This program has been brought to you by Cider Week New York City, happening November 6th through 15th, 2015. For more information, check out CiderweekNYC.com. Cider Week helps to bring profitability to local orchards while reviving heirloom apple varieties by cultivating awareness of craft cider. Cider Week connects cider makers from New York State and select pioneering guest cideries outside the state to buyers from top restaurants, bars, and retail shops across New York City. Those culinary tastemakers in turn help increase consumer awareness of cider's pleasures by hosting public events, tastings, dinners, classes, and pairings that build appreciation and demand for regional ciders.
Hey, hey, hey, I'm Jimmy Carboni from Beer Sessions Radio. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadio Network.org for thousands more. Every Tuesday, always late, supposed to be here at 12. Am not.
Yeah. Got Nastasio the Hammer, Lopez, here in the uh in the shipping container. And in an engineering booth, we got Njackie Molecules Insley and Rebecca. How you guys doing? Oh, yeah.
I'm good. It's good to be back. I'm just playing this crazy video on loop. Oh, yeah, dude. Oh, I actually talked about that.
It's it's horrifying. So, so you know, like uh, I was going through my box of crap the other day, and uh I came across uh by the way, calling your questions to 718 497 2128. That's 7184972128. So I'm going through my box of crap the other day, and I noticed uh an old VHS tape from when I was in uh art school, like back in like 95, 96, something like this. And uh it's a piece I did called what what I am thinking about.
And pretty much, and I had been making like flipbooks of this image in my mind for for years, years, like little flipbooks. Have any of you guys ever seen my little elf character I draw sometimes? Yes. Yeah, it's that that elf character, it's been with me for for years. So anyway, so um I uploaded the video to YouTube.
I got someone to dig digitize the uh VHS, which is super low quality. I wish I could find the original discs. And by the way, like it was really hard. Like when you see it, you'll know. Like it was really hard because I'm walking a very long distance in it, and so to do the chroma key on it back in the like mid-90s, like the computers weren't so great.
And so uh I rolled a giant like uh 200 uh foot long sheet of paper down uh my mom's uh street outside of her house, and had a friend walk behind me with a giant blue uh sheet that I had painted, like rolling it behind me as I walked. And uh so you you know there's some bleed through. I had some problems with the chroma key, I had some interlacing problems when I was doing the early. It was like after effects version one or something like that. Whatever, whatever.
What does it mean? Okay, well, let me explain what the video is. You can it's on YouTube, you can go look at it. Like search chat room got it. Oh, they got it?
I got it. Alright. So it's called uh so so basically it's just this elf who's me, like it, like an infinite number of me just jumping into a wood chipper over and over and over and over and over again with a band playing. Like that's what it is. That there's no more meaning than that.
Isn't art supposed to seem dumb? This is what I'm thinking about. It's I told you this many times. I know, but what's people who are so Rebecca said she can figure out she could write an essay on it. Yeah, of course.
I spent, you know, like many, many, many hours critiquing this piece. And uh, you know, like defending it and critiques and all this other stuff. Kind of felt like lemmings. Yeah, you know. Well, the the whole point of it, I'll give you a little hint, Styles, a little insight.
I'll give you a little insight. Notice that I'm not I'm not upset about it. Just jumping in the wood chipper. Yeah. Just there.
Here I am, jumping in the wood chipper again and again and again. Just keep jumping in the wood chipper. And it's very important that it's not gore, that it's like it's you know, it's cartoon blood coming out of the side of the wood chipper. And uh, I believe, I believe this is pre-Fargo woodchipper. I believe.
I believe this is pre pre-Steve Busemi jamming his enemies into a wood chipper. Pretty sure. Anyway, so uh, and pretty much any time you see me staring off into the distance nowadays, this is what's going on in my head. Ban inch, dinch, dan inch, dent. Yeah.
Tim in the chat room says it reminds him of a craft for video. Oh, no, I'll I'll take that as a compliment. I went back to my high school, which I hadn't been to in, you know, like five, six years or something like that. And uh, I was like, I need a sousaphone, and I need a bass drum and a cymbal. And they're like, All right, let me take it to my mom's house and like film the video with that stuff.
I sewed the elf outfit myself, and the curly shoes are real. I still own them. And uh there used to be a leather joint in the uh in um Soho. They moved uh outside up near Chelsea. They might be gone now.
Run by a guy who any time you bought anything from As You Leaf, he'd be like, God bless. That's all you would ever say, God bless. AR leather. Uh and uh yeah, I got all the green suede from him, made the lass, made the shoes, you know. It was a full, full service, you know, art project back in the day.
Anyway, still thinking about it. Figured I'd post it there. How was your Halloween? How many, how many, how many listeners did I just lose when they're like, that's what that guy's thinking about? I'm out.
I'm out. I mean, how was your Halloween? Kids were freaking animals. Crazy. I had listen to this.
I had 150 full-size freaking candy, full-sized candy bars. And by the way, a good selection. Jack, name me some candy bars. Uh, Snickers. Had it.
Three Musketeers. Had it. Twix. Had it. Mr.
