This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the emergent circulator for Sous V by Chef Steps. Order now at Chef Steps.com slash J-O-U-L-E. I'm Damon Bolti, host of the Speakeasy. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.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 sometime like kind of around 12 to like 1245, 1255, sometimes one. Easter time on the Heritage Radio Network in Br broklyn, and the specific area in Brooklyn is Bubba Bushwick. So uh we are here today, Dave Dave's in the booth or David's in the booth. How are you doing?
Yeah, hey, good. Yeah. We do not have uh Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. She is in Naples, not Florida. Naples, like the actual city.
Oh, she didn't retire to Florida? Can you imagine Nastasia retiring to Naples, Florida? Um, no. She's in the actual, you know, Naples, like Napoli. Uh when I was a kid, you got like we have some some guests here to take Nastasia's place.
But uh before I get to that, David, where'd you grow up again? Uh outside of Philadelphia. Yeah. Did you get the uh the Napoli car advertisements when you were a kid? No, never saw them.
See, when I was a kid, the word Napoli to me was a used car salesman who literally called his used car lot Napoli. Like, new cars, used cars, come to Napoli. You never heard this commercial? Anyone? No?
No. I think it was a New York City and environs area. So, like to me, like when I think of Naples, I think of used cars. I don't think of, you know. I mean, that's kind of sad, right?
The local commercials here are pretty amazing. They got a leg up on Philly for sure. Yeah, but as I said before on the air, nothing on New Orleans. New Orleans has like some like sweet local commercials. So taking Nastasia the Hamroad Lopez place, we actually we have two people here.
One officially says she's not here, but because she's here, she actually is here. We have this is not who I'm talking about. Nick Wong. Hey Nick. Hi.
Hi. Yeah. You might have remembered him from the last time he was on the show when he purposely made faces at me, which you can't see through the internet, but wouldn't wasn't saying anything. But today he's going to say stuff, right? Stuff.
Stuff. Yeah, right. So Nick uh came to uh work with me at the French culinary. When were you there? 2008.
2008. And then after that, went to Sambar for what, like a billion years? Plus two. Billion two. A billion two years at Mama Fuku Sambar, then decided he needed to uh sew his non-Mamafuku oats.
And where did you go? You went to Grammar Cent to Grammarcy, and then you went out back to California for a while. Worked with uh Chris Costantino, right? Yep. What else did you work anywhere else there?
Nastalgia a few places. And then you hightailed it back to the to the good old East Coast, even though you're from California. I say you're from Milpitas, but you're not. Yeah, you just made that up. I made it up.
Totally wow, it's you just pulled that out of your ass. It's close though, right? Yeah, kinda. I mean it's a c you know that Booker doesn't allow me to say the word milpedis. I think you told me this once.
Yeah, Booker, because like I think it's a hilarious word, and obviously it sounds like, you know. Like millipede. Or like, you know, I don't know, junk. Like you're like junk, like manjunk. Kind of like a like a mill peat.
Like, it sounds weird. It sounds weird. It's like the town, it's my other favorite one that Booker won't let me allow me to say over here in Connecticut is uh the Mayanus. He won't let me say the town name Mayanus. There's a town name Mayanus?
There is. Well, he says it's pronounced Mianus, and I'm like, prove it. And I've never had anyone call in who lives there and be like, is it Mianus? Is it Mayanus? Phone lines are open.
Yeah, phone, yeah. Call in your questions or your correct pronunciation of Mayanus to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. So anyway, where are you actually from then if you're not from Lil Petis? San Mateo.
Alright. So then after that it comes back to Mamafuku Sambar. What's your current title there? Uh Chefted Guisine. Cheftak cuisine.
That's one of those weird titles. Chef de cuisine can mean like almost anything, right? Pretty much. Yeah. So like, you know, but you're actually coming up with recipes, right?
Ain't got anything new that you're working on? Not really. Come on. What do you got new that you're working on? What'd you put on in the menu last month that you that you think is fun?
Uh we just did a new scallop crude dish. It's going on in this menu tomorrow. What kind of scallops are you getting? Good ones. What do you do like like you're getting like C Bay?
What are you getting? Sea scallops, 1020. Yeah, 1020. You know who you know, my favorite scallops ever? Or the freshest scallops ever.
You ever like you ever like like hang out like and where they bring the Nantucket scallops right in and just get them like right there? Is it over by Mayanus? It well, pretty close to my anus. Everything, whenever wherever I'm there, my anus is always pretty close. But the uh no, but like uh Nantucket scallops, like day boat, like right off the thing are like I've actually never shook the live scallop.
I've I've always wanted to. I don't I don't know. Yeah, the well the the other thing is I think even when they are like live, like on on the shell, like how long they've been in transit is a huge uh impact on kind of their kind of flavor profile, but I don't know, it's also like when you're hanging out up there, I don't know, the every all the seafood like has a you know it tastes like you're eating it in New England, you know why? Because you are. You know what I mean?
Food really tastes different depending on where you're eating it, I think. Like your mental association with the food. Like if you if you hate the people cooking it, it never tastes as good. Yeah. Yeah.
What if you're eating it in my anus. Well, again, I'm always I won't go back into it. You're not gonna draw me back into this, Nick. And we also have back into the anus. Oh my god, that was a good one.
David, was that you or is that Nick? I wasn't looking. That was me. Sweet. That's sweet.
All right. Um we also have with us uh Esther Wester, what's your last name? Ha. Ha, cool. And you're a cook at uh at whi which one of the uh Daniel Ballute establishments?
Cafe. Ca Cafe Balud. How's how's it going over there? It's good. Yeah?
What do you we make anything fun? You got anything fun? Uh fun dishes? Fun dishes. Yeah.
Something that's like like I have to go try it. I like I need to like run. I mean, it's a great place. What what what do I need to go there and eat like right now? She put Korean food on a French restaurant's menu.
