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. Hey, hey, hey, I'm Jimmy Carboni from Beer Sessions Radio. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn.
If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 in Bushwick, Brooklyn at Roberta's Pizzeria. You guys should see the drugs that Dave huffs before he does that every time. So calling your calling your questions.
It's a sad show today. Immediately after that, you just said it here, too. It's a sad yeah, it's a sad show today. That was a great intro, though. Thank you.
I switched it up a little bit for you. Uh today is we not in the booth today, in the what do you call this? In the room with us today, not in the booth is uh Jack Insley, Jackie Molecules. It's his last it's his last cooking issues. Jack is leaving us.
And so uh it's you know, it's it's sad. And he's not in the booth to give us the sad noise. I know. But like, you know, this picture on Well, but the good news is he's gonna go on on tour, uh, which he'll talk about in a minute for a couple of months, and then he's uh gonna start his uh own uh radio station down in uh Washington. Why don't you tell us about it, Jack?
Yeah, Washington, DC. It's gonna be I can't give too many details away yet. Uh the ink is not dry, but it'll be a really, really exciting radio station. I'm starting in a really cool public space uh in in DC. So uh some food.
Yeah. Now now you play the sound. Yeah. Nice, nice, nice. It'll be some food, uh lots of music, of course, some politics by nature of the city.
Um countercultures, all kinds of stuff. It'll be fun. Wait, so what but before politics, what subjects? Food, of course. Okay, some food, and those food shows hopefully, you know, we'll we'll be sharing those with heritage and uh a lot of music, a lot of DJ shows and uh live music.
When you say DJ like like stuff like that you are more like what kind of like well, no, I want like uh, you know, go go is like the the thing in DC or like uh for real, like old school? Yeah, like hardcore, like you know, there's DC hardcore like old school hardcore, like bad brains? Sure. I'm I'm open. It'll be all all genres of music.
Uh definitely not really club music, I don't think so. No. Not even a little in just for some late night stuff. So uh here to uh by the way, are you gonna be open? You think the radio show is gonna st a station is gonna open before the elections in November?
No, but I'll be down, I'm moving in September to DC. So if any listeners are in DC and want to hang out, uh I need some friends, so so get at me. And uh I'll be recording, like compiling content starting in September and definitely covering the election. So nice, cool. Uh and to uh wish uh Jack farewell, we got a full uh full room here today.
We got uh Peter Kim, who maybe he can piss off Jack today instead of pissing me off. You know? You got uh I think people want me are want me here to needle you, Dave. So yeah, but you know, you can needle me all the time. This is your last molecules.
By the way. I like Jack. I have a lot of respect for Dak. Oh, strong. Jack is Jack is a high quality individual.
We got uh we got uh cooking Issues friend uh Paul Adams here from uh the popular the science that is popular. How are you doing? That's correct, I'm here. Yeah. Uh also fan of skunks.
I don't know if you know this, and fan of skunks. For for Omer Captain included. Uh I don't know. It's okay, yeah. Yeah, and uh To be more accurate, skunks are a fan of me.
Uh uh and uh and also uh avid uh what's like uh like Rocketeer for drones? Like drone a tier? No. Like droner. No, listeners call in with your suggestion.
Yeah. Uh and uh as usual, the the uh ever ebullient Nastasia the Hammer Lopez here. Yeah, yeah. So uh for Jack's last day, we have some uh we have some bubbly Nastasi's gonna open it because if there's one thing that makes her happy, it's gotta be uh the bubbly. That's true.
By the way, Paul's a drone thug. Drone thug? Oh. Which are you the harmony? Yeah.
Wow. Now now I need you to like during the commercial break. I didn't even have to wait. I didn't have to wait. I was like, you can rework the lyrics while we're oh man.
Uh strong. Quick. Strong, strong. You know, I saw a uh like a fat uh like a fast rapping, like my Dax is obsessed with rappers that can rap quickly. I probably already have talked about this on the radio show.
I'm like the ones you don't even know what you're talking about. But anyway, one of them like Is this from the moped event? I don't remember. He's like super. It's because I was gonna meet, I think, Buster Rhymes at one time, and I didn't get to meet Buster Rhymes.
And then uh and so and he had thought Eminem was the fastest wrapper, and I was like, you don't know what you're talking about. It's not even in contention. First of all, like speed isn't you it's speed with flow is what's important, not like you know what I mean. I was like There's one answer to this question. It's Twister.
Uh well, technically, yeah, but I mean, was is that the fast stuff that you'd listen to? Like on a daily basis? Yeah, he's good. I mean, I have some of it. Right, I mean, all right.
Okay. Anyway, uh, we can all agree it's not MM. No, it's not M. Like that part we can agree with. Anyway, so then uh I don't know, I don't even remember how I got into it.
Let's get let's let's get to some uh some questions. But before we do, remember, you have a short time left to call in all of your molecule-related questions to Jackie Molecules. I wish we got expert on molecules. We gotta get that ringtone back. Do you have it?
You have another thing you can play it. I didn't know if I still have it on here. Uh 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Hey, we got a caller.
Okay, caller, you're on the air. Hey guys, hey, um, so before I ask my question, uh, just real quick, I wanted to um extend a sincere thank you to Jack for all the time he's put in. Um good luck in everything that he's doing. Thank you. Um, so are you there?