Good Bar. Did not. But I did I had Fifth Avenue and I had paydays. Ooh, paydays. Payday.
I like the payday. Underrated bar. Everyone loves everyone who can have peanuts enjoys the payday, but no one talks about the payday. Yeah, I like it. Yeah.
Also, like I always like to have a certain amount. I also had like the entire MM, like, you know, the all of the new and the regular MMs. Ooh, like the pretzel MMs. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Mega, which are the large scale MMs. Coconut, right? I don't know if they had those at the store or but I also had like uh uh not the full range of Skittles because there's 150 different kinds of Skittles almost at this point, but like, you know, a decent Skittle selection. The full size Twizzler, which by the way would be my call, the full size sour patch pack. Yeah, Stas is turned off her vegan face for that one.
And uh so, anyways, it's like uh, you know, I had 150 and uh pounded it, gone. Gone. I had to go out, I bought 50 more, and they still wiped us out. Booker and Dax were so depressed because they thought they were gonna have all this candy left over. But then, of course, I went, when you know, we started cooking dinner and Booker got picking anyway, so Jen took away all of his candy.
I don't think she threw it away. She's not like she's not that. She's not the it's going in the shoot. Because you see, in new when you live in New York, you have a trash shoot. Once that stuff's gone, there's no getting it back.
You know what I mean? It's not like some sort of secret fake trash like you might have somewhere in the suburbs or something like this. It's like if it goes in the chute, that's it's done. There's no like going out to the curb and trying to resurrect it or anything, you know what I mean? We have an announcement.
Jen's gonna be on the show at some point. Well, that's not an announcement if we don't have the point yet. Before the end of this year. We have to say it out loud, and then it'll happen, maybe, right? Well, d the people actually want my wife to come on.
Were they gonna call and ask her questions or something? Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Well, do you you know, tweet on in if that's what you want to have happen?
Let me know. Uh also, uh, so you know, the museum, this has been the first week of the museum being open to the public. Um, tomorrow will actually be the whole first week because we're closed Monday, Tuesday, so we were open from Wednesday to Sunday. And I think it went really well. I still have some stuff to fix, but I think it went really well.
And I've been going to Greenpoint more, so I've been going to all the Polish joints. I gotta get Lukash, you know, the to help me out. I bought so in Poland uh they have this soup, which I think is called Zurek. I think that's how you pronounce it. And it's got in it this stuff called Zur, which I thought was Zure, as in like Zur and the Coden Armada.
Are you a last Starfighter fan? Jack, last Starfighter, anyone? Robert Preston's last movie, freaking the great Robert Preston from The Music Man. You're familiar with Robert Preston stuff? No.
What the hell? The hell is wrong with you people? Seriously. America, you live in it, learn it. Anyway, the last star the last Starfighter was awesome because it was one of the first times when uh video games were painted in a very kind of good light.
This guy did nothing but play this video game called The Last Star Fighter, and he lived in a kind of a trailer, not kind of, he lived in a trailer park and he played it, but he got like the like like the a universe-wide uh high score. And it turned out that these video games have been planted all over the universe, which is strange because you'd think that like you know they would have had better technology all over the universe. But no, they were using 1980s video games. So they planted them all over the universe, and people who got super high scores were actually sucked up, brought out into space to become star fighters to fight against Zur and the Kodan Armada. See what I'm saying?
See? Anyways, and so Polish. Polish. So anyway, so Zur. But I didn't tell you my favorite part about last star.
Well, if anyone cares about last Starfighter, we can have a Last Star Fighter conversation someday. The best part about that is this guy, I this is a life lesson I took. At the end, the Kodans are smashing into a planet, like their starship has been destroyed by you know the Starfighter guy. They're going in, and the guy who's kind of a wussy is like, what's the thing's crashing? What do we do now?
And the guy goes, he has this little eyepiece with a motor on it that goes like a heads-up display, and he goes, and he just looks at him and goes, we die. And then the thing goes, but I'm like, that's a baller way to go out. The Kodans know how to go out. They might have been evil, but they know how to go out. So back to Jure, aka Zur.
It's fermented rye flour. So it's like a sourdough, but real thick, and it's used as the base of this sour soup called uh Zurek, which is really awesome. Lukash said it's like kind of Polish version of Miso, but the soup is really good. I need the the short story is I need to learn a lot more about Polish food because everything I've had so far, even though obviously I don't know how to actually make it, so I'm just guessing based on what I read, what the stuff's supposed to taste like. But stuff's straight up delicious.
You know what's really good? Is uh sauerkraut and uh mushroom like hacked together and cooked like pierogi mix. I think it's from a Piero Gi mix, but anyway, good stuff. Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about today. So, what was I supposed to be talking about today?
We have some Twitter questions. Uh all right, let's do a Twitter question, then I'll do a question that came in on the uh on the give me a Twitter question. Give it to me. Well, first off, do you like the new heart and how they got rid of the star for the fave? Wait a minute, what?
The new what? They got rid of the star for favoring tweets, and there's a little tiny heart. I hadn't noticed. Do I don't know, do I like it or do I hate it? Social media queen.
I don't like it. So what's the difference? Uh it's a heart. So they're trying to Instagram it? Is that it?
