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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. This is Michael Harlan Turkell, host of the Food Scene. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadio Network.org for thousands more.
Hello and welcome to Cooking News. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking New Shoes, coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network, roughly 1250, something like that. Call it Noonish. Noonish. Noonish-ish.
Uh joined as usual with Nastasia the Hemer Lopez. How are you doing? Good. Yeah? We got Jack in the Engineering Booth.
Hello. Thank goodness. I don't like to do the show without Jack in the Engineering Booth. Oh, thanks. You know what I mean?
I know. And we have a special guest with us today. We have uh Darren from Meld Meld. Now, MELD, although it sounds like a delicious grilled cheese corporation, is not. Do you like growth she sandwiches?
I do. What's not to like? Exactly. But I figure if you have a company named Meld, then you gotta like grilled cheese sandwiches. Otherwise it's like, you know, it's gonna be problems.
Uh but anyway, they do not in fact manufacture you know what's a bad name for no offense for a grilled cheese sandwich corporation? Cheese boy. Yeah. Isn't that the one that's on the I95? Cheese boy.
No. First of all, like why you why are you making an agendered thing? Like why are you going gender on your grilled cheese sandwich? Grilled cheese sandwich is a non-gendered delicious item, in my opinion. You know, and I I've passed by not staffed only by boys.
First of all, you want like an adult making your grilled cheese sandwiches anyway. I mean, like we do have labor laws. I'm just saying, someone can call in and convince me that I'm wrong, but I just think it's kind of not a good name. Whereas, like, not a grilled cheese corporation, but like FUDRuckers, it's too hilarious not to like the name of, right? I can't believe that like there's millions of dollars invested in a corporation called FUDRuckers that makes food for people.
You ever been to a Fudrucker's? I have. So it's like a free fixings bar, a lot of like Roy Rogers back in the 70s. Exactly. Loves Roy Rogers.
Free fixes bar, baby. Yeah. So what I would do, you know, my Roy Rogers trick with the low quality salad bar ingredients they had for the free fixings, was I would pile it high to ruin the burger, like you say, but then I would move it aside and then I would have a salad with my burger. I would take the toppings back off of the burger. And then have there all kinds of uh kinds of good tricks.
When I was in grad school, we used to uh eat lunch at this uh terrible cafeteria on campus, and it would come with a little side salad. But if you put the dressing in the bottom of the little bowl first and then piled everything up on that, it would stick together and then you'd go to the table and flip it over, and you'd have like, you know, five times the salad anyone else would. That's some smart business. And and that, that, friends and listeners, is the kind of thinking that uh is gonna bring to your kitchen in the near future meld. Now, meld not being a grilled cheese corporation, what they do, and I'm actually like uh frankly uh excited to see it out because we have one here, is that it's the knob that automatically turns your gas stove range, rather, up.
Can it do stoves too? Yeah, it it does electric. It's it's not quite as perfect uh as it is on gas, but anything that's got a knob, it can turn. Uh Rebecca, you can do ranges and ovens, gas, or electric? Correct.
Anyway, it it turns the knob for you so that you can have adequate uh temperature control. We had them on the phone uh I don't know, a couple months ago, and uh some of the stuff I thought was interesting was uh you know uh as more and more users use it, uh they'll be able to write more and more interesting algorithms like a rice cooker algorithm or uh all sorts of fun stuff. Because once you once you have computers controlling everything, you know, not only will they take over the world and turn us into their slaves instead of the other way around, but you can do interesting things like turn your gas range into a rice cooker. Exactly. Yeah.
And so what we've got here is we've got one mounted on a little portable butane burner. Uh no butane involved uh at this point. Oh, there's no butane on it? Uh no. Uh Jack uh kind of vetoed that given the uh confines.
What the hell, dude? These are rated for indoor cooking. You know, I just had the same freaking problem. I have to do a freaking demo in uh London in like a week and a half, right, Stas? And I just got a text today.
We can't get I'll I will read the text in its entirety just because of how irritating. No, yeah, I'm not gonna say who's involved because I'm not gonna throw anyone under the bus specifically. But I had the same problem when we were I was in London a couple of weeks ago where no one wants to get liquid nitrogen. Here's it okay. Our issue with uh is with supplier delivery of liquid nitrogen and storage and health and safety issues in a live show environment.
Uh it's not even the one that was uh I really need to know the details of what you'll be doing and order any ingredients you need. And here's what it says liquid nitrogen is possible, but we need more details for risk assessment and methods statement. If you could tell me more about your demo and had a video you could send, we need to answer such questions as how do we ensure liquid nitrogen has evaporated from the glass, etc. You look at it. We dump out the glass and we look at it.
