Today's program is proudly brought to you by Culture City, a for-purpose organization that provides a place of acceptance and support for all autism families. For more information, visit CultureCity.org. Hey, hey, hey, I'm Jimmy Carboni from Vier Sessions Radio. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwood 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 on the Heritage Radio Network in Roberta's Pizzeria. Where in where's the stas? Where is it? Where are we?
Old radio questions. Yeah, where no, where are we? We're in Chelsea, Manhattan. Ah. That'd be incredible.
Bushwick Brooklyn. So, joined as usual in the studio with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, Stas? Good. And uh she's looking up last week's questions that I missed.
And Jack Jackie Molecules back from his stomach virus. Yeah. Was it a virus or are you food poisoned? See, I was just talking to Stas about this before the show. Everybody pukes, and they immediately assume they've been food poisoned.
Um, which is what I assumed when my girlfriend was puking all Valentine's Day weekend. Uh either that or she was just like sick of me, and it was, you know. Wait, you were both puking it up? No, so she was first all weekend, and then two days later, I got hit with the same thing in the middle of the night. That's virus.
That's not that's not food poisoning unless she got it, cooked you something, didn't wash her hands. No, no, no, no, no. No, then she went back to work at a school she teaches at, and like half of the teachers had been calling out sick with the same thing, so she I hope she kept her mouth shut that it was her that did it. No, it wasn't her. It was some kid in the cafeteria puked when she was working.
So of course it was a kid. Come on. Yeah, well, you know, they're a little virus. But how do you tell Dave way that if it's you know food poisoning or or viral? I feel like d everybody kind of jumps to that conclusion, right?
They're like, oh, it must have been that sushi ad or something. Yeah, I mean, usually, like I only know it's food poisoning when first of all, I very rarely have any of that kind of stuff happen to me, but like I usually someone else will get hit. Like, because I can survive foods that like I've had my my wife get knocked out by foods like like puking like on the ground unconscious. I've had like friends and family like get totally wiped out, and like I just feel like a little bit not as not good. But when I get knocked out and then like everyone around me was eating with me, gets knocked out, pretty sure it was food poisoning.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. At the same time. Also, like if you eat something that's just intensely stupid and you get hit, pretty much, hey, you know it was the food. Like my wife once, she went you familiar with the story.
Fine fair? Yeah. All right, never mind. Wait, what's intensely stupid food? Uh don't buy the week and a half old pre made parfait at your local, like, you know, supermarket that was made by someone in the back.
Got it. Don't buy the sushi that's been sitting there all day, God knows how long. You know what I mean? Like don't like don't buy sushi at a supermarket. You know what I mean?
That has like raw products in it, because all it takes is one knucklehead to not wash their hands before they uh before they do it or to get some cross contamination and you are hosed. You know what I mean? And it's not like it it's not i you know, it's uh at at least at a restaurant, right? You know, you assume that the people who are cooking have had some sort of training or there's some sort of cook there who knows what's right and what's wrong and it's gonna at least partially prevent uh, you know, the the people making the food from completely uh destroying the clientele. But you know, at a supermarket, who the hell knows?
You know what I mean? Yeah. Supermarket sushi. Right up there with gas station sushi, you know, our good friend of the show, Peter Kim, once purchased a moldy sandwich made at a gas station and ate it and didn't die. No, he took the mold off, and then when he was finished with the sandwich, he saw an extra piece of something in the container, and he was like, Oh, I'm not done.
And then he ate the mold, forgetting that he had taken the mold off. Yeah, now listen Peter Kim. The thing about Peter Kim lived like, like literally lived like in a hut in the jungle for years. Can eat it, has amazing pictures from Cameroon of uh like he was like teaching these little kids, and they would draw pictures of people with like horrible intestinal diseases, like spraying fluids out of every orifice, intense stuff. So I guess he you know, he is a strong personality in terms of his constitution, so you know he's like, What's it what's mold gonna do to me?
Although I'll tell you what. Bad mold has the aflatoxin, and then you don't know until you get the cancer, like 20 years later. You know what I mean? You know what I'm saying? I just stay away from it.
Well, we'll check in with Peter in 20 years, right? Wow. For a number of reasons. Uh wow, that's rough. There's a caller on the line.
Oh, okay, caller, you're on the air. Hi, Jeff. This is Andrew from Pittsburgh. How you doing? I'm doing well.
Um, I'm a bartender, and I just had a bunch of really fantastic USB G classes yesterday. Nice. One of them was a removed class, and the guy giving the class um talked about uh Oris roots and it's uh its role in gin, and he kind of described it as um it kind of helped lift the all the other ingredients. It doesn't really have a flavor by itself, it's just kind of bitterness, but it helps lift all the other flavors. Well, it's good it's got a flavor, it's got like a kind of also like a vague kind of sweetness.
I like Oris. I think Oris is is good, you know what I mean? Um we were playing with Oris last week, so I think it's good. Yeah, I mean, you don't want like, you know, you don't want like I don't know that anyone's ever made a plain oris root liqueur. I don't think it would stand on its own, but you know what I mean?
