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You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network in Bushwick, Brooklyn! At Roberta's Pizzeria, joined as usual with Nastasia.
The Hammer Lopez is used and Jack in the engineering booth. Yes. We're just running with the old school crew right now. Old school. Old school crew.
Streamlined. Yeah. Call in your questions to a 718 497 2128. That's 718 497 2128. Uh and uh Jack's told me to read this at the beginning because we have an auction.
It's gone live. Join uh me, Dave Arnold, and the Hammer are my co-host, Nastasia Lopez and the Heritage Radio Network executive producer Jack Insley. All three of us in the same place at the same time, join us in the studio as a special guest on an episode of Cooking Issues, the weekly radio show on the latest innovative techniques, equipment, and ingredients in the food world. Well, presumably they know what show it is, because they're listening to it. If not, if you somehow tuned in here by mistake, I am truly sorry.
Uh a I I'm not gonna read this about myself, Jack. You have to read this. I'm not gonna read a crap about myself. That's crazy. That's what I wanted to see what would happen.
Yeah, I'm not gonna read that like you know, all right. You read this crap, Jack. Well, it's it's basically uh it's on charitybuzz.com if you search Heritage Radio Network, and uh as as you may have gathered, you get a chance to sit in on the show, be a guest on the show. We will take you to lunch here at Roberta's, the the famous lunch that Dave always enjoys after his show. Now, listen, just so you guys know, the lunch that we normally get, Stas and I, when we're here, like what we get is she gets a lemonade, I get a Dai Coke, because I don't think they have seltzer, otherwise I'll get Seltsair.
They have seltzer. They have seltzer. I like Seltzer better. Anyway, like she gets a lemonade, I will now be getting a seltzer. We get a pizza and a salad.
That's what happens. Uh right, but this lunch would be, you know. Yeah, this is like more of this is more tricked out, right? Yeah, yeah. This is all the fireworks.
Yeah, yeah. And if you are lucky, if you are lucky, maybe, maybe Santa's little hipster will be your waiter. But we can't guarantee that as part of the maybe Indy Jesus would be making a return surprise visit. I don't know. Do you think we can get an DC Stas sees him in Manhattan now all the time.
Resurrection. Oh my god, Indy Jesus Christ. You're gonna get me in some big big trouble. Uh yeah, so anyway, and then uh well, we're gonna go, you might have to sit and listen to a bar meeting for a while, or else you can entertain yourselves for a couple of hours while I do real business, and then you can join us at five for a couple of drinks when Booker and Dax opens up and uh we'll hang out. I'm sure Nastasia will make fun of me, and you you get to see uh behind the scenes how she daily attempts to drive me banana ramas.
If you're lucky, Nastasia will make fun of you also. Well, it depends. Listen, yeah, like she's not kidding. You really have to kind of watch your step because she'll just she'll just like razor blade you without you even not physical razor blade. I mean, she's not you know that won't happen.
That won't happen. She's not a physically violent person, right, Stas? She's giving me the mezzo mezzo hands. She knows she gave the mezzo mezzo hands. She's like, you know, would it be fair to say that to a random person you would not be violent?
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. We'll just leave it at that. Speaking of, I know that this is supposed to be a cooking related st uh show, but I have to bring up uh uh a story of holiday cheer at at the beginning. And I asked Nastasia's permission on this, so I'm not talking out out of school here. Nastasia, I'm not gonna say she stole her Christmas tree this year, because that would be true.
But like she like right on the border, you want to tell this story, Stas? Uh no, you do it. The quick way that you did at the bar, that was good. Oh, okay. So for those of you that have never been to New York City, here's the way it works.
People like from Canada or Minnesota, right? Who I don't know what the hell they do the rest of the year. Do you have any idea? No. They pile they they rent a flatbed truck and they pile it full of trees from where the trees grow, way up north.
And then they're basically like circus carnies for Christmas trees. No offense if you this is what you do for a living. And then they drive down, and for the holiday season, they pretty much camp out in front of like some sort of hurricane fence or parking lot somewhere, and they just have all their trees leaning against the fence, right? Because we can't just go to Home Depot or Lowe's or like standard Christmas tree operations here in New York, like nurseries and this kind of stuff. You can't do it, right?
And there's a host of these guys that totally overcharge. So Stas goes to this guy in the in Hell's Kitchen, which is you know where she lives, and it's in a parking lot. She walks up, she goes, talks to the parking lot. Where the hell's the guy? Where the hell is the guy?
I want to get a Christmas tree. Because listen, when you're gonna buy a Christmas tree in New York, you're set up to buy a Christmas tree. You're not like I could buy it now or I could buy it later. You're like, you're gonna go out, you're gonna buy the freaking tree. It's a huge hassle.
You're either gonna pay your your like someone or a friend or something, you're gonna cart a freaking tree home on your shoulders, and you're gonna lug it, and Stas now has an elevator, but she still has like those memories of of like and I do as well of trucking those trees up the stairs and down the stairs on the shoulder with people looking and laughing. This is what New York Christmas trees are like happy freaking holidays. So you don't go out unless you're gonna get the tree. So she's like, Where's the freaking guy? And the parking lot tenant's like, hey, hey, I don't know.
Just you know, he's like, Yeah, he's in a car over there or something. I don't know, just shake a tree, he'll come. So Stas goes over. She starts, you know, she's just not even probably looking at the tree. She's probably giving it like the you know her irritated, bored face, and just starts shaking this random tree.
No guy. She looks over at the parking lot tenant, guy goes, Meh, you know what it doesn't meh. And so she starts shaking the tree even harder, like this anger shake. I don't know if you can feel it in my voice, the anger shake of the tree. Nothing.
So then she picks the tree up and she starts doing the where you like hammer the tree on the ground and kind of see how it shakes out. You know what I mean? Nothing, not a zip. So she's like, hey, hey, hey, boom, walks away with it. She's like, I'm gonna get 10 feet away.