Furthermore, when you add a liquid to the glass that had liquid nitrogen in it, if there is liquid nitrogen present, it will continue to smoke. You know, I've I've been to Booker and Dex. I've seen them manage the uh liquid nitrogen and the glass problem pretty pretty well. Yeah, the only person that I'm aware of that was injured by the a customer who was injured by the use of liquid nitrogen, the liquid nitrogen was intentionally placed in the glass and handed to her. Yeah, that was weird.
Int intentionally placed in the glass and handed to her. And all of the UK is like on flip doodles about using LN, right? It's a completely valid technique to use it, and they're all going freaking pretzel because some jackwad intentionally poured liquid nitrogen into some lady's drink. It's nuts. Yeah, well, you know, all there's all kinds of things we use that uh have created a a problem when misused, but when used properly produce great results, right?
Yeah, you know I gotta uh put a caller through. He's been patiently waiting. Let's put that thought on pause. All right, but I'm gonna make hammers and bricks illegal because people hit each other with them sometimes. Caller, you're on the air.
Collar, you're on the air. Hey, I can't hear you, man. Oh, hey I hear you. Are you can you hear me now? I can hear you a little bit, yeah.
All righty, what's going on? Hey, I'm a biodynamic uh CSA farmer down in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Nice. Which is in the eastern panhandle just outside of Washington, DC. And uh the reason I'm calling you is uh I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but the uh old line CSA people, the original grassroots CSA people are uh having a pretty hard time nowadays.
And in the DC area, uh uh those of us who hold to the original standards of CSA, which is uh soil farm and a group of people gathered around the farm to get food of a quality that's not being produced by the open market system. Right. Um are being beat out by uh well out outright uh commercial vegetable distributions, CSAs that aren't even organic, CSAs that don't have a farm or a farmer, uh aggregators, which are things put together by the USDA that scoop up a bunch of crops from uh just c uh c uh I guess commercially oriented farms, put 'em out in uh share bags like a CSA does, but that's kind of all b beside the point. Uh I've I've been doing CSA since uh I think uh nineteen ninety was our first CSA. And um it's uh hard to hold on to a community in the DC area because it's such uh there's so much turnover in the area and so much uh house flipping and so people in neighborhoods change rather rapidly.
But uh I the reason I'm I'm calling you Dave is because I've been listening to your program for a really long time and I realize you have a a really uh great understanding of how the restaurant businesses work. And uh there's myself and several other farmers out here in West Virginia. They're probably gonna go belly up this season if we don't find an outlet other than CSA for our produce. And uh being tied to the land, try still trying to support the couple dozen CSA shares I've sold this year instead of our our CSA's been up to three hundred and fifty shares some years. Uh I think it's twenty-four this year.
Oh my god. Um I I wonder if there's some easy way for farmers who like I said are tied to the land running around with irrigation hoses for six hours a day and whatnot to contact chefs who are interested in very flavorful local foods. Well first of all, give for me it would be the DC area, but give the give the name give the name of your of your farm in case anyone in DC is looking to, you know, contact you. What's the what's the name of your farm? It's fresh and local CSA.
It is it is uh in local harvest, it is uh on the web, it's fresh and local CSA dot com. And uh it's uh fifteen years on this soil with biodynamic techniques. All the produce is outrageously flavorful because of all of the uh minerals that are in the soil and available to the plants now. And how's the crop year looking this year? Were you hit by the same like the late uh late kind of spring that we got up here?
Are you guys doing all right for for crops? Um well we're okay with crops, but everything was late this year, and it and it was I don't know how it was for you, but for us it went from freezing nights to 90 degree days in the same week, I believe. Yeah, it's ping-ponging like crazy. I didn't uh it's never never seen anything quite like it. But um well, let me say this.
I think that you know, New York has a uh a fantastic model in our green market. And uh, you know, for a long time uh the the advantage of the green market, right, is that you get kind of what I like to call a critical mass of suppliers together. Now the average person on the street thinks of the green market as a place that they can go buy uh veg, but you know, all the chefs I know think of the green market as a place where they can interact directly with the farmer as supplier, right? And the advantage from the farmer's standpoint is obviously they know in advance that they have to bring X, Y, and Z because they know the chefs are gonna are gonna buy it because they have communication prior to them arriving at the at the farm. And believe it or not, I think it's fairly efficient for uh the farmer because they either they or you know someone that they're having doing their their truck for them really only has to give up one day, you know what I mean, uh to go and interact with uh the chefs.
And the chefs, it's very easy for them because they know that let's say you grow fantastic peppers, right? And then uh that you know they'll get the peppers from you, but let's say they know that they really like the you know the purple basil from some other farmer, they can go get that. And so you get a critical mass together, the chef can make the run to the green market. Here the main ones are are uh Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. I mean, we're a huge market, but you know what I mean?