Really? Like what kind of c like hook me up. Because also Cafe Balou is like of all of them is the more traditional I mean bul like actual like Danielle, I haven't been in years and years, but when I did go, like it was like hardcore, like Garadon service, like like the waiter knows how to like get the fish out of the uh pastry and then like debone it and put the fillets without touching it. Like hardcore, awesome, like like tears to your eyes, old school French. But I mean, to tell you how long ago the last time I was there was Dominic Ansel was still the pastry chef there, so it was like a long time ago.
But uh, you know, they all they also had their share of like kind of like um, you know, kind of cutting edge and weird stuff to go with the old school French. But I've always pictured like kind of cafe baloos being like like you know, like a bastion of kind of like a lot of the old school cool Frenchy stuff, right? So what how do you care Koreanify, Koreanify, coriate? To coriate a dish? Yeah.
At the at Cafe Balloon. How do you do that? What what did you do? Like what are we talking? Did you add some pepper paste to it?
Like, what do you mean? What are you talking about? Did you throw some like wild mountain pickle vegetables onto it? Did you like what did you do? Uh we have we have a voyage section of our menu, and it changes every season.
So the next one is Korea. So I was trying to pitch a dish for fish. That's good. That's you have good alliteration there. It's rhyming more, but like a fat more rhyming, but we have a good dish for fish.
So, like, what else what are they doing in Korea? Like, how big is the voyage section of the menu? Um, it's a quarter of our menu. That's a big voyage. So, how long have you been doing voyages?
They didn't used to have that years ago, did they? Uh, they've had it since Gavin. Yeah, so like how like so again, a long time. But like, so give me give me uh what are you doing to the fish? What are you doing?
So I'm I'm doing the special for this past week was a take on aguchim, which is a braised monkfish dish in Korea. So good or bad? Uh visually, pretty shitty. Yeah. Like it's a pile of red fish and then soybean sprouts.
So once you overcook a monkfish and then you keep going, like what happens? No, you right, because like monkfish, what's interesting about it is it's got that like kind of like shellfishy kind of texture to it, right? So really, it's okay. So, like, you know how like okay, uh uh you know, Nick, we used to have this discussion, so it's been a long, you know, been having it for years and years. Back I would say like in the mid-2000s, right?
When everyone was interested in these hyper low uh fish preparations, and like the the thing that people were most worried about like in life was overcooking your fish, right? That was what everyone was like you know, and and and when you're cooking that style, that prep style, which I think you know, a lot of it came to us via like um like the rocas in uh El Calar con Roca over there, because they were doing a lot of that really low, really low temperature fish, or you know, and then later on you had, I guess when modernist cuisine came out a couple years ago, like that super low temperature gooey duck, the stuff that is like not really cooked in the classic sense of cooked. And so for a number of years, like cooked, when I say cooked, I mean like traditionally cooked fish dishes were like not served. Like you wouldn't get them. You know what I mean at a lot of restaurants.
Um but monkfish is one of those fish that I think you want, like I don't really particularly, and people are gonna get mad at me, like the low-cooked shellfish, except for the gooey duck actually, that Miraval and and Chris Young and those guys did. I thought that was excellent, texture-wise. But in general, um, I mean, I don't like my shrimp hammered, I'm not a barbarian. I mean, I like it cooked, but I don't like it. But I don't like it when it's low, especially something like a shrimp.
You know how when shrimp is a little bit too under and it's still got a little bit of that paste, that little bit of that hate. I don't like that either. Hate. Hate. Hey, we got a caller on the line.
All right, one second. So yeah, so we're gonna take a colour in a second. But but here's my question. So when you're doing monk fish, you actually want it to be a little bit springy. So it seems like it would work for a dish like that, and you shouldn't be afraid to do a longer, afraid to do a longer cooked version.
Agree or disagree. I agree. Is there sprayed? No. Oh, so yours is not braised.
The traditional one is braised. The traditional one is braised. We we kind of revamped everything so that because you thought the traditional one was too hammered and you didn't want to serve people like uh also it looks it's a pile of red. So pile of red, it's like you know. If you're gonna have a pile of something, I guess green would be your first choice, red would be your second choice.
Brown is last. Brown is blue is last. I'll take blue over brown. All right, caller, you're on the air. Oh, hey, it's uh Judy from Malden again.
Hey, how you doing? Nastasia is has your cookies in the freezer. So I know. We've had our wires crossed a couple of times. I I think the cookies are where uh box is gonna die in her building.
No, no. There's another set of cookies. I've uh designed like uh 10 signatures for now, which is crazy. But uh, yeah. So what do you got going on?
What do you got going on? You got a question for us? Yeah, well, there's one specific question. You want me to tell you about like what I had come up with in terms of pricing, but there's uh cookie with Cheetos in it. So how do you get the Cheetos crispy?
Oh, well, I mean, you need you need to use a hardness technique. Cookie Cheetos are, first of all, you have to if you want a Cheeto to remain crispy, you you can't use the puffy ones. You have to use the the hard ones, the ones that are less expanded. I I am using the hard ones. Alright.
So that's your first step. The second step is that uh you're gonna need to choose a low water cookie. You know what I mean? A low a low moisture cookie. You're gonna have to go hard bake.
Like you're not gonna get a soft baked texture because it contains moisture, and also have your Cheeto remain uh hard unless you did some like real fancy footwork. And I have to think about it. Uh but you know, because there is a classic cookie that I didn't know existed. Maybe you guys know this existed. Maybe it's a California thing, or maybe it's a Massachusetts thing.
I don't know. King Arthur Flower has a recipe for it because at Chester County Fair where I was last week, uh they had uh a contest for it. Potato chip cookies. Potato chip cookies. Oh, I like potato chips and uh Toesy's compost cookie much better than I like pretzels.
I think pretzels are just kind of gross there. I don't know. My my favorite tozy cookie is corn. Yours, Nick? Compost.
Compost? My favorite corn. I don't like uh the coffee in it, like kind of there's coffee in it, right? I like the coffee. Yeah, I mean, I don't I'm not a fan of coffee flavored cookies.
I mean, they're good they're good. My favorite corn. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Yeah. No.
I mean, I can appreciate that it's done well or done poorly, but I don't like it. You know what I mean? We know Nastasia doesn't like it. Yeah, I mean, I will eat it. Uh unlike Nastasia, I will eat something and I can appreciate if it's well made.
