This program has been brought to you by Cider Week New York City, happening November 6th through 15th, 2015. For more information, check out Cider Weekny C dot com. 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 Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more.
Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from roughly 12, a little late as usual. 1245, thereabouts, 1250. We are super pleased. Oh, we got as usual.
We have uh we have Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. Hello. Hello. Uh and actually we're gonna be talking about something that she's a fan of for a freaking change. What?
Yeah. Yeah. Jack in the engineering booth. How are you doing, Jack? I'm good.
Uh I just got a free bowl of chicken noodle soup from uh Jackie at the Roberta's kitchen. It was really nice of her. Yeah, how is it? It's really good. What kind of noodles?
The flat noodles? No, like some kind of handmade pastas in there. Handmade pasta. Have they fallen apart? Have they gotten mushy yet?
They're getting there. Yeah. Yeah, that's the problem, right? Yeah. Uh we have also uh Rebecca live tweeting out there.
Rebecca, hi hi. But uh we can talk about mushy noodles in a minute because we have with us t this week is Cider Week here in uh in in the Big Apple. And uh presumably do you guys do well, I'll introduce them, I'll ask them whether they also do parries or all these other things, which are getting hugely popular in uh in the UK, right? Perries are just going nuts. Yeah, yeah.
The French, but who cares? No kidding. Well, France is like France. If France were Belgium, they would be the France of pairs. Whatever.
I'm not even gonna get into it. Okay. We have John Reynolds here uh from the uh Finger Lakes uh from Black Duck Cider, and he's here to uh you know let us taste out and talk about some ciders. And we also have uh uh Leif uh Sundstrom. Have you remembered pronouncing that right?
Yeah, close enough. Sounds from Sandstrom Ciders, and they're in Hudson, New York. Woo and we're here to talk about uh well uh hopefully we'll get to some actual questions later. If not, I'm sure I'll just rip through some at the end or whatever. But you call in your questions, hopefully cider related questions.
Too 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Now listen, it is my feeling that anyone who has the time, interest, inclination, and takes the care to make a cider will also have something interesting to say about most cooking questions. So you don't have to have necessarily a cider related question, but it might be helpful. So let's uh To that end I have a caller who called like right at the top of the show, has been waiting, so let's see if it's cider or not.
All right, let's see if it's cider caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, this is Jonathan from Tempe, Arizona. How you doing? Not a good apple place, by the way, Tempe, Arizona. Not good, good for many things.
I love the smell of Arizona, actually, frankly. When you get off the airplane, that Arizona smell, I like it, but it's not Apple Country. Go ahead, depends on which airport. It is not Apple Co it is not Apple Country, that's right. Yeah.
Uh this isn't a cider question, but I will definitely be interested in buying some cider. Uh but it's not but it's a it's a question. Uh I ran into it because I just bought a a Nova circulator. Mm-hmm. And I started doing some uh steaks, and I ran into the problem uh well the exact problem that you made the cerez all for, where I just can't get a good enough crust in a cast iron pan.
Right. On like a on a regular residential burner. Yes. But uh I do have uh a baking steel, so I was curious if I should try to maybe put the baking steel on the stove or maybe just heat it in the oven for for an hour, just anything. Um is there any reason to use a baking steel over the cast iron?
And granted, um it'll be a while before I can make another kitchen uh kitchen purchase such as a search all. So this is just an interim solution. Right. So I was just wondering if you had any thoughts about baking steel versus cast iron, anything like that. How hot does your uh how hot does your oven get?
Five fifty, just a regular residential oven. Yeah. So uh what I would do in this situation, I would first of all uh test this on yourself before you like invite a billion people over for steak. But the thing I would I would try the baking steel, I think that's probably a good thing to try. Crank your oven, heat the hell out of it for a while, and then what I would do is keep the oven super cranked, and I would throw the steaks on one side of the of the thing and then um flip it and hit a different section of your baking steel.
By the way, is your baking steel will if how many burners will your baking steel hit if you put it directly on your burners? I mean, I think like two total. Okay. Well, you could put it in 550 oven, right? Get some good mitts, heat it way the hell up to five fifty so it's nice and even, then crank your burners, throw it on your burner, put the steak on, and then flip it and put it over on the other side.
The one problem with the baking steel as opposed to a cast iron pan is you're not gonna be able to get a lot of oil on it, and so it's gonna run off and cause fires and flames and smoking, and it's very difficult to get yeah, it's very difficult to get a good sear on a pre cooked piece of meat um because the surface of the cr uh the surface of the meat is all m you know m moundy and bumpy. So you're gonna get big blonde areas where there is a concavity at the meat surface, unless you have a significant quantity of oil. And if you put a significant quant quantity of oil onto a baking steel that's five hundred and fifty to that's a recipe for huge, huge, as Trump would say, huge problems. So I would work with that. You can paint the oil on.
Another thing is, are you pre-searing your meat? I'm not, no. Ah pre-sear. Look, I know I know that like our good friend Kenji uh Kenji uh Lopez Alt, uh he doesn't believe that pre-searing is necessary. Here's here's here's where I think he's incorrect about this.
Pre-searing reduces the amount of searing time you have to do at the end to get X amount of crust. So if you do a pre-sear on cast iron before you do your low temp cooking and chill it down before you do your low temp cooking, instead of taking two and a half minutes to reach a certain crust level on the side on the outside of the steak, it will only take like a minute and a half. So you can you can greatly increase like how good your crust is, even with your current technologies without lighting fire to your house and pissing off whoever else lives in your house. You can greatly increase the crust you can produce by simply pre-searing the meat before you do it. Put it put it start it.