But uh even one or two of those days would be enough to sustain it. But I think what you what you need is a critical mass of like-minded uh farmers. Do you I mean do you have a structure like that in DC uh for it for a green market the way that we we operate it? Because I think that's really the method that's allowed a lot of farmers here in uh New Jersey and the Hudson Valley really kind of stay connected with the chef community. Yeah, well, there are several really good markets in DC, but they've been closed to new farmers for a lot of years.
Huh. And so that's uh that's the problem. Huh, it's a really interesting problem. You know, I'd love to hear kind of uh and you know, and I haven't heard that flip side of it either. Like I don't know whether there's a lot of farmers who would, you know, be itching to supply New York chefs but can't because they're getting shut out of our green market system.
Specifically the Union Square Green Market is the big one we have here, which is you know on 14th Street. Uh I mean there's a bunch of others that chefs also go to, but that's uh kind of main one. But I I you know it's a really interesting question. I think it's something that needs to be kind of uh needs to be kind of addressed, and I would encourage you know, any chefs in the DC area to you know reach out to you, anyone that's like listening. You know what you know, you have something to go?
I I mean I I totally agree with that, and I think you know, just giving a perspective from Seattle, which is where I'm from, um, you know, Pike Place Market, it's a hundred and something years old, it's kind of the big famous one that that people know about, but um, but there are a lot of other markets, and and I think you know, if you're looking for where the chefs are going in in Seattle, at least it's not there, it's probably you know, more like the Ballard uh market on Sundays and and there are a few others, but uh you know, they've they've expanded to the point that uh even though Pike Place may be shut out to to new vendors, um, you know, some of these other markets around town are uh are available. And I think you know you're you're more likely to see uh Seattle chefs probably walking around and sampling what's uh what's available in Ballard than you are at Pike Place these days. Right. I mean, one thing I know for sure is that chefs will chefs will seek out and go through great pains and trouble to seek out the good ingredients. However, once they seek it out, the supply chain to them needs to be relatively convenient because it needs to be it needs to be able to be gotten to the restaurant like on a kind of a regular or semi-regular base.
Now they'll deal with, you know, they'll deal with uh I don't have any potatoes this week, you know, they you know the whatever we gotta we had a fail crop failure. They'll deal with this, you know what I mean? But it's it's more like you know, they can't drive you know 50 miles to go to go get their to go get their stuff because they're simultaneously getting from a bunch of different suppliers. So I mean I think it's just a question of figuring out how you can uh you know gather like enough like like-minded farmers in you know in some sort of new venue, and it doesn't have to be like super organized or even super nice, as long as the chefs know that it's gonna be there and know that they can count on sending like one person uh over there and they can and they can pick up what they need from like four or five suppliers that they've um developed a relationship with. Um but you know, one thing I know about chefs, at least the people that like I deal with and I know, is that they are monsters for uh quality and they love absolutely love having personal relationships with farmers.
Love it. You know, yeah, completely agree. Yeah. Yeah so let me throw in there I I don't have any problem driving down to DC if we're talking about some sort of scale right yeah it's just a question of making of like making it of of like you know germinating the idea planting the seed and like reaching that critical mass I mean there's going to be the the real problem is is that either way from the chef side and from the farmer side there's going to be like a time period where everyone's sucking wind trying to get enough uh enough of a critical mass to make it worthwhile for everyone but uh and I mean I hope someone in DC you know hears this or you know I mean or if you're calling someone else and has like some sort of uh uh and you know and you know Jack this is something that Heritage Radio could take on as a as a problem too because you know a lot of people uh on this network are interested in this kind of problem as well. Yeah a hundred percent yeah why don't you leave your information with Jack and then we'll um we'll try to see if we have anyone that um is more of a specific expert in this but uh yeah absolutely so info at heritageradio network dot org is gonna be the best way because we're gonna drop the call and uh go to another caller but definitely shoot us an email and we will stay in touch.
Alright thanks so much for calling that's a uh interesting subject we have that we haven't addressed here on the radio all right thanks so much um all right cool thanks Jack so back to Mel to have one oh we have another caller is the second caller on the line oh caller you're on the air uh hi uh my name is Rob I'm calling because I'm looking to set up a draft soda system. Right? I wanted to know what other things you turn out. Well, you're cutting in and out. I heard you're setting up a draft soda system and you want to know certain things, and then when you actually said what the certain things was, you cut out.
Sorry, I I started to. Um my goodness. One second. Like it's literally like I hear the word specifically, and then all of the actual specifics are trailing off. Yeah, give us a ring back if you get.