It's that's good. Anyway, so what so do we got going with Oris? Well, I guess so I I mean that anything that was an additive effect to a lot of other ingredients interests me. And so um, you know, I looked up tried to find as much as I could about it and all the usual suspects. I went to McGee and didn't have anything, and then I went to Amy Stewart, and she just had a very strong repeat on it, um talking about how it would like that fixative and help hold fragrances or flavors in solution by creating some sort of a missing compound um to keep them from uh volatilizing.
Is that true or is that just a theory? I I have I mean, I have no idea on this. So I mean I'm coming at it from hearing about this less than twenty four hours ago. Right. So I don't understand why it would do that.
Yeah. I I I mean that that's kind of my question, but is it if you knew more about it and and what you could do with it, or if it was possible to make a tincture that would uh that you could use to kind of act as a way to lift a bunch of other ingredients or I mean if that's even possible or well uh I mean obviously certain flavors and also certain aromas and certain taste ints, right? Uh can push and pull other flavors up and down in the way that you perceive them, even if they themselves are not immediately perceivable. And so the obvious ones are of course vanilla and uh salt, right? So uh and you know, it's entirely um possible, feasible that um oris also has some of those uh characteristics.
I don't understand what would be an oris root that would literally fix, in other words, make uh make volatiles less fugitive you know what I mean? Um maybe I don't know maybe I I uh the thing is I've carbonated things with Oris before and I don't know notice it doesn't have any like it doesn't really change the viscosity it doesn't like I doesn't appreciably I don't think change the surface tension too much so I don't know what or any in other words I don't see I don't see anything that it would change that would stop stuff from volatilizing but it might make volatiles uh more apparent to you now what typically like Nastasia and I literally we did this like a week ago uh or two weeks ago it you know what you should do is and I'm sure you have a local store in in Pittsburgh you know we have a couple here and I know where you know a couple where they are in Philadelphia but you know everyone's got one or there's the internet and you just get a bunch of different um things and and I would make a uh a tea a water based tea and then I would do um an alcohol tincture and I would do one like hot it depends on how much experimentation you want to do hot cold and then uh ISI uh and then um you can kind of get a range because what happens is that the different extraction uh techniques i e in water or in oil uh water or in uh alcohol will will pull out different um different properties and also um whether it's hot or cold or whether it's ISI is going to change the extraction speed and usually the faster extraction speeds tend to reduce bitter components and increase kind of uh aromatic highlights which is which is nice. And so what you do is you just make a whole boatload of these uh tinctures make them one item right and then you can go about and uh mix them. So if you if you're very accurate, if you measure exactly how much product you put into your um tinctures, like you know, like I I am doing 20 grams of Oris into 500 mils of water, f uh 500 mils boiling water, steeping it for five minutes and straining it. Bang.
Now you know and you know, you keep track to make sure that the oris roots are always the same size all the time, so your extraction rate's the same, etc. etc. Then you you know, you're like, okay, I put five milliliters of that solution in and then you know, t you know, twenty milliliters of uh mace, uh uh the solution and blah blah blah. And then you can go back and reconstruct your recipe. Now, it's never gonna taste the same when you try to do all your extractions at the same time or you average them out, but you can get pretty close and you can really kind of fine-tune your um your mixtures.
Or for instance, you could buy someone's gin and you could jack the oris. You know what I mean? You can do a uh a bunch of things like that. So it's a lot of fun. But uh, you know, in order to do experimenting, you really have to and it's uh Stas, how much of a pain in the ass is it?
I mean but butt, sorry, pain of the butt, yeah, it family show. But the yeah, so you're sitting there with like, you know, 30 quart containers all labeled, and you know, don't even bother tasting at the get go. Just crank quart containers out with uh with different known uh solutions in them and then just go out tasting. Teas are the fastest, right? I mean like and cheapest because you're not blasting through alcohol.
So I think as a first approximation, alcohol's gonna taste entirely different, but you know, just for fun playing around, it's uh it's really fun doing um uh teas. And then the great thing about teas is is that it you can use them for sodas, you know what I mean? So you can make sodas and and non alcoholic stuff, uh and then you can later uh kind of re ramp those recipes for alcohol or or or bar, but the remembering that if you do extractions in alcohol, you almost invariably pull more bitter components out. Okay. Um and was that using um fresh oris or was that using the really overdised uh oris that um they do to get the iron to like they something ox wet and turns into iowa.
Uh the only stuff I've ever used is the is like dried, it's like they almost look like very white wood chips, but they're small. Yeah. That's the only kind I've ever I've ever used. And you've seen it fresh or no, no, I I haven't. I was just curious um if there was a way to use a press because the only one that I've seen and talked about was super super dried.
Oxidizes a lot so it um produces the iron. I mean, that's like the I mean the characteristic f one I'm used to is that and you remember is that you know most of the time when people were making liqueurs and things like that, they were dealing with the dried article anyway. Because you know, they weren't growing it necessarily, and if they were they were stockpiling it and drying it. Dry stuff is a lot more stable. So you like um if you're you would never make um and there's a question later that we're gonna talk about hopefully that that you never would make is something that is intended to be stable with something unstable, right?
