Today's program is brought to you by Kane Vineyard and Winery, a Napa Valley winery committed to respecting the soil and dedicated to the creation of three Cabernet blends. For more information, visit Kane5.com. I'm Greg Blaze, host of Cutting the Curd. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for thousands more.
Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Crooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245, 1250 on the Heritage Radio Network in Bushwick, Brooklyn! Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer, uh Lopez, Jack in the booth, and special guest star on today's show, Nick Wong. How you doing, Nick? You have to talk into the microphone.
He's just gonna sit there and he's gonna shake his head. So Nick's special mode of being guests is just gonna be to lean back and go, you can't see it, but imagine someone looking back and closing their eyes almost. Almost, not 100%, just back and forth now. No. No, no.
Anyways, uh so Nick was uh originally we met him at the French Culinary Institute. He was one of the uh tech interns, then go went to work at Som. How long do you work at Sombar? Before the first time. Nick is killing my brother.
Two years. And then for some reason, he decided where do you go in grammarcy or something like this? And then he went out uh where the hell do you go? You went to Chris Constantino's place, uh uh in Canto. The no longer no longer extant in Kanto.
Chris has a new restaurant. And now for some reason that uh escapes us, he's back at Songbar. Right? Right, Stas? Uh-huh.
Yeah. Listeners have no way of knowing if this guy's really in the studio. Yeah, no, he's being a good one. You could be making him up. It's like an imaginary friend, you know.
You know what? He's gonna have an imaginary lunch after this. Imaginary pizza. And then he will then become my imaginary friend. The imaginary pie here is not that good, also.
Oh, calling out their imaginary pie. I am. What uh what varieties of imaginary pie do they have here? Uh there's there are a few. Yeah.
Yeah. They have pecan pie. Or a pecan. We already went through this on the air. Pecan or pecan?
Oh, pecan. Pecan, which we're northerners. I think if you're from the south, isn't it pecan if you're from the No. Or is it the other way around? Is it peacan if you're from the north and pecan if you're from the south?
But we've had this discussion and I'll have it till the day I die. Goop or nuts. Goop or nuts. Jack, goop or nuts. I don't even know what that question is.
What the hell? Do you not eat pecan pie? Stas? Oh, goop or nuts. Oh, nuts.
Nuts? I don't like it. Any variety of pecan pie? You don't like any variety of pecan pie? No.
Is it because you don't like pies? Because you don't like crust? Because you don't like biscuits? Because you're bad? Yeah.
What about just a filling? Do you like pie filling? Uh I don't like nuts a lot. So I don't like pecans. D D's nuts?
There it is. D's nuts. Uh I have to get that in. Do you know that there is a well, there is a company. First of all, our bar manager D is making a drink, I think, with nuts, and it's gonna be called D's nuts.
And there is a uh nut company, a legit nut company out of Louisville, Kentucky. And I saw them on Twitter a couple weeks ago, and their their Twitter their their thing is these nuts. Because it's you know, they're D. And they sell nuts. Apostrophe S, nuts.
So it's very similar except for the Z. Of course, you know, whole groups of people enjoy using a uh a Z instead of an S. Jack, I I would imagine you might occasionally I'm not a Z guy. Come on, Jack. Back in the day?
Yeah, for sure. When you were downloading when you were downloading uh programs, were they wears anywhere? Wow. Yeah. Wow, what a reference.
Yeah. Yeah, straight. Try to keep current on stuff from like ten years past. Like I'm I'm very current on what was going on ten years ago. So, uh, this is our first time back from Thanksgiving.
Uh so Stas actually had a question. I don't know if I was supposed to say it's from her or not, but this is the first time Nastasha's ever written a question into the true. This is big. Oh, well, maybe she was around the case. And just not told me?
Yeah. Maybe you just ignored her. Like who Nick's talking? So here's uh the first that I know of question from Nastasia. When your friend is overcooking a turkey at his house, his house, remember, can you tell him to take it out of the oven or give him any type of direction, especially if he thinks the turkey needs another hour?
Well, it's an etiquette question. We've answered etiquette questions before here on the radio, like regarding whether or not you're allowed to mess with people's tomatoes, and then we got Daniel in as a result. So here's the thing. First of all, uh it's a tough it's a tough call. I think a lot depends on how much gravy they're making.
How much gravy were they making? Uh a lot. Three three boats worth. Okay, and were they giving you sharp knives? No.
Oh. Well, were there mashed potatoes? Yeah. So you could conceivably take each piece of shoe leather, slice it into tiny little niblets, surround the niblets with mashed potatoes, and then drench it in gravy and choke down one slice and you're out. And you don't have to deal with the leftovers because they're not in your kitchen, right?
So it's not your sandwiches that he's ruining. Right. So nah, I don't think you can take anything to him. I think maybe you can be like. I think you're allowed one of these.
Shoulders go up, head goes aside a little bit. Yeah, maybe maybe it's done. I think you're I think you're allowed one of those, you know. I think maybe you know. I think maybe it's done.
Because and then, like, if you're really good friend, you're allowed to say, listen, you know that little bit of the meat near the thigh that you're worried about is not cooked? That's really not that big a deal. We can slice that off and just pan it later. Really, you don't want to overcook the whole breast and the thigh and the rest of the leg and stuff like that for the sake of that one little piece of meat down by the thigh that we all know, worse comes to worse. I just cut it off and throw it in the microwave for about a minute and a half, and that little that little nugget of meat is done.
