Today's program is brought to you by Whole Foods Market, a dynamic leader in the quality food business, a mission-driven company that aims to set the standards of excellence for food retailers. For more information, visit Whole Foods Market.com. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, 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.
Hey, hey, I'm Jim. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, not Jimmy Carbone. Coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network from Robert's Pizzeria in Bushwick. I'm bruting calling your questions to 7184972128.
That's 7184972128. Stas, you like how I put a little Broadway to the. Did you see what that lady did? No, what she did. Well, because I put the Broadway on my voice, and she's clearly not a Broadway.
Did you enjoy the Wait, who? Uh an employee or a customer? A customer? Customer. Oh, cool.
Yeah, whatever. Like that seat was there to punish customers. You know they only put people there that they hate patents. Only when there's not a radio show going on. At least not when we're doing it.
Right. I mean, you know, you know what I'm saying. So we are joined in studio today with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. Peter's coming for lunch. Uh again, this is information that the people in uh out there in cooking issues lands.
Don't need to know. I think they care. Yeah, yeah. But he's not here for them. Hey, by the way, odds are Peter Kim took a shower this morning.
No, no, I'm saying if you're not going to be able to do You know what? At some point this evening, Peter Kim will go to sleep, and then tomorrow he's gonna wake up when he's thirsty, as David Letterman used to say, he will drink a cool, refreshing beverage. And it will slake his thirst. I mean, he's not gonna be here to like, you know, for their benefit, so what the hell do they care? People like Peter Kim, I thought, but that's fine.
But that's not like Jack, are you with me on this at all? Joining the booth also about Jackie Molecules? I don't know. There's some Peter Kim fans in the chat room. But I'm saying, like, like that's even meaner then.
Peter's not gonna be here with you. Well, that's what Stas is doing. She's torturing them. It's like Peter's gonna join us for lunch, but he won't grace you with his presence on the show, you know? Wow.
Yeah. Okay. So Grace. So uh unfortunately, not joined via telephone today with uh Professor uh Richard Rangham of the Harvard University. Apparently, do you have a want-wan noise in there, Jack?
So strong. So strong. I wish May 3rd. I wish I played like uh a trumpet or anything like brass so that I could put a hat over the front of it and make that noise. You know what I mean?
It's just such a classic, it's like an in your face. Can I hear that one more time? But what you do have is a boat. Oh my god. Whoa.
Look, I mean, did you see it, Jack? I look, that might be one of the reasons. So here's the thing. The doctor gave me like free reign now to do whatever I want. Like I can I can take up my amateur career in boxing again.
I don't have an amateur career in boxing. Uh with my eye, like my eyes, but then over the weekend, I I literally tore a muscle in my arm, ripping vines out of the ground in advance of them blooming. I f actually I don't know. My wife is like, you need to go to the doctor. And I'm like, what the hell are they gonna do about it?
My arm hurts. Like, what is a torn what is a torn thing feel like? Is anyone torn anything ever? Does anyone know what a torn thing feels like? Not that I know of.
I mean, I've broken things. Malcolm says it hurts like hell. Yeah, but is it is it possible that it hurts? Like, in other words, like I can move my arm like down and like this. I can go bibbity bibbity bibity-bibibbity boo, right?
Bibbity bibbity boo. But I can't extend my arm. Yeah, Nastasia. No, it's right like on the side of my arm. Like I can't extend my arm like I can't like punch nostalgia as much as I want to with my left hand, or like do like fist pumps in the air of victory with my left arm anymore because of like intense, intense sharp pain.
If you tore a muscle, you c you could be releasing whatever that stuff is. What the hell are you talking about stuff? Like there's some kind of yeah, somebody told me that. Okay, yeah, somebody. You sound like Dax who like comes with him with the craziest theories from his dirtbag buddies, the craziest freaking theories.
Wow, dirtbag buddies is a great band name. Oh my god, it's the best, right? That's good. Dirtbag buddies. Um I I use the term dirtbag buddies so much that I've actually called Dax's friends dirtbag buddies in front of the dirtbag buddies' parents by mistake.
Oh my god. I'm like, yeah, Dax is out with his dirtbag buddies. I mean, not your kid. Your kid's not a dirt bag. I mean, they are you know what I mean?
You know how it is. All kids are kind of dirtbags, right? Boats. Yes. Look, I don't know that we have time to get into the boat.
Look, I've I was at the dump, right, as I am wont to be at the dump, and I picked up a uh someone threw away a boat. Turns out it was uh made for the Sears and Road Buck Corporation in the mid 60s. Uh it is a 14 foot fiberglass runabout, but the hole is fine. All I need to do is find an I found out later I can buy one of these for like three dollars and fifty cents. And I'm gonna have a tough time getting it uh registered because it has no owner and I can't find an owner.
