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. Hi, this is Celia Cutcher, host of Animal Instinct, and you are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadio Network.org for thousands more. Hello, and we're back.
It's Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues coming to you live for the first time in a long time here on the Heritage Radio Network in Bushwick. What is it? Bushwick. Where are you gonna stay? You're not gonna do it for me?
Oh, what? Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network. Joined not as usual, Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez, is caught on a train back from the home. No, I'm in a no, I didn't take the train. You told me to find a good place.
So I'm in a crappy hotel room. What's up, crappy hotel room? Are they about to kick you out? Are you are you staying past your checkout time? I did the late checkout.
Oh, what's up, late checkout? Stas are leaving the hotel door open. The whole the room to room. Door to your room. Oh, hello, Peter.
Oh, uh, yeah. So everyone who, you know, we've been gone for like a month. What they really want to hear is a bunch of inside jokes I don't understand. Oh, they don't. Uh, yeah, so joined uh via phone from Harvard uh uh at uh Boston, Cambridge, actually, because uh Harvard and Boston never the two shall touch.
Uh how you doing, Staz? Good. I'm actually at Leslie, the school next to Harvard. Well, what do you mean? Like Leslie didn't invite so Mark Ladner was doing the uh like the public lecture and the uh and the uh what's it called, the uh student lecture for the for the uh you know the Harvard Science Cooking uh class there.
Uh uh Stas and I were there last week doing it uh with uh Harold McGee. But um why are you not stay why is Harvard not putting up where you what are you doing with Leslie? No, I'm joking. I'm at Arbor. Okay.
All right. Uh and uh how was the uh lecture uh it was good. It was good. He got he got through all his demos. So by the way, another inside joke.
This is like Nastasia, you gotta understand. So Nastasia likes to joke that uh that I never make it through the demos that I intend to do, and that's just because I uh plan more demos than I have time for in case I get to them, and then I just keep moving until I get through what I get through. That's my MO. Uh I've done it forever, and we'll continue to do it until I stop sucking air into my body and breathing it back out again. Uh one last demo.
Yeah, now yeah. Uh so but Stas, you know, like uh it inside jokes. You guys gotta quit with the inside jokes. These people are listening on the internet. I just said I'm so glad he made it through the demos.
No, no, no, you're a liar. Uh anyone who know anyone who knows you knows you're a liar. Uh it was a dig. It was a dig. Dig.
Anyway, what was the subject of the demos? Uh heat. Heat. What a little bit. Pretty easy.
Heat heat anything like that. Related to what yeah. He used uh the Sears all to di that did a full steak in ten minutes by th turning it every thirty seconds. Uh there was a putanesca pasta making demo and something else. Did you do that just so we could say Puto in front of the students?
Yeah, he had to explain what it where it came from. Yeah, it's it's pasta like a hooa might make and eat. Yes. Yeah. Pasta in the variety of a hooah.
I think that's uh it's really literally what it is, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's the one time I get to use that accent legit. Legit.
Uh Jack, how you doing? Oh, I'm good. Yeah, why don't you tell us what's been up with the Heritage Radio Network during the hiatus? Just hard at work making a new website here. And no, but you gotta tell them about the tweeting in.
They can tweet in live now in case they have so many things. So next week it's gonna launch and we'll we'll announce all the cool features, but there'll be a little chat room in the live player. Um the website itself is completely overhauled and just uh a it's a pleasant experience, this new website. But uh if you're in Brooklyn or New York, we're having a big big party next Monday, uh the 21st from 5 to 10 PM at Roberta's to celebrate the new website launch. It's free, free ninety nine to get the.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Free? What do I get for free? Uh you get to come in to the party. What's in the party?
It's the back garden of Roberta's. So there's DJs. Okay. Drinks are $20 a pop. Drinks are $37 per beer.
Wow. That's how we make up the difference. They're not $37. No. We're actually asking a suggested donation, which is ten bucks, and that'll get you a uh a six-point beer and a shot of tequila.
Nice. Wow. Yeah. And I'm old enough to actually pay the suggested admission as opposed to being that guy who's like, I suggest nothing. Yeah, exactly.
You know what I mean? You don't want to be that dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I you know what? I'm almost like I had to be re I never actually had the cojones to go and do that like at the at the Met.
So I would always just walk outside for a half an hour looking down at the ground to find someone who had dropped their button on the way out to go in. So I wouldn't have to be like I don't pay nothing. You know what I mean? You know, because then I don't the look. You ever the look.
Oh, they give you the look, yeah. You've seen the look. Oh, yeah. As a museum uh person myself, which we'll get to in a minute. You know, I know the look.