Yeah. No, and goodbye. So my my question uh is my brother recently got married, and I was asked to make a groom's cake, and so I decided to make the milk bar uh mini chocolate chip cake with the passion fruit curd. And um, because I couldn't find Passion Fruit Curd locally and it was uh there was a time constraint, I went ahead and used the really crappy mango nectar. And um I felt kind of like an enemy of quality, but um something something really weird happened because I followed the recipe to a tea, but when I made the uh the curd filling, um the egg mixture like totally curdled and like the little protein particles started to like block out and like agglomerate.
And the weirdest thing happened because after I mixed in the butter in the food processor, it became totally silky smooth again. And I'm just wondering why it would like curdle and then be able to come back to being totally smooth again. Huh. Well, hold on a second. Let me cheers Jack while we're while we're while I'm thinking.
Cheers. Huh. So I don't know why it broke. That's uh it's interesting. The um Peter wouldn't cheers me.
Speaking of enemy of quality. So weak. I'm in the room there. You won't even cheese like I'll cheers everyone with that. Uh I don't know.
I mean, I've never I've never actually interestingly, uh I mean, I've eaten a whole hell of a lot of mango in my life, including Nastasia and Harold McGee and I went down to pound mangoes in Florida once. It was a nightmare of a trip, actually, but we can talk about that later. Complete nightmare. Uh, and led me to the knowledge that tropical fruit people are very possessive of their fruit. Whether they're ever gonna freaking eat it or not.
I'm like, I've said this before. I'm like a temperate fruit person where they're like, Yeah, take all the apples. I don't care, I don't eat these things, I just collect the trees. Like the people in the tropics are like, touch my mango, you're dead. I'm like, you have billions.
Anyway, whatever. I've uh but the strange thing is I have never cooked with mango. Ever. I've only ever eaten mango. I've made mango into drinks, and I've used mango in cold prep, but I've never cooked a mango.
Mangoes are relatives of uh let me see, they're the relatives actually of like poison ivy and uh cashews. I think they're anacardacy, I think, but it's been a long time since I've looked that up. Uh yeah, uh so they contain a latex in them, but I don't know of anything that necessarily would break occurred. I wonder whether anyone out there in the chat room has had an experience uh cooking mangoes and can uh can can help us out. But as for the silky smooth, there's lots of times when you get like kind of a micro break in something, and then when you blend the hell uh you know out of it with another like smooth, especially emulsified ingredient like butter, it'll come back into shape on you.
In fact, uh I have a recipe for uh milk syrup, which I'm actually gonna talk about later because of a question we have if we get to it, where the whole point is you make a micro break in it. So you stabilize the milk with sugar, you make a micro break in it with uh with a little bit of acid, and it curds it a little bit, and that like little bit of break actually keeps it smooth because you break the the the pieces that have broken, you break them into into pieces smaller than your tongue can taste, which is roughly uh 20 micrometers is roughly the limit that your tongue can sense in terms of now you can sense different textures smoother than that, like things can become more uncuous all of a sudden, but the in terms of actual grit or or particles, you can't really tell uh much below 20 uh 20 micrometers. So um it's micro it is microcommeters right now. Yeah. Uh the uh getting my I'm making sure that I'm metric.
The uh but the point being that um it's it's easy to do, and so if something is breaks a little bit, it can actually be more stabilized if the ensuing actions break it into pieces that are as finer than your tongue can taste and it no longer agglomerates afterwards. I don't know, is that helpful at all? Yeah, I gotcha. That makes total sense. Yeah.
So I'm thinking that's what happened. I'm I'm thinking what that you did some sort of partial break, and then when you put it into the other thing, it just you know brought it all back together, and whatever the partial break was, uh is stable now. Now, uh uh the flip is I have no freaking idea what's in mango that would make it behave differently. If anything, I would guess passion fruit would be the evil thing because it's so acidic, you know? Yeah.
Yeah. Was the mango puree nasty? Or was it good? Did it taste nasty? Uh no, it was it came out like exactly how I wanted it.
Like you could not even tell that it had remotely even broken at all. So you did not ruin the wedding? No. For that reason. Yeah, no, but I was gonna say, did you ruin the wedding some other way?
Did you do some sort of like Steve B. semi toast at the end and like, you know? No, I didn't I didn't bring any plain white toast either. Oh man. Well, we're working on it.
We'll work on the plain white, we'll work on the good plain white toast. Thanks for calling in. Yes, yeah. All right. So, uh see what we got here.
Uh well, might as well do the milk question now, right? Yeah. Unless any do you guys do you guys have any pressing cooking questions before I get to the while you're talking about passion fruit? Yeah, I'm not sure. Well, while you're talking about passion fruit, why is passion fruit so delicious?
Ah. Do you know there are very, very many different kinds of uh Passaflora uh fruits that you know, the whole the genus, right, Passaflora fruits that um are consumed worldwide, um, especially in South America. And we only get one of them. Maybe two. Like nowadays, you can sometimes get the yellow, like the grenadilla style ones up here.
But you we usually get the small wrinkly ones. And I like them all, but they aren't all strictly speaking, delicious. Do you do you like well, Paul does, I'm sure, but do you like musky flavors, folks? Stas, what about what do you think about a musky fruit? No.
No, Peter? Yeah. No? Sound very good. There's like some very musky Passaflora ones, uh in like weird shapes.
Like there's one that looks like an overgrown uh Australian finger lime kind of Koruba, and and it's got a very musky kind of note to it. So maybe that's not inherently delicious. But also, like there's something, you know how lychee gets sweaty? Yes. Yeah.
