Today's program is brought to you by Nettle Meadow Farm Cheese and Spirits Pairing, taking place on Saturday, June 18th at Nettle Meadow Farm. For more information, visit Nettle Meadow Cheese and Spirits.com. That's N-E-T-T-L-E, Meadow Cheese and Spirits dot com. I'm Erica White, host of Let's Get Real, the cooking show about finding, preparing, and eating food. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn.
If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every week, uh Tuesday from roughly 12 to 1245. The Heritage Radio Network here in Bushwick Br Brooklyn. How you doing?
How are you doing, Stas? Good. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Look crazy on the Bushwick today, huh?
Mm-hmm. Do you know why I have to go crazy on the Bushwick? Because this is one of Jackie Molecules, Jack Ansley's last weeks here in Bushwick. Next week is last week. Next week's his last week.
Next week will be my last uh in studio live cooking issues for the time being. Forever. Wow. Forever, says Stas. Yeah.
Uh well, can you where's my where's the awe voice? The what? Where's the awe voice? Oh, I know, right? All I have is this.
I like that. Um. Oh, you want to hear some good news? My phone decided it would be funny to erase all of the stuff that I had prepared to talk today. So I'm gonna have to have you call up the questions and then I'll make the uh answers.
There's only one. No, there's that extra question that you got. And then there's one from last week. All of those, all because I didn't get to answer any questions last week because we had Jim Leahy on. You couldn't miss it because you were stuck in My Inus.
Right. Myanis, Connecticut. For those of you that weren't tuned in last week, Nastasia borrowed a stick shift 1993 stick shift sob that for some reason one of her friends decides is a good New York City car to have. And uh the clutch cylinder leaked its oil, its last breath on the way back to New York City, and she was stuck in the beautiful hamlet of Mayanus, part of Greenwich, Connecticut. Do you know you lived in Greenwich for a while?
Mm-hmm. Do they honestly? Because my son Booker is like, enough with the bathroom humor, Dad. You and your precious Mayanus, is what he says. Because we we pass the sign all the time.
Do they pronounce it Mainas or do they pronounce it Mayanis? I've never heard anybody say that word ever. If there's anyone who lives in the Greenwich, Connecticut area, we gotta find someone who lives around there, maybe someone from the neighboring Koscob, who can tell us. How are you gonna look it up? I'm looking it up right now.
Do you know that if you look up the pronunciation on there's like some there's people whose only thing that they do in life is make fake pronunciations and put them on the internets to mess things up? There's something called like pronunciation guide that literally is just some guy mispronouncing words on purpose. So I just don't trust the internet. And plus Well, the internet says it's my Anise. Yeah.
My Anise, as in my star. Yeah, no, no, my Anise. My Anise? What is it? Some sort of tropical?
It's Greenwich. Mayanise. Mayanise. Is it mayonnaise? Is it like some sort of like French mayonnaise alike?
Makes no sense. Yeah, we gotta get somebody to call in with that. Yeah, I need someone from Greenwich, probably uh preferably a hater, right? Who who like, you know, grew up like, you know, fighting the the local like my anus warriors growing up or whatever the name of their team is. You know what I'm saying?
Mm-hmm. And just you know, give it to me straight. Give it to me straight. Uh okay. So uh we have some questions, but as I say, they've been lost, so Nastasia's finding those and I'll start with the one that I have here.
Um dear Dave Nastasia Jack Peter who's not here because he Peters doesn't care right Stas? He said he couldn't make it. Yeah yeah I couldn't make it yeah and then you know it's only like you know one of Jack's last Peter I don't think he knows that well yeah he's I told him where are you Peter? Wow wow and the gang uh I've been reading up on British desserts mistake. No I'm kidding I'm kidding.
Uh I've been reading up on British desserts and they use double cream which has about 48% milk fat. I haven't been able to find this in the USA. Is there any way I could take that heavy cream and either add more milk fat without a homogenizer or remove water to bump the uh milk fat content from 35 to 48. Uh thanks for all the great work Tom Fisher. Well look it depends on what you want to do with it.
I mean you can boil uh cream down to a very very high fat content but then the question is I'm not sure what you want to uh do with it afterwards whether that's gonna alter the um whether that's gonna alter the flavor. You can't just melt butter or butter fat and add it in because remember the cream is a fat in uh water emulsion and butter is the reverse it's a water in fat emulsion. So we used to do the experiment with uh Harold McGee at the French culinary where we would take cream which is fat in water, right? Whenever you're talking about an emulsion you first name the the thing that's that's you know formed in pockets that's not the continuous phase, and then you say what it's in, which is the continuous phase. So it's you know, fat uh globules, do you hate the word globule?
Mm-hmm yeah. Uh distributed in a in a water uh in a water base, uh you know, water-ish. And so um then you beat it, you know, until it the fat particles agglomerate, you you break the emulsion, and now you have the reverse. You have a water uh in water droplet in oil emulsion, which is butter. So you you know it you can't really fortify it.
You can mount it and do a revert, like a mounted thing, but it's not gonna be the same. But luckily for you, uh, you know, if you get nice fresh cream and it's you know doesn't have any like uh uh high acidity or anything like that, you can uh boil it down and get pretty much whatever fat content you want. Now, you might be affecting or you will be affecting the taste uh and the uh whipping uh properties. Uh but I didn't have time to look what the standard recipe for making it is because I'm pretty sure that you know it's gonna be hard to get 48% fat straight from the cow, just rising up on the top, unless you really spin it down. Oh, you know what, like I could spin it in the centrifuge and get it pretty easily because I can make butter in the centrifuge, but I don't know if I can I guess I could probably enrich it to that level, but you're getting real close, you know, to like having it just automatically form a dense kind of uh uh butter anyway.