Do you have to? Yeah, it's like you can't just like suddenly show up at the DMV with a car and being like, hey, where'd it come from? I found it. You know what I mean? It turns out you can't do that with a boat either.
Be like, what is the the dump gonna write you an affidavit? Yeah, yeah, that was dumped off you. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm saying?
How you register a boat that doesn't exist? Plus, I have to do a lot of fiberglass work. I have you could go to the Sears Company and you could give the thing. No, they don't make it. It's like Kenmore.
They don't make any of that stuff. They don't make any of that stuff. And there's no online, there's no online way to trace boat ownership because I have the old Connecticut registration number on it. Anyway, it's not worth the amount of time and energy I'm gonna put into this dang thing, but I definitely want to get that son of a gun out on the water. It's got a really cool like curved front windshield, it's kind of Robin's egg.
It's really nifty. And the wood is still good. It's got a couple of problems, like none of all the metal is stripped off by freaking scavenger freak shows. You know, people show up at dumps with screwdrivers, just take off little pieces of metal. I mean, whatever.
It's good business, I guess. Whatever. Uh, point being, uh, we I have I have a couple people. Remember, remember Captain Jeff, Crazy Jeff intern. Yeah.
He's a captain of he is a Coast Guard guy. One of my favorite cooking guys, Coast Guard Lunatic. He he used to captain one of those rescue boats that can flip over in the water where in order to be on it, registrant, you have to strap yourself to the top side and it capsizes and it takes like a full minute to flip around, so you have to hold your breath underwater the whole time. He's the guy that married the judge and that he had a hearing in front of for some sort of crazy like 200 mile an hour speeding ticket or some nonsense on his motorcycle. That's not a real story.
It is a real story. And dude, the guy back when he was in the in the service was a uh was uh a demolitions expert. Guy's a straight nut job. Wow. Love that guy.
Look, that guy, I don't know if anyone listening, why this person doesn't have some sort of a TV show, I have no freaking idea. What's the guy in the big Lubowski, his friend? I don't know. I haven't seen it in decades. Uh whose animals.
Yeah. Anyway, he w we he went to the French Culinary Institute, and so you know, he's a he's a cooking guy as well. But I mean, man, he is like he's like the Long Island version of Duck Dynasty without the beard. You know what I mean? He's like you know what I'm saying?
We gotta get him on the show. Yeah, sure. I love that guy. He's a good guy. He always brings a gun with him.
I don't know whether he still has his concealed carry, but he once okay, I shouldn't say this, but since it's all over, I think it's okay. He was once packing freaking heat at the French culinary under his whites. Who are you gonna shoot in the head at the French culinary well, plenty. Yeah, no. Plenty.
Anyway. Alright. So we have some questions to get to. Uh, so we might as well uh get to them. Oh, you said when's the rangum gonna come on now?
May 3rd. May 3rd, huh? Yes. Unless he decides to cancel again. You know, I was gonna be very favorable towards him on uh not I mean what his theories are his theories, but like there's some people who have come out kind of against his theories.
I was talking about him last week. And I was gonna like say all sorts of unpleasant things about them, but maybe now I'll be a little no, not really, you know me. Like uh I'm gonna be excited to talk to him when he finally comes on, but whatever. Uh so I'm sorry, there will be no Paleolithic uh discussions. There'll be no discussions of uh division of labor uh early in humans.
There'll be no dis uh discussions of uh tuber consumption in Paleolithic Africa. It just won't happen right now. Till May. Till May. Until May.
Alright. Kevin writes in, uh, supporting you, actually, Nastasia. I know. I know, me, I know. But you weren't thinking of these freaking things.
You never had one of these things. The shrimp things you saw. Well, whatever. Let me read the thing. Oh, before people get all pretzeled up.
I have a comment and a couple of questions. Uh regarding the use of when you see RE, do you say regarding or do you say RE? I say regarding. Yeah. I'm gonna start saying regarding.
That's a lot better than saying RE. Yeah. Can we uh just ca there's a girl dressed in some kind of ancient garb out there? You see her? I see someone in a red jacket.
Her back is to us and she's putting a headpiece on. Now watch the front. Are you making why are you making fun of someone's clothes? It's so crazy. Do you want to take a collar before you get to this?
Uh yeah, okay. She's not wearing ancient. She's got a Xena Warrior Princess outfit on, but it's not ancient. It's Xena is not ancient. That's New Zealand modern.
Okay, yeah. Uh it's she's through the pipe. All right, uh, yeah, call is the caller there? Call her. You on the air?
Are you? Hello. Hello. I'm here. Hello.
It's Stephen from Indianapolis. How are you doing? All right, how you doing? Doing great. Um, I had a question.
