This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the immersion circulator for Sous V by Chef Steps. Order now at chefsteps.com slash J-O-U-L-E. I'm Damon Bolte, 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 It Shoes coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. Actually, we're really on time this uh today, right? Yeah. You're crazy.
We got uh a lot to go through, some good, some great, some terrible. Uh if you have questions, uh call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Uh on the show, we have as usual Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. I'm good.
Good. We have uh Dave slash David in the booth. How you doing? What up? I'm good.
Uh we have uh special recurring guest and uh a secondary tasting panel because uh for those of you that listen to the podcast regularly, Nastasia literally doesn't care about coffee, merely because I do care. Really? Definitely not true. It's the only it's the only real reason. Uh so we brought uh lover of all things taste related uh and uh coffee as well, and also an expert in coffee techniques that I am not.
Uh we got uh Paul from Popular Science. How you doing? I'm good. Yeah. I've had a lot of coffee already.
Yeah, so uh, you know, and you can tweet him out at at Pote.pot dot no it's at at Pote. At PopSiEats. Oh, at PopsIET. Oh, Pote is your On Twitter. Twitter.
Or you can email me at my secret private. Uh yeah, nice strength. And we have uh now uh I'm not sure uh his title, but we have uh Kali Kale Kale. Calais. Kale.
Kale Fries from Sudden Coffee, correct? Correct. Uh and what's your title over there? I'm uh definitely not chief coffee officer, but I hustle the coffee. I'm co-founder.
Are you on the engineering side? Are you on the production side, the tasting side, the money side, the bro side? Uh there's two of us, and I have a numbers guy, Josh, who's very much numbers guy, and then I handled the rest pretty much. So you're more production engineering. All right.
So uh he uh he's on the show today because I think you're probably here for the coffee festival we had in New York this weekend, right? Yeah. Yeah, which I went to. We could talk more about that later. But we had a number of people actually uh tweeting on and I think asking even whether we had tried uh this uh sudden coffee.
Uh and so we're gonna try it in in a minute. You want to go over what the you had this like w well, how do you start? Were you a Kickstarter situation? What were you? We well, I started working on it about a year ago.
So sudden coffee is instant coffee, that tastes really good. Right. That's it. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention what it is is is instant coffee that's supposed to actually be good. Now, is it taste like coffee or is it just good in its own right but isn't the same thing as coffee?
Well, we think it's pretty good as as coffee. That's definitely what we aim for. Okay. So it's not a third product. Not really.
I think we're what we want to be doing is creating another way, like alternative way of drinking good coffee. It's not meant to replace Burin Coffee yourself or going out to a coffee shop, but rather just help you drink good coffee when you wouldn't be able to otherwise. Yeah. Yep. So uh now your main competitor then is Starbucks still selling that via thing, where it was what's it called?
Via Condios, what the hell is that called? Yeah, yeah, via whatever. Yeah, I mean Why would you choose something that has alternate English pronunciations? It's a good question. Via, via if you you can you can hire you can hire a very expensive brand agency who will tell you that that it sounds sophisticated, I guess.
Do you think it sounds sophisticated? I don't think so. Right. Do you know that back in the day I used to get into arguments? I I I think they become much more flexible now.
We might have talked about this years and years ago, Nastasi, but you would actually appreciate this because this is the kind of thing Nastasi would do. I'd walk in, I would like, I would like a double espresso, and they're like, dopio, and I would say double. And they would say, yeah, they would say dopio, and I was like, no, I would like a double. It would just I would see how long I could keep it going. And it used to be basically forever.
They would they would just they would go like Dobio, and then go make hand it to me, and I was like, uh and you know, and there's no need to go into like what the hell tall means because it has no meaning. But um, yeah, I don't think I don't like things that sound like specifically via sounds like via duct. Yeah. And duct work doesn't sound like something I want to drink out of. Or or Viagra.
Oh that well, that probably that's that's a good you know, uh I also said this in the air before, but my son Booker, who's now fourteen, so it would be incredibly inappropriate for him to say this. But when he was a little kid, he used to say, I'm gonna put batteries in my penis. When he's a little kid, before he knew what it meant, and I thought that would be the best Viagra slogan. It would beat the hell out of like all of these like Cialis and Viagra things. If they if a dude just walked up and was like, yo, put batteries in your penis, Viagra, boom.
And then walked away. How many would that sell? Because batteries, you know, has the they're kind of, you know, you put some batteries in, it becomes like a mag light. You know what I mean? It's very strong.
Very strong. Yeah. It can shape the pills to look like little batteries. Like little batteries? Yeah.
Is that how it works? It's got the energizer, it's got the energizer reference. Anyway, I think it's genius. And my son Booker has a promising future as an ad uh exec, I think. Anyway, so back to um back to sudden coffee.
Before we taste it, I have uh other stuff to go through. But so explain the process. What makes this different from uh Viaduct coffee? Or Folgers, which as Nastasia believes is the best part of waking up. That is definitely not true.
Okay. Um before I go there, I think a little bit of context is sort of important. Uh I would be extremely skeptical if somebody came on our air and said that this is instant coffee that doesn't suck. Um my background, I've been working in coffee as a barista for like 10 years, won the Finnish Burks at championships twice, and I was ranked ninth in the world last year. Ran a couple of coffee shops in Helsinki, um, also ninth best coffee taster, I think.