You know what else I've never noticed us? The the quote unquote butter that you make in the centrifuge when you spin butter in the centrifuge. Um I wonder whether it's actually butter or just really solidified cream. Like I wonder whether you've actually broken the emulsion. I think you probably have because you get that thin buttermilk.
You know what I'm saying? Um anyway. Speaking of uh centrifuge. Uh that was from Tom Fisher, by the way. Um, I wonder, like, should we put a an all points bullet now for people to tell us what they want the centrifuge to be able to do?
Right. The new one, just so we get more feedback from people before we release what the prototype is gonna do so I can test recipes. Like right now, I already know that the centrifuge we're working on can do strawberries, tomato, orange, lime, lemon, um, you know, banana, justino, dates. Uh I know it can do parsley oil, I know it can do pea butter, I know it can do um, I know it can do some kinds of nut milk and stuff like this, but maybe we should try to figure out what people want it to do so I can test the recipes. I don't know.
If any of you guys have any things that you are dying to have a centrifuge be able to do, I can test it on my uh prototype. Send it back. What? Whoops send it back. No, we don't.
You're wrong. Nastasia's talking about stuff that you don't have any idea we're talking about. I might as well I might as well be I might as well be speaking in a language. I might as well be speaking. We have a prototype here.
We have a prototype here that I'm gonna send back. They're sending us another one, and in fact, we just need to send a rotor, of which I have three for testing. Uh Nastasia again talking about stuff that you out there don't care about or don't know. They love knowing. Who between the two of us, who's the one that spent an hour from midnight to one a.m.
talking to them yesterday? Oh me. Okay. Uh anyway, so the um yes, we had to send some stuff back. We can still run uh tests, and I have four units in the US.
Four. Anyway. Um little bit of uh Dave Dave anger on the on a on a Tuesday morning. Well, it's like a Monday though. I haven't seen uh yeah, it's it's a it's a weird Monday.
It's like yeah, it's like Monday, Monday anger on a Tuesday. There's a lot of anger. There's a lot of like bad traffic on the way here. Yeah, weird attitudes. Everybody's confused and hung over.
It's New York when it's hot, you know. Yeah, that's right. You know, and Nastasia hates it, I think, as much as I do, don't you? Yes. Did you go anywhere fun over the weekend?
No. How would I? The face. The same way that you always do by taking a train or stealing the car that you just Nastasia literally just got a car fixed. Right.
Just paid to get her buddy's car fixed. Her buddy with this car is in Seoul. So she's like, how would I get a big thing? You don't have to sleep over somewhere. You can leave the city.
You know, I've done many times. That's the worst weekend to go places, I think. I'll tell you what, I drove back yesterday, not a big deal. Really? Yeah.
Hmm. Not a big deal. From Connecticut? Yeah. What time?
Like three. Okay. Not a big deal. Um, in fact, saw some accidents. Still didn't do cause too much problems.
I'm in traffic on the way back. But you know, Nastasia wants to be martyred poor man. I'm not going to be able to do that. Where would I go? I'm saying you know that I wouldn't go anywhere.
What would I do? Anyway, the so you know, you know, whatever. You know what the thing is? It's like it's like if if I were to say, hey, are you gonna be around this week? And she's like, What do you think?
I stay wherever you want me. That's not true. You know I'm always in New York. No, that's not true. You're always doing something.
Constantly. You're I'm going out to the Hamptons to visit my dirtbag buddies. I'm going to this. Ooh, dirt bag buddies. Dirt bag buddies.
Oh my god, Nastasia has some s some. Do you know Booker has started calling all of Dax's buddies dirt bag buddies? Yeah, so we're gonna name a band that too. Dirt bag buddies, yeah. And so now my wife, Jen, is like, you have to stop using the word dirtbag because the kids are picking it up.
What do you think, S? No comment. You think I should stop saying dirt bag? You say a lot of things that they pick up. A lot.
Look, A, uh, that's not necessarily. I heard X talk exactly like you. Well, yeah. Oh, speaking of things that they picked up, my kids have picked up. This is not cooking related, so we'll try to get off it quickly.
But my kids have without without any actual physical contact, picked up my hatred of geese, of Canadian geese. Because I was like driving by if you you know, if you've ever lived in the Northeast and spent uh in the suburbs and spent, you know, this time of year, and you go to any pond that has a lawn next to it, right? You need a pond with a lawn next to it. It is infested with freaking Canadian geese. And right now, this time of year is when they have their rancid little goslings.
And when when Canadian geese have their gauzings, if you want your children to grow up with a healthy hatred of Canadian geese, just throw them on the side of a pond with freaking geese and their goslings because they're the most vicious creatures. That you could because if you didn't know better, you'd be like, Oh geese, what are they gonna do, right? You ever been attacked by goose? Mm-hmm. It's nuts, man.
No, yeah. My little brother was attacked once when he was a kid, and then that was it. Yeah, they like start h first of all, they start hissing like some sort of like like creature from a horror show, and then they run at you like snapping and hissing with their with their wings giving you the they're giving you this one, Stas What? What? What with the wings?
You know what I mean? They're running at you and just do that like once or twice with it. There's a book written by uh I forget her name, but she's uh writes about how to poach animals. I'm not advocating for that. But she said, I think it was her who wrote that if you ever want your kids to never be vegetarians and to always support the killing of animals, expose them as often as possible to geese.
Did you see the gorilla? I felt so bad about that. I know. Yeah. But you know what I looked up?
I looked up. How did he get in there? It's unclear yet how the kid got in there, but here's the here's the real So what we're talking about for those of you that haven't been following the news is uh was where was it, Cincinnati or something like this? Three-year-old or four or something like this kid makes it into the gorilla pen, falls ten feet down into this moat where this like 450 pound silver back, 17-year-old silverback gorilla is. I forget the gorilla's name.
