Today's program is brought to you by Heritage Foods USA, the nation's largest distributor of heritage breed pigs and turkeys. For more information, visit Heritage Foods USA.com. I'm Linda Pilaggio, host of A Taste of the Pass. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwith Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more.
Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live from Robert's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network. As usual on Tuesdays from meh meh around twelve, somewhere in the 12 area. 12, 12, 10, 12, 12. Hey, look, it's it is my fault because you know, obviously, people show up to work on time.
However, in my defense, the J and the M are skipping all of the stops that are related. I mean, that Jack, no offense. That's one of the problems about being about being out here in theoretically well served Brooklyn. See, Manhattan is not theoretically well served by public transportation. We are actually well served by public transportation, at least south of 96.
Rice does? Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's why she lives. Over in Hell's Kitchen.
That's one place on earth Nastasia does not hate is uh Hell's Kitchen. That's true. She claims, I don't know if you know this, Jack. She claims that uh the actual sun is nicer, like a mile and a half west on the west side of the island. Well, yeah, better coordinates, sure.
What? It's a mile and a half away. It depends on how many tall buildings there are between you and everything else. Crazy people. I was driving to Philly and all these people are in the middle of the street blocking traffic with their phones.
It's completely overcast. Are you about to sing the Age of Aquarius? It sounded like you were sitting at the intro to the Age of Aquarius. Right? How does it go?
It's like something like that. It's in like a seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars. Something will happen across the planet. But but I think Love, I think I think Love Rules the Earth, which goes to show it never happened. Never got to happen.
I think that show made me uncomfortable. Why are they running around naked? What's that all about? It's not shocking. It's just why I don't want to, you know.
Not necessary. Hey, I do want to jump right to our first uh our call here. We're with Lou from Beacon. Now, this is not a question, this is just a call. That's right.
It's just uh it's a guest. It's a guest. Yeah. Lou from well, but it's pronounced Beacon, isn't it? Beacon, yes.
And uh hi, Dave, it's it's actually Lou and Dean. Uh we're we're both here. No, and you are a you are a brother duo, correct? That's correct. So how's that working for you, working with your brothers?
Uh it's gotten better and better over the years. I'm trying to imagine my two kids working together, and it only if their job was to fight each other would be the only way they stopped growing and he didn't, so uh we stopped fighting a long time ago. Oh, nice, nice. All right, so listen, um, rather than me giving the uh so they they've developed this new uh brewing device, but rather than me give the spiel for your product, why don't you just roughly tell people who aren't familiar with it kind of what you got going? Sure.
So uh so beacon, you know, we're um we've been focused on unlocking uh, you know, a higher quality, the highest quality made-to-order craft beverage. Um we come from the coffee industry, and the technology was originally born from coffee when Dean invented it. But um the process uses vacuums to pull the air out of the granite material. And when the vacuums are released, the liquid goes back in size called rain. It stands for reverse atmosphere confusion.
And what we've realized is that it is an open technology that really optimizes the flavor extraction from coffees, teas, infused waters, cocktails. It allows beverages to be created that have never been able to be created before. And so the patents and the technology is um very broad reaching. We're focusing first in the restaurant arena in the interest of working with uh chefs and mixologists and baristas to create great content for the platform, but ultimately the idea is that this is an internet technology that um that will bring into the home so one day all those recipes that exist out there um can be replicated by any consumer. And uh uh it's not spelled like beacon that the why do you spell it for people so that they can uh find it on the internets.
Sure, it's uh B K O N the website is Beacon Brew, B-K-O-N-B-R-E-W. And um we just spelled it a little bit differently, but um it's it's pronounced as in beacon, like a beacon of light signal a um uh uh um a pathfinding um illuminator. Right. Now so the the now the fundament one of the the fundamental things similar to like old school vacuum infusion where you're doing like pulse cycles of of vacuum to first infuse liquid in and then draw it back back out again. Presumably the patent has to do with the combination of that with the heating element and the processor control of it.
I'll let Dean explain, but there we have a whole range of uh intellectual property, but um it's the the process is is is quite simple, although it's a little bit more complicated than just pulling a vacuum. Um specifically, it has to do with just the phases of the the vacuum, uh the depth of the vacuum, the time that it's applied and or controlled. Um with the uh intervals in between where it goes back to normal atmosphere. So that's really the key of the technology is the uh by controlling the vacuum and the depth of each specific vacuum phase, it allows it to penetrate uh a determined distance essentially into the cellular structure of the material. Um so let's say if we have three three that are in sequence with a with a pause in between, it allows us to draw the gases out, the the solvent goes in.