Myard likes my yard, crust likes crust. So you'll get a good flavor development. And while it's true that if you put the same crust on it by doing post sear only, you won't be able to probably tell the difference flavor wise between the two two steaks, and there will be more moisture loss, which again is something we can argue about, but I don't care. I don't mean I don't I care that you care about it, but I don't care. In other words, I'm I'm not anti moisture loss in a piece of meat necessarily.
Um anyway, so I I would go that route. I would try to see if a pre sear can help you uh without burning your house down. Yeah, I mean I'd say next time I'll just do one pre-seared, one not pre-seared, see the results, and then go from there. Yeah. Remember, the whole thing about a pre-sear is it's saving you searing time at the end.
That's the main thing about a pre-sear. Another thing you another thing you can do is you can uh like uh let the meat rest longer for out of the bag or even put it in a little bit of water to chill it down before you sear it, and then you can do a radically longer sear time on it without overcooking the center. Yeah, I did hear that somebody or I read somewhere where someone will put it bag directly from the circulator into an ice bath for 15 minutes. Yeah. Well, uh, I mean, I'm in general anti-that because um I've run a bunch of tests based on the initial knowledge that I poo-pooed of a guy named Bruno Gousseau, who's kind of the godfather of low temperature cooking, even if he is French.
And um the uh I like the French, by the way, I'm just messing. The uh the the uh so the but if you put a bag directly in ice water, you tend to get less uh kind of reabsorption of um the kind of juices, which again I said I don't really care about, but most people when we do the side-by-side taste test, they prefer the meat that is uh allowed to gradually reduce uh in temperature. So I also well anyway, so I'm I'm a fan of just like pull it out of the circulator. Like I pull if you if you're gonna do a hard, hard sear, I'd pull it out of the circulator like like uh a good 45 minutes, maybe 30 to 45 minutes before you're gonna eat it. And then for at least like the first 15 or so, 20, like leave it on the counter, and then if you want to chill it even further, you can put it into regular uh room temp water, uh, you know, you know, regular cold tap water.
I wouldn't use ice. And then uh and then you can put a monstrously hard sear on the outside of it and still not overcook the inside. But you have to be careful that you don't render the inside uh so cold that people are like, this steak is not hot in the middle. People don't like that. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Especially because beef beef fat, the texture of beef fat gets uh, you know, unless you're like a cold beef fat. There are cold beef fat people. I'm not one. No, no.
Me neither. No. All right. Anyway, let us know. Uh uh tweet peep back on uh on to cooking issues and tell us how uh how how it went.
All right. Well uh thank you. I'm turning this into the cider hotline. So we're only taking cider and apple calls. And uh we actually have two calls.
So one is an apple question, one is a cider question. Okay, listen, Jack, give me give me give these let's give these guys at least 30 seconds each to s to give us like who they are and what's going on. So that we know, and then we'll take the call. Cider calls, stay in the line. All right, say stay on the line.
Don't leave us cider calls because we want them. So John. So uh uh I'm Black Duck Cidery. Uh we're up in the finger lakes, basically in wine country. Uh we took really good grape land and planted uh trees starting about 15 years ago, mainly pear and apple trees.
So we've made all our neighbors in the finger lakes hate us. Um, you know, because they think it's grape land. Uh and basically three years ago we got a commercial license. Uh these are all natural fermentations, uh our ciders. Uh there's no finding, no filtering.
Uh we don't take anything away, we don't add anything. And uh Yeah, we make we make four kinds, and when you were talking about Perry, one of them is a Perry. I did not bring it today because we are sold out, we sell out quick. Um but it is a still period so it's quite different than most of the English or French Perries because there's no carbonation. Cool.
And how close are you to Geneva? Uh I'm uh halfway between Geneva and Ithaca, so I'm like 25 minutes uh from Geneva. So and uh I actually worked at the Ag Station at Geneva, so I worked uh where sort of the Noah's arc of apples. With like w when Phil Force Line was still there, were you there? I was I I was.
Nice. So you know Phil? Oh, well, I've met him. Yeah, yeah. Phil Force Line, for those of you don't for those of you that don't have no idea what we're talking about.
Geneva, New York is the m is like is like the mothership of apples in this country. Uh I mean, straight up, it's like r it's ridiculous. And this guy, Phil Force Line, I guess best known for going to Kazakhstan and bringing a whole bunch of wild types back. He did. And so they have thousands of kinds of wild type apples, many of which could be market apples because they're delicious.
And anyway, so you want to go ahead and um talk a little more about that for a sec before. Yeah. Well, I mean, and and and it's uh you know, it's basically the USDA's uh uh germplasm repositories, so they're holding these apples essentially, uh their varieties um basically uh so they don't get lost uh in in history. And then it's true that they went not only to Kazakhstan and Tajikistan um uh but they went to China for collection trips and and basically the theory is that the apple sort of originates in Central Asia. And that's sort of the center point of the you know silk trade route, and you have trade from China, you know, to the Middle East and so forth.
And it uh you know, eventually these apples uh sort of go uh, you know, mm well to to where they grow now in Europe and places like that. It spreads to the U.S., obviously people bring them over as settlers. Um but it is an amazing place. It is your tax dollars at work. So the public, no no doubt.