And basically what I uh to me, coffee is a really concrete, great way of making somebody stay better. And I want to make great coffee as easy and fun and accessible as possible. And I was really frustrated by how unscalable doing a coffee shop is. So decided to close that about a year and a half ago and started figuring out what would be a more like a better way to make good coffee happen. And I studied food science at University of Helsinki, so had a pretty good idea of instant coffee and why it sucks.
And first of all, for those of you that don't know, Finns have one of the highest per capita coffee consumptions in the world. True. But you also like traditionally drink it, uh, some people drink it with grounds, so you also have like strange health anomalies due to high consumption of grounds. Is that not true? Yeah, and especially sort of uh there's a lot of theories about basically the cholesterol, well, or like cholesterol uh increasing um effects of drinking also unfiltered coffee.
Yeah. But the vast majority is like drip coffee. Yeah. But you're like you're that much kind of people that you're like, I just drink the grounds. I just that's it.
Who needs a filter? Totally. Yeah. Yeah. You know, uh Nils Noran, my friend, uh finish.
What? It's not finished. He's Swedish, but he has Finnish jokes where like you're you're drinking with a you're drinking with a fin and the Swede says to the fin, Skull, and the Finn says, Are we here to drink or to talk? So you talk more than most Finns, I would expect. I know, that's why they kicked me out.
And I thought I all it's a benefit benefit of the US. Yeah, nice. All right, go ahead. So like you like you've said more than the entire country of Finland. Pretty much.
Alright, nice. Okay, good. All right. So go ahead. So basically what you're saying is you have credentials.
Now what? Yeah. So instant coffee is is liquid coffee that's dehydrated. Right. And usually the big companies that be making it now have the intention of making as much of it for as little money as possible without really caring how it tastes like.
Although it is technologically sophisticated process, right? It is extremely. Yeah. Theoretically, but I mean if you like if you taste it, uh doesn't taste great for what's been out on the market so far. And that's because they essentially start with like really cheap froppy coffee that nobody else wants to drink.
Um take that, verse it, and they extract it twice, which like blew my mind when I first heard about it. You mean they actually like steep it twice to make two beverages, like uh like a like a small beer and a lot, like like like rewashing. Yeah, but even more. So the extracted at like normal temperature, it was called the aroma extraction. So at about like 100 degrees Celsius for for whatever time.
And normally out of coffee you can extract about 30% of the mass. So that's like water soluble part and rest of cellulose. It's a grounds you dump. But what they do is that they so they breed wine once and then they brew it twice, second time at like 15 bars pressure, uh 180 degrees Celsius, uh, for hours. And what happens that pressure is that the hemicellulose changes and becomes water soluble.
And you can go from like 20% extraction yield, which is the stuff you extract, which is what you normally want to do, to up to sixty percent, which makes a lot of sense if you wanna get as much stuff out of there, out of the bean for as little money as possible. Well, does that also do they need the increase in in other words like would an alternate technique if uh if they weren't looking for pure number of extraction, does it is the hemicellulose help in bulking later? Is that another reason why they do it? Could they add another solids bulking agent or is that it's partly for that. So they what they do after that is they basically combine them and then uh essentially boil it down, so evaporate.
Vacuum distillation, right? Yeah, yeah. Uh and then same like for orange juice. Right. And most of it is spray dried.
So they actually use that sort of the the added solids. It helps into spray drying. Right. They don't have to add malt right. They don't have to add multixtrin.
Now, but the but uh from my impression there is a vacuum distillation run, then a spray dry, right, then a recom combining, and then an air drying, or something like that. There's many steps. It takes a lot of steps to make even crappy instant coffee, right? And I don't even know like what else, like all the stuff that goes into a factory. They haven't shown me one.
Uh but but there's a bunch of stuff going and then it's like spray dried, so dried with hot air. Um and uh it's not definitely a great way to preserve any flavors that might be in there or aromas. But they've already de aromatized it at that point for the most part, yeah? Most part, yeah. Yeah.
So they actually once you have the dry coffee, they spray some of the coffee aroma and oil into that ground to make it smell and taste fresher. Right, right. But I mean to me there's like whole thing doesn't make any sense. Like w uh we were thinking that what if we what if we just started with the best possible coffee you can find. Right.
Extract it really nicely and dehydrate it in a way that really preserves all the flavors in there or as much as we can. By the way, I've never tasted instant coffee. What? Really? Never.
What's wrong with you? Uh why would I do that? Well, it I mean, that's a thing. I don't blame you. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, have you tasted it, says? Yeah. I mean, yeah, obviously. What about you, Paul? I believe I've tasted it.
It doesn't really matter. I've I think I've got any positive. Uh we used to have it in my house when I was growing up because my mom would use it in cake recipes. Right. Yeah, well, should we try some now?
Yeah, okay, so but before, like what's your technique can I get milk and sugar? Whoa. Uh you can, but I will stare at you strangely with busted up eye. Uh yeah, actually, uh David, can we can we get some? Because otherwise Nastasi's gonna hem and haw the rest of the day and say that I'm a bad person more than normal.