And so uh liquors uh and liqueurs and and spirits and whatnot typically are meant to be relatively stable over a relatively long period of time. So in general, you'd be using um things that are dried out. Now, I do the exact opposite a lot and try to make things that you wouldn't ordinarily have fresh that couldn't be made that couldn't be made as a commercial product because they they won't last and that is really fun to do, right? So like fresh turmeric, for instance, or fresh galangle or uh, you know, things like this, that the um where the f the you know the the freshness couldn't be really made into a commercial product, uh, but you can because you're gonna sell it right away. But the problem then is if you don't sell it right away, you're you're stuck with a lot of product that costs money.
But you know, that's life in the big city. Yeah. Right. All right all right great. Thank you so much.
I appreciate it. Hey, no problem. Good luck. Um wait so what what were we talking about Sash Food poisoning oh yeah so yeah just stay away f stay away from uh stay away from the supermarket uh sushi right says do you ever eat that stuff no what is there anything that is like really like stupid like that that you like to eat like Mark eats the tiramisu from Food Emporium. Whoa not anymore food emporium out of business remember or fine fare every night.
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa Mark Ladner chef of Del Posto restaurant eats the teramasue from the fine fair the fine you don't even have fine fair wait wait people for those of you that know they shop at big they shop at Big Apple supermarket which is big apple supermarket at least the roaches are refrigerated. I haven't dropped there in a while yeah I used to like shopping there because they have the giant buckets of uh like the giant giant buckets of food like the giant thing of of cheese the government cheese blocks and the giant cans. I forget what can I used to buy. Some giant can of food 15 number 15 that I used to buy there all the time for home. I loved it you hate it?
It's just a little further. Yeah yeah uh okay so oh Stuz another question but maybe of interest did uh did I see that our patent uh provisional patent got put in or no so we can talk about it now? I guess so you sure I can recheck. Yeah she's gonna recheck and if she if we're allowed to talk about uh if we're allowed to talk about our new patent, uh, we can. Oh, and did we have we we have a new product?
It's not like a big new product don't don't get excited. But we're going through beta testing now with some with some users. We hear heard anything back. Do people like it? Do they hate it?
Yeah, Nick likes it. Really? Trying to find how to use it with pebble ice. Huh. So how long uh until we start selling it, you think?
Um, I don't know, like two weeks. Okay, so for those of you that were listening, um, I don't know, we've we've talked about it before on the show, right? There's this it that okay, listen. When you're shaking a cocktail, you want to shake with big ice, right? Why?
Because the texture is better. That's it. The texture's just better. But a lot of times you don't have big ice, right? When I say big ice, I'm talking like two inches on a side, big ice.
And something about that big cube rattling around inside of your uh inside of your shaker, um makes the texture better. But the problem is you don't have that ice a lot. And even if you do have that ice, it's shake once and you throw it away, so you're throwing away all this ice. So your freezer is gonna be full of these big ice cubes. You shake them once, you throw them away.
It's wasteful, right, Stas? Right. Waste, waste. And also, if you're doing an event, right, and this is why we came up with it. If you're gonna do an event and you're going out to uh let's say let's say you're going to some like crap tank, you know, cater location.
I'm not saying that all cater locations are crap tank. Most many are beautiful, but you know what I'm saying, Stas, crap tank. So you go there and the ice they bring you is like the world's worst ice. It's like it like literally is like a soupy, soupy mess of like tiny shells and broken uh things. You know what I'm talking about, Stus?
So that ice from a dilution standpoint, as we all know from the fundamental law of cocktails, if anyone's read the liquid intelligence, like the dilution's gonna be fine as long as you shake off the uh excess water that's on it, because it's got a lot of surface area water on it. But the texture's not gonna be good. So what you do is is uh you we made this fake fake cock cube. What do we call it? The cocktail cube?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Doesn't chill drinks. Listen to me, please, very freaking carefully. It does not chill drinks.
Oh my God. You're gonna confuse the people, Stas. Seriously. It's not gonna actually register in their brains until you say it three times. Okay, listen.
Dude, listen. People are like, okay, so you put this in the freezer and you use it instead of uh ice cube. No. No. No.
First of all, you need ice to melt to dilute the drink, or the dilution will be wrong. Right? I mean, clearly you need ice to melt. And plus, we make this cube out of a uh polymer, it's like polyurethane, that is that is an insulator. It does not chill, nor does it heat your drink.
Does it chill it, Stas? No. Does it heat it? No. Should you put it in your freezer?
No. Right. Right. It neither chills nor heats. It's just there to provide texture.
So you throw this into your into your shaker, along with whatever crap tanking ice you have at your event or at your wonderful house, and you shake it and then you wash off the cube and you start again. Now, the one thing I have been told is that you should run, and it's not in the instructions, people, but that you should run this uh polyurethane cube through the dishwasher once before you use it to, you know, because it's it's and we should have put it in the instructions, but it's a manufactured item, so you want to wash it before you use it. Yeah. I'd say dishwasher, right? Yeah, it's it's a very it's like a rubbery polyurethane because we discovered that if we used a really hard one that you would it would like kind of like uh make little flakes.
But this rubber works great, but it's not so rubbery. Uh did I talk about this in a show ever? We we made one so rubbery that it f that it felt gross. Oh, speaking of we allowed to talk about your sister's art piece? Is that your sister's art piece?
