry with us anymore about that, right, Stas? Not angry with you anymore. Anyway, uh, so saw him last week at the at the Harvard, and he wanted to give us a shout out because he's working with the uh with the Ig Nobel, you know, familiar with the Ig Nobel Prizes?
It's like Nobel but ignoble. Yeah, yeah. So the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Uh he's involved with it this year, and it's kind of cool. Like they give they give out awards to kind of non-consequential but cool science kind of things or cool and like so.
What you want to do is go see and he this year it's food theme. He has some food theme stuff. So he's doing some like crazy dumb s'more stuff on the uh on this uh promo video, which you should watch, and uh and you should watch the uh live uh webcast that they're gonna have because this uh I don't know the day. Jack, could you look up the date? September 18th.
It's September 18th. There's a live uh webcast. Uh it is the 24th first international Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Every year it's always the first, like it's the 20th, whatever, like 27th. Anyway, uh go look at it on Improbable.com.
Uh check out his 30-second promo for the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and check it out. One of the things they have that you might find interesting, they have these things called 24-7 lectures, where they get very eminent uh scientists, they come in and the the thing is they have to explain in technical terms, explain, give a full technical explanation of their field in 24 seconds. Yeah. And then a seven word summary of what they do uh that is understandable by any uh layperson. Completely understandable by any lay person.
So what this actually boils down to is people start trying to explain what's going on, and in 27 seconds they get to blow a very loud like coach whistle in the ear of extremely eminent scientists, and then but sometimes they come up with like really amazing definitions. Like I forget what her name uh was, but uh uh some well known biologist came up with like the most awesome uh definition of biology ever, and it goes like this. If it gets infected, it's biology. There it is, biology, seven words. Sweet.
Anyways, uh second shout out. Uh Greg Mueller, uh, I guess it's Mueller, right? Because M U, like Mueller, like with an umlaut, but I don't know if once you're in America whether they just go with Muller. What do you think? Mueller.
Anyway, uh wrote in. Uh how about a shout out? We are doing an event in Lyon in January uh with uh chef George Castaneda, and it's called the Catering Cup, uh, International Catering Cup, another ICC, another freaking ICC, International Culinary Center, International Chef Conference, uh, International Culinary Cup, uh catering cup. Anyways, uh, it's kind of cool. It's uh it's a competition, and this is the first year, it's every two years, I think, and this is the first year that the uh Americans are competing.
In fact, so new that the Weasels up at International Catering Cup.com uh didn't put the American team on their page yet, but we're there, America. We're going. So you should uh check it out and support it. Uh catering cup.com forward slash English. And the the shtick is this each team must prepare the same dishes.
Uh this year it's 100% duck pate en cruit uh and exotic fruit chutney, a whole stuffed uh whole trout stuffed with cod and scallops with a cold emulsion sauce, an item made from three types of pork that's so much less specific than the other ones. Hey, I want you I want a freaking I want a trout stuffed with cod and scallops, and then uh you know, three kinds of pork. Like, what is that? That's nuts, French. Uh, and a dessert using dark chocolate tartlets, Victoria pineapple.
What is a Victoria pineapple? Don't know. Don't know. Uh, coconut and lime. So uh check out uh catering cup.com forward slash English.
And if you happen to be, it's not slash English, slash E N. And if you happen to be American, vote for us. And you can't really vote. It's like one of those things where they where they test you on like like uh first of all taste and second of all presentation. I don't know which one's first.
Hopefully it's taste. And then like, you know, cleanliness and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know whether they judge you on your spiel or not. That's the way cocktail uh competitions are they just judge you on spiels. Spiels.
Speaking of uh cocktails, just got back from uh the uh from Chicago, like I said, was doing um mod Mex with uh Rick Bayless who set up this thing called Mod Max, which is I guess modern Mexican, where they get some Mexicans, some people Americans doing Mexican stuff, and then just some knuckleheads like me going over there and working with Mexican ingredients and kind of talking about how these ingredients and or techniques have place in modern um you know, modern kitchens. Interesting, not modern necessarily meaning kind of like what we do, but just kind of like contemporary. Uh had uh some really interesting stuff over there, was at Frontera and uh Topolobambo and had uh delicious banana leaf ice cream. It's good. It's like almost like it was delicious anyway.
Uh I don't know, oh, and I also got to go to Aviary, but I don't really have time to talk about uh going to Aviary uh had a lot of cocktails. I'm not able to finish them all because of just so many cocktails. And it's and it's a sign, I think, of how adult I've become that did not even attempt to finish all the cocktails. Well that's Damon Bolti's like number one piece of advice when you go to a cocktail event. He said, never ever finish a cocktail.