Yeah, we'll humor her, that's fine. Yeah, yeah. All right. So uh so what's your tech are you using straight freeze drying or what are you doing? Uh kind of.
So we uh like we started as a look we're a San Francisco-based startup now. So we started as as there's this famous SAR-p guy called Paul Graham who says that do things that don't scale. Like first get get a product done and see if you can make something you like. Yeah, right. And if somebody wants to pay you that before you figure out how to scale that.
So we started by having myself in a garage in Zoma neighborhood, uh with single group espresso machine pulling a lot of espresso shots that we then uh kind of filtered and took through our brosses and and essentially freeze tried. Okay. Now one of the problems with espresso in general, uh, I'm sure you're familiar, is that um it's uh it's uh like like changing constantly on a chemical basis the minute it's pulled. So like a cold espresso, even as carefully rewarmed as possible in a completely static environment with no anything, just changes over time. Or espresso keeping keep kept at a constant temperature will change drastically over time, even if it's sealed.
So it's not just simply a volatile loss, like it's actually changing as it's sitting there. More so though than drip, right? Yeah. I mean drip is also changing, but that's like on the order of a couple of hours if it's kept properly, right? I mean, radically changing versus espresso, which is like changing radically quickly, no?
Yeah, yeah. I mean in drip coffee you have the the biggest change is is the stuff called chlorogenic acids that start breaking down and constitute to that like bitter, nasty sour taste you let's like your airport taste. Yeah, that's what Nastasia likes the most. So if you don't have that, she's not gonna like it. I'm I'm sorry, we like I I can deliver a little bit of oxygen like uh oxidation, but that's that's about it.
Yeah. So you know, Anastasia like preferred actually that's weird. She likes really good wine. I was about to make a jug wine joke, but she actually likes really good wine. So with milk and sugar?
With milk and sugar. And remember, she her first food job, I think, real food job, was with Cesare Casella, who will who would put ice cubes in Dompering yell given the choice. And by the way, he can do whatever he wants because he's Chesare Casella. You know what I'm saying? Some people have earned the right with their palate over time to do whatever in the hell they want.
Yep. You know what I mean? Okay, so you're essentially freeze-drying, right? Yeah, but we do a bunch of other stuff too, which is there some sort of patent involved here, or is it a trade secret situation or what? It's more like a trade-secret situation.
Uh I will mention this, uh, not knowing a coffee is notoriously difficult to capture as a distillant. I don't know whether anyone out there listening knows that, but the uh aroma of coffee, very hard to capture and keep in, especially in a non-alcoholic situation, virtually impossible uh to get a decent thing. And I think it's because so much of uh so much of the coffee character is in the is in the a larger molecular weight crap that's left behind in the cups. So uh would you agree with that? Yeah, we've actually been uh like one of the interesting parts of this working on this is that I get to to geek out about stuff like this.
Yeah. And you can certainly capture some of the aroma, um, but it does not so yeah, you it's true. Like a big part of it is sort of a heavier molecular weights that you just cannot heavy enough that you cannot extract them, like uh distill them out of there. Which is really uh interesting. Yeah.
And sort of all the like the diminutions you get in the flavor. Alright, so I I uh actually this this is what we'll do. Why don't we taste this coffee and then we'll s we'll we'll talk about the coffee thing, and then after the break, we'll come back as though it's the beginning of the show, and I'll talk about the other stuff I've talked. Does that make sense? We'll just stay with coffee.
We're gonna talk stay with coffee. Stay with coffee. No, no. I have stuff I have to do. I have questions I have to get to, and I have also.
You'll stay around and uh Kylie, and we'll talk about it. Okay, so let's taste it. How long is it? How instant is instant? It's sudden, it's very sudden.
Oh yeah, now how now what's it sudden? By the way. You're really working with SpaceX? No. Oh that was Ariel Fool's joke.
These cups aren't warm. Single! Uh enemies of quality all around us. Feel that, Stus? Feel that?
No, I see it. Nastasia is affrightened of cups that have like grit on the outsides. Dirt grit? Yeah. No, I think it's the dishwasher.
Oh, you want me to lick it and find out? No. See whether it's do this. Why did you decide to start with espresso rather than drip coffee? Oh, what's up?
Good questions.com. It's a good question. Uh I mean it's literally only the the concentration really. Like there's nothing intrinsically great about espresso. Just the fact that what?
There's nothing intrinsically great about espresso? What? Just kidding. I mean Well, I mean, so drip coffee would have a concentration of about 1.5%, like 1.5 to 2. So it has 98% water.
Whereas espresso has roughly like 10% coffee solids and 90% water. So when you when you can only like basically dehydrate some amount of stuff uh makes a lot more sense to dehydrate espresso. Do you do you sell it in these tubes? Yes. How do they how many come in a two how many when you buy tubes?
You can you can choose. It's like between eight and twenty-four cups. Now have you caught up with production? Because apparently you can't buy this stuff, right? Yeah, we're uh like the biggest issue has been producing enough.
So we're now we're now really working on scaling up the production. Is that hot enough? That water? That should be good. It's not like boiling or you don't want to have it boiling.