Oh, wait. Are you there? Yeah, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you now. Cell service is a is a is a wretched thing, is it not?
All right. So okay, so what what are the specific problems you're worried about? Um I'm looking to set up a pre-mix system where I'll be running uh a root beer syrup that I made. Right. Right.
Oh. We're so close. So close. So close. Pre mix system with root beer.
All right, listen, I can't hear what your actual questions are, but you get like you can call back with the questions, or I'll tell you some of the problems with root beer. Root beer is known for the world over by anyone that's ever made it to be the absolute hardest thing to clean out of your lines. Right? So like if you're doing uh if you're doing a corny keg with uh with root beer, like you need to throw all of the rubber in your tank needs to be thrown away if you want to switch flavors. All of it.
You know what I mean? So you gotta throw away the ring gasket. Uh even I know some people replace uh the uh the sealing parts of the uh of the ball lock valves because they say that anything that is even mildly absorbent will absorb flavors from the root beer. This includes the polyethylene tubes that you use uh into into your cold plate. Uh I know that you can wash the actual cold plate out, but it takes kind of a lot uh to do.
I'm assuming these are the kind of problems. You might be having a foam now. I'll address another problem you might be having. If you're using now, so the the answer there is just, you know, dedicate a system to root beer. You know what I mean?
Dedicate a corny keg to root beer. Uh dedicate, remember I'm a huge advocate of two cold plate circuits for every flavor, not one, two. So I would always get a cold plate that has at least twice as many circuits as you have flavors. And the reason for that is twofold. One, the extra trip through the uh, and this is gonna address the second problem that you might be having with root beer.
The uh the second trip through the uh cold plate gives it a longer line, and that longer line uh tends to slow it down a little bit and cause less foam out on the on the on the output. Um the other problem, the other thing it solves is it gets it colder and getting it colder by a good chunk by several degrees, uh also reduces your foam out on the output and plus makes it colder, which duh. Do you want your root beer warm stuff? Do you like root beer? Oh wow, good.
I like it too. Uh that's not the like. Exactly, much like grilled cheese. In fact, root beer and grilled cheese might go well together. Anyway, um so um the other the the other problem you're gonna have is uh with foaming.
So anytime you're making your own root beer flavors uh with you know uh tree and bark pieces, these things tend to foam like a loony tune. They're really foamy. And in fact, foam is one of the characteristics of root beer, a foamy mug of root beer. But the problem is is you have to keep it somewhat in line. And I would not suggest adding uh, you know, um like silicone derivatives, um uh anti foaming agents, just because I haven't found them really to work, at least in alcoholic beverages.
I mean, they'll kill foam maybe in a glass, but they're not gonna kill they're not I don't think it's gonna cause your foam out problems on the thing. I think what your main issues are with foaming is realize you are gonna have some foaming. Then instead of you have to get a very good pre-mix soda valve. I recommend the ones that CM Becker makes, but you know, you can get uh and by the way, kudos to you for doing pre-mix because I think most post mixed soda sucks. But like uh anyway, so I would get a very good valve uh by Becker.
It's gonna have like a very long in the back torpedo-shaped compensator that's going to gently take it from uh the pressure in the tube to atmospheric pressure and it's gonna save you a lot of your foam out uh problems. Um like I say, cold is gonna solve your foam out problems, but also clarity. So if you don't have a centrifuge, which I'm assuming you don't, centrifuge is gonna knock out a lot of your particulates and really help here. But I would just take the trouble to really filter your uh bark uh stuff through like you know the finest uh uh strainers that you have, like coffee, even if it takes uh a million years. And eventually I'll get a centrifuge because it can spin all the particulate matter out, and that's really gonna solve a lot of your foaming problems.
I'm assuming you had one of those two problems. If you didn't, call me back and uh and and and we'll talk about it. And Jack, should we come back right after the commercial break with our demonstration of mil? Let's squeeze one more call who's been waiting and then go to break. All right, caller, you were on the air.
Uh hi, I thought a question about acids in draft cocktails. Oh, nice. Um not I'm sorry, not draft, but I want to I want to carbonate and bottle some cocktails. Sure. But all the suggestions, all suggestions you have in liquid intelligence require uh fresh lime juice.
And as we know, storing fresh lime juice makes me the devil. Yes. So I'm I'm curious about acid alternatives that will bottle well and and keep. Alright. I'll give you a couple, I'll give you a couple of suggestions.
And uh this one uh you know I hadn't really thought of by the time I I wrote the book, but you know, I like fresh lime juice. I also kind of like lime cordial, right? And lime cordial is you know, so and and literally at the bar, what I what we do to make the lime cordial is I take the leftover clarified lime juice that we have, uh, and then I boil it with uh sugar and a couple of peels of lime, and right away the cordial is good, and it actually ages uh after a couple of weeks, I think it's even like a little bit better. And so that's a stable acid source. Now it doesn't taste like fresh lime, right?