Even Damon Bolti says that. Yeah, I mean, those of you who don't personally know Damon Bolti, let me just say the man knows how to squirrel away some liquor inside of himself. So uh, right? Mm-hmm. Right?
And and he's one of those freaking like culinary twins here in uh what is his brother Deuce does? Rolling Stone or Spin Magazine? Writer? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, so he's at least at least only one half of the twins are in uh culinary stuff here, but there's like so many culinary twins, and then when you see like the one and you don't know it's the other here, I can think of like four or five sets of twins here in uh in the New York area.
It freaks me out. I mean, whatever, it's not his fault. Right? Anyway. Uh okay.
Uh Kyle Payton wrote in, says, Can I get more information on the bottle style carbonation setup you have for home seltzer? Uh oh or not, I I have I have an actual inline carbonator. Well, Rudy Tutie for me. But uh if you want to do bottle style carbonation, which in the end is much more um what's the word I'm looking for? Much uh m more economical than using a soda stream, right?
I mean it's a little more of a pain in the butt, but it's much more uh economical. It you what you need is you need a a CO2 tank. Now it depends on how your counters are. Some people can fit a full 20-pound CO2 tank under their uh counter. Uh if you can't, right, like I can't because mine goes underneath where my sink is, and so it just doesn't clear.
But most of you can if you have a full cabinet depth that you can fit it in. Remember to strap it down, you don't want to have it fall over it. Don't keep a lot of CO2 tanks because if one breaks, you don't want it to asphyxiate you by opening the stuff up, but yada yada yada yada yada. Anyways, you can get a twenty pounder, you can get a uh a five pounder, which is a lot smaller, but there's a little known uh and little used uh ten pound unit. So what I recommend is going to Mark Powers, uh who they're in Guntersville, Alabama, and they can sell you, they have the best price on like the regulators, the hoses, and the fittings.
So all you need is a and they'll sell you an empty tank and you get it refilled at a welding supply shop in your area. And you can usually just drive if you you live in the suburbs, you can drive your uh in the trunk, put your in a trunk drive in and swap them out and it's relatively inexpensive. You know, it everything depends on where you live, but a 20 pound CO2 tank can do like 400 gallons of seltzer and cost less than 20 dollars okay to swap out. So you get your empty tank, you own a high pressure regulator, one that they because the lower pressure ones that are made for beer don't go quite high enough, especially if you're going to use things like cocktails. You need to also buy you don't need it but I would highly recommend buying what's called a regulator cage and it's a metal thing that goes around your regulator so that the gauges don't get smashed.
You can buy very expensive gauges uh that they kind of don't get smashed but in general they're hundreds of dollars whereas the regulator I buy is more like thirty dollars it's a tap right and it's very cheap because it's made to you know be used by every person who has like a brew uh you know a beer set up in their in their restaurant so they sell eight bajillion of them and they're consequently fairly cheap. They're not quite as accurate maybe but you probably don't care. What you do care is that they're not they're fairly fragile. So I would get those cages uh that you just bolt onto the back I would also buy uh an extra plastic washer for the high pressure CO2 washer and the reason the tank washer and the reason is there's a little um there's a usually a little rubber thingamajiggy on the regulator that seals with the high pressure on the CO2 uh tank but sometimes this can degrade and if you have one of the plastic white things zip tied to your regulator at all times then no matter what happens you are able to seal your tank properly and you're good. So I'll get one of those and then uh use a a bunch of uh flex hose.
I use one quarter uh beverage hose, which is um re-it's like braided reinforced polyethylene hosing. That stuff never breaks. Uh the stuff that people will sell that's more flexible, they consider better for carbonating because it's not as stiff. I've seen break a bunch of times, the unreinforced stuff, like the red specifically uh tubing that people sell, so I'd stay away from that. And there's a hose barb uh fitting that goes on, and you want there's a little uh flare, it's a flare fitting, uh flare CO2 washer, and then I would take it directly to a barbed uh uh gas fitting, which is great, the gray fitting from a beverage uh from a ball lock connector or the old stuff, and you can get this all from Mark Power.
Uh and you want some clamps that clamp down on it. You can use a little hand hose clamps that screw down, but I hate them. I hate them. I don't use them. I use uh what we're called Odoker clamps, which are little uh little things that crimp down and have ears and they never come off and they don't cut my hands, and I don't hate them like I hate the other ones.
