Today's program has been brought to you by S. Wallace Edwardson Sons, third generation Cure Masters producing the country's best dry cured and aged hams, bacon, and sausage. For more information, visit SurreyFarms.com. 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 on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to 1245. Well, Nastasha the Hammer Lopez is uh later than me today, which is unusual. Unusual. She's on the L train.
Uh, I'm sure you guys all know the fabulous website. Is the L train F'd, but you know, spelled out, right? And apparently if you go on that right now, it would probably say They spell it L-A-T-E train. Really? They spell it out.
Yeah, L. I think it's just is the L train, you know, not French Connection UK, but properly uh spelled. Anyways. But while we're waiting for Nastasha, we have a new person in the engineering booth today. Liz, right?
Yes. Hello. Hello, how are you doing? How are you enjoying the uh engineering stuff while Jack's away? Oh, you know what they say with the with a cat's away, the mice will play, right?
Uh I guess, I guess, I guess. And uh um before we get too into it, we have two special guests with us today. We might actually, a third person might be coming. Uh, we got Don Lee, the fabulous Don Lee of uh what's the new bar called? Uh Boilermaker.
Boilermaker. But you don't drop the shot glasses into the you don't actually drop the boilermaker shot glass into the into the pine glass. You can if you want. There's no right or wrong way to do it. You can just, you know, bear in a shot next to each other.
You can pour it in, you can drop the shot. But do you you don't encourage this though? We encourage fun. So if you're having fun, do what you want. Do you leave enough volume in the pint glass to do a to drop a proper, or do you have to take a sip first?
You gotta take a sip first. We don't want to stiff you if you want to, you know, a good beer. Not an exact line, but you know, it should be to the top. British people. You know?
Like, don't get me stuck. I love you. I love you, Brits, but you and your obsession over your pour lines in your beers is a little bananas because like the c the the price, and we're also joined by the way, Paul Adams, the uh head honcho of uh uh popular sciences uh web press. Is that true? Was that your title, Head Honcho?
Senior Editor. Is that the same thing? I prefer Hancho. Okay, yeah, head honcho. And and and uh Stinky Fish Enthusiast.
Yes. Yes, which we're gonna get to in a minute. Because it's it's it's it's stinky fish Tuesday on cooking issues. As you might know, uh we are actually going to get to my backlog of questions. We're gonna record a special ketchup show.
And maybe I can even uh do a ketchup tasting for that for Nest Nastasha, who for years had said that the brand of ketchup that you use doesn't matter until Yeah, until recently she went away and someone gave her some off brand ketchup, but she's like, uh oh, I thought it didn't matter because I had just been eating, you know, eating heints this whole time. So we could do a comparative ketchup tasting, maybe some fancy ketchups, and some crappier supermarket ketchups. But I mean it's kind of like everything's rated against heints, wouldn't you say? Right, but are you gonna do the Steingarten, you know, McDonald's French fries the medium, or what are you gonna use? Okay, look, I love Jeffrey.
In fact, I saw him recently for the first time in a long time. Uh for those of you that don't know, Jeffrey is like, in you know, for me, one of the most influential food writers ever eat up. He ate. Although, you know what? I can never get the name of his book right because I confuse his book name with uh I'd said this in the air before with uh Oliver Sachs's book name, so it's like the man who who ate his wife with everything or something.
He mistook his wife for something to eat. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Something like this. But it's actually The Man Who Ate Everything, uh is his first book. Um and it's just, you know, I think it's one of the it's like of its style, like the seminal book.
Anyway, amazing. Uh amazing book. Anyways, uh, he's dead wrong. McDonald's French fries suck. In fact, that uh that style of French fries sucks.
It's like right in between like a shoestring fry, uh cooked to the point where it's basically a potato chip. I mean, I can kind of appreciate this. Um uh even a soggy, crappy thinner fry, but the fries that taste good for 13.5 seconds when they come out of the fryer and then turn to like uh hollow pieces of cardboard, which is kind of like how McDonald's French fries work, they suck. I hate them. So, what would be your uh medium for testing different kinds of ketchup then?
Well, okay, look. But what do you think about McDonald's fries? I mean, McDonald's fries are McDonald's fries. If you're on a road trip, you know, it's uh it's something you can, you know, count on. I mean, look, I can get first of all on a road trip, they're they get cold so fast because you're driving and you can't just like pound them.
You have to sit there and like the person in the passenger seat is holding the fries over and you're missing and you're dipping. I I would say you have to taste them straight and then taste them on uh hmm. I don't know, Nastasha, what is the you're looking well today? I'm gonna go see Fleetwood Mac. Oh, she's dressed up to see Fleetwood Mac.
Uh Nastasia, one of the largest Fleetwood Mac fans, hates Stevie Nicks. I don't hate it. I prefer the other one. Can you make more crinkling noises as you pass the mic, please? Because it's your dry ice.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we we're doing an event at for the low line tomorrow, and uh we need dry ice. There's a low line now. Well, yes. Uh it's uh some abandoned like tunnel area in the lower east side, and they're uh having a uh a fundraiser tomorrow.