So it's not fresh lime flavor. But it's still good flavor. But it's still good flavor. It's different than and it takes a little bit of an education because someone who's looking to have a fresh lime flavor, if you give them a cordial flavor, they're like, This tastes like cordial, and you're like, Yes, but cordial tastes good. You know what I mean?
It's the in-between stuff that doesn't taste good. Another option is you can uh bolster I'm I'm a huge fan of including actual citrus in uh in the drinks because as opposed to just acids. So you can do some cordial and then bolster it with some uh acids like a citric uh mallet blend. Um some acid combinations, especially ones that are barely soluble, so like if you make the champagne acid from liquid intelligence, which is a uh a mixture of um it's a three percent um a three percent lactic acid and three percent tartaric acid blend, like that actually blend at that acidity tends to throw crystals, uh, you know, because it's kind of at the limit of it of uh solubility of some of that stuff. And I don't know why, but maybe that's why when you carbonate with champagne acid, you tend to get foamy drinks.
Something about that the lactic uh tartaric blend causes foamy drinks. And also when you're bottling something car uh carbonated, like I've noticed certain certain drinks like Kampari, the bitterness is not stable when bottled under acidic conditions. I don't know why. I've never, you know, I've never asked uh someone with a mass spec to look at it, so I don't know why. But it it you know it's definitely true.
So you know, I would I would start with um augmented citrus, so you can use like uh clarified orange juice, tastes terrible. Not like terrible, it tastes like sunny D, it tastes like tang, right? It has all of its character stripped. Right. But you can take that and bolster it with citric and malic and you can have a very nice citrus uh you know citrus flavor that'll last for a while.
Or if you do cordials and you can augment cordials, like I say, with acid to bolster the freshness level of it by increasingly boosting the acidity higher, so you use less of the cordial, and it is stable as far as I can tell for a long time. Great. Are there any non-citric um things I should look at? Like, you know, just the things that aren't citrus at all? Sure.
So I mean, like a any any sort of juice uh can be bolstered, can have its acidity bolstered, right? So um to kind of greater or lesser effect. The trick with it is is uh is is it's figuring out what acids you're gonna add and not adding adding so much that they turn kind of uh fake, right? But you can bolster grape juice. I mean, I tend to like things that have characteristics have like a character because this way when you bolster the acidity of that, like it it helps to like if the fruitiness is there, the actual fruitiness from fruit is there, the acidity doesn't taste fake, whereas it can taste more like a soda-based acidity, like an actual like a flavor, like an just uh it can taste more like an added acidity if there isn't some sort of natural fruit there to back it up.
If you want to go dry, obviously the cola acid, the acid that's used in colas is phosphoric acid. I would say that you, you know, um it's one of the few acids that doesn't kind of scale directly weight for weight, you know, you need to use a little bit less of the phosphoric acid. Uh and it's typically sold in very concentrated solutions. So I would take it down, like you you can buy it as like 85% uh phosphoric acid solution, and I would take it down to like six or less, and then start mixing with it at those lower levels because Stas doesn't like the phosphoric acid, right? But are you a cola head?
Like, do you like cola? Yeah, so you like mild, like a mild amount of phosphoric acid, but like usually when bartenders try to add phosphoric acid to a drink, they hit it too hard. And you don't like that intense, dry, it's an intensely dry, non-fruity acidity. Um yeah, give those, give those uh give those a shot. Great, thanks.
That's very helpful. Alright, good luck with it. Let's know uh tweet on it if you get any good results. I will. Alright, back back from the break with MELD on cooking issues.
Hello out there, it's Steve Jenkins. I'm with Fairway Markets. White Leghorn, Red Wattle, Bourbon Red, Navajo Churro. Well, these aren't names you're likely to hear at a Fairway butcher counter or any other counter today, but before the rise of factory farming, you would have. And at Heritage Foods USA, you still do.
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Animals raised according to this philosophy taste better. And as we like to say, you have to eat them to save them. Visit us at HeritageFoods USA.com for more information. Wouldn't that be awesome? Alec, if you're out there.
Alec, if you're out there, let me see you dance. For those of you who are friend uh who like the uh Princess Black album, do you ever you ever listen to that? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Bob George is an intensely weird song.
If you're out there, let me see you dance. Okay, so uh so let's look at the meld. I wish it had some freaking flame on it, Jack. Well, it's anyway. It's uh Jack.
Yeah. Why do you not let him have the butane in here, man? Listen. It's uh not the first place that has uh has not let me use butane. It's not my restaurant, you know.