But if you're only making one rig, just use the ones that I hate that have a little screw, but man, I hate them. And uh after that, that's everything you need except for the carbonator cap, which you can get on Amazon.com. It's called liquid bread, is the corporation that makes it the carbonator cap, and some soda bottles, which you can save. Make sure that the uh liquid is extremely cold. Uh you can even throw a couple, smash a couple small chunks of ice into the bottle when you're carbonating, because carbonating raises the temperature of the uh of the stuff slightly.
Uh makes so it's ice cold. You can even have some ice in the bottle. Uh fill it two-thirds to three quarters with water three-quarters of the way through, fill, squeeze uh all the air out, screw the carbonator cap on, carbonate it at like 35, depending on 40 psi. Don't turn it upside down because there's no check valve in this system. You don't want water rolling in.
Shake it, vent it once, shake it again, throw it in your fridge, and sell surf for days. What do you think? Yeah. Okay. Uh about a quick break.
Yeah. Ooh, okay, quick break. Coming back with cooking issues. So today's episode of Cooking Issues is brought to you by the restaurant Wilma Jean, serving delicious fried chicken and other Southern Food Comfort Classics. Great burgers, too.
They're located at 345 Smith Street. And these are the people behind Searsucker and Nightingale Nine. So again, that's Wilma Jean. Wilma Jean345.com. One more announcement.
We've got a great event, The Silver Snail, 25 Years of Slow Food, will be hosted by Slow Food USA Heritage Radio Network and Roberta's Pizza. It's been 25 years since Carlo Petrini and a group of activists launched a peaceful revolution to defend regional traditions, good food, gastronomic pleasure, and a slow pace of life. The Slow Food Movement has since evolved into a comprehensive approach to food that recognizes the strong connections between plate, planet, people, politics, and culture. Today this movement involves thousands of projects and millions of people in more than 160 countries worldwide. Join us for a dialogue between Slow Foods founder Carlo Petrini and Locavore activist Alice Waters as they reflect on the evolution of the food movement and all things slow.
That's Friday, October 3rd, from 11 30 to 2 30 p.m. at Roberta's. You know what's weak, Jack? You have all those peas, and then you had to throw in culture. I know.
You had all those freaking peas. Give me those give me the peas again. Plate, planet, people, politics, and culture. Yeah, what the hell? There's no word for culture to start with a P.
I mean, you should either change some of the other ones so you don't have all the P's, and then you're like, oh, sweet, this dude's only using Ps. You know what I mean? And then it's like I mean, I would even like I would even just be like, and Pulture. Planet, people, politics, and Petrini. Oh, yeah, you got Petrini working with people, planets, what people, planets, plates, politics.
Culture. Pulture. Right? I mean, just do it. See what people say.
I mean, like, you need to see. It's like this, I mean you need the P. The C just is not working for you, bro. I don't know. Anyway, maybe I'm wrong.
I could be wrong. I've got a caller on the line. All right, caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave. How you doing?
Good. How are you? All right. I have a question about the fears all and changing my shipping address because I'm moving um to a new address since I since I funded on the Kickstarter. Okay, where are you in the US or you abroad?
Yeah, US. Okay. Amazon already has all of the addresses. We've shipped all the addresses like to Amazon. Uh we might be able to still change it though, is that true?
Yeah, we can change it. Yeah, but Amazon already has all the addresses and all of the all of the Sears alls have been built. There might still be time if you e email uh the cooking issues, uh email like I'll just email Sears all at BookerInDAX.com. If it goes to your old address, does that mean you're never gonna see it, or is this just more convenient? Um if it goes to the old address in the next two weeks, we're okay.
If it if it goes after that, then I'll never see it.com uh and uh and we'll push through email today and we'll push through the change uh with uh Amazon and we'll s we'll send confirmation out because we're gonna send a confirmation email on shipping along with the address. Amazon does. Amazon sends and Amazon's gonna send you an email based, but not everyone s sent us their email. Make sure you we have the email with it so that we can uh add the email to the um not everyone gave us their is that true or is everyone have an email? Everyone has an email, so put it there uh and I can go out, but hurry because they already have all of the all the shipping information.
Perfect, and that's Booker and dash A and D. Yeah, A N D D A X. And you know, and again, like they're I'm probably the uh actually Nastasia's probably the most frustrated. Yeah. Yeah, I'm second most frustrated, and then maybe Drew, our partner's third most frustrated.
Uh uh but the Sears alls have all been built. And uh I can't I mean I I'm supposed to not really but they they're literally just waiting for a reapproved uh instruction sheet. Uh uh so anyways. Uh they are they're all built and rest assured they are in fact I personally have seen a thousand of them. There's a thousand of them sitting in Booker and Dac's uh lab right now.