No? Alright, so we won't talk about it. But speaking of like rubbery things that may or may not feel like they belong in in an adult shop. Oh God. Yeah.
Uh this art piece that Stuas sent me a gif of is uh uh unreal. Uh I wish we could talk about it because it reminds me of an art piece that I did. She doesn't know somebody made it there. I don't know who's gonna be. Oh, it's not hers?
No, unfortunately. No, it's not a good one. Okay. So I put collar on the line. Collar, you're on the air.
Hi. Uh hi, Dave Natalcia and the whole gang. Um I am a huge I'm a huge fan of the show. Um I've been trying to make some veggie chips. Uh so far I've been experimenting with taro, um, sweet potato, rutabega, and custava.
I've been having a hard time getting the sweet potato and rutabega to crisp up nicely. I was wondering if you had any suggestion. Right, so they're soft and they go brown too fast, right? Uh yeah. Yeah.
Uh are you soaking them a lot beforehand? So um I tried two um two different things. Uh one of them I uh just like I rinsed them off in like cold water, and then one other time I uh salted them for a half hour beforehand. And both times both things didn't really work. Yeah.
So uh there's a c there are a couple issues here. Uh wait, what was the sweet potato? What was the other one you're having problems with? I'm sorry? Yeah, the the sweet potato you're having problems, what was the other one?
Uh rutabega. Rutabega. Huh. Does rutabega have I guess rutabega does have sugar in it, huh? Yeah, it's it was pretty sweet when I like tra tasted it raw.
Yeah. So the I love rutabega. I've never had a rubega chip. I love it. I don't know why.
Do you know why that the Brits call it sweet? No. Me neither. It's it's a delicious vegetable. Don't you find it an underused vegetable?
Yeah. I mean, it tastes kind of like turnip to me. Yeah, but better. In other words, like if someone said to me, hey, you could have a rutabaga, or hey, you could have a turnip, would you ever say, Give me the turnip? Never.
Rutabega sounds so much better. Doesn't it though? What do you think, Jack? It's obvious. I mean, yeah, obviously.
So uh here's the thing. Um sugar is doing two things bad to you. One. Uh it's browning very quickly when uh when it's frying, right? And secondly, uh as it cools down, the residual sugar, uh, because it's uh you know hygroscopic is gonna be absorbing uh moisture and is gonna make them soft and pliable, which are both your enemy, which is why, by the way, sweet potato fries in general, fries, not chips, fries, uh are hard to make taste good, and so I never order them.
Uh ever. But the uh never. But the the so how do you get around this? One, if you soak to try and get as much soluble sugar out as possible, uh you're gonna win somewhat. The other thing is you're gonna want to do is that you're gonna want to get as much of the liquid out of the thing before uh bef before it goes brown.
So start are you are you starting with cold oil? Um cold oil, I I haven't been. You should. With chips, here's the thing, right? So the the common wisdom when you're frying uh something, right, is you put the oil in uh and you put it in hot and you don't let the temperature drop too much because God forbid uh if the temperature drops, the oil is gonna get absorbed into uh whatever you're frying, right?
This is what we've all been taught growing up, right? Yep. Okay. In a chip, uh chips are supposed to be filled with oil. Anyone who tells you that a chip a chip is supposed to be freaking saturated with oil, like half the weight of a chip is the oil that's been absorbed.
It's it's solely crust. There is no reason to not um you know fully inundate a chip with oil. Now you don't want grease on the outside, right? You want to like, you know, put them on a towel and get the excess grease. Greasy chips, disgusting.
But like they like having oil in the chip itself, not bad. Uh in fact, necessary. That's what a chip is. Uh that's why those quote unquote baked chips are an abomination, enemy of quality, ridiculous freaking things that should be banned. They should not call them the they should call them something else.
Do you like those things, Studs? No. Jack, do you like those dang things? No, no, no. They're ridiculous.
Well, like the thing is, is there a joke? Why don't why do people even why don't they just call them something else? Do you know what I'm saying? They're not a potato chip. Okay, enough.
But listen, if you start from a cold oil, what happens is is that you can regulate the heat. You need to get rid of all of the water. That is your problem. You need to you need to get the water out of those chips before they turn brown. So if you go cold, then you can do that.
So for instance, um some people do this by uh putting a vacuum on. So there was a people used to try this try to sell this thing called a gastrovac, which was uh it didn't really work. But they they said it was a vacuum fryer, but the problem is is that they put a vacuum pump on it that didn't have the cojones to really suck a vacuum while you were frying, right? This it didn't work. But uh people commercially use a vacuum fryer to make things like apple chips.
So the apple chips they want to fry them, but they don't want to absorb a lot of oil because they're I don't know why, because they're you know low quality people. And uh they suck a vacuum on it so that they can get rid of the water at a low temperature without the apple browning because the apple's got a lot of sugar in it, right? And so if if you had a commercial system, which is I think how they do a lot of these kind of things commercially, you could suck a vacuum while you fry, but that's not really an option for you. For you, I would say do an initial soak to get rid of as much of the uh uh sugar as you can, then uh start from cold oil and bring it up slow, get the water out, and then at the last minute, let the temperature ramp up to do any additional browning that you want after they after they kind of bubble the stuff out. You ever do you ever fried tortillas?