I'm hanging you this and then I will get this. So we'll be scale up like caught up in production in by end of October latest, I think. I think Nastasia likes dumping the coffee out. Let me take a look at it. My eyes are really bad for reasons I'll discuss later.
Dave, do you want to take calls on this part of the show or wait till later? Yeah, let's take call, especially if they're related to the Wow, that was sudden. Can I use the sudden thing as a stirring device? Oh Nastasia, why don't you make yours first instead of handing one to Paul? Oh, you did.
So what I'm doing now, I just have uh brown powder in the bottom of the cup and pouring water and you get a cup of coffee. Smells like coffee. Do we uh do we have a collar related to coffee or anything else? Uh we have a collar. I don't know if it's related to coffee.
Let's take it while we're let's take caller, you're on the air. Ask me any question about coffee along with whatever other question you're gonna ask. Okay, I have no questions about coffee. I'm sorry. That's okay.
I don't drink coffee. Really? Wow. I like it in ice cream though. Well, uh you're the opposite of that.
You're the opposite of me. You know, exciting coffee is really awesome with ice cream. You just mix it and it becomes super, super awesome. You work for the company or something? Anyway, so let's go.
Go ahead with your question while we're making the last cup of uh sudden coffee or last two cups. Go ahead and Sir. All right, yeah. Uh you guys are uh you guys are a little blurry there, but um I'm gonna give you my my question here, which is uh is has uh has to do with ice cream. Uh by the way, this is Brian in New York.
Uh-huh. And uh uh my my question has to do with making basil or any kind of herb ice cream. Because I've seen a bunch of different recipes. I've tried a few. I can't figure out which is best.
Um say heat up the base uh and then blend in your uh your herbs. Others say just do a cold infusion with the base, some say do a cold infusion in milk. Um I'm wondering kind of what what the best uh best way to get the best flavor is um without uh getting any of those those off notes. Yeah, uh that's a good question. I can't I've no I can't remember if I've ever like how how soon do you have to uh how s how soon do you have to wait before you turn it and what's your churning what what are you using to churn it?
Uh I I mean I don't I don't I don't have any of the herbs on me right now. No, no, I mean I don't mean that, but like what kind of week what kind of machine are you using? I tried it, but are you doing Paco or is that what you're asking me how soon? No, no, no. What what kind of machine are you using?
Oh, what what kind of yeah, it's just one of those freeze in the bowl uh kind of machines. Right. Okay. So here are the issues, right? If you want it to not go nasty, once it's frozen, it the sad part is it probably will continue to go nasty because you're gonna be hyper contrate hi hyper concentrating the enzymes and whatever's left of the liquid phase.
But it'll also happen uh I don't know what'll win, whether the concentration will win or whether the reduced temperature is gonna win in terms of uh make making it stay uh uh nice. I think that the correct answer is not going to be um is not going to be blanching it because then you're not gonna get any of the kind of uh fresh uh flavors that you want. Uh if you were gonna use something like a Paco jet, I would just freeze the leaves whole and then Paco jet it down, but you're not gonna do that. Um you could uh do uh you you could blend the herbs in like a um a little bit of like high proof ethanol and then use the high proof ethanol blended herbs in with the base and that will it will mess with your freezing point depression slightly, but the the the um I believe that the um alcohol should help uh de you know denature the polyphenol oxidase enzymes and a little bit of ascorbic acid, but not enough to mess with your uh not enough to mess with your um milk. Milk would be would be helpful uh in that as well.
But I wish I had more personal experience working on it because basal ice cream is a thing you see, so people must know how to do it. Is anyone in the chat room, David, uh giving me anything? Uh one second, let me check. I'll see if anyone in the chat room chimes in with anything. Obviously, for just punch color without going brown, but it won't have fresh flavors, dried herbs.
I know dried mint will stay uh green because the drying process gets rid of the polyphenol oxidase enzymes. Uh nothing in chat, they're just talking about Starbucks instant coffee. Well, tell them to get on it and go to the chat room. And we'll I'll think about it. I'm sure someone will call in or tweet me and tell me what the correct answer is, and we'll read it out on the air next time if we can.
Okay, great. So uh definitely not blanching. You're anti-blanch. I'm not anti-Blanche unless I'm anti-Blanche if you want the flavor of fresh basil. For that, you should read uh Harold McGee's section on pesto in uh The Curious Cook, wherein he tries various different techniques for keeping uh pest pesto nice and green, one of which is blanching, which is deemed poor.
In terms of flavor. Yeah, I don't care about collar. I care most about flavor. Well, um yeah. But the problem is color and flavor are linked.
The brown notes, the brown color is linked with oxidized flavor in those situations. Brown notes. Brown notes, yeah. Brown town. Yeah, the uh which is where we were going with coffee.
Anyway, I'm sure someone will tweet me the answer and we'll and we'll figure it out. Speaking of singing uh Broadway musicals. Alright, thanks. Oh, thank we'll we'll get you the answer. Not this week, but we'll get you the answer.
So, like Broadway musicals, the entire morning this morning as I was getting ready with Sun Coffee, I was singing suddenly Seymour to myself. I don't know that, Dave. Suddenly C More. You know that song? Paul, do you know that he loves ours?