And we're one of the drink makers for it. So I'm gonna do um our our version. Don has his own version of the uh uh Harvey Wallbanger. We're gonna do our frozen version to the Italiano Esteliano uh name tip of the hat to Piper. That was one of his uh final punks for us before he moved on to uh, you know.
That's true. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, uh so we were about to eat some stinky fish and I got sidetracked. Uh we have a caller on the air and we were talking about boiler makers. Why don't I take the caller first so he's not sitting there all the whole time.
Caller, are you still there? Yes. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing good, how are you? Doing well, doing well.
What's your what is your question? Um, okay, so I actually have asked this already on America's Test Kitchen Radio, but um Chris and Bridget were not able to question uh out. You're cutting in and out a little bit. Try to try to rearrange your head in relation to the phone and and uh start again. I couldn't hear that last sentence.
Um I have actually already asked uh Chris and Bridget of America's Test Kitchen about this question and they actually weren't able to answer it, so I'm hoping you could help me out. Ooh, well we got we got four heads here plus plus Liz a separate head in the engineering room, so maybe we got maybe we got your answer here. All right. Um so um about two years ago I was in a lab um for biology and uh one of the experiments is where we took salivary amylase and um tested its effect on a dish of agar jelly. And the idea is that the enzyme can actually break down the starch into sugars.
And um I was wondering if you can have that same effect with like an egg yolk on fruit, because I know egg yolks contain amylase. So I'm wondering, can you buy like a really crappy piece of supermarket fruit that's totally unripe and put the egg yolk on it and have it like magically ripen um artificially. My understanding of it is that while there are some enzymes in uh egg yolk, and I guess those are the ones that make custards uh turn to crap if you don't cook them through enough, right? Um that's my memory, it's been a long time. Yeah, that they're relatively uh low in activity compared to um compared to commercial preparations or for instance saliva.
Um better off spitting on it. Better off spitting on it, uh, aside from the fact that you'd have uh egg yolk on it. But the the more interesting thing that you bring up is that uh ripeness isn't just a function of uh sugar. So ripeness is oft times a uh an increase in sugar, but concomitant with lots of other changes. For instance, sometimes a reduction in acid, sometimes acid is stable, it depends.
Like apples, the acid in apples will slowly decrease over time as it ripens. Um the creation of uh volatiles, especially kind of like higher uh flowery and esterine notes, things like this, are created during the ripening process. So it's not all starch to sugar conversion. However, liquor companies make a very good business out of taking things like potatoes and converting the starch in them into sugar without having to go through any consume you know time consuming step like fermentation. So they just dump amylases into it.
But remember, uh enzyme. There's alpha uh amylases and there's beta amylases, and there's different ones that are uh meant to operate at various different um uh points. But if you have like, for instance, a puree of unripe uh product, I would recommend add and you but you just wanted to sugar it up. Let's say you're doing like potatoes or something, right? If you have a lot of pectin, I would I would add a pectin uh pectonase enzyme to thin it out so that your other enzymes can work more effectively.
And then uh usually they do a two-step process, two different enzymes when they're doing conversions for things or more, like shotgun enzyme approaches. I call them when they're doing things like fermentation for potatoes. I forget the names of the enzymes that they use, but uh uh novozymes makes a bunch of them gusmer is the place. But I don't think any I've tried using just straight amylase from a brew shop, and uh I think they're cr they're I was very underwhelmed. Very underwhelmed by it.
Um also remember that uh for your amylases to work properly, they have to have access to the starch in the in granules. So unless you like let's say you take an underripe apple. So when you taste an underripe apple, one of the characteristic nodes of an underripe apple is a starchy flavor, and you can see almost feel it when you cut it with a knife, it goes shunk and it cleaves because it's starchy. The only starch is really if you lick that apple instead of eating it, you can actually get that kind of starchy taste from it. And uh the um the that starch can be is available to be converted by uh an amylase.
Uh however, the starch uh intact starch is typically not. So you would need to uh functionalize the starch, aka cook it, and which is what they do when they're doing uh when they're mashing out or something like this. Usually you'll you'll you'll bring the ward up so you can hydrate the starch and then it's more available. Back me up on this, Don Paul. Yeah.
So uh so I would recommend you gotta do all those, but chewing and spitting out is a time honored way of increasing the sugar content of uh starchy products, although it's it people find it gross. But if you're doing it for yourself, or if you're doing it. I don't really want to spit on my fruit, so I don't think I'm gonna do that. Well, you're not gonna sp spin on it, you're just gonna chew it and spit it out. And then ferment it.
But even if you just keep it in your mouth, you keep chewing it, you'll feel it change over time in on your tongue. I really I've never done it. Like to a potato I've definitely done it with rice. So like even just like the the plainest of white rices, if you just you know keep it in your mouth, keep chewing on it, wait a like you know 30 seconds to a minute, it'll become sweeter. Hey Stas, you ever seen me chew something for a full minute stuff?