I'm familiar with it. Um it's not a good look. Not a good look. So next week, I guess not this week, next week. Here's what you can do.
Let's say you're one of these people who's listening to the the broadcast here, and you happen to be listening. Well, it's live, but you can't call in. I don't know. Maybe you're at work, maybe you're goofing off, you can't call, whatever. Elliot.
Uh not calling you out. But uh, you know, you can tweet your stuff in and we can respond to it live on the air, right? Right, Jack? And Jack will be monitoring it. Yep.
Right? Uh or some combination of uh uh Jack uh Stasia. That's like the combination of you two, so I'm gonna have to mash that up to Jack Stasia. We'll look and then we can uh interact without you having to necessarily call in. Although, please still call in if you can.
Yes. Uh and keep it to one question per call. Wow, yeah. See, yeah. Jack's the hammer.
We really should just mash you two together. You'd be like superhero if there was like a combination like Jack Stasia. What do you think? Yeah. It's the Jackhammer.
Yeah. Oh my god. Oh, it's so strong. Oh my goodness, they're so strong. So strong.
Uh all right. Well, to uh, you know, I have so much I like the thing is is like uh I'll tell you what, we'll answer some questions and then we'll go back to like because we we've done so much in the month uh that you guys have been gone. But the thing to discuss first is I have with me uh oh by the way, calling your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Here for the next, I don't know, half hour or so.
Uh got with me Peter Kim. Peter Kim, everyone. You got the fake clap laugh uh clap track. Oh Peter Kim from the Museum of Food and Drink. What are you now, the executive director?
Yeah, something like that. What it was the title changes every week. Yeah, what is it? Who's the Galactic Emperor before? Oh, I like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, we don't yet have a fully operational battle station. Fully operational battle station. Uh so we can't you can't be the strike me that.
I wish we had that much money, but why don't you tell them what's going on? Exciting uh exciting news in the world of the Museum of Food and Drink. Well, we are about to have a fully operational museum gallery. Uh this is something obviously we've been really looking forward to doing since we started working on MoFed, uh really in earnest, I guess. Uh well you started really four years ago.
Uh getting a space finally um to be able to put on our first uh brick and mortar exhibition. And so yeah, I mean uh you guys might have seen the news in the New York Times last week, but uh we're opening October twenty-eighth. We've got a five thousand square foot converted warehouse in Williamsburg and uh doing an exhibition on the flavor industry, which is you know a pretty crazy a pretty crazy story to tell. It's something where, you know, I've been surprised actually getting to know it. Uh, you know, these these flavorists, they really uh pretty much every time you're eating uh there's there's something that they've done to to tweak your food, and it's a 25 billion dollar industry, but nobody really ever stops to think about that.
And so think about like the thing I like to think about is like is 25 billion dollars is a drop in the bucket if you think I mean think about what percentage of like what percentage of the foods that we eat have some sort of what we call like flavoring system. You know what I mean? Hey Stas, can you crumple more paper next to the phone, please? Like uh what what things have a I was joking, uh have like a flavor system in them, right? It could be our patient caller who's waiting to ask.
Oh, really? Uh all right. We'll talk about the flavor industry in a second. Caller, you are on the air. All right, Dave, congrats on the museum.
That sounds great. Oh, thanks. Uh I have a question. I know that um I think I've heard you say that you used to be pretty into homebrewing. Oh, yeah.
Well, a while ago, a long while ago, before so Dax, my youngest son, is ten now, and I stopped the minute he was born because uh, you know, like the mess was just so intense that um, you know, I was getting in it would not have been good. Yeah, so I mean I'm just kind of throwing out myself, so I was just wondering like what kind of stuff you were into and uh if you have any kind of you know, New York City apartment type tips or anything. Yeah. Okay. So let me ask you this.
What methods do you have like what's your stove like? Um crappy four burner. Okay. Like the like the wimp like standard wimpy New York City, like been there for like forty years gas burner? Like sixty-seven years, but yeah.
No, well you might get lucky. If you get old enough you might get lucky, but probably not. Okay. So your first issue is gonna be it's gonna take a while to get the the the you know the the wort down to where you want it to be. So I would I mean, what I did was I I limited myself to five gallon uh kind of uh batches, right?
Uh I I did all grain because I mean, please. I did all grain. You know what I mean? I started with corny kegs because I had a bunch of corny kegs around, which meant I actually did a batch uh you know, a batch size smaller than five. I was doing like four or something like that.