Um then we go uh with the next one, go a little bit further and keep going through the cellular structure. Drawing the flavors actually out through the uh the pores of the material, the material itself is acting as as a filter, like uh water purify is um bedrock. Right. Right. So and presumably you you have different uh programs written for different kind of products, and there's like a lot where you have like a like a recipe system in it that there's more of a user just types in what they want and it and then you pump it out the other side.
Yes, yes, it's uh it the the recipes are predetermined, pre designed by the content partners. Um there's specific flights that we've designed that allow a uh a very turnkey application as far as finding the best recipes for a specific type of beverage. So we've done a lot of research to make it easier for the people to use the tool the right way and to find the optimal setting. Right. Now are you able to pull the vacuum levels that you need with uh like a simple like a diaphragm or a wobble pump or do you have to have like a larger pump in there or what do you what are you guys using?
Uh we're using a uh a small uh diaphragm pump that's uh was designed for uh medical equipment. Right. Now so presumably with a diaphragm pump you're not taking to like as uh deep a vacuum level as you would with let's say like a rotary vane pump in a c in a commercial uh in in a in a packer but also you can't suck those kind of volumes anyway be I mean those kind of uh vacuum levels anyway because a lot of what you're doing is at temperature so you're gonna get boil off a a lot before that. So is a lot of the art of it figuring out how to get enough of a vacuum delta and still have the high temperature without a lot of boil off or what? Absolutely.
Absolutely all that is based in the code of the recipe. There is a certainly a relationship of the water temperature to the depth of the vacuum um also uh taking the the material and the solvent into account as well. Right. So um uh we we certainly don't want to go into a full on boil uh with by creating a a very deep vacuum as that will also reduce the temperature of the liquid if we're working with something hot. But we're thinking working with uh ambient beverage uh we can go uh quite a bit further but there certainly is that uh that relationship uh what's optimal.
Well one of the one of the things Dave that makes this really unique and very much a um an internet of things play um from a uh from a model standpoint is all of the uh all the code that goes into controlling the different parameters, um the water temperatures, the whole times different vacuum pressures, different vacuum durations and uh it differs um between just two different coffees or the same coffee two different roast profiles and um but the beautiful thing about it is because it's it because it's it's because it's code um and based on uh you know our first product line it was built is built uh exclusively in commercial space by um by Franke and because of the uh the level of engineering that there has gone into this um what's amazing about it is that when that beverage is recre it can be recreated. So going back to your question earlier about how there's other methods that have been around for a long time of using manual pumps and manual methods or or or uh partial manual methods to pull vacuums on uh materials and liquid this is all about understanding how we control those parameters, how we put them into code and um ultimately how we allow them to be replicated um based on all the factors that allow you to achieve a precise um beverage. The same way that when you open up a bottle of stone beer you don't need to be in San Diego to drink it to know exactly how good and how perfect it should taste. That's our goal what we're trying to do on the mate to order side. Right and presumably also like if some knucklehead uh hits a uh a recipe that's uh water based and they have an alcohol in there like you have to know when you're like you it has to know from the pumping curve that stop I'm boiling before I thought I was going to things like this, right?
I mean presumably that has to get built into the kind of at least somewhere, right? Absolutely. I mean it's it's keep in mind, it's a semi-automatic piece of equipment. So there's obviously plenty of room for user error. Um there's obvious there's certainly going to be visual cues.
Uh the more you you get used to um seeing and and identifying very quickly whether things are right or wrong. Um it's not to say that we can't actually mix hot water with with an ethanol base um and make a uh beverage because we can. Um and we've done we've shown that with hot todds, which is quite interesting. So um, you know, there's it's not just a single beverage in itself, but the system allows for a crossover. So going from a tea to a spirit and then a and a tea and a spirit combined into the same recipe, it's quite quite intriguing.
If for instance we have a drink that um that we make using um Buffalo Trace because it's uh a little bit sweeter, and we get this beautiful Madagascar vanilla bean and this um both from Rishi P and as well as this um this uh this beautiful black tea from Rishi Tea. We put it in the porta filter with the bourbon. Um so that bourbon is let's say 75 degrees and there's six ounces of it. And then we add eight ounces of 200 degree water, so now we're at somewhere between let's say 140 degrees, math is in my strong suit. Um but we are able to extract within about 90 seconds flavors from that bourbon and tea in um I'm sorry, the flavors from that tea and vanilla into the water and the bourbon because we have increased the temperature, but we're now have the um the bourbon in there acting as a solvent as well.