Uh you brought up uh I think like two or three weeks ago about the Lohie bread method. Yep. Um we're gonna talk about it again later. Go ahead. What were you saying?
Sorry. Oh no, and and uh I I I think we might have to address it again later, but let's just hit it now. Let's just do it now. Go. Okay.
Well, my question was um, so when you're looking at the the gluten development and the lahy bread method, I actually have like two breads going in my closet right now over 18 hours, and it's supposed to align and mature the gluten. Uh and I know that like when you're making and I I I try and consider like what you're doing with gluten in the way of like when you're making stretched noodles, you're aligning up the gluten, right? How d how does the gluten mature in each situation? How is it different? Okay, well, you know, one of the the theories, right?
The theory of operation here on the on the no-need and on a lot of stuff is that actually a lot of what you're doing when you're developing a dough simply isn't necessarily um the aligning per se, but the actual hydration of the gluten. I remember you're going way back. I haven't actually thoroughly researched this subject in a long, long time. But that a lot of the strength of gluten is coming from uh uh strength of the gluten network, isn't coming from uh the aligning, but rather the hydration and then the um bonding of the uh of the gluten network, right? And so that if if you just let it sit there, and this is why, you know, also I mean most of these uh most of these breads are fairly high hydration, right?
Like what's the hydration ratio on your on your what do you got? Um so it's uh 400 grams of flour, 300 grams of water, so 75%? Yeah, yes, that's fairly high hydration, right? I mean, by the way, for those of you that don't bake bread out there, uh hydration in in bread language, and in fact I use this for like a lot of stuff whenever I'm dealing with flours, is uh baker's percentage. So it's liquid expressed as a percentage of the flour that you put in.
Um it's just over it's just over the flour. I mean, because most of the time when you're making bread, the rest of this stuff is so minimal anyway, so you're not counting like yeast and salt or any other adjuncts you're adding. But anyway, um so they're fairly high hydration, right? And just by letting them sit around for a long time, the uh gluten uh hydrates over over hours and uh forms a network. And then usually, right?
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but even in like the most simple one, the you have uh uh like an an over, over, over, overstep inside of the inside of the cat uh whatever you're gonna do to give it structure, right? Right, right, yes. Right. And so I think that is where like a lot of that stretching is super important, is forming the internal structure of the bread. And frankly, that's where like a lot of people uh kind of fall short with the with the no need, and where McGee, if you go back and read Harold McGee's um articles on it, or article on it in the New York Times, I think his main his main point is the bread is delicious, however, it's it's not necessarily easy using that technique to get a wide variety of internal structures on the bread, right?
Because it's fairly high hydration and there's not a lot of work. Whereas if you look at a lot of classic uh classic bread um a lot of classic breads, there's two things that are going on in the bread. There uh well m millions of things going on in the bread, but I mean in other words, there's there's the recipe itself, right, and then there's how it's manipulated. And only part of that uh manipulation, and I would say from a functional standpoint, the least important part of that manipulation is how the bread is needed, right? It's getting it to a certain point of development in terms of its gluten structure extremely important, right?
But then once you get past that, uh then like different forming uh techniques take on uh their relative importance to give us the different shapes, the different uh outside crust textures, what the burst looks like when it's slashed, etc. etc. et cetera. Uh and so most of the criticisms I've heard of these relatively high hydration, uh, relatively unworked bread is frankly their lack of internal structure. Okay.
So so when you're looking at like the difference in structure between like uh like a pulled noodle, which I've actually attempted and it ended up miserably. Yeah. Uh whose recipe did you use? What was that? Were you using the Chef Tom recipe?
Uh yeah, yeah, I was. Okay. Um and uh and I tried to, and I even did it like like slapping it on the table like they do in the you know, just to try and relax the gluten. But I I know that that's linearizing the gluten. When you're making bread, it's actually like the the kneading is is really important in the structure of the bread because of the way that you're organizing the gluten after the proof.
Well, yeah, here's a couple things on uh on on the noodle recipe. My mental understanding of what's going on, watching people make it, right, is you have actually an extremely slack dough. There's almost no elasticity to that thing. Right? So in my mind, you're dealing with a situation where the gluten has been kind of beat literally beaten into submission, right?
So the structure of the dough is linearized, but the actual gluten has been put into some sort of compromised form, right? Clearly, because if you take uh uh a well-developed dough, right, and you and you, you know, uh that you've kneaded a lot and you push into it, the sub it has some elasticity. It comes back, you stretch it, it stretches back. That's why, you know, um that's why it does that. You can stretch it out thin because it's elastic, but if you just take a big hunk of dough and go should bring, it has some it has some kind of pull to it.
That's what the gluten, you know what I'm saying? And so uh it's definitely an overdeveloped dough, right? Now then then now then the c but on the other hand, then why do they need to add uh why do they add a base to it, right? So base is strengthening the gluten. I don't know whether that's making it for quicker overdevelopment.