No. I like full like millisecond more like I'm like I'm like I almost I I almost got kicked out of a Michelin starred restaurant in s in Spain because the guys couldn't come to the table fast enough to explain what the hell they were doing. It was already gone. And like the actual the chef came out and was angry with me I'm like well you know just don't talk so goddamn much so excuse me don't talk so much family show uh and let me have my food and eat it right or or serve everyone else and then wait or like put a cloche over mine or something you know something. Because I eat very quickly real quick I know this is your ketchup show but if you have time I've got two more quick questions to ask all right go go quick while Don is setting up our fish products.
Okay. Um so I've got two uh all clad Teflon pans and the finish has been totally ruined on them from like use and abuse and scratching them on accident stuff like that. Um I don't want to ditch two really nice pans um I feel like the metal underneath is fine so um I actually have access to a lot of like stainless working equipment like polishing and stuff. Right. Is there any way to the Teflon finish off the pan and functionalize the pan into a standard uh stainless non uh regular sticking pan like normal yeah sure I mean uh yeah usually it's Teflon over uh aluminum though.
You're sure it's uh the the undersurface of it is stainless, right below the Teflon. Usually it's it's it's like the old school like V3 pan, so I think it's a sandwich of stainless aluminum stainless. That's a good point. I didn't think about the fact that it might just be aluminum and then Teflon. Yeah, but uh Teflon, uh, as abrasion uh resistant as it is, uh, is no match for a uh a very quickly spinning wire brush attached to a four and a half inch angle grinder.
But uh, you know, then you're gonna have to polish and and buff out, and you want to make sure you get all the uh Teflon particles off because uh it's gonna be more apt to uh you keeping those things straight, Don? Which one's which? Yeah, you're more apt to uh you know have uh you know little Teflon particles and people are more and more worried about like burned little Teflon particles every every five minutes. I see them. I hear more people upset about uh P what P F O what is it P F O A's that perfluorinated something or others?
Anyway, okay, what's your what's your next one? Um what is the deal on the Searsol? How can I get one? Are you gonna offer them for sale on Amazon? We are.
There's not that many left. In fact, I'm glad you asked this will be the update uh for the Sears all for right now. Uh the international ones are going out tomorrow. Oh tomorrow? They're shipping tomorrow, and all we're doing is waiting on the uh the handoff from our importer into Amazon, and then they'll ship out.
So literally, in order to give something to Amazon, you need to have an appointment, uh, believe it or not. And so they're making that appointment, but we hope it happens this week. As soon as I get confirmation that everyone from Shop Starter and Kickstarter has been uh had their product sent to them, I will then mail the residual Sears all, of which there are gonna be how many styles? Like 300? 350, probably.
300. Uh I'll mail them mail them to Amazon and they'll just go up on Amazon Prime ready ready to to go. Awesome. Awesome. Good deal.
Okay. Um if I miss out, I'm probably gonna have to like hack my iron or something out of a Boston Shaker or whatever. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't obviously I can't recommend infringing uh our patent or uh doing things that are unsafe, but you know, but it is a fun project. All right, fair enough.
Alrighty, thanks so much. All right, Don, back to you for a second with the boilermaker. Yes, sir. Uh I forget we were we're talking about boilermakers and and and the drop and the drop and it's sip. Oh, and the freaking, yeah, the British with their pores.
Here's the thing the price is arbitrary, so why does the pour have to be exact? Same with the Germans, the little wine glass with the line etched in it. You ever seen those? Well, so you know, historically there's the fact that it was uh something that was mandated so that you subs that it was trying to protect the customer. So the government would say that you have to have this line so people know that this is what it is.
And in in in England, they take the weights and measures very sp uh very seriously. So even jiggers, if you're producing a 2550 milliliter jigger, you can't first of all you can't make a uh 3060, it has to be 2550, because that's what is uh recognized by the weights and measures, and then it has to be certified by them. So they're they just are obsessive about uh making sure that everything is right for the for the folks. And then after that, it's really just perception. At this point, people have an expectation of what it's gonna be.
And if you, you know, it's like even if you order a cocktail today, if you uh go to like a hotel and they give you an absurdly large uh VSTEM glass and they give you a martini to the top, like no one wants to drink that all the way to the bottom. It'll just be warm by the time it's the bottom. But if you give them the the right amount of drink, you know, that uh in in a large glass, people feel like they're at that they've been chips. I'm familiar with this problem, that's why you use a smaller glass. Exactly.
But the fact of the matter is it's all it's all perception and not actual kind of mandates and these weird There's another caller. Alright, uh okay. After this, we gotta we gotta eat some we gotta eat some fish. Caller, you're on the air. Hi David, good afternoon.
Uh really uh enjoy the show and also I'm really looking forward to uh your book coming out. Oh, thank you. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Pretty soon.