So so the public actually can go there certain times of the year and you can go toward these orchards and uh uh you know see uh, you know, two thousand apple varieties, different ones all in the same orchard. If we have time later, I can we can talk about visiting because Nastasi and I we haven't been there. We went to the Brogdale, uh we've been to a couple other uh tastings, but I you know I've been to Geneva with Harold McGee. We could talk about fruit tastings and apple mecca and pilgrimages. Hopefully we'll have have time.
But before before we get to callers, Laf, why don't you give us a give us some story? Give us some give us some lathe. So I'm based in the Hudson Valley. I produce cider in a small barn in southern Sagardies. Um I had lived in New York City, Brooklyn, for a number of years, spent roughly ten years working in the wine industry.
Um various capacities, importing, distribution, restaurants, spent more than a dozen years of my life in restaurants also, but also worked with wine makers in Oregon and Germany, doing harvest and so forth like that. That really informed a lot of the kind of transition and focus of cider making for me after I left kind of the wine world to focus on something that was a little bit more indigenous, so to speak, to where I'm living, trying to stay rooted in the Hudson Valley and New York State and exploring cider a lot because it's has so much in touch and in line with what drove me to be passionate about wine, but also because there's just a lot of unexplored territory at this point. Um both in recovering a past and history that cider's involved with here in the United States, but also in exploring new frontiers informed by everything from new understandings of flavors and farming and and that kind of thing. Um so yeah, I'm I'm working out there now. We're this year actually, tonight officially is the first commercial release of the cider.
I've been producing for several years. Um the directive is generally focused on uh a want of exploring terroir in various areas through cider. Um that is proved to be a little bit of a a naive uh exploratory uh element in my my case because just the access to certain apples with not being your own farmer, growing your own fruit is is incredibly difficult if you're keeping a focus on specific varieties and a specific level of quality. So we're exploring it as much as we can, but um right now uh producing a couple bottlings of last year. One we have here is all from Columbia County fruit, and there's another bottling for single orchard fruit.
And this coming year from 2015, it's gonna be a different program altogether, but with a focus on heirloom varieties that are from North America or some cider varieties as well. But hopefully with a focus on limited number of apple varieties per bottling as opposed to large blends. Try and kind of you know focus on what these individual characteristics are for the specific varieties. So a lot to talk about, but collar, let's get some cider collar cider collar one. You are on the air.
So we're gonna go with the cider question first. Apple question, stay patient. Hi Dave, how are you? Doing all right. Hi, um this is uh a nice coincidence.
So I'm trying to track down the elusive Ashmeads kernel, apple. And so I was wondering if you have any tips for finding that in New York City and or if you have any um substitutions you'd recommend for your liquid intelligence recipe. Yeah. So uh for those of you don't know, I really like Ash Meads kernel because it's uh a high sugar, high acid, extremely rich uh kind of uh apple. There are people who make hard cider f with it, but it's actually I think probably a very challenging apple to make a hard cider with just because uh of its high acid content.
So I think you probably need to mean cider people you tell me, but I think it would need a lot of mellowing before you could uh use that to personal preference, I would say. Right. No, and we and we grow quite a lot of that and uh it goes into blends. Now as a straight varietal, yeah. Uh you would almost have to put it through malloactic uh fermentation to reduce the acidity of it.
And I think that's what people do when they generally make it as a straight varietal. But it's uh it's an amazing blend um in in there. And I uh there's probably some in this well, I know there's some ash meads in uh this cider. Had I had I known you want 'em, I would have brought them down to the city for you. Yeah, collar.
Ash meads are ash meads are fantastic. The first ash meads I ever tasted was actually from Geneva from the AG uh station. Um in uh New Hampshire, Poverty Lanes Orchards grows ash meads for commercial sale. They ship via Baldur, the distributor here in New York City. And they they'll work some I mean they're probably working overtime now because it's like you know, I'm I don't know how whether they'll take calls now, but they uh uh they they can they can provide it and uh Stas, you ever seen it at our green market?
No. I've never seen an Arc Green Market. And the problem with um, yeah, like for the recipes that I that uh so like for you you guys don't know, I have a book and in the book is a chapter on apples, specifically apples and cocktail, but they're not fermented apples, they're apples that we use kind of fresh. And I think there's nothing beats ash meads for like co cocktail work, like ash meads is like kind of like par excellence, like cocktail apple to work with, even though it is hard to source. Um I will say this.
Um if you're using it in cocktail work and you want to preserve that uh kind of like rich acid note of Ash Meads kernel, like uh process them right away. I mean, like uh you know, I've had people we've ordered the we've ordered the cases from uh Poverty Lanes, and uh they come in and some knucklehead will put the case down in you know in the in a hot basement next to a dishwasher, and then they're toasted inside of a day, they're they're they're just they're a shadow of their former self. They've lost their richness, they've lost their punch, you know, they've uh they start going to cure in a a good environment can really increase a lot of that richness and complexity of flavor quite a bit. You know. And then also on that note too, uh a variety that may work as a decent substitute that's sometimes easier to find is Golden Russet.
Um while different, it has a lot of similar kind of profiles. I I would throw out Cox Orange Pippin, which I don't know in the city, but it probably is slightly easier. But it's another you know, famous English apple high in acid and very aromatic. Uh but it may also be slightly difficult. You don't really see a lot of cocks here because uh as educated as you'd hope New York City market is, like we demand crunchy and like a good cocks is not is not crunchy.