The guy's gonna be like come out of his car. Nothing. She, so like one block later, two blocks later, three blocks later. Home. A home, tree.
Wow. Now they have a sign on those trees when I walked here that says, You're being watched. Uh there's a camera surveillance on you. Call this number if you want a tree. Oh, come on.
That is not that is not. I gotta put this one on them, you know? Yeah. Well, yes and no. I mean, Stas did steal a Christmas tree.
Right. But I had $42 pocket. Miracle on 41st Street. Hey, listen, listen, here's the thing, right? She like, she thinks that because she had the money in her pocket to pay, that she didn't steal it.
Yeah, I had every intention of paying. Yeah. But I was going there. You know what you should do? You should pin a 20 on one of the trees and walk away.
Somebody's gonna see that on the video tape. Yeah, it's on the video. It's a pizza crap. So you think the whole thing's like a big lie. Yeah, yeah.
There's no And I must not have been the only one. That's all they would have sign on the other. Clearly, if the guy f first of all, now Nastasia to make herself feel better. Nastasia makers it's like, I think he stole those trees anyway. No, Mark said that.
Oh, all right. Well, he's just trying to make it feel better. Whoa! I have no problem, by the way, someone stealing a stolen tree. That's fair.
Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. Right? But uh yeah, you have no evidence that that tree is stolen, just that the guy's an idiot.
You have very, very strong evidence that the guy is uh like either an idiot or he's unprepared. Right. Here's the thing, right? Let's see And there's no tree stump cutter air area. Oh, yeah, no, weak, weak.
No bailer, no tree stump thing. Here's the thing, right? Like either you have to have like a bladder of steel to do this job, or you have to have a helper that checks in on you once every two, three hours so you can go relieve yourself. You know, I don't care if you're cold, if you're bored, this is your job. You know what I mean?
Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's like, you know, whatever. It's like the crossing guard has to stand in the street because if the kid gets run over when this person's not in the crossing lane, then that you know, it doesn't matter that you need it to pee. You know what I mean?
You're guarding the trees. That's your job, that's your livelihood. And and considering how bad this presumably fellow, most of these people are are dudes. By the way, there are occasionally women tree sellers. I had one at Lowe's, so she was quite good.
Uh and uh because I got mine at Lowe's and carry my heavy, heavy tree home on the subway like uh dingus. Anyway, the um my car someone. My point being that it's kind of, you know, uh it couldn't have just been one tree because I don't think this guy has such an accurate inventory if he just leaves the stuff lying around 43rd Street. Right. You know what I'm saying?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, all right. Well, if you want to steal Christmas trees with Nastasia, head to charity buzz.com and just you know Is that thing gonna be over in time for her to steal a tree? I don't know. It's like next year, right?
What, the auction? No, the the getting of the prize. Oh yeah. Well, yeah, sure. There'll be no more trees.
We'll have to get something else. You know what though? She'll give you tips, tips and pointers from next year on how to steal various various things that are supposed to be symbols of giving and love and compassion. So there's 14 days on this, so uh listeners, you know, get in there. Yeah.
All right. Now before I start in, uh uh I'm gonna do a couple of rants. I get very angry. I read reviews of things, and not just my own book, by the way. Other people's books, other people's restaurants, and I get like virulently angry at people's reviews.
So I'm gonna read the first uh a couple of the reviews I got, like kind of takes me off a little bit. I got one review on liquid Intelligence that pissed me off, and so I'm gonna read it. Uh but I'm first gonna read uh a review of Death and Company's book because like we often get reviewed at the same time, because they came out roughly similar time, and it turns out they're both about cocktails. So anyway, this is by Craig, who is not smart enough to have his own last name on Amazon. Uh and he wrote this review of uh of Death Co.'s book.
One star. First of all, idiot. Why would you get idiot? Why would you give Death Co's book one star? Idiot.
And then here's what he wrote. I think this I'm this is Craig's voice now. He sounds a lot like me. I think it is important for everyone considering purchasing this book to understand that the authors completely omit vodka from the book. No drink recipes with vodka.
It's like having the definitive book on fashion and omitting the color black. Oh man. First of all, Death Co. never said, right? The authors never said, hey, you know what I'm gonna give you?
I'm gonna give you the definitive all-time book on cocktails. No, it's the definitive book on Death Co's cocktails, and what Death Co. thinks about cocktails, and guess what, buddy? They don't serve the vodka the thing. And now if you had bought, like, you know, like Mr.
Boston's guide to like how to make every cocktail in the world, and it wasn't like shellacked with vodka recipes, you'd have a point. But as is, no freaking point. What do you think about this, Jack? It's irritating, right? That's crazy.
A person's an idiot. And yet you like, you know, that that review has been sticking in my craw for a long time. And but yet you don't have a way to erase it. Like this idiot is sitting there knocking on on their on their totals. Like, thank God it doesn't knock it a lot, but whatever.
Irritating. That's why you have to read the one-star reviews. You know? You have to read all of it, but like the thing is like, how is it like that they learn to type? How can they tie their shoes if they're that stupid?
Now here's one from my book, Liquid Intelligence. Three stars, which is not horrible. I don't like it. I mean, I don't like it. Um, it pisses me off, to be honest, but whatever.
By Robert Boyle, not the famous dead scientist, right? Uh Robert Boyle, here's what he wrote. I swear to God, this is what this is what it said. A little too, first of all, first of all, one-o in two. A little to deep.
One-o, huh? Yeah. Wow. Deep, not really a verb here. I think what they meant is too too deep as in T-O-O-D.
Whatever. A little to deep. Not many home micxologists will be buying liquid nitro for their guests, no apostrophe drinks. Now, here here's my point. First of all, forget the grammar.