Pretty soon, very soon. Yeah, terrific. Oh, I had a couple recipe questions. I hope uh you could help me with. Um I've heard you talk about um making onion ice cream.
Sure. Um I was wondering um how you did that. Uh do you caramelize the onions? Do you pressure cook them? Or how do you how do you do that?
Well, um you could I guess we we never caramelize them first. You could caramelize them first, I guess, or afterwards. Uh but we we pressure cook them in milk and then blend it for like 20 minutes uh and then uh blend and then use strain and then use that as the uh milk base with the with the cream. So um and it that works. If you want more of a frankly, I would actually just if you wanted to get more of a brown note, I would just add brown sugar rather than caramelized, because my the only issue you might have is that you might develop some stable Usually when I pressure cook, I pressure cooked uncooked onions, and I don't know whether you'll develop some more stable, sulfury stuff if you pre-saute and kind of set the flavor of the onion before you pressure cook it.
Usually I slice it into rings very quickly, throw it in milk and pressure cook it right away. So I don't let it sit around all the time and develop that kind of stale onion flavor or any of any of that kind of any of that kind of jazz. Uh but yeah, it's a legit, it's a legit ice cream. I mean, it's on the savory side, but it's legitimately an ice cream. Have you guys ever been to the demos when we've done that?
Uh no, I've never tried your version of it, but have you ever tried it with uh the Maui onions? I've heard they're like much sweeter to begin with. Really? We still gotta pressure cook those suckers. No.
Stasia, you've had the onion ice cream, right? Yeah. Did you like it? Mm-hmm. Wow.
And now Nastasha likes it. You know that it has to be a legit product because she there's nothing. Booker and Nastasia are the two people that love to hate the stuff that I do the most. And that's kind of why I like keeping them around. I mean, Booker, because he's my son, but Nastasha, because, you know, she's a good one.
It's a vital role. Yeah, what? It's a vital role. It is a vital role. The hater.
Yes. Yeah. We gotta write a song. Is there a song called The Hater? There's a Joker.
Can we do a new version called The Hater and You're the Star? Sure. Sweet. Alright. Cool.
Alright, well, thanks. Alright, so on to fish. If you don't mind, I was also trying to um make your um first aid cocktail at home. Will that work with agar clarification? No.
I mean, look, you can clarify with Agar, but uh I found that uh drinks that are traditionally meant to be uh kind of Houstinos or really thin when they're agar, especially because remember you have to add water when you're doing an agar-based thing anyway. And so it just it never bec uh becomes kind of uh awesome. Here's what I recommend you do, because first date lasts forever. So here's what you should do. You should get the dates, you should get whichever spirit you're gonna make the first date into because we've made it with various different ones, blend it uh a high speed with SPL, and then just put it in a cabinet for like a month and uh and then rack it off.
And you know, you might not get like a hundred percent, but you're gonna get a lot of settling, and you're gonna get excuse me, a significant amount of clear stuff on the top of it. Oh, nice. No, that's what I recommend. But it takes a while, but it's fine because first date doesn't go bad. That's the method known as God centrifuge.
Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah, thank you very much.
Appreciate it. I appreciate your help. Alright, cool, thanks. Hey, Paul, you have these kind of contacts. Can we get into one of those NASA uh AstroNath centrifuges and just hold the bottle of uh it's only a couple G's, though, it's probably not enough to do much.
I think they go up to seven G's. Yeah. Yeah. I don't mean uh well, we're doing a couple thousand G's, but I wonder whether you could visibly see settling in a bottle of Houstino if you're holding it in your hand. Probably.
In a in an astronaut centrifuge. Insofar as you can see anything at seven G's. Well, because your eyes are peeled back. Yeah, well, you know, Paula's been on the vomit comet. Did you know that?
I think we might be on the vomit comet in about 20 minutes here when we're eating the hotel. So why don't we talk about the fish that we have first? But we have some non-spinky fish that was mailed to us uh by a longtime listener, John Riper. Right? Yep.
Yeah. Uh thank you, John. So he did he fish these he fished these, right? I think he fished these. He's fish these?
Mm-hmm. All right. So uh where are they from? What river? Do you know?
Yeah, I can tell you in a second. Alright. So uh for those of you that I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what your background is because I'm not talking to you. You're you're listening to a podcast. But um so salmon, right?
Uh there's a bunch of different variables with a salmon. We're not talking about the latter variables like uh harvesting or any of this other nonsense. But aside from your standard kind of farmed or uh or uh wild, right? You have uh which run they're from and then which species they're from. Bo the species obviously affects what species it is and the waters it come from are gonna affect things like uh fat content based on how cold the waters are, etc.
etc. This is what he said. He has two different wild Pacific salmon. The Lewis and Clark expedition ate a ton of salmon when they ventured out to my corner of the globe. Most of it was dried and they came to hate it.
