Today's episode of Cooking Issues is brought to you by Wilma Jean, Delicious Fried Chicken and Other Southern Comfort Food Classics Great Burgers 2, located at 345 Smith Street in Brooklyn. Wilma Jean 345 for more information. Hi, this is Celia Cutcher, host of Animal Instinct, and you are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Joined with uh usual Nastasha the Hammer Lopez, fresh off another trip to uh the Harvard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was great. We like that place.
Yeah, no, I like it a lot. I like uh also joined, well, first in engineering. Who do we got? You got Jack, as usual, Inslee, and a full crew back here today. Who do you got over there?
We've got G Paul, who's here, uh training to engineer. Uh Wyatt Burns, who's been with us for the past few weeks. Wyatt, yeah, I'm familiar with the word. Who for the first time provided you with a list of unanswered questions. Isn't that groundbreaking?
Sweet. But the are they okay, listen, I don't want anyone to get ticked off here, but we have in-house Daniel Gritzer, formerly of the the Fantastic Magazine Food and Wine, now at Sirius Seats. What's your do you have a title over there or just like, you know? They're calling me culinary director. Wow, that's fucking that's a that's a high title.
I didn't drop I didn't I I didn't actually drop an F bomb, just careful. I said Frr. Frr is what what I got to. Fantastic, fantastic. That's a that's a it's uh high title there.
Yeah. So are you're running that thing? What does that mean? No, I'm not running things. I work with uh you know Jake Kenji Lopez all.
Sure. Yeah. Go ahead. He he has his title is Chief Creative Officer, right? He was.
He when I came on board, I think they finally decided to make things a little bit more official. So he's now managing culinary director. So he and I think that mean we usually managing means they handle the ad side in magazine. Uh no, like you can have like a managing editor. But doesn't managing editor handle the like the integration of ad side into edit?
Well, yeah, okay. In print magazines it's true. The managing editor does often straddle those lines a little bit. Um here it just means there's uh just making up titles, aren't you? Making make it crap up.
He you know, he's he manages the the culinary portion of the or the recipe portion, the cooking portion of the website. Where do isn't he moving to like Botswana or something crazy? Where is he moving? If uh if San Francisco is Botswana, yeah. I've never been to Botswana, so I can't say.
I have been to San Francisco. Yeah, no, he moved out, he moved out to the West Coast. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
I like San Francisco. San Francisco's a good town, right? Mm-hmm. And it's a good place to visit the Redwoods, which are some of my favorite places in the world. That's true.
Yeah. Yeah. And like basically all of us here in Nevada is crazy towns full of like crazy craziness and like wildfires and stuff. Really cool. I like that stuff.
But that's not why we brought you here. Let me first of all, why don't we tackle it? We'll tackle tomatoes like midway through. You want to get what? No, you have to say what slow food means to you.
Oh, yeah, there's a cool announcement here. So at Heritage Radio and Roberta's on Friday, we're having Alice Waters and Carlo Petrini here to celebrate uh 25 years of slow food. It's pretty cool, right? Yeah, it's a long time. Right?
Yeah. I mean, what do you think slow foods meant for food over 25 years? I mean, look, l uh, what year was it, 25 years ago? Uh what's that? Uh geez.
89. No, no. We're we're a decade. 89. 90, 90.
Wait. 1989, right? 1989. 89, yeah. 89.
The year I the year I graduated. 89, you're right. 89. Uh, okay, so let's all look back to what food was like in 1989. I mean, let's look at like where the high end, where where like people who cared about ingredients and stuff, where where we were as uh a culture in 1989 versus where we are now.
And I think what's uh what's interesting about it is is uh you know, even in the early 90s, like the concept of um kind of caring about where food came from was much more advanced in Italy where slow food was was born. Uh much, much, much more than it was here in the U.S. at that time. But uh, you know, you look at the influence of groups like Slow Foods uh America. Let's give a shout out to Patrick, who is, you know, Martin's one of the founders of that.
Uh, you know, and I think it's done, it's done a lot. It's hard to say, you know, uh they were there kind of at the beginning, so I think a you know, a big player. What do you think, Daniel? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so many people who can be given credit for so much that's happened in the food world in the past 25 or 30 years uh from Alice Waters who will be here.
Um but the slow food movement, I think if you look at if you look at the state of the the food world today and the things that people talk about and even the the trends that some people now get annoyed with um in terms of them being marketing lines or give me some annoying. Oh, you know, every everything's farmed to table, and then people say, okay, well what everything's farmed to table because every everything comes from you know that kind of thing. Well, you know, it like you know we extended that, right? It's farm to toilet now. Farm to toilet.
Yeah. That's gonna be the new back page of the the national glossy. Yeah, you know, remember that's mine, farm to toilet. Like other people, I've given it to other people, but farm to toilet, that's that's all me. I and you know, that actually fits in with like the great, you know, like American, like American th uh thinking about uh diet and like the problems with American diet and food.
Like one of the early people who was uh interested in that was uh the Reverend Sylvester Graham, like you know, would not have actually enjoyed graham crackers, but was very interested in stopping us from masturbating and having excess sex uh sex. And he thought he could do this by reducing our meat consumption to almost nil and having us eat only kind of whole uh you know whole grain breads like cooked without like external leavenings, uh kind of like really what we would consider like poorly made products. And and so like you know, he thought that this would like de-inflame our passions, get rid of like the national problem at the time, which was dyspepsia. So he, you know, his his conception, this is Jacksonian America now, is that dyspepsia is one of the great problems. It leads to things like adultery, masturbation, things like this, things that he sees as actually kind of morally reprehensible.
And remember that dieting in general and and uh detoxing and uh and and I I've written about this, although I've never published it, it's all tied in with body hate. Uh uh and moralism about kind of what we what we do and what we eat and and hatred of of the body and of a physical self. Um that I'm talking to you uh detox people. And um and so uh, you know, that way he was very much interested in pooping. Uh-huh.