What? Oh no, she has Dunkin' Donuts coffee is way too high rent for Nastasia. If it doesn't come from like a guy that made it the day before, like like like on literally being sold on the street. She hasn't actually enjoyed it. If the taste of the paper cup doesn't like what I told S in an email that you have to get like a Mr.
Coffee and a can of shock full of nuts just for her, really. Yeah chock full of nuts. That brings back some pleasant memories of getting no, they're not pleasant. What am I talking about? No.
Yeah, chocolate nuts does not bring back pleasant memories. I mean it's fine, whatever. My mom used to uh my mom uh was went to med school when I was a kid and the only source of uh nutrients for the med students without leaving the hospital at Columbia uh uptown was a chalk full of nuts. And so like I spent a good chunk of my childhood only eating crappy, overwrapped and sometimes rancid cream donut pastries from I'll never forget I didn't I used to hate cream donuts for like ten ten twelve years because I got one that was moldy and it knocked me off a cream donuts at at a chock full of nuts in the 70s in you know uptown in New York and it knocked me off a cream donuts for like well over a decade. I don't eat I still don't like them.
I'll eat them. Do you like a cream donut? I like moldy cream donuts only moldy donuts. Only moldy? Only mold?
I like Boston cream donuts. Of course 'cause you're from up there. So the uh I uh but about Dunkin' Donuts like people order extra extra even though regular tastes like almost ice cream anyway. Look I look you know I I gotta get to the the the pricing thing in a sec 'cause I got a bunch of stuff I I gotta get to. But here but here but but before I do that let me just say this.
Dunkin' Donuts and I mean there's this argument on the internet a while ago and it keeps coming back up. Dunkin' donut has ruined the world in terms of the way they spell donut. It's just ruined. It's just ruined. And they've also ruined the you know that they've trademarked, they can trademark Boston cream because they spell it C-R-E-M-E.
C R E M E. What the heck is C-R-E-M-E? Boston cream. It's a Boston cream do nut. It's a they sell do nuts.
They do not sell donuts. And I happen to like Dunkin' Donuts, by the way. The flavor of Dunkin' Donuts, I happen to enjoy them because I grew up eating them. I'm just very mad at what they've done to our language. Yeah.
Oh, okay. One more thing. Uh there's a cookie with sumac in it. Oh, that's good. I like sumac.
There are uh uh quote unquote Slim Jim's and the cookie and Red and Hot. Well, whenever I think of Slim Jims, I have to I have to if I was wearing a hat, I would take it off from my man Macho Man Randy Savage, the famous one out. Yeah, we've got to pull it, snap it, just snap it too. There's not really a solution, or you're gonna think about it. Yeah, I'll think I'll think I'll think about it.
But remember, uh I would look I would look at the classic potato chip cookie recipe and see what they're doing. But I looked at the classic potato chip cookies that were the winners in this contest they had at the Chester County Fair, which by the way, we should all enter. Everyone at cooking issues who listens should go and we should just crush all the locals. Not that they can't cook, but we should just imagine if imagine if all these like cooking nerds descended on Chester, the Chester Fair every year, and was just like boom! And just like dropped like a huge like splat of stuff on everyone's like baked good.
It would be crazy. It would be awesome. It'd be intense. You know what I mean? Also, here's something upsets me about the Chester County Fair.
Chester County Fair's vegetable, uh, the the vegetable judging, it's all shape. It's all shape. Shape. So like flavor. No flavor, no flavor, and not even like a size.
So like we're growing like a huge pumpkin. Huge. It's already, it already weighs more than the kids. It's huge. You know what I mean?
Like both of the kids put together. But it's like, it's like shape. I mean, that's like that's what's that's what's so wrong with American fruit and veg today is the shape based. Because who cares? Shape and color, who cares?
That's not, I mean, color sometimes is an indicator of quality. But rarely, you know what I mean? It's like, I mean, you know, more red. Whatever. Is this is this social commentary on body image in the media?
It could be if you want it to be, or it could just be we need to change the way that people judge fruit and veg in in county fairs. And people. Yeah, sure. You could change it. I mean, like, I don't really judge people, I just judge fruit and veg.
Anyway, so what so uh so you're gonna send more cookies and we'll talk about the pricing when they come when they get here? Oh, I think she dropped the line. Alright, cool. All right. I like how like Nick tries to make it into a deep inner inner meaning kind of a thing.
I know you're not a deep inner meaning sort of person, though. No, no, no, as we used to call it dim. No, none of that. Uh all right, so since we're gonna run out of time, remind me at the oh, next week we're gonna be I'm gonna be at Harvard. Uh I don't know if Nastasia's coming up or not.
Uh, but I'm doing the talk with uh Harold McGee, so I won't be able to uh be here. I'm giving a public lecture with Harold McGee on Monday. I don't know, you know, I don't know how you get into it or whatever, up in uh at Harvard. And the subject that I will be discussing is how um kind of modern ideas of cooking and kind of uh observational and analytic cooking has led to a change in kitchen equipment design, both from my own perspective, like Sears all, Centrifuge, cubes, stuff like that, and uh other people's perspective, like the baking steel, uh, and maybe what the future of that means as opposed to the past in kitchen designs. That's one of the things I'm gonna or implement design.
That's one of the things that I don't know what Harold's gonna be talking about. He may or may not talk about uh impossible foods and like food engineering from that side, which is uh kind of a whole new category of things that's going on. But anyway, that's what we might talk about. Um so what else? Do you know, Nick?
You ever grow tomatoes? Nope. My tomatoes are growing so beautifully this year, and I've not eaten one because some evil freaking, either climbing or small mammal has eaten. I see the teeth marks in the tomatoes. I have not had one freaking tomato.
My tomato plants are like six and a half feet tall, all up on like things, like all beautiful, like healthy as all get out, not one. Thank goodness, whatever this thing is, doesn't like cucumbers or pumpkins, or I'd have nothing. Ripity do that, zip. If you plant perilla leaves around, they'll stay away. Really?