I can't alright. Uh let's uh see it. And uh Stas, can you make a flame noises? No. So uh so first off, I've I've I've got the knob mounted here on this uh little butane less burner.
So you can't see it. What we have here is a a butane picnic burner, which strangely enough, if you actually read the NFPA uh fire codes, uh this is rated as a fine piece of indoor cooking equipment because the butane canister is uh contained and it's uh sits on a table and can't be knocked over. I've gone through these codes a million times when I was doing the Sears all work. But anyway, just saying Okay, so so what I'm gonna do now is is just the the sort of first manual thing. So you can see the knob turned itself.
All uh all I'm doing is doing it the old-fashioned way, and actually uh just telling it to go to a certain percentage. But what I'm gonna do now instead is I'm going to set it, uh I'm gonna tell it, okay, I'd like to to go to a temperature of 35 degrees C. And uh that's not very warm, but it's warmer than it is in here. Uh it's 26 right now. So I'm gonna touch the uh the end of this, and that uh this is the temperature probe that goes in the pot or pan, and we're gonna look at the knob and it's gonna it's going to turn on.
Right. So as the uh it's actually on high now because it's trying to raise the temperature, but as my body heat actually raises the temperature of this, it's gonna start turning it down because it's thinking, oh, I've got the gas on uh and it's making the temperature go up. So there it goes. You see it start starting to turn itself down uh as we approach the target temperature. And is it auto-tuning now or what's it doing?
Exactly. So it's it is what it's trying to do is get to the temperature I want without overshooting, because if it overshoots, it's much harder than even if it turns the gas essentially to zero to come down in temperature. It's much easier to go up. So it's it's biased to not overshoot and to make these very small adjustments. Uh but does it learn your range or is it constantly learning?
It it both. Now, how how long is it going to continue to theoretically dump gas into the air with no flame before it it's like no? Well, at this point, it's uh my my body heat's not actually quite quite uh hot enough for it, so I'll turn down the target temperature a little bit, and now it's actually has has turned it uh all the way down. So for for demo purposes, actually, these butane burners are are sort of the worst of all possible worlds, but but uh it also stresses the system, which I really like because if we can handle this, we can handle anything. The reason it's the worst case is because from zero to full blast on this is a rotation of only about 40 degrees.
Uh right, whereas most ranges here, it's 180, maybe even 270. And so the precision that we have to get is is much higher on this. Um, so it's actually running at at now four percent. It thinks it's one degree shy of of its target. So, and uh like will this thing light, or do you still need to manually go through the click, click click click click click click click poof?
You still have to do that manually. So, what happens is when you start up the app and and choose a recipe, uh, before any cooking step, what it's gonna do is it's gonna say turn it on, and you turn your knob, click, click, click, like you said, it it goes and then leave it at any temperature or any heat level you want. You then hit a button on the app that says, Okay, it's on, I'm handing you control. The app will then say, Oh, I see it's at 47%. But actually, at the moment I'd like it to be at 92%, and it'll move it there, and then it will continue adjusting uh throughout the the whole execution of that step of the recipe.
And then for certain recipes, like um, for example, we've got a a caramel recipe, there's a video of it on our website, where you want to caramelize the sugar, but then you want to bring the temperature down, add the cream and butter, and so it it knows that there are different target temperatures for different steps, and as you move through the recipe and and do the various steps, uh it will adjust the temperature. It's sort of like you never have to touch the knob, someone is there doing it for you. You're putting ingredients in, taking things out, and so on. When you when are you shipping these guys? October.
Yeah, yeah. I'd love to mess with one. Yeah, we'd we'd uh we'll we'll do our best to try and uh get you one uh a little sooner if we can. But uh yeah, some really cool techniques that that we are working on. Um so for example, you know, people I think a lot of times confuse precision temperature cooking with low temperature cooking because you know, people are familiar with or people who listen to this show certainly are are familiar with circulators and and what they do.
Um circulators uh obviously don't work particularly well over a hundred C because uh unless you use oil but they're no longer they're no longer spec'd out to use oil. Exactly. Whereas with MELD we can put a pot of oil on there. Um and you can do all kinds of things ranging from you know relatively low temperature stuff. So we've been playing around a little bit with with poaching things in oil around like 120 C um and then you can go obviously all the way up to you know frying things at 350, 375, 400 the classic everyone's always wanted to put a circulator for years can you put a circulator fry it's like well it'll the metal ones.
They'll handle the temperature but they're crap at frying because they they're they're even if they had the power they're not designed to have the recovery rate that a fryer needs. Could you could you tell this guy like could you is it in other words could you go from for minimize recovery time but still not completely blast out your oil? Like could you have like a middle I mean tube burner fryers are so freaking good because they have such a high surface area to heat out. This is why everyone at home like I'm sorry you're just not gonna have as good a fried stuff as someone who has a tube fryer. You're just not you know what I mean?