It's more of a crumbly apple, and Americans uh I'm serious s sad to say can't appreciate the crumbly texture of like an old fashioned um And there's very few places in this country where you can really grow them well. I mean Finger Lakes is one exception. Yeah, yeah, they do well, although uh there's still issues. I mean it's it's probably the most difficult tree that we have to grow in the orchard. Uh yeah.
It's also I mean I don't know how sensitive all apples are to it, but I I was in the Brogdale, we Nastasi and I broke into a section where they were testing cocks on a bunch of different root stocks. Wildly different. Same piece of dirt, different root stocks on cocks. And I don't know like I said, uh yeah, so uh I you know, I don't know whether it is more sensitive than most to root stock in terms of flavor, but it was definitely it I know it was sensitive. It's the only one I've ever done a comparative tasting on.
Yeah, well, and it's it's a very low vigor tree. So that's that's part of the problem too. Uh you can't crop them early or the tree never gets beyond a certain height. Um yeah, they and they just have a lot of issues. They're just susceptible to everything and uh disease wise, insect and uh you know, and that's sort of why even in England they're ripping them out and replacing 'em with sort of more modern varieties.
Um just for that reason. Uh they they you know, it's not not economically viable even for them. Right in in the motherland. Do you do you do growing for for eating market as well? I do.
Yeah. So do you find it disheartening that you have to do like for instance, like it's impossible to get good early season apples because they're always harvested too early because they go soft almost instantly. And so that they're not it's not even a point buying like low dyes or transparents here because they're like there's not good. Yeah, those are I mean for me that's too early. I mean, our sort of earliest ones are uh like for eating or St.
Edmunds Russet, which is another uh it's a full russet, it's another English apple. And that one has like a pear drop sort of uh flavor. It's not very high in acids, but we also use it in a cider blend, and that's really for us uh right at the beginning of September. So I don't mess with any apples generally that are August ripening, because I do. They're they're very short season, very short-lived, and I think the flavor is eh on most of those.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, those also like the people had no offense to the people I buy them from occasionally, but like they harvest them when they're like baseballs, still like starchy, nasty. Uh wait, we have another caller still on the air? We do.
Yeah. Caller, you are you are on the air. Hey. Howdy. My aunt.
Yes, yes. Your question, sir. Is he still there? He did we lose him? Maybe he dropped his phone.
Uh he'll come back. Yeah, he'll be back. He'll be back. Whenever you get back, get back. Because in the meantime, we're gonna start opening some cider to uh to taste it.
What what what are we gonna taste here first, Jens? And by the way, Stas likes cider. The one thing in the world, maybe that she likes. She likes cider. Nice.
Well, I mean, if I can find something to actually open, do you have a bottle opener? Cider makers don't actually carry bottle openers. That's right. Oh, look at that. Jack.
Yes. So so since I came over on the subway and my bottle is sort of a little full, I'm a little worried that I've got to be able to get the floor. Nice, yeah, sure. Why would why don't you uh okay, why don't you describe the ciders that uh did these suckers on the air don't get to don't get to my doing this. So so uh ours is uh why is this not uh I'm having a little little technical difficulty with the uh I will I will let the beverage director actually use the restaurant man, yeah.
Exactly. That's why I shouldn't be involved. Uh so the black duck one is actually our hop cider. Um and this is uh main mainly sort of heirloom uh American heirloom fruit, which is uh different than most of our other ones. Uh we we generally use uh more true cider fruit, uh English and French uh bittersweets and bitter sharps.
But these are also our hops. So it's Fuggles, Ken Golding, Cascade, um, and a unknown noble hop. Um let me grab a glass. Oh, it's hopped. Unfortunately, Stas, she loves cider, not a hops person.
Oh, I'm so sorry. We need uh more jackets. Jackie's for you guys. Yeah, hops. Oh Jack loves hops.
Just just smell it. Maybe maybe you won't get hops, maybe it'll get the other plant in the hop family. Yes, now we're deep we're dealing with uh we're dealing with an un an unfiltered product here. An unfiltered, unfined, um yeah. I mean, this was uh ambient yeast, you know, natural yeast fermentation.
Uh and essentially uh with the hops, uh we pick them, uh we dry them, we freeze the hops because they're they're ready in August or early September. We ferment the grape uh yeah, grapes. Uh we ferment the apples when when they're completely done fermenting, uh at some point I make a blend of the ciders and I put the hops whole cone in the cider. The this was about five and a half days. Uh I pull it back out, and then uh actually this got bottle conditioned, uh, so it's at another few months in the bottle, and uh basically this is the product uh so stash, you might like it because it's dry hopped.
It's not it's not obviously my brain is on fry, it's not bitter hop, it's not bittered, it's not boiled with hops. Right. Right. Well that's the big difference that that when you put heat to hops, that's when you extract out most of the bitters. And um yeah, you know, essentially when you dry hop, you're getting more of the aromatics of the hops out.
Uh and any bitter that's in this is probably more from the apples and less to do with the hops themselves. So John, you probably said this, but my mind spaced for a second. Did you co-ferment the hops with the apples or was it all infused after the fact? No, no. So so it's uh uh completely fermented uh and then I put a blend together from from some different tanks and get get the base where I want it, and then I add the the hop whole cone after fermentation is complete.