So I think sometimes passion fruit, it's not the same kind of sweat, but I can get some sweat on a passion fruit. What do you guys think? Sweat on a fruit. But I like it. I do think it's delicious.
It's just so acidic. I like anything freaking acidic, and I like the texture of the little seedy seeds. It's acidic, but it's also got that like juiciness that's a certain kind of acidity that Yuzu has. A couple of other tropical fruits. Also, related question.
You know how like you group together tropical fruit flavors as sort of a category? Is there an actual common thread between tropical fruits? I asked someone that once, and you know what the answer was? They didn't answer my question. So I don't know.
I mean You think about like right, like mango, banana, papaya. Well, okay. Those are all your lactone fruits, right? Well, and like a lot of them have a lot of real high ester notes too, and you know, like a lot of those really kind of like high volatilizing things. I don't know.
Maybe there's something about tropical environment that requires fruits to be extremely volatile. In not like volatile, like I'm volatile, like volatile like aroma chemicals. Uh but the um it is interesting, but i it's true. It's it's very there are very few temperate fruits that have tropical notes in them. Strawberries, right?
Have a little bit of that, although they're clearly a temperate taste, but they can some of the other ones have some higher notes, especially when they start to go off. Peach. Uh yeah, a good peach. A good peach. Some apples.
Yeah, the rare apple. But like, you know what the the uh the one that really tastes like it's a tropical fruit that is completely temperate is uh the May apple, the American uh it's but you can't get it because it's poisonous. But it's not really poisonous, but it's like kind of poisonous. It's like mezzo mezzo poisonous. It's like it's like it's poisonous to the extent that if they sold it in the supermarket, somebody would kill themselves because they would eat the seeds and they would eat it unripe.
But once it's ripened, and uh I only got a couple of them last year. I have a whole like plot of them, and I was like, I'm gonna let them ripen one more week before I pull them in. And in that week, the animals came and ate everyone but two. I'm talking I have like bigger than this studio of like uh uh may apple tree, uh, you know, un you know, whatever they're called, little plants. You know what I mean?
It's perennial. And um all gone, but two. But when it finally ripened, man, that was delicious. It'd be worth dying for, the poisonous. Because it's like tropical, but it grows in Connecticut.
Anyway. When does it hit? Uh they're on the thing now. Right now, they're the size of what size is that? They're this big.
The size of a ripe may apple. Nah, they're the si the size of a large shooter marble. Yeah. Wow. But uh the uh they're good, they're still green.
I've just got to I can't let them go. It's that one week. As soon as they start to show shine show signs of ripening, I'm gonna pull them and let them ripen inside. You can get them this weekend, though. No, it needs to go longer than that.
It says May because they show up in May, but like last year it wasn't like it was after Fourth of July is when they got when they got taken. This year is so weird anyway, with uh with what's it called? What's it called? Weather. What's that thing?
What's that thing? Weather. Uh anyway, so that's a delicious tropical fruit. You know what a fruit that I've never tried that I grew up with, but I was always petrified of? You familiar you guys familiar with U, Y E W, U, the Wood?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, Taxodium species, I think. And so uh so it obviously it doesn't have actual technical fruit because it's a conifer, so it does not an angiosperm, has no flowers, therefore it has no fruit. Right?
Right. So, but it has what's called an arrow that looks like a fru fruit, and we'll and it's like a red, we'll call it a berry, even though it's not a berry, but it's a red berry. Yeah, Jack has a fruit on it. You can always tell uh a U because it's got the red berries on it, and the red berries have like a hole in the front of them, like sunken. They look like a cup.
Right. Like an olive. Like an olive. Like a pitted olive. Yeah, like a pitted olive, right?
Like a like a red m mini red martini olive. And uh, and so what's interesting is is that even a couple of the seeds crushed will kill you. But the fruit, apparently, the actual arrow itself, the red part, okay. That's yeah, I'm not taking that. But I don't have I don't have the cojones, I don't got the stones.
I do, but is it delicious? Uh I don't know. I haven't found anyone that's actually eaten it. Where's the seeds? Right inside the damn thing.
So you have to like squash them, but not crush the seeds. No way. And like, and make sure you spit the seeds out because literally I've read cases of like kids who've eaten three of them are down. Yeah, down for the now, strangely, strangely, the conifer hemlock, not related to the poisonous hemlock, totally edible. You can make a tea from the hemlock.
Mm-hmm. Right, and apparently nice beds, because it's nice and soft if you're in the woods woodcrafting. But uh you, no. So you doesn't sound poisonous, sounds fine, is deadly poisonous. Hemlock sounds poisonous, is not, it's the water hemlock that's poisonous, which is as we all know, related to parsley and all those things, which is why you should never forage for what, Peter?
Uh wild freaking parsley, Peter. You're gonna kill your whole family. Never forage for wild freaking parsley. Hey Dave, we got another caller on the line. Caller, you're on the air.
Hey Dave, how's it going? Doing all right. Good. It's uh Chris from the Green Zone in DC. Hey, how you doing?
Good, how are you? Hey, did you ever have any luck with uh like uh m stabilized mint tea green liquors? No, not really. Have you ever thought did you ever try doing a fruit question for you as long as we're talking about fruits and acid. Alright, alright.