You know what I mean? And so like f like the early times it was farm to toilet. So I think over the past, you know, 25 years with this farm to table stuff, we've really been ignoring the toilet part. It's yeah, it is definitely the one part of the process that's generally ignored in the food coverage. Only it's only it's not.
If you talk to someone and they go to a restaurant. How was it? It was good, but in the morning, oh you know what I mean? So I mean, people actually treat the farm to toilet movement. I think though that the toilet thing started in Italy too.
Like they talk about pooping and how it feels and what the food it like's part of everyday conversation. I agree with that, but you also don't hang out with Germans. Do Italians have the shelf in the toilet? Oh, the toilet shelf. The toilet shelf.
It's for inspection. Is that what it's for? Yeah, yeah. I have like this to avoid backsplash. No, there's a famous book put out by a guy named Alan Daldus uh Dundas, who's now dead, who did a study of uh kind of uh uh fecal expressions and and uh fascination with uh toiletries in in German uh in German folklore and in in you know culture.
It's a fascinating book, and it's called Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder. Uh which you know comes from an old German expression that I won't uh get into here. But um Yeah, it's how do they inspect it once it's on the shelf? Well, that you know have you ever had like that style of toilet, and you're like, who designed this freaking thing? It's it's like a skid machine, it's like a skidmaster 5,000 who designed this thing, and it's because some people like to inspect the business after it's done.
Uh-huh. It's just a terrible idea. Americans, we want the stuff to go away. There's actually another famous book, what's it called? Oh my goodness, it came out of I think out of Cornell, I forget the author's name.
Uh Rem Kulhaus, the famous architect, along with the graduate school of design, uh, recently uh participated in the uh architectural biennale for the uh and one of the things they did is they had a bunch of small books, each on a room of of the house, and the one that my wife bought me, of course, was the bathroom, because I have an intense fear of public restrooms. Uh I detest them. Uh I especially hate. Listen, anyone out there who owns a restaurant or any sort of public place, put a trash can near the door and make sure there are towels there, not just those hand dryers, because I'm going to use a towel to open the doorknob in your door, and I wish to throw that towel in a trash can because I have a mental problem that I can't touch the doorknob in in a public restroom. I'll I'll be locked in that restroom until somebody else comes in.
If there's not a source of paper towels nearby, or if I don't happen to have a receipt in my pocket, probably too much information. You can use toilet paper. Yeah, yeah, you can, but you're like there have been a situation, there's just situations. I just don't like it. Just put a towels and and a trash can by the door.
You with me, Daniel on this? I'm with you. I think that they need to facilitate that for anyone who wants to use a uh a paper towel to open the door. Yeah. That's a common, common thing.
Especially because I'm about to go cook your food. You know what I mean? Or I'm about to go. Wouldn't you prefer that I didn't touch that doorknob? Right.
Wouldn't you prefer that? Yeah, you would. Uh now the So anyway, Rem Koolhouse did this thing, and in you know, uh along with some other people, and you know, their point is that um Americans they're focusing on, but Westerners in general, like we do everything uh, well, to back ass words. So we poop into water and wipe with dry things instead of pooping into a dry hole and wiping with wetness. And there's a fantastic book from the 70s uh that was redone, I think, or maybe it's late 60s and redone in the 70s, called uh, you know, the bathroom, and it's a complete ergonomic study of like how different cultures, like with angles, diagrams, pictures.
One of our good friends, all of our good friends in the food industry, is using the squatty potty and loves it. You know that really? Yeah. Like the kind they had in Japan? Well, because it's better for your better for your muscles.
Put you in a squat position even when you're on a Western toilet. Right. First of all, how do first of all, who is it? I can't. And his girlfriend made him throw it out because she was embarrassed by it.
Why? What who cares? No, no, it's just like it's like a stool on either side of your thingamaji. And your legs are like up here. Hey, look, it's a well known fact to anyone that's been to my fam my family's house that I'm a believer in the in the wet on wet, full waste of water, because I have the Japanese toilet seats, which are I think the highest are the dream.
They're the apogee of toilet technology. I don't know why we've allowed ourselves to fall behind. I've discussed this on the show many times. I wish I knew who was using this squat toilet, because that's interesting information. And how do we get on?
Oh, farm the toilet. Okay. So uh the right. Right, so the the contribution of Carlo Petrini and Alice Waters is Daniel, welcome to the tangential radio hour where we just go off on tangents for no apparent reason. I just want to point out that I think that's the most Nastasia's ever chimed in.
No. Oh, well come on. No, willingly. Willingly. She loves some poop talk.
I do love some poop talk. Yeah, come on. Like because you know why? She okay, Nastashia's in the food business, right? So she actually I'm gonna give a little secret that you're not gonna be mad about.
You're not gonna you're not gonna be mad about this. I'm not like this is nothing you wouldn't be willing to say on air. What do you not like when you go out after work? Oh, going out with food people who want to talk about food. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's you know, now she gets to exercise the other subject. Poop. She doesn't care about religion or politics.
So you got your poop and you got your reading. Right? Yeah. And then there's, you know, other less polite things. But well you know, whatever.
Uh okay. So uh here's what I figure. Like I think we should get now the reason we have Daniel here today is because as uh we've said many I've said many times, is that tomatoes, refrigeration, with the exception of I think like grape tomatoes and whatnot, which I don't really care about because I don't think it really degrades the taste of the seed section so much, but and there's very little pulp in one of those grape tomatoes. And so like I've always stored those in the fridge because why the hell not? But uh I've always said storing tomatoes in the fridge, uh enemy of quality, and uh Daniel came out with a series of the articles on uh on serious seeds, basically telling me to not me personally, but people like me to shove it.