And um uh, you know, like most people when they start, I was interested, never really got past like super high OG uh I didn't I wasn't like hyper bitter, but I was like pretty high OG uh like very carbonated stuff that I I force carbonated um afterwards. Um, you know, I pretty much was able to use the only thing that I had to get that I didn't have at the time was the uh was the mill. They the you know to do the uh to you know coarsely uh grind up the um the grains. 'Cause I had already a turkey fryer, right? Uh even though you can't use that in the city those pots I know there's people who hate aluminum whatever and you know whatever if you're one of those people then don't use it you know with the you don't ask me you ask me so I'm telling you I use the uh uh giant like aluminum um turkey fryer pots and those suckers hold I gotta remember I gotta look back I think they hold roughly six gallons so you can you can put a good amount in and still uh uh you know bo boil down um a bit uh you're gonna need uh I'm assuming you're gonna you're not investing in any like recirculated mash stuff right away so you're probably right uh no but actually I don't know I do have a circulator so is there any way not to completely ruin it or um just kind of like holding a temperature for a mash with that you know it's been so long since uh it's been so long since uh since I've done it that uh you know I didn't have a circulator at the time I considered starting up again when I did have a circulator as I was looking at doing a recirculated mash even before they had uh circulators but I just never I never got into it I was just doing stuff based on the old you know choose your strike temperature and then you know bring it up and then you can you know adjust the temperature by you know uh in a got cooler I did the old traditional kind of got cooler you know five gallon got cooler uh one they I don't know if they still call it that but you know the big five gallon igloos that everyone uses yes yeah that's what I use that's I that's the other thing I had to buy.
Um you know I don't know what the issue because it's been so long since I've researched it on um kind of uh what the effects of uh like positive or negative of having that much uh oxygen flow through if you're gonna use a circulator to get it going, you know, whereas the old systems, eh I just don't know. I just don't know. I mean maybe it'd be good, maybe it'd be bad. It's been so I haven't even like I I haven't even put the flow chart of how to do it in my mind as something I planned on doing in years and years. You know what I mean?
Like ten years. Um but I would definitely start um I would definitely start with the the the good old fashioned uh got cooler uh technique. Uh corny kegs are a good place to start because uh it's easy to get the stuff in and out of them although uh I I had to cheat. I opened it up and cut the tubing down so that I could rack better. You know what I mean?
But or just buy a carboy. I just didn't ha I didn't have a lot of room in my apartment. You know corny kegs are very like uh space uh efficient you know what I mean because they're relatively thin. They're tall but they're relatively thin and they fit in my cabinets. And so like I could do everything in a corny cake although I know most people are gonna think I'm a jerk for doing my primary in a in a corny cake.
I never tried doing uh the primary in uh five gallon buckets. I know a lot of people enjoy the the the bucket fermentation I've never I just never never done it. But the good thing about the corny was I had two corneys, one for my primary and then I would rack over into the other guy and then I would force carbonate that guy and I it was on tap right away from the get go. So I never bottled, I just kept a sucker on tap. You know what I mean?
And I wasn't taking it anywhere. I was just drinking it in my house and so that was a good kind of a a good kind of a uh a solution. I mean I don't know. Is that just helpful or no? Yeah absolutely I was just kind of interested in hearing your background with it wasn't they mean uh look I mean uh I don't know if if you're like me, you're gonna want to go obviously you're gonna want to go all grain because otherwise why would you do it?
You're gonna want to control as many of the aspects as you can. If I had stayed in the Yeah, I'm I'm already there. Yeah, if I had stayed in it even another six months, I would have attempted to malt. You know what I mean? And and probably another six months after that.
I think it it before I would have attacked the uh recirculating mash, I would have attacked the malt. And then probably after the malt, I would attack the mash. And then I would inv but the problem is you only have what your apartment space, so everything has to pack away, everything has to be closet friendly. Can you there used to be an outfit out of Ohio that made really nice fermenters out of Sankey kegs? Um and like they made things that you could kind of repurpose as fermenters and boiling things, and like that was kind of the the next step up, and that's what I would have done if I'd stayed in it for another like year, year and a half, because they can kind of fit in a closet.
You have to throw a bunch of stuff away and mash all of your like get rid of all of your stuff so you could put it in a closet. Oh, the other thing I did, uh I put a temperature control on it. I uh I put uh my cold water system uh through a solenoid with a temperature control so that I could control the temperature of the fermentation, assuming that I wanted to drop it low because my house was always above kind of the ideal temperature at that time, even for the uh AU strains that I was using. So anyway, there you have it. Hope hope that's helpful.