It's trying to be more like Instagram? Exactly. I like things to be separate. I don't like muddy, I don't like waters muddied. I don't I know I'm agree with you.
I'm a category kind of a guy. I like categories to stay the same. You know how like when you when you go to college and then you come home for the first like ten years, something changes in the house every time you come home and it pisses you off? It's like that. It's like that.
And by the way, the guy who does the video, the guy who did the last Sears All video, which uh you you should all take a look at the last uh Sears All video that uh Chris did for us. Uh the one where he's like has the secret Sears all that with whispers and stuff. Anyway, uh he claims to have done this uh what we're talking about, changing like a a well-loved program. He got some serious, serious backlash. So is there a serious backlash on this Twitter thing or no?
For sure, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh I have to say I did it. Yeah, I made a persimmon puree the next day. It had a s it has solidified into a very, very firm gel.
Any idea why and how to prevent that? Well, I mean, percent it's full of pectin, but the first question I have is are we talking what kind of persimmon are we talking? That's all I got. What kind of persimmon? We need to figure out what kind of persimmon we're talking about.
Because uh you know what's new I've never cooked with? I've always wanted to is the native uh persimmon. I saw one growing in Washington, DC once on the mall, and even though I was probably expressly forbidden to, I I jumped up, grabbed one, and ate the hell out of it because no one's gonna eat it. What do you guys think about this? When you're in a a place, right?
And like obviously, if everybody took a persimmon, there wouldn't be any performance. But the fact of the matter is that all of them, all of them, every one is going to hit the ground and rot, right? Every single one. So if you really, really care, like really care. Shouldn't you just eat one?
What do you guys think? Yeah, like at the Brogdale, right? Gotta eat them to save them. You gotta eat them to save 'em. And I'm not even ripping the tree down.
It's not like I have to like slice the slice the bark off and like girdle the tree like you do with a pig, and you murder it to save it. Like this is Yeah. So I don't know, what do you guys think? You guys was I wrong to take the persimmon? No way.
When I was at Montecello, you know, uh, was I wrong to taste some of the fruit that was clearly gonna go to waste because nobody was eating it? No way. Yeah, right. I mean, yeah, I took a rock from the uh that's evil. You better not say it on air, you're gonna get a blast.
Okay, I want you guys to know what Stas is really like. All right, say, say it. From the uh, what's it called? Parthenon. Yeah, Stas took a freaking rock from the freaking Parthenon, which is just wrong.
It's evil. It's like destroying cultural patrimony. It's like it's evil under a tree. It's just wrong. It's just wrong.
Yeah, yeah. Give me that, give me that again. Survey says, Yeah. It's not right. All right.
So we got let me get a question that we got, and we'll go back to two other questions. Hey, Jack, this is gonna need a jack. First, I wanted to thank Dave and Nastasia for answering my writing question back in March, uh, when I asked uh Nastasi about Stanford and how Dave and Nastasia met. Um this time I have a question for Dave regarding writing cookbooks. This past year I helped a bioengineering professor teach one of the first cooking classes at Stanford that was essentially the science of cooking.
He's considering taking his lecture material along with recipes and writing a science of cooking cookbook. So I wanted to ask, what are some of the biggest challenges you faced when writing your book? Also, any advice or suggestions would be great, best Kevin. All right, well, here's the first one, straight up. Don't write somebody else's book.
So what you have to do is just look at McGee's book and be like, how's my book going to be different? Right? So that's the first thing. Like, like you have to differentiate yourself from Harold McGee's book. You also have to differentiate yourself from the modernist cuisine series.
Kenji's book. Will you let me finish? Yeah, yeah. Kenji's book, which by the way, apparently is selling like great guns, like selling like crazy. So they're all a little bit different, right?
So McGee's book is obviously like the reference book, right? The modernist cuisine book is the book for um like the book for kind of new techniques, you know what I mean, in terms of like just an exposition of new techniques and cooking. Kenji's book is kind of like uh home recipes treated in kind of a scientific fashion and kind of like his blog series, you know, that he wrote, well, the his columns for serious eats, if you know that. So it, you know, these are the kind of like three things, and then there's a host of other ones. So like on baking and science, you have like Shirley Corriger and you have like like all these other kinds.
So it's like your goal is going to be to differentiate yourself, right? Now, if you're just saying you're gonna write it as a textbook and you're gonna force people to buy it, and all you care about is like the fact that you're gonna force a certain number of students to buy every year, that's different. But if you're actually writing a book book, uh, especially in that field where you have some big, big uh kind of uh things to live up to, just make sure you're differentiated. And then, you know, obviously if you're dealing with uh, you know, a bioengineering person, I don't know what the I don't know what their cooking chops are like, right? So it helps when you're writing a cookbook to really know the subject like really well.
So like maybe they have really great cooking chops. I don't know. You know what I mean? But it's it it's helpful. Um I think it's a lot easier to write a book when you know the the depth of knowledge you have on the subject is two, three and four times deeper than what you actually write because then everything seems kind of richer and more textured.