Um I'm doing a drink that has bitter orange juice in it, but bitter oranges are now out of season, and I wanted to know if there are any substitutes. Okay. Does uh look, I don't know anything about DC. Do you have a hardcore Latin neighborhood in DC? Sort of.
Bitter oranges are never out of season in Latin markets, but they're not the good I mean, okay. I don't want to be like they're not the ones that you might think of as good ones. Like they're not Sevilles, they're not like they don't have really nice uh skins or anything like that. No, that's fine, because I'm using the juice. Yeah, and the juice, to be honest, not like super on point point, but it's got not just the sourness.
So, like, you know, obviously at the bar, like I take regular oranges and I hit it with acid to get the acid profile that I like. Right. But it doesn't have the kind of bitterness that the bitter oranges have. But Latin markets have their version of bitter orange, you know, that's like mashed up with garlic and whatnot. Like they have them like all year long.
At least i in New York they do. They have them all year long. Yeah, and you can get it bottled the most. Oh, yeah, but come on. Really?
You can buy that in a bottle? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's with garlic, so you probably wouldn't want it in the bar. Yeah, and also, like, I can't think of anything.
Do you like Paul? Do you like uh that like that chopped last year garlic stuff? I haven't really tried it. You know what I'm talking about? It's that it's that thing that looks like convenience garlic.
Yeah. It's like weird. Yeah, that stuff's nasty. My grandma used to buy that exclusively. My grandma, you know, died in the I don't know, like early nineties, maybe.
Yeah, early nineties. She was like, look what they can do now. They can put chopped up garlic in a jar. I'm like, no, they can't, grandma. You tasted this stuff?
You know what I mean? Anyway, um, whatever. But so I I I would do that. Or I would say that you, you know, you could try acid adjusting it, but it's not going to have that um that bitter. What what blend of acids is in a bitter orange?
Well, okay, I cheat, and I just turn it into lime juice. And so if you take, I mean, like, I have the recipe for that in the book, but look, here's the thing. I would assume I've ta I've used straight bitter oranges off the trees in uh in Arizona, and I've used straight bitter orange juice for cocktails uh before. I don't remember what the ratio is, but it's pretty damn close to lemon or lime juice in terms of total acidity. And so what what you're looking at there is a six percent.
You're just looking at six percent acidity. So you can choose what kind of acidity you want. You know, if you want if you want to stay more on the lemon side, then you know, citric. If you want to shade it towards the lime side, you know, all the way so two to one mal. I wouldn't go more than uh two to one uh citric to malloc.
I wouldn't go higher in malloc, because I don't think it's gonna taste citrus anymore. I think it'll take on some other kind of notes. But like anywhere in that uh in that ratio is is fine. And you know, the the the ratio to turn it into lime juice would be uh thirty-two roughly, depending on the oranges, you have roughly thirty two grams of citric and 20 grams of malloc per liter. So you're looking at an additional acid of uh someone help me out of thirty to fifty two grams of acid per liter in any sort of ratio up to about twenty grams of malic should do it.
Uh and that way all of your bartenders can just use it as though it were lemon or lime juice and you don't have to worry about them like being like oh I got a flat or I gotta I gotta use a fat half ounce of this because it's not the same. The th the crappy thing about the it the the juice the yield on the on the Latin uh sour oranges is bad if you um are going to strain it because the pulp tends to be very coarse and so you lose kind of a lot to the pulping uh the pulp straining but you know try it they're they're okay I like them but they're different they're very different from the Seville's very well what about the uh the bitterness element oh they're bitter. I mean they're bitter ish. You know what I mean? No I mean if I'm if I'm doping orange juice.
Oh yeah. I mean you can j I mean you could add any sort of like bitter anything I guess or you could like throw some peel in there and let it macerate for a while. You know what I mean? And then that that would be what about like um bitter orange essential oil. Oh I never used it.
Uh I never used it. You probably want to suspend that in some alcohol and then stir it in but it might break you might need to have a little bit of umablic or something. Yeah. See what see what I've got that as you probably remember it's a lot of like let us know how it works. Yeah I'll go to Side.
Uh Jack should definitely come check out green zoners in DC Oh that's right. Yeah. You sure will. Call in from call in from there to one of the shows and go and go do it. Yeah.
But you gotta figure out the mint before he comes out he's not gonna come to you until you figure out the green mint. That's right. Yeah. Alrighty. All right, well, we'll work on it.
All right. So should we go back to the question? Got another caller too. Oh, call okay, caller. You're on the air.
Hey there, Dave. Uh I got a quick question for you. But first, I also want to say thank you, Jack. Uh, congrats on your new venture. That sounds pretty awesome, dude.
Thanks, man. Yeah. Um, okay, so Dave, um I've been doing a sourdough culture for a while, like a couple of years. Um, and have fed it with all different types of flour, but recently have been feeding it with gold metal. Right.
Um, and they just had a big recall uh because of possible E. coli contamination on some of their some of their flowers. So my question is, um, you remind me of the time and temperature killing regimen for E. coli, and like am I gonna have to toss out my two-year-old sourdough starter because I'm gonna go ahead and say no. The chances the chances of you the God's honest truth is I don't know whether look, your sourdough starter isn't gonna kill E.
coli, but I don't like your sourdough starter is a huge mélange of different microbes, and I think you're probably the E. coli is probably gonna get way out competed, especially over if you're keeping it alive, it means you're feeding it and using it on a regular basis. And so uh it's gonna get out competed, and there's E. coli is what we in the trade like refer to as ubiquitous. It's everywhere.