Don't care. You know what I mean? Don't care about that. Because if they had said nice things, I would have forgiven their grammar. For all I know, even though his name sounds as English speaking as the day is long, the guy's, you know, native language could be some like you know completely different language.
I don't know. You know what I mean? So I don't judge people's like, you know, writing skills on this. However, what they're saying is is that I gave them too much freaking information in the book. I bend over backwards in the book, telling everyone how they can do all of these techniques and ideas without the fancy equipment if they want to.
And then I also tell them how to do the fancy stuff if they want to, and I'm getting hammered on it. To me, I was telling Stas before, it's the equivalent of saying, you know what? You know what? This encyclopedia Britannica kind of sucks. Why do they have this section on trigonometry?
I'm never gonna read it. They could have gotten rid of all those pages, and these this freaking encyclopedia would not have taken so much room on my shelf. Jerk. Anyway, whatever. That's my rant.
We should just pick, like, not my book in general, but like other people's like, we should pick some bad reviews and like rank on the reviewers every once in a while. Because it just it just bugs me that people can write. You know, here's the thing. Most people I think that write reviews like this have probably never done a damn thing that they've put out there for other people to enjoy. This is why I have problems with it, not problems with because I'm friends with a lot of critics, but the problem my problem with criticism in general, uh, whether it's like Yelp or whatever, is that most of the people who are making criticisms, and it can be valid or not, is just that they don't they wouldn't do it if what they did for a living was try to put something out there for someone else to enjoy.
You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden get smacked back on stuff like you wouldn't take it so lightly. If you actually wrote books or had a bar, or you know, did anything like that, you made clothes, whatever. You would not write flip reviews of other people's work. You would take it seriously, wouldn't you, Stas?
Yeah. Whatever. Speaking of beautiful day here in New York, huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
You know what? It's rainy, it's raining. It's not the rain. The rain's not so bad. It's the freaking wind.
But guess what? Booker and Dax has a buyout, so it's a perfect night for a buyout. Because we're not gonna have any foot traffic anyway. Awesome. Awesome.
Anyway, Jack, now that we've uh done the uh preliminaries. Yes, uh oh Stas, we have a contest. You want to announce that or no? You're not gonna announce that? Yeah, we're having people send in their cool Sears all tricks, techniques, practices, application videos.
Um send it to Sears all at Booker and Dax.com. We're gonna choose ten. The ten will all get a burnsomatic TS TS 8,000, and then the winner will get a Sears All signed by Dave. Lock signed by Dave. Do the people who get the TS8000 also get another Sears all or just a torch?
Just the torch. Okay, so every like everyone who wins is gonna get a TS8000, and then one of them's gonna get an additional Sears All on top of the 8W. You sounded really excited. I'm kidding. I can't wait to see your videos.
Jack, did you believe her excitement? I did, yeah. I bought it. Yeah? You bought it?
I'm I'm so excited. So we're looking for, look, here's the the basic deal. We know what we use it for, but like every day, you know, I have like different things that I come up with it for because it's sitting there all the time in my house. So I use it for different things. So we're looking for new things that we haven't thought of or tips and tricks that we can put videos up.
And we're looking to steal your good ideas, and in return, we will give you a sweet new Burns Matic TSA. And by the way, donated by Burnsmatic. Yeah. Yeah. Because they they they're friendly with us.
They're they're good people. Uh okay. Got some questions in. Uh BJD wrote in a while ago, and I didn't get this. Uh, first of all, searching a cooking issue site for an email address, and I love that I missed this because now I get to smack it back on Stas.
Stas used to have a little blog called uh well, little in the technical sense. It's about being little. Five foot kitchen. Long time ago. Long time ago.
Uh where she was like, you know, sh she had this like tiny, tiny, apparently five feet long kitchen where she would cook and she would like, you know, try to, you know, have like meals for like I don't know, 20 people or something out of this five. That was the that was the the conceit of the blog. Correct? Okay. First, while searching the cooking issue site for an email address, I stumbled across five foot kitchen, and it appears now to be a porn site.
Not judging, but in case it's a mistake, I thought I'd let you know. Not a mistake. Wow. Wow. So it's not five foot kitchen dot wordpress.com?
I don't know what it I mean, it used to be. Oh, really? It got taken over, I guess, of the porn site, but it's not really an appropriate foreign title. I mean, like, there's no like five, not a particularly porny number. Oh, no.
Yeah, it's still there. All right. Well, it must have gotten temporarily taken over, but I I like that idea. Now, uh the onto the questions. Does proof affect the flavor extraction while fat washing?
I believe PDT uses four roses yellow label. If I use bonded bourbon ice, something with higher proof than the four roses yellow, will I pull out more bacon flavor? Okay, that's an excellent question. Uh I would say that the proof most definitely affects uh the flavor you get with fat washing. Now you gotta remember PDT is using uh Benton's bacon fat, and Benton's is the smokiest damn bacon in in that I've ever had.
It's I mean like I can't say, you know, whether they're or not smokier. It is by far, however, the smokiest bacon I've ever had. So uh they don't necessarily need to get the maximum amount of extraction out. So they're just picking a whiskey that they like. You know what I mean?
And so I think in certain situations, like uh at the bar, for some reason, I don't know, God knows why, uh, they they wanted to make uh uh a booker and dacks smearing off ice so that they could ice some bartender at some event in some other city, right? But they want to do it booker and dact style. So they said to me, hey Dave, hey Dave, we want to make a smearing off ice style thing. What are we gonna do? Now the key thing with the smearing off ice, right, is it I mean, I think that's not clear, right?