And but it's more nuanced than that. So we're gonna get into the great tomato smackdown. We gotta get some uh reverb on that next time. When we come back out of the we come back out of minute. The great tomato smackdown.
Yeah. Tuesday. Anyway, uh maybe we'll do that after the first break. You know what I'm saying? And so I feel that like, you know, I read all all your posts on it, so we'll get into a little bit now.
And this is gonna give you time during the 30-second commercial break to read all 6,000 words or whatever it is of uh tomato technology that you have. What is it, like 5,000 words? I don't even know. You didn't even look. I didn't even see it.
People kept asking for more. Niagara Falls tomato. Well, yeah, because they kept telling me I was wrong. Yeah, well, look, look, they listen. There's two things I'll just say this as a spoiler, is that I I after reading it, I you know, like some of the stuff is very hard to dispute, and I think people that could just call people out as wrong, you need to learn this.
This is the greatest thing you can learn in in life, I think, is the best thing in the world that you can ever do is to be proven wrong, learn from it, and grow. You know what I mean? It's like I've learned the best things when I was wrong, you know, uh especially because I've tried you try to be right, you try to do as right as you can, and then when you're proven wrong, it means that you've grown, so that's a win. But I think there's room for both of us at this tomato table because you're you're people another thing I hate about people is they read something like you we wrote a lot of words, yeah, and they come back with one with one overarching statement that encapsulates everything. That's not the case.
That's not the I mean, like for instance, we have to talk about what types of tomatoes, right, how long, right, what you're doing, what your house is like, blah blue, ble, blah blah blah. Exactly. I mean, that's really the thing is there's so many variables. And really what all I mean I started where you were. I was a don't put the tomatoes in the refrigerator guy.
Because you're not an enemy of quality. That's right. I like quality. Yeah. Um I like good tomatoes.
Uh, and that's what I had always been taught, and uh it seemed that that made sense to me, and it sort of fit with my anecdotal experience. But I'd never tested it. So, you know, we decided, well, let's put it to the test. Let's see what actually happened. So all summer long I was uh I was buying tomatoes of different types and different quality levels and putting half in the fridge and half on the counter, and just keeping track of and then and then tasting them uh uh blind and keeping track of what the results were, and it started to emerge that this thing wasn't really holding up in my tests as much as the rule to never refrigerate tomatoes suggested it should have.
And I couldn't ignore that. So, yeah, so then I wrote wrote about it, and uh I think there are a fair number of people simply didn't want to let go of the rule or consider the possibility that the rule may not hold as much as they think it does. Right. People wake up, learn, and pay attention to what people are doing, especially if they're being rigorous about it. So uh I've had m like so many people tweet at me about your articles, and I've had people write in about it.
And so, by the way, we're gonna get into it in depth after the uh after the first break, but call in your questions for Daniel regarding tomatoes or anything else. Two seven one eight four nine. Now, uh before we get into that, so where do you live? Now I live in Queens in Jackson Heights. Remember they bought a house?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But where's your farmer's market? Where are you buying your tomatoes? Oh, well, a lot of them I bought at the Jack and Jackson Heights farmers market. Which is run by Green Market.
Well, it's a lot of the same Stokes there? It's a l uh Stokes is not there, but I did get I did get a big random tomatoes from Stokes. Which ones? Uh I got uh flat of mixed heirlooms and I got a flat of their red, uh they're like regular red tomatoes. The the two tomatoes from Stokes that are to me are the only ones that I ever they're only tomatoes I buy, other than just crap tomatoes.
Are you gonna say those small yellow ones? No, I buy uh the German stripes, which are large and kind of mottled yellow and red, and the Ant Ruby's German green, which are green, relatively large, and then get a pinkish red blush that goes around them. And I've been buying these these exact two tomatoes from them for you know, it's over it's gotta be, I don't know, like ten years or something, like nine, ten years. So like I wait for them every year. I know exactly what they look like when they're the way I want them to be, and like how long it's gonna take them to get them where I want them to be.
Yeah. You know what I mean? So like for me, it's like this. A lot of heirlooms, and we can get this in discussion later, aren't very good to begin with. That's true, yeah.
Yeah. But anyway, so we'll we'll talk about all this, and then we'll also talk about the implications for the. Remember growing up those like those uh rectangular plastic boxes of the clamshells of the case. Yeah, with well the well, the the rectangular like mesh boxes long, they had four three or four really kind of sallow looking tomatoes, and then they were overwrapped with plastic, and then they had like an image of like a nice tomato on the plastic wrap. You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like that's what I grew up with as a tomato, or like a the diner tomato. Which is that. Right.
You know, those those things are the size of like uh, well, I don't know, you can't see my hands. Like a handball. They're like small, crappy, medium, small. They're size of like a little larger than a compari tomato. Yeah.
Which I think are a fine supermarket tomato. It tastes good. Yeah. Yeah. Um people hate on those things, but they actually they taste good.
And they're year-round. They're not bad to eat. They're not all that bad. No. Okay.
So let's get to some questions though. And Daniel, please uh feel free to uh chime in. I have some, you know, technical qu technical cooking questions I got to get to, otherwise I'll I'll hear clamorings. So Jesper writes in from Sweden regarding roto vaps and vacuums. Now, if uh you might recall Jesper's written in a couple times about rotovap problems.
Uh he's uh making uh building a roto vap setup. For those of you that don't know what a rotovap is, a rotary evaporator is a vacuum still that allows you to do uh like uh distillation of flavors at very uh low temperatures and under vacuum, which means there's no oxidation and there's almost no heat damage to the flavors. Very pure flavors. And you can do it with a, you know, it you can do it with a normal condenser, it's a piece of laboratory equipment. If you buy them used, you have to be very careful to clean them, blah, blah, blah.