I really don't understand it, but I've felt the dough that you've made and it feels dead in your hands, right? So pulled noodle dough in your hands, and I'm sure you felt it too when you when you did it, it feels weird and dead. You know what I'm saying? Because it doesn't have that kind of life that like an elastic kind of gluten-y or like a even like a like a like a pizza dough or something like that would have. Um so frankly, I've never had good luck with that recipe either.
Uh I th uh my feeling is is that pulled noodles is one of those things that uh once you get it right once or twice, you're gonna get it right forever. You know what I'm saying? But it's a lot about uh the hydration and getting the texture uh exactly exactly right. Uh because you know the people I see doing it down, you know, the block from where I live, you know, I look at them and I don't, you know, think of them as being like some sort of i you know enlightened Buddha. You know what I mean?
They're not like some sort of being from on high that is given the knowledge of how to make noodles. I think you know, they probably just hung out with someone who knew how to do it, and then like so even Chef Tom, who uh I don't know what he's doing now, but he was or maybe still is teaching at the at the cooking school that the French culinary owns out in San Jose. Um I bet you even if you hung out with him for a day, you could probably get it right. You know what I mean? It's all a question of just getting there's some there's something to it to the feel of it that if you just get it right, it's gonna go.
But my feeling about it has always been that it's an overdeveloped dough, and so I wouldn't necessarily in other words, if you were to take that dough and you were to uh uh you know somehow add yeast to it after you did that to it, I don't think it would make great bread. Right, right, right. Okay, and and uh I guess uh one more point and sorry, sorry for the multiple questions, but one more point to it is the difference between the the stretch dough and ramen, right? They both have base in them. Right.
But is there such a thing as so is it is it a mechanical denaturation of the gluten? I'm a chemist, so I know it from like a chemical standpoint and the temperature and a thermal standpoint, but not like uh like is there such thing as mechanical denaturation of gluten? Well, I mean, look, I I from an actual um chemical standpoint, I don't know. I do know that if you look at the pharynographs of um so they would hook up uh you know um measurement devices to mixers basically and measure how much energy was being put into a mixer over time uh in dough development. It's called a pharynograph.
And I think it is, I mean I haven't looked at them in years, but um you look at it and there's definitely a peak force that it takes to mix it and a breakdown stage. Um so what that yeah, what that would lead me to believe is that there's some sort of peak development after which there's destruction of that network, whether or not it recovers again. Anecdotally, people say it does not, right? And there and there are other there are other doughs that are that are based on the destruction of the dough structure, the most famous in the US being beaten biscuits, right? So where where where you'll take uh uh a dough and you'll just beat the beat the ever loving snot out of it with a with a rolling pin.
I went through a uh a period years ago where I was trying to make that dough via repeated lamination instead of actual physical violence, and I was never able to get the exact texture uh through repeated lamination that I was able to get through the uh just uh immense physical violence of beating with large sticks. Okay. Interesting. All right, thank you, Dave. I appreciate it.
Hey, no problem. Good luck and let us know how it goes. Today's program is proudly brought to you by Whole Foods Market, America's healthiest grocery store with more than 400 locations throughout the United States. Download the Whole Foods Market app on your smartphone for recipes, sales, information, and digital coupons, or visit Whole Foodsmarket.com to find a store closest to you. Have you listened to A Taste of the Past?
It's a show devoted to connecting our current food world with its storied past. Host and culinary historian Linda Palacio welcomes chefs, scientists, authors, scholars, and revolutionaries into the studio to discuss food culture and history from around the globe. Have you seen the culture of food change over the past 25, 30 years? It's been incredible. Linda covers content ranging from the history of black chefs in the White House to behavioral psychology and the evolution of Italian food in America.
You can listen to a taste of the past anytime on Heritage Radio Network.org or on iTunes and Stitcher. Today's program was brought to you by the 2016 Food and Enterprise Summit, presented by Slow Money NYC. Want to learn how to finance a better food system? Are you ready to showcase your food business or product in front of New York's top players in the food industry? Join like minded entrepreneurs and investors at the 2016 Food and Enterprise Summit in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Tickets available at food and enterprise dot com. Save twenty percent when you enter special discount code Friends20 for Heritage Radio Network listeners. And so b and and on that subject, you know, someone was saying that. Do you have another call? Oh, I have another call.
Yeah, we do. But do you want to get to the thing, the shrimp thing first? Oh well, well, no, no, we'll go, yeah. Caller you're on the air. Hi, Dave.
It's uh David from California here. How are you doing? Hey, good. Um, I'm gonna be uh designing uh well, I'm designing a a house uh uh for for me and my family. But I was wondering if you had some tips about kitchen design.