No, no, I haven't you should because if you buy to first of all, like buying tortilla chips, they charge too much for the tortilla chips, and I find them too thin. I don't enjoy the thin. Do you like you enjoy thin tortilla chips? I do not enjoy them. They suck.
They suck. You want the thick ones, so like I, you know, I'm not a fan of like uh, you know, the maseca in general, if you can get the real masa, but like for frying, they're fine. Just go buy like the the regular like big stacks of tortilla uh you know tortillas. Uh you know, I I break them in half like a book, like book book, not break them, but like fold them so that they separate and then like peel them all individually apart, put them down into a stack, chop them into six, and fry them. But they're good practice for chips, uh for potato chips because they're a lot more um forgiving than a potato chip.
But you just want to look at a tortilla chip, right? And it's gonna bubble like a lunatic for a while, stir them up, and then you're gonna notice the bubbling start to subside, right? And that's when you know that you've gotten almost all the water out of the tortilla chip. Now, the mistake people make when they fry tortilla chips is they pull them out too soon because they don't want them to get too dark, or they have it. But when you pull them out, you have that little circle on the inside of the triangle that's too white.
Anyone know what I'm talking about, Stas. You know what I'm talking about? And then you tap it and it's not crunchy. Yeah. And that's the worst.
No one wants a saw, unless you're making chiliquilis or something, nobody wants a soggy tortilla chip. It's not what you want. And the same goes true for potato chips, but I would practice maybe with tortillas on on the frying, because you can start tortilla chips also from cold. Uh you don't need to, and and and bring them up, and you'll notice that the water, if you get the oil temperature right, the water will go away, and then you have like a couple, like you have several seconds of window between that and when they start over browning. I also don't like an overbrown tortilla chip.
Do you like that stuff? They start getting that burn over-nutty flavor. No good. Tortilla chips, good practice for you and very cheap. And everybody likes tortilla chips that have been fried at home.
They just they're just like they're just so much better. They really are. Right, Jack? I I agree. All right.
Give that give that a try and tweet us back and let us know how it worked. Well dude. Thank you very much. Alright, no problem. Hey, Jack, should we take a break?
That's what I was just gonna say. Alright, buddy. Today's program is proudly brought to you by Culture City, a for-purpose organization that provides a place of acceptance and support for all autism families. This is Culture City's founder, Julian Maha. Culture City was really born out of uh necessity.
You know, it was born when my uh you know currently six-year-old boy was diagnosed with autism. Uh, his name is Abram, and he's non-verbal. And even though my wife and I were both physicians at the time, it was really hard for us to find any resources at that point to help him. All the other organizations out there that we know of, um, they do phenomenal work, but your main focus is basically finding a cure for autism. Our main focus is basically trying to prepare the community to accept not only children with autism, but their families as well.
You know, in addition to that, we also want to provide help to these families in the here and now. You know, so tangible things like you know, iPads for non-verbal kids, you know, financial scholarships, uh therapy scholarships, you know, art camps, and also some um lecture series that can teach parents about you know dietary issues, um, you know, how to financially plan and things like that. For more information, visit culturecity.org. Sounds good. Are they good people, Jack?
Oops, sorry, they are very good people, yeah. In Birmingham. Very, very good people. Yeah. You know, uh, that's exactly exactly right, I think.
The you know, the attitude is like every everyone, you know, focuses on a cure. When you get hit with uh a diagnosis for your kids like that, it's like oh cure, cure, cure. But no, it's like what you want to do is have your kid be the best them they can be. The most f have the most joy in life for what they for what they want. You know what I mean?
Absolutely. Yeah, that's what they do. That's the whole point of the organization. And uh they're great. And they also kind of like they they were a big part of the wave of getting like iPads and noise canceling headphones in restaurants um and stuff.
So, you know, like having things available for kids with autism and families that want to dine out or or go out. They do tons of work. Culture City with a K. Um, definitely check them out. Yeah, and you know, that's the thing.
If you see like look, parent like people people who don't like have uh haven't dealt with these kinds of issues, just be uh be what's the word I'm looking for, be charitable to people around you. You're like, why is a kid doing that? Just shut up and leave him alone. You know what I'm saying, Jack? Absolutely.
Yeah. Uh and uh because there's a lot of things that you don't understand, like why kids can't, why this kid can't eat food that are mixtures. And look, I have problems with it too. Like why can't kids what who knows? But you know, deal with it.
That's that's life. Uh it is a weird thing not liking foods mixed together, right, Stas? Mm-hmm. Did you were you like that when you were a kid? Uh yeah, but not yeah.
Not like, you know, like not Rose or whatever. Yeah, like like Booker w can't have anything like mixed. He like he wants his chicken broth by itself. Remember when you gave him uh chicken breast and an egg, and I said that's a bad idea because I think you prompted him. So I didn't I said it to you privately.
He's like, Dad, too much protein, Dad. Not too much chicken. Not too much chicken protein because it was an egg. Uh dinner. Here's your dinner kid.
Here's your dinner. Well, look, he looked at the time he just wanted like all he wanted was chicken and eggs. So I figured I'll combine two things he likes separately on on the plate. I don't know. Whatever.