But too, it's weird, like because tomatoes are also a stinky leaf. You'd think that they would so you're a planter, you plant things? No, my dad used to. Yeah. Can I can I just put like a like a like a some sort of evil, like like fence of death?
Can I just obliterate everything that lives that walks near the tomatoes? Is there a some sort of like something that does that? I don't know. I mean, I bear this thing ill will. Ill will.
You gotta make yourself a Tesla coil to protect your tomatoes. If I look, you know remember Nathan Vir Mirval was working on that like like Star Wars defense system for mosquitoes, he was gonna wipe out malaria. I need that to pre protect my tomato plants. I don't think that ever happened. Anyway, alright.
Uh okay. By the way, my son Dax, lazy. Lazy, lazy. I was cooking for all these people this this weekend, cooking so much. You know what I mean?
Last week I was on vacation, so like family was coming while I was cooking, cooking. I'm like, Dax, I need to I need to cook, I need to cook. Can you roast the coffee? All he has to do is sit there and turn a crank for like 10 minutes. Roast coffee.
The entire 10 minutes complaining about how much work it was. And why can't I go buy an automatic coffee roasting machine? Lazy. I love him. Lazy.
Anyway. He did help me build a hovercraft. We built a hovercraft together. I saw that video. That was fun.
Hovercraft, fun. Next step, propulsion. Anyway, leaf blower. I bought a really good leaf blower. Anyway, this has nothing to do with cooking.
Let's get into cooking. Shy wrote in a long time ago about plums. So here's the question. I've recently made a nice plum tart, but it had a somewhat bitter tart taste to it. It's a flavor I've noticed before to an extent in uncooked nectarines and peaches.
Anytime say, see, brown is bad in a big dish that you serve out, but like anything that's crisp and brown, people like. You know what I mean? Crisp and brown, good. Golden brown. Golden brown.
Golden brown. Right? It's inherently good. Yes. Anyway.
Can you suggest a reason for this flavor to develop during baking and hopefully a method to prevent it? Thanks, Shy. Yes, uh, well, at first I thought I think you have multiple problems. First of all, what you're noticing is not just you. A quick internet search shows that this is a problem a lot of people have had with plum tarts, and I think also sometimes with uh apricots and cook plums in general.
So the short answer is uh no one's written the answer, and like what people have said is pretty much like the stuff the answers I have seen are pretty much wrong. I did do some uh research in the um, and here are the three articles that I I read. The physical pretreatment of plums, prunus domestica, part two, the effect on quality characteristics of different prune cultival cultivars by Luciano Cinquanta. And I read Bitterness and Astringency of Flavin 3 all monomers, dimers, and trimers by Hannah Peleg in 1999, uh, along along with uh a couple of other things. And here's what I think is going on.
Very interesting, uh, very interesting. There are, so there's a lot of like polyphenols and like tans and stuff in in plums, both in the skins where you taste them more in terms of astringency and in the plum fruit itself. Now, one thing I was thinking is that you ever notice, you guys have noticed this. When you eat a plum, if you chew on the skin for a long time, you get a lot more of that astringency versus if you just and like suck it down, and also like a lot of the acidity is in the plum skin area in a plum. And so, like, I've noticed a lot when I'm doing um plum juices um or infusions with plums that if you let them sit a long time on the skin the same way that you do with a grape, you're pulling a lot more of the astringency out, uh, and a lot more of the sourness.
So, like a like a short uh, you know, uh a quick juicing where you don't let the plums so typically when I want to extract a lot of those flavors before I do any juicing or clarification, I'll just smash the pumps, plums in the skins, maybe even and then the depending on how much you want, you can blend it. If you blend it, it really does get very astringent and bitter once you then spin it out or clarify it or whatever else you're gonna do with it, right? So, at first I thought that was the only thing that was going on, but then when I did some research, it turns out that this is a known issue. Uh uh when you dry plums, um the the amount of the uh catachins in them, which is the same kind of polyphenols that you get in teas, they provide a lot of the like kind of those bitter astringent notes in teas. They're like somewhat bitter, somewhat astringent, but they're um polymerized to a certain extent.
This is what I've gathered. I could be totally wrong, but chemists will write in. They're polymerized to a certain extent in a native plum, but uh the more those polymers are built up, the more they taste astringent, right? The more they're broken down into smaller molecules, the less astringent they are, the more bitter they are. So perhaps, and this is uh is shown like a the data in these articles show that during the drying of of plums from plums to prunes, prunes are so delicious that they actually changed the name, you know what I mean, of the thing from plum to prune.
You know, dried apples, which I love, are still just dried apples. Right. People like a raisin, right? They deserve their own name. I personally think dried apricots deserve their own name.
I personally think that the best dried apricot, to me, I would rather eat it than a fry a fresh apricot. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. I think it deserves its own name.
I don't know. Nick, you'll come up with it. Mienus. Uh I don't think people would buy a lot of the a lot of those. I like how you're pronouncing it with the alternate pronunciation though.
Anyway, so my point being uh that as these things dry, the uh level of their um the polyphenols in them by dry weight uh as composed of of unpolymerized catechin goes up by a good chunk. So you could have something that doesn't appear bitter that then appears more bitter. Now, as to what's going on with uh tartness, getting more tart, I don't know. But uh the interesting thing is here that there is chemistry going on here that is beyond my kind of knowledge, but someone else can find out. Now, as to how you fix it, I don't know.
I would try to maybe do a test where you cook down some that you've uh blanched and peeled. Can you blanch and peel a plum? You probably could. I mean, I would guess. I would guess you could.
I'm just saying that though, because I've never tried it. Never tried either. I've never peeled a plum. I mean, on purpose. I mean, I've sat there with my teeth and peeled the skin areas off.
But I'm I tell you what, I'm not, I'll tell you what I'm not doing. I'm not sitting there with a knife and trying to cut the skin off of off of a ripe plum. That's what's not going to happen. No. Would you try to do that, Nick?
No. Did I ever tell a story on here where we tried to make you peel fennel seeds? I yo, you never made me do it. Yes. Remember, I pressure cooked the fennel seeds, and they have those little white insides in them.