It's white, it's milky, yeah? And y yeah, the way to do that is to put citrus oils in, but they didn't want to get citrus oils and buy it and do all that stuff, so what I told them to do was take super high proof. We use stuff called uh industry standard technical reserve, which is ninety-five five, soak a bunch of citrus peels in it, that's gonna extract the oil. Then you're gonna make a a water base that you're going to put uh some uh gum arabic into, then you're gonna add the two together, it's gonna loosh out, and then when it looses out, you're gonna get a smearing off ice colored thing, which is what they did, and it worked. Now here's the thing, right?
So for that, I needed very high proof. Why? Because I really wanted it to loosh, so I was sucking a lot of stuff out, right? Now, let's say you weren't, or you didn't want it to loosh, or you had a different set of criteria, then you know that high proof would be a detriment because it would cause uh looshing when you diluted your drink down. Um so yeah, you'll probably extract more, but more isn't even the right way.
Probably different uh different ratios of uh flavors will come out and just different overall things. So I don't think there's a better or a worse. I think there's just kind of what you like. What do you think? Good.
Yeah, whatever. She isn't care. Okay. Also got a caller. Oh, okay, caller, you're on the air.
Hey Dave, how's it going? It's Antoine from Bokwertone. Hey, how you doing? Hope you're not hope you're not back on any juice cleanses for the holidays. You know how I feel about that.
Exactly, man. I uh I didn't explode the turkey, so everything came out alright. We didn't we didn't die with the deep front of the turkey. Nice. You still have a house or garage or wherever you did it.
Nice. Everything's all intact. Sweet, sweet. Uh my question is we're I'm actually gonna be opening up a restaurant zone at a very small cafe, about 1300 feet. Um my partners really want to hold off from putting in a a hood just inside there.
And because of the expansion of the amount of time that's going out. One of the solutions that I thought I could go around is perhaps offering the Searsol, because I wanna I still wanna put something, some sort of cook on everything without having the whole small place mellow up like that. I don't know if you had any other recommendations outside of that as well, or what you thought. Well, I mean, look, the sear the Searsol is not intended to be the primary heating device for a you know, f in a commercial application, just 'cause like it just gonna take a long time to do a bunch of covers. If you're doing like a Well I I I did wanna do I was definitely gonna do like uh a partial cook, like I was definitely gonna do C V just a finish anything on it.
Yeah, I mean look, you could do like a finish or like, you know, uh you know, I've done I've done so I just put a video up to show people kind of, you know, what it's like and but you're talking so when I did the four stakes on the second finish around, you're looking at like five minutes, but excuse me, that's not five minutes that you get to like do other stuff. That's five minutes of you just searing the stakes. So I mean I think it would be a little tough to do something like that. I mean, like, you know, one way to get around this also is like, you know, you could kinda go like induction portable and then do something that's not tech I can't believe I'm recommending this, but not technically illegal, like in terms of like no like you need to have a hood if you have certain kind of cooking stuff, right? You just need to from a code standpoint.
However, if you just have a non hood uh ventilation in a window with a fan, you know, that's not technically uh you know, ventilation for what you're doing, but then if you had a small induction unit that you can move around, people might not gripe on you so hard, and then you could use that in conjunction with some spot work on a searzole. Sears all still gonna th throw off smoke though. You know what I mean? But you know, you you could do something like that, but I wouldn't wanna rely on doing I mean look, if you were in a catering situation or like a one off thing, or if you had like just a couple of things that you wanted to hit, but you know, you you're gonna be talking that if you're just cranking covers out with that thing, you're gonna have someone on it, you know, all the time. Now, you know, eventually I'd like to make one that's you know kind of holds itself there almost like a broiler that's bigger, in which case it'd be golden for that.
But you know, in in this application, um are you is it multiple story building? Pardon me? Is it a multiple story building or single story building? Single. They should put the hood in.
Yeah, I I I want them to, but uh trying to crank everything out as quickly as possible, and then also they're trying to do it with minimal cost as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know what the costs are to do, like a uh, you know, but uh uh a hood down there, but there's that outfit out of Georgia that that sells really cheap hoods and like in uh up, you know, uh up blast blowers. I just I don't know what it would cost to actually get an install down there. Uh but you know, you're in a good situation because you have only one story.
And you know, can you fake around not having a hood? Sure, but then you know you're gonna be limiting your menu quite a bit based on what you can do. Um, you know, I just I don't I don't like seeing anyone kind of go into a situation where you know it they're setting themselves up for problems later on, you know what I mean? And that's that's pretty much what I see right now, too. I'm I'm trying to see what options I can go down.
Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, I would do a lot of tests. Is it relatively open the place? I mean, are the is it like how open is the space? Um the actual cooking area is fairly closed off, but it's it's probably gonna be endless being around 500 square feet. Right, but I mean can you open the cooking space to the outside?
The problem is that in the summertime you're gonna need to AC that thing, otherwise, like, you know, I mean, you know, you're in Florida. You can't mess around with that. You know what I'm saying? So it's not like you're gonna be able to, you know, but you have you you have like you have a what you have like four or five months of decent weather in front of you before you get totally hosed on the heat, you know, and maybe they'll install uh a hood by then. But you know, the question is, yeah, can you get around stuff?
Sure. You know, you you work around having minimal amounts of sear you uh on things, you can spot do things with a searzole, or you know, you can get um there are these uh like cast iron griddles that you can heat up on uh that you know Kenji Alt Lopez has one on this, they're not available yet that you could heat on induction until it's ripping, and then do stuff like that. So there are ways around this kind of a thing. Um, you know, you're gonna have to like you're gonna have to add texture in other ways, like other crunchy stuff that you can add to it, you know, and then you can do a minimal amount of sear down on stuff, or things like fish that are primarily on the on the more uh you know raw side where you're just hitting it with something for a little bit to like get it out. Um you know, shift your menu towards that kind of stuff until you can go serious on on the on the hot side, but you're not gonna want to choke yourself out and put yourself in a situation where you can't crank the stuff out in a reasonable amount of time.