And the gorilla's like, what? You know what I mean? It starts like dragging this kid around, and the video is like, oh my god, it's crazy. So they shot the gorilla to death. I looked it up.
They there's no such thing as a tranquilizer that'll take a gorilla down. Why is there not such a thing as a tranquilizer that could do that? I that's my question. I don't know. But uh a first thing, you know, uh, you know, my Dax and I were like, what the hell?
Why can't they just shoot it with a you know a tranquilizer dart? Why do they have to kill the freaking gorilla? It's horrible. It's not the gorilla's fault. You know what I mean?
Yeah. But then, you know, I saw all these skats of things on the internet saying that there's nothing that can take a gor reliably take a gorilla down in less than about 30 seconds. And you know, and what you don't want is an enraged, pissed off gorilla that's just been crank darted, like taking a kid and smacking it around on a bunch of concrete. Mm-hmm. But the gorilla didn't look mad at the kid.
No. And the kid didn't look phased. What the what's the game? The gorilla looked like he was kind of taking care of the kid. It was weird.
Well, I mean, I just don't mean the gorilla, like, you know, what does the gorilla know about how fragile a you know a three-year-old human is? You know what I'm saying? It's like, I don't know. The gorilla looked like a lot less uh intent on damaging that uh kid than you know, my dog did eating frogs this weekend. My dog turned into such a frog murderer this weekend, like there are frogs everywhere, and he would see a frog and then instantly start foaming at the mouth as if rabbit and jump after the frog and just be like, and my kids are like, daddy the frog, daddy the frog.
I'm like, the dog's a carnivore. The dog is a freaking carnivore. It's like you're feeding it chummed up chicken and cow and lamb every day out of a can, and you're worried about a frog, a frog, an amphibian that doesn't even have a sense of play, and like you're okay. Whatever. I mean, don't get don't get me started.
Don't get me started. Okay. Uh so Stas, you find the other question? There's one other question. There's two.
From last week? There's last week, there's the there's the John Oliver one, and then there's the other one that came in. So when you just read it. Hello, and thank you for making this a great podcast. Um First, it seems to me that other than mixers and cheaters, and not much advancement was made in the process of making puff pastry and croissants over the years.
Making it is time consuming and requires much skill and practice. Can you suggest a modern ingredient or method that might help in the process? Preheats keeping the butter from soaking in the dough or melting at room temperature, maybe even, and forgive me for the hearsay, use less heresy. Buttercy, heresy. Heresy, use less butter and still get separate flaky layers.
Second, in order to keep the puff. Oh, let's do one at time. Do one at time. So uh the question is is it are any new tricks for uh pup pastry? And the he mentioned croissant too, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, first of all, I have to say, I have I've only made you ever you don't like croissant, right, Stas? No. What's worse?
A croissant or a biscuit? I equal really croissant has chocolate in it, then that's fine. What about almond? No. What if you had what if you had a uh what if you had chocolate in a biscuit?
No. No, no. But chocolate and croissant, okay. I'm kind of intrigued by the chocolate biscuit idea, Dave. Well, I'm telling you, you heard it here first, people.
Cooking issues, chocolate, chocolate inside of a biscuit. It's be easy enough to do. Yeah. I mean, freaking simple. You know what I mean?
They bake for roughly the same amount of time as a croissant bakes. And they bake at roughly the same temperature that a croissant bakes. So and they're they're cooked through as as much as a croissant is, so I'm gonna go ahead and say that you could do a chocolate biscuit. You know, standard baking powder uh biscuit, uh buttermilk biscuit. Um okay.
I made Coisson exactly once in my life. Uh it was well over twenty years ago, and it was in the middle of the freaking summer in an unair conditioned house. So it sucked. And I was like, when I made them, they've tasted fine, but I was like, this crap in a rare, I was like, this crap is not worth it. You know what I mean?
Like, I'm glad I made it once, I'm never gonna do it again. So I don't have a lot of experience with croissant, but I have made a bunch of puff pastry. Uh, and I've never really tried to make it um I've never really tried to tech it up. Uh I looked up the patent literature on this, and there are a bunch of people that have um patents out uh on on puff pastry, specifically trying to lower the fat content of pat puff pastry because for some reason this is the kind of thing that people are uh interested in doing. I'm not I mean, not me personally, like I'd rather just have puff pastries.
But what they did was so when you're making puff pastry, obviously the idea is you have a laminated dough, you have the dough layers, and you have the fat in between them. Now, back when I was uh paying attention to such things, you would uh people always said that it was the water in the butter that was the important part that would blast the that would steam and blast the layers apart, but now most people say that uh the water in the dough does the same thing as the water in the butter, although I've never tried making puff pastry with a s with a s a solid fat that didn't have uh any water in it at all. And I'm pretty sure that the puff pastry fats that they make specifically for making super light flaky puff pastries, which are they are a technical marvel, if terrible for you, uh they are because they're all trans, although they probably have trans fat free ones now. But um those like are awesome, but I think that those are emulsions with water in them, like a standard margarine, but they're done for puff pastry. Anyways, so uh you need this separation that and you need the dough layers to not stick together so that they can um puff apart.
Um so there's uh fella, I forget his name because I don't have it in front of me anymore, but the who uh had a patent out on making a uh thickened starch uh water uh along with fat emulsion so that it had the plasticity and laminating characteristics of margarine, but instead of being eighty-two or eighty to eighty-two percent fat, was like forty to forty-five percent fat. And so that would be a significant fat reduction, and according to the patent, it works. But as Nastasi and I both know, any idiot can write a patent even if stuff doesn't work and they'll get it. You know what I mean? It's true.