That he loves musicals. Do you know that he's like a musical? I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, that's great. I forget her name, but Little Shop of Horrors with Rick Moranis. Disappointing he wasn't in the uh in the recent uh uh Ghostbusters reboot. Were you one of those anti-Ghostbusters reboot people, Paul? You strike me as as as could either be one or not.
I was not one. I was not anti. Not anti? Why were PC people so anti? Women.
I think it destroyed their childhoods. Women were anti? No, I think because women were playing the roles. Yes, the new Ghostbusters are all women, which destroys the childhoods of people who saw it growing up in which the original Ghostbusters were not women in some way. Is that is it is that actual truth?
Yes, that's what I've heard. Yes, Dave. Thank God Paul's here because you'd be like, I don't believe you. I didn't say that. I just didn't know I didn't know the uh the answer.
Well, every single living Ghostbuster was in that movie, with the exception of Rick Moranis, who was like known misogynist. Rick Moranis? Mm-hmm. For reals? Mm-hmm.
Paul. Was he not in the movie because of the women in the movie? Oh, that's why? I thought you had some actual information about Rick Moranis. You're like, he wasn't in the movie, therefore he hates women.
That's the problem, people working with Nastasi. You never know whether she is just like saying something that is actually backed up with information, or whether she's just blowing smoke up your You never know. Never know. Alright, so let's talk about this. What do you think, uh Coffee Man?
I like it. Well, Nastasia likes it, but that is not a vote of confidence, my friend. Sounds like it's got a lot more body than I would expect from an instant coffee. Why is that? I think it's uh it's a variety of things.
The I think ideal flavor balance we find is a little higher concentration than for a regular filter coffee. So instead of like 1.5 1.5, it's closer to two. Yeah, which is gives you a little more solids. But I think it's also so originally I thought that it would be just like the same coffee that we use, but not so interesting version of it. And now I think it's more of uh just a different kind of representation or different brewing method in a way.
So you lose some of the acidity through the purse. Yeah, it's not a very acidic hit. It's also not very bitter. It's not very bitter, yeah. So we I mean we what we what we try to do is get a coffee that's really sweet, is really balanced and like nicely sort of big bodied and low acidity and low bitterness.
But what's interesting is it it almost tastes like an espresso profile, but as a drip b as a drip water balance. Right. And mm the cool thing is that you can also drink it uh with higher concentration, like espresso style, if that's how you like it. Can you make us a 10% one? Sure.
Heat up the water again, though. Um what was the name of the of the actress? She was so awesome in Little Trap of Horse. In the movie? Yeah, she was so awesome.
I don't remember the movie. I liked the theatrical version. Well, of course you do. You, you know, born-raised New Yorker, can you wean that the theater? Okay, uh, so uh so Nastasia likes it, which as I say is not by the way, Nastassi's brother, so like it can be on the air.
He could pull up a mic. I see uh him and his fiance are sitting there in the wing just staring in through the glass. It's so it's so weird. Your whole family lurkers, Nastasia, lurkers. So when do you think you're gonna be uh up and running with production?
We're I mean, we're like all hands on deck working on it, uh, where it's getting a better all the time, and by early October we should be at sort of a much, much better point. David, you a coffee man? Love coffee. Well, why didn't he go? Why didn't you get a cup and try this stuff?
Because I gotta make the wheels turn here. Oh, now you have wheels in the sky keep on turning going through my head. All right. By the way, don't know where I'm gonna be tomorrow. By the way, Dave, it's uh Ellen Green.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, okay. So uh you want to do a break and then come back with your let's do a break.
Yeah, I'll get to come back. We'll come back. Yeah, yeah. Dave will get us some coffee. Nastasia's brother will come in, and we'll uh we'll pretend like the show is starting again with uh with whole new whole new set of like questions and answers.
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Over the break we tasted some espresso strength uh sudden coffee. It was espresso strength. Obviously, no crema, not an emulsion. You know what you need to sell is you need to sell a uh little um like a frothing device so you can be like you could do it espresso strength and then go and like froth some air into it. Right.
What do you think you don't like that idea? No, personally not a crema fan. Oh, in general? No, but why do you not like crema? Because you've tasted it separately and it's different constituent, because it's coming out mainly at a other part of the extraction, right?
Is it you don't like what is it you don't like about it? It's really bitter. Well, it is, but is that because of what is that because that it is frothed, or is that because of when it's happening during the shop? Have you actually tried frothing your product? And does it taste bitter?
So, what I think about a crema is the crema is basically the foam where you have basically like oils, proteins, and just like physical, like unsoluble parts of the coffee bean. And I think it's those mainly those kind of uh bitter, unsoluble parts of the bean that are just so fine that they go through the metals, metal filter that make it more bitter. Right, but but here hear me out here. If you're looking at a uh if you're looking at like uh machine profile on crema, right? The the way that it used to be said was that lever machines produce a lot less crema but have a lot better, well, they have a lot some people like the flavor profile of lever machines better, and the reason is is because they're pushing less water through at the end because the pressure is dropping as the spring goes down, right?
As a spring. Right. So you're getting less crema on that because you're pulling out less at the end. At the end is when that like last floating stuff and you're extracting that stuff out, right? And that's why the crema is bitter, because that's where it's coming from.