And I tried to convince you as a joke to peel a quart container of fennel seeds down to the little white things. That's some other stupid person that's not me. I think that was you, man. I'm pretty sure it wasn't me. I don't know.
One of the other stupid interns. Did we have another Nick Wong? Yes. Anyway, so like I would try taking the skin off. And then the other thing I would try is maybe doing um like uh some sort of like either I mean this sounds kind of gross, but like an egg white soak or like a milk soak to see whether you can complex more do a more of a hard complexing with the casein of some of these things to suck them out of the plum before you uh cook it.
Uh alternatively, you could use something else that con like some other charged uh protinaceous thing that might complex with um the precursors to this bitterness and knock them out. That's my and another thing you can do is you could try to actually dip the stuff in milk and see whether that uh reduces the bitterness after the fact, in which you know, as a test to see what what's happening. Although my guess is that the more condensed, the more polymerized the uh these things are, the better they will complex with milk. But again, you're beyond my actual level of knowledge and you're into my realm of extreme speculation. Anyway, which is where I live most of my life.
By the way, speaking of bitterness, do you know that you know uh bow eats, you know, bowl eats, the the mushrooms like you know, like porcinis, bolites, they're the ones that have the poor structure instead of the gills. Good news about bowl eats is that well, they taste good and that they um uh that they're not poisonous. Like there's very few bow, there's no bol eats that are gonna kill you. You know what I mean? It's like you if you go for gild mushrooms and you get the wrong gild mushroom, like you're toast.
You know what I mean? Like, unless you get a liver transplant, you're hosed. You know what I mean? Uh you know, like destroying angel, you know, amenitas, things like this. Bolets, like some of them are like toxic-ish, but like they're not gonna kill you.
Anyway, but there's there's one that looks fairly similar to an actual porcina. It's called a bitter bolit. Bitter bolit. Bitter bully. You are a bitter bowl eat, Nick.
Nick was gonna say I was a bitter bullet. Turns out I have these up in Connecticut. But here's the interesting thing that I'm gonna maybe cook some up and bring it. The whatever is bitter in a bitter bowl is only bitter to people who have the genetic ability to taste that particular bitter compound. And like prop, you know, the bitter tasting uh strips that people test to see if you're a super taster, not everyone can taste it.
So if you don't have the genes to taste it, apparently it's delicious mushroom, as delicious as a porcini. But then if you have that gene, it's as disgusting as chewing on prop strips. Like hardcore bitter. So I'm gonna try to find some and then bring them back and we'll have a bitter bowl eat cook off, and then we'll sit there and like like I like hopefully I can't taste it just so that I can serve it to other people. So I can sit there and be pounding it, and then someone else eats it, it's like ah ah, right?
What do you think? Are you a super taster? You you guys are have either of you ever done prop? I'm pretty sure I'm not a super taster. I think I did it once.
I'm not. I'm definitely not. And I don't feel and I don't feel bad about it, to quote Macy Gray. Hey, David, you ever done that prop strip? No.
You know what I'm talking about, though? Never heard of it. So what the classic thing you do, so here's the thing. If you want to pretend to be a super taster, and really I don't see why you would, because a lot of like it, like it's a really crappy, like because it makes it seem like it's an awesome thing to be, super taster. I mean, it may or may not be, but it's like whatever.
It's it might just ruin your life. I don't know. Well, apparently, uh, you know, super tasters are the ones that go for the white zen. Uh just saying, uh just saying, make what that you want, but you know, there there you have it. Ooh, the white fin.
Hater of the white zen. By the way, people out there, and maybe get some in the chat room. Why has no one made a delicious well-crafted white zen? I mean, I'm sure they have. Let me take that back.
Why have I never tasted a delicious well-crafted white zen? Because we all grew up like well grew up, you know, we all grew up in drinking life, th especially like, you know, my at my age, like a lot of people were pounding that sweet white rock gut white zen. You know what I mean? And so, like, it took a long time for even real good Zinfandel to kind of overcome that hump of like the white zen, the like the kind of uh, you know, bad connotations of the white zen. But then why hasn't there been more of like a white zen comeback, like good white zen?
Like what can it not be made? I'm sure someone makes a delicious one. I just haven't had it. I had it, you know, whatever. I went, whatever.
It's not the it's neither here nor there. Hey you want to take another caller? Sure, call her, you're on the air. Hello? Hello?
Hey. Hey. Um I'm a baker and I make a carrot pumpkin bread every year. Um had a question about that. Sure.
How do you cure the pumpkin? All right. So it's just uh roasted, you know, roasted squash, whatever, whatever we can find, kabucha, blue hubbard. Um, and then most of the hydration for the bread, it's a rye bread. Most of the hydration comes from carrot juice.
Um, so I basically I the bread's delicious. I just wanted to reduce some of the labor of it, especially since I don't have an outlet for the runoff from the juicing process. And uh you mean like the carrot pulp? It looks like carrots are mostly uh are are pretty high pectin. So I was wondering if anyone had experienced just kind of breaking down carrots into a mush with pectin enzyme pectinase enzymes.
Uh maybe for you you've done something like that for a cocktail or uh um wanted to know how that would work out. I have, but it's been many, many years. I mean, carrots one of those things that like you know auto auto-clarifies to a very high extent as opposed to like a lot of other juices on separation, like so it's one of those things that I haven't focused a lot on in like trying to clarify it. And it's been I used to do uh like back in the day, we run for that one, Nick. We did apples and carrots, we did a bunch of cocktails like that, um gin, apple, carrot, but it's been a long, long time.