So the you know, if you have a toddler anywhere in the house, it's gotten anywhere near it, you've like E. coli up and down all over, like, you know, left and right all over that. Unless you dip your hands in bleach every time that you're touching it, like there E. coli has gotten in it before. So I would say no.
I wouldn't worry about it. Um, unless you're eating sourdough raw, like you are cooking the hell out of uh bread. Even if you let's say you let your sourdough go for such a long time that it's an acid bomb and you need to bring it back, and so you make pancakes with a whole bunch of it so that you can have a small amount that you bring back to life again, which is a valid use because as we all know, sourdough pancakes, you're using the acidity of the sourdough starter of an overdone sourdough starter uh in in conjunction with um baking soda as a base, you're not actually using the the actual acid, uh the actual um flora of it. Anyway, so even in that pancakes are you're cooking the hell out of a pancake and you're gonna be killing the hell out of the E. coli.
Yeah. Yeah, I think all the gold metal illnesses were from people eating raw dough. Yeah, raw dough. And remember this, like, so what happened now? No, obviously, obviously, sourdough starter is a good place for bacterial and yeast growth.
Otherwise, guess what? It wouldn't work, right? But the but I'm I'm thinking you're gonna be out competed, and I would not, I mean, like, there's so many chances for contamination. And just think of the lawsuits. I'm just kidding.
I'm not kidding, I'm kidding. I've never never recommended, never recommend, never recommend lawsuits. But uh, I'll also say this uh uh you there must have been, I haven't read the research since I looked at it originally, but it must have been uh contamination of a liquid on a grain, perhaps when it was going through the tempering step prior to being milled. Uh, there's a couple of places that you can get contamination on the grain, and then uh obviously, you know, you're not killing the bacteria. Uh it can go dormant in the dry conditions, and that's how it can theoretically survive, yada yada.
But um I'm I personally I would feed it to my family. That's all I'm saying. But cook it. Awesome. Okay.
Cool. Thanks, Dave. Alrighty. Appreciate it. No problem.
Okay. Back to the milk question. Yeah, what's this milk question? Alright, this is Ben from Rhode Island. He says, making a clarified milk punch.
I want to keep the punch base, grapefruit, pineapple, whole milk, matcha tea, separate from uh the booze, so I can figure it out as an a la carte cocktail, use it with different spirits and minimize waste. I'm getting very small curds. That's my next band. Yeah. Small curds.
Small curds. Small curds. Uh I'm getting very small curds that are too small for even the finest of cheesecloth. The finest cheesecloth. Uh coffee filters work, especially super thick chemex filters, but this is a brutal process.
Uh, one of the things, as we all know, that Nastasia Lopez will never do is filter liquor through coffee filters. Yeah. Never, never. You know what? She'd be like, no, I'm and she'd walk away.
That would be it. It's one of those things. Why? It's getting decided. It's detestable.
She's like, I'm done. You know how like uh no, I will I'll do liquor through coffee filters. I won't do grapefruit juice freeze-thaw through cheesecloth. Ever. Ever.
Yeah. She walk it's like it's like, you know, but I think it's the kind of thing like like like pooping in diapers where you say you're done with it, but you never know, you might go back to it later. What do you do with you? Good one. Uh what?
Well, you do it. I do what I have to, you know me. It's like it's like it's like if I'm in a situation where I have to do it, I'll be like, uh. But I'm getting better, Nastasia. I am now choosing things that don't require me to do the awful thing.
Like it used to be so eager to please that I would just choose the thing that I thought was absolutely the best and then figure out how to do it later, which often meant screwing us. But now I'm like, I'm gonna choose something that's really good, but that's also not gonna screw us. Getting older. You familiar with the gangrene album, Older Budweiser? Oh, it's good.
Yeah, good strong. But they uh they were famous for a uh computer just got it. Yeah, older Budweiser, yeah. They were famous for they did a cover of uh Voices Carrie. They did a hardcore cover of Voices Carry in the uh eighties that won some in very important Boston battle of the bands and it rocketed them to quote unquote fame in the comedy hardcore world.
They I think they for a minute they were past the dead milkman. It was like who's gonna be the comedy hardcore like, you know, group? Is it gonna be gangrene or is it gonna be dead milkman and it's back and forth? I like them both. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh milk punch. How the heck do we get on this? What were we talking about? Small curds.
Uh I'm getting very small curves. They're too small for even the finest cheesecloth coffee filters uh work, especially the thick chemex filters, but it's a brutal process. Would upping the acid increase the size of the curd, making it easier to clarify. Any other tips? Uh yeah, I don't think upping the acid.
In fact, I've had someone over like somehow they were able to rapidly acidify it and then like stop it from breaking. Here's what I would do in in in this order, depending on whether you need to do it right now, like today, or you can wait. So I did a little test this morning, and the problem with one of the problems with the your recipe is if your recipe has a lot of sugar in it, uh sugar tends to uh stabilize, as I said before, with milk syrups, it tends to stabilize and create very small, uh, very, very small curves. In fact, sometimes such that it doesn't even look like it's broken. So I would not put any sugar into your recipe or as little sugar as you can, you know, yeah, as little as you can until later on in the recipe after you've broken the milk.