Whereas we all know that espresso has higher foaming capacity than regular coffee when you're making regular drinks with it. So merely the fact that there is foam on top isn't necessarily mean that that foam is bitter. It's where the foam is coming from in an actual regular produced espresso shot, right? Or could be. I actually haven't tried just like foaming the whole thing.
But it I like I've tried shaking it and it doesn't sort of produce like if you try making a frappe out of it, it doesn't like shake or like foam quite as like it doesn't foam the same way as Nescafe. Again, a Nescafe, like you lost me, yeah. But like, but like in other words, like if I was to take this product, Nastasi's like, don't rank on my stuff. Don't rank on my garbage. Uh like, but if you were to take uh if you were to take an espresso shot, right, let it cool in a cup, take you know, some sudden coffee to the same uh the same extraction density, right?
And then you were to add milk and shake with ice, would the bever would the regular espresso foam appreciably better on the shake? Probably would. But that's also so what we do if we brew the coffee, we uh you know what you do with filtrate, which uh literally reduces the amount of crema and removes some of those undissolved solids that personally I don't enjoy in the coffee and I like we want to have removed. You could sell those to Dave. Right.
Look, well no, I actually like lever shots best. Like, like when I've had side by side, same barista, same beans, uh same grinder, like same espresso machine corporation. Yeah. Lever uh that's actually when I say when I've had, it was one time. It was Vittorio Arduino, I had one of their uh levers versus their not, and their lever machine.
I was like, oh my god, I love this shot. Have you had pressure profiled? Yes. We could talk about that at the end of the show. We'll talk about the coffee.
Uh we'll talk about the coffee. You know that I built my own pressure profiler like years ago with uh with I I shunted, I shunted out my procon pump with a uh with a ball valve and was able to profile pressure, but it sucked because I had to reach underneath my counter and then put my head up to look at the gauge to see where I was going. But I could I could dial between a hundred percent bypass, so zero pressure, and then all the way up to um nine bar, and then just go anywhere in between. But it was it's real touchy, like throttling pressure with a ball valve like that is touchy because it's not linear. Anyways, it tastes great.
Like one out of eight shots, I was able to get like a pretty smooth ramp from you know, like uh like full spring pressure, which it's been a while, but it's like it was like a hundred and like the right when the spring releases is like a hundred and I think 50 PS, I don't know what in bar, and then it goes down to well below, or maybe less, maybe eight and a half bar. I don't know. Anyway, but it goes down to well below a normal thing at the end of the shot because obviously it goes down. So I I was able to get decent shots that way. It was just so much of a pain in the butt.
And then I was gonna try to build one with a servo that would do it, but then eventually I didn't do it for many years, and eventually it became like a thing. But now a lot of people, like I was talking to the La Marzoco people uh yesterday, in fact, and those guys were like, people are so worried about all these variables, they don't even control like the most important thing, which is the dose. They don't even control the dose. And so they're like, all this pressure profile stuff, whatever, great. He's like, but the fact of the matter is that now temperature profile, everyone's got temperature profiles going where like Ranchillio's new machine, they can do a temperature profile.
In fact, one of their temperature profiles was they start it colder in the beginning and end hotter, which is the weirdest thing ever, because you're putting like intentionally producing a tart shot, right? So you start with your extraction at a low temperature, you're sucking out like a very acidic shot, which like the only people I know who make like yeah, it's not it's like a purposely acidic shot, but I guess some people like it, right? Kylie, what do you what do you say about this? You were at the show, you saw this machine, right? Oh yeah.
Um I mean I think it doesn't make any sense. I don't really believe in the temperature profiling. Uh I mean it does make sense in the sense that if you have a colder coffee in the beginning, you might like absorb more energy and you might might want to have a higher temperature in the beginning, and then basically like ramp down. Yeah, but I wouldn't ramping ramping doesn't make any sense to me. Like it's not gonna it's a different thing than having like a sour or acidic, and that's only gonna make it like sour, like very unpleasantly like tasting a citrus.
Right, it's not gonna it's not gonna make it like winy or more Kenyan tasting. Definitely not. Yeah. And I do you like that crap in espresso, by the way? Do you like those like African acidic whiny notes and espresso shots or no?
I guess not. I'm tasting your coffee, so I guess not. Right. Well, so the thing is that so decent Ethiopian coffee called Bocasso, and it is a lot more acidic in the beginning. And we're I mean we're still very early on.
We're working on preserving more of that acidity through the process. Uh but we start with something that's kind of more acidic. Um so we have oh, because it gets blunted by the process. Yeah. So if you taste this against any other instant coffee, it's actually a lot more acidic than anything else, but it does not taste that acidic compared to like a drip coffee.
Right, right, right, right, right. And I mean, personally I prefer more uh I was kind of very sort of acidic profile, but now I prefer more like just a bit more balanced, sweeter approach. Alright, so since you're an espresso guy, where are we? This is also something I was discussing with a lot more so people. I thought we were gonna talk about this after.
Uh well one more second. I can't stop I can't stop, I can't stop myself. Okay, gee geez, okay. So where are we in the uh where are we in the espresso volume wars? Are we coming back up to normal shot volumes or are we still with these like skim cup crazinesses?