Uh thank you. Yeah, cool. Um Peter, uh back on the you want to get why first of all give a sh you want to give a shout out to some of the people that's helped help with the museum, yeah. Yeah, hold on. But you're you're actually you're you should give the shout-out, really.
Well, no, you're here, you're the museum. We're both gonna shout out. Here's the so here's what you're doing. Well, why don't you give me my phone that had that? No, that was actually the wrong list.
Those are people who didn't want this shout-out. Uh who said they didn't want to be mentioned. But this is a list of that. That's why they're in red. Below the red, below the red.
So just so you know, like I was about to give a shout-out specifically only to those people who asked to not be conventioned. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. She's just trying to throw monkey rent and things.
Yeah, so we're just gonna give to the uh to the yes. Now now these are people that have helped us in various ways. Yes. Yeah. So uh Bill and Mata, super thanks to Bill.
He's actually on our board now. You wanted to say a little bit. Yeah, Bill's awesome. He's he runs uh IW group, it's advertising firm focuses on uh minority demographics. Yeah.
Awesome guy. Good man. Yeah. He got me into the vice president Biden's house, so I'll take that. And uh Peter, like who is like, you know, the the joke master general made a box of cereal with Biden's face on it called Cheery Joe's.
Yeah, he liked that. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure he did he did he give you a bear hug? Did he squeeze the life of you while he was? Yeah, yeah, nice, nice.
Uh uh Harold McGee. Uh you guys, anyone who listens to this show doesn't know Harold McGee is just go look it up. Just like drop, turn off the thing, go on the other section of the internet and look up Harold McGee. Uh he's been helping us out a lot with uh kind of ideas and just you know in general plus. Also goes by MCG, that's his stage name.
Uh yeah, yeah. Uh Sarah Marsh. Yeah. I'm gonna bring these people out, and you're gonna describe what's going on. Also uh made some you know, great supporter.
Yeah, Sam Tigan. Yeah, he hooked us up with some great uh fabricators too, and uh he's been yeah, awesome. Yeah, uh Ryan, whose last name I can't pronounce, so it goes by like Mr. Lyon, Dandelion, but I'm gonna give it a shot. Uh Chetty Yarwardana.
Man, yeah. London. Bartender, well known. Uh Romy Vrelin. Yep, also a great supporter.
Yep. Pedro Mendez. Yep, Pedro's coming from Texas. Right? John Cooper.
Yeah, John's uh Australian. Uh yeah, awesome, awesome guy. Yeah, Jen Bieler. Yeah. Yep, Jenny Wang and the Modernist Pantry crew.
Yeah, you know that. You know that whole crew. Yeah. Yeah. We bought a bunch of stuff for our tastings from them.
We used to be affiliated here with the radio program. Yeah. Modernistpantry.com. They don't like us no more. I don't know.
I guess they still like us. Jack, do they not like us anymore? No, I mean I can't answer that. Wow. Wow.
All right. I like them. Uh me too. ModernistPantry.com. Remember, we used to get to say that all the time.
Yeah, that was great. Yeah. Anyway, thanks to all those people for supporting MoFad. Uh yeah, means a lot to us. It's a project that we're all really passionate about.
Yeah, but why don't we tell these people who may or may not like know what the hell we're talking about, what the project is. Yeah, so we're we're opening the world's first large scale museum that'll have exhibits you can eat called the Museum of Food and Drink. It's a project that Dave's been working on for over 10 years, me about four years. And it's something that we think really needs to happen. Uh and we're actually now at an extremely important moment where we're about to open up our first 5,000 square foot space in Williamsburg in about a little over a month.
And we have a pretty awesome exhibition planned. Uh the flavor industry, it's gonna involve tastings and smellings, and uh, you know, Dave's putting together some pretty cool exhibits for that. Yeah, Peter, this part they already heard. You gotta get to the new stuff. Remember we had a cool right in the middle.
The new stuff is what they're gonna see when they get there. So for instance, we're gonna we're gonna have Stas is like, what the hell? So the uh I I I like I'm just imagining your face, Stas, how far are your shoulders crammed up into your ears now? What? What?
Right? You're giving the big shrug. Her shoulders are above her head, right? Yeah, yeah. They're sure like her head is like, you know, on the floor compared to where her shoulders are.
Oh my god, Peter. She giving she's given the fingers. Not the finger, like the middle finger, the the the five, yeah. The f you know, the the thumb against the the thumb against the rest of the fingers. The slight head shake horizontally.
Yeah, that the the lower lip pushed up. You know what I'm talking about. Exactly. Uh yeah. So, anyways.