Anyways, what do you what you st you don't want me to talk about, Stan? Well I'm sure all the New Yorkers will come tear down the walls if they know they're sitting in the lab. Well, don't do that. Uh but anyway, so uh that's the story, and it's uh still possible. And then after everyone gets their everyone gets their fulfillment off of Kickstarter and Shopstarter, because obviously they come first, then the remainder from this shipment are gonna go on to Amazon.
Uh but are we good? We can't because it's uh it's media only gets pre-order status. We're not media. Okay. Cool.
But anyway, as soon as uh as soon as Amazon then starts shipping them out to uh the fulfillment stuff, then go on Amazon. Hey Hey David, is the book gonna be out at Starchefs, by the way? When when is Starchefs this year? What's that? When is Starchefs?
Book comes out uh like first week of November or like November 8th or November 9th. Uh I think it's first week of November, like November 3rd. So if Starchefs is after that, then the book will be out. But I don't know. Oh, it's like the week before.
It's like the last week of October. Ow, busted. Come on. I don't know. I'll see I'll see I'll see.
They'll they will exist in the in the country, but I don't know whether or not they're allowed to do maybe they are. I'll talk to the publishers. If they're publishers are allowed to do it. Um you know. Yeah, because last year uh Alex Panaki had they look out a week early.
Really? Well, uh I know that I don't that might not have been with Norton. I know currently they're doing some work with Norton, which is my publisher, but I don't know whether that book was with Norton. But I'll I'll talk to them because that would be fun, right? Be fun.
I'll pick one, I'll pick one up from the bar for you. Uh yeah, yeah. All right, well so we'll see. We'll s I'll I'll see. I'll I'll uh I'll look into it.
I'll definitely look into it. Okay, cool. All right, thanks. Thanks a lot. Uh okay.
Now, uh had a question in from Andrea. Uh hi there. Um I'm from Germany and listen to your show uh regularly. I have a question regarding baking without eggs. I am not a vegan, but I don't tolerate eggs, and all my attempts at baking cakes have been awful.
Bunt and sponge cakes turn out extremely moist and heavy and not light and fluffy at all. This might be okay in a fudgy, a fudgy brownie light cake, but I'm looking for a sponge slash siffan cake. It is usually just made with eggs, flour, sugar, and baking powder, uh, and all that can be used for layering cakes with uh and all that can be used for layering cakes with whipping cream or switch rolls, kind of or angel food cake, but with uh the yolks also being used. I've tried various egg replacers, but they don't work well either. Do you have uh any idea and a good recipe for that?
Thanks for your help. Uh Andrea, okay. Well, I mean, there's a number of things that eggs do, right? Uh so the yolks provide so if you're looking for like the the tenderness like provision that you get out of things like yolks, right? Then you can add uh, I guess you can just supplement the fat for the fat that's in the egg yolks, and you could probably add some uh emulsifiers like soilethis and something like this, and probably get some of those uh effects.
Um but um the other thing that the eggs have in them is protein, which provides uh structure for things like uh angel food cakes and sponge cakes uh as their setting. So it aerates, right, because it can hold air, and then it sits there holding its structure until it's baked, at which point you form an actual interlocked cooked starch and protein network that holds the structure of the cake, you know, until you eat it, right? So the question is how do you uh get around this? So some people try to make uh if you look on the on the internet, which I'm not gonna endorse any of these recipes because I've never made one, but if you look on the internet, some people used uh sweetened condensed milk in uh their uh flourless, I mean sorry, flour uh egless uh sponge cake stuff, presumably because the super uh thick uh structure of that allows the batter to hold uh its uh leavening and structure better as it's baking. So there's what they're fundamentally doing, I would guess, is just increasing the viscosity of their um of their of their batter.
There might also be something because of the extra milk protein that's in it. I don't know. They're also jacking the sugar in it, but but whatever. I guess they're reducing the sugar for the rest of the stuff. But that's probably presumably that's an increased viscosity effect, maybe an effect from the protein in the milk, I don't know.
Um if you're using an egg replacer, egg replacers, uh, I think I have to look up specifically what kind of egg replacer you're using. There, by the way, is the there's these folks in uh California who are working, and I think there's two separate companies, one of which already has one product, I think, in Whole Foods, but they're working on direct uh egg replacers that that satisfy kind of all of the culinary functions of eggs. I again have never used it, but I know Bill Gates is sponsoring one to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. So you have to wait for that guy to come out. But a lot of times what they're doing is A, they're adding viscosity.