I think we're coming back to like normal volumes, like one to two ratios, like one part coffee grounds to like two parts of coffee in the cup. So w we would use something like uh 20 gram dose of gram coffee and like 40 grams of coffee in the cup. In like 2001, like people were like, I'm using 16 grams, and they're pulling like what would now be like a long shot, and now and then like it's gone, but you're she's coming somewhere in between, huh? Yeah, well, I mean, so like uh 10 years ago when I started in coffee, it was like super ristretto, so like using the same like one to one, like using a ton of coffee and then having therapy in the cup. Yeah, like like oh six, oh seven, stuff like that.
It was like it was literally, yeah, they were filling triple baskets, and then like, you know, I was like, where where's the where's the coffee? Right. You know what I mean? It's like w which I mean I think is really bad. Like what the most important thing in coffee is sort of the extraction yield, which is how much stuff you extract out of the grounds.
And the more water you use, the higher extraction yield you can get, because you have the same amount of coffee but more water to do the job. Um so at some point, like a couple years ago it went to the extreme, like people using 20 grams of coffee and like 60 grams at a cup. Which in some ways can be very enjoyable. It's a it's a different type of a coffee. Um, but I think now it's it's it's somewhere around like the the sort of closer to regular.
Um yeah, I mean in my mind I still make it more like you would have gotten in 2001, because I guess I don't know, that's what I like, but whatever. That's me. Okay, now hold on. Now off coffee for a minute and we can go back and coffee later. Dave, what happened to your face?
Well, okay, I I got many things. Before we talk about what happened in my face, uh should I do the face first? No, no, no, no, I'm not gonna do the face first. Let's uh let's let's take a no let's take a minute. Uh really uh sad news.
Um Friday, uh Dorothy Can Hamilton, the founder of the French Culinary Uh Institute, now the International Culinary Center, uh died in a car accident in her beloved Nova Scotia. Uh and I don't really know the particulars of it yet. I don't know because uh, you know, they they just publicly announced it, I think, on um Sunday night, I think, or something like that, right, Nastasia? Um so sh, you know, Dorothy uh she was the only person in the car, uh as far as I know, it's the only person killed in the car. She um founded the French culinary in like 1984, right?
Uh it's around the same year actually that on food and and cooking came out, and you know, she was kind of the force behind uh a lot of what was good about culinary education in the United States for many, many years. Uh she uh gave me my first real job in the in the food world, uh, you know, when I was the director of culinary technology there for years um with Nastasia. Uh and uh yeah, so you know it's not she was not sick, it was not nothing. It was very terrible, terrible news. Uh and my heart goes out to um to her family and to the whole community at the ICC um yeah it's terrible news so anyway yeah so I don't know we should have done that right before the break I guess because now I don't want to talk about anything yeah for a minute but yeah we should have we should have or we should uh we uh and I I never handled anything well because I'm a moron but um yeah a lot of people a lot of people have gone through that school to affect a lot of people most recently she did the um she did the uh expo at Milan the food expo at Milan uh so just you know stayed uh super in it super active you know one of the things I was there she wrested control away from investors and got the school back and yeah she was just uh you know she was uh she was a force to be reckoned with Dorothy anyway terrible terrible so on to uh on to how do you transition from that on to what I was doing uh last week I was in uh Catalonia last week uh giving a talk at uh Alisia the Alicia Foundation you familiar with this yes Paul you familiar with this Nastasia Alicia is a cooking foundation I think it was founded by uh Farron and the El Bully people or it's founded by the Catalan government and he uh he helped out with it but it's in the middle of this town uh it's near a town called Navarklas because I can't pronounce the other one the other town is something literally like fruity bags it's like fruity bags but it's in it's in Catalan so I don't even know how it's like fui de baj or something like this with fruity bags.
Fruity bags. And it's in and I was there, and actually, interestingly, I was doing a demo for a bunch of uh uh olfactory scientists, and I was using the actual centrifuge that was the first one that Ferran had used. And by the way, not nearly as good as the one that we used to use at the French culinary boomstas. Yeah, uh, yeah. Now the flip side is he got his new.
So, you know, he didn't have to clean all the rabies out of it like we did. Right. Yeah, it wasn't sprayed with like CSI juice like ours was. But the uh also I used the actual rotary evaporator that uh that the Rokas used to do their oyster uh distillate way back in the day. Uh no comment.
No comment. It turns out that rotary evaporators need quite a bit of maintenance to have them uh work properly, and it wasn't set up like it was a pain. So like literally, I and they know it, like they're like, you know, we don't they they don't really do that kind of work anymore at Elisi, but they have all of the the stuff left over, so I was like, okay, so I went to go use it because I was doing and actually this fits into a question. There was someone who asked about not sweet honey a week ago. Uh and uh I commented that I I can't remember whether I had done a honey distillate, but when I went there, I was supposed to mess with uh olfaction, right?
And when I used gumemic acid, and gumnemic acid is the uh is the material that knocks out your sense of sweetness for about half hour, and Nastasi's done it, you've done it right, Paul with me. I never have. You never have? Tastes terrible, tastes like it tastes like like the bottom of a rodent cage, it's awful. And but you swirl it around and then for like half hour uh or more sometimes, you can't taste anything sweet.