Uh this this particular one is just by taste. Uh these were in for just about five and a half days. Uh I pull it back out and uh you know, then we bottle condition. So basically, you know, uh, you know, and this is what you get. This is the only product other than I do make a black currant one sometimes that that we sort of put something else in other than apples or pears.
Um I will say there the reason we made this is uh you know everyone needs a uh gateway, and this is our gateway cider for beer drinkers. Ah, nice. I like that. I like that. I just want to make sure the collar got on.
Are you on caller? Oh, yeah. Okay, hey, ask your question while we're while we're drinking this. By the way, you should know because you can't taste it, that uh there's very good uh I think there's very good acid control on this. Maybe it's because you're adding also some um, you know a little bit of uh tannin bitterness or the hop aroma maybe that's what balances out but very good I don't you think so yeah yeah I agree.
I mean but back to that note earlier you're talking about ash means maybe too acidic you have to blend it. Again it's all personal and I think I I'm a lover of higher acid beverages. When I was in the wine world it was champagne and Riesling and Gruner and Veltiner and that was my world and so the cider definitely leans that way. So I think there's a there's a broad range of what's acceptable but um I think this has a great balance especially for that bitter note too yeah you have to have some acidity to keep that to me it's all about energy in the beverage which acidity gives everything which is easier. Alright caller sorry sorry to cut you off yet again caller what is your question?
My question is about keeving cider. What's the what's specifically the question? Oh specifically specifically the question is I've been you know doing my own keeping experiments over the years over the last couple years and I can't seem to get it down like to a science essentially obviously it is but I can't seem to get it to come out like evenly every single time and I know that there are a lot of places that do it on a regular basis you know like industrially I think so I figured someone's gotta know something about this you know that I'm missing. And I was wondering because I know it's involved similar you know hydrocolloid type stuff I was wondering if there's like a synergistic effect with another hydrocolloid you know because it's low methoxal pectin if there's anything we can do to like you know get it get it uh evened out I I will say where they do that in France uh uh well first to describe describe the process for people who have no idea what what's going with keeping is or what's going on. So keeving basically is a uh process where you sort of uh we get to uh uh uh what they call the brown cap, uh which uh is pectins and things like that come up and you have uh some of the nitrogen and and vitamins and things like that that are in the juice settle down, and you uh essentially take out the liquid in between.
So you're you're basically taking cider and starving it of the things that yeast need to ferment quickly and and uh maybe finish the fermentation. Uh so uh you know, then basically you get a very slow fermentation if it's done right, and you can actually get it to stop and have you know residual sugar in it uh and uh not have to use other processes sort of do it. It's a natural way to do it. But even in France and parts of England where they do it, uh it isn't a science and they don't make it happen all the time. And I will say varieties usually play a big role in it.
The bitter uh sweets uh generally make it easier to do, and uh also temperature is uh a huge factor. It has to be cold enough uh to make it happen. And but not too cold. But not too cold, true, true. And then there's just some amount of luck.
It truly is a little bit of luck. And uh I mean I know the biggest producer uh uh r in the US that I know that's doing uh keeping on a commercial level is uh uh Kevin from uh Easy Orchard, which is out in the the West Coast, and he it's a hit or miss thing for him. He sometimes get partial keys, sometimes he gets full keeves, and sometimes it just doesn't happen. And he has to ferment it sort of in a natural way. They do make I don't know what they are exactly, but they do make some additives which I would never involve myself with, you know, to like help the Keeve along.
Because I mean, what you're the beauty of the Kieve is the idea of blastoing the whole situation into kind of this great balance between failing and not failing, and it's also important, I think, to mention that you know you can have residual sugar in a cider from various methods. And one of the other keeping methods is this oxidative quality, which is also something you have to kind of monitor and keep in balance with both temperature and air exposure after the fact and so forth. Because you know, I don't personally don't do Kiev's because I enjoy some key ciders a hell of a lot. Like that's not my goal to make any kind of oxidative style of cider. Yeah.
But I think most people, especially on the still side, produce a fairly highly oxidized product now. It does happen. There's many reasons we can discuss why that's the case. But can and should. Um but yeah, the Kiev, I don't I can't speak to like how to help you be successful.
What about the salads content of the juice before it's fermented? Is that does have something to do with it too? Because you mean depending on if you're if you are straining it in some way when you're juicing it or not at all, and what's your press and like what was the texture of the apples, and did they squirt through the press and creep put more sediment in your juice than necessary for that Keefe? Because the weight of those things, as I understand it, can cause like a difficulty in the true separation of pectin to the top and other sediment to the bottom of a Kieve. Yeah, and I I also don't make any Keefe ciders, although in the past uh when I was experimenting, I did make you know small five and ten gallon lots of Keeve cider, and right, I added nothing.
Um and I would get I'm I'm this is a rough estimate, probably half of them to work and the other half didn't. Um and you know, I was using true bitter sweets and things like that, um, which i I'm at least told helps. Um if you're using straight up dessert fruit, it's uh yeah, that it's a l sometimes harder to make it work. Um as I've understand too, like you mentioned bitter sweets and so forth often work a little better because they do tend some of them at least tend to have a lower nutrient level to begin with. And they also have a higher pH.