You know what I'm saying, Stas? Mm-hmm. Anyway. Is this good advice? Anyway, wait, is this good advice?
I don't know. It's okay. So it's not great. It's okay. Um also test the hell out of your recipes.
Just test the hell out of your recipes. If you should test them, but also you should get someone who doesn't know uh the subject to test them. Also you should get someone who doesn't know science to read your text. Because it's almost impossible for a science head to write a science book uh that actually makes sense to someone who doesn't already know the answers. So uh and you know give it to people to read who don't understand.
Now listen don't when the when the person comes back and and tries to change it to something that makes sense to them almost invariably you will look at what they what they've changed it to and you'll be like, no that's scientifically wrong now. Now it's wrong. And what that means, that's a note to you in your head that you didn't explain it right the first time. So you need to recast the entire thing. And that's why it takes forever to freaking write anything.
You know what I'm saying, Stu? Is that better now? Yes, yeah. Also if it's thick enough Nastasi will use it to separate hot and cold foods. But it has to be like three hundred, four hundred pages and like you know just the that right thickness to make sure that by the time she gets off the subway.
Can't be too heavy. She can't use this Kenji's book for this. So, like, you know, like this is perfect. Yeah, mine mine is the perfect thickness to keep the hot side hot and the cold side cold. Um all right.
Let me see. Next question. Um this in uh from uh Pedro Paiva. You think that's how you pronounce that? P A I V A Paiva?
Anyway. Hope everything's okay over there. Probably already gotten tons of questions regarding this issue. But if not, can we have Dave's point of view on uh the red pro and red and processed meats thing from the World Health Organization? Oh, yeah.
That's what they were talking about last week. World. Yeah. Well, the truth of the matter is uh oh, I asked uh my girlfriend who is a doctor, and the answer was that almost everything uh will cause cancer uh if you eat it like there's no tomorrow. Uh keep up with the good work.
Okay. So I didn't have uh uh a boat ton of time to uh look into this. Uh but uh I will I went to the uh the WA show, which is who dot int, right, is their is their website, and I looked up their QA. And so you gotta remember is all they've done is they've classified hoopt, they've classified um because in my head that's how Justino is said too. You know what I mean?
But the uh they've classified meat as a carcinogen, meaning that they feel they feel the epidemiological studies are good enough to say that it causes cancer. You know, definitely, you know what I mean? Good epidemiology, but not that doesn't mean that that there's a huge increase related to it. First of all, let me just be very clear. As far as I can tell, and someone tweeted and tell me I'm wrong, please, please.
Someone tweeted and tell me I'm wrong. But uh, I don't believe there's any new studies. This is just an aggregation and a decision based on studies that are already out there. So if you already thought the studies that were out there were crap or horse hockey, then nothing has changed, right? And here's what they said.
Here's what they said. Uh according to this is how many question twelve. How many cancer cases every year can be attributed to the consumption of processed meat and red meat? You ready for this? Who said this?
This is this is who uh according to the most recent estimates by the Global Burden of Disease Project. That's good. The Global Burden of Disease Project, an independent academic research organization. About 34,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meats. That seems really weak.
34,000 worldwide. Worldwide. How many billions are we now, guys? Also show me those diets. Yeah, I know.
Look, all those studies are horrible. But show me, show me that show me that th 34,000 out of how many billion? Eight. I don't know. Many.
Anyway, uh are attributed are attributable to diets high in processed meat. And here, eating red meat has not yet been established as a cause of cancer. However, if the reported associations were proven to be causal, the Global Burden of Disease Project has estimated that diets high in red meat could be responsible for 50,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide. Also, remember, these are diets high in those things. Not any consumption of those things, but high in those things.
And so we're talking, I believe, for uh processed meat, what they're talking about is 50 uh grams a day. So roughly two ounces of processed meat every day. Which is more than I, you know, more than I eat. I mean, I wish I ate more processed meats, because I love them. They are delicious.
I don't know. Anyway. So I think pretty weak. But uh at some point, either someone that I know that's this percentage. Wow.
Yeah. Wow. Wow, that's a lot of zeros before the first number. Yeah. Um anyway, the point being that uh I wouldn't worry about it overly much.
And you know what? Like, if I had to give up uh country ham or like take that billion percentages of zeros and like and like add that to my thing, like I think I take the hand. Yeah. You know what I mean? Anyway, got a caller.
Caller, you are on the air. Hey Dave, um, I have a question about wine. Um I've been making a concerted effort to drink more wine and to start appreciating it more. Good man. And um in in uh in my efforts, I'm wondering when you're um sort of profiling the aroma of a wine, is there any technique or way that you're aware of?
And this is goes for food in general, too, to sort of like reset your um your sense of smell. Um because like I get like 30 seconds into smelling a glass and then like get used to the smell, and I can't tell, I can't uh sort of latch on to um what it what exactly reminds me of before I can't even smell it anymore. Um it's a good problem. So I think everything depends on kind of what what you're uh specifically tasting. Like what there are things and I wish I had remembered.