Uh look, the original uh purpose of a lot of these um pectinase things, there was one that I used to use on apples called Pectanex Smash XXL, which was what we started using before we were using SPL back in the day. And its stated goal is to increase the yield of juice out of um increase the yield of juice out of uh apples and I'm sure it would also work on um carrots now I would use SPL because my guess is that there's probably beyond pectin that there's a good bit of like uh hemicellulose and stuff in a carrot so I would um carrots are like one of the reasons carrots are hard is because aren't they high in calcium anyway uh like uh doesn't that reinforce the pectin structure it's I haven't researched carrot in a million years but I remember remember how the modern cuisine guys used to say that uh the internal like the very taproot inside structure of the carrot is higher in calcium that like lighter core and that they did uh differential tasting where they popped the core out and did a like a triangle test of like the outside of the carrot versus the inside and I think they were saying that they thought it was a higher calcium level that was increasing to a bitterness perception in the inside of the taproot but I don't know if that's actually what was going on or if it's just the majority of the sugar storage is in the outside. I don't know how far they went into it. Anyway been many years. But so my guess is that yes uh pre-treatment with pectinx uh ultra SPL will increase uh your yield uh there's gotta be some good use for that dry nasty pulp there's gotta be like some some sort of some sort of crappy health cookie some what some sort of crappy health cookie like is there's got to be some use that's like you know how like when you make tofu you have all the OKRA left over like the the things and you're like, what am I gonna do with this?
And so you just add a little bit to like every muffin and pancake you make for the next like you know month to try to get rid of it until it starts going stale and stanky in your in your in your fridge. You guys know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah is carrot pulp the same way? Can you just kind of toss dry worthless carrot pulp into as roughage for people who want like a cookie that helps them like uh go go go you know to the bathroom or no?
Yeah I mean we f we found that the the runoff from the juicing just isn't really flavorful to use for too much. Um yeah no it's just a fiber it's just fiber. Yeah yeah I mean what what I so I I guess what I was wondering is is uh if so say I'm using about I think uh if I remember right it's about like fifty percent carrot juice, fifty percent water in the in the in the uh the the formula if I were to s to just take carrots and submerge them one to one by weight in water plus pectin X and kind of let it sit and then would would that uh no break down at all or no no no no no no no no no no no no what you would have to do is you'd have to juice it, take the pulp, treat the pulp with pectanex, and then try to do another juice extraction on that. Okay. Pegton X will not penetrate at all.
In fact when we used to use the Pectanex Ultra SPL to do things like uh you know one of the old tricks is uh to get all of the white off of uh like doing supremes of uh like pomelos and something things are very hard to do supremes of and uh you know we would peel it first because it wouldn't penetrate through the peel then we would uh break the it into like like halves and quarters then soak it, then break it apart after it had started dissolving, and then soak it again to get all the stuff off. The stuff just will not penetrate uh it won't. Like even under vacuum conditions you uh in a carrot specifically, vacuum infusions into carrots tend not to go that deep unless you're doing super multiple pulses. And so I highly doubt that you're going to get that much of an increase in yield, unless you could, if you if you if you put all of the carrots, if you didn't want to juice it twice, if you put all the carrots through like uh like um a RoboCoup with a disc in it and like chip them into carrot chips and then soak them in pectanex and then pull them out and throw them through them through your champion or whatever you're using, uh that might increase your yield. But I would run some tests to make sure that it's worth the time uh and effort.
Otherwise, I would just try to do a rejuice of the stuff and see whether the stuff that comes out uh later is any good. Hey, here's a question. It's just off the top of my head. You have any of you guys ever make rice bran pickles? You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, no, you're talking about it. Rice bran pickles. I wonder, because when you make rice bran pickles, you know, you have to like incubate the rice bran and all this, and it has to have a it has a certain moisture content, you're burying your vegetables and you have to replenish it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? I wonder whether you could cut a rice bran mixture with like really dry pressed carrot stuff. I wonder whether you could like add it, whether it would be bad, or would it add like a good thing to like an already going rice bran pickle?
What do you think? I don't know. But it's just fiber though. That's right. Well, what's rice brand?
Fiber plus some fat and some other stuff. What's carrot, what's carrot waste? A little bit of sugar, not no fat, fiber. But I'm not saying like go a hundred percent, I'm saying like go partial. Do you think it would rot, or do you think it's a low enough moisture content that it'd be okay?
I don't know. I don't know. I mean, with all with all the sugar, it might get yeasty though. That's that's that'd be the one concern. Right, but that's what I'm when you taste, like when you do a good job, like if you like double double juice or whatever, the pulp that comes out of a champion with the carrot stuff, it's pretty it's fairly neutralized compared to a real carrot.
You know what I mean? Like I wonder how much actual sugar is left in there. I get what you're saying. Like you wouldn't want a lot of yeast, you wouldn't want yeast stuff going. But it'd be interesting.
Anyway, I don't know. Someone's sure has tried it. I don't know. Well, I'll I'll I'll try that out and I'll let you guys know. Yeah, cool.
Let us know what happens. Let us know whether you increase your yield. All right, thanks very much. Cool, thank you. Um Matt, are you an olive you guys olive fans?
You like olives? You have any you have thoughts on olives? No? No thoughts on olives? You guys are you guys you guys are worse than Nastasia.
Matt Hall wrote in the That's just hurtful. Yeah. I'm interested in getting your opinion on the selection of olives for cocktails. I have been using um uh I can't pronounce words that I read. Castle Vitrano olives for dirty martinis, two parts uh dry gin, one part uh dry vermouth, uh, and a bar spoon of brine.
It seems good, but am I missing a better option? What about other cocktails? Thanks, Matt Hall. So we use uh we use um frankly, we use olives that fit into the bottles because what we do is we throw, we push olives into our martini bottles. What are they?
What do we use? Like peachelines or something like that? I don't know. No, the little ones, little green guys. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. Um so that's what we use. But I, you know, I would just do it based on uh taste. Tony Cunigliaro in um in 69 Colebrook Row and Zetter Townhouse, et cetera, et cetera, in um London, he uses exclusively Nochelara olives. And he um, of course, he's Sicilian, but then he, you know, what he does is the the the least, the least, I should say, the the lowest yield idea on earth.
He takes Nochulara olives, drains the brine from them, puts them in a centrifuge, spins them, and lets the the increased weight of the centrifuge on whole olives expel some brine, and then that's what he uses for his dirty martinis. And then the rest he sends back to the kitchen to make tapa knot. I was like, Tony, how much top and not do you sell? Like, who are you, who are you unloading all this top and not on that you can like, you know. I'm talking like, you know, he'll get, you know, those the big the big 10 cans of Nochularas, and he'll get out of that like, I don't know, like a cup, like a less than a pint of like of uh uh of brine.