So that's another thing to be considered. Like that's why a lot of Keeve ciders that are successful aren't necessarily that high in acidity or they don't have that sense of acidity in the palate, because they generally start with a higher pH to begin with, which also create uh in a whole new danger zone in that situation because you have an oxidized juice that you're leaving a little bit open to the elements, has a high pH, so it's a little bit more likely to be inviting to certain bacteria that you may not want later on. So that's it's a tricky but it's also one of these beautiful things that was discovered by accident by people just putting juice outside because they needed a place to store it and it happened to be cold, and the chapeau brune developed and they had to salvage what was there and figured this whole method out over a number of years. So delicious mistakes. Yeah.
Yes. Yeah. Collar, did that did that help at all? Um yeah, it does. I was just I was actually hoping more for like a food science perspective.
I appreciate you know the natural, you know, amazingness of the apples, but like I would be probably adding like pectin methylesterase or something like a novo shape or something like that. And I was thinking from you know a hydrocolide perspective, I know there are a lot of synergistic hydrocolloid interactions. I was wondering if there's something I could just like, you know, if I can you know get it too. Have you done a successful Kiev without that yet? Um yeah, I have.
It's just it does seem to be without the pectomethyl esterase you're saying? Or would have just yeah, with just basic. Oh no. Okay. No.
Yeah, I mean, not without the pectomethyl esterase. I mean, the but okay, so like here's here's here's an example that I I don't know what's gonna happen, so I'll let I'll let you know. And unfortunately for me, there's too many variables to just to actually separate the stuff out, but uh I I can't afford a cider press yet. So I I only have one tree. I'm gonna plant more.
By the way, what do you what do you guys think about fall planting? You pro fall planting or anti? No, no, I think it can work as long as you uh mulch it and you know get it watered in and we don't have severe, severe winters. I'll talk to you I'll talk to you after the show because I want to plant some apple trees, but I don't, you know, I don't I whatever. I'm not gonna get into it.
But the uh I mean I will if you want, but the um so I juice with with like uh regular you know human like home juicers. So my first cider that I did this year, I did in a champion juicer, which provides a fairly low solids juice. I did not treat it at all with any sort of um with any sort of pectinase because it was already low enough, and when you when you treat a juice early with um pectinase, you strip a lot of flavor out of the juice, and so that's why a lot of times for cocktails where I need a clear juice for carbonation, like uh I have to use extremely high flavored varieties like an ash meads, because if you're hitting it with a pectinase enzyme and then stripping the solids out that early, like you know, it's just it they get too thin. Like a lot of apples can't survive it from a flavor standpoint. Okay.
I this time I juiced because Mark from Del Posto gave Nastasia an extra juicer. Nastasia's like, this is the size of my freaking kitchen. What the hell am I gonna do with this, Dave? You want this juicer? So I got this brevel juicer, which is a centrifugal basket juicer, radically higher solids content in this juice.
So I have no idea so much so, and this is why the variables are too much, that I hit it with a little bit of pectanex because it was just so it was like a slurry, like you know, much more higher solids than you would get in a press. And so I unf unfortunately for you, caller, I treated it with uh with uh some uh pectinase, but uh you know I'm keeping it fairly cool, so I don't know like how much of a breakdown whether it's gonna be complete. I mean only time will tell as journey wasn't that journey? Journey, I think, right? No.
Only time will tell. No. That's corner, some hair some hairband. It was one of them. Yeah, yeah, anyway.
Anyway, uh now I have the lyrics of the song up oh god's too bad. Yeah. So the uh uh point being that uh you know, maybe if you were to take some juice and hit it with if you didn't want to use a science perspective, but you were able to do it successfully with pectin methylesterase. You still there even? What?
You you were able to successfully do to do it by you pre-treated the apples, or you treated that you crushed it, then treated the crush with pectin methylesterase, and then and then pressed it. Yeah. So you're only treating when you're if when you're just treating the crush with pre pectin methylesterase, especially if your transit time is not too high, you're only really uh affecting like a percentage of the of the juice before but of the product. And so you could probably you know if you mean if if you like that method, continue to use that method. The only problem being that pectin pectin methylesterase, nova shape is increasingly difficult to source.
So like modernist pantry is not selling it anymore. Uh good Guzman from NovoZimes will only sell it in 25 liter pails, which is like you know, five orchards worth of freaking uh enzyme. Uh and so you might want to uh you might want to try just uh adding some slurry to it, like some extra or like using a different juicing technique for some of it just to boost your solids content on it, because I don't think that the pectin methylesterase is doing much besides that. As you mentioned, is also it does strip a little bit of flavor, right? So when you're doing that, you're gonna you're losing a little bit of solids instead of having them infused at a slower rate.
So it's it's expediting the whole keeping process to a certain extent, which I think you kind of run the risk of maybe losing a little bit of your final flavor product. Yeah, aromatics. Right. There is no there is no effect one thing, don't affect the rest in any sort of cooking, really. You know what I mean?
Like everything that you do, for instance, on this second batch. I I met you know, I've I've I cured the apples for a couple weeks to and also I froze a portion of them because I needed to, because they were they I damaged them when I was harvesting them because I don't want to get up. My tree is a standard apple tree. It's the tallest freaking apple tree I've ever had. So I literally had to beat the fruit off of the top of the tree.
I don't have a ladder that can get up to the top of this dang tree. And so a lot of the stuff was uh uh damaged. I couldn't juice it right away, so I froze it, and then when it thaws, it thaws like a like a like a brown bag, which is kind of cool. It kind of tastes good actually. But um anyway, it's too many variables for me to actually describe to the caller like what's going on because it's now it's partially frozen, the juicer was like making this slurry.