Why am I so stupid? Like uh the flavorists who do this kind of thing for a living, smell things for a living, they have things that they specifically do to kind of get around this. And he and Jack, Fasttag, the guy who was our consultant in the uh in the exhibition was like, Yeah, I do, and now it's erased. I remember him saying, Yeah, I do, and that's gone. Isn't that crazy?
Yeah. I hate that. But like it depends. So, like, for instance, like uh for palate cleansing, if you're doing country hams, it's apple juice, not cider juice. Uh when you're doing wines, I mean a lot of times, uh I mean, if you're eating something, it's relatively easy.
You just want to make sure you're eating something that's not gonna like rip the wine apart. You know what I mean? Like nothing in ass high in acid, uh, you know, too too high in acid. Um but also like I just like put it down for a while and do other stuff till I clear out and then kind of pick it up again. But I don't do like constant nosing.
Like I'm not like we should ask uh Jeff. Why don't you text uh Jeff or I don't have this number? Anyone? Anyone tweeting in what they use? Come on, chat room.
Hook me up. But uh I also find it's really like smell your hand. Ooh, let me see. Onions. They say chop onions.
You know, if you chop a lot of onions, like it takes me two or three days to get the onion smell off my fingertips. That doesn't happen to you? Or if you eat a lot of onions, it comes out. Garlic, yeah, that happens to me with garlic. It's the worst, right?
Don't you hate like waking up in the morning and like you garlic? You're like, get out, get out. There's actually like research studies in this, so like I wouldn't mean I don't know, smell your hands. Tell me if they smell like garlic. I don't know.
No? What do you cook last night, says? Uh eggplant parm. Ooh, really? For real?
I didn't bread it. So in what sense eggplant parms does? Just the eggplant and sauteed and uh with tomato sauce and the mozzarella slice on top. Nice. That's not an eggplant parm.
Phil was over, he didn't want to eat heavy. What? Did you squeeze out all the water? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it good?
Yes. Really? Yes. Was it stringy? No, I no.
I bought uh a thin one. And the skin wasn't gross? No. Alright. Alright.
Jack, what's your thoughts? Uh and Rebecca, what are your thoughts on the non-fried eggplant parm? I think it's kind of has to be fried. You would like it. I'm sure I'd like it.
Although in uh the hip pressure cooking book, I haven't tried it, but there is a pressure cooked eggplant parm style thing. Here's my thing. I'm sure it's delicious. It's not what I consider an eggplant farm. Sure, but what do I call it?
I don't know. Was there Parmigiano on it? No. There wasn't eggs like I mean, like, quite clearly. Quite clearly.
No parm. No freaking parm. Was it made by someone from Parma? No parm. No part Parmigiano.
Like, you know what I'm saying? Because Phil's not eating much dairy either. What a dilly. It's like, the hell. Just eat a raw eggplant.
Just give them a raw freaking eggplant and just chow on it like a goat. You know what I mean? Christ's sakes. Did you answer this guy's question? I don't know, did I?
Is he still there? I don't know. Yeah, I'm good. Thank you. Alright, cool.
Well, listen, I want people to tweet in the answer because I'm just not good at that stuff. You know what I mean? Anyway, someone will do it. Alright. Okay.
Uh let me see. I'm actually gonna get to some of these questions here. Okay. Uh this is from uh Wade uh Taneth. Longtime listener, want to say thanks for the interesting food ideas.
Last week, Chris from the green zone. This is a follow-up. This is a good one, people. Last week, Chris from the green zone called in about his attempt to make a chartreuse like liquor, which precipitated, you know, flocked out after adding the honey. I think you are correct, suggesting it could be an ionic reaction of suspended green particles with cations in the honey.
Uh one idea occurred to me from an application in the pharmaceutical industry which uses hydroxypropocellulose. Hydroxypropocellulose, HPC. Uh to stabilize suspensions of nanoparticles. The HPC is non-ionic and forms a barrier around small particles, preventing them from agglomerating. I love that word.
I love that word. Agglomerate. Don't you like that word, Sas? Why? You don't like it?
Does it sound like spore to you? A little bit. Really? Do you like aggregate better? Yeah.
I prefer agglomerate. Do you like the word preagglomerated? No. Okay. Uh I I do.
Agglomerate. It sounds like it sounds like a space word. Agglomerate. Uh it's also unique in that it has excellent solubility in water and ethanol. Uh I think it could help to provide stability for this liqueur.
Using sugar instead of honey should help too. My suggestion would be to use 0.3% of, I'm going to spell it, C E L N Y H P C, which stands for hydroxypropocellulose, SSL, uh to stabilize the particles in the liqueur. It is the lowest molecular weight uh weight grade of HPC produced, so it will give some extra body slash mouthfeel, but not thicken too much. For a liter of liqueur, you would add three grams of HPC. Dry mix the three grams of HPC with about 50 grams of sugar.
Uh put the liquor in a blender on low and then add the HPC sugar mixture, blend for 30 seconds. It will get a little foamy, but we'll settle to be clear. Full disclosure, uh, Wade works for a Niso, N I S S O, which manufactures uh this product. But anyway, he's playing with it with cocktails for his own fun anyway at home, so we're gonna give it a try. He said he'd send us some.