So the the point being that uh what are you gonna see when you get there? You're gonna see uh well we're allowed to say some of it, right? Yeah, some, but you gotta keep it a little vague. The New York Times really wants to have these. Oh my god.
You know what? People, this is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Backlash. Look, back in the day, right? It used to be the be you know, like well, if uh if the New Yorker is writing about it, we don't want to write about it anymore.
But like seriously, like isn't you know most of the d drivers we have now? Is it real whatever, I'm not gonna get into it. The rules are the rules, people, and we can't talk, but I'll let you know this. We went to Monell uh a while ago and saw that this uh device they had called an old factometer. And an old factometer is really stupid name because it doesn't actually meter anything.
It's not a meter of any type. What it is is it's a device that delivers uh sense. And so, you know, we knew that we needed to, because we were doing with the flavor industry here in the history of the flavor industry. Uh and so we knew we had to do something where we delivered uh sense in a way that were you know very interactive, but we didn't really know kind of whether these basic ideas that we wanted to do were feasible, so we went and saw it and saw when they'd womped up. And so uh now I'm building a bunch of these in my house, which is what I'm spending most of my time doing now is building these tubas that well we c I call them stink tubas.
Yeah. But uh we won't call them that the exhibition because that's kind of gross. It's kind of grown on me. Stink tuba? Yeah, yeah.
Because it should be like boom boom boom boom boom of smell. Yeah, yeah. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Uh there's gonna be uh Peter has learned how to make uh tablets.
Drugs. Well, oh my god. If we were on any sort of like watch list, we were we're totally on it now. We have tableting machines. Yeah, powders like powders galore, and the stink removers.
Oh my god. Yeah, we have like all we have like we've been buying so much stuff that could get us on a DEA or any sort of like terror watch list to for this uh exhibition. But it's it's gonna be good. Uh a little bit Family friendly exhibition, folks. Yeah.
Little little preview. The reason the flavor industry is interesting is we're only the exhibition itself is only going to be about what, eighteen hundred square feet or something like that. Yeah, two thousand a little over two thousand. Two thousand square feet. So we needed to choose something that we could do in a fairly small amount of space uh that addressed something important to the museum.
Everything the museum deals with is gonna be um not just uh science, which I'm interested in, but uh history, uh culture, um economics, yeah. Um you know, the the environment to to a certain extent. And so um the kind of rise of the flavor industry over the last hundred years as an historical fact that was really predicated on this one simple idea that uh molecules that molecules are foo, uh, you know, are flavors and tastes, uh, and that a flavor and taste is really nothing but a specific uh molecule. Now how it's presented to you is different, right? Uh, but really, you know, there's kind of this cor correspondence between them and that kind of unhinging of uh flavors and aromas uh and tastes from uh the actual substrate of the food uh is kind of what allowed the flavor industry to rise and become a dominant force in our kind of in in in our food now for you know for good or for ill.
And so, you know, we're not uh you know, it's not uh an expose, it's more just an explanation of kind of how this came to be, uh how it works, how uh you know, how your uh sensory equipment um works. And we're gonna highlight a couple of you know interesting historical examples. Most you know, MSG, and we we're not gonna go super rant on MSG the way that I would if we were doing it on this uh on the radio program. Yeah. Right.
Yeah, but we're still gonna clear up, you know, uh debunk some of the stuff that has uh you know, some of the the more uh the the whacker claims around MSC for lack of better words. Yeah, you're gonna spray some uh you're gonna spray some uh scientific fabris all over uh all over that. Uh but the uh also um uh vanilla. Vanilla is super interesting uh because it was one of the early flavors uh that was uh synthesized and it has a very interesting kind of economic uh history. So look for that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um go to, so yeah, if you want to learn more about the exhibition and about the space we're opening up in October, lab.mofad.org. That's lab.mofad.org.
And our ticket pre-sale is going to start September 28th. 28th. So yeah, you should go on our mailing list if you're not on it already, and you'll get the announcement. Oh, yeah. Okay, listen.
So for I haven't like the entire season of my garden and everything is we totally missed. So I don't even know what I've talked about and what what I haven't. Uh but I have this interesting spice. I know you've tasted it before, but you taste it again. Jack, you want to taste this spice?
I absolutely do. All right. So uh I can't actually you this one's dried. I can't use this at the bar because it's not G, you know, grass, it's not generally recognized as safe just because it's not part of the list, but it has been used for a long time. So take this comes off of a tree in my uh in my backyard called uh Lindera benzoin, the spice bush.