And that's think of how much top and not a number 10 can has in it worth of olives. You know what I'm saying? Anyways, so uh I would just choose olives that you like. I would think most, I mean, what do most people do? I've done calamata, but it's very specific and it's colored, so it's kind of like people generally want green olives, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I would just say experiment. If you have access to a centrifuge, you can make really, really, really good olive brine just by blending it and spinning it, and you get really, really good paste, really, really good brine, and a little bit of uh oil that olive connoisseurs hate because it's fusty.
It has that it has that oxidized kind of cured taste to it, which olive uh people hate. Uh okay. Uh Richard wrote in about seasoning sticks. There's a Kickstarter, it's called seasoning sticks. And he said, Well, watching the video, I got a few laughs and uh and a couple of fave face palms over there.
Science behind the product. Probably the worst thing it uh worst thing being that they feel that all the water has gone from the inside of the meat at 110 degrees. There's some notice, there's some science problems. There's some science problems. What what this is, Nick, Esther, you tell me is that these people make sticks there uh out of some sort of seasoning, and then they shove these sticks into like a meat product, and then they cook it to try and season it from the inside out.
Now, I'm sure that Richard is expecting uh that I'm going to go completely like ape on this. And I would if I had more time. You know what I mean? But I'm gonna say something here, and this goes back to like Greg Greg Blonder. I'm supposed to be talking about Greg Blonder and vacuum vacuum pressure marination, but I haven't had time to run a lot of the experiments yet.
Whatever, we'll get to it next week. Or in fact, I would love to meet him uh at the Harvard uh next week. He believes that vacuum marination and pressure marination don't work, but I think that he is not necessarily uh correct based on the experiments he's run. Like, for instance, have you guys noticed, do you guys you guys vacuum bag for with with flavor, right? Right.
So and again, remember, and I'll get back to the seasoning sticks. But like remember, uh in general, like it's clear that under vacuum salt penetration is higher, right? And nitrate penetrate penetration is higher. I know this because you can run the test. You can fuse a uh pork belly with uh with pink salt and then not do it.
I mean, uh not vacuum it and vacuum it. He's doing it under a lower um under a less high vacuum than we would be doing it. But and then when you cook it the next day, the pink is deeper in the pork belly that you did under vacuum. He's also not getting a lot of the effects. He's doing whole muscle meat, so he's not getting effective like penetration along bone lines and crevices in in muscles.
Uh also he's not doing it to the point where you know how when you do a bad vacuum job and like you can see the meat inflate like a marshmallow, like it puffs up. Clearly, you're f separating the fibers, and by doing that, you're allowing the meat to penetrate. But the c I think that's bad practice. Although it might not actually be bad practice on meat that you are trying to quote untenderize. So we since we sit there and we beat chickens and beef with mallets to tenderize them, and yet I'm worried about inflating them with a vacuum, right?
So who's the idiot? It's me. But you know, obviously fish is destroyed by that technique. So like, you know, you don't want to do it with fish. But going back to my point, what do you guys think, you two here in the studio with me, think, and Dave, if you if you do this as well, uh, is the is the thing that you cook most often that absorbs marinade the fastest in a vacuum.
I'll give you five seconds to think. Five, four, three, two, one. Shrimp! Shrimp. And crustaceans, because they have open circulatory systems.
So I think you know, you're dealing with something like uh uh a cre me, everybody knows that when you vacuum bag shrimp, you don't do it to cook it because that's gross, right? You do it because shrimp absorbs flavor like a mofo in a bag, as opposed to something like a chicken, right? Haven't you noticed that? Like shrimp picks up stuff in a bag, and I think it's because it's just a big straw. It's a big open circulatory system.
And so it goes right through. Yeah, and that's my theory. I want to run some tests though with larger molecules. So he uses green food coloring as a stand-in for larger molecules because most of the flavor molecules that we have are very large compared to something like salt. And so, like the mistake people make in marinades is they think that uh these larger molecules are actually gonna make their way into the meat, and they're simply not under most uh things, unless you beat them with mallets, whether it being marinated, in which case it will.
But anyway, we'll get into that later. As for the sticks, uh so marinades tend not to work, but anyone that's have you ever roasted a chicken? I know you have at freaking cafe balut. I know you've roasted a chicken in your life, right? Nick, you roasted a chicken.
If you stuff crap into a chicken's cavity, is there anyone on earth who doesn't think that the flavors from the herbs and the citrus and the onions and the alliums that you shove into the cavity of a chicken when you roast it don't permeate the freaking meat? Because they're stupid, they have no smell or taste. You know what I mean? It's like it's obvious that those flavors during cooking permeate, right? Yeah.
And so like that's affect that's uh uh temperature effect happens while while it's cooking. And so if that happens by shoving a chicken, by shoving like you know, uh chopped up uh lemon, uh coriander, parsley, uh, onions, and rosemary into a chicken cavity, pepper, salt, uh, you know what I mean? Like I mean, maybe these sticks, as horrifying as they are to have what horrifies me about the idea of a stick of spice through uh uh something is that you have this like hyper-concentrated like spice hit right where the stick was. Right. So, you know, we always used to call that spice burn, right?
So, like you'd have like someone, some idiot was like spicing a bag, let's say for low temperature cooking, and they just throw the freaking spice into the bag and then they walk away, and then you get that super concentration. A lot of spices go hard bitter when they're cooked for a long time in high concentrations of one thing, and so you get spice burns, or some idiot would throw uh like rosemary right against uh like like a fragile thing in a bag, hard vac it down without any liquids, and then you get that like imprint, that like bitter over rosemary imprint of green all over the meat, right where it hit. First of all, those jerks would make an actual literal cooked imprint of a rosemary stick into the food, which is enough that you should like you should go to a corner of the room and cry. But uh beyond that, uh it creates spice burn. So that would be my only thing, right?