Should we should we get some and play around with it? Yeah, send us some. Wait, the liqueur or the No, the freaking HP C. Hey, Jack, what if they're gonna mail samples like this? Where should they mail it to?
Ooh, that's a good question. Uh I will provide that address in a second. In the meantime, we have a caller. Caller, you are on the air. Hey Dave, this is Rob in New Hampshire.
How are you? Doing all right. How's New Hampshire doing? Uh it's nice. Beautiful weather.
Yeah, you you setting off fireworks, living free or dying? Love that place. It's the way to be in life. Yeah, yeah. What's up?
Hey, uh, quick question. I want to melt a bunch of chocolate in my circulator. So I was just gonna vacuum bag it and throw it in overnight to melt it down. Uh is that a safety problem? No.
No, it's a hundred percent fine. The only issue, and I know people that do this because uh you can get exactly accurate so you don't have to do it like up and down, up and down, because you can get it so that you never melt out um you know all of the uh all of the good crystals in it. So uh yeah, it's great. The only problem is you have to make five billion percent sure that you don't um that you don't get water in it. Right, right.
So it's it'll just seize up and be nasty. Yeah, and like unless you're doing like a lot, because it's not gonna be like hyper like thin probably, you like there's a a tendency to kind of lose some to the to the bag. So like you know, you gotta you gotta s you gotta s you know, dry the hell out of the bag before you're done, and then get uh like one of those plastic pastry scrapers, put it like down over your thing and sh shoop and like you know, get all the stuff out, or else you end up losing a lot. Especially I don't know what kind of bag you're using, but if you're using one of those uh one of those um um uh just something out, you know, the with the with the with the crisscrosses. You know what I'm talking about?
Food savers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Food saver, yeah. Yeah, if you're using a food saver bag, like you're gonna lose a lot just to those crisscrosses.
You know what I'm saying? But yeah, it's totally doable. Uh is it a pro is it a problem having it 30 to 45 C for twelve hours? Nah. The water activity make that a non-safety issue.
Yeah, it's not yeah, there's no there's like remember, there's a zero water activity. Okay. And r and you know, they're they're gr you know, yeah. I can't imagine anything that's gonna I can't imagine anything that's gonna happen in that. I mean, look, someone wrote me back and saying I'm killing people, but I know people that do it.
And um, you know, obviously people store chocolate at that temperature in its molten state for a long, long time, not in a vacuum, but they're they'll have a giant vat of it, and then you know, the stuff at the bottom is not like it's getting a lot of oxygen. So, yeah, no. Right. I I I mean I I looked up some numbers and cocoa butter is like 0.41 to 0.56, water activity and curvature is around point three. So nothing lives below point eight five or something, right?
Yeah, uh I don't know the exact numbers, but remember like water is the complete enemy. Like water is the the complete enemy of chocolate. So I don't think in other words, like I don't think anything will grow. You're not killing anything, so if there's anything in there, it you know, it's not gonna kill it. You know what I mean?
But I don't think it's it's there's nothing there for it there's nothing there for things to grow on, you know what I mean? Right. So you don't have to worry about the botulin toxin. That's always been my big scare with putting stuff in bags. Yeah, no, look, it's also like got like a pretty hefty dose of sugar in there, which even if there was a little water, you know, would like form such a concentrated syrup that it would be hosed.
You know, nothing can I don't think anything can survive in that. Awesome. Yep. All right, have fun. All right, thanks.
So this mailing address. Oh, yeah, yeah, do it. Yeah, so it's one one three zero Bedford Ave, box three oh one, Brooklyn, New York, one one two one six. You can rewind if you missed that. Yeah.
Uh let me take the last question that we had in on the email, and then maybe uh Ru Rebecca, you have a couple more for me for uh Twitter or no? That's a thumbs up. All right, cool. All right. Greetings from Pittsburgh, uh from Justin.
Uh oh wait, no, this is two questions. Greeting from Pittsburgh. This is Sarah. I've been making uh an aging eggnog, raw eggs, cream, maple syrup, nutmeg, cinnamon, a bourbon, rum, and brandy for a few years now, and I think I am narrowing in on the best mix of ingredients and aging. The longest I have let it age is about thirteen months.
But I usually let it go uh but I usually let it go for eleven months. My question to Dave is how long is too long? Is there a point it will stop mellowing out and begin to be unpleasant? Or is it possible it will get even better? Totally possible, Sarah, that it might get better.
I don't know what the answer like because here's the here's the issue. Here's what you need to do. Like obviously, duh. What you need to do. I've had eggnog uh two years and three years old, I think.
Nick Bennett, remember, had some that was uh he I forget how old the oldest one he had was Nick Bennett, who now is you know at Porch Light, killing it, doing awesomely. Um forget how old the oldest one he has, but it's the question is is it gonna get better? That's gonna be a matter of taste. And so here's what you need to do. You need to make the same recipe three years running.
You can make whatever you want, like as well, but you're gonna make uh like at least enough to save a bottle and have a bottle every year. So you're gonna make at least three extra bottles. Okay. And then uh you're gonna do that every year. And then year three, or year four, I guess, you'll have uh a bottle of three year old, a bottle of two year old, and a bottle of one year old, and you'll taste them all side by side.