Okay. Uh that's actually extremely common, and it was uh the settlers use this bush to kind of determine whether or not you had if the bush grew there, they knew that your ground was fruitful, right? So it's tasteless here. Just chew on it. It kind of looks like a poo pellet, by the way.
Oh, it does. Oh, it is a poop pellet. No, uh, but it has like a flavor of like uh kind of pink peppercorn. Yeah, pink peppercorn, exactly. And like a little bit of uh a juniper, kind of a resonancey uh note to it.
Oh wow. Isn't that fantastic? I love it. Isn't that amazing? That is amazing.
The crab grows in my backyard. I want to copy it. I was worried that it was gonna be all fibrous. No, it's delicious, right? I'm I'm looking like uh I unfortunately I'm not there this week, and I hope I picked uh like a small amount.
I'm gonna go back and try to pick a whole Ziploc bag. My garden is full of it. And if uh, you know, I'm gonna try to get as much as I can and keep it. I mean, but I could go sweet, I could go savory. It's like a pink peppercorn.
Could go sweet, could go savory. Mendera benzoin. Uh and so that you know, so what I do is is and you know, uh I just look around, like, what do we got? You know what I mean? Another one I was I was kind of lucky, like, so we had these things called uh uh called uh may apples, which is an American kind of mandrake, and uh poisonous.
Poisonous. But but cool leaves, cool leaves, but poisonous. Uh le the leaves poisonous, roots, poisonous, unripe fruit, poisonous. Uh and but I've been waiting for these things to ripen up. I had all these fruits, right?
And I was like, meh, yeah, man, not quite ready to pick. I leave for a week, I come back, the deer ate them all. All so I go through all these like things, all except for three. I found three ones that were too crappy for the deer even to bother with. And I picked them off, and I swear to God, I am glad the deer ate them all because if they were even mildly poisonous, I would be dead right now because of how many I would have eaten.
I would have eaten so many. It's unclear whether the seeds are poisonous, but the pulp is like because you know what the thing is is that most temperate fruits, right? Most and you know, I'm here in New York on Connecticut, temperate land, right? Most temperate fruits have that kind of temperate, fruity flavor, you know. You got your apples, you got your pears, you know, you got your cherries, which I can't have, bastards.
You got your plums, you got most of these things, like they like none of them taste tropical. Do you know what I'm saying when I say that? There's a tropical flavor, yeah. Yeah, these taste tropical. Yeah.
Whoa. Nice. Yeah, these taste like uh they have a bit of the, you know, like the real like fruity tropical sour guavas, those little guys. Yeah. Like they have like some of that going, but they're just tastes amazingly tropical.
I would I would have eaten myself to death on this. Are you saying that you're generally more of a fan of tropical fruits over temperate fruits? No, I love I love both. It's just you're not used to having a local fruit that in in here in my area that has that kind of tropical note to it, and so when you did, you would just gorge until you died. Yeah, yeah.
You know? I wonder what the tropical note is, right? I mean, I'm sure that somebody in the flavor industry could help us out with it. Like, what is you know I mean, like what's the common thread between a papaya, banana, a mango, guava, question. I mean, like, obviously, we have like a sort of understanding that those fruits come from the same region, or you know, at least the you know, the same band around the world, but right, but they're in widely variant.
Yeah, why widely widely variant. What is it about them that there's like you feel like there should be a common thread between all those fruits. Hey, let's sit on that for one second, take a very, very short break and come right back. Alrighty. Hello out there, it's Steve Jenkins.
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Give us a few bucks. Help keep us running. HeritageRadio Network.org. Click the donate tab on the top right corner. Yeah, and for uh every uh donation you send, uh Steve Jenkins will shoot a Navajo churro in the face.
In order to save it. Nice. Yeah. Stas, you love that one. Stas loves it.
I love it. I love it. Hey, people, you know, like uh Soupy Sales got fired for saying stuff like that. We won't actually shoot a Navajo Churro in the face for every time you donate. You know what I'm saying?
Not in the face, at least. Well, so if you want to save it, you know, sometimes you gotta do the hard thing, Jack. Yeah to save it. All right. Uh okay, uh, let's get to some uh let's get to some write-in since it's been quite a while.
Uh 10-minute warning right here. Oh, geez Louise. Well, you know. All right. Uh okay.
I'll I'll get to some MDF first. Hey, Dave, Anastasia and the team. I have a question about making Biltong curing box, a Biltong curing box out of MDF. Biltong, you know what Biltong is, yeah? Nope.
Dried uh meat. It's like a jerky. No, nice. Supposedly it's great. I've never had real.