Right? No one ever gets down to that part of the turkey anyway. Except for my house. Oh, yeah. But but my point is that uh that you're allowed to say.
Then if they're like, ah, then you all right. Yeah, that's it. Another hour. And just, you know, although I heard you got busted because I asked you about this. I was like, well, the one good thing about a badly overcooked turkey is usually the skin's pretty good.
Right, but I didn't get any skin. Oh do you know Johnny Hunter from uh from the yeah, the uh the underground uh food and meats collective in Madison, Wisconsin, we visited a while ago. Great folks. Uh he did the bionic turkey. Sweet, the bionic turkey lives on.
He uh Nick, if he was to ever speak, did that once with us, I think maybe twice. You did it with us twice or once. I don't think you did it. Just once? You didn't come to do it at my house with me?
No. You were in San Francisco at the time. You I think you brought it in just to do this to circulate at FCI, but no. Anyway. So I've done the Bionic Turkey, I think, three times now.
But Johnny did it, and I was awesome. So he posted on Twitter, so go look on uh Johnny Hunter's uh Twitter account for his bionic turkey, or I retweeted it if you have my Twitter uh at Cooking Issues. I did not do the Bionic Turkey this year because I wanted to go super simple this year for me, super simple. So what I did was I went to the uh Pollo Vivo place up 117th Street between like Far to 2nd Avenue, picked out my live turkey. They didn't have the wild turkey of reasonable size this time, that you know the the you know the Wajalote style, they only had the little ones.
And I wasn't gonna feed all those people with like a like a 15-pound turkey live. That's like 12 pound turkey in the real life. That's like it's like me. I can eat that. Anyway, so I got the live turkey, let it rest a day, right?
This is I suggest people do this. This is the easy, the easy hype, the easy complicated way. This is the easiest complicated turkey I've ever done. Then you know how when you teach you to bone out birds, you bone out, like you cut down the breast and you bone out so that you then roll it back up, but uh usually you don't cut the you don't cut down the back of the animal. You know what I'm saying, Nick?
Right. So anyway, so this one I boned out by cutting down the back of the turkey, ripped out the carcass, ripped out the thigh bones, left in the legs. Are you a believer in taking out the wishbone before you bone out a bird or not? Jackie Peeps, that's Jacques Papin for all of you out there. Jackie Peeps always takes the wishbone out of the bird before he does the uh which I think makes sense if you're gonna carve the breast off of it, because then you don't lose that little bit like where your knife goes around.
Nils never used to take the bone out. I can't decide whether I like taking the bone out or not. Now it's just a habit. You take the bone out or not, which I'm too lazy to take the the bone out. So you lose that little nugget of meat.
You can you can put the knife in the other set, yeah. You can kind of come at it with the knife in a different angle. Yeah. My kids for the first time this year did the wishbone. Booker lost.
Dax was super happy. Because Dax knows the grip up high and like Yank hard trick and has snapped it off and left Booker with this little stub of wishbone. And Dax was like, Yeah! Like running around the house with the wishbone. I was like, you're not gonna get like they both wish for crap you're not gonna get.
Neither of them were like, you know, I want like, you know, a candy bar or some crap that like I might actually get them. I bet Booker wanted something you're gonna get for him for Christmas. No, they both wanted like a thousand dollars a day. Or something like, you know, something stupid that you're not gonna get out of it. People need to like, is it that I'm all for dreaming big, but don't dream stupid.
You know what I mean? What if you just wish to win the wishbone competition? For next time, you mean? Or like a like a retroactive wish. You're like, you won as you pull it, you've won.
Exactly. See, that's why I like Nick. Yeah, sweet. I love that. Alright, done.
Done. I won. Done and granted. One, granted. Anyway.
Uh the Simul win grant. I like that. Uh so, anyways, so uh had the turkey, so now you have the bones. The great thing about boning out of turkey, I say this a billion times, say one more time. You have the bones to make the stock.
So you bone that sucker out, so dry salt it, stick it in a ziploc bag. Now the turkey fits in your fridge, no problem. No problem. In a ziploc with no bones, big turkey fits in the fridge in the little crisper drawer. Anyways, salted, sitting overnight, take the bones, roast them off, bought extra bones because that's how I am.
Made the stock in the pressure cooker, duh, coon recon, no venting. Uh, let it come down. Then the next day, when I made the I injected the stock into the I I salted, took some of the stock, boiled it down, salted it up, injected the stock into the into the breast meat and the legs and stuff, not water stock, then with a meat injector, then made the stuffing plug, right? The giant stuffing plug, carcass shaped stuffing plug. Circulated that at like 80 Celsius to heat the whole stuffing plug up, like sterilize it pretty you know, pasteurize it pretty quickly and uh and uh heat it through.
Then used that as an inside heater, draped the turkey around the stuffing plug, like basted boat ton of butter on it, and then threw it in the oven so it was cooking from both sides at once using the stuffing plug as my heat reservoir. Turkey. And and other advantage, it's because the skin is wrapped around the side, really you're cheating and you're putting the skin that is underneath right on the bottom at the outside, all the skin crisp. All the skin crisp, crisp and delicious. Yeah.