You know what I mean? Yeah, totally. It's just yeah, it's it's a huge predicament that I've been thinking about for a while. Here's the here's the thing, right? Uh here here's how I would approach it.
I approach any situation. So say, look it, okay, you're gonna have a Searzole or two, you're gonna have like some induction burners, I don't know, maybe you're gonna have an electric oven, whatever. Look at what you have, right? What you're gonna be able to get. And then just like forget forget whatever it is that you think you want to make, right?
Just forget it. Because you know, it maybe it do maybe that's not what this kitchen wants to make. But you have a certain battery of you know to cuisine there, and you have a certain refrigerator and freezer storage space, and you have a certain amount of ventilation. So now just like build build a re use it as an exercise in menu design and just build the menu around your your battery, you know, to cuisine. And that's it.
And that way, you know, don't you know don't do like the big old hard seared X, Y or Z because you know you're not gonna be able to get rid of this smoke. But like, you know, a little item here with a small amount of sear to give that brown flavor, and then maybe, you know, a bunch of other stuff that you can do on on like a coal prep or uh, you know, uh, you know something that's like hot but not smoky, like on a stove and induction on a pot or you know, in a in a in a in a warmer. So just bu build what you do around what you have, and I think you're gonna be like a lot happier than trying to crush something you want into a space that you can't produce it. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure.
For sure, for sure. Excellent. So when are you gonna open up? It's gonna it's actually gonna be uh it's still gonna be uh juice file, but for cocktails this time. Oh, nice.
All right. Well, good. So like like I mean, unfortunately w you know, as I as we all know, if it's gonna be mainly cocktail, what I what I want to eat is fried food, but that you definitely need a hood for. Ain't no, I really wanted to put in a fry. That was the initial thing.
I initially tried looking at the oilless fryers, but I don't know if that was possible or not. Yeah, you know, look, there are uh hoodless fryers, and apparently they're pretty good because um, you know, like they have them in Penn Station, right? So like they can't like, but I think those things are pricey. In other words, by the time you get, and I don't know this, I'm just talking out of out of, I'm not talking out of the proper hole when I'm saying this, but you know, the uh my feeling is is that if you're gonna invest in uh a hoodless fryer system, then you know for I mean, because you don't have a particularly difficult install job on a hood. So, you know, those are typically I think sold to people because it's gonna cost a lot to make to do a hood.
So you're looking at you could have had like an eight hundred dollar fryer and then like a five hundred dollar hood and like you know, a thousand dollar blower installed for an extra thousand dollars, or you could buy a four thousand dollar hoodless fryer and still have and still not have a hood. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Um, another option, I don't know whether it's legal or not, but you know, I don't know if you could fry outside, but you know, then if it you know, with that with like a with like uh what's it called, with like a uh cover or something. I don't know if it's legal or not, but it's you know, you could do that.
I mean uh you know my next fryer is probably gonna be, you know, outside, semi-covered, so I don't have to worry about ventilating it. Very good. Yeah. Well thank you once again, man. All right, let us know.
Let us know how it goes. Let us uh, you know, you know, uh take a picture of your uh menu and uh send it over to the uh cooking issues Twitter so we can see what you came up with. We'll do. Alrighty. And uh Jack, do you want us to take our first break?
Let's do it. Alrighty, uh Today's program brought to you by Brooklyn Slate. We're so proud to count Brooklyn Slate as a business member of Heritage Radio Network. Brooklyn Slate Company is a collaborative effort from Brooklyn graphic designer Sean Tice and Parsons graduate student Christy Hideka. After visiting Christie's family slate quarry in upstate New York in the spring of 2009, the two grabbed a few pieces to use as all-purpose boards back home in Brooklyn and began gifting pieces to friends.
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By the way, those Brooklyn Slate people, good people. Great people, yeah. Yeah. You know, they they donated uh slates to our very first uh fundraiser at Del Posto years ago, early supporters of MoFed. They're nice slates, too.
Yeah, very nice. I wonder whether I wonder like, are they like uh I know what those slates look like, but I wonder whether they do like slate for pool tables too. Not them, but the family. You know what I mean? Or whether they do slate for like more like like uh shingles, like slate roofs and stuff like that.
Yeah, not sure. I don't know. Do you know, Stas, that if you try to move a slate pool table, you'll totally ruin it? Oh, really? I did not know that either.
I thought it was the kind of thing where you could just get a bunch of knuckleheads, like buy the used pool table, pick the sucker up, you know, because you know, I'll I'll pick any. It's not that I'm I'm weak. I'm physically weak, but I have so much internal, kind of like deep seated simmering rage that I can pretty much lift anything. You know what I mean? Even though I myself am physically weak.
So I just thought I could get, you know, a couple people like that and like throw it in something and drive it around, but apparently just picking one up will totally hose it. Like the slate, like slates in like three pieces, and it'll break and it'll never be the same again. So when a pool table is moved, it's completely disassembled and then reassembled, including the felt and everything. Or it's not really felt cloth, you know what I mean? You can move the Brooklyn slate pieces though, pretty pretty easily.
Yeah, in in contradistinction to uh pool tables, right? Uh Brooklyn slate pieces are easy to move unless you're moving a couple hundred of them around to a mofed uh thing. Remember that? We're like, oh yeah, that's slate. That that box is heavy.
Uh anyway, so uh back to some questions. The Aviary did a cool Martinez variant about a year ago with a maraschino liqueur ice balls that gently melted. Uh gently melted. Uh what song am I thinking of? Gently melted.
Gently. Silently. I'm thinking of silently sleep. That's like uh Simon Garfunkel. Somehow gently melted makes me think of Simon and Garfunkel.
Which you're pro, right? Surprisingly. You like the garfunkel in the Simon, me too. Uh altering the drink and adding to my overall enjoyment of the cocktail as it dried out. Um I wonder when you dried out.