I've had I've had uh I've had the fake. As they say, gankers can get the fake. You can get the real from the Biltong man. But I like uh I've never had the real one, unfortunately. Anyways, uh so it's a box to make this uh dried uh dried South African meat in.
I have a question about making a Biltong curing box out of MDF. I just started by the way, what well the whole question is about the MDF. MDF stands for me medium density fiber board. You familiar with that? Yeah.
Yeah, okay. Uh I just started drawing up plans to make a large uh cabinet out of MDF when a couple of scaremongers, scaremongers, uh started uh waving their arms at me about formaldehyde degassing from the MDF and poisoning the meat. I looked into the particular wood I will be using, and it has a formaldehyde rating of E0, which is the lowest. Uh my question is have the scaremongers fooled me, or should I actually consider changing construction materials? This all sounds a bit crazy to me because if you Google uh image search built on box, uh sounds like it's gonna be something like not like safe for work, right?
And two, most modern food uh pantries are made out of MDF and often have food sitting in them for weeks slash months on end. Think potatoes, onions, pumpkins. And I've never heard of this being an issue. The Biltong box will be at a max temperature of 35 degrees Celsius, and the meat there will be uh be there for no longer than uh six days. 35 C.
What is that? That's like a hundred. 35 C. It's like 90s, 90s. 90s?
Yeah. Yeah. I know it's not super, super hot because I know the Western Desert lives and breeze at 45 degrees. I think of like 40 and up as being extremely hot. Yeah?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh the meat will be in there no longer than six days. Thanks for the awesome work you do.
Uh keep it up, regard Rory Murns. Uh, okay, look. Here's a couple of things. I think you're right. There's a low temperature.
Most of the built-on boxes I've seen have a light bulb in the in the bottom uh to provide uh you know the relative heating. Uh so built on box, uh, for those of you that Google it is basically a box that you put to hang the meat in with a bunch of air vent holes with uh like some stuff over it to stop flies and whatnot from getting in. And then a source to cause kind of convection and to keep it kind of relatively dry and moving, and that convective source is usually uh uh like a light bulb that they put in the bottom. So the question is is whether or not uh locally the MDF can heat up over that where the light bulb is and start producing some uh some nastiness. Uh you know, I wouldn't worry about it too much if you can't smell it, but I will say this.
I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate MDF. I hate MDF. MDF is the worst. I freaking hate it. I hate picking it up.
I hate buying it. I hate cutting it. I hate it. I hate it so much. Here's some other things.
Here's some things, some good things about MDF. Sucker's cheap. Yeah. Right. For prototyping.
Yeah, yeah. It it cuts well, right? It glues and staples well, right? It's relatively uniform. Here's what sucks.
Sucks suckety sucks about MDF. It is heavy as a mother. Even the lighter MDF is heavy as a mother. Secondly, MDF chips on the edges, right? Thirdly, if you try to screw into the edge of MDF later for whatever reason, you're screwed because it's gonna rip out.
Third, should you rip out MDF, you have to put a bunch of you know stuff on it to get a screw to hold it again because it's not gonna hold again because it's MDF. Fourth, God forbid if you have unsealed MDF and you get water on the edge of it because it's going to soak up that water like a freaking sponge and flare out like a lunatic. Third, if it's big, it's gonna bow over time because the sucker doesn't hold its dimensions. I just hate it. I hate everything about it.
I mean, it is cheaper, right? Uh, but I just detest it. I just I just think it's an execrable, nasty thing, unless you're gonna paint it. It holds paint really, really well. You know what I mean?
Uh, and you know, I had my uh last cabinets at my last apartment made out of the particle board, and I screamed and yelled, and I was gonna pay the upcharge for the for the Baltic just because I hate this stuff so much, and we didn't, and I reg regretted it for years because after a while this stuff sags, it just doesn't hold its dimensions the way real plywood does. I just detest it. But I think you're probably safe, especially at those low temperatures. Wait, so how do you feel about MDF, Dave? Love it.
Yeah, I'm unclear. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't I wasn't clear enough on my feelings. Uh yeah. Anyways.
Uh okay. Um my god, what am I gonna get to? Okay, I was trying uh this is from uh uh Liz Myers or Lizzy, it's Liz Liza Myers. Liza. I was trying to make an agar fluid gel out of maple syrup because I love the flavor of maple syrup, but find its consistency is too liquid.
Uh I want the good flavor of real maple syrup with the texture of fake maple syrup. I tried to set the syrup by boiling and adding 2% agar. It kind of set into a stickyish, jellyish thing, and that was okay, but the texture of the syrup uh got a little crystallize-y. I was wondering if there was a better way to do this uh or why the maple syrup crystallized. Well, first of all, maple syrup is uh 66% sugar by uh by weight, right?