Anyway. Uh as opposed to Stas's turkey and Jack's turkey. Did you have uh which they sucked? Uh Nick, uh, how is uh actually Jen liked this even better than Bionic Turkey? I don't know whether it's just because there wasn't the headache of me frying or what?
Probably. Yeah. No, that's definitely the reason. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Nick, what did you do a turkey? I did not do turkey. What'd you do?
I went over to Mindy's place for Thanksgiving dinner. Oh, Mindy, who ran the intern program for a long time. Uh uh how is Mindy's turkey? It's good. Yeah?
What'd she do? Straight regular roast. I didn't have to tell her that it was overcooking because she knows better. Right, then to that mean because she did but she did not overcook it? Nope.
Turkey was good? Yes. Gravy? I made the gravy, so yes. Was that you roasting bones and song?
And the day a couple days before Thanksgiving, it smelled awesome like turkey stock and song. That's probably because we're making boatloads of turkey gravy. Strong. All right. So enough of Thanksgiving.
Uh I don't think I have any other Thanksgiving things to report. Anything else uh good or bad on Thanksgiving? Anything to report? Is that the end of Thanksgiving? We can't talk about Thanksgiving now until next year.
We could talk about it. Jack, what do you want to talk about? You want to talk about Thanksgiving? No, I got nothing. Thanksgiving Thursday.
Yeah, yeah. So uh another thing, I want to say, you guys seen the movie The Jerk? No. Yeah. Yeah, you seen The Jerk?
Yeah. So Stas, I like for some reason Nastasia like likes to claim that she's never seen any movie prior to like 1995. She's like, that's old. Like, meanwhile, like I've seen like, you know, movies from the 20s, 30s, teens. So, like, it like, especially any comedy movie in like the 70s or 80s, she's like, no.
That's not true. What's stripes? Who's Bill Murray? They're great movies. And like I've seen them all.
Oh, you have seen them. I can't believe this. One of my favorite movies is Young Frankenstein, and you know that. It's a great movie. I am really angry right now.
You sound you sounded. Because I feel like I am enraged. You sound like Mike Dukakis. You sound like Mike Dukakis. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Anyways, but you haven't seen The Jerk? No. Alright. So you'll enjoy this, Stas.
Fake silent, imaginary silent. For a change. Yeah. Oh. Wow.
Whoa, she just gave them oh harsh. Anyways. So in The Jerk, and I'll tell you why I feel this way. Nastash will enjoy this. In The Jerk, there's a famous section where uh the Steve Martin is the lead character in The Jerk.
And he's an idiot. He's not just a jerk, he's an idiot, right? So at one point he's working in a gas station and the phone book comes. He's like, The phone book, my name in print, the phone book finally. Like, like great stuff's gonna happen to me.
My name's in print. I'm in the phone book. And the guy's like, what the hell? You're in the phone book. And then, like, literally the next scene is like a psycho sniper who opens the phone book at a random page and goes like, Naven R.
Johnson, typical bastard. And then, like, go drives out in a truck and tries to kill Steve Martin at the gas station with like a sniper rifle, right? And so it's like, you know, a classic, like, guy thinks he's getting somewhere, but really it's stupid because who cares about where they're in the phone book, but that random thing does happen to shaft him in life. And so that's what I'm living right now with Amazon. So like uh, what's happening with Amazon?
So, like, I'm like, oh, we're in Amazon, my name's in the phone book. And like, uh, because we have the Sears All supposedly on sale. Amazon hosed us how hard it which by the way, Sears all is on sale on Amazon, right? But they are like, they like no one understands what the hell's going on. Whenever we have something going wrong with Amazon and the Sears All, like, everyone is like, it can't be Amazon.
Amazon is a well-run large company, and it must be you guys who are incompetent and stupid. And I'm like, no, you don't understand. People, right, Stas, people just don't get how crazy instinct. Well, that's also true. But like the like the fact that is like, it's like, oh my god, I can't even get into it.
Then, so Amazon hoses us, and they say they're not gonna sell the Sears Alls on Black Friday, even though we swore in a stack of Bibles that they were in stock, which they are, they were at Amazon's warehouse. Stas and I are up there at midnight, you know, Thanksgiving, like, well, she was, I don't know, what an hour early or some crap, 11 because Ohio's on our time zone. Anyways, so she's like, she's there, and like, we're like, and what? And like they wouldn't let us sell live. That was it.
And like people start some idiots like sent us in, like, so what they're they're asleep at the too much turkey. They meanwhile, Nastasia are up at like midnight, trying like they thought we fell asleep, and we're sitting there like, what the hell? What the hell? And Amazon, even though all of their customer service is not in the United States of America. Maybe they have like five guys in Washington who are in the United States of America, right?
But they have a boat ton of people who are customer service who have nothing to do with the United States of America, right? Yet those guys also get Thanksgiving off. What the hell is that about? No customer service on the Thanksgiving, trying to get the stuff selling. By that time it was Black Friday, though, which you would think Amazon would be on top of.
Yeah. Right? So, so they're like, well, you you can't. And then like all of a sudden, Sears all gets flagged as a hazmat device. Meaning that it's hazardous material because in the it uses the word torch, I guess, or gas or something in the text.
So the computer, because they have some sort of like dumb NSA algorithm like searching it for like terror and hazmat crap. It's like, uh, yeah, this might be hazmat, so maybe we shouldn't sell this thing. So bang. And then it says, could take maybe 42 out 48 hours for us to look at it, maybe longer. So we're like, what the what?