Sometimes they're gonna add protein, but probably not usually, and then they're gonna add some sort of holding uh capacity for structure with something like Xanthan, something that forms kind of a um something that can form kind of a a little bit of a uh a gel, like a weak gel, uh, but it's not gonna be like too crazy with uh binding and messing with water. So you can add these kinds of things like heavy xanthan makes it snotty for an egg replacer. But as you say, you haven't had a lot of uh luck with that. I have used in the past, Johnny Azini and I years ago developed a um like a sp like a sponge cake, eggless, uh actually like angel food cake almost, but it ended up being more like a sponge cake that used a product called methylcel uh the methyl cell, which is a uh I think we were using there's two different varieties we were testing, the SG, which is a super gelling series, and the A series. I don't know if we published it.
I have to look online for like and he might have published it uh on his own later, but it was uh methyl cell-based uh kind of eggless uh angel food batter that we put through an IS through an EC through a siphon to for aeration. And the main the main thing sh you know shtick with that was is that methyl cell, when you heat it, it sets. It's like one of the few hydrocolloids that as you heat it, it forms a gel uh because it actually loses its ability to be uh to use its loses its solubility and gels out as it's heated. So we would spray it out of an out of an uh an EC whipper of the batter, we'd spray it out into a pan, uh it would be pre-airated, you throw it in an oven, and the heat of the oven, instead of expanding and popping uh uh, you know, the gel, which is what would normally happen in an oven, actually sets the gel. And so you would have these cakes that were set, and then as they cooked, the actual starch in there would be enough to hold this thing together, and then it would um and then it would be fine.
The problem with it is is that methyl cell responds poorly to milk. So you want to do a non uh non-mil-based uh recipe if you're gonna if you're gonna do that. Another thing you might want to do, and I've never tried it before, but you take the whatever the water base of the eggs would be for whipping, right, and uh make a a gel and fluid gel with it. The reason I use gel-an is it it doesn't uh break so much. So you then use a gel-an fluid gel, you blend it so it's uh I would do it relatively thick, and then that structure, if you whip it or you know, you have some way to whip it or aerate it beforehand, or even with that will hold its structure as it's as it bakes and won't break.
I haven't tried it again, but that's something you might want to try. Another thing thing is you could uh add extra thickening power to it in the form of other viscosity building agents. Um I don't I don't know exactly which one you want to use or what you have access to, but you know, that's in general what people are trying to do. Sorry, I don't have anything more specific. What do you think, Steph?
Good. Yeah, all right. Uh boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Um Philip Wolf Right in uh he saw us at the lecture uh last week at the Harvard he wrote in. But uh he had actually interesting thing, one of the things we talked about was that uh McGee and I had and Nils actually had uh done a course where we were cooking octopus after octopus after octopus, and we were trying to disprove the fact that a cork and an octopus makes a difference.
But the fact of the matter is is that if you use enough corks, we actually did repeatably get a difference between cork and non-cork cooked octopus, and we didn't know why. Uh and Philip had some interesting things where he had said that he had read something and done some tests where um change in temperature during cooking also affects the texture of octopus. So it's something to look at. But he had some questions. Um, uh, what's the best thing you've ever put uh putting into and gotten out of a rotovap?
I think the best thing I've ever done. Um did you ever have the cheese course does? No. The best thing I've ever done uh isn't really a distillation, isn't really about like some fancy distillation. But the best thing was uh we took um port, nice port uh Ruby, and uh distilled it into a port brandy and then threw away the water and then distilled it down to a port syrup that had never been heated.
And port syrup that's never been heated is ridiculous, ridiculous, and down to the like like down to about 66 uh bricks, so like maple syrup style, all done, you know, kind of room temperature. We then did the same thing to a um a Madeira, Malmse Madeira, and that syrup also stupid, stupid good. Uh, and then we did it to a bum de Venice, you know, uh dessert wine. Like amazing syrups and and brandies all. Uh, and then took three small glass chilled the brandies, did not well kind of room temp, little little coal, like like white wine temp.
Three the three brandies in small tasting cups, and then uh cheese courses. So we did with the um with the uh port, we did stilton cause duh. But then with the stilton syrup, and I forget what we what I paired. We we did a uh garnish as well, but I forget what we did with the garnish on that one. And then we did cheddar, uh, like a really nice like Montgomery was at the time Montgomery was the best cheddar you can get.