Um maybe just uh whatever comes to your mind, although keep in mind that I'm probably gonna be in an all electric situation, so no gas. Okay. Uh are you like what what area of California and what kind of neighborhood is it? Uh well, I'm actually up in the mountains. Uh, and so we're at 6,000 foot altitude.
Um, and it's it it can be cold. Oh, nice. You're in the land of sugar pine cones, huh? Beautiful. I love it over there.
Is that are you in the Sierra somewhere or somewhere some other mountains in California? So um, kind of sort of near Big Bear uh in Southern California if you know where that is. Yeah, southern. I only know like yeah. All right.
What do you Stas? You know that stuff? Stas is like, yeah, I'm from down near there. Okay. So here's what I would say.
I would say there are some things uh I mean, go induction. If you're gonna go electric, go induction, period. You know what I'm saying? And then get uh, you know, your range is gonna be fine induction. How big's your family?
Uh just my wife and uh a baby for for now. Well, congratulations on the baby. And are you gonna try to in integrate indoor and outdoor cooking? I'm sorry? Are you gonna do have like an indoor-outdoor situation?
Are you gonna try to have some of your cooking take place outdoors? Yeah, I mean, I I have a barbecue and a smoker, um, although uh that you know, that's not the bulk of what I do. So, what's the bulk of what you do? What do you like to cook? Um, I'm kind of uh uh, you know, uh a steak and potatoes kind of guy.
Um, although uh I am a deep fry maniac like you are. So I like I I'm gonna say this up front. Outside the house, like uh like I like having access from the kitchen to an outdoor place where the cooking is. So if you're ever gonna do cooking outside, like uh whether it be grilling or the stuff I'm about to talk about, um you want to have very fluid and easy access between your main kitchen and outside. And you want that outside cooking area to have a cover on it, right?
So you either want to build a separate cover for it or you want to have it close to the house where there's an eve that extends over it such that you can work. That's what I have. And you're gonna want to put a deep fryer out there. You're gonna want an outdoor deep fryer. I would run that sucker off of propane, which you can get so you don't have to worry about plumbing gas to the house.
And since you're not gonna use it every day, you can run it off of 20 uh pound things and it's not gonna uh bankrupt you. I'm just gonna make that suggestion right now. And you can and you know, take it for what it is, but like my my situation like that works great because I have outside I have the tandoor, the fryer, and like an outdoor um prep station where I can work that's all protected from the rain. Uh and I love that it's right next to where my kitchen is. Now it's not perfect because it wasn't designed, but it's pretty good for moving indoor and outdoor, getting large amounts of food in and out properly because sometimes we'll be cooking outside and eating inside and vice versa and all that other stuff.
Inside, I would definitely go I would 100% go induction. The main thing I would like worry about is I don't know how you know your relationship with your spouse is or what they like, but the fight usually is between between visible cooks and the non-cooks is between visible uh exposed storage of things and closed in. I'm a huge advocate for trying to have as much um non-enclosed storage as is humanly possible and throwing away as many non-matching um things as as is humanly possible. And this usually comes at odds because people think it's uh it's ugly. Also, if you don't cook a lot, exposed storage gets dusty.
But if you do cook a lot, then you do what I do, which is you I have like four sizes of bowl, and I only have those four sizes of stainless steel bowl, and they stack, and you're always pulling the one on top, so it never gets dusty. You know what I'm saying? You have to dust the shelves and stuff, but they the the things themselves never get dusty. So I'm a huge uh advocate of that. Here's another one.
Build a s uh build a uh speed rack, you know not a bar speed rack, but a uh like one of those cooling racks that uh that tray uh tray rack speed rack that you can put uh sheet trays into. Build one of those if you ever like entertaining, build one of those into your kitchen. Uh I have one that's on casters and it can roll in and out, and I have one in you know in my apartment that doesn't. And you can just you know how when you're cooking, you have like a bunch of food, and you can't get that food out of the way to cook the next round of food if you're doing like a party or something like this. Well, if you have one of those rack trays, you can just you can just sheet up entirely huge amounts of stuff and throw it into the sheet rack while you're working on the next thing, or like if you're like me and let's say you make Christmas cookies.
I mean, I don't know what you do, but let's say you're like me and you make Christmas cookies. You want to make a whole bunch of Christmas cookies. Normally these things would be spread all over your house, so it would be a freaking nightmare while you're making them. But if you have one of these speed rack things, you can just start throwing uh the sheet trays into it, tray after tray after tray after tray. So I would make sure that A, your oven can handle a full-size sheet tray because it's just so versatile.
If you're ever going to do entertaining, I would uh electric. I would then uh I would uh if if I were you, I would use I would go into some place, whatever oven you're gonna get, I will go in and use it a couple times. Like I hate, hate a lot of the um control functions on modern electric ovens. Like, for instance, like uh I have an electric uh one of my ovens is an electric oven, right? You know what I use it for?