I use them at Booker Index, the bar. I have to use a very much more complicated way of doing it because I can't distill with alcohol, so in order to keep the flavors intact, I need to use liquid nitrogen and special kind of condensers, so yada yada. So uh that said, that is what a roto vap is. They ain't cheap if you, you know, they ain't cheap. I first saw one uh the first time I I wait, I I when I first started working at the French culinary, even when I was part-time there, you know, we were researching all equipment, and I knew I wanted to do some um some vacuum distillation, so I built a really crappy one, you know, like out of parts that I found around uh found around, and it really kind of sucked, but it gave me like a taste for it.
And then I saw the Rokas do a uh uh demonstration at Madrid Fusion where they did the oyster thing. It's the first time I ever seen the distilled uh dirt going in uh distilled dirt water that they put on oysters, they're surfing turf. I was like, must get real one. Okay, so uh Jesper writes in. I previously sent a question that is still unanswered.
I apologize. Uh consequently, I would appreciate if Dave uh can have uh his expertise and opinions on this question, namely in regards to selecting a vacuum pump for a roto vap, uh though I'm already in the process of buying one. So now Jesper's got looking at okay. So you need a vacuum to run a vacuum still. This is obvious, right?
That seems apparent, yeah. Right, because when you lower the when you lower the uh the pressure, when you lower the the pressure inside of a system, you you decrease the temperature at which things boil, just like going up to the top of a mountain. You decrease the temperature at which things boil, things boil at a lower temperature, therefore you can shift the distillation point down to a lower temperature. That's the whole principle of what's going on here. Now, the deal is you need a vacuum pump that can one get to a low enough uh vacuum pressure that you can um really reduce the boiling point, especially if you're gonna do cooking with it.
You need very good vacuums because uh if you're gonna try to make things like syrups and you don't want them to get too hot, they have a very high boiling point. Think of when you're boiling candy down, you're boiling down uh the temperature goes up and up, you need a better and better vacuum to be able to maintain this low temperature, right? So the other thing you need is you need a uh a vacuum that can one tolerate some moisture because you're gonna mess up and you're gonna you're gonna accidentally suck some moisture up into your vacuum pump, so it needs to tolerate some moisture. And uh three, you need it to be powerful enough that it uh can um suck the vacuum uh fast enough. So a lot of people make a mistake.
They try to get uh either these little things called aspirators, which run off of uh faucets, and they um they're kind of weak. They don't have, they don't, they're not strong enough. They can't suck enough of a vacuum fast enough to really be useful for what we're doing. And then other people go the other way, they get a really uh vacuum that sucks a lot but can't get to a low enough vacuum level. So, like a vacuum cleaner or a hood has a huge amount of exhaust you know, can exhaust a huge amount, but it can't do it to a very low vacuum.
So these are the problems. So uh Jasper is looking at buying either the uh Bukey V700 or V710 pump, which is their standard laboratory vacuum pump. I have the V700, it's nice, it can get down to around 10 millibar, so stay atmospheric pressure is about 16 uh 1600, you know, uh no, 1000, sorry, 1,065 millibar. So it gets down pretty low, but it can't really get that all the time. It can really get to about 20, especially if your rotovap is leaking and it's kind of a pain in the ass.
Leaky rotovap, by the way, for those of you that don't know, leaky rotovap, key cause of flavor loss in a distillation, leaky roto vap, because your air is sucking in through the leak and stripping flavor up and out through your pump. In real life, when you're using a vacuum pump in a di in a rotary evaporator uh evaporator distillation, your pump should run down to its pressure and then never turn on again. That's the best of all possible worlds. And then you're losing no flavor. Think about it.
You're evacuating it down to a to a certain level, you're supposed to boil everything off and then recondense it in the condenser. You're not supposed to have to suck a vacuum again. It's supposed to be like closed loop, but it doesn't work that way. So the pump always has to run a little bit, but it shouldn't ever run that much. Uh but uh the more much more expensive pump, the pump I have is the one that you know he's saying the 700, the cheaper one.
Um and do you know how to make this? Um by the way, I'm running the show for the first time off of my new iPhone 6 Plus. Fabulous. Oh, check that out. But unlike the my iPad, it keeps turning off on me.
Do you know how to go into settings and make this thing not automatically turn off? Because I keep looking down and then I have to use my finger to sign in. Oh, it's only finger sign in now? No, yeah, I still have a password on it, but like it's irritating. Every time I go to look at the question, I say something, I go down and I see my my lock screen, it's no fun.
So, anyways, so uh the 7710 is a much bigger pump. If you could afford it, uh I would go for it. Uh, if you could afford the you know footprint, I would go for it because it's gonna be better for things like syrups because it can get down to a much lower vacuum pressure. It has another level of uh pump on it. Both of the and it also you there's a thing in vacuum pumps.
Daniel, I'm sorry about the you have to listen to vacuum pump technology, but there's a one of the problems when you're doing a vacuum is is that you suck how long is it gonna stay on now? Forever. Really? It says Woo! Uh so there's a thing in a vacuum where if you get moisture inside of your vacuum system, right?
And you're not pumping a lot, you can't get down to a low level. So they have this thing called a gas ballast that after your vacuum system lets a little bit of air in, so the sucker can pump all the time, draw dry air with it and expel out your uh your your moisture. Get it? Okay, I think so. Yeah.
So when you're running a gas ballast to get the moisture out of your vacuum pump, the bigger vacuum pump can still reach a lower vacuum pressure, right? It's just put it this way, it's got more balls. Sounds good, yeah. All right. So if you can afford it, take it.
The other question is you need a vacuum controller, and he wants to know whether he should get the uh V850, which is the one we have, which is basically just a standard vacuum controller, it hits a set point and stops, or the V855, which that's automatic distillation. Listen, I have no idea. I would always wanted to have the uh 855, and if you know someone at Bukey, let me tell you, it's the same freaking unit. All they gotta do is like flip some switches and like do a firmware update, and they can convert. They won't.