Remember this? So I get a I get a guy on the phone at eight when they opened up in the morning next morning, and he's like, uh, yeah, you're you're pretty much shafted. He's like, you have one option. He's like, I was like, they're all in your warehouse. He's like, yeah, so here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna put it on sale on the Amazon website, but really you're selling it, not us. I was like, what? He's like, yeah, you're selling it, not us. I'm like, what does that mean? He's like, well, it means that you have to ship it.
I was like, yeah, but you have all of our Seersols. And the guy's like, yeah, I know. So what then you'll have to do is you'll then have to make your own separate order to ship out from our warehouse as your own self to these customers. So we're like, I was like, what? I was like, then if you're gonna if you're gonna accept an order, and then you're gonna let me ship the order from your warehouse, why don't you just take the order and ship the order?
And they're like, no. No. And there is no, this is what people aren't gonna believe. They're not gonna believe this. There is no way on the computer to say, hey, Amazon, this chunk of 300 orders that you got in, right?
This chunk, right? Like, really those are your orders. Can you just ship them out and track them? No. And when you when we use Amazon to ship, I'm sorry this is boring people, but I have to get it off my chest.
When you use Amazon to ship as like a as we're a seller, they don't guarantee they're gonna ship it out in a reasonable um amount of time. Even when you pay expediting, which I did for all of the series all that got ordered, I pay the extra expediting, I got totally hosed because I didn't want people to not have it prime speed, right? They don't guarantee that. However, the orders that they took in your name and gave to you, they expect to get out in a reasonable amount of time and you get dinged if you don't get them out. What?
I hate them. And then in the middle of this, and this is where the the jerk really came to my mind in the phone book. They also ran out of stock on liquid intelligence for no reason. Even though I called my publisher and it's been sitting in the warehouse waiting for their pickup for like a week and a half. They had copies of liquid intelligence.
Oh, did they not get an interview? Was that the thing? They didn't do the interview. They're a publisher. They should know how to get a book to the whatever.
Anyway, so yeah, for some reason, like I got I got I got randomly selected in the phone book for like singling out by Amazon.com. I'm I'm Bezos' random whipping boy of the day. Enough of that. Uh so anyways, um we got some questions in other than Nastasha's turkey question. So let's up, you know, I'm gonna do in reverse.
Crap on that. I'm not gonna do yet last week's now because they're not on my phone now. I'm gonna do this week's, and then I'm gonna go back to. I like the first question. You like the first question?
Alright, so I'll do it. So now you get to know what uh Nastasia likes because she apparently likes this question. From Jeff Moore in Jersey City. It's here at Jersey. Anything for Jersey?
No love for Jersey City? Jack, any love for Jersey City? Jesus. Wow. Wow.
He's he's like won't even pick up the mic for Jersey City. I think maybe he's in the bathroom. I'm here. Oh, there's no love for Jersey City. I'm gonna give some love out to Jersey City.
Why? What's all the hate on Jersey City? Mr. Love. Wow.
Damn. Damn. Alright. I've been enjoying the Liquid Intelligence book, but I was wondering. Oh, this is why.
Saz, you're such an evil person. This is gonna give an idea of how evil Nastasia is, people. She just loves to break them. Like, like, she loves to break them. If she had them, she would break her own because she loves to break them so much.
Uh I've been enjoying the liquid intelligence book, but I was wondering if there's a published errata list, so I can mark up my book with any corrections which have accumulated so far. I haven't been able to find one at the publisher site or at cookingissues.com, nor have my attempts at Google Foo found it. Google Foo. That she knows she used to work at uh at uh Soundbar and a PDT. Karen Foo is her name, not Google Foo, but now Google Foo is a thing.
Uh found it for me. Thanks. And keep doing what you do, Jeff Moore. Alright, Stas. You evil person, you uh only likes it.
You remember that song? Remember that uh group uh Garbage? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm only happy when it rains.
That's a good song. Yeah, that is Nastasia. That is that is Nastas. She's only happy when it's complicated, you know? Yeah, she feels so good, feels so bad.
She's only happy when it rains. Um, what was the question again? Uh published errata. Okay, there is not. I am thinking of printing up a sheet though to carry around with me.
Uh and maybe give it to the publisher. Um the the basic there, there's nothing the only thing in there that I know of that actually would affect a recipe is in the Manhattans for two. Uh the vermouth is written down as a fat three-quarters of an ounce, and I think it's a fat one and three-quarters, I think is the thing. I have to look at exactly what the thing is, but the milliliter number is right. So if you follow the milliliter number there, but go look at the Manhattans for two, and that number is wrong.
The other main uh issue, uh the issues that I found is that in the uh classics cocktail section at the end with the where you have the chart of all the things, they they well some somehow they the the acid numbers got messed up in the before, but not in the after. So it's not gonna affect uh the recipes, except for the vermouth listing in the in the double Manhattan experiments. I haven't seen any uh like errata that actually mess up the um mess up the recipes. I will say in the in the reprint, I'm probably gonna lower the uh froze the frozen daiquiries. I might I'm gonna lower the lime juice a little bit, little bits, little bits in retrospect.
I might lower it a little bits. So there's nowhere he can go. I I just gave it to him. If he's listening, I just gave him the answer. And then like in the next one, it's like there's no printed sheet yet.