A lot of people don't know this, but if you write a patent, it doesn't mean you could literally, if you write a patent, uh you never have to prove that the sucker works. You just have to make up a good enough story for the patent officer to believe that you come up with uh, you know, in fact, people have patented things that are physically impossible to do, and they slipped it past uh, you know, uh a patent officer who, you know, I don't know, high as a kite or or you know, drunk as a skunk or whatever, didn't wasn't paying any attention. And there are people, I forget, that who collect these kind of absurd patents as kind of little uh things. Anyway, so uh let's go on to the second question. Second, in order to keep the potency of rarely used spices, hello, pink peppercorn.
I store those in the freezer. Assuming I keep counting assuming I keep condensation at check. Is there any reason repeated freezing and thawing might hurt them? And is the same true for nuts? Nuts.
Okay, so uh to look up my suspicions. Nastasi, you'll enjoy this, I think. I looked up UC Davis's PDF on uh nut storage, and uh you know, UC Davis, they know from nuts. They safe the safe handling of nuts. How awesome is that as a as a PDF title?
The safe, the safe handling of nuts gently. Gently. I believe is the uh is it anyway. So the the point is is that uh and McCormick, if you look at what McCormick tells you, McCormick tells you not to freeze uh dry spices just because it's unnecessary. But let's break down what's going on here.
There are several things you need to worry about when you're uh when you're dealing with spices. So in general, dried spices are those things that have been deemed for millennia in some cases to withstand the rigors of shipment on boats and long storage and still retain potency and as long as they're kept whole, not ground, uh, you know, for long, long periods of time. Uh that's why they are the spices that we use, because they are items of commerce that can be shipped over long distances. So they tend to store rather well without any sort of like uh um freezing or or refrigeration. Now, most you're gonna extend the life of these things where where these things get damaged is a yes, they will volatilize their their aromas off over time and and decrease their potency.
Some of them will also probably alter in flavor over time. Uh, but you have two main things. You have water damage due to condensation, which is obviously enhanced by um cycling through different temperatures where you get condensation on it. So that's why repeatedly bringing it in and out of cold uh can be problematic unless it's stored under a vacuum. So if it's stored under a vacuum, you can bring something in and out, and you're not going to get condensation because there's not any extra uh vapor in there to have water that can damage it through repeated freeze thaw cycles.
But I doubt you're gonna get that much of an advantage on that versus just storing it in a vacuum container. Also remember, every time you suck a vacuum, you're sucking volatiles off of it. Now, are you really gonna notice? I don't think so. But uh a good way to do this, if you really um want to do it, is to vacuum these things into smaller packages and keep them vaced down so you're not repeatedly vacuuming and unvacking them time and time again.
So that's in terms of keeping. But the other thing, and this this is where you know the some spices, but also D's and nuts and like seeds and things like that. Yeah, uh are uh are important is uh rancidity, right? So um your nuts are gonna go rancid if you leave them out at room temperature for a long time. And in fact, I just had an interesting uh uh pack of uh black walnuts, American grown black walnuts.
Uh I've I'm not I I'm not gonna get into that joke. Anyway, but like they like I can't, it's family show. Uh much you know, Jim Leahy, how long did it take us to get tell Jim that it was a family show? Yeah, that was. I think he was surprised it was a family show, and then like he's just you know, it's just not in his nature to to turn off the the the bleep bombs.
You know, but his Bernie Sanders impression was excellent. Well that's why, yes, we also had to be like it's not a political show. Not a political show. Yeah. Family show.
You can live that I don't care what your I mean, within reason, I don't care what your political beliefs are. But uh, you know, anyway, back to what I was saying, nuts. So the they're gonna go rancid. In fact, I've got these black walnuts, and they had gone rancid in a really uh kind of interesting way. Stas, did you were you here when we ate with Paul and uh Don, those uh I think Don was here, those ants.
Yeah. Did you eat one? Yeah. Remember how disgusting they were? But like greasy and like like but fruity greasy?
Well, you know, most of the time when I taste rancid nuts, uh, it's more that cardboard kind of rancidity that you get with oil, where you can taste oil and see that it's gone off and it's getting rancid. But these walnuts had that fruity rancidity, it was so weird. Anyway, so they go rancid, uh, very obviously. Um so you're gonna want to store your nuts in uh a vacuum if possible, and nuts are good in the freezer, but you also you want like I say, if you store it in a vacuum and you can get rid of the um the air, you're not gonna get condensation even through the a couple of uh freeze freeze thaw cycles. But other than that, I would say that airtight storage and buying them whole and buying high quality is the way to go.
And unless you're cooking um professionally, so if you're cooking professionally, uh you know, people in general, if you if you it again it depends on what kind of professional cooking. If you're dealing in a large kind of institutional environment where you're expecting someone to follow measurements, like you will use five grams of pink peppercorn, right? Then consistency of your pink peppercorn over time is super important. But if you're just cooking, or even if you're a real cook in a restaurant and you can adjust on the fly, typically these kind of spices will just lose potency over time, and so you can just jack the quantity. This is why, like we were talking before when uh Kenji was in and someone on the internet said that bay leaves don't have flavor.
Remember that, Jack? Yeah, I do. Yeah, I'm stasm. Remember that? And uh, and I was like, Yeah, you're yeah, it's wrong.
Just use more because you have crappy ones. You know what I'm saying? Right. And so uh a lot of times I think you're probably better off just jacking the quantity a little bit. I mean, I know I I do that.
I mean, most of us use those kinds of things um to taste anyhow, right? Yeah. Uh okay. So what was the other? We had another question in from uh Norway, right?