I don't know if it still is, but it was Montgomery's cheddar uh with the uh momsey uh Madeira, and then that one and the and the syrup, and that one we did with uh flash pickled um flash pickled onions, like red onions, which made cheddar and onions, duh, duh, right? Duh. And then uh we did uh the Bum de Venise. I wish I could remember all the garnishes. One of the garnishes we did, and this might have been with the port, was we did um we did uh pressure cooked uh pars press pressure cooked uh barley with uh coffee.
I think it was with that one, maybe anyway. And then with the um bomb de Venise, we did uh a really delicious uh pecorino uh Toscano uh and this syrup, but I forget what the garnish is. We'll have to look it up. But that was good. That was the best thing I ever done in rota vap.
And then, you know, other ones are just all kinds of random distillations that that I like. Uh habanero, like doing habanero in the rotovap was always good because it got rid of the uh spice and it was kind of a thing a unique thing that you couldn't really do any other way. So I also like that. That was good. Um two.
Have you ever used uh liquid nitrogen uh liquid nitrogen gel technique to put shard uh shards of gels into a foie gras torchant? If not, it's super cool, especially different herb gels, pretty cool uh with uh and chemo too. So here's the what we're talking about. At the lecture, I was talking about how I think Sam Mason is like an ice cream genius, because it's true. And at Oddfellows, he kind of did this in Brooklyn.
He did this technique where he took things like jellies and other things, froze them with liquid nitrogen, and then shattered them and folded them into his ice creams as they were being made. So instead of having swirls of crap, you would have like discrete pockets of crap inside the ice cream, because then as it tempers out, right? Of course, it turns to its normal jelly consistency, which is pretty cool. Uh but apparently you can do it in other things as well. And when are you opening a booker and Dax Cambridge outpost?
Well, sadly, I don't know. I don't know if we're ever gonna are we ever gonna open another one, Stas? It would be great if we could have put one there. I don't know, yeah. But I like it actually in the Boston Cambridge area.
You like it over there? Mm-hmm. Yeah? She's like, whatever, I don't care. I hate it everywhere.
I'm an equal opportunity hater. But where do you not hate it? Where do you not hate it about Cambridge? Yeah. Where do you where do you not where do you not hate it?
What's the name of place you don't hate? I I like a lot of places. Okay. Yeah. That wasn't an answer though.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was not an answer. Uh okay, and on a similar vein, Adrian Blackpool wrote in, hey hammer, only writes to you. Don't care about me. Uh I didn't I didn't order the first generation of Searsol after the first run.
Is there a second one planned already? Uh yeah, we're just gonna keep making them as long as people keep buying them. The problem is, uh, if you're in the UK, which it says you are, we're only gonna sell them in the future on uh Amazon.us. So you're gonna have to figure out some way to uh get them to like drop ship it o overseas because right? Yeah.
Yeah. But yes, the answer is yes. And could you speak to my second book? I don't even know what my second book is gonna be about, but you know, my editor Maria Guarna Shelley is anxious for us to figure out when did I tell her I was gonna figure that out? First week of October.
You think that's gonna happen? No. No, no, hell no. Uh and is there anything else in the Booker and Dax pipeline? Answer yes, but I don't want to talk about anything future until we get these Searsols out the door.
I have nothing, nothing publicly is on my mind until the Sears alls are out the door, right? Yeah. And finally, could you give any warning for UK dates uh so I can plan uh sick leave? Uh because I presume you're uh any dates you're gonna be are in London, uh, because they're in Lancashire, UK. Yeah, I mean I hope to come to uh London sometime for the for the book thing because we can write it off, right?
Uh and the last question how do I clean a rotovap? Uh I think I answered someone else on this, or I don't know, maybe you were writing in. Uh rotary evaporator, for those of you that don't know, is a piece of equipment uh to do it's a lab piece of equipment that does uh distillation under vacuum, so that allows you to do very gentle distillations. When you're cooking, it allows you to do uh distillations at very low temperature and without oxygen, which means that you can do very gentle, awesome things. However, they're expensive, and so people buy them used, and if you buy them used, you have the problem that really, really disgusting things have gone through them.
So the a short answer is is I can never guarantee that your roto vac will be safe. However, you need to clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, and clean some more. I would boil it a couple of times. The all the glassware, I would put it through an ultrasonic bath if you have it. I would clean it with uh as many solvents as you can get, starting with the least like food grade and working towards like you know, like pure ethanol if you can, and then water.