So it's a lot, like a lot of it, a lot of it is uh sugar. And if you add basically anything other than uh liquid to it, uh if you remove any liquid from it at all, it's going to start crystallizing because you've taken the water away from the sugar, right? So, you know, because it 66 on the maple syrup is about the limit where you can not have crystallization. It's kind of I guess why they take it there. Um honey can go a big uh a good bit uh farther up because it's completely inverted.
The sugar is completely inverted, uh almost completely inverted. Uh so you know, so it doesn't crystallize as readily. So sugar, you can I mean a honey you can take up to a bricks of like uh 82. So what I would do, were I you is I would make a uh a thickener, like a very thick thickener and with pure water, and then just cut your maple syrup with that thickener slightly. You know what I mean?
And then what that'll do is is it'll just thicken up the the water that you have, but it's not going to uh cause any kind of crystallization to happen. The fake syrups are made with like sugar and uh I think if they think they use microcrystalline cellulose uh and stuff like that. The other thing you could do, if you want to set it solid as a rock without anything changing it, you could probably uh you want to make and you want to use agar, you'll still have to dilute it, but what you'll do is you'll hydrate the agar in pure water, and then you'll add the maple syrup to it, making sure that the temperature of the maple syrup is above about 100 degrees, and then as the temperature drops, it will uh it will form a solid. Uh the other thing you could do is you could make a poorly uh you could do a poorly set pectin, especially because you're not using acid. You can use um one of the pectins that can set uh without the presence of uh of uh acid, and you could probably do uh some amount of thickening that way.
Um bunch of different um things, but straight agar isn't gonna uh isn't gonna help you out, right? Is that a good answer? No. How much more time I got, Jackity Jack? A few minutes here.
Okay. All right, listen. Two. Two. Jeez.
Helen, I'm gonna get to your chickpeas uh on the next on the next week. Um I do catering. This is from uh Noya. I do catering for bar and bat mitzvahs. I'd like to boil large quantities of fries at a time, uh, with the temperature staying below eighty Celsius.
I don't know why you necessarily want the temperature to stay below eighty Celsius unless you're trying to do that starch kind of set trick that uh Steingarden does with the mashed potatoes. Some people do it for fries too, but anyway. Thus far I come up with hotel pans over burners, or I could buy a stock pot induction stove. There must be a better way, please help. Uh Noya.
Yes. Well, there is a better way, actually. Uh there's several. I mean, if you don't want to just get a giant pot, first of all, do you have a deep fryer? I have a deep fryer.
So what I do is before I f well, of course you do. You have free, you're making french fries, right? So like if you have a if you mean if you have a if you're gonna do a lot of them, you probably have a real fryer. So what I do is uh at the end of the night when you filter the uh fryer oil out, your fryer's empty now, right? Right.
Right? Yep. Yeah, okay. So what you do is is you use your fryer as the boil kettle for the uh for the potatoes. Boom.
So what I always do is I put my uh water in, uh, I then uh salt and I boil up all the potatoes in batches in uh in that, spread them out on the racks to to dry out or do whatever else I'm gonna do. Then when I'm done, I drain out the water, then clean all the salt and water back out, and then it's ready to fry, ready for the first fry by the time it's coming. Super, super convenient. Fryers are super fast to heat up. They heat up in like five minutes.
They're freaking awesome. That's good one good way to do it. If you have if you're doing catering and you have a combi oven, you can just throw them out on uh on racks and steam them in a in a combi, especially if you have a combi. If you really want to stay below eighty, you can because you can set it at uh 100% humidity with uh lower than two twelve, and you can do them in a combi. I've done that with a with a lot of success.
Um, but uh you're gonna have to pre-salt. If you're gonna do that, you have to like soak them in salt before and assault them or something because you're not gonna get the salt penetration that way. But both of those things uh may or may not work. Uh let us know. Uh and so I think Jack's gonna rip me off of the friggin' air in in a second.
So I still have to get to uh Helen's chickpea question, and I still have to get to uh Ken, Ken who writes in on uh the definition of the sandwich. Right. Uh but I will give you this one, I'll give I'll give you one paragraph of that on the way out, folks. And uh remember to tune in next week. We're gonna be live again with cooking issues.
Uh and he goes, I listened to the discussion. This is Ken. I listened to the discussion on the definition of sandwich, and I now feel strongly that someone ought to tell my mom that uh she did not waste her money uh or I did not waste my time majoring in philosophy. Nice. Nice.
All right. 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. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio.
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