That's one. Uh two, uh anything you can do to uh destabilize um the the proteins so that they go together in big clumps would help. So I did this. Four I did uh I didn't know what your I don't know what your recipe is, so I did uh 50% water, 50% milk, right? And then I added uh so I did uh uh ounce, ounce, ounce, ounce, and then in one I added another half ounce of water and some citric acid to break it, and another one I added a half a half ounce only of uh 30-proof uh I had some 30-proof old banana Houstino vodka right in.
But a small amount of alcohol just to help destabilize it a little bit and citric acid, and I got much bigger, fluffier curd and better yield out of the one that had even a small amount of alcohol. So if it doesn't need to be like alcohol like it doesn't need to be alcohol-free for kids, even a small dose of alcohol will help destabilize it if you need to do it right now. If you and also your technique, how you move the curd around can cause the curd to be bigger if you move it gently around and as I like to say, sweep the spoon around to let the curds get bigger and bigger as they as they pull casein in from outside, that's gonna help. Lastly, it's pretty much universally recognized that rennet does a better job of making big curds than acid. So if you can uh if you can go on the internet and buy rennet to do your curding instead of acid, it's microbial, so you don't need to worry about it being, you know, you're killing some baby animals for it.
Uh I mean, unless you want to, in which case you can get the baby animal one. If you need to have dead animal in your cocktail, you can do it. Um but the um anyway, so I would do it uh in that order. And that reminds me, last week we had a question about uh that's enough, right, styles on that? Yeah.
So uh last week we had a question about uh spices and freezing them, and I remembered like afterwards what I forgot to say. Another reason to freeze spices, we were talking the the questionnaire was worried about the questioner was worried about uh spoilage and all this other stuff and whether or not the freeze style would be a problem and moisture and blah blah blah. Here's a good reason to freeze spices. A lot of spices are infested with the eggs of uh insects like weevils and other nasty little things. This is especially true on like the more artisanal your product is, the more likely it is it's infested with some sort of crazy uh thing.
Uh even like uh flowers that you get, if you get like small run flowers from our artisanal places that don't have like, you know, don't have like E. coli spraying quality controls kind of situations in it. Um they can have infestations in them. And if you're worried about long-term storage or something that might have insect eggs in it, freeze. The I always get my spices at dual, the the like Indian shop.
You ever had any you ever had any hatching? No, they have dates on all of them, which is great. Date the date, not the fruit. You know what though? Uh people make those freaking dates up.
You think so? Oh, I know so. No, okay. I have seen it happen. But like the uh like the but no, but it's good to know it's you know what, you know what a date's good for?
It's good for you as a consumer to know how long you've had it anyway. Right. But I'm not gonna say where I bought it, it. It wasn't dual specialty, but there is a particular brand of flour that I still to this day buy because I really like it. Uh uh Indian um uh like it's it's whole, it's mostly whole grain, but it's really soft and it doesn't puncture like whole wheat does, so it's really good uh adjunct to like biscuits if you want to give it a little bit of weediness.
Like I really like it. Biscuits. Biscuits. Everyone likes them, but Nastasia. I had something else on your harpy on the yeah, no, don't get me started.
Please. You didn't know this? What? Peter, you did not know this? Well, I mean, I I would have guessed.
You would have guessed? Why? Because they're delicious? Because everybody loves biscuits and they're delicious. That's why they invented butter.
That's a category? That's why they invented butter, Nastasia. They have two, they have two solutions to your problem. I'll name two. Butter, jelly.
I'll name some more. Honey, molasses, good molasses. Not that bull crap that we get normally in the supermarket. But the um got a question for Jack in the chat room. Nice.
What's the question? Jack, what is your favorite meal? Um first thing that came to mind was like Cachoe Pepe done right. Yeah. Nastasia, why don't you give us your thoughts on that on that?
I know you have serious thoughts. No, you're the one. When it's like done right, it like has to be like I I agree with Stas on this, like it's gotta be al dente and like. When you say al dente, do you like it like Nastasia? Like hard as hard as no, like a little bit more than al dente.
So Nastasi, you're saying you don't like it hard? I do like it hard. Ah, made her good. Made her safe. Wow.
Yeah. But no, but Nastasia likes it hard to the point of like small core on the inside. Oh, like the they're still white in the middle and you're still tiny, but yeah, I kind of get down with that. Yeah. Yeah?
I like bookettini. Oh, the everybody. I like hooketia. Yeah, that shit. I mean, that's stuff.
Oh, believe me out. Oh, whoa. Whoa, family joe. I'm too used to Leahy being on it. I think that's a weird word.
It doesn't sound like it reminds me, like, I think there's a dude making it. I think that I think it's like a dude named Pepe that's making it. Oh, Pepe's making. Like that's why like it's somehow like, I don't know. I don't I can't, you know, I don't know any, I don't know any actual Italian like uh like nostasia here.
So anyway, we have a question about uh should I talk about the rice? Or do you want to talk more about that? You want to talk more about you we had a question of the crab. Is that enough? You want to talk about it?
Is that enough? Yeah, I think that's enough. You make that for yourself? Yeah, I don't do that bad that great of a job though. Why?
How can you up your game? How can I up my game? It's uh the finishing step there, you know. It's just the consistency's never like perfectly uh do you like using pasta water? Yeah, of course.
You have to. No, I actually tried it out. Kenji has a weird technique where he kind of uh cooks the pasta dry in a in like a pan like a like a saucepan, like risotto style? Yeah, exactly. Porquet.
Why? I don't know. I tried it. I know a bunch of people that have talked about uh pre-frying their pasta. I never really bought I never bought it.