I would then do some distillation runs through it. But the whole thing, all the grease, everything off of it, do some whole uh do some distillation runs with it to further get into every nook and cranny that you might somehow have missed and just clean, clean, clean, you know, like beyond the fact beyond the point when there's no smell anymore. You just have no idea what they put through it. You know what I'm saying, Stez? Sure.
You have no idea. Unless they tell you. Uh okay. Um we have Lucas wrote in. Lucas, love Lucas.
Uh hey, Dave, Nastasia, Jack, and Wyatt. Although Wyatt doesn't hasn't come back, doesn't like us. Uh Wyatt's right here. Oh, hey, why you weren't here earlier? Nope.
He was late. All right. Like somebody else. Well, there you go. Hey, oh, well, Lucas gave you a shout out.
So howdy, anyway. Anyway, my all-time favorite food is bully bays. Julia Child, that's an I like bully base. You like it? What do you like better?
Boulia bays, or you like like San Francisco Chapino style? I I don't know. Chapino, the Capino's got the spicy sausage and stuff. Oh. And they they serve with the garlic bread next to it.
I think I like Chapino better, although I like bully base. Anyway, my all-time favorite food is bully bays. Julia Child advocates making stock by simmering less expensive parts of fish but never boiling it. This got me thinking of lobster stock, which when done in pressure cooker is unpalatable. Could these two things be related?
And shall I make my fish stocks in a water bath well below 100 C. Okay. I think it's two separate things. The reason I don't think she wants you to boil the fish is because uh she doesn't want it to get like too clouded up with like weird like bull crap from the bones and less expensive parts. I think that's the thing against the boiling uh with uh the fish.
But whereas lobster, if you do lobster stock, i.e. with the bone with the shells, uh in a pressure cooker, you just get too much of that calcium shell note out. I think any time with lobster, I think a lot of people overcook their uh lobster uh stuff when they're using shells to get flavors out of because there's a certain point at which you're not extracting flavor and just extracting that just shell note, and I hate that. So I think that that's what what that is. I don't know that um I mean I've never taken have I ever tested doing I don't think I've ever tested uh temperatures on fish stocks before in a circular.
I mean, obviously I've done a lot of tests with combuh, but not with fish. There's probably a difference, um, but I don't know. I don't know that uh give it a try. Let me know. I don't know, but I think that those two things are not necessarily uh related.
Um and what I do with the bully bays anyway is I always I always buy like usually whole fish, fillet them out, and then use all this all the all the bones and crap for the stock. And then I usually do my I don't usually do any of that stuff traditionally. What I'll do is I'll take uh, for instance, like uh all my I'll take first I'll take all of my uh I'll sweat the onions, then I'll do the wine, then I'll do all of my uh like hard like clams and whatnot, uh steam them open, get the juices out, pull the shells out, and then shuck and and reserve because I don't really like throwing the shells in. Do you like throwing you don't like throwing the shells in, right? I reserve, and then I and then I'll usually um I usually like quickly to cook the fillets and steam like over that and then remove and then throw the bones and make the stock out of that reserve and then add all the meat together at the last second after I cook the veg out, but whatever.
Um that's a little different. Each time I used to go to Booker and Dacks, my girlfriend, I pointed at the doer in the front of the bar and told her we need to buy one at home because I cannot keep one in my Manhattan apartment. No, tell her that we need to buy a home to have the liquid nitrogen. Good reason to have liquid nitrogen because I can't uh have one in my Manhattan apartment. Uh now I have a home and a couple of questions.
How large a doer should I get? I imagine using it daily for the first two months and then probably once or twice a week afterwards. If I can get a large one, how much will I lose to evaporation per week? Well, first of all, I mean, I know you, so like you're gonna look up the safety stuff because he's like a you know low temperature physicist or was you know before he's doing what he does now. Um so I looked up on Taylor Wharton, which manufactures most of the doers, and a 180 liter doer uh loses about 1.25% a day, which amounts to about 2.25 liters.
Uh then what they mean is 1.25% of total capacity, not of the current capacity. So it because otherwise it would be like radioactive decay and it would never go dry, which is not the way it works. Um 2.25 liters. And a hundred and sixty liter doer loses 1.3% a day, which is roughly two liters. Uh so you can see that they last, as we like to say, a good long time.
Uh and I looked up on the website, and by the way, don't believe any of these. When you get those 180s and 160s, you're in this essence renting them for like $30 a month from the uh from the welding company that has them. If you buy, and they the the good thing is is that when you get liquid nitrogen in that large quantity, it's relatively inexpensive. Anytime you own the doer and then have them refill it, usually they're gonna charge you more. I know that's the case if they come out and do it.