Um but to your to your point, it's the the digital part is only one side, the other side is the art, and that is the art that occurs on the content partner side, whether it's a coffee roaster or tea company or a chef or a mixologist that's creating a recipe and has the knowledge and expertise of how to source and curate and prepare the ingredients. And then the second part is um understanding the parameters and having the right code, having the right recipes, so you when you put the two together the magic occurs. Right. Now is it oh I I never knew is it is it Frankie or Frankie? It's um it it depends where you are in the world.
In America we call it Frankie uh Frankie and in Europe it's Frankie. It's F-R-A-N-K-E. Um one of the reasons we chose to work with them is as you realize this technology was going to be very broad reaching and have applications in home applications and vending and and bottling way down the you know way down the road we knew we needed to be um we needed to be flawless in the food service space where the content would be created. And as an example when we looked at other boutique companies that were bringing technologies to market a lot of them were building these technologies in garages on their own, which really is very exciting and and um and definitely has an appeal to it but there's obviously a lot of cost and a lot of risks that go into it. We chose Franki because they're a multi-billion dollar organization and as an example when McDonald's wanted to do MEC Cafe and they said they needed thousands and thousands of locations activated in one year and those machines couldn't be down for more than four hours and they needed to be call centers and service um networks set up to to protect this and the machines have to be built to a certain specy that won that and executed on it.
So our equipment is being built in the same uh at the same caliber on the same platform. I mean the interesting thing about that particular company is they're freaking huge, right? But in terms of the US, their penetration from like, I don't know, in the QSR world, but in like the fine restaurant world, really only in the coffee sector. Like, but they have a huge business outside of that in Europe and all over the world. I wonder why they never like they sell autoclaves, they sell, you know, all sorts of stuff.
I wonder why they don't have the penetration in the other segments here. It's an interesting thing I've always wondered about with those guys. Yeah, I I uh I can't speak to their business. Um but but what I can say is that uh you know they definitely have the infrastructure and um they've been incredibly been an amazing partner and incredibly um um I I guess uh non-traditional in terms of um stepping out of their their big infr infrastructure organizational um uh norms to be very innovative and adaptive with us as as entrepreneurs. So um it's it's really sort of the best of both worlds in that you know we're um beacon gets to still be essentially be essentially involved from the innovation um and ideation and marketing standpoint um with them but they bring um you know decades and decades of experience and you know unbelievable unbelievable infrastructure that we could never uh um practically you know uh pragmatically raise the money or or or build.
All right, so you don't have a unit yet that people can futz around with at home. Where can they go? Like who who's who's buying these things now, how much they cost? Sure. So so this is a purely a commercial unit.
Um the uh the the market price that these should be that these should be um finding being sold for somewhere around the 14k mark. Ouch! Oh now if you look at it from a commercial standpoint, you really only need to put, you know, uh, you know, twenty teas through it a day to to break even within a matter of months. Right. And we have customers who've gone from, as an example on the tea side, who had no tea beverage business and they were just dry tea sellers.
Maybe they did it maybe 10 hot teas a day because they weren't promoting it, to putting this in and now having seventy hot teas a day. Um so it's gonna be transformational. The other thing is um just to point out is that because it's an open technology, it allows you to deliver that level of of quality across any beverage, and so it allows you to do things that you can never even do before. As an example, our infused water capabilities are um un unmatched and really, you know, big can cannot be achieved by anything else. Um our ability to do make to order iced teas.
We can brew loose leaf tea and and and concentrate it over ice to make the freshest tasting iced tea in 90 seconds. Um to do that would take eight minutes, so you wouldn't even be in the game anywhere else in doing it. So from a business standpoint, it's purely it's it's it's a it's a moneymaker, it's a commercial machine, and that's what we're focused on. We've just started putting in market um uh we got our NSF certification late last fall. Um, and there's numerous companies that have been purchasing them.
There's dozens, um, well over 50 that uh something between 50 and 100 that have already been purchased that are uh going into market. Um you can begin to see it at Whole Foods in Chicago. Um they're doing great things with it. Um Q Ashinson down Empire State South, we're gonna be with him actually this Sunday. Uh Panzer Coffee in Miami, they're um rolling out multiple locations.