It's not gonna happen. You don't have a cold zone you don't have to you can do good fried stuff but you're not gonna have you're not gonna have all night good fry the way that you can in a tube fryer. But can you Yeah the the key for uh we we can do a really good job the key is not overloading and that that's the key in you know any frying application right if you if you have a two quart pot of oil and you dump in I don't know twenty chicken wings you know it's gonna be hard for even your fifteen thousand BTU burner on your stove at home to to recover from that quickly. Yeah um and even if you could even if you could you don't have the surface area of Panta oil to not locally so look my burners at home they're kind of stupid high you know they're they're way higher than they're supposed to be because the knucklehead that installed the stove didn't put the regulator on it right so you know I can I it looks like a jet engine when I turn on my burners which I can't for a lot of things. It is but like it's irritating because um I get a lot of flame out on the low end.
So it makes it hard to do kind of like the more delicate things. Not that I like to do delicate things does don't worry. But like I'm saying you know I have exactly the same thing on my oven at home which is which is great. It's like I have this vintage sort of 1990 oven that it's a double wall oven the top one is digital and the bottom one's analog I think because you know digital controls were too expensive then to actually put it on both ovens. And the analog one on the bottom the knob goes to 500 like most uh home oven knobs do but the little catch that makes it stop there is gone.
And you can just keep on turning it and so I can actually crank it up to around 700 for pizza. Take that safety you know what I did that I I shouldn't mention but I literally put a uh I literally put a thermostat bypass on my uh on my oven. So just like th thermostat thermostat but here was the rule right I had to make it such that like any normal so my last oven in my last place when you went there uh people like I don't want to cook in your oven, your oven's too complicated. I have to know how to program a Watlow P I D controller to do it. I'm like, so what?
Learn how to program a Watt learn. You know what I mean? Learn. You know, it's like you know, you know how to drive a car, can't dr you can't program my oven. You know what I mean?
That was my uh attitude. But this one, um, one of my things was A, it had to look like a normal oven, so it couldn't have wires and stuff sticking out of it fine. And it turns out I really didn't need a lot of control on the super high end for pizza because it just needs to be freaking hot, right? Exactly. So it's and then it's well, is it in there for a minute or a minute and a half?
Yeah, yeah. So so the simplest uh method was to hell with it and just literally put a uh a ball valve bypass onto onto the thermostat, and then when it's you know, when it's horizontal, I just tell people not to touch that. And it's a normal oven until I turn it into you know uh you know, flame on mode, and then it's then it's just you know, in real thermal runaway, not like the puny thermal runaway that you use on your 500 degree thermostat thermal runaway. I'm talking like thermal runaway. It doesn't actually run away, it doesn't melt itself into an ingot, but it gets close.
It's like, you know, up it's actually too hot, it gets up to 900. I have to throttle it. But anyway, back to the frying problem. So with my ridiculously high output range, right? I still can't get as good a frying uh in a normal pot situation because I just can't get the surface area contact with the oil in the pan to have it not abuse uh I mean I get slightly better results in a wok because I have a larger surface area for it to hit.
Of course, the oil degrades because it's against a uh a non-stainless walk because my walk's not stainless, so the oil degrades quickly there. You can't win, you know what I mean? But uh it would be interesting, I'm sure you could win better if you had uh a control app that was taking it up to the brink of being destroyed, and then but not like over. Because it in general, a hundred percent of the time when I watch cooks uh try to fry on a range, um they over they jack it too high to get the recovery rate which I understand but it always goes too far over the line and there's a kind of a porpoise effect with the temperature where it goes over and then under and I think people underestimate how much physical abuse the oil is taking during each cycle of overheating along with like salt and flour and burnt particles that are in that it's just absolutely and and and going back to what I was saying before that's why we we bias our algorithms to uh to avoid overshooting so we you know talking about about frying things all night so uh back in May sort of to thank uh a bunch of our Kickstarter supporters we had a a Cinco de Meld party and we were making tortilla chips uh on it on a burner very much like this but with butane uh all night long and and we're able to you know to keep that level of control and you know was was there some degradation in the oil you know three hours later yeah of course but um you know but but those chips were still good. Yeah and by the way fun fact about tortilla chips for those of you out there who make tortilla chips you should first of all you should make your own tortilla chips.
Absolutely and I'm not talking about I mean you should also learn to nixtamalize things but that's not what I'm talking about. I mean just go buy the crappy maseca not their crap but you know what I'm saying maseca fresh tortillas and fry them up because they're thicker and they're crunchier that's the way I like you know what I mean? And they're cheap as hell. Yeah. So cheap.