Um so uh Stas, do me a favor. I had a question. Uh I didn't get a chance to look up the recipe because I don't have it committed to memory. I've had it committed to memory before, but I erase it from my mind. Can you look up a Long Island Ice T because we had a question about it, and you can uh ask me.
And meanwhile, I'll hit another uh hit another question here. This in from Benjamin Terry. My sister wants you to know that is not her art project. Uh okay. There may or may not be there may or may not be a rubber there may or may not be a a rubber male member attached to a servo motor that that goes back and forth like a windshield wiper, and as it as it's moving out of the way, uh a steak knife comes down and just misses it, right?
Yes. Uh and so that's the piece that Nastasia's sister said she didn't make. But it reminds me very much of a piece that I actually made back um, you know, before I went to grad school. Did I tell you about this piece? Maybe.
I don't think I've told this on the air. It's stupid. But it's a involves with knives. It's one of the worst cuts I've ever received in my life. I've received some pretty bad cuts.
So uh I I I was very interested in my artwork with in uh kind of um machines and uh and kind of false like spectacle where it looked like you were gonna get hurt but you weren't, or like there was danger, but you know, you didn't end up hurting yourself. So I built this little so I had you know, I built this little kind of machine that was supposed to be a tiny like amusement park ride, and you you grab his handle with your hand, and as you spin the the handle, an uh a razor like I built this knife with razor blades all on it, like all real razor blades, and as your knuckle went down, the razor blade would accelerate over the top of your knuckle. So you couldn't like it was geared, so you couldn't cut your hand, but it accelerated so fast around over your hand that it was like foom, like foom, blinding right over your knuckles. And so I would sit there and I would I would crank it with all these gears, and it would just be boom, boop, boop, boop, boom, these razors right over your hand. It's kind of like freaky, right?
So that was the whole thing, this like kind of little mini amusement park ride. So, anywho, I'm going to uh I applied to actually went to what got in, went to uh Columbia University for fine arts as my MFA grad school. So I'm like, you know, uh I'll bring an art piece with me so I can show him what I do in the you know in the interview. And so I'm having this interview with Alan Hacklin, who is uh he's an artist and he's the uh he was the the head of the program at the time. And so I'm talking to him, and you know how it's hard for me sometimes like to talk and do stuff at the same time.
Yeah, so I'm talking to him, and I had had to disassemble it to to take it with me, right? So I'm assembling this thing while I'm talking to him and like pieces everywhere, and because I'm not paying attention, I assemble it, get ready for it, Jack, 180 degrees wrong. Oh boy. And so what that means is is that the my knuckle is in the high position when the blade is over your hand. And so I'm like, and so you can never cut your shaboof.
And then like the razor blade embeds itself like all the way into my knuckle. I still have the scar, and a blood just starts pouring out of my hand all over his desk in the middle of the interview. And I kept on well, maybe because like my reaction was, um, yeah. I like pulled like a napkin off of his uh desk and wrapped it around my knuckle and tried to like keep as much pressure on as possible, blood like seeping out of it all over my lap. Yeah, they let me in.
I could have finished the interview, kind of scraped the thing under my one arm and like kind of walked out. Anyway. Wow. Yeah. So Long Island ice tea.
Let's see what you got, Stuz. I got that one too. What's in the long okay? Two cups, ice cubes, one ounce vodka, one ounce gin, one ounce white red, and white one ounce white tequila, half ounce triple sack, two tablespoons, freshly squeezed lemon juice, half cup cola, two lemon wedges. What do you got, Jack?
This this recipe says sour mix, but I mean I mean that's you know, then there's the Wondrich variation. Uh, what's his? So Wondrich has uh half ounce absolute vodka, half ounce beef eater gin, half ounce Don Q white rum, half ounce uh milagro blanco tequila, half ounce fresh lemon juice, simple syrup, and um wow, you know, this is I wonder if Perna Ricard paid for that recipe. Those are all Perno, those are all Perno products. Um I have to ask you something though.
I've never been able to pronounce um Quantra, it's Quantra, right? Quantra. Yeah, okay, good. Yeah. Quanch.
The quanch. I love that stuff. You like Quantro? I've trouble it. Yeah.
Yeah. Urcell? And Coke. You have pro you have trouble with pronouncing Curaçao? Not anymore.
Uh well, I mean, I look, I pronounce everything wrong. I got in a huge argument with my wife uh just a couple days ago because I was like, I'm we talked about it on the air. We thought last week we talked about it. I s I'm gonna say coupon. She's like, that's not what it is.
Oh, that's a few weeks ago, yeah. Do you know what she gets really mad at me for? Like uh, you know the word like uh opaque? I say it I say it opaque. She's like, it doesn't have three freaking syllables, it's opaque.
I'm like, no, I say it opaque, and like I don't care. Like I don't care. Like I'll call it chicken if I want. I'm the and that character like you know what I mean. It's like leave me alone with the leave me alone.
You know what I mean? Wow. Yeah. Well, if these are the only problems you have in a marriage, God bless you, right? Okay.