Oh, you know what? I think you should call Nastasia. I'll give her your cell number over the next radio program, and you can call her for the errata list. How about that? Does that sound Nick?
Sound like a good idea? That's a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. I give you a hint.
It's in California, so it's like she still has like a like she still has this first cell phone she got when she was like like 12 from Covina, California. She still has the the area code. My first cell phone is in New York City, so I still have like an honest to God New York City cell phone and a half cents. You know what Booker actually wants a three, four, whatever it is, instead of he has a nine one? He has a nine one seven.
I have a two and two. Yeah. On your cell phone. How the hell do you do that? Uh someplace in Queens.
Like what do you mean? It's like you go there and you're like, yo, give me the two one two. I was young. I don't know. They were just like, you want two and two?
And I was like, Yeah, I'll take it. Of course you do. You can you pretend to be Manhattan forever. That's right. Yeah.
Yeah. Anyways. Also, I've never been to Jersey City, really. I'm sure it's a great place. Have you been to the Hoboken?
Not really. I don't spend much time in Jersey. I was once I had to go to Hoboken. I mozzarella is great there, by the way. We talked about it on a show.
Yeah, mozzarella there is great and worth going to. Read anything that Josh Ozersky wrote about Mozzarella and to find uh suggestions there. But the only real time I've spent there, other than that, was uh back when I used to work at the lawyer's office. Uh, this is how little work that we did. They this is before Powerball was in New York.
They literally put me on a train to go buy the office's Powerball tickets in Hoboken. Wow. Keep in mind, I was their computer consultant. So I was like theoretically making a decent wage. You know, more much more decent than I have made since.
And yet I like I was put on a on a train over to Hoboken to buy lottery tickets. We didn't win. Which we didn't win. I don't know whether you didn't aware of that fact. Okay.
Can we take our 60-second spot very quickly so we have more time? All right. Okay, here we go. It is so exciting to have this new medium. Hosting after the dump has been a huge part of me transitioning from being a blogger to somebody who has sort of real important conversations with people in real life.
My show, I I kind of describe it as an audio trade magazine. I learned a ton from the guests every week, whether it's it's restaurants, bars, all the hosts at Heritage all come from different perspectives. Everyone should be listening to this if you're interested in conservation and practical approach to renewable food sources. You know, not this big industry. Whether it's history, uh laws, social policies of food.
I think people now take food seriously, and hopefully what's on their plate will become something very special. And I feel that podcasting has a future. Giving people information in a format they can really use on the go. We need your support to keep these conversations going. To donate, visit heritageradio network.org backslash donate.
We need your support. Give us your support. Right? Yeah, that was it. Support.
That's uh you don't talk like that though. See it? Like you can never judge what someone actually sounds like based on my invitation. Because that's my like 80-year-old lady from like the outer boroughs. And your Jack Insley impression.
Yeah, well, I don't know. I just like no, it's like I don't know. I don't know. No, my normal Jack impression is using my normal voice. I don't really have a you.
I don't have like you you sound normal to me, so I don't have like a real impression for you. You know, well, it's giving Tuesday, so if any cooking issues listeners want to donate, um that would be awesome. Show your support if you like the show. Is tomorrow giving Wednesday? No, actually, Nick decided what tomorrow was.
What's tomorrow? You can't say it. I can't say it. Oh, can't say it on the radio. It's S E Wednesday.
SA Wednesday? No, S not SA. Yes. We can come up with another word, maybe dash Y Wednesday. I don't know.
I don't even. I'm too uh uh you'll tell me afterwards. Okay. By the way, I know what I forgot to talk about, people. Uh WD50 closed.
I went on Sunday to the final uh the final meal, and they had like a family meal party yesterday. They already taken down the neon sign, end of an era. End. Yeah. Sad.
But he's ending on a high like at first. I was like, you know, because I, you know, I talked to some people about it. I was like, oh well, he's ending on a really high note. There's no better reason to have to end a restaurant than they're gonna knock the building down and they paid you, you know, money to get out. You know what I mean?
They're like, they paid you a bunch of money to give up a successful business so they could knock the building down and build like an ugly, stupid high-rise, right? It's about the best way to leave a restaurant. Uh, you know, and uh, but still, when you're there and then you were like, oh my god, it's a restaurant, like all these people now need to hide have find new jobs. I spoke to a lot of people, and like, you know, I think a lot of the folks there have uh you know found other good places to go. But you know, I I hope they all have wish wish everyone from WD uh good feature.
Um great restaurant, end of an era. Um okay. Hello, Dave and Hammer, emailing you live from Putin's new Byzantium, Moscow, Russia. Do you do they have like like imagine like uh they should have announcing like that over there, do they? I don't know.
I'm not gonna do it in my Russian accent though. I have an okay fake Russian accent. Anyway, uh congrats on the new well, he's not the guy's writing's not Russian though. Uh he's English. Anyway, uh 80s name.
Uh, congratulations on the book. As I read it, I can hear Dave's disembodied voice in my head, which worries this Englishman. Yeah, right. It worries Nick too. Nick's got like a like a Dave voice face, which is similar to Nastasia's vegan face on right now.