You sent it to me last night. Uh okay. Yeah, well while we're not while we're looking it up, uh no, but they were in two separate emails. I lost any changes I made to my email. Yeah.
Uh so anyway, so why don't we go to commercial break? We'll get that question. We'll come back with more cooking issues. And the break song here is called Forks by Slow Roasters. We'll be right back.
Nettle Meadow Farm Cheese and Spirits Pairing is a celebration of good food and beverages in the newly restored Barn Loft event venue at Nettle Meadow Farm in Thurman, New York. On Saturday, June 18th, come sample and savor, then buy your favorite cheeses and beverages to take home. Nettle Meadow cheeses have been praised highly in national media and have won prestigious awards from the American Cheese Society. Taste samples of goat and sheep cheese is paired with an array of local regional wines, beers, and ciders. You'll never forget your first sample of rich, creamy kunic, nettle meadows trademark cheese.
In Esquire, our very own Ansaxelby said Kunic. It may very well be the sexiest cheese in the USA. Nettle Meadow Farm is a goat and sheep dairy and cheese company in Thurman, New York, just below Crane Mountain in the Adirondacks, between Gore Mountain, North Creek, and Warrensburg. It's owned and operated by Lorraine Limbiase and Sheila Flanagan. Both have a great love of animals, artisan cheese, and the unique challenges of farm life.
Nettle Meadow Farm was originally founded in nineteen ninety, and it's the home of over three hundred goats, dozens of sheep, and a variety of farm sanctuary animals. Again, the cheese and spirits pairing is Saturday, June 18th. For more information and tickets, visit nettle Meadow Cheese and Spirits dot com. That's N E T T L E, Meadow Cheese and Spirits dot com. All right.
All right, and we are back. So we had this question in uh by the way you can call your cooking questions in to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Uh this in from uh Arnie Olsen. Uh hey guys and thanks for great show I have a question about Limequat.
Lime quad. Remember the Limequads? Mm-hmm. They're like you know what though the thing so Limequat is I don't know whether it's technically a mix between a kumquat and a lime but they're these little kumquat y things you eat the whole thing like a like a lime right? I mean like I like eating the kumquats really you going to Nastasia on me here?
A little bit I don't know. I don't I don't like eating the the rind you know but the rhin's the best part of the kumquat. Yeah. That's where all the that's where this you know the the fruit I first of all I happen to freaking love kumquats. Like I completely denuded Harold McGee's Kumquat tree and which is a gross sounding sentence I know but like it was uh I it never came back from what I did.
I just wiped it out. I was just like that basically just like sat there and ch chewed on the whole plant until the kumquats were gone. And then when Nastasia and Harold and I visited uh Gene Lester's citrus farm, we were bathing in different kinds of cumquats and limequats and stuff. Remember that? Mm-hmm.
Do you but I think I like the cumquat better than the limequat. Yeah. I like a good old-fashioned orange colored cumquat. Jack, I feel like you need to give the kumquat another chance. Yeah, oh, I'm open to it.
What do you how I'm not I'm not hardline on these things? Just like the last time I had kumquats, I don't remember like loving them. How did you have them? Well, whole. Do you like sour things?
Yeah. I might have just had a bad batch. It's possible. I guess. You know what I don't like about them?
Is like uh I like like uh every once in a while the seeds will tick me off. You know what I mean? I don't know. What do you think about biting into a kumquat seeds dust? Not good.
Not good? No. But I love a level. I don't I don't really cook with them, I just eat them. We've tried to make cocktails out of them.
I've never been like, oh my god, that's the best cocktail I've ever had. I've made garnishes with them, done punch, I've candied them. Yeah. But I think they're best just eaten. You know what I mean?
Uh anyway. You know what? I think the last time I had one, it was a garnish. Yeah, sure. Yeah.
And it might have just not been like the highest quality, you know. Yeah, and plus what was it? Garnishing, do you remember? I don't. Yeah.
Uh I've been uh I have a question about lime quad. I've been fermenting all sorts of things lately, and I threw some limequat wedges in with some chilies and Turkish sour green plums. I'm not gonna try to pronounce the Turkish word here, uh Yezel Eric Tavazi, I guess is what it is. I've actually had if it's the ones I'm thinking of, they're like they're in season. I forget when exactly they're season.
It's when I was in Istanbul's when they were in season. And they're good. And uh, you know, remember we had, you know uh in May. Really? So it's running around now?
Okay. Um but here's here's anyway. The liquid has become a lot more viscous. What do you think about that word? It's okay.
Yeah. Uh viscous than I've experienced before, and the only differing thing this time were the lime quads. The plums haven't behaved like this before, so I assume it's not them. I've been able to uh I've been able to find anything online about hydrocolloid properties of lime quat or cumquat. I used a brine of about four percent salt.
The change in viscosity happened fast before any significant drop in pH can have occurred after a few hours, and it hasn't changed after a month. Any ideas? Huh. No. That is really weird.
Um I know that uh Harold McGee has had uh snotty preserved lemons before. Like they've gone, like his preserved lemons have gone all snotty on him. Um but that is probably due to halophilic uh bacteria that were causing making some sort of mucilage. So typically, like I wouldn't imagine that the limes uh oh here's an interesting thing though. The limes are far more acidic than the uh plums are, right?
I mean the plums are acidic, but the lime quads are m more acidic still. Uh I wonder I wonder if you um I wonder if you as a test just took some of the plums and jacked the acidity up a little bit to the same kind of acidity level you had. I wonder whether it's just some sort of weird pectin phenomenon, like you have solubilized some pectin, and then when you lower the acidity, it's doing some sort of like pre-gel or set or something like this. Because I my my guess is is that it's not an aspect of the citrus itself. It's an aspect of the uh acidity of the environment dropping uh with the addition of the of the lime crop.