Uh so uh the question about Long Island IST, John from Dallas, and by the way, I tweeted out. Do you know I saw J.R. Ewing's uh hat at the Museum The Moving Image, which is a fantastic museum, and I I I did it on Instagram, but he had he had a really not that expensive hat for J.R. It was like I I like shoved my face against the side of the of the display case. So I could s look and see inside the hat band.
And it was just a triple X beaver, which is like, you know, like an $80 hat. Like a $70 or $80 hat. I have the same hat, but I have remolded it, of course, into a planter shape because that's the only shape that I wear. Whatever. So John from Dallas asks, what affects the perception of alcohol in Long Island Iced tea?
The drink is almost completely liquor, yet it's famous for tasting nearly non-alcoholic. It doesn't seem like it should work. Uh well, I haven't had one in a long time. Although Tristan back in the day used to and Robbie used to make these uh carbonated Long Island iced teas. Which uh they were just doing it for the acronym.
But the the why it works, I think it has to do with any time that you mix uh it's just getting on board. Uh and any any time that you mix a boat ton of stuff together, everything tends to even out. You know what I mean? And you kind of just lose the ability to distinguish uh anything. So I think it's just the cola is probably watering it down and the lemon, and then it's just a uh a poop spray of ingredients.
I mean, I think that's the only thing I can think of. I don't think it's a magical list. I think you could re-jigger it with almost anything else in it and it'd be fine. I'll tell you what we did once at the bar. I get very uh uh I get kind of pretzeled when you know the bartenders come up with drinks that have like 35 different ingredients in them.
And so uh, and I've said it on the air a million times, I call it like shotgun mixing. So I went to the bar once and I literally just went on the back bar and I took the first 15 uh liqueurs and I just mixed them all in equal proportions. Just pick them all up, 15 liqueurs, bang, and they're like, Yeah, it tastes fine. Tastes like cocktail, it tastes fine. I'm like duh.
Because if you mix a bunch of crap together, it just is kind of like uniform cocktail pablum. You know what I'm saying? And so I think something's happening there, the same thing with the with the uh with the ice tea. Was there anything brown in it? No.
Yeah, that's it. They're sticking away, they're staying away from the brown. Okay. Uh Benjamin Terry wrote in. I'm trying to figure out a vegan.
Vegan. The cola also cuts. Yeah. No, I mean brown. Oh, brown, but not mean liqueur.
I don't know. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out a vegan replacement for egg whites in a cocktail uh setting. Lately I've been playing with aquafaba, the chickpea brine, uh, which we have a lot of people who are interested in the chickpea brine. Just does.
I know. Friggin' chickpea brine. And while I haven't noticed too much of a flavor or odor variation, it certainly isn't as frothy as an egg white. Uh I'm mostly using the chickpea water from the falafel place across the street, cold soaked. Would heat change the chemistry and make it frothier?
I bet it would, yes. I would definitely, yeah, 100%. Uh it would also taste more. Uh, any tips for this process or for any other egg white replacements in your experience, I should try. Thanks.
Well, most of the egg white replacements I've used actually are not vegan. So, like milk washing. Um there are certain ingredients that are inherently frothy. So using those here's the here's the thing, right? Okay, look.
Egg whites are doing two things in a cocktail. They're providing uh a texture and a f and a foam froth. But also the proteins in the egg whites are binding with um uh flavors in the cocktail and kind of muting them. So like one of the reasons that an egg white is really good in whiskey sour is because it deadens the kind of uh tannic nature of the wood in the in the oak. So what so there's a flavor thing happening there as well.
So if you're gonna substitute out, now you can just go by, by the way. I don't know if you're against this, you can go buy frothy. The problem with frothy, which is a cocktail frother, and I think it's I don't know what remember whether it's propylene glycolalginate or just propylene glycol, but uh with uh some emulsifiers is that they also add the stupidly add flavor to it, like citric acid and like fake lemon flavor. I don't know why the hell you would do that. Like just sell me the freaking froth.
You know what I mean, Stas? Yeah. Don't sell me the froth plus some other BS, just sell me the froth. But I'm sure someone makes one that just has the froth in it. Um but you know, that adds the the foam, but I don't think it's gonna I don't think it's gonna do that uh flavor uh change uh thing for you.
Now, anytime you uh are gonna put a foam on something, a lot of what times what people want to do is they want to add a stabilizer. So like your chickpea thing probably has some stable stabilizing stuff in it. I've tried various cocktails with Xanthan uh as a stabilizer. It's not a whipping agent. You still need a whipping agent, something like a pineapple juice or a cucumber juice or uh VersaWhip or anything that has kind of uh a a whipping uh uh ability to it.
But the z little bit of xanthan can stabilize the foam so that it lasts longer. Um problem is is that remember we did that test with all those xanthans and you could kind of taste it. It was kind of like a little bit of a remember that yeah. Anyway, uh so I don't have anything uh a hundred percent, but try the f try the frothy. Um I'll try to think about it more.
Anyone on the uh on the webinats on our uh chat room there uh can uh crank in on it too. Okay, uh so uh so what shall we talk about in the in the few minutes we have left? Should we talk about the patent? Should we uh uh flowers on florage? Yeah, I just wanted to double check with him and he hasn't written me back.