You know what I use it for 80% of the time? Warming. Warming. 80% of the time, it's a warming oven. So like I'll be cooking a bunch of stuff in my tandoor or on the grill, or I'll I'll have like a whole bunch of pancakes that I'm making on the griddle, right?
And then I want to keep them warm. But every time that I uh every time that I want to uh use the oven to keep it warm, it takes me 35 to 45 seconds to turn it on and turn the temperature down because they you know they assume that when you press go on your oven, you want it at 350. And so to make it say 170, you have to sit there forever with your finger on a button. Hate. Hate.
So I would look into things like that. Actually, uh, if you can believe it, Dave, I have a CVAP. Ah, yeah. Uh see, you're so you know, you didn't tell me this. Now you go entirely different.
So if I were you, here's something like it depends on how sustainable you want to be, right? One of my dreams, and no one has ever done it. In fact, although it's uh Neil uh not Neil Armstrong, Louie Armstrong, the musician, right, had a had a uh uh what's it called? A uh dishwasher? No, dishwasher.
Commercial dishwashers, right? Why doesn't anyone make a commercial dishwasher that has a residential mode that says, hey, look it. I have an hour to sit here while you wash dishes, right? And you can be eco-friendly, blah, blah, and quiet, all Bosch like. You know what I'm saying?
And then, but it's like, I have a party, there's 30 people here, cook the dishes, clean them, clean them, clean them, clean them. And then you press it and they're clean in a minute. A minute and a half, like a commercial dishwasher. And for that minute and a half during the party, yeah, tremendous energy waste, but it's only for that short amount of time. Why doesn't no one build that?
Why does nobody build that, David? Wow. Yeah. So you know what people do? You know what people with money have to freaking do?
Buy two dishwashers. What a freaking waste of kitchen space. Two dishwashers is. But it's the only way to get around it if you're a party master because you you you're gonna wind up like your kitchen's gonna fill with dishes. Who?
I've seen them. Who? I've seen them who really rich people. Yeah, but they're not good for normal use because they're entirely so you have to have a commercial and then you have to have a for glasses. But you have to have a commercial and then you have to have a re regular residential unless you hate the environment.
Do you hate the environment, Nastasia? I don't. Well, you know, he lives in California, he's not allowed to hate the environment. He lives in the mountains. He's not allowed, it's like you physically you're not allowed.
You'd you'd be looked down upon by everyone in your community. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's true. Yeah, especially in the mountains.
It's a why would you live in the mountains if you didn't like the environment? Yeah, but but residential dishwashers run for an hour. Yes, but they doesn't waste much time. No, no, no. They're so much more efficient.
They're so much more efficient than it it it seems like it's a waste, but they're very eco-friendly compared with uh and they use a lot less power. So that's the other question. You're gonna get 220 volts. Uh thank you, Elliot Papanot. Uh Jonathan Sawyer, the chef at Gra um, what's the restaurant?
Uh the Cleveland chef. Yeah. Yeah, he's got one. At his house. At his house?
Does he love it? Does he love, love, love it? I would assume so. You know what? It's so freaking easy because someone like Hobart also like can make stuff for home.
Just like just like team up with a home person, charge three times as much. How many gallons, how much more energy? Oh my god, Nastasia. Oh, I mean, it's like a lot more. They're completely not efficient.
First of all, they're they're bad for your dishes because they're running super hot, and they they you have like a little boiler that heats that water up to tremendous temperatures. They're just butt, they're freaking monsters, huh? Right? And the other thing about them that's nice is that if you have parties a lot, like I have like here's what's depressing, right? Commercial glass racks are awesome because you have glasses that you're only gonna use at parties, right?
So you put them in commercial glass racks, and they're so close to fitting in a regular residential freaking uh dishwasher. So if you just like modify them a little bit, you could store all of your party glasses in racks. You could live like a normal human 90% of the time, and then rack and roll when you're putting in having parties, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, well, whatever. That's life, big city.
Yeah. We do have another caller. All right, caller. Caller, you're on the air. Hello?
Hello. Hey, uh, it's Josh from Virginia. Um I had a quick question on if you had any advice to control bubble size when uh carbonation uh carbonating cocktails out of a CO2 tank. We're running a CO2 tank through with the hose and the uh you know screw on cap. Okay.
Uh uh Okay, how are the bubbles now and which way do you want them to go? Uh they're really, really small, like Perry esque, uh and I would like to get them up larger towards uh like Topo Chico size, ideally. So like a kind of mix of medium and large. Okay. So for a given liquid, right?