What do you think? Is is a rosemary stick the original seasoning stick? Rosemary stick is the original seasoning stick. Because you know, you shove that thing into, you know, shove that. That's what Ched Chesray was born on a rosemary skewer, I think.
I look, uh I'm not sure. You're turning it into something gross, but I don't I'm not sure exactly how that. So listen, we're running out of time here. Next week we'll get or two weeks from now, we'll get uh to Mark Bledsoe's question uh from uh we have a we have a month. He has an event he has an event a month away, but I'll get into it uh next week, hopefully, with time for you to work on it.
Uh Devin Krebs had a question about how'd you get into this whole line of business, which is a kind of a longer discussion. Uh we'll get to it. We'll eat some cookies, uh, and uh that's it. Oh, I will say this one thing on the way out. You know in New York City and Washington and Philadelphia, like all the buildings are this is not a cooking thing.
They're like brownstone. You familiar with brownstones? Yeah. So all that brownstone came from a quarry in Connecticut called Brownstone, and uh they it flooded in 1936. It's now a water park, dude.
It's sick. It's sick, man. You gotta go, gotta go to Brownstone Water Park. And last thing, this is cooking related. Uh so everybody who listens to me knows that I'm very pro-Tandoor, right?
You know this? You know anybody anti-Tandoor? Well, no, but I'm very pro. Trump. Trump.
Trump hates tandoors, yes. But I'm very, very pro-tandoor. But what it's done, and this is it's totally changed my entire outlook on cook cooking in general. Because yeah, because what if you cook in a Tandor, other than bread, which is one and done, right, on the side pops off. Everything in a tandoor is uh most everything is is multi-cook, right?
In, out, in out, in out. And I've said before, like David Kinch bat uh David Kinch, you know, from Monresa, when he decided that he wasn't gonna do low temperature anymore because it wasn't enough it wasn't enough work for him to do just low temperature work. So he would take his like old school, I think he's I forget whether he's Bonet or Moltaney, one of those things, right? He would he would just take his meats in and out of the old traditional oven to try to get that high average, a high instantaneous heat, low average heat, which is why rotisserie is so good. And tando is the same way, super high instantaneous, in out, in out, in out, oil based in between so that it it starts cooking as soon as it gets into the fire, right?
And so you get these like that's how you get the really nice crust, and then really but and so but I've just been cooking everything that way. So like on my grills now, and like you know, meathead when he was here would hate this, but like everything I do is like is done tandoor style now because I don't have to think ahead. You know what I mean? It's just like make it thin enough so that it's gonna work, and then just off on off on off on off on. So I do I I I've been doing the vertical grilling, but now I've been doing it now horizontal grilling.
I told you I bought one of those big cowboy grills at the Home Depot for 150 dollars that has you know basically the grilling area of a of a dining room table, and like I have so much wood that like I don't have to like I don't have to worry about like uh sustainability. It's like I live in the eighteen hundreds and like I'm just destroying the earth, you know, one person at a time. You know, it's like but again, like the wood would otherwise go to waste, it would rot into the ground. No one's coming to buy it or use it or build houses out of it. So I'd build a I do one uh I do one chimney of charcoal and then I layered like logs over it.
Literally if you go back and you read camp cookbooks from uh like the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was a huge woodcraft movement that went along, not woodcraft meaning like woodwork, woodcraft meaning like how to survive in the woods uh movement that happened in the US as part of the kind of a return to nature naturalism movement, right? It happened right around the time when all of our forests were already kind of destroyed, so people were trying to like hook it up. But the culture at the time was still, you know, you get a big hunting party, you go out into the woods, you chop down a bunch of full-size freaking trees, and you build a camp, uh c you know, including like you know, like uh like big uh fireplaces, and they were burning huge amounts of wood. And so like I can kind of act that way now, at least for a little while. So I'm building these giant wood fires, and man, having a giant, like dining room-sized, like super hot flame that you can just off on, off on, I can crank, and I really love cooking that way.
I just love it. And I did shrimp on it the other day and chicken, because like shrimp, shrimp's a master of the off on, off on. Shrimp is like boom boom boom boom, done. You know what I mean? Off on, off on, off on.
Do you hate people that cook their shrimp at too low a heat and then the whole thing is ruined and the outside still doesn't have any nice crust on it? Yeah. I hate that. I hate. One last question, because I know we need to leave.
Are you guys bigger fans of getting a shrimp and cooking it nicely so that you can eat the shell and get all the flavor? Or do you like people to cook it with the shell on and then the idiots peel off the shell and lose all the flavor? Or do you like to shell the sucker and then put the flavor on it, but then also not shield the meat as much from the high heat? I like the worst option on that. Which is you cook it with the shell on and the idiots peel it.
Yeah. I would rather just eat the shell. I like eating the shell. I'm very pro-eating the shell. I'm I'm more I'm just lazy.
Well, do you does that mean you also like the double stir fry technique? The second one is the one that makes the shell crispy enough to eat. Like like salt and pepper shrimp, where you hit it once, then you pull it, and then you hit it again, and then yeah. And that actually, to be honest, and this they're gonna have to kick me off here. But the the that's the one advantage to kind of the low quality, really thin-shelled, like farm-raised, like BS shrimp that we get, is that if you cook it like that, those shells are super super easy just to eat.
You know what I mean? And I don't mind it. I don't mind it. I don't mind it. Americans need to get over it, eat the shell.
Anyway. Just eat the shell. Yeah, uh, is that true? There's ca- is there calcium in it? It's chitin.
I know it's chitinous, it's so it's good for like whatever chitin's good for. Maybe there's calcium in it. Uh I'm sure there is. Because I know lobster shells make that terrible flavor. If you cook, you know, you ever you ever make a lobster uh broth?
You ever accidentally cook the shell too long? Nasty. Nasty. Lobster shell only want to be in the broth for a certain amount of time. And if you overcook it, it gets that shell taste.
And I think that shell taste is calcium, but I don't know because I never researched it. All I know is is that if I see someone boiling their lobster shell and then I come back in in like an hour and they're still boiling that lobster shell, I'm like, oh my god, why? You know what I mean? You know what I'm talking about. Anyway, cooking issues.
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