We're gonna be with them actually on Wednesday. Um there's uh Brennan Danes outside of Philadelphia, really innovative. You guys got you have to watch them. They have uh they've got some incredible investors and um incredible model. Um what they're doing in sort of the health fast food health QSR model is uh is really disruptive.
Um they're building an entire pro they're using it for their keys and their their infused waters. Um Gabriel uh Cruther um up in uh uh um in Midtown is opening up a new restaurant. He has one. Um it's uh does your website have a list of places like it's like uh that so like if someone is lives, I don't know, if they live, I don't know, where do they live, Stas Cleveland? Sure.
They live in Cleveland. Like, can they go on uh on your website and find someone like you know close to them that has one or no? Not yet, but what I can say is that there's um that in addition to the boutiques that it's very likely you're gonna see some some significant um uh multi-unit players in the craft beverage space that um are gonna make this more accessible on a nationwide level. Um so it's right now a lot of the not a lot of the buy-in, as within any new product is in this innovative, that innovator demographic, which is actually represents about two percent of your market. The next stage is the early adopters, and that we're really sort of still in that innovator custom early adopter phase of people who are using it, but the results have been um you know we're we're we're we're seeing increases of sales at 165% um within established beverage categories of people.
Right. Now one last question, but then we have to go to break. Are you worried at all? I guess not because you're working with uh Frankie, but are you worried about being clovered where like some big person buys you and then crushes the technology into tiny pieces? No, and and that's exactly why we partnered with Frankie, and that we're um you know, we're building this thing to bring it around the world.
And most importantly, we're building this to populate the beacon the craft cloud, which um once that content is up there, it's gonna allow us to answer your question from before, it's gonna allow us to move very quickly into the home space because the content will exist. The home model is much simpler for us to build. Um, and so we already are adding content partners like Reshi T and Counterculture Coffee, and it just it's like apps, and once those are there, when home units come out, you're gonna know exactly what you love, and you're gonna pull those apps down. Um can really pull recipes that you've created, Dave, and they could have their own cocktail or water or coffee recipe, and they hit that button as long as they have the ingredients they're in the game. I don't know if they want any recipes that we created, right, Stad?
Anyway, gentlemen, thanks so much. Look it out, be it's BKON.com, right? Beacon? Yes, you got it. Check it out, check it out.
Really interesting new technology. Thanks for coming on the show. We'll be right back with a little more cooking issues. It's Steve Jenkins. I'm with Fairway Markets.
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You know what I mean? But you know, in general, I get it. I get what you're saying. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Stas, how you doing?
Good. Yeah? Anything good happening today after the show? Oh, uh nerd sale. You're gonna say it?
Say it. No, you say it. You got the you got the uh reverb on me, Jack? Oh, yeah, here we go. Nerd sale.
That happens at 2 30. Uh yeah, there I thought we said two. Oh. Yeah, we'll be there at two. Yeah, around two, two thirty.
You know, bring cash in a truck because I'm not touching it. I wore a light blue shirt today. I didn't wear my I want to see this happen where you're doing it. Uh it's gonna be off. Like, I'm gonna take you saying I have to take the shirt off.
Yeah. Or we're just gonna be we're gonna be sipping old booze straight out of the bottle. Yeah, I have the waivers to sign, I have everything. Yeah, yeah. If you buy something that's dangerous, hey, it's on you.
It's on you, baby. You know what I mean? Also, one more thing. I have a request. First of all, uh uh I missed this question, it's too late because I didn't know when the thing was, but Julian wrote in saying, I'm traveling to San Francisco for the WWDC, which is I think the Apple developer thing this year, and I'm lucky enough to have some free time, but I didn't realize before the conference, and it just started, so he missed his free time.
So tweet to him, uh tweet to me for him any suggestions you have for his remaining time in the San Francisco Bay Area of places to go. Uh I need to go back there soon. I forget why, but I have to go back to San Francisco soon, and then I can have my own fresh recommendations. But uh, I hope you're having a good time there, Julian. Why don't you tweet us and tell us where you went, whether you enjoyed it?
Right, Stas? Yeah. Did you enjoy it? Did you have a good time? Uh okay.