I think we have some at the lab, the lab that's like three years old now. In that low boy? Yeah. Oh my god. Does it have to be refrigerated?
Uh I don't know. I think it I don't know, man. Oh, geez. All right, Stas and I may or may not, if we ever go back, because we're the we're supposed to not have a lab anymore, but we have a low boy somewhere that apparently has some eggnog in it. And we'll taste it.
But we don't know if it's better or worse because we don't know what it tasted like at the get go. Yeah, we did. I don't. Yeah, you had some. I didn't.
Yes, you did. You did. Uh you'll know. You'll make it. Yeah, and Stots isn't pulling any punches.
She's, you know. Stas mean that way. Okay. Um Justin from Forest Hills writes in I was wondering if Dave had any suggestions for projects or resources to learn soldering and other basic electronic skills. I don't think I'm comfortable animating dead frogs, but I would greatly appreciate any other suggestions.
Did I talk about that on the air once or something? Most likely. Really? Anyway. Yes, I would not start uh for your first soldering project uh animating uh dead frogs.
But um the problem with soldering is like you gotta remember, like I'm old, right? So, like when I was when I was a kid, we still used wire wrap. You know what I mean? With for those of you that are really, really old. And then, like, you know, all of the components that I would solder were all through hole components, meaning like, you know, you put pins through a board and solder them.
Whereas now, like the cool thing to do is like all kind of surface mounted stuff, which is impossible for me to solder because it's so fine pitch. Buy a decent soldering iron. First thing is buy a good soldering iron with a very fine uh tip. Get yourself some decent solder. I someone must make a good lead-free solder now, but most of the solderers that you buy are really crap at wedding.
Uh and then just go online and choose like a you know, go on uh attafruit or go on uh Spark Fun and find some sort of like fun cooking thing that you want to do. Like I want to build them, I don't have time, but I want to build some moisture meters so I can auto-water some plants. I'm gonna put some citrus up and auto-water it. That'd be pretty cool, right, Stas? Right.
So then you get a board with a kit and you saw solder it up and you know, practice, and then eventually, you know, in no time you'll do some microprocessor development, and then you'll be doing your own boards, and then you're gonna go, you know, right, you know, nowadays it's like it's child's play. You just learn some uh PCB, which is the board editing software, and you know, you output and like two days later, someone ships you a board in the mail. It's not even prohibitively expensive anymore. When I was a kid, if you wanted to make a board, you got out a drill, you got uh uh, you know, you you took you to your Xerox machine and you Xeroxed uh a black and white negative of what you wanted. You painted the no, not black and white, not reverse.
It wasn't a negative, it was uh the positive. You'd paint a board, a copper board with uh with goop, and then you'd put the paper that you put the uh the uh clear plastic that you put in the Xerox machine over it, you'd expose it with a light, then you'd wash off the goop that you hadn't cured. I guess it is negative. I don't remember. And then uh you put that in an acid etching bath, etch it out, and then you'd sit there with a drill and drill the hole so that you could put the resistors and parts in.
In other words, it was a royal pain in the behind. And like often it didn't work because you didn't etch it right or anything. So the world is a much more fun place for uh soldering stuff now. Um anyway, I don't know. Is that a desinstruction?
I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, Rebecca, what do you got for me on the Twit air? Well, we got the persimmon guy right back, and he said it was foo you f-u-y-u you, F U Y U. What the hell did you call me?
Anyway, yeah, yeah. So those are the ones that you yeah, eat. It's just gonna look it's gotta be uh uh a pectant. It's just gotta be a pectant issue. Anytime you get like a major setback in uh something, it's it's usually uh pectins.
I don't know if there's a lot of other things going on. I've never made a persimmon jelly, so I don't know if they're particularly or like paste. So I don't know if they're particularly kind of hard set. Um I don't know. They feel like they when you imagine in your mouth, you're are you tasting one in your mouth, Daz?
Or no? I'm I'm I'm like more of a fan of not the ones that you eat fresh, but the ones that you dry out and blet down and like get all soft and gooey and then dry out. Do you like those like you buy in the Asian stores? No. You don't like persimmon?
Not really. How about you, Jack? What about you, Rebecca? Um lukewarm. Lukewarm, man.
All right. What even the dried ones? What's that? Even the dried ones? Yeah.
What's up, lukewarm? You guys know how. Anyway, someone will tweet in the answer. All right, what else we got? Any ideas for egg white replacement in a whiskey sour?
My girlfriend and I love egg white drinks, but she's developed an allergy from Joel. Wow. Huh. Okay. So what would I do here?
Well, you you could use uh uh a milk syrup, right? So if you made a milk syrup, uh that would see when when you're making egg white whiskey sour, the egg white's doing two things. It's adding texture to uh the drink, duh, but it's also uh it's also um mellowing out a little bit of the woodiness of the of the um astringency and woodiness of the of the whiskey. So milk syrup would do kind of the same thing. So you could just do you know, milk syrup is one to one milk and uh and sugar in a blender.