Melted out, probably. Anyway. Uh, any idea uh and how this might have been done and any way to replicate it without liquid nitrogen? Well, I happen to have gone to Aviary, and I'm pretty sure that they don't use liquid nitrogen for this trick. The way that you used to get kind of hollow spheres of stuff is you would take uh water and you would put it, you would well, you would blow up a balloon partially and then you'd put water in it, and then you'd throw that balloon into LN or whatever, and you'd spin the balloon and you'd spit it fast because it's gonna shrink because the the water.
Although maybe they just do it full. I don't know. Maybe they don't have air in it, in which case it won't shrink. Smart. Maybe.
I don't know. Anyway, probably. Anyway. So you spin it, right? And then you're getting a layer of ice all the way around the balloon, and you know how long you're gonna spin it, and you spin it, and you spin it, you spin it.
Uh, and then uh what you do is you take the pop the balloon off of it, and now you have a sphere of uh ice and the inside's still liquid. Then what you do is you take an ice pick or whatever, and then you go. That was my noise, and then you blick-lick-lick-blick-like, you pour the water out of the inside. While my guitar gently leaves. Oh, that's it, that's it.
While my guitar, while my guitar gently melts. Yeah, anyway, so you stick the uh stick the ice pick in, glick click look it out, and now you can fill it with whatever you want. There are some caveats because it's gonna melt the stuff out of the inside, so storage is an issue. I would do it, you know, relatively quickly. They then refreeze a plug over the hole and do it.
I'm pretty sure this is how they do it, right? Um but uh they don't do it with liquid nitrogen. Last time I was at Aviary, they do it with uh poly science uh a circulating chiller that uh chills uh liquid down to I don't I didn't see, I didn't notice what temperature they were running their circulator at, but that's what they do. What you could do at home is crush ice very fine and then add a not a little bit of salt, a lot of salt, like on the order of a quarter of the weight of the ice in salt, like salt. But you want it also to be kind of uh liquidy, right?
You don't want it to be chunky solids, that's why you want crushed ice, uh, water, and uh boat well, but don't add water right away because you know you're gonna get some meltdown, and a boat ton of salt. You just stir it up and it's gonna get preposterously cold, and then you could probably do the balloon with water spin. It will freeze, it's gonna take you a little bit longer, but you'll be able to do it if you immerse the balloon in it and spin it around so it stays nice and uh, you know, evenly, whatever, and you should be able to do it that way. Third, every year I make several batches of Regent's punch for my holiday party. I was thinking of adding a spherification technique in an attempt to add a festive flavor.
I don't know. I wouldn't add a spherification festive flavor, I'd go straight, but I'm still gonna answer this question. Uh I was thinking of something like slightly diluted Angostura syrup balls. Like people know I don't like the I don't like the little balls. You know, Stas?
I know. I don't like the little balls. Uh, what technique would you suggest to mineral minimize flavor thievery and maximize stability? Uh first of all, Regent's punch. So uh here uh this is by the way, I'm giving you um uh David Wonderich's recipe for Regent's Punch off of uh an Esquire article he wrote.
Thin cut the rinds of four lemons, one pint tea, twelve ounces super fine sugar, six ounces lemon juice, uh, one and a half cups orange juice, uh one cup pineapple juice, one pint brandy, one half pint dark rum, two bottles of brute champagne. Stas just perked up champagne. Uh slices of orange and slices of pineapples. Uh put the lemon rinds into the tea while the latter is still hot, allowing them to steep together, add the sugar, set aside to cool when cooled, add the fruit juices and the liquor, uh liqueur, uh, or liquor, actually. Uh place in a punch bowl with one or two large chunks of ice, uh, adding the champagne immediately before serving, garnish with orange and pineapple slices.
Now, this is Dave Wonderich's note on the official recipe. If you were to cut the brandy in half, lose the rum and pineapple juice, and pitch in a bottle of Madeira, your fellow creatures would not turn up their snouts. I think that's probably a good addition. Now, what you want to do here is you're trying to throw angostura balls into this, right? So if you want the angostura, it's a punch.
First of all, it's a punch. We mentioned this? Mm-hmm. Punch. So that means if you're going to do it traditional, it's going to sit around.
It's going to sit, right? So now you have a couple of choices. If you do standard spherification, the angostura balls are going to go solid. And that's going to suck. There's going to be little balls that are not going to have any flavor if you use algin and go forward, right?
Even if you were to, you could do like uh gel an very light. Excuse me. Very I'm coughing like a lunatic today. Uh it's the sweet weather we're having. Uh, you could do like a very light gel-an gel, and they would still have some flavor and go a little bit larger.
You could drop them, but again, and we're talking light, like, you know, a quarter of a percent or less of uh low acyl gel and so you get that nice brittle and the flavor release, but they're gonna melt their flavor out relatively quickly. By the way, if you're gonna make the balls beforehand, you're gonna want to store them in the ango syrup themselves so that they don't leach flavor out. Um but you're gonna be looking at at that kind of a problem. It's still gonna be solid. If you want it to stay liquid, right, then you're gonna have to do some form of reverse alginate.
And to do reverse alginate, you're gonna need to add, I would presumably you need to add um calcium to the angostura, thicken it quite a bit uh with sugar or whatever else, and then drop it into a relatively thin alginate bath, let it sit long enough, pull it out, and then put it through a calcium water bath to rinse off the rinse off and slash set the uh algin on the outside. You don't have to add calcium in the first bath. Although I usually rinse off in water and then in calcium. But if the balls stick together, then you're SOL. But this way, these balls will last forever.
Um if you store them in Angostora with a little bit of calcium in it, you can keep these things forever. And they will stay liquid on the inside forever. But here is your problem. One of two things is going to happen, depending on the density you choose for it. They are either going to sink to the bottom of your bowl or they're going to float to the top of your bowl.