They won't do it. But it's just a software difference, just the same piece of hardware. Isn't that isn't that just a kicker? That sounds like Apple. Yeah, right?
They're just crippling products. They cripple why? Yeah, why? Still, still no USB on this damn thing. You know what I'm saying?
Caller on the line. Oh, caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. How's it going? Going alright, what's up?
Hey, I had a couple of equipment questions. I hope you could help me with. Alrighty. Um, I'm I'm curious in a cheap uh home ice cream maker. I think I've heard you say before you like the rock salt one.
The which one? Um the rock salt. Yep, yep, rock salt and ice, yep. Is there any particular model you like or what should I look for? All right.
So I'll tell you that this the sad truth is I want to love the whatever it's called, the White Mountain, which is the kind of the White Mountain, that's the name of it, right? I can't remember. Yeah, I saw I saw that on uh I think Chev Dubs like Route or something. Yeah, it's good. I have one, right?
Uh it's really good, it's expensive, right? But it's like right it's it's oldie timey, and the scrapers that it uses are wooden. Okay. Now I had a thrift store, like I forget the name of it, like Revco or something like this. A thrift store motorized.
I also I was stupid. I thought my kids would want to get into ice cream making with me and crank that thing. And so I bought the hand crank crank. Probably. Yeah, yeah.
I th I bought the hand crank one thinking that oh, we would sit around the table and crank ice cream. Hell no, you can't get around the table by yourself. Yeah, hell no, hell no. I see I sit there by myself cranking on that thing. So, like, if I could go back, I would definitely get the motorized one because I have better things to do with my life than watch my kids watch me crank an ice cream machine.
But the uh so aside from that though, uh like the white mountain is really good, but the old crappy Revco, I think Revco, I don't even remember, one that I had had uh plastic like scraper dashers on it that actually did I think a better job of getting the ice cream off the side of the freezing tin. And so I think that so one of the problems with uh rock salt and ice uh um ice cream freezers, right? Is you need to be able to effectively scrape the crystals off the side of the uh metal container, or you get like weird like chunky crystal problems in it. And that's why those companies who make those things don't recommend that you salt the hell out of your ice. They they give you a like a assault recommendation and they give you a freezing window that's actually a lot longer than I like.
Now, with my old Revco with the plastic scraper blades, until that sucker died, like I could churn out like easy like 12-15 minute batch times on that thing and still get good scrapage on the sides. Whereas my feeling is with the with the scraper dasher things that they have on the White Mountain, that if you were to push the times that fast by salting the hell out of it, that it would lose its scraping efficiency. So I've never been, but I again like you know, I haven't played with the White Mountain as much because you know, years ago I would make ice cream like like two times a week in my old Revco one. I paid I think three bucks for that ice cream maker on the thrift shop. I'm so sad that thing died.
And um, and so I used to do it uh all the time. I I also bought the really big white mountain, so I don't know whether I would have had better results if I had used the smaller one. Uh, because when I go, I go big usually, uh, unless I'm buying something from a thrift shop. It's just, you know, it's in my nature. I can't help it.
Um so anyway, so that's that's my thoughts. What did am I answering any sort of question or am I just saying things? I can't tell. No, no, I think uh I think that's helpful. Um I I I know what you're talking about with a scraper.
My my parents had an old kind of crappy one too, and uh uh I I know what you're talking about with the weird chunky kind of crystal thing. Yeah. Yeah, although I think you can modify a white mountain. Yeah, that's you retrofit. The other thing uh I want to ask you about is I was reading blog posts from a while ago about the um the little tidy centrifuge.
Yep. Uh um what do you think about that now that you've had a chance to use it more? Can it do much and how does how is the yield gonna compare to like I love uh your guys who's pinotechnique. I've been doing a lot of uh trying like outdoor clarification. I wonder how the yield gonna be.
Can you use it for much more than clarification? And then just what are your current thoughts on that machine now? Uh well, it's not good for anything that where you care about the solids because it's very hard. So most of the time when I work with solids in a centrifuge, you're actually dealing with kind of a stratification of layers, and you're not going to want all of those layers, and so it's useful to have large buckets so you can scrape the different layers off. So, like let's say you're making like pecan you know, you grind up pecans.
You can get the oil layer, then you can get the fine nut layer, and then you can get the like this like the the outer, you know, skinny layer at the bottom. And it's very hard with a machine like this. It's first of all, it's not gonna do nut separation so well, but it's very hard with a machine like this to do any real separation. So it's really only useful for things where you want the liquid on top. Uh and you have to spin it a lot.
I did do a Houstino once of uh uh for a large group of people, and I was uh it's back when Tristan was the bar manager at Booker and Dax, and we were in a basement in Bogota spinning for hours and hours and hours and hours. Oh god and hours. But if you want to do something like lime juice where you only need like you know, a couple ounces and you're good. You know, right? Yeah.
Yeah. We did it for Hurricane Sandy, too, remember? For the Today Show. Oh, really? Oh my god, that was a nightmare.
Uh yeah, yes. I I I've never like I've never been so like visibly like just not in a good mood on a on a T on a TV appearance ever. Right? Like visibly just like making Halloween drinks in a not good mood. Uh but anyway, it's not that big of an investment.
Um, you know, if you want to jump in and get it, you know, I'm sure, you know, sooner or later there'll be a much better alternative, but um it's not a horrible thing to play around with for things like lime juice or small amounts of grapefruit juice and things like that. Yeah, okay, great. Thanks. Uh thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
Uh the insight. Hey, cool, no problem. Thanks for calling. Okay. New tagline.