But Mary Weather Lewis later wrote that the fresh king salmon he ate here was the finest fish he ever tasted. I wouldn't argue with that, although some people think Coho salmon is just as good as Chinook. I'm sending you some of both so you can compare for yourself. But I'm not sending them as fresh fish. I've smoked them instead.
But they're not the hard, dry chunks that commercially smoked salmon tend to be. They are dry cured and cherry wood smoked, but both the curing and smoking are a lot lighter than you typically find. So these fillets are still perishable, but they are a lot less delicate than raw fish. Well, I'm not gonna say I'm anti-coho, but uh, you know, I don't fly around in uh coho helicopters, right? Like it's chinook is the freaking helicopter.
I saw two Chinook helicopters out my window in Manhattan yesterday. Yeah. I don't know why there were military troop transport helicopters in Chelsea. Is it flee? Is it Fleet Week?
No. Well, you know, they're a lot of helicopters. Oh damn, strength! Strength, Paul. Strength.
This is why, you know, Paul just can't be beefy. Alright, so let's taste this before we get to our our crazy uh craziness. So okay, which one's which? So the one on the right is the the coho and the tasteless. Why are you sitting here not eating?
You guys are making me angry. Um I think salmon's a delicious product. Do you like salmon? Mm-hmm. Are you literally eating bubblegum right before you taste the salmon?
No. No, yes. Do a quick uh shot of Brennan. Oh, was it? Why don't you just why don't you describe what we're gonna be uh drinking here?
Uh we have some uh Icelandic schnaps here. It's uh it's like aqua vete from Iceland. Uh Paul was uh kind enough to uh hook us up with the the the the US importer of uh Brennan. Who contacted me on Twitter when he heard we were going to be eating fermented shark today. And by the way, by the way, John, who's a stickler for details, which I appreciate, um, took pictures of the actual fish they came from and took both um fillet pieces from the same section of fish and labeled them with marks.
Yeah. Which is so that's fantastic. That's fantastic, right? Uh this is also a really delicious fish. I think I prefer the one on the left, but I'm a f I'm a fat ear dude.
Like, what do you what do you do? What do you do? What do you prefer? Which one's the one on the left? I wasn't paying attention.
The left was the uh the chinook. Well, there you go. It's called it's called the King for a reason, people. I think the other one's also delicious. Yeah.
But it's a different product. I mean, like, you know, I've come to expect delicious kind of I mean, I've come to expect like fatty being positive. Whereas now a lot of people like the leaner uh salmons because um they still haven't gotten over this uh stupid hatred of fat. Let's save that for another show. Okay, so what uh uh so we're drinking uh uh what's the how do you say skull in uh in uh do they have a special pronunciation of skull there?
Don went. Iceland, no idea. So though they we're gonna go Scandinavian style. You know, uh old Iceland Icelandic, the most uh conservative Norse language, and therefore uh people in Iceland can actually read the uh sagas because it's the closest language to Old Norse. And so uh respecting that, I will not clink glasses.
We will just look at each other and skull properly. Skull. Skull skull. Oh, that's good. That's good.
They don't wussy out. They don't wussy out on the uh on the caraway flavor. Caraway forward. Yeah, which I appreciate. I don't like sissy, sissy Akavitz with no uh speaking of sissies.
What are our glass levels? Oh I know. The the the bartender and the man of experimental eating prowess are the ones who haven't pounded their uh now Don. Don just came back from Iceland and was not involved in any sort of eruption. Why don't you tell us what you brought back?
Uh brought back some uh fermented shark. Uh well, so you and I did. We went on a trip to Sweden together, and you uh made the poor decision to try to bring back uh sastrami in your luggage. Managed to bring it back. Yeah, no, so Sir Strami, why don't you want to explain what surstramen is.
Surstrami is uh intentionally miscanned is it's herring? I believe. Yeah. Yeah. So the uh you know how you're not supposed to eat a bulging can if you buy can uh fruit?
It's it's it's a bulging can of uh fish that's gone dead. And uh it was quite horrendous. Paul joined us for tasting that. And I figured, you know, I'm at another uh Scandinavian place with something that's supposedly terrible. I figure I should share the the terrible with you.
So uh for those of you uh we talked about it on the air, and Paul uh blog blogged it, right, for Popular Science. I did. There's a video of Dave and McGee enjoying it. Yeah, so it was uh for those of you that uh I don't know, just were born today and don't know Harold McGee. Uh Harold McGee had possibly the greatest quote of all time as we were eating the surf stroming.
So surf stromming, what they do is is they they don't add enough salt to it, so it ferments in the can. And for some reason it always ferments in a way that doesn't pr uh produce any sort of uh botulism, but it does make some for some stinky stuff. And when you open it on a day when you see nothing, instantly everything's coated in flies. Everything's coated in flies, like your face, the surstrom, everything coated in flies, and the smell irradiates out from you know far and wide. And McGee, uh, who had had it maybe two or three times prior, was like this one is missing uh the vomit note.