Alright, so we'll talk about it next time then. But we we've got the patent in working on the centrifuge, hard is hard as hard is hard. Um it's uh it's a long road. Once we once I can talk about the patent, I'll talk about because someone asked me what's it like to try to make a product in China and I can talk about it. Did I say China like Trump?
Did I just do it? Did I just use Trump's accent when I said China China? China. Uh he has a weary weird way of saying China, right? China.
Very strange. Um we'll talk about when that when that gets back. All right, so then did you have any questions from last week I need to hit, or should I hit this other one? Um you had one about did you talk about the pineapple and the cerez all pineapple drink series all the guy wanted you to acknowledge? No.
It's nothing, it's not a question. Oh, all right. Well uh YouTube videos. Oh, all right. Well, what's w who who was it when we say go look at their YouTube video of pineapple uh I like it, I like that.
I like pineapple, I like Searsols. Um while you're looking for that, I will read uh this. Uh my wife works as an assistant winemaker and is planning a blind tasting of wines doped, doped, with different floral components to taste through with a group of winemakers where she works. We have done by the way, are we we're doing a centrifuge exp uh teaching uh seminar today, right? You are doing that today.
Yeah. Look, when we talk about the patent, I'll do a little bit about how centrifuges work and you know, etc. etc. Okay. Uh we have done similar experiments with fruits and herbs, and it is fairly str herbs, and it's fairly straightforward to extract uh the characteristics.
However, flowers are more of a challenge. There are issues getting all the flowers fresh, extracting floral aromatics versus the green character, among other concerns. Yeah, so the people like pick the calyces off of flowers. Dealing with flowers is a pain in the behind. Um I don't have the list of flowers at present, but I'm sure it includes jasmine, honeysuckle, violets, roses, etc.
Uh are there a specific are there specific methods for making extracts or essential oils that are food safe and can be added into wine directly and are stable for weeks to months? Uh this would make finding all the flowers fresh at the same time less of an issue. If so, what would be the preferred liquid to perform our own extractions that we can later add to wine? Okay, uh from Bobby. So I would definitely get in touch with Mandy Aftel, the uh perfumer, because she deals with this kind of uh stuff all the time.
But in general, flower essence, it flower essences to me they don't really they're not necessarily the same as the actual flower itself. Sometimes they're pretty close, right? Like rose, like rose. Rose can be pretty close. Uh but you you don't want to do a straight extraction uh into most of the time if you try to do a straight extraction of a flower directly into alcohol, it gets that disgusting soaked flower flavor.
You know what I'm talking about, Saz? That gross soaked flower flavor. So typically the uh the kind of uh essences and are are made in in one of several ways, but steam distillation is the easiest, kind of the cheapest way to do it. But a lot of flower aromas are and then they're then they're fixed in alcohol or other things. And you can get them and they're stable and you can get them food grade.
I mean, some flowers are poison some flow not sunflowers, some flowers are poisonous, and so you should stay away from them. Remember, we were gonna put some poisonous flower into a drink, and I was like, come on, it's a little bit okay. And they're like, no, really poisonous. No, kill you. Some iris variant.
No. Wasn't it you that we were looking to say? Yeah, but they were anyway. Uh but some flowers can't be uh done that way. So the like the hardest one is like tuberos, is really difficult to do distillations because the flavor breaks down.
Now we used to do tuberos in the rotovap. Remember, Stas? That was a pain in the behind. We would rotovap the tuberos because it was all at a low temperature so it wouldn't break down. Do you like tuberos?
Mm-hmm. That's the one that grows on the beach. Uh no, it's the one that they make Hawaiian lays out of, and it's got that like aroma. It's hard to do. Anyway.
The classic way to do flowers that are difficult to do via distillation is a technique that Sam Mason used to play around a little bit with, but and you know, but it kind of got superseded by fat washing in general, but is uh enflourage. Uh and so remember what's that movie Stas about the perfume guy with the enflourage where he was like, It says perfume, yeah. Yeah, it's just called perfume? What was he doing? Killing people and getting their aromas?
What was he doing? Yeah, that was it, yeah. Yeah. So anyway, the way enflourage works is that uh it's labor intensive is that you take the the f the aromatics in the flowers are soluble in uh fat. So what they do is they take typically for these, they take a solid fat, spread it on glass plates, and then put the flowers onto the glass plates and then stack the glass plates up so that the aromas are just constantly wafting in these in these crates of glass plates through the fat, and then like after a specific amount of time, like a while, they'll rip the old flowers off, slap another layer of flowers onto them, and basically get these like hyper aromatic uh flower fat things.
And the reason you leave in there for a long time is that the flowers, you pick the calyx off, by the way, the green part, so it's doesn't have those green things, f aromas. The flower keeps on making aromas until it starts to break down. And so the flower like the rather than just getting like a like a couple of minutes or a couple, you get like a long period of the flower producing these aromas that you absorb into the fat. Then you wash the fat with very high proof ethanol to take the flavors out of the fat, but you're not pulling any of the weird, bitter, crappy stuff out of the flowers because you've already removed the flowers from the equation by the time you put the alcohol in. And that is how Enflorage works, and that's the way I would go.
And we gotta go. 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.
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