Am I answering questions or am I just saying things? It's hard to know. I don't know. I can't tell. Uh so anyway, uh back to break time.
Well, wait, let me finish Jesper's question first. Then we'll go to break. So uh look, the 855, the key thing with that is automatic distillation. Uh, it depends on how they run the autumn. See, for those of you that don't, when you're when you're doing a distillation, just like when you're making candy, I tell you the boiling point goes up as you're as you're boiling stuff off, as there's less water in the product or less alcohol, depending on what kind of distillation you're doing.
Especially when you're doing alcohol distillation, which is what you're gonna be doing, let's be honest, is uh the the boiling point is constantly changing. And because the boiling point is constantly changing, you need to sit there and keep and adjust constantly the boiling point of the you know the the vacuum pressure that you're running the distillation at in order to keep a constant level of distillation. That's how you have to do it. Now the 855 claims to have automatic uh distillation algorithms that make it so you can walk away from it. I've never used it, I don't know if I trust it to make the best possible flavor.
Maybe it does. It would in which case it'll save you. I mean, like I have to sit in front of every liter of product I want. I or someone who is trained has to sit in front of the rotor vap for an hour. Okay?
So it's like if you could just, you know, Ronco, you know, Ron Popeel it, set it and forget it, you know, then maybe it would be worth almost untold amounts of money if you were gonna do this kind of thing a lot. One last thing you said you had uh, and this I'm gonna get into just really quickly, Jack, before we go to the break, is uh you're using for your chiller, remember, when you're doing distillation, what's the key, what's the key thing you have to remember distillation, moonshiners? Anyone? Anyone? Cutting off the tails.
Well, the uh in terms of taste, yes, but in terms of physics, in terms of physics, everything that you boil, you have to condense, right? You have to in other words, you have to have as much chilling power as you have heating power, or you'll saturate your condenser, right? So the way moonshiners do this is they always moonshine near a creek or a well and they just put it through a boat ton of water, right? Uh through long tubes and a lot of water, but they're not doing it at a very low temperature. In rotary evaporation, you're doing your your um your chilling, you're condensing, usually at a lower temperature, much lower than tap water.
Chemists use tap water at 20 degrees Celsius because they're doing their distillations higher, like 60 degrees Celsius, and they just dump, dump, dump tap water through the condenser. But they're not getting a very large temperature delta between their distillation and their condensing, which means they're not getting a lot of fine resolution of flavors. They're just not doing it. They're losing a lot of stuff through their through their vacuum stack. Okay.
So you need a low temperature, but you need to have a low temperature and a lot of power. So your piece of equipment that you own, which is a Julabo FE500 recirculating cooler, only has 120 watts of cooling power at minus 10 Celsius, right? You're gonna want to set it at minus 20, minus 23, start your distillation, and then it's gonna that temperature is gonna creep up through your distillation runs. So you're gonna have to do smaller distillation runs so that your temperature doesn't get too high before you get too far in, or you're not gonna be able to maintain your chilling. You need if I was you and if it's gonna spend money on something, I would spend it on more chilling power.
Alright, let's go to break. Today's program has been brought to you by Wilma Jean from the team behind Nightingale 9. Delicious fried chicken and other Southern Comfort Food Classics, awesome burgers too, located at 345 Smith Street in Brooklyn. That's Wilma Jean. Wilma Jean 345.com.
And a welcome back. Alright, listen, Stas is like, we're only gonna have time for the tomatoes. Let me like here, Jack. We're gonna have to have some sort of a catch-up show at some point. Yeah, that sounds great.
Like, because I have I have so many questions. A whole show dedicated to it? Because I have like nine. Yeah, look, I got I got I got Should we put the freeze on right now? The new question freeze?
What I have like I have to go, I have like I have a bunch of questions from Lucas. I have Sam's like autolysse for bread, I have cooking black bass, I have salad nichois, I have salt and penetration. Oh well, I have poo. I have brine penetration and I have salt uh like uh assaulting, I have aegless cooking, I have I have how to make a foam that doesn't break. None of these things seem that they need it right away.
Liquid smoke, uh ISI versus soda screen. We're gonna need to do we're gonna need to do a ketchup show. A special ketchup show. Special ketchup show. How we gonna do that?
Oh, that would be sick. You know, Stas, as you remember, we learned on this show, does not care about what brand of ketchup she uses. Actually, no, that's not true. When I was away this past week. Are you using crappy ketchup?
Someone gave like a Sir Kensington, and I was like, and you were like, Where's my freaking hines? Well, if you read Patrick's book, he you know, we've he he uh firm believer in the Heinz being better than all of their ketchup. Yeah, you know something interesting about the Heinz Corporation? They figured out a process for making ketchup relatively early on that uh meant they didn't have to use benzoate, uh sodium benzoate in their as a preservative in the in their stuff. So they were trying to push through a benzoit brand a ban early along with uh some governmental people so that they could squash everybody else who still had to use benzoid.
That's some sweet business. They're like, this stuff that we figured out how not to use is dangerous. But then everyone else figured it out, so it wasn't so imperative that they put the band through. Hey, and we're back on tomatoes. Hey, hey.
Yeah. You know what? Look, you know, Ron O'Reagan taught me as a child ketchup, that's a straight-up veggie. That's a straight-up serving of veggie. Sure is.
Anyone, anyone old enough to remember this? Tomato ketchup was considered like in school lunches. They'll talk about what what slow foods and that kind of thinking is done, Alice Waters and whatnot. Like, you know, back then, tomatoes were a vegetable. Think about that.
Oh, yeah, pizza. I mean, not tomatoes. Uh, ketchup was a vegetable. Tomatoes are a fruit. My son's like, they're the vegetable, no, they're fruit, but they are used as vegetable.
I mean, ketchup vegetable, which is nuts. Okay. So, uh, Jack, when are we gonna have this ketchup show? Uh, how about two weeks from now? I'm gonna I'm out next week, so maybe the following week.