I never done it. I did it once and did it again. No? It's called like pasotto or something. Really?
I heard somebody say that, yeah. Pasote, why would they call it that? Well, it's when you use the liquid that the pasta's cooking in as a sauce. Oh no, he's talking about pre-frying the pasta like a risotto. Yeah.
Peter's zoned out for a minute. Yeah. Oh, sleeping. Okay, caller, you're on the air. Hello, Dave.
Uh longtime listener, first time caller. Nice. You made it under the wire. You still have Jack here. Yeah, nice.
What's up? Um, I know that's against the rules, but one is actually for a different show altogether called Issues. Oh. Oh, wow. Wow.
Let's start with that one. Longtime listener. Yeah, so my first question is for Jack, and it's in regards to uh Darcy's show Chef's Talk. Chef's story, yeah. And then that is going to fold into my second question for cooking issues.
Alright. You know, Dorothy has a lot going on. Uh she's a very busy woman. She's she's she's awesome. She's awesome.
But I do laugh every time I get called Jack Innes on that show. Is that a thing? Is Jack Innis like a person? Is there a innus somewhere? No.
Is it like a baseball player or something? She's called she calls Erin Aaron Fairchild sometimes instead of Fairbanks. I think she just you know mixes up the names a little bit. Yeah. I I'm glad you noticed that though.
Thanks. Yeah, I just figured you'd fix it in post-production, but that's cool. Oh no, you should do it the way I do it for everything. Just put a totally different voice in. Right.
And thanks to Jack Insley. Yeah, yeah. Or just the Inslee part. Right, yeah, yeah. Insley.
My uh my ringtone for Peter, I gotta play that if I have time, I'll play that. I'll play my Peter ringtone. And I'll get I'll get Peter's ringtone up here. Alright, sounds good. So I was listening to an episode where Steve Jenkins was being interviewed and basically called out the olive oil industry and cold press not being a real thing.
And I started to look into like raw juice and juice bars, and I've always been a fan of the champion juicer and wanted to see what the fundamental differences were. And everyone that I see who puts out a cold pressed juice machine gets you to get a food processor where you blend the ingredients first and then cold press that. Yeah. You mean like Norwalk? Uh I don't know.
Here, listen to this first. No child wants to play with a heater in the box. No child wants to play with a Peter in the box? Yeah. That's uh whatever Peter calls me, that's what I that's what I get on my phone.
But the um before that it was the sound of me in pain from burning my hands on the puffing gun. No, which uh which which I'll also play for you. Yeah. Uh yeah. I don't uh I don't uh honestly have any experience with the cold press, and I'm sure you're talking about like uh Norwalks, uh you know, where it's basically just like a car jack with a bunch of stainless steel surrounding it, and it crushes it.
Um the people I know who have juice bars, like they love it because they say it's low temperature, but like like you say, if you have to put it through a whole bunch of blending operations first, there's the opportunity for heating it before it goes into the press. Paul, I bet you you've played with that crap. You play with that crap at all? That sounds like something you would play with. It sounds like something you would call into popular science.
Not yet. Brian Lamb of the Wire Cutter and the Sweet Home is a gadget guy and a cold juice guy. Brian, are you listening? I don't know. So you know, call or tweet in, give us the answer.
Uh I look I'm gonna I I can't come down one way or the other on uh on cold juicing. I'll tell you this: the champion juicer heats the hell out of the juice sometimes, especially like case three or four of apples, and you're not stopping and you're cranking through. I've had the champion heat the juice, I've had the champion boil water, I've melted the magnets, the uh protective magnets in the champion juicer from going to town on it. And partially that's why I love it so. But uh you know, uh the different juicers do have different qualities, and it's not just the temperature, it's the way the extraction works.
I tested the Breville versus uh the champion on apple juice this year, and the juice qualities were very different. Not better, not worse, different. So uh we got a caller who claims to have the answer to the juicing question. All right, here we go. Caller, you are on the air with the answer to the juicing question.
Hey David, it's Anton from Boga. Remember, I told you I used to run at Juice Bar. That is true. Before you before you saw the light and started eating meat and and you know, cooking fish and all this other stuff. Yeah.
And I now work in the cocktail bar as well. It's just full circle. But yeah, there's really almost no difference at all. Having worked with both, doing it at the taste-wise is minimal. Uh if anything, the the uh traditional juicers that are on cold press actually last longer.
Really? From what I've used, yeah. Huh. Huh. Um, when you use traditional juicers though, are you using neutrafasters or are you using champions?
Champions. Champions. Because the neutrafaster is so fat, literally fat, that I bet you it doesn't heat juice at all. It's such a monster. And did you have a neutral faster at your juice bar?
No, we use uh um it's called the good nature, which is basically a soup version of the door walks, essentially. Okay. Same principle, but just bigger. Even more expensive. Yeah, about ten times more expensive.
And you and you were like, this is Hokum. Pardon? You were like, This is horse hockey, this is BS. Just it makes no difference. Oh, totally.
So much so. I mean, yeah. I uh the cold juicing is the biggest sham I could ever. Wow. Nice.
If your concern is enzymes acting on the juice, as long as it's not warm for very long. I don't think we're gonna run into too much trouble. I was talking in regards to the whole cold juice, like in raw thing altogether. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Well, I don't know. It's good to know. I mean, I have no experience. So, you know, I'll uh I'm gonna put I like that you threw that out there over the bow. Maybe I hope we get other people and be like, man, someone let me tell you something about cold pressed juice though.