For a given liquid, bubble size is going to be determined uh a hundred percent by the amount of CO2 that is uh in the uh beverage and the temperature that it's uh at. In other words, like how fast the CO2 is leaving is going to determine the bubble size. So uh one thing to do is to get your your CO2 pre your CO2 dissolved, not necessarily the pressure you're carbonating at, but getting the dissolved CO2 level to be much higher. So ways to do that are to make it colder, right? Or to make it clearer, or to uh carbonate it um multiple times or more times than you're doing now with a lot of foaming off in between to make sure that you're getting the maximum amount of CO2 in there.
So if you have your thing and you let it sit for like 15, 20 minutes, if you reattach your c your CO2 tank and start shaking it again, and you hear the gas going from the tank into your beverage, it means it you haven't fully added as much CO2 to that beverage as is possible. Okay. So within a given beverage, the bubble size will be determined by those things. And for instance, uh for note on temperature, just think about when you crack open a cold seltzer versus when you crack open a warm seltzer and the bubble size difference there, just because the bubbles are leaving at a tremendously faster rate. And so the bubbles get bigger as they're traveling from the bottom to the top of the glass.
Really, once a bubble forms, its size is pretty much dependent on the characteristics of the liquid, which we're gonna talk about in a minute, and how fast CO2 is leaving the liquid and going into that bubble in the short time it has from when it forms near the bottom of your glass to when it bursts on the surface of the liquid, right? Okay. So now we've dealt with those kind of physical factors. Then there's a liquid itself. So uh things like salt, uh, like the l larger the the dissolved mineral content uh in it, the the kind of smaller the bubble perception is gonna be and the size of the bubble's gonna be.
That's why like a lot of fairly carbonated, like very mineralized waters don't appear to be that bubbly, even though there actually is a lot of CO2 in them. Uh I'm talking to you, German waters. And um the you know, other thing it's gonna it's like uh alcohol content. So if you want larger bubbles, you lower the alcohol content um or anything like that that affects the uh surface activity of the liquid, right? So um, you know, uh increasing the alcohol content will decrease the surface uh tension and increase the viscosity, and so your bubbles will start getting larger and foamier, right?
So at least that's my it's been a while since I've I think that's right. But anyway, so like there's a liquid itself, but I would focus on physical things first. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. All right.
Let us know how it works. Yeah, we'll do things. Alright, cool. Um. All right.
So let's get uh see what am I saying? So what were you talking about? Tortas. This isn't even a question, it's a it's it's a comment. Uh torta defin okay.
Regarding the use of torta to mean sandwich in Mexican cuisine, and just so you know, this is from Kevin. And he's uh defending Nastasia the hammer Lopez. Kevin, defending Stas. Like she needs someone to defend her, please. Please.
Torta definitely means sandwich. How do you oh I'm not no tangents, no tangents. Torta definitely means sandwich. However, I've also seen it used commonly in Mexico to mean something like a fritter slash patty. Right, which is not what you said, Nastasia.
My sister had this like folded fried, yeah, thing. Fold it now. Hey, whoa, family show. They'll learn soon enough. Oh, geez.
They'll learn. Let them learn. It's like, you know, you know, your kids stubs uh stubs their toe, they're like, oh, it hurts. They're like, get used to it, get used to pain. My mom makes uh tortas de camarone, which is basically a whipped egg and ground shrimp mix that's uh pan fried.
By the way, I've had that uh uh j uh just thought I'd share since I never really thought about how a torta refers to both until your sandwich conversation this week. I actually like those things. You ever had those? I think they're made with dried shrimp, they have that dried shrimp taste, but they're good. It's like they're like they're like little patties, and I think they're served like in like a I think it's a tomato y sauce.
I've had them. Um I've had at least a style that comes from Guerrero. They're good. I like them, but they're not a sandwich. They're not even an open face sandwich, which as we all know is not a sandwich.
Uh here's the question. Uh my friend and I were talking about people cooking ethnic food of a culture that is not their own. There was a recent NPR uh article on this uh where where Rick Bayless was featured. Uh when my friend asked me if there's a certain form/slash presentation that differentiates high-end food from plebeian food. What are your thoughts on this?
Um, I don't know. What are your thoughts on that, Steph? I don't know. I have some thoughts on it, if you if you don't have thoughts. Uh I mean I thought maybe.
What was the what's the issue here? So the question is is like when you're taking uh another ethnic food, right? Why is it this is what I get out of it. Why is it that's that m a lot of times it can be seen as low end, or why is it difficult sometimes to go high end with certain ethnic cuisines? And furthermore, um why, you know, why is it that some presentations are seen as highbrow and some are seen as lowbrow when you're going and I'll give you an example.