But you know what? You said it wasn't there wasn't a significant drop in pH, so that must mean you've been measuring it and if measuring it, you know what the pH was. So I don't know. I've never heard of any weird hydrocoloid property in uh a lime quat or uh or any anything else. But maybe some people in the chat room have a uh something to say.
Now remember, my lime quad experience is solely based on Nastasia and I eating the hell out of them uh on Gene Lester's farm. I've never shopped for Limequats, nor have I sourced Lime Quats or you know, the only sort of quat that I have sourced is is Cumquats. What was that drink name we're gonna make for that cumquat thing that Derek can't remember his last name? Cram Yeah, what was it? Anyway, we'll figure it out.
We have a cumquat dish uh uh drink at the bar. And uh and Nastasia came up with an awesome name for it, which is not the name that you can order it from at the bar, but it was like something in the cram quats. What was it? It was like Is it just Derek? Yeah, hysteric, yes.
Something Derek and the Cram Quats? Maybe. This week, tonight. Something like that. Tonight, this week, tonight, or something like this, tomorrow, yesterday, tonight, this week.
He's a funny dude. Anyway, he did something on um on science that uh scientific studies and food specifically that uh someone wanted us to read and uh look at rather and comment on. And I have to say that I think it was hilarious. Everybody should go to John Oliver's website and look at his twenty two or twenty-three minute uh you know rant basically on how crappy most uh food science studies are and how they're mishandled by the media. Um last week tonight.
Last week tonight. It is uh I think it's pretty much spot on. I'm being like it's uh it's a subject that I plan on going more uh in depth on if I ever finish or start writing the book that I'm supposed to write. I'm gonna have a chapter on kind of the what I consider the pyramid of garbage that most uh of these uh a lot of these studies are are based on. But I don't wanna go into it now because if I go half cocked on it, someone will call me out and tell me that I'm a terrible uneducated fool, right?
As has happened before. As has happened before. Um okay. So that's that. Those are the questions that are in.
So now I'm gonna talk about some stuff I want to do. First of all, Nastasia, I'm gonna redo my outdoor uh cooking situation again, right? Because no matter what I do, I cannot get in a situation where people will be in the same freaking area w while I'm cooking. It's com it it it it it still is completely anti-social. Like my Tandoor is like crammed outside.
No one wants to hang out where the Tandoor is. You know what I mean? Also, like you know how to you know how I'm cheap? Yeah, yeah, she's nodding her head up and down. Yeah, cheap.
So uh everyone, you know, the the big thing over the past couple of years people want, they want a fire pit, right? Because people want to hang out the fire. I bet you have the fire pit. I did. So, but I bought it the cheap one, right?
From the Home Depot. It's called the Cowboy Grill, but it doubles as a grill. But I'm like, I'm never gonna use this thing as a grill. I actually used it as a grill. Because then now I have those benches around the grill.
Remember the chainsaw, the tree fell down. I cut all those benches with the chainsaw, because uh, you know, I think chainsaw art is like, you know, I like chain, I'm not good at it, but like I like everybody really likes playing with chainsaws, don't you think? Okay. Wouldn't you like playing with a chainsaw? No.
You have no desire to play with chainsaws? No. Jack, you? Yeah, totally. Yeah.
My uh I used to have a I used to like not wake up when I was a kid, you know. I I'd like to sleep in and stuff, and my grandpa once walked into my room with a chainsaw. Wow. Revved it up. That did the trick.
Wow, where was grandpa from? Sicily. Nice. Nice. So, like crazy Sicilian grandpa with a chainsaw.
That'll that'll get you up. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I like chainsaws.
Uh I have never have not yet been severely damaged by one, thank goodness. Anyway, so I had this cowboy grill. Um, and I have to say, uh, you know, I'm a big fan of the vertical grilling in the tandoor, but I was like, I'm gonna try to cook something so people can actually hang out with me while I'm cooking, so I have all the benches. So those things actually cook like a monster because they are like imagine a Weber grill that is like two and a half feet across or more. How big is this, Doss?
Like three feet? Mm-hmm. It's like three feet across. So what you do is the way you use this, and so I'm I'm actually recommending this as a cooking implement, strangely, is you take a chimney, uh you take a chimney starter for charcoal, you fill it full of hardwood charcoal. I use the cowboy brand because it fits with the cowboy grill.
Actually, it's just the one I use, the red one. Uh, and you put actually it's not cowboy, maybe it's Royal Oak, and you pour it into the chimney thing, you put one thing of paper underneath, you light it with the torch, and the coals start after like 20 minutes. We've all used chimney starters, right? Now, a chimney starter is in no way, shape, form, kind color enough charcoal to cook on this thing because it's like it would be the equivalent of putting like two pieces of charcoal in a Weber, right? It's like nothing.
So, what you do is you dump the chimney down and then you build your TP of like, you know, how big is that, Styles Across? Um two inches. All right, yeah. You take like your two-inch sticks and you layer them like a teepee over the burning coals, and then you take your big pieces of like firewood that you use for fire, and you make another TP around that, and because the coals are so hot, the wood lights in like in in less than like 20 minutes, the wood is already so on fire that you can spread it out over the entire thing, and now you have like a three-foot circle of instant death that you can put the grill on top of, and it's just a freaking monster. Like it's such a freaking monster.
I did bluefish on it, so like I put them, you know, I I have those uh I have like infinite kinds of like skewers and baskets for my uh Tandoor. So like I you know, I'm doing it and I was like, man, this sucker really freaking cranks. So I would say if you're a fan of Weber style cooking, go get you a cowboy grill if you really need to cook for a lot of people. Because does anyone like waiting around to like swap stuff off and on the Weber grill? No.