I miss the vomit note. And I was like, wow, Harold, that's strong. Strength. Strength. Uh remember that?
That was crazy. And then Paul, Paul was the only guy standing next to McGee and just like pounding chunk after chunk. Like I had like three or four because I wanted to see if I could acquire a taste over this like you know, small amount of time. But Paul, I don't even remember this, Stas. Yeah, took a cab?
Took a cab home with it. But then what happened? Paul, the window wouldn't go down. I took a cab home with the leftover surstromming because we couldn't finish the can. And I was in a cab with where the windows wouldn't open.
What did the cabby say? He didn't say anything, but he looked very unhappy. I love that the cabbie had seen so much worse that he doesn't mention surstromming in the cab. Anyway, totally illegal to bring back. Is this stuff also illegal to bring back?
Not to my knowledge. Uh it's sold everywhere. I saw some vacuum pack, some uh but they're all kind of frozen. Uh there were no warnings in the airport like uh in Sweden where it said specifically not to put this in your in your luggage. Right.
All right. Well, okay, so so Hackerl, as it's called, uh Icelandic delicacy. Turns out that they have a boatload of these green land sharks off the coast of their waters, right? Right. And they catch them from time to time.
But the level of trimethylamine, I believe, I I I wasn't able to look up my scholarly stuff today, but TMA, I think it's TMA, trimethylamine. I don't think it's straight ammonia, is so high that the uh flesh is actually toxic to eat. Yes. And uh so get what's called shark sick. Well, I like that.
Uh you know, but there's also a lot of squids that are high in well, I guess that's more iodine, huh? Anyway, but like dogs apparently don't aren't offended by the smell, and they can get uh some sort of like uh TMA narcosis from eating too much of this of red. Yeah, which is kind of awesome. Humans can't I believe they also have Brenavin with it. Uh yeah, the dogs.
Yeah, yeah. Well, but the thing is like we're so repulsed by the smell that we can't eat enough of it to actually have it be toxic. That's one of the few things that's you know, kind of like that. Uh, you know, where but we're gonna try. But we're gonna try.
Well, no, but so then they what they do is they they uh bury it. They just bury it, bury the sucker in the ground, and some portion of you know, I I love how people figure things out. This is why people are so resourceful or dumb or both, a combination of resource dumb. Yeah. So they bury the shark for however long it freezes and thaws because you know, because it does.
They they pull it out of the ground and someone's like, This stinks, but differently than before. Yes. I'm gonna eat this thing. And then they actually hang it up for a couple more weeks to dry it out. Yeah, they gotta dry it out.
Well, the guy like probably tasted a piece, didn't die. He's like, well, I'm gonna hang it up for later and see what see what happens. This is how all this kind of crap happens. You know what I'm saying? Because you're starving, and it's either eat your eat your dead brother or eat this rotting shark, and you go for the rotting shark first, and the brother's kind of like a second call.
I mean, that's usually how this thing works, right? Yeah, okay. So the line between fermented and rotten is sort of a hazy one. It's a matter of opinion. Yeah, that's true.
I mean, like in a fine place, and uh they're you know, you know, it we've kind of lost it, but like when you travel to other places and you see cultures that still have a complete continuum from fresh to fermented in everything they eat, including grains and and uh you know main starches and stuff. We very rarely eat, you know, anyway, whatever. Uh so uh it's uh hung up to dry they smoke it as well, they smoke it, right? Isn't there a fire in there? I don't think there's a smoking, just uh just a dry hanger from what from at least what wikit Wikipedia tells me.
So the guy didn't use his uh his brother to smoke the fish instead of eating the brother use it as a as a as smoking fuel. Well, yeah, unfortunately there aren't very many trees in Iceland, so apparently the uh the primarily uh they use um sheep dung. So there is in fact a sheepdung beer that you can get in Iceland. How was it? Uh it was uh smoking.
Uh Don Lee, if you uh ever visit Don Lee uh as a very, very you have to be a very special guest, but if you visit him at the Cocktail Kingdom, he will serve you uh uh hor horse pizzle uh horse pizzle booze. Yeah, that was uh courtesy of uh Tin Ho who brought it back from Vietnam for me. Sweet. The label was amazing. Yeah, it was uh we will we we've been conquering awards for the past 20 years, and we will continue to conquer more.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean 24 hour hotline if you have any questions. Yeah, I mean horse, you know, horse is uh you know uh you know a a uh a well endowed creature yeah yeah I don't what's that called what's that thing called it's uh it's a classic thing I have flew out of my head right now where you think you become something by eating something of like that like Jinseng looks like a a dude with a thing so you're gonna become a dude with a thing if you eat it or like you know what's that called that's it's a it's like there's Daniel Gritzer. Oh Daniel Gritzer is come back why don't you cut him some why don't you cut him some non stink first I'll I could use some more too we're gonna need to uh yeah I lost track of which salmon was which well the one in the package the Chinook is the Chinook and the other one's a coach. No I mean I think he means on the plate on the plate which you were eating it.