You blend it till it dissolves, and then for every liter of syrup, you add about an ounce of 15% citric acid solution or like two ounces of lemon juice. Uh while it's stirring. That'll pre-curdle a little bit. If you don't do that, the milk syrup will end up being chalky. That milk syrup will last for a long time in the fridge.
It'll separate, but you can just shake it to get it back, and it foams fairly well. Not as well as a whiskey sour does with an egg white, but it foams pretty well. Another thing you can do is milk wash. So you could milk wash the bourbon just by taking bourbon, adding uh adding bur adding a le per for every liter of bourbon. Add a you know, add a liter of bourbon to 250 milliliters of milk uh with stirring, blend in a little bit of citric acid till it breaks, strain out the solids in a cloth, and now you have milk wash bourbon.
You should use it probably within a uh within a week or so it'll lose its foaming ability. Um we're running a test now at the bar with sodium hexametophosphate to see whether that'll stabilize it, because I got a tip from somebody in Florida that that might work. So that'll increase the foaminess. You could also uh cheat, you could use uh VersaWhip or something like that, and just make kind of a foam on top and shake, but you still want to add something to the whiskey sour that's going to um mellow the whiskey a little bit, otherwise it's going to be Poquito uh astringent, in my opinion. Anything else?
You got anything else? They're gonna rip us off the air in a minute. We should say that you're doing uh uh science of cooking next week at MoFad for people to buy uh tickets, $30 online. Is that true? You'll be doing Ikajime.
Okay, listen, people. So Emma Bose, the program director at MoFad is like she's a Japanophile, right? And so she wanted me to do a bunch of crap that I've done recently. I'm like, uh, and I don't have a lot of time to develop kind of new things, although I'm doing a lot of interesting, fun new cooking, but just not like t necessarily technical related. Like it's like the Polish food I'm interested in now and a bunch of other stuff.
Although uh Nastasia, by the way, here's big news. Generally, Nastasi and I hate each other. Like we're bad, you know, we're like oil and oil and water. You know what I'm saying? Like, like oil near the smoke point that you pour water on, and then it volatilizes and like catches fire in the fire, and then the whole kitchen's burning.
Like, that's normally kind of how we are. However, uh Nastasia is coming to my place for Thanksgiving this year. That is true. Yeah, yeah. I just can't yell at you.
Yeah, yeah. You said I can't, I can't. No, you're not allowed to purposely make me get angry on Thanksgiving. That's the that's the one stipulation. You have to put that in check.
Yeah. No purposely making me upset. No getting me spooled up and making me yell in front of my kids or anything like this. All right, okay. But we will be doing some fun uh stuff, like for instance, uh, we're gonna I'm gonna do the turkey and the tandoor this year, tandoor turkey.
So maybe we can get uh because I don't think I'm gonna get a chance to shoot a turkey in the head because I'm not that good at it, and it would be illegal anyway. Maybe we should should we get some heritage heritage bird? Yeah, tweet out about it. Yeah, yeah. All right.
But that wasn't what we were talking about. We were you you said I had to talk about something. Oh, yeah. So like I want to do something relatively new, and she was like, Oh, yeah, the Ikajima in a long time, and I'm actually thinking about Ikajime and slaughtering techniques for my next book as part of my next book. I don't know exactly how I'm gonna do it.
I'm gonna do clove oil, probably, and we'll do the ikajime, but you know, I don't know. Uh we gotta see what kind of live fish we can source the demo. But we're gonna do that. We're gonna do some oldies but goodies, like we're gonna do thousand-year old eggs. Uh and we're gonna be at the Bass Pro in Bridgeport.
Is that for real? Yeah, 19. Well, we're still working on getting access. The Bass Pro Be there, yeah. Well, we'll be there when Bass Pro opens, but Stas wants to do the radio show.
Hey, Jack, uh nice for you to know. We want to do the radio show from the Bass Pro in Bridgeport slash. Totally down to do this. Right? Yeah.
When? I don't know. It's the opening and they're giving away a pontoon boat. Stas is making this up. Yeah, that's totally over.
She's making this up. That's just a lie. They might be. Look, we love Bass Pro. We might have to do this.
We might remote broadcast from uh people, people. I love every little bit as as we go in. It's like it's years later, but you get a little bit of real Stas as we go. This is all wishful thinking on Nastasia's part. She has not yet contacted anyone.
There's not even a Bass Pro opening. And they said yes? No, they haven't responded. Exactly. But we are gonna do the show from there.
If it's from the your car, we're gonna do the show from there. What? Yes. We got it's the opening. It's the big there's gonna be famous people and hunters.
What famous people are gonna do? Hunters. Famous hunters? Yeah. You, you're the famous person.
What about Fisher? Uh turkey in the head. I'm not allowed to I don't have a license that allows me to shoot a turkey in the head in the state of Connecticut. And if I did, the only thing I would be allowed to have at the house would be an air rifle, and they don't allow hunting. How many times?
They don't allow hunting turkeys with air rifles in the state of Connecticut. Hey, guess what? Uh all right, next week we'll be back with more cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network.
You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore Radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritage radio network dot org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.
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