Everybody hates it, right? And so the the thing about the cool thing about this is it's got a little swing over um grate that's like a warming grate, it's like a second level above the other one, and you can kind of adjust the height of that, and it's got a swing over for a boil kettle, right? So it swings over. So what you do is, but you know, like a lot of people what they want to do in their grilling is they want to switch the height of their grill up and down to to adjust the heat. I find that cooking with the tandoor, what you want to do is get a uniform kind of like high heat.
Although I I don't know, I don't know whether it's talking on air or talking later with Jim. I've lowered my I've lowered my super high cooking temperatures pretty much across the board. So now with my tandoor, I I kind of do a first burnout low, then I put all my breads in, my non's, because I find that my was I talking about this on Air, Jack? I think so. I was talking about lowering the temperature of the to bake the nons.
Uh I I think so. Stars maybe. She wasn't here. She was oh last week. She was in my anus during the whole show.
You know. Um they want to repeat it anyway. All right, right. So in other words, like normally with a tandoor you get a scorching hot, right? And then you you you want, and I think this is the same as true with like most pizzas.
I think most pizza doughs and most pizzas, uh you know, I I've been doing super super hot for a long time. And I'm thinking uh I like now to reduce the temperatures a little bit. I find I like the interior texture better if the bake time's a little bit longer. And so lower temperature. So what I'll do is for the tandoor is I'll do a relatively long fire to fire it up to like a nice uh even temp, do my breads, and then I'll throw another chimney of charcoal in to do my meats, my like shrimp, stuff that you want like really fast.
Anyway, but I find with the grill, I think most things, and this is another thing I you know uh that I've been thinking a lot about recently is uh moisture, moisture control and surface effects. I think you can gain a lot when you're grilling by just going off on off on off on off on or putting on the warm and just like constantly moving the thing around. So you don't really need to worry, I think about having a billion different heat levels as long as you're on top of it. You know what I mean? If you want to be a jamoke and just throw something on the hot side for a couple seconds to uh you know, a couple minutes to make the crust and then throw it on the cold side, I guess you could do that too, but you know, I find that if you just keep the thing cranking at a pretty hardcore rate, you can just slam the stuff out as long as you're on top of it.
Anyway, so cowboy grill uh I'm definitely uh pro. The other thing that I'm gonna do that this summer. Oh, but here's the here's why I brought it up. So then the next day, when we had a bunch of people coming over, right, after I grilled the bluefish, my first bluefish of the season, delicious. Do you like blue fish?
I don't know. Huh, Jack, you like blue fish? Yeah. I love bluefish. Bluefish is now becoming popular because everyone now is liking fish that they didn't used to like.
It is around a lot now. Yeah, it's delicious, but it's oily. You know what I mean? And so, like, if you if you talk to an old timer, like when I bought it, they were like, when did that fish come in? And the guy's like, today, of course, because what are they going to say?
And you're just like, no, no. When was it caught? And he's like, freaking today. Today, freaking today. You know what I mean?
And she wouldn't buy it until I bought a piece and she smelled my piece. She's like, okay, I'll take a piece. You know what I mean? But I don't know why the guy didn't just offer to let her smell the fish in the first place. So I had to be an intermediary at whatever.
Uh and I did the old school. You know that have I talked about this on there? You know the old school of bluefish? The old old timers recipe is to put mayonnaise on the bluefish. You know what the old theory, which is garbage, is the oil gets out oil.
It doesn't make any freaking sense. But the man is it all? No. No, that's why it doesn't make any freaking sense. But the mayonnaise is good.
It forms like a nice crust. So you mayonnaise salt, pepper, and then only on the on the meat side, not on the skin side. Mm-hmm. Anyway. So that then the next day when a bunch of people came over, they're like, you know what?
We don't want to sit with you next to the grill while you're cooking all the food. We're gonna sit on the deck. I'm like, of course. So now I'm gonna build, I want to build a deck-friendly cooking thing. And here's the thing when you're cooking outside, what are you missing?
Usually, don't know. A way to cook things that want to be cooked on ranges, right? So a lot of people will take a walk and they'll try to put it on their grill, which I think is weak, or they'll do a bunch of uh other things. They'll put pans on grills, which I think is problematic. But I'm gonna build an outdoor uh walk burner.
So I need some I need some advice from people. I'm either gonna get what's called the Big Kahuna, which is a uh a gas-fired 65,000 BTU propane wok burner, or buy uh one of those uh Thai uh charcoal stoves that you that you like hold a wok, or maybe get both. I don't know. But I'm gonna get a uh the wok burner. And the other problem is is that you know why I don't use my outdoor fryer enough, Stas?
No. Because my outdoor fryer is not sealed. I realize this is that if you have to completely drain clean, dry, and store a fryer every time you use it, especially when you're using six gallons of oil, you don't do it that often. You know what I mean? Whereas uh if I could just have my fryer act like my indoor fryer, like completely seal it from all pests, then I can just uh I can just strain it, keep the oil in in in fine feather, cover it, and then just go back and fry with it.
Because honestly, if you're just making like if you're just making like like four or five pounds of tortilla chips or like a couple of chickens, are you really gonna sit there and fill an entire fryer with six gallons of oil, then at the end of the night strain it out, clean it, and drop it in? Whereas back when it was sitting at home inside, I would just fire up the freaking fryer, do the tortilla chips, let it cool down and cover it, right? So I'm gonna work on that. I'll let you know. I'll let you people, good people know.
Uh another thing is that I know I said earlier at the beginning of the year that this was gonna be the year of starch. I finally started working on it. Right now, my newest thing, I I tweeted it out or something potato starch, big on potato starch. I've been working on the Korean fried uh chicken my Korean fried chicken recipe. I'm getting very close to a Korean fried chicken that I like.