Also, I have a request. This is a goes a request out. Uh, to anyone who listens to this show who lives in a mountainous region. I'm interested in Turkish coffee that is produced at altitude. And so if you live in kind of like your in your like 6,000, uh that's like around 2,000 or 1800 meters or somewhere in there, like the boiling point of water should just about be at optimum coffee extraction temperature.
And I want to know whether your Turkish coffee is uh is it's especially delicious. I don't know, do you're a natural Libre fan styles? You've seen that movie? Today is especially delicious. I want to know whether it's any different from uh us uh you know chumps down here at sea level producing uh producing coffee.
So tweet me in, let me know, because I'm I gotta tell the Turkish coffee man story. Which one? I mean the copper maker story. You didn't do it. Well, when I when I when I run my own tests, I'll talk about the the guy.
But like I look, I have a nice look. Uh for those of you that are actually Turks, you're gonna get mad if I call the Turkish coffee maker an ebrik because you use the term ebric to mean something else. But here in the United States, when we refer to a Turkish coffee maker, we call it an e brick. And the Greeks who don't care about what anyone calls anything in Turkey, they call it a brickie, right? He's like a brickie.
We mine's from Greece. It's very nice. Nastasia bought it for me, and it was very cheap because as we all know, the economy in Greece. Not so bueno. But uh I feel I'll tell a story later because I gotta get some questions.
But uh, I'm interested very interested in Turkish coffee, and I am very interested in rubbing it in the face of snobs who think that Turkish coffee is not a good product or can't be a good product because it doesn't fit their particular idea of what good coffee should be. And uh, you know, any time somebody uh does something as a cultural ritual for hundreds and hundreds of years, I'm just gonna go ahead and say there's probably something to it, right, Stas? Probably something to it, or people wouldn't keep freaking doing it. That's true. You know, like crappy percolators from the 50s, like no one sits around doing those anymore.
You know why? I do. You use a percolator, you use a freaking percolator, one that goes gab bloop, gab bloop, gab bloop into the plastic top. You put it on your stove and it goes bloop. Yeah.
Yeah. It died. It died, yeah. Fine. You know what I mean?
Or like mocha pot, like has its own kind of like advantages, you know what I mean? It has its own kind of its own kind of brew. But the fact of the matter is is that these technologies have sustained themselves because they produce something that people freaking like. So why thumb your nose at the idea? Let's just figure out what all the parameters are in Turkish coffee.
I'll let you know one thing about Turkish coffee is that every single American I've seen do it, does it wrong. They do it freaking wrong. For those of you that for those of you that have no idea, I don't really have the time to go into it, but here it is. So, like Turkish coffee, like extremely finely ground, almost like a powder, right? So whether you mix it into the water when it's already hot or not, depends on where where you make it, like whether you're doing it in Serbia and Turkey, Greece, whatever.
But we're not even gonna get into that. So you put the powdered thing in, and then it comes up and forms a froth, which is called a boil, right? And in America, they always say you boil it three times, right? But if you look at Americans do it, they're such jokers, right? That what we do is we let it boil up and then we don't do anything, we let it settle back down, and then we just boil that three times and pour it, and then you spoon the froth off the top.
No. You do this it look, you don't have to go to Turkey, right, to know this. This is why YouTube was invented. Not really, but this is why I don't like the fact that YouTube was invented, because I can go watch a video of like 12 different folks in Turkey making Turkish coffee and instantly realize that as soon as it froths up, first of all, they cook it in sand, right? And that's why I haven't tested yet because I haven't gotten the sand.
I didn't want to buy a 50-pound sack of it in Home Depot because, as Nastasia likes to say, I'm not a real man, I'm a straw man. Anyway, uh and I was like, I don't need 50, it's not that I can't lift the 50 pounds of sandstars. It's what the hell am I gonna do with the other 48 freaking pounds? Throw it in the trash? Anyways, I need a small amount of sand.
So you put sand into a like into a pan, put it over coals, and it's very evening. Uh anyway, so it boils up, it makes a froth, you then pour that froth out right now into the cup. Then you let it froth again, then you pour that froth out again, then maybe if you want, you do it a third time, and then you pour it out and you leave a lot of the grounds in the cup. That's the way to do it. And I've never seen an American do it that way.
Maybe that's why snobby Americans thumb their noses at it because they just have no idea how to properly make it. Anyway, I'm gonna go through the investigation. Why? Because I enjoy it. Now, if I can get to a question before they p unplug my mic and kick me out of here.