We come in early and do a double episode. You want to do that? Wait, but you're not here next week. Yeah, but we'll have somebody here. We have Liz will be here.
We have a really interesting Don Lee. Next week, Don Lee and uh Paul Adams are gonna come in and we're gonna eat Icelandic fermented shark on air. No way. The one week I leave. Yeah, you can come back.
Kind of like try that. Who who do you not like at all, Jack? Because they should be running the station then. Can't say on air. Oh, well, we'll find out next week when we show up.
Well, we got 10 minutes, so let's all right so we so we we either do a double show next week. Oh, because Jack's gone. We kind of need Jack. For the early one? If we do a double?
Well, I'll tweet out what our answer is. But we'll do a show where there's no new questions, where we just do ketchup on these questions that we've missed. Not catch up, catch catch up. Catching up to our questions. Alright, so people, I have not missed your questions.
I have them, but right now we must talk tomatoes. And that's actually one of the questions. So why don't you talk about your studies here real quick? Okay, so it started out, let's see, over the summer, I was actually down in Florida and I knew I wanted to visiting visiting my mom. By definition, not a mistake.
Um I knew I wanted to get started on these. What the hell are you doing visiting Florida in the summer? Unless you're coming to a mango tasting. Alright. Um so I didn't have access down there to really good, you know, let's say farmers market tomatoes.
Um but I figured people buy a lot of tomatoes at the supermarket, so let me start this test with these. So that was the first round. And what kind were they? They were your they were, it was I got three kinds. I got a sort of your standard red sandwich tomato, um, uh plum tomatoes, and then some smaller, yeah, like cherry tomatoes basically.
And half in the fridge, half on the counter. I always brought the ones from the fridge back up to room temperature before tasting just so that tasters couldn't easily identify which was which by temperature. And uh the first day, after the first overnight, um the the countertop tomatoes, the room temperature tomatoes, were clearly better than the refrigerated ones. Uh and at that point I was still expecting the refrigerated tomatoes to just be terrible across the board, because I was operating under the same assumption that everyone else has been. Um on the second day, with the so the tomatoes had sat at the counter for two days at that point and had been in the fridge for two days at that point, uh things flipped.
And suddenly the counter tomatoes tasted kind of dull. And whereas the refrigerated tomatoes still maintained a vibrancy, I would say. Yeah, I mean exactly. The bar was low. By the way, when you said suddenly the song Suddenly Seymour came into my head, which is an amazing song.
Suddenly Seymour. Awesome, Daniel. I love it. Yeah. It's right there.
It's right there with it. Right there. Oh yeah. Alright, let's continue before we get kicked off the air. So uh not for not because of suddenly Seymour, but because of our time.
Yeah. So right. Uh okay, so let's see, to make this quick. So that surprised me. Um I started to wonder, well, okay, it it it looks like there's a point at which sitting out in warmer temperatures can actually be potentially more detrimental to the flavor of a tomato than a refrigerated one.
But and I and I wrote a thing about that, uh, but that left a lot of questions because these were your your really generic uh big ag tomatoes shipped from state to state, picked green, the whole thing. Sure, crap tanks. Crap tanks. So how does this does this really apply to better tomatoes? So for the rest of the summer I was doing tests where I was buying tomatoes pretty much at the rate that I could consume them and uh refrigerating half of each kind and putting the other half in the counter.
And it and it continued to bear out uh in in my blind tastings, the findings. Now my my apartment is hot uh in the summer because I don't have air conditioning. Mistake. Yeah, I know. I I pat myself on the back for it for environmental reasons, but it's actually actually really stupid.
Um so that's I started to s home in on this on this theory that a lot of the studies that had been done, the the ones that I found, I I haven't done an exhaustive search of all of the literature on tomato storage, but what I did find across the board, all the tomatoes that were tested were tested in cooler temperatures. So room temperature was defined as being below 70 degrees Fahrenheit and then compared to refrigeration temperatures. And I was finding that in my room temperature, which was well over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, um the ripe the so angry sweating too while he's writing. Yeah. Can't sleep, face against the pillow.
Oh man. Yeah. I've done all sorts of crazy things to deal with deal with the the heat in my place, including sleeping on wet sheets. Um anyway, uh it it continued to it continued to look like at the very least in warm temperatures, once you have a nice ripe tomato, uh it actually seems to do better more often than not in the fridge than being left out uh to kind of wilt in the heat. Um a lot of people were still not happy with those results.
They wanted more quantitative data because this was mostly just qualitative, you know, I do blind tastings and say, well, I like this one because of X and that one because of Y, and sort of see where the see where everything uh everything ended up. So then for the third round, I did uh I tried to quantify it by doing uh a pretty large blind tasting in my office. I had people rate the tomatoes on a scale of uh zero to ten on criteria like overall preference, texture, flavor, aroma. Uh had different tomatoes. I averaged them all out um to see to see where things were.
I also did many rounds of triangle tests because one of the things that I was finding was that in many cases it was hard to actually even distinguish between the counter tomatoes and the refrigerated tomatoes. So a triangle test, for those of you that don't know, it's uh two things that are the same, one thing's different, and you see if they can pick out the different one. Right. Um and I did an early round of triangle tests, uh just sort of a test run with a colleague, and he was about 50% uh correct in identifying the counter tomatoes, um, which is better than what you'd expect um if he were guessing at random. Right.
Uh but not not great. Right. Not great success in differentiating. And then I did a a full, a much bigger round with multiple tasters, triangle tests. It was 24 rounds, I think, and in that case they got uh n uh nine out of the 24 rounds correct, which puts it just about in the zone of guessing at random.