Jack, you like Korean fried chicken? Yes. What do you like better? American fried chicken or Korean fried chicken? American.
Really? Interesting. What style of American fried chicken? What's your ultimate fried chicken style? Don't know.
Mine's hot chicken, like Nashville style hot chicken. So how's that? Like I've never been to Nashville. So what's that? Oh, really?
Yeah. It's just fried chicken with a shit ton of spice on it. Oops, sorry for the cards. So is it, but is it is it is the crust more like uh more like uh uh KFC original, more like an X Krispy, more like a Popeye, it's more like a traditional southern soft crust. No, no, no, it's a cr a crunchy, crunchy crust.
Yeah. Thick, thick, crunchy crust. Uh huh. See, the interesting thing about the uh Kentucky fried chicken, sorry, the uh Korean fried chicken, obviously, is that it's like super thin. So some people, when they do the recipes for it, they do a thin batter, which is I think a mistake.
And this goes back to what I was saying before about it's all about moisture control. So obviously, everybody who really knows how to how to do this, right, they do multiple fryings. And what you're doing during the multiple fryings is controlling the um controlling the crust, controlling the formation of the skin and and the crust, which is why you can get a hyper thin, shattering uh crust on a on a on a Korean fried chicken using fundamentally just the skin. So what I'm working towards, you know, the Koreans use these small chickens and they fry the whole thing whole, right? I want to do a larger American style in the Korean uh of chicken in the using low temp cooking.
So I've been testing with low temp cooking first and then doing a triple fry on it with potato starch as the as the as the base for the crust. And I want to do a blues brothers four whole fried chickens and dry white toast dinner. Now the thing is I haven't figured out I figured it out, I'm pretty close. I'd say I'm 95% of the way there with getting being able to make four whole fried chickens that are delicious all the way through. Perfect.
But what I've not been able to do yet is make dry white toast that I want to eat by itself. Do you know what I'm saying? You guys familiar with this movie? No. You've never seen the Blues Brothers?
Yeah, yeah. I've seen it. So they walk, they're trying to get uh McIntar Murphy to leave Aretha Franklin where they're working at this greasy spoon in Chicago and go out on the road with them to form the band because they're on a mission from God, right? Okay. So uh what they do is they go in there and Belushi orders four whole fried chickens, and Dan Aykroyd orders dry white toast, and that's how McIntyre Murphy knows that the blues because this is what they eat.
But who the hell eats dry white toast on its own? Don't know. Can you imagine? Can anyone imagine what good dry white toast to eat on its own is? Like, what would it mean to make dry white toast that you would eat on its own?
Is Dan Aykroyd just trying to say like I'm a horrible person? And and Belushi is trying to say I merely am a hedonist and I want four whole fried chickens, and therefore I will eat whole, and then Dan Ackroy is just like I am I am I am just a a no a non-entity, even though like that's clearly not the case. What do you think, Jack? What do you think about the dry white toast? I don't know.
Maybe he had he had to duck out, I guess, but like the dry white toast is not something that I can imagine. I've thought a lot about toast, right? The texture of toast. Like what when you eat toast, what do you hide what kind of toast do you like? Just white toast.
Yeah, but what is the texture like? Oh. Crunchy? You like crunchy? So more of a British, more like a Melba toast.
Like where you break it in half and it shatters into a million pieces? No, no, no. You need like a good crunch on the outside and then a little bit of chew in the middle, yeah. Right. So you're dealing with another moisture control problem.
And this is what we talked about this before when that guy came and we did that uh TV shoot about toast, the guy wasn't even thinking straight about it. When a toaster is done, what do you do? What's the first thing you do when the toaster goes uh if you have a toaster oven? If it's not a pop-up, what do you do? Take the toast out?
Open the freaking door to let the moisture come out, or it's gonna be ruined. What's the worst thing you can do to toast? Take it and put it on a plate right away. You're ruining the freaking toast. Because when you put the toast on the plate, have you never done this?
You take toast right out of the toaster, you put it on the plate, you let it sit there. What happens when you lift the toast? I don't know. There's all water and steam and condensed garbage underneath the toast. And the bottom of the toast is ruined.
Dax did Dax did this to toast over the weekend because I uh I made uh some seafood salad and we had it uh, you know, seafood salad sandwiches, and and he made the toast, and he did that to the toast, and it was all I could do not to like lose it. You don't want steamed Jack, are you with me on this? Yeah, definitely. And Erica's back here, she says you need a toast rack. Yeah, so I have a whole bunch.
Erica's totally right. I have a whole bunch of uh quarter, and this is by the way, something that everyone should buy. Um, and this is another thing. I'm actually talking to my editor about it, is a kitchen organization in general, even though I'm the most disorganized person on earth. I think that actually gives me some reason to be interested in the idea of kitchen organization.
I have stacks of quarter racks, and so quarter rack, quarter sheet pan rack is very useful uh for moving stuff around, and they're very kind of portable and they stack up. So my toaster, literally on top of my toaster are stacks of quarter racks that I can just put whatever pancakes, toast, anything that has a moisture control problem. So the whole kind of thing boils down to everything is moisture control. Fried chicken is a moisture control problem, toys toast is a moisture control problem. All of these things, uh grilling properly to get the crust right before the inside is done, is a moisture control problem.
Uh, and that is in essence, all I think about all day is getting the outside uh and the inside at their proper kind of moistures and doneness at the right time. And all the tech that we use, all the low temperature cooking, really all we're doing is trying to more effectively make the inside be the way we want and the outside be the way we want. So it all comes down to moisture control, cooking issues.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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