But um the true fact about tortillas is that uh they're they're gonna absorb a lot of oil. That's how they're supposed to work. That's what they do. Yeah. So you don't need to go French fry temperature when you're cooking a tortilla.
People overheat their oil when they're doing tortillas on a regular basis. In fact, next time you make tortillas, I want you to do this. I want you potato chips, the same thing. People go over temp on their potato chips. Because really, really you're when you're frying a French fry, you have a crust and an interior.
Right? Right. So you need to fry at a temperature that maintains the crust without shafting the interior. That's why it needs to be so high. Whereas in a tortilla chip or a potato chip, you're making a nice crunchy thing, but it is entirely the crust.
And you're what you're doing is a moisture removal operation. That's right. And so to do moisture removal, which is actually tough on oil, frankly, you know what I mean? Especially with cycling, thermal cycling. The next time you start tortilla chips, I want you to start your first batch in cold oil.
Just like you would for a potato chip batch. And and and you will not be able to tell the difference between that batch and the batch that started in hot oil. Why? Because tortilla chips are going to absorb oil, period. It it's going to happen.
It's going to go in all the spots where the water used to be that you're getting rid of. Right. And any sort of uh like intermediate absorption you might get when you throw a tortilla chip into locally cooled oil is going to be blasted out by the tremendous water evaporation you're going to get as soon as the local temperature of the oil around the tortilla chip gets above the boiling point of water. I guarantee it. Don't take my word for it.
Go cook some tortillas. You know what I mean? Yeah, the the uh the water evaporation thing is is really interesting point more generally, too. It's that, you know, as we've been been playing with this and and kind of understanding how it works and looking at the feedback loops. You know, a lot of uh a lot of cooking techniques are really all about uh the heat being sucked out by the evaporation of water, right?
So, you know, raising a gram of water one degree takes a calorie, but but uh boiling it off takes 540. So essentially when you're when you're cranking up the heat to maintain temperature, uh you are in almost all cases doing that to compensate for it being sucked out by evaporation. And understanding that then as things, you know, as you stop seeing the bubbling and and and all the steam coming off, uh, and then you watch as the knob is dialing back, it you know, it doesn't see the steam, but it but it's uh it's encountering the same thermodynamics, uh you realize, you know, that's what it's really all about for a lot of a lot of cooking techniques. And then the um, you know, controlling those and and do getting to the right temperature and recovering and so on. Um to your point about, you know, you you watch cooks do it at home and they porpoise, they go up and down.
Um we saw the exact same thing. So when we very first started down the road that that eventually became meld, the first thing we we looked at was, well, what if we could sense the temperature in a pot and pan in any of various ways and transmit that to an app, and then people could look and say, oh, it's too hot, it's too cold. And so we'd give people, you know, pretty good cooks the the simple task of bring this pot to this particular temperature. And they'd try and do it, and they'd go up and they'd overshoot and they'd dial it back and they'd undershoot and they'd and go back and forth. Twenty minutes later, they'd say, All you've done is you've told me I'm a terrible cook.
You haven't given me any tool to do anything about it. And that's where then the knob came. We said, okay, we've got to actually get the kind of feedback loop and get the kind of control uh that you get in Sous Vide and why is it that we're still out there, you know, following recipes that say put a pot on medium when that means, you know, what that means on your stove and what it means on mine could be two hundred degrees apart. Right. Well, though, yeah, those kind of recipes that say things like like the ones that are hilarious are the gas mark recipes where they actually whatever.
It's supposed to mean something in the UK. I don't know. But um, yeah, I mean, like you still they the the issue is is that recipes like that are still written, assuming that kind of we're all a community of cooks and we know what we're talking about. You know what I mean? Which is not always the case when someone's in fact I I mean I wish I had some time.
Well you know what, Jack, we're gonna have to do a catch-up episode. Yeah, let's do one. Because I need I have I didn't get to any of the written questions. I want to talk about breaking down chickens. Yes.
You know that I I was had someone over my age didn't know how to break down a chicken. We gotta go though. Uh all right, well listen, and I want to talk about scyth. I learned about scythes, you know that the tool scythe, like fear of the reaper. Cutting down wheat.
Yeah, they're freaking amazing. I looked at it, this is a joke. Who the heck wants a scythe? It's a pe I need to go get a uh uh you know a a weed whack or something. Amazing pieces of equipment, but I can't talk about it now.
Uh because we have to go. But uh thank you, Darren from Melk for coming in showing us this uh piece of equipment. Uh we'll do a catch-up episode of cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradio network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes Store by searching Heritage Radio Network.
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