Now, maybe if you're out uh and you have a house, you can drive, obviously, putting it in the trunk and not having it in the car with you. If you can drive there, you might be able to get a reasonable per liter price on a smaller doer, like a 50, a 35 or something like this. And if you can get roughly similar prices, because we're only paying like a dollar a liter when you're getting like 180 or 200 liters or something like this. Um so if you can get a roughly equivalent price, so it's only costing you like 50 bucks to fill a 50 liter doer, they can also be uh relatively economic from a holding standpoint. So they say, for instance, one of the companies I looked up has a what's called a static hold time of 125 liters, which is 0.4 liters a day.
I think that's in general a lie. I think they radically underestimate how much you're gonna lose out, especially losing out on pouring when you're pouring and all and all this other stuff. And the other thing to remember about a doer is that um as soon as they age, they start losing more, and when they get damaged at all, they start and if you lose the vacuum, then you're done because uh it it'll like lose its stuff in less than a day. So, you know, the good thing about not owning the doer, having the welding company own the doer, is that uh then if it starts having a problem, it's their problem and uh not your problem. Uh you also asked why are all diners horrible.
I don't have time to answer that now, so we'll try to get to that. Try to remember that next uh week. They're not well, whatever, we'll talk about it. Uh and then uh lastly, a while back you spoke about Columbo. Do you think he is actually married?
He always talks about his wife, but she is never there. I think he is just making her up. I grew up beyond the Iron Curtain. I imagine because it's quite critical uh of American class society, we were allowed to watch it. Uh it was um by far my father's favorite show.
Uh usually followed with my parents arguing whether Columbia's actually married Colombo's actually married or not. Look at this guy. There is no way he is married, by the way. And then he wanted to know if he could come to the ham tasting. I didn't get this until now.
I would have tried to sneak you in because I totally could have snuck you in maybe but uh but right Jack I could snuck him in. Anyways um so I like the fact that like this like in this paranoid Iron Curtain plus it's the only thing you could watch behind the iron curtain and somehow see Columbo what's hilarious is that he is critical of class society but to me he's like quintessential America because he wins you know what I mean in the end. But as to whether or not he is married uh please look up uh www dot columbo dash slight dot free uk dot com uh for a whole thing on uh Mrs. Columbo indeed I think she does exist and although I love the idea that there's a conspiracy that she hasn't existed and this she's just some sort of prop that he uses to like kind of beat the criminals there are a couple episodes in particular the one where he's on a cruise ship where uh Mrs. Columbo is seen by other characters in the thing so they would have to be part of the larger conspiracy.
Now I know there are many places around the world that think Americans are capable of such kind of intense conspiracies but I think it's only because they overestimate the general competence of people trying to do conspiracy. That's the problem that people I mean when people have conspiracy theories right the assumption is is that somehow there are this number large number of people out there who are a competent to uh make a conspiracy happen and B can then keep it secret which is almost never the case because people are both talkative and incompetent in general true anyway. You're like oh yeah. It's about that time. Oh man all right so I have a lot of stuff uh that I missed I'm gonna list the stuff that I'm missing and then I will get to uh for uh the next time, all right?
We're gonna keep track of it too. And we're gonna keep track of it. Uh thanks Wyatt. But we're not well we're not taking, we're not anyway. So we had a question on uh re giving my uh thing for how to do sausages in an immersion uh blender from the Hashi Food Truck.
We'll get to it. I don't think we got to uh Sam's uh auto life step, or maybe we did last week, uh two weeks ago. I don't know. Uh we gotta figure it out. Um, but most importantly, Christoph had a question on cooking bass, not striped bass, but uh black bass.
So we'll get to that uh next week. Uh Alex wrote in, and everyone wanted to hear about this, so it's a shame. Sirius Eats, our friend at Dan uh at Sirius Eats, Daniel Gritzer. Uh is he still a food and wine too, right? Food and wine, but he wrote for Sirius Heats this article uh about quality and tomatoes and refrigeration, which uh, you know, er I got about 30 tweets saying what's up about this, and I have responses, but don't have the time to get into it now.
Maybe we can even have Daniel on. You want to try to see if we can get him on? We'll get him on. Anyway, Daniel's a good man, and I agree with some of his points and disagree with others of them, so we can uh we'll get him on and we'll talk about it. And Sam Geiger asked me about my ideal salad nichoirs, and we'll get to that uh next week.
If I didn't mention it, it means that uh somehow we don't know that we didn't answer your question, so send it back in. Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradio network.org. You can find all of our archive programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions anytime at info at heritage radio network.org.
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