Who the hell knows? You know, you can have good results of that sometimes too. If you're if you're juicing frozen fruit, a lot of those ice crystals from the water will stay frozen while the juice and the nectar releases and you can end up with a higher concentration of flavor and sugar in the end. I've done a bunch of s years ago. I did a bunch of side by sides on purposely freezing apples to simulate like like post-thaw like po post initial freeze harvest of like certain varieties, like um you know, certain late season varieties.
And I had some good luck actually developing some interesting flavors with apples that are that were just simply like artificially frozen and then allowed to thaw before they were before they were juiced. Yeah. Well, I think I'm gonna add I think I'm gonna try adding some like low methoxal pectin, hopefully maybe to help you know get things going. Yeah. Amp up my my pectin amounts.
Maybe that'll help, you know, stabilize some of the ones that aren't quite you know coming together. Hmm. Right. Well let us know. Let us know what happens like in however many weeks or whatever it takes.
Let us know let us know what happens. I'm always curious about these things. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Good luck.
Um by the way, speaking of apple trees, I don't know what the heck I'm gonna do with this dang tree. All the lower branches are basically it's weird. They produce fruit this year was an unbelievable I think for a lot of people like fruit year in in our area like the the the tree just went bananas. I don't know whether it's because we had a hard winter or what, but the tree just went totally ape, like made so many freaking apples. No, this was the perfect year.
I mean last year in New York State was a short crop year for a lot of a lot of regions. So uh you know when the apple trees have all that kind of energy and and the pollination season this year was perfect. I mean we had no rain and warm days uh uh when when the blossoms were out and and you know honeybees are lazy and uh pre Madonna's and they won't work you know if it's below fifty five if it's raining and things like that and and some of the other pollinators uh so I think it was just uh you know a confluence of all these things you know light crop last year uh for most people so you know you're you're pretty much guaranteed a big crop and just the pollination uh was just perfect the weather. So, I mean, for us, we had the biggest crop we've ever had. Nice.
Yeah. Speak Lafe, before we get done on we gotta taste your cider. We've got a taste of cider. Let's taste it. Yeah let's rinse these glasses since that those hops are so the hot years.
Wait, this one's a cle this one's a clean guy. Okay. Oh, because I host host steals the clean glass. By the way, Nastasia, are we doing are we doing the show from Bass Pro next week? We are.
They just got back to me. Woo! Bass Pro people is opening up in Bridgeport, and we're gonna do the show, but it's not gonna be Tuesday. It's gonna be Wednesday, right? It's gonna be Wednesday.
Oh, it's gonna be so awesome. Also, while we're we won't be able to take call-ins, so it'll be like a catch-up show, you know. Yeah, by the way, once uh uh the all questions on hunting or cooking foods that you hunt. I'll get to the questions I had today. I had some really interesting questions today that I'm clearly not going to get to, like how to blanch, i.e.
remove bitterness and chlorophyll, like you know, of cartoons post-harvest, which is interesting to me, and I have some thoughts on it, but I don't have time necessarily to get into it today. Let's taste the cider. So describe the cider that we're that we're looking at here. So this is all this is all Columbia County fruit up in Hudson Valley. Um this is all from 2014 harvest, just two varieties 60% Northern Spy, 40% Newtown Pippin, both native uh North American heirlooms.
Um Northern. Yeah, you said Northern? Yeah, no, yeah. Yeah, North American heirlooms. But like like don't let the Virginians tell you that like we we own Newtown comes from Queens.
Yeah, right. But by the way, you do you know that that's the most polluted area in all like was for a while. Newtown Creek was like the most polluted waterway in the country. It's all the the actual land where the tree, the first Newtown Pippin is documented from, is now a children's park. So that's a good combination there.
A really polluted area and children's playground. Yeah. Um but this is um this was fermented very slowly. There's this is a combination actually of inoculate and uh spontaneous fermentation. Um this year everything so far is kicking off a spontaneous just fine, but I've been kind of a migratory gypsy of a cider maker for a while.
So you know, a lot of people talk about all the yeasts come in on the fruit, and there's a whole other element of the environment that you're producing in could be a contributing factor to those kinds of fermentations. So until there was a little bit more of a settled homestead for the cideries, so to speak. Um I was kind of using a mix of the two. Um this aged and vat um fermented for about six six or seven weeks total. And then age and vat for another five and a half months.
It's method champagnoise or bottle conditioned and bit and bottled now for about five and a half, six months. Now uh I see what you mean by you like acid, but here's the thing like there's a uh a very characteristic brightness in the finish from that, but it's not like overly acidic. It's not like it's not like an acid bomb. No. You know, it balances is always should be the goal, I think.
Not just in making cider, but in all aspects of life. Yeah. But let me let me ask you guys this, but before they you know, before we run out of time. So I find that like uh how many years would you guys say we're into the cider kind of resurgence here in in the US? Five, six, seven?
Probably yeah, I don't even know if it's that really. I mean, are we at re year zero yet? That's really the question. I think I mean, but it's it's been a few, yeah. I mean maybe five.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I'm when I say that, I mean there is uh, you know, I remember a time when you know all you would read in books is we lost it. We were a cider country and we lost it. And there was nothing. You know what I mean?