You've reignated my reignited my need for a fuse. That's centerfuge to those of you not in the know. On this post below, you mentioned that the size of the Zhuan three-liter rotor affects the G's pulled versus the lighter champion E-34. So the E34, I thought it was an E33, but maybe it's E34 now. You know, things get better.
So the uh the the deal is both of them uh I think actually the Arjouan goes at around 4,000 RPM, and the little guy goes at like 3,000 and change because it's run off of an induction motor, and that's just the speed that it runs. Um so here's the deal. Like uh you can't, the rotor size does make a difference. Well, let me finish your question. Uh, however, how can I or where can I uh look up and work out what a 1.2 liter 4,000 RPM Juan bench top uh fuge does.
Is there a simple equation between mass uh RPM and time that I need to know? Uh well, mass doesn't matter. Mass doesn't matter. Mass irrelevant. The only things you need to know are the radius of your rotor and the speed at which the rotor goes in RPM.
And yeah, you look up, uh just look up on the Wikipedia RCF. That's uh R like Richard C like C F like F. Uh and it stands for relative centrifugal force. And uh basically you need to know the mean rotor, whatever they're gonna take is the rotor uh diameter or radius, depending you have to look at it, uh usually in millimeters, and then the speed in RPMs, and it'll calculate the relative centrifugal force for you. And there's c there's like JavaScript calculators all over everywhere because this is stuff that people have to do every day.
So then you just need to know the radius of your rotor, which is easily findable on any one of the websites and the thing. But here's what I'm here to tell you. Well for a given bucket, for a given rotor, uh the speed of the centrifuge is super important because it's the number of G's that are going to determine what the separating power of the centrifuge is. However, it's not the only number that's important. So on a spinning bucket rotor, right, you need a relative, which is what we have with the with the with the Zhuan with the big one that I use.
You need a relatively high number of G's, not to clarify, right? Uh the you need a relatively high number of G's to compact all of the crap into the bottom of the bucket and have it so that when the center fuge uh stops, it doesn't refloat up back into the stuff. That's what you need all the extra G's for over the first like, you know, 2,000, right? The extra 2,000 G's that you need in that are really just to smash the pellet tough so that it doesn't resuspend when you spin down. And that's also why you need to spin it for like 10-15 minutes and not for five minutes, because the stuff is really clear inside of like three to five minutes, but it's just not densely packed in the bottom.
Now, uh, like how well it packs is dependent upon uh a couple of things. One is uh the the you know the speed of the centrifuge, the number the amount of G forces it has, but also how far the pellets need to tra the particles need to travel through the liquid before they smash. And for a spinning bucket rotor, they need to travel a relatively long distance, and they're getting forced directly into a big flat plate, so they need a relatively large amount of force to smash them down into a pellet, into a puck. Uh in a in a fixed angle rotor where they where the sides of the rotor are at an angle and the liquid hits them, and then the pellet the the particles hit the sides and then slide down. Those things kind of grind the particles into a pellet faster, and so they can work with uh lower G's.
So a fixed angle rotor is going to give you easier clarification at lower G's than a swinging bucket, but the swinging buckets typically gonna have a higher uh capacity. Does that make any sense? Yeah, hope that helps. Uh uh iPhone thinks I want to take a picture instead of uh helping you guys with your questions. It's wrong.
It's wrong. Um okay, that that's it for this. We're gonna go on to last week's questions, uh, which I'm gonna uh call up. You uh you you want to say anything, Nick, while I'm looking up last week's questions? You the answer better be yes, or I'm gonna I'm going to do terrible things to your pizza.
Just terrible things. Nothing. You're a bad person. You're never invited on the radio program again. Uh never.
Never. Uh okay. So uh the last question we asked was was uh the pretzel one, right? We did we did we talked about tempeh last week? Or two weeks ago?
Yeah, yeah, we did. All right. Uh and we talked about uh can man maybe we got maybe we got everything. I doubt it. No, it's like we mean I know we missed a whole bunch.
Oh, I know what happened. They never made it onto Dropbox. I had to send them into the uh into the into the email thing. Hmm. Hmm.
All right. All right, people. I apologize. And since Nick is such a low quality human being. You know what?
Before we came on, when I came in late because of my bike, he thinks it's freaking hilarious. I'm gonna hit him with I'm gonna hit him with a lead pipe as soon as this is over. But uh he was telling all kinds of stories back from the uh yeah, yeah. All kinds of stories about like, you know, uh me hitting him with lead pipes, how much I could hit him wish I could hit him with a lead pipe. Um here we go.
Uh okay, so we got the lemon sorbet question, and we got the ramen, we got the salt, we got the tempeh. We did not get to freezing, right? Did we? Did we talk about freezing? Depends on what it is about to gin and juice with the freezing?
No. Okay. Uh another Dave here from the UK. Love your show. Only stumbled across it a few months ago and wish I'd found it years ago.
I've been working through the archives, uh, and they make great listening whilst I'm pottering about in the kitchen. Pottering. I never heard that in a long time. What do you think, Steves? You pro?
No. Pro not pro pottering? No. Puttering. I'm sure whilst he's puttering and well no, maybe it's in the UK.
I don't know. Maybe you potter in the UK. Maybe you potter. I don't know. I don't spend much time over there.
Uh I've already heard a ton of useful information, but he spells the English ton. Are you for the English ton? Two Ns and an E? No. No?