Um Tom wrote in I didn't tell me if I answer this question uh or not. For instance, like Jason wrote in about uh gimlets, and I think I answered it already. Jason, if I didn't answer your gimlet question, your basil gimlet question, just write it back. Just write me again. Say, hey, jerk, you didn't answer it.
You know what I mean? Uh, and uh, and I will. Uh so uh Tom wrote in uh and he says hello to uh Nastasia Jack and the and the rest of the crew, which is very nice. Uh uh finally up to date to the podcast. Uh got three questions, order by priority.
Uh I've been using my sans server circulator, we're getting amazing results on fish and pork belly, but when I tried the hundred-hour oxtail recipe of modernist cuisine, did I do this? No, thanks. Okay. Uh I found off flavors and gas development starting around 50 hours of circulation. The same thing happened with the modernist cuisine, 72-hour short ribs, 58 or 60 uh degrees Celsius recipe, which I luckily got out before they actually went off.
I had the oxtail and ribs vacpacked at my local butcher with a chamber vac sealer. Now, I assume the reason that's to do with bacteria not getting killed off, which may be due to slightly big water bath. But the short ribs uh were uh fixed in the center, and I measured the temperature throughout the bath with a thermometer, indicating constant and correct temperature every everywhere. Any ideas what went wrong? All right, yes, I have some ideas.
I think what happened is like let's say you had uh a bunch of short ribs in a you have to tell me, right? But let's say you had a bunch of short ribs in one package, right? So there's sauce and microbes and all sorts of like nastiness, right, inside of the bag, in the center of the bag, right? And I think what happens is it just took too long for the temperature, the kill temperatures to make it to the inside of the bag, right? So if you were to take uh a block, uh this is my favorite example, I don't know why, but if you were to take a block of meat, whole meat that had never been pierced with a knife, like let's say don't cook kill and cook whales, but let's say you had a chunk of whale flesh, single chunk of whale flesh, because I can't think of any other animal big enough to do this, right?
That is the size of like a Chevy small block engine, right? And you were to put that into a bag, one piece, right, and then you were to circulate it, right? Then it doesn't matter really how long it takes for the center of that whale chunk to get up to cooking temperature because the inside of the meat is fundamentally sterile unless it had an infection or unless you stabbed it with a knife all the way through to the center. Now, as soon as you get in a situation where because the whale meat is extremely uh, you know, it's very it's very lean, it's a quail. You know what I mean?
Well, they got a lot of blubber, but I think the meat itself, the muscles, I don't know how marbled it is, I've never seen, I've never cooked whale meat, obviously, because I'm not for killing whales. But as soon as you take big pieces of lard or or or blubber and you start like penetrating the meat with and like putting stuff in the middle of it, or if you start hacking up that big piece of meat and then laminating it together with sauce, or if you take a bunch of different ribs and sh and short, you know, uh short ribs or whatever you're using oxtail and you pack them all into one bag, well now you have contamination in the middle of your bag. So if it takes six hours for the middle of the bag to get up to kill temperatures, you have plenty of time for bacteria to start growing and puffing the bag out. Once the bag puffs out, then you can have a reduced temperature everywhere in it and you can continue to grow and it can go off. So I think that's what happened, because the temperatures that you're using are clearly high enough to kill everything.
So even if you're cooking at home and uh and you're not gonna be doing portion control work, I always recommend, if you can, to bag each uh large each piece, like each oxtail or each rib, in a s a separate bag, if you can, and barring that, because also then if you lose a bag, you only lose one piece of meat, but and you know, if uh it's that jerk who said they were gonna come over to dinner doesn't come over to dinner, you can always just chill that bag without contaminating the rest of your bag. How often is that happens, Doz? Like they could they're like, uh I'm late all the time. All the time, right? So then you could take that bag that you would plan to serve to your ungrateful uh house guest and put it back in the, you know, chill it down and put it back in the fridge.
So it's it's convenient a lot of times, although wasteful of plastic, to have them individually bagged. But barring that, you should have all of your individual pieces of meat in a single layer, and I think that might solve your problem. And when I say single layer, such that the bag can get all the way around it, right? So if you have a bunch that are laminated together, even you know, it's it could cause problems. I think that's what's happening.
Uh second problem is uh on centrifuges. Uh via my university, I had the uh fortune uh of uh using a centerfuge to make some oh no, I answered the pea butter question. Peanut butter question, I think I answered. Okay. I remembered answering a peanut butter question.