The Chinook one was the one that was a little bit more briny. And I think the fatty might have been whether it was the top or the bottom the belly side was a little bit fattier than the top. I think you're a little more briny Daniel you're just in time my brother pull up this uh weird white chair. You don't get a cushy seat because you're late how about that okay Daniel Gritzer from Serious Eats. So we have now uh the like uh the brains here oh by the way uh cocktail kingdom popular science serious eats and then like the two jokers from cooking issues here to tell we have a five heads are clearly better than uh none for uh tasting this uh stuff you want to you want a taste of this stuff before we crack open the hot girl yeah this looks like salmon isn't that yeah looks are not deceiving this is uh so this is the Chinook and this is the Koho.
Chinook and Koho. Well, it's tasty. Same same river, same smoking process. And take from the same piece, take the same piece as you go down, like belly versus belly. So you have to test versus that piece.
Oh, and you needs a shotgun. Alright. I mean, yes. I'm sorry, I'm eating on the air. Okay, here we go.
Drum roll. Open the hockerel. Oh. It's already hot. Ektahockerl.
It's only a hundred grams uh nut. We could pound this. Oh, oh, it's it gets got on me. Oh, geez. I hate these plastic containers.
Alright. That's nothing. That smells like that's nothing. People, people out there, Gordon Ramsey, Gordon Ramsay, I'm calling you out. You are a sissy.
Isn't this what he isn't this what he ate and he puked? You were a free. You were a freaking sissy. Yeah. I figured, you know, if anyone can take it, it would be us.
You know, the number of times we clean down stuff at the end of the night using uh just a windex, it's like ammonia city. Yeah, it's just ammonia. It's not it's not death. Like surstroming is the smell, you're smelling your own decay and rot. You're smelling like liquefied version of that dude on the subway who clears out the subway.
You know what I'm talking about? You're you're like this the stuff that's kind of dripping like from him, like that is what you uh get from Surstroming with an additional note of some other nastiness, plus ammonia. Plus ammonia, right? This just smells like you spilled a little ammonia on your on your fish. Pass this around, let's get our impressions.
It's also supposed to have plenty of urea. Uh yeah, yeah, yes. Oh, okay. So let's. Well, we can't do a break.
We're about to taste it. We'll do a break in a minute. We'll come. What we'll do is we'll do a tasting and then we'll go do a break and we'll come back. But I am I'm telling you that anyone.
Who's it to say a bunch of people have said this is the worst thing they've ever eaten, right? Anthony Burdain said it was the worst thing he's had. Listen, I've met that guy. It didn't seem like a cis. Did his sister try it?
Maybe that's who tried it. Anthony Burdain. Or what is it called? Uh like uh Tony Reichel. What's his like mash up?
Yeah, Don knows. Uh yeah, it's uh Ruth Reichel uh Anthony Burdain. I can't remember. It's a Twitter. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, look, I'm not saying that first of all, obviously men don't have a stronger constitution than women do, but I just like calling people sissies. Right? That's okay, that's fair, right? Totally.
Alright, take a piece, everyone. And then we're gonna seers all it to see what that does to the ammonia, because ammonia is volatile. And then we also have some lemon here to see whether we can uh cut some of the stuff with the lemon, but I don't even think it's gonna need it. Yep. Oh, I mean this.
I eat stinkier stuff than this on a regular basis. Eat that tastes good. That tastes good. It's kind of salty. Very chewy.
Oh you're all you're all you're all you're all complete wusses. Good as stretching it. No, it's got a good thing. I could say it tastes good. Yeah, it's got a good texture.
It's got a little ammonia. Here, give me a f give me a f give me a fork and let's put the sears all together. Here, hand me the cerez all. We should take a break now. Alright, let's take a break and we'll come back with some more uh hackeral issues here on cooking issues.
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Wait, we have Andrew WK on uh as our one of our people saying stuff. For some reason he really likes food. Come on, really? Yeah. Does that mean he's gonna allow us to say uh he's gonna allow us to play party hard?
Oh my god, that's awesome. You you don't you know him, right? You know who he is. Yeah, awesome. I appreciate that.
My son loves Dax loves the show that he had on Cartoon Network called Destroy Build Destroy. Where like teams of like usually a parent versus like it's usually like it can be jocks versus uh cheerleaders or parents versus sons or whatever, parents versus kids, and they they blow up a bunch of crap and then they recombine it and do challenges with the recombined stuff. But like everyone hated it because they're like, it's not a cartoon, and I can't wrap my head around Cartoon Network doing something that's not a cartoon. People are weird. People are weird.
Okay, look. So I got some hot girl here, and I got uh what's this called? A Searsol, and uh here we go. I'm gonna try to search all technical difficulty. So it's toasted up nice.
Alright. Shark is not a fatty fish. No, not at all. Well, that looks lovely. Well, taste it, then.
Whoa. You don't want the first bite? No, I mean I look, you know. Host. Host.