Neither of which is necessarily what you want, right? So how are you going to remedy this? Well, you can't unless you want to make a gel-an fluid gel out of the punch. And now you've you've gone beyond where I'm going to even co-sign even temporarily on this on this stuff. Because like by making a fluid gel out of the punch, the whole thing's gonna shake like a bowl full of jelly, like Santa's belly from that uh night before Christmas uh thing.
You used to read that when you're a kid? Mm-hmm. You like that poem? I used to have it memorized. I don't have it anymore.
I just remember their sashes. Remember, he throws open the sash. Oh, yeah. Yeah. At the time I didn't know what a sash was.
That's why I've stuck in my head. I would say it every year, and I was like, I have no idea. But you know what? Too lazy to look it up. You know what I'm saying?
It's like my son Dax. He's like, what does this mean? I'm like, go look it up. He's like, no. Anyway.
Uh P.S. Some friends of mine were traveling from our home in St. Louis to New York and visited Booker and Dax on my recommendation. They loved it. I don't usually recommend places.
I've myself not visited, but I felt confident you would deliver. Uh thank you, BJD. Thank you. That's very nice. I appreciate that.
Um now we got some more these are actually new questions. We got new questions in. How much time do I have? Uh 10 minutes. Yeah, 10 minutes.
Alex writes in, Hello, Jack, Anastasia, and Dave. Hey, yeah, right. Nice. Uh thank you for the show and everything else. I've listened to just about every back episode over the past two years and have heard your comments about pressure cookers that don't leak any steam as being better, but I cannot recall ever hearing why.
I have some guesses, but I would rather hear your reason. Um he says, and if it's a slow day and you have time for another question, we spoke uh about ultra spurse M versus 3. Um I'm unfamiliar with them besides being pre-gelatinized starch, but how are they different from Wondra? And what am I missing out by not using them? Well, I'll get into that one next time.
If uh Jack, if you can have someone remind me to get to get that question uh next week, I'll I'll get that one next week. But as a results of the pressure cooker, the interesting answer is I have no idea. I have no freaking idea why it makes a difference whether the pressure cooker is emitting steam or not. Uh and s uh, you know, I just don't know. You know, because it's gonna be like, well, it's um you know, the volatiles are coming out with the steam, and that's what's ruining it, right?
That's what you would think. No, Stas, is that what you would think if you actually care to think about it? Yeah, probably yeah, right. Yeah, probably if I care to think about it. But um, interestingly, uh this the pressure cookers that let off steam fared worse in side-by-side stock tests, and this is just stock, by the way.
And by the way, I think I did veal and chicken. Um, they fared worse than an like an open standard stock pot. Now, you know, that thing is open and the volatiles are leaving all of the time, right? So if it's the fact that it's volatiles leaving, then why should an open pot be better than a pressure cooker pot? Unless it's a different kind of better that you know, like it goes loses so many volatiles that it comes back through.
But that wasn't my impression. So, what happened was is that for years I'd been making stock in in my pressure cooker, which is a coon recon, which doesn't uh which has a spring and doesn't make steam. And I was like, this is a better way of making stock. And then uh, you know, I went to go write the blog post about how years ago uh, you know, I went to go write, you know, my blog post about how awesome pressure cookers are and how they're so much better for stocks because the stocks are browner and faster, and they just taste inherently better because there's more extraction and more meaty flavor and more and more better, blah blah blah. And I used uh the FCI's crappy pressure cookers, their crappy $60 pressure cookers that were blowing steam off the entire time they were doing it.
And this was by the way, just a formality, because in my head I'd already the pressure cooker was already better, blah, blah, blah. So I made a traditional stock and I made the pressure cooker stock, and I tasted them side by side, and I was like, what? What? What? The traditional one was better, like by a good margin.
The the pressure cooker one was darker, but the you know, traditional one had like a much better flavor, everyone agreed, and it wasn't just because onion is uh really softened, for instance, in a pressure cooker, or sweetness of carrots magnified. It just wasn't as good. And I was like, what the what? Like my entire world was like kind of like thrown upside down for a couple of days. Uh so I did it again and again, the traditional one.
And then I was like, you know what? You know what? I'm bringing my pressure cooker in to work. So I brought my pressure cooker into work, and then I did three. I did traditional, I did my pressure cooker that doesn't vent, and I did their crappy pressure cooker that vented.
I'm not gonna say it was a fagor, but it was. And then uh, no offense to them, but it's steams, whatever. Anyway, so like uh I did the test, and then uh I was like, my pressure cooker easily beat, easily beat traditional and way, way, way, way beat the um the venting pressure cooker. And I ran the test a couple of times, and we always got the same kind of results. And so uh and I also ran it in a different kind of sealing pressure cooker, the American canner, which also seals.
Uh because it's basically a bomb with you know with a little overpressure valve on it. So whatever. So you know, it's just something that, you know, I discovered empirically, and I haven't ever really made a good reason for it because I don't really know the answer. Um but you know, that's the good thing about not having to know the why necessarily in the kitchen, just knowing the what. But you can't know the what unless you do the kind of careful uh observation of of what you're doing.
So I have no I I still have no clue. I'd like to hear someone tell me why. Um I'd like to hear someone tell me why. But I think for other things it doesn't make so much of a difference. Like uh, you know, I haven't noticed a difference in eggs, pressure cooked eggs, for instance, between a venting and a and a and a non venting.
Um so I don't know. Interesting question. I'd love to hear uh other people's ideas, but I never like to give explanations that I just don't have any idea. You know, Stas? Yes.
Yeah, yeah. All right. All right. Uh so uh let me see. We have uh now this now Uriel wrote in, right, uh a couple of times.