Listen, if I didn't answer the rest of your questions, Tom, let me know and and I'll and I'll get to them. You can ask me more questions. One more question. One more question. One more question.
Uh okay. Let's see, let's see what this one is. Uh hey, Dave, uh Nastasha, Jack, and Annie Poppins. This is from Christian. Uh love the show.
Discovered it after my buddies at Arden Restaurant here in Milwaukee. Stas, you love Milwaukee. It's one of the things you like. Hate biscuits, loves Milwaukee. Uh called in to get recipe for brandy old-fashioned slushies for their late-night ramen transformation.
Uh, my wife and I just bought a house, congrats, uh, and discovered the previous owners had never installed a water line into the freezer. What the hell does this guy's doing? What are they doing? How do you not have a water line in your people? Uh ice makers good.
Ice maker good. Um into the freezer. So we are iceless barring a midsummer snowstorm. Uh even up there I don't think you get them. You know what I'm saying?
Do you know that Dax used to when he was roasting coffee in the in the winter, he would run out and snow chill it? He over he overrose it. And Dax wanted to go into business selling snow chilled Dax's dark roast snow chilled coffee. And I was like, good luck with that, Dax. Good luck.
You know, I would support him, but that's a hard, that's a hard business model because you have to wait for snow or move to Sweden or something. Uh okay. So we're ICES barring a midsummer snowstorm. You can probably have a line installed, but you can, by the way. But before doing that, I wanted to get your thoughts on making ice at home.
We basically have two uses. One, the rapid uh cooling during cooking, uh blanching, bringing cooked ice cream base or yogurt down, standard uh beer cooler uh filling, and two, ice for cocktails. Uh considering uh getting a greater than $300 standalone uh ice maker for rapid cooling and making cubes uh using the cooler in freezer technique described uh you know on Dave Stolte's website for bar ice. How would you set up a good home ice program from scratch? Any recommendations for inexpensive ice makers that could work for both the cooking and bar applications, thanks, Christian.
All right, look. Uh this oh, that used to be my telephone. Uh the okay, let me give you some good and bad news. The the good news is well, it's there's no good news. Like, I would get the expensive uh ice maker.
Well, okay, look. What do I have? I got you know, I got a I got flat back because I I pronounced it incorrectly. I don't I'm gonna say it the way I say it, and then someone can write in again and tell me how to actually pronounce it. Manitawok?
Manitowok, manitawak. That's the company, the ice maker company that I have at home. Um commercial ice maker, I would get an under-counter commercial ice maker, and I would try to find some knucklehead who's uh getting rid of it. Now the problem is they use a lot of uh energy, right? They use a lot of energy because they're constantly making ice, right?
Definitely that what you really should do is just drill a hole in your freezer and put a water line in and then buy a and and most likely your freezer has a space in the back for you to put the water line in, and most likely you can just put in a um you could put in a an ice maker because I I've done that before. You know, get a filter and an ice maker and do it, uh, you know, run like a quarter-inch line of copper to it, and that's just gonna make ice because really you want kind of crappy ice for your normal chilling, you don't want the big blocks, and then you can just do like uh freezer things. But if you're gonna have what you didn't mention is that you're gonna put uh seltzer water on tap. Now, assuming that you like seltzer water and who doesn't, right? Like I use a cold chiller and I have that in the bottom of a commercial ice machine.
So I always have decent ice on hand all the time because it makes it. And I use uh a very nice uh Manita walk, and the reason I like it is because you can it makes a nice kind of large cube. Uh it's weird octagonal shape. It looks like those little jello cup shapes, but um you can shut it off because they're very loud. So if if someone in the house is like, ah, it's so loud, uh, you can shut it off for like two hours and it'll come back on and continue to make ice.
But that thing, I use it to chill actually when I make my big cooler of ice, uh, I use hot water from the tap and then throw those ice cubes into it to get the temperature down without including a lot of gas by pouring back and forth, then put the cooler in the freezer and and go from there. So the best from a budget standpoint is to aftermarket install your own uh ice maker into your freezer because they make ice on a cycle but don't require a lot of water and energy, and they actually store the ice without melting, whereas a commercial ice maker is constantly making ice and letting it melt down. The quality of the ice in the home in the inside of the freezer ones is never quite as high, so you're always going to want to make some ice uh in in in a cooler, but it's a lot less energy intensive and a lot cheaper. So that's my recommendations. Uh back next week with Cooking Issues.
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