No. Of useful information from listening to you, which inspires me to try new things in the kitchen. I feel I've learned so much that I thought I'd uh better do the decent thing and help support the show. So I signed up and became a Heritage Radio Network member the other week. Keep up the good work.
Sweet. This is from Dave W. Um I have a quick question. I bought your book and started off by making a gin and juice. I wrote a blog post about it.
I saw that actually. You say what you obviously saw is you made a comment on it. Thank you. So the agar clarification process for the grapefruit is very straightforward and works very well, but it takes about three days. That's not really helpful if you suddenly have an urge for a spontaneous cocktail.
I was wondering if I can make up a larger batch of clarified juice and freeze it in smaller portions, enough for a couple of drinks. How well would it keep in the freezer? Would it lose anything over time? It's already been frozen once during the process, so I figure it's worth trying. I just wondered if you had an opinion.
Thanks, Dave W. Uh, yeah, you could totally freeze it. So grapefruit juice freezes quite well. Uh clarified grapefruit juice freezes quite well. Uh clarified apple juice freezes quite well.
Uh clarified uh lime and lemon juice, no, not so much. Uh they still taste like poison. Not as much. You know, I did a study uh of uh pre mixed drinks that were frozen for a long time versus kept at room temperature, and the room temperature ones did taste more poisonous with the lemon and lime juice in them than the one in the freezer, but uh the one in the freezer still tasted poisonous to me. And you know what I'm saying when I'm saying poisonous, right?
Like not actually like poison, but you know that like poisonous taste, that detergent, poisonous, like real lemon, like fake, like crap hole, like 70s supermarket flavor. Familiar with it? You might know it from such things as like the skinny like margarita, that skinny, like lady margarita, like her. That tastes like poison to me. You ever had one of those things?
Poisonous. It tastes poisonous, right? Why have you had one of those? I've done events where it's there and then they made remember we went to an event and they made your drink and they used like stuff like that? Yeah, oh my god.
No, remember when we threw it away and we had to go get new? And I've had also, I was I remember we were at one of these shows, I think it was called the Fancy Food Show. I think it was that one in in uh in Javits, and this person's like, I make I make you know frozen lime juice, concentrate lime juice. And I was like, I hate it. He's like, No, ours is really good.
I'm like, but buddy, I hate it. Like, like he's like, No, try it. I'm like, okay. And the best I could give him was it's not as terrible as the rest of the poisonous stuff that I'm used to tasting. Which is true.
Which is true. Actually, this is strange. You know how I think lemoncello tastes poisonous. I actually had uh a really a good lemoncello the other day. Nice.
I'm gonna be using a Tales of the Cocktail, it's at the bar. Do you like lemoncello? Depends if it's really good. Yeah. Yeah, doesn't most of it taste like poison?
Like detergent, like pledge. Nick feels the same way. What about Jack? You lemon cello guy? Yeah, it's either that pledgy taste or like too sweet.
It's hard to find in between. I like it when it's got both the lemon pledge flavor and the too sweet. Yeah. That's that's the best. That's the best.
Uh anyways, uh I don't know what the hell I was talking about. So yeah, those things taste like poison. So don't do that. But grapefruit juice, all that stuff is fine. Uh what I would do is if you're gonna freeze it, there's a couple ways to freeze it.
Uh Ziploc bag, freezer ziploc bags. If you uh put like however much you want and then lay them flat on uh, you know, lay them like close them like you were gonna bag uh a steak for a low temp, put your finger in it and then like let the air out slowly on a flat counter, pinch it at the end so there's no air bubbles in it, and then uh just put them on a sheet tray in your freezer until they freeze in a flat configuration. That's the best way. And then you can like stack a lot of them in the freezer, you don't have to worry about it, and they freeze relatively quickly, and because they're flat, they unfreeze relatively quickly, which is also good. Uh and if you're in a good Ziploc bag like that, you can throw it into a pan of water and just run warm water on it and thaw it out without like overheating or anything super quickly.
If you freeze it in core containers, it takes forever for them to thaw out, and it's a huge pain in the butt. Uh and plus also when you drop a core can when you drop a frozen core container, it cracks. And there's always like a it'll here's what always happens. You pull it out of the freezer, you drop it a little bit, or it cracks, or someone throws something into the freezer and it cracks the core container, you pull the core container out, you don't know it's cracked until it starts thawing and the stuff starts leaking out all over. Here's the real problem with that.
Not only that, but the stuff that thaws out first is all the sugar and flavor, and so all the sugar and flavor leach out, and you're left with a crappy ice cube, and then you're still gonna try and use it for a drink because it's all you've got and you feel bad because you've wasted all this product, you spend all this time on. So, what I'm telling you is don't use the core container. Uh another alternative, if you know you're only gonna make a really like couple couple of drinks at a time, it's not as ideal from a storage standpoint, but you freeze the stuff down in ice cube trays, they're never gonna get as firm as a real ice cube because of the sugar and whatnot. But then pop them, don't leave them in the ice cube trays, that's a rookie move, pop them out of the ice cube trays, put them in a ziploc container in the fridge, and then you can pull them out cube by cube. Just make sure you measure beforehand the volume of your ice cube trays so you know how much juice is is in each cube, and you'll find that if you're decent at it, like your your cubes are gonna be pretty accurate to within like you know, way less than a quarter of an ounce per cube, and so you'll be able to accurately judge how much juice you're gonna add just by throwing certain number of cubes in.