Looks fantastic on a menu. That stuff sells. You put cold pressed juice on a menu, and people were like, cold press. Yep. I think it sounds like I should care, right?
Doesn't it sound like I should care? Yes. We've we didn't heat the juice and destroy all of its vital nutrients. Dave, it's like our idea for calling milk boob juice. Yeah, so Peter had this idea yesterday to have a milk brand called boob juice.
Line crosser. And uh Peter, obviously habitual line crosser, as we've known, takes it just to the edge of the family show and then crosses over it. But the reason why we were talking about Hagen Daws, we're like, I got in an argument with Peter because um, you know, I I hate any any labeling on any food of any type claiming health of any sort at all. I just don't like it at all. I don't think I hate it when people say the XYZ piece of garbage is healthy because you know, just you know, I hate it.
It's like it's like just uh whatever, leave it off. And so we were saying that ice cream should get the healthy label, but the ingredients should be boob juice, vegetable juice, rare orchid seeds. Yeah, wow. Cold pressed. Cold pressed.
Very cold pressed. Well, no, but you have to heat the vanilla to get it to ferment right. So it's like cold pressed boob juice. Cold pressed boob juice. Yeah.
Cold pressed boob juice, vegetable juice. Which is, you know, sugar, cocaine, and and rare rare tropical orchid. For your health. Vanilla. Yeah.
Health. Health. Steve Perole reference? Health that was. Nice.
Health. That's for Philly style. Do you have an alternate label for eggs? Like, that's Philly. That would be a Philly style.
That's old style Briars. It's boob juice, vegetable juice, and uh, and tropical orchid. Yeah. Chicken seeds. Huge.
Chicken seeds. Like, that's like someone who thinks of a chicken as a plant is like that's like just some like weird. That's weird up in this. Look at Nastasia has a different face than normal. It's kind of a freaked out face, a little bit of a freaked out face.
Nice. Alright. Um chicken seeds. Okay. Uh Shira.
Uh well, you know what? Any of you guys experts on Japanese rice? Peter. Beater. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, of course. Look to me. Oh. Nastasia really showing her true colors here. She thought I was Chinese for the record.
She did not think you were Chinese. She did not think. Up until Chinese. For years. We knew each other for years.
Last year we clarified that I'm not Chinese. What do you mean last year? I've known like every the day I've known you, I know you're Korean. Yeah. Yeah, you.
But it's it's Das's brain. I was Chinese up until last year. That is not the case, man. Well, I know that. She's not disputing it.
She's got her shut shut up face on right now. Alright, so the uh you know what I'll do the Japanese rice thing next next next week, because it gets too long and involved Japanese rice. Yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay. Uh Shy writes in. Hello, uh, cooking issues team, thanks for answering my previous questions.
Um you spoke before about making tofu from peanuts. Uh I've wondered if you've tried using other pulses. I think I have, but I can't remember. It's been a long time since I've made non-traditional tofu. Uh Modernist Cuisine's done a lot of work on non-traditional tofus.
You can you can go look up their stuff. And the peanuts, I didn't have super great success with them because it was it didn't clot as well. I mean, other people have had good success. I looked it up on the internets today. And I know the modernist cuisine folks uh did a lot.
Anyway, whatever. I made tempeh from peanuts. I was earlier this year. It was a successful tempeh, but it was disgusting tasting. It's successful texturally, but successful texturally, it the mold grew correctly.
Yeah. Looked good. Yeah. Smelled bad, tasted bad. Not like toxic bad.
If you think it smells bad, Paul's remember, that was Paul Adams. The man who brought an open uh can of Surstromming in a taxi home with him and didn't think it was a problem. So if Paul thought it smelled bad, it stank up. It stank. It stank.
I previously made a ginkgo tempeh. Oh my god. What? Ginkgo nuts are the worst, most foul smelling things. You have to wash the bejesus out of them before they're even usable.
I did that. Oh, alright. Half ginkgo nuts, half dried soybeans, delicious tempeh. You know what people used to write? You ever read old like horticultural books?
I haven't. No. I mean, does I say write, I meant read. The uh the in ginkgo, they're like, people only plant the female ginkgos because I mean, sorry, the male ginkgos because the the nuts stinks so bad. I was thinking nuts, male, but no, they're on the female tree.
But the point is is that that's not the case. Right outside the Mofad's office, there used to be a ginkgo nut that uh ginkgo tree that would drop its stinky nuts all over the tree, all over the sidewalk. You used to step on the stinky nuts. What are you talking about? Stas, you don't remember the stinky ginkgo nuts.
Uh red ones? They're no, they're like this, and they're on the ground, and you step on your like, oh, what smells like vomit. Our old office. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of course. There were stinky nuts all over there. Stinky nuts. We're getting the high sign over there. Oh man.
All right. Well, listen, I'll answer I'll answer uh Shy's question uh about Burmese tofu from Chickpeas next week. Hopefully I can get Francis Lamb. You couldn't talk about it this uh week because whatever. Hey, listen, all love and thanks to my man Jack Insley for all the years of cooking issues and being a part of the show, being a part of the team, being our friend.
My favorite part. Cheers, Paul, not you, dude. Uh I'll come make cameos. I'll come prank you from all different places. And we'll be back next week with more cooking issues, but it won't be the same.
Oh, bye guys. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritage radio network.org.
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