Oh wait, we have Paul Paul said because Uriel, listen, you wrote in about uh milk powder, and I don't have a good answer for you because I haven't had the chance to try to cook with the milk powder yet. I'm gonna try uh to do a test with the milk powder to see kind of what happens. So, you know, the question that he had was um there's a couple of questions, but the the important one is about, and I read it once on the air about Heston Blumenthal and how he you adds milk powder to chicken wings when he's uh roasting them off and then he's gonna make a stock. And uh Uriel's not a able to get because the reason being that you get uh kind of mired reactions because you know, milk has both milk powder has both proteins and reducing sugars in them. And the browning in milk is really like a myard, like uh like in um I believe it is, like in Dulce de Leche and things like this.
And so um, you know, getting those extra kind of flavors by adding the you know, milk powder to the to the chicken wings. But um, and Uriel wasn't making stock, but he said that this really doesn't have a kind of a good result. But uh I um I don't I I don't really know the answer to like how to get it to use it for searing because I have me for browning on on something cooked, so I haven't tried. So I'd love to get other people's responses into this, and I'm gonna try to do it myself, because I do have some milk powder uh lying around. Um okay, so we're gonna hold that one off again, and hopefully someone can write in or you know, tweet me or whatever and give me some uh guidance or advice, and hopefully I have time to run some experiments myself.
Uh but we have Paul writing in. I guess it's gonna have to be the last question, huh? Yeah. Yep. All right.
Uh hi Dave. Uh I was wondering if you had any experience or advice using a coffee siphon brewer. So we're talking about a vacuum pot. And he drew a really nice picture. You like that picture, is that?
Yeah. By the way, you know, people, I appreciate I can't show them on the air, but I appreciate that in the nice little picture, you know. Uh in fact, instead of reading it, I am looking at the nice little picture. He's he drew a Japanese style one, those really kind of expensive Japanese ones that you get with the little ball underneath and the thingamajig. Um anyway.
I was wondering if you had any experience or advice using a coffee siphon brewer with hot cocktails. A bartender friend of mine was thinking of doing something with gin, see attached sketch. Oh, there's a recipe there. I can't see that small. Stas, can you blow it up on your computer to see what the recipe is?
Uh bartender friend of mine was thinking of doing something with gin, see attached sketch, and while I have seen hot cocktails prepared this way at the aviary here in Chicago, I didn't know what considerations need to be made with ratios, etc. I'd also heard the method brings down the ABV. Is this considerably? Is this true and anything that could be done to counter that? What do you want to know?
Well, what what what was the recipe? Cinnamon, anise, allspice, clothes, orange peel, gin, gin cider. Gin cider? Well, I mean, that's the arrow there. Oh.
Okay. So a couple of questions here. One, do you have to adjust ratios? Absolutely. Two, do you uh lose ABV?
Absolutely. Three, uh, what does the siphon do to it? Uh, and the answer to that is I have no idea. I've never used uh this uh I've never used a siphon for uh infusion for cocktails. I've had coffee with it, but I've never used it for kind of infusion because uh a bunch of people uh kind of had already done it.
And uh and so like you know, I we don't do kind of table side infusions of booker and dacks, so I don't have a lot of personal experience with it. But I do have a lot of experience balancing hot drinks uh and getting rid of alcohol. And the truth of the matter is is that losing alcohol is not a bad thing. When you have a hot drink, you need to have an ex like a much, much lower alcohol content in that drink uh than you would in uh any other kind of cocktail. You also need to serve in a wide, not like in a bowl, because if you if it's in a huge bowl, then you have to put your face over it like you're a dog looking out of a bowl and you'll get overwhelmed by the fumes.
But if you have a smaller glass, like a normal cocktail glass, when you bring your uh it up to your nostrils, you'll you'll get a focused hit of hot alcohol, and it'll it'll even if the drink is balanced, you won't be able to drink it. So what we use is kind of you know, uh T slash coffee cups when we're doing it. So the what the vessel you drink out of is extremely important when you're doing a hot alcohol drink like this. Also, bear in mind when you're serving hot drinks to people, it's nice to give them a cup with a handle on it. There's a reason coffee cups have handles on them, uh, and teacups have handles on them.
Now, so getting rid of the uh some of the alcohol is not bad. In fact, when I do the red hot pokers, which we're gonna fire up again in about a week or so at Booker and Dax, um, because we have our new welder coming in. Uh when you when I do hot drinks, I literally burn excess alcohol off because when you're um if if I want to include uh like a lot of a flavor of the base spirit, right? I I need to include uh enough liquor for you to really taste the liquor, but that amount of liquor, if you didn't get rid of some of the alcohol, would be too strong in the aroma of alcohol in the finished drink. So getting rid of ABV is actually your friend in this situation, not your friend from a cost standpoint, but it's definitely your friend from a flavor standpoint.
Um and as regards mixing, uh, if you're gonna add, was there any was there any acid in that? I know I heard there was orange. Was there any acid at all in that? You want to really scale the acid back to very low. And then um, you know, you you're gonna need to taste it hot because the your perception of the sugar is gonna change radically, and your perception of the alcohol is gonna change radically.
So what I would do is I would make the drink and then just add in hot water until you get the kind of dilution you want in terms of the alcohol nose and the flavor of the spirit, you'll get that. Then back s back substitute in your other base flavors. By that I mean your sweetness and any acid that you're going to do. Then, then worry about your botanicals and infusions because those things you're going to be able to nail pretty easily because they work just like tea. And tea is something you're used to.
The parameters that you're going to have to work with that you're not used to working with are hot alcohol, hot acid, and hot sugar in terms of how they relate and balancing a cocktail. There's a section called Red Hot Poker Drinks and Liquid Intelligence that you could probably do Amazon search inside without even buying the book and just check out and see kind of what the parameters are there. Because I write down my alcohol levels, theoretical, uh, you know, and whatnot, and talk about this in kind of greater detail. And with that, we're out of here cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org.
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Thanks for listening. Mm-hmm.
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