Then you can do stuff like the juice shake from the book. Anyway, whatever. What if he wants to use a liter container? Instead instead of a because he's English? Hearty Hardy.
Actually, in fact, you know, I found out that most people over the world don't have core containers. Like we're like, like even when I say most people all over the world, like San Francisco doesn't use core containers. They find them to be ungreen. That's a lie. Well, maybe it in Kanto they used them, but how many restaurants did you go to?
Did you like your friends you went to, and you're like, where's the core container? And they're like, what is that? Is it green and made of bamboo? Right? Come on now.
We worked a bunch of events at Stas in San Francisco, and we can never get freaking core containers over there. I think they're green because you use them over and over and over again. I've had the same core containers for years. Do you do you find them to be bad for the environment? If you don't throw them away.
Yeah, they're fine. They're fine, right? Yeah. Alright, anyways. Uh liter containers.
So they don't have a ton with a two ends in an E. So what about the what what what what size Ziploc bags do they have over there? A four-liter Ziploc? Yeah. Instead of a gallon?
A liter a liter bag. Yeah, but what like a gallon bag is the one we use. That's the baller size. So, like what like what are those? Four liters?
A two-liter bag? Four-liter bag? What do they have? We don't even have a two-liter bag here. I don't know.
Okay. Uh did we do the thing on clarification? No, I don't think so. Jesper called in about clarification. I know you have a backlog already, which I heard in the last episode had some questions in regards to the liquid intelligence book, which I've had for three weeks and in uh three weeks and enjoy, so now like five weeks.
Uh but I'll anyway push uh push you some more uh questions into the FIFO list. I understand there's some known typos. Alright, we took care of this one. I'm not gonna get into that one again. Not gonna get into that again.
Not gonna get into it. Not gonna happen. Oh, Stas, you're so you're so evil. You know, Stas won't read the book, which I don't blame her, by the way, because she has to work with me every day. But here's what she said.
I don't even consider it a book. I actually used it on Sunday as a separator. A separator of what? Between two hot things to carry the sun. Wow.
Wow. Yeah. She can't even look at it as a book. It's like an object. It does contain words.
Like she like will admit that, that like there are words. So, you know. My name's in the phone book. Uh okay. My main question, which I guess you may be tired of, is on the topic of clarifying lime juice.
I followed the steps in the book, but could not identify any noticeable differences between the steps uh uh that that you're doing, I guess, apart from the last one after uh I ran the centrifuge. My question. By the way, so Mike Lime Clarification, the way it works in the center fuge is you you juice the limes, you add uh enzyme, and you add something called kesel salt to it, which is suspended silicosol. You wait fifteen, and what that's doing is the the the um the enzyme is breaking down the pectin. It's called pectinic ul pectin's ultra spl, but you can't use it by itself because the lime juice is too acidic.
So at the same time you add kesel salt, which is a charged uh silicosol. It attracts the charged particles in it, which a lot of the turbid particles are, most of them are. Almost all of them are attracts it to it. Nick was trying to say that I'm a turbid particle, which is true. Uh attracts it to it, then you add the uh then you wait 15 minutes for that reaction, then you add the keysel saw uh the chitosan, which is the opposite charge, and it bloms them together again, wait 15 minutes, add the Keselsaw again, re-glom and spin because that's what it is.
Anyway, uh after you add the Keselsaw the second time, so this is the last step. Uh, how long should you wait prior to running the fuse? 15 minutes in the previous steps? That I'm adding that question. In the previous steps?
Uh, or can you go ahead and run the fuse immediately as implicitly implied in the book? You can pretty much run it immediately. Like, like you know, I would wait a couple minutes, but you can pretty much run it right away. My centrifuge has cooling. What temperature do you recommend when spinning?
Run it as cold as you can, but not without freezing it. Like I run it, run it at like run it at like, you know, zero or like set four. I can think we keep ours at like four. When it's when the when the refrigerator is working, that is, we keep it at four. Uh should the final clarified juice, apart from being transparent, also be colorless?
No. No. No. No. Clarified strawberry juice is bright red, thank God.
Imagine if like your strawberry remember, so like the the Rokas, right? Like Juan Roca, Jordi Roca, those guys and El Calar Can Roca, like uh, they used to do clear desserts where they would actually rotovap things and make them colorless because they were doing distillation. Distillation is the only real way, I mean, other than like, you know, stripping color with charcoal to make something, because that's how they do it with uh rum, by the way. You know, they age rum and then they strip the color out with uh charcoal. Does it don't care?
Uh the uh so usually like that's the only way to get rid of color. So like remember that clear is different from colorless. So like strawberry juice, if you can read a newspaper through it, it's clarified. Uh but the newsprint's not necessarily gonna mean it's not necessarily gonna look white. You know what I mean?
It's gonna it's gonna look like the color. So lime juice should be kind of like a very light green. Very light green. Anyway, uh, thanks for the program and support. Jesper from Sweden.
Uh okay, and we have some more cocktail questions. Uh first, well, we're what? Just so you know, we're running out of time. Uh uh. Okay, so we will get to the uh Punch regency Punch question on the next time.
I have a whole bunch on Regency Punch. So whoever wrote in uh on fat washing and Regency Punch, I think it's BJD. We'll get to you next time on cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes Store by searching Heritage Radio Network.
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