Like like uh many years ago I went to, and even recently, you go to like uh uh a French restaurant and they do something that is uh like they put five spice powder on it, right? They go they go Asian in that sort of very, very kind of pedestrian sense of just putting five spice powder on it. Like all of a sudden, like for a lot of taste for a lot of um consumers, it's gonna get knocked a couple pegs down in refinement in their minds just because they associate certain flavor uh palettes and they associate certain cooking techniques and presentations with less expensive uh cuisines, right? And we've had this discussion a little bit regarding uh Mexican cuisine when I when we got back from Mexico and we were I was upset that there's no way you're ever gonna have those flor de calabasa freaking quesadillas like you have in Mexico because no stupid idiot Americ I love Americans, but no none of us are smart enough to pay what it would cost to have those kind of whereas Italian is allowed to be simple, rustic, and refined at the same time. Not to the level of like French, right?
But everyone knows that you're paying for these fancy ingredients, and so you'll pay a lot for something simple if it's got an Italian label on it. He's like everybody wants cheap, cheap, cheap tacos. Cheap, like where are the best cheap tacos? That's the question everybody asks, right? Right.
Right. And nobody, in other words, like it's very difficult to get someone to spend uh, you know, a lot of money on something that they don't feel is that different from that's the thing. It's like perceived difference and perceived value. So the question is, how do you get someone so at Empeyon Casino, for instance, he's not doing, you know, really it's not really Mexican food. He's inspired by that stuff, but it's like you can see the presentation work on the plate and the and the kind of work, and so it gets to jump into a a high, you know, into a high level kind of a situation.
So or if you go like Nastasi and I were at Cosme last week, Enrique Olivera's restaurant here in New York, and you know and so there I think they successfully are are jumping to a high-end presentation, but it's because it's a bunch of stuff that no one here has ever tasted before. Right? Ingredients that they've never tasted before. So some of the stuff, you know, makes sense, like tortillas, right? But you know, uh, but a lot of the stuff is is is um you know not the flavor palette that people are used to, and so they're they they can take the jump out of their mind and you know, not like Americans, and I maybe people in the world aren't necessarily smart enough to understand a very, very well executed plate of beans being worth a lot of money, right?
I mean, uh the exception is risotto. For some reason, people realize that risotto is difficult, and so you can spend a lot of money on like a risotto alla Milanese be and and not feel ripped off, right, Stuzz? Mm-hmm. Um I don't know. Like another way, like if you look at uh, you know, Danny Bowen at Mission Chinese, right?
So like uh Chinese food other than banquet cuisine uh where you're spending money just on really really expensive materials like sharks fin and you know not that you should buy I mean obviously you shouldn't but or or or bird's nest or sea cucumber or any one of these other things like um you know it's hard to get people to spend a lot of money on that in the US if it tastes traditional. I mean I think that was the genius of someone like uh Danny at Mission Chinese was having it be not that it's that expensive compared to you know what we think of as high high end but it it's like uh having something being so not what you're used to tasting in that category so different from what you would get at the standard restaurants that it gets to punch through that barrier and go on the other side. Side note tangent I just bought a whole bunch of the red uh Sichuan peppercorns got them at home yeah that kind of moppo numbing thing get at Mission you like those he he uses them at the absolute limit of what I find enjoyable. Yeah exactly it's right at the limit. Right at that limit.
And in fact it's funny it's weird with uh it's weird with certain wines it's weird with a lot of wines uh that that stuff but uh one more note on Mission Chinese before we get kicked off the air and I'm missing all like all the other questions I have to answer. But uh something I didn't understand you know they have a wood fired oven at Mission Chinese did you know that yeah and so like they use it for a bunch of presentations but because they had the wood fired oven they kinda they make these pizzas there right these kind of like Neapolitan style kind of pizzas and then they make one with pepperoni on it. And for a while after I know they had I was like why do they why do they do that right? Why do they have those pizzas there? Because it's not in keeping with the rest of the menu.
It doesn't really make sense from a mental point on the menu, right? And then I went there with my kids, and I was like, this is the smartest freaking thing that anyone has ever done at a restaurant. And I think restaurant owners take note of like it's hard to step outside of yourself, right? And what you do for a living. But I think this is the kind of like where I mean, not that you know, Nastasia give me the face because not like Danny needs anyone or the those crew need anyone blowing blowing extra sunshine in their nether regions, but I think they're really good at what they do.
You know what I mean? And um, like I never would have thought to do that there because it in a way, like you don't know that you have permission in quotes to make that kind of food at that restaurant. But then now I can shuffle uh shove as much uh Mapu tofu into my mouth as I care to uh shove in my mouth, and my kids are sitting there eating pizza and they're happy as clams, right? And so then they want to go back. Makes life so much more enjoyable if you have kids.
You know what I'm saying? Cooking issues. That's it. All right, thanks. See you next week.
Thanks for listening to this program on heritage radio network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradio network.org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization.
To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.