Did you correct for where in the tomato they were tasting? I tried to, you know, admit it like my tests were not absolutely sound and and and uh you know scientifically perfect in their in how I designed them, but I did try to select cross-sections that had similar representations of uh seed quantity and uh the pulpy part. So I tried not to give someone a cross-section that was mostly pulp with one and mostly seed with another. Right. I mean the the issue one of the interesting things about tomatoes is that the flavor profile changes radically from the stem end to the tip.
Yes. Well, that's I would say that you that's there's I was seeing much more variation within the batches, whether refrigerated or countertop than between refrigerated and countertop. Sure. Like when I know when I'm serving tomatoes in the summer I'll take a the I'll take off the the end right by the stem, taste it. If that one's flavorless, I'll take off a few more slices until I get to the flavor I like and then I'll reserve those for another use and then put the awesome like other side up for service.
Exactly. Yeah there's tremendous variation even within one piece of fruit. And in fact even in the s when I had my the tasters blind tasting the t the the big batch of tomatoes and scoring them, I had scores for every single individual piece of fruit and I was seeing huge spreads of scores which is partly there's a level of arbitrariness when somebody decides what's a five or what's a set you know people tend to be somewhat consistent within their own scoring numbers but some people just tend to score low and some tend to score high. But even with that I could see variations were happening even within a piece of fruit that suggests exactly what you're saying which is that you have tremendous variation within a piece of fruit let alone yeah I mean I'd I would say I saw much more variation from fruit to fruit and within a fruit than between refrigerated and countertop. And actually the one thing I didn't mention is my latest my last round of testing it had actually gotten cool in New York City at that point and so those tomatoes were sitting out in average temperatures of about 65 to 70 degrees which I had never my whole theory was okay well if it's really warm the refrigerator is arguably the better place to go.
Exactly yeah there's just accelerated aging is happening, and so you're gonna have degradation at the end. Once they've hit their sweet spot, they're just going downhill. So it's just a race to the bottom. What's amazing is that what I was finding was that even in the around 70 degrees it was not as drastic drastic. The countertop was did better, but at the r it's still I wasn't seeing this dramatic refrigerated tomatoes are absolutely horrible and re and tomatoes stored at room temperature are great spread.
Oh sweet, I love that. Well maybe he stored some with his wet sheets. But the uh some in the shower. So after after reading some on the toilet shelf. Oh yeah, sweet, sweet.
Uh inside the toilet in the water on the shelf for inspection. So let me I mean let me just 'cause after reading it, let me just give you my thoughts on reading it. Yeah. And then uh you tell me what you think about my thoughts, and then they're gonna kick us off the air. Okay.
Okay. Um kind of like my initial hatred of the refrigerating tomatoes comes from, you know, uh like childhood days of you people would buy a tomato, a crappy tomato, it's underripe anyway, has you know, very little flavor to begin with, and then they would store it in the fridge for like a week and a half. Right. And then, you know, after a week and a half they would slice it and it had just turned into a now it's not as long as it tasteless, it's also mealy and disgusting. Yeah.
So it's mainly this mealiness that happens after long refrigerated storage, this tissue damage that happens after long refrigerated storage to these tomatoes, that you know, that that happens. You know what I mean? But so I think that you know, on reading it, I'm like, look it. So over a couple of days, you're not getting that kind of a damage to a tomato by storing it in the fridge, probably, right? Exactly.
And so what the fridge is doing is the fridge is saying stop. Stop ripening. Right. So if you get it to your perfect place, then maybe the fridge is a good place to put it as long as you let it warm thoroughly the hell up afterwards, right? Right.
And I think for things that don't get mealy, like grape tomatoes, I store them in the fridge for doesn't matter. I mean they lose quality, but they're not getting mealy on me. Right. It's mainly mealiness that I hate. You know what I mean?
And the uh and and I think some tomato varieties like uh are more susceptible to that. Or more prone to that. Yeah, more and I hate that. And the qual and the general quality level. I I did see some mealiness developing.
You know, for for for some of the tests, like the big the big tasting I did in my office, I knew which was which. Um so I was able to just do my own um tastes, and I could see that for the tomatoes that I perceive to be lower quality to begin with, uh, the mealiness was more of a problem in the refrigerator. Um tasters still had a harder time differentiating when they when they were blind. Um so I knew that I was I knew what to look for and I could I could see it to some degree. Um so there, you know, at the end of the day, there's no argument that the refrigerator is a great place to put tomatoes.
Um by the way, also I sh uh in case anyone wonders if they haven't read the stuff yet, he was storing them right on the counter, i.e. stem side down. Stem side down. Uh it's the only way to store a tomato on your counter. Please don't store it the other way.
Uh especially with an expensive tomato. So yeah, there we there but here here's my thing. The other thing I took away from it is that look at like I told you before, I buy these two tomatoes every year. The German stripes and the Ant Rubies. I know by color and feel exactly how I want them to be.
Yeah. So typically I'll buy them, I'll buy some that I'm gonna eat today. Right. And I'll buy some I'm gonna eat tomorrow, and then I'm gonna buy some that I'm gonna eat the day after that. And I leave them out on the counter, and they come perfect exactly when I want them to, like an avocado does.
Like, yeah. Like you're buying just like avocados. You're buying some ready to eat, some that are have a day left in them, and some that need a couple days. Right. And so I would never put those suckers in the fridge because I need them to get to their perfect spot.
Exactly. But if you have something that's at its perfect spot, I guess I might have to concede that it deges less in the fridge. Wow. That's what that's what I found. It degrades less.
It's less of an encrapping than having it ripened past its perfect point. Interesting, interesting stuff. You know I hate to do this, Dave. Yes, we have to go. Thank you, Daniel.
Maybe you can come back for some fermented shark. Can I really? Yeah. Yeah. All right, fermented shark next week, plus maybe a catch-up episode, cooking go juice.
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