There was a couple of people producing some some stuff, but they were really chasing like a slightly higher price point. They were chasing the same folks that were buying woodchuck. And I think it's a bit no offense to the woodshuck corporation. Yeah. But they've done great things for us.
Yeah. But I've noticed like, you know, maybe eight years, like as you start seeing people who would go out and do the rounds like you guys are doing, talking to people, like talking about their products, uh, and trying to take serious drinkers and hook serious when I mean I don't mean alcoholic, I mean like people who take their drinks seriously, like hook them in into into cider. So that I I've only sensed maybe a little over half a decade or something like this. Um maybe year zero, ironically, was when Anheuser Busch and Instellar Toise and all them started bottling a cider because it was clearly money to be made, which is kind of laughable from people like John and I think. But what which product do they do?
Well, the what was the uh the Johnny Apple seed? Johnny Apple seed, yeah. You know, these are six pack 12 ounce bottle ciders marketed in that kind of you know generally with some amount of concentrate and other sort of flavorings and things like that. I mean, it's weird they dop them with malik, which is so strange, because why would you need to? Well, if you had very, very high pH weak apples, you might have to like so my question is this I th I feel that like early on in this kind of scenario or the uh early on in this kind of uh uh greater appreciation understanding of what by the way is like our birthright good cider, you know, especially here in this part of the c country, right?
Uh it we we weren't born with it, but it it belongs to us, right? And we should have it. It's like super important. Um to me anyway. But that I feel that like early on, uh like a lot of people who are trying to do a good job were producing kind of you know, lay to put unbalanced ciders.
Like like too much, not balanced out, but I feel like we're getting so much better. I feel like every year we're getting better and better. Well, that's an interesting kind of thing because people talk about this is an interesting point to me. Like when I when I told some friends of mine from the wine industry that I was going to start making cider, they say, Oh, what are you gonna do? You're gonna make like Spanish style cider or like more like Normandy style cider.
And I know that if I said to them, I'm gonna move to the finger lakes to start making wine, they wouldn't ask me, Oh, what are you gonna make like French style wine? Are you gonna, you know, but there was this understanding, even people understood that terroir that they were attaching the idea of cider to these very specific locales is how they aesthetically identified their cider. And I think there's an interesting element going on, especially in New York State. Maybe I know it better because I'm intimately involved with this state because I'm here, but of trying to not necessarily pinpoint an identity of what North American cider or New York State cider is, but having the opportunity to explore these kinds of elements of balance. Because traditionally speaking, you know, a lot of the Normandy and Brittany ciders are off dry, most of them Kiev, not all, but you know, definitely that, and use varieties that are a little bit lower in acidity.
Then the English style of cider, traditionally speaking, is definitely more on the bitter, sweeter, lower acid style of things. In fact, there's even some writing in the the British reviewers of quality cider that require a low level of acidity to be a to be a good cider. So, you know, I think finding the balance, yeah yeah, it's a maybe it's a cultural difference. Maybe it's because we're in a world where we're used to wines that have high acidity or getting into worlds of cocktails that have a greater balance of acidities and bitter notes and those kinds of things. So I think it's awesome that we're in a realm where we can explore it a little bit more freely than being beholden to like a longer, deeper history of certain traditions.
Right. You know what's interesting on what you're saying with uh yeah I got it. We gotta do it. All right, well, listen, okay, 30 seconds 30 seconds, 30 seconds. So, like uh I think it's interesting.
Oh, well, it takes more than 30 seconds. Like early on in this, you get a lot of things I thought were well crafted products out of places like Virginia where it's low acid inherently because of the hotter kind of climate they have, so it's easier for them to translate what in their head is a cider into a product in a bottle. I mean, we need to talk more about this, but they're about to rip us off the air. Well, but listen, let's take this time. Let's let's just like gentlemen, uh punch your products again, say where we can get them, say the names of your of your places, and then unfortunately we'll have to continue this like in the Twitter trap chat room or online.
But thanks so much for coming. And why just give give the give the give the pitch? Well, no, no, and thanks thanks for having us. Uh Black Duck Cider, uh, you know, basically we're pear and uh cider, and we do lean more to a Spanish style. Um I believe uh the late great uh James Brown did approve our ciders for their funk and um you can pretty much get them uh at some select places in uh uh Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Uh Wasale, of course, the Great Wasale in Orchard Street in the Lower East Side has it. And I just want to uh give a shout out to all the cider drinkers on uh uh Staten Island because uh no one ever gives them props. All two of them out there. Nice. I love you guys.
That's half the population. So you got your good saturation. Leaf, what do you what do you got? So Suns from Cider. Uh tonight at what's sale is the first launch party release of a cider that we're tasting right now.
So come on out after 8 p.m. if you want to buy by the glass and enjoy it there. The cider is pretty limited right now. It'll be available at Wasale and then at the new Rouge tomat when it opens, it'll be by the glass there. And Wassail, by the way, is a cider, a cider focused uh bar in uh lower Manhattan in uh in on Orchard Orchard, right?
Orchard Street, it's a Mecca. Yeah. I mean it's they do a good job. They're the first place, and still, I think the only place in New York City focused solely on cider. I could be wrong, but can I give them props real quick for their chef, the food?
Oh, yeah. Don't overlook it. It's phenomenal. I've been there several times. I endorse.
And the and the pastries, uh, Rebecca. Amazing. All right, listen. That's been cooking issues. Thanks so much.
Cheers. Cheers. 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.
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