Host with most. Yeah, all right. So what do you think? Better or worse, same. Maybe better.
Better? I like it better. Yeah. You got a little more texture on that or? Well, the the the you know, like I say, ammonia is quite volatile, so I should be able to drive off at least a lot of the ammonia that's on the surface just by uh twisting it up a little bit.
It's dumbly triangle. Oh, this actually well, just to give the uh the listeners what uh what I'm looking at here, it is uh slightly bubbling on the outside, so some of the oil the oil has come to the surface. A little light charring on the side. It looks delicious, uh let's give it a try. Yeah, no noticeful ammonia on the outside.
It has the smell of cooked fish. Yeah. Looks sort of like a chunk of pork valley from here. Yeah. Yeah, the the ammonia's a little more tame.
And you have yeah, you don't have that also that's sort of that cured. It's not quite a raw fish texture, but it's somewhere between round cooked when you don't when it wasn't search all, and here it's got a full uncooked texture. And by the way, the searzole living up to its name and uh serum all. Stas, what do you think of the first piece you had? Did you like it or no?
No, I didn't like it. Did you hate it or just not like it? No, I just didn't like it. Alright, so you try this one. Wait, no, and that Hall do it.
Paul loves it. Paul and I have to use the fork last because we're a little bit sick. Oh. Really? There's more fork.
There's more forks? Yeah, okay. Paul. You use my fork. This is my fork.
Here, Paul, you talk while I search. Now, are both these identical ones? Smells toasted. Uh yes, they're both uh two containers. Paul wants to take one home.
Oh. They're telling us to wrap it up. What? They're telling us to wrap it up. Oh, they all right.
We gotta clear one more piece from Stasha, one for me. You want to show what else we're eating here? Yeah, what's the bread, buddy? We have some uh finished rye crisps and some uh just some German uh rye bread. It's just what I could find locally.
Here, cut the cut the lemon, see what the lemon does, and Paul do we have to do simultaneous testing because they're cutting us off. And the ketchup show, when is the ketchup show, Stas? The ketchup show we can we can pre-record on it. Yeah, but when is it gonna be? So people know when to expect it.
Next week. We're gonna do it next week. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
So uh here, let me have one of those uh what are those? What are they what do they call these? Oh, it's not like a specialized land egg crisp, it's like the standard kind of rye crisp. It's a fin crisp from Finland. Fins, the fins.
Alright, listen. Uh this has been uh stinky fish. We heard a report from Stinky Fishland that uh it's it's not uh it's not that not as stinky as advertised. Not not as stinky as advertised. So uh if anyone there is from Iceland, if anyone can hear our voices and you're from Iceland, I'm calling you out.
Like this stuff is is completely tolerable. Uh I don't know what the heck you guys are are uh you know complaining about or thinking that you have some sort of like you know, I like a hardcore poise is as ammoniated as this, if it's gone over the hill, and I'll eat that anyway because I've already spent the money, even though I know it's not supposed to necessarily be that way. Yep. And uh I'm gonna say about that. What's the where country is it?
Is it is it uh Greenland or Iceland that has the seal stuffed with puffins? I didn't see any steel seal stuff with puffin. I saw a seal and puffin. Uh I did eat I think twelve animals in one day uh while driving around Iceland. So I like that.
How was the puffin? Puffin uh was uh had great puffin and had terrible puffin. Uh but puffin was a lot better than whale. The smoked puffin was delicious. I wish they they sold a puffin jerky, that'd be great.
Really? Yeah, I wish they did. Tell me, what's the puffin taste like? Uh it it again, it was just like uh almost like a uh uh like a duck jerky. It was uh had that kind of uh that gameiness the duck has, not quite like a like a white meat uh chicken, but uh it was it was delicious.
You know, it tastes like puffin. It doesn't taste fishy. It did not taste fishy at all. What about the bad puffin? The bad puffin was just uh it wasn't uh smoked long enough, so it was just kind of squishy in the center, didn't have that that smoke flavor all the way through.
It just looked like a bad smoking chip. So just poorly prepared. It wasn't the puffin that was bad, it was the cook. I blame the chef. Yeah, as usual.
It's usually usually that's the that's the way. Okay, so listen, thank you. Let's give it a shout out to John Riperg and I was about to say that, and you made me look like I was gonna forget. Thanks to John Riper for the delicious uh chinook and co-ho salmon. It's delicious.
We will eat more of that uh at the lunchtime here. Thanks to uh Don for bringing uh this uh hot roll to us and showing that uh it's not as difficult to consume as people make it out to be. Although if you're from Iceland and you and you think that the uh ECTA brand is somehow less uh hardcore than some brand that you have in you know, buried in your in your backyard somewhere, then fine. We'll try your backyard buried hot girl if you can get it to us. And I'm sure we'll get the same crew back to taste it.
Thanks to Paul coming in. Uh thanks to uh Daniel Gritzer, and this has been Cooking Issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio 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.
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