So white sugar tastes like sand, uh ever it's just it just knocks out everything, it's completely unpleasant. But it's we use it to teach um kind of what sugar does to texture, so you can just remove the sensation of sweetness. And it knocks out artificial sweeteners, it knocks out the effect of miraculin, so you know, it ruins that party too. It knocks out brown sugar doesn't taste uh sweet. Things that smell sweet to you, but but like candies, things that you associate with sweetness uh don't taste sweet at all.
What is brown sugar taste like? Sand with a little bit of a butterscotchy hit, uh but the uh melting sand. But honey still tastes sweet. And so I distilled honey there and served them honey distillate with none of the sugar, and they all agreed it tasted sweet. So there's something about honey that we perceive as sweet that's not that's old fashioned based, does not have anything to do with the sweet receptors because your sweet receptors are totally wiped out by uh genemic acid.
Fantastic. So that's going back to the question that Andrew asked uh last week. So anyway, so while I was there, I also did some oldies but goodies. Uh I used to do, I did a thing years and years ago uh called the cheese course where I would take wines, I would take like three sweet wines, I would take off the brandy in a rotary evaporator, and then reduce them down to about 60 or 70 bricks so that they were like a syrup that had never been heated, and then serve them both with uh cheeses and then an array of like, you know, array of toppings. Uh and uh so anyway, so I did one of those cheese courses, so I had to uh evaporate the stuff down, and the rotary evaporator was a little bit leaky, so I couldn't get the stuff that down.
But they had a vacuum oven, so I ripped the vacuum oven apart and like put a cold trap, built a cold trap on the output of the vacuum oven because it had a really good vacuum pump, then stuck the stuff in a vacuum bag and taped it to the interior of the cylinder of the vacuum oven and was able to get all of my product down to 70 bricks in the vacuum oven. And I was like, I had to go to a lunch. When the lunch was over, I had to go get the stuff out of the vacuum oven. Now all of Alicia is like all this glass. It's all glass everywhere.
Glass, walls, glass doors, just gl freaking glass everywhere. And like I guess for like uh HVAC reasons, they staggered the door. So you have to go in one, and then you have to turn and go in another, and then the kitchen's there, but the kitchen's all glass, all glass, and so like this thing. I I don't know, I thought it was a freaking door. And and uh and when I walk, I walk fast, especially when I'm going to get something.
I don't run because you don't run in the kitchen, right? You walk fast. I walk fast and boom, right into the glass, like right into the glass, like right on the point of my forehead. Because when I walk, I walk with my head slightly down and slightly turned to one side. It's my kind of thinking mode.
Styles, you've seen that a million times, right? Slightly down and slightly to one side, and so I hit right above my left eyebrow, like like boom. I didn't pass out, but I I did one of those, like I did one of those like sumo squats down, and it was and like just stayed there for like frozen, like in like uh like a like you know, like you can't see because you're on a radio, but like one of these. It does look like a sort of thing. I've never seen you from this angle before.
It has a very low center of balance. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you know, you get down because you know, it's like the horse stance in karate, like you know, like a hurricane's map space will blow you down, you know what I mean? It's like you know, if you want stable, you go down, you go wide, and you plant like this, you know what I mean? Anywho, so I was blind not to actually hit the floor when that happens.
Yeah, because if you hit the floor, that's just amateur hour, you know what I mean? But then so I'm there and I'm squatting down, and this has never happened to me before. I was like, I could feel my head inflating. Like that's how fast the edema was building up in my head, and so I was like, oh man. And so I was also staring down on the ground, waiting to see if I see the drip, drip, drip of blood.
No blood, because the glass, so smooth. Glass, so smooth. I tore a little bit, so there was a little bit of blood later. But it inflated, you saw the original pictures, Nastasia. It was like I had embedded a grapefruit under, not grapefruit, orange, under my under my eye socket.
And then the next day it was kind of totally glued shut. But the entire conference heard it. So even the guy giving a talk at the time, like a room and a half away, was like, oh man. What was that? You know what I mean?
And like, and like the people standing near me were just like, oh. You know what I mean? You know that look that you have when you don't really know what's gonna happen. And when I went to the hospital, it turns out uh Catalonian uh medical care, vastly more efficient than US medical care. Vastly more efficient.
I was in and out of that ER in like an hour and ten minutes, like on the dot. Uh and uh we you know we ended up all laughing because I didn't break any bones and uh anything. And uh I was lucky I didn't hit my nose. I'd just been to a talk the day before where the guy mentioned that if you break the your nose in the wrong way, it shears all the nerves from your old from your olfactory nerves into your skull, and then you lose your sense of smell. So I was like, oh, it's not my nose.
And uh so I'm there, and the guy, I have like I have uh Chef Jamey, the chef from Alicia, who has brought me to the emergency room doing the translating, and he says, The doctor says there is no cure for loss of dignity. And so then he then like the first day when I went back, right? I just had my kind of like elephant man face rocking it, you know what I mean? And people were just like not eating as much as they should have been eating, and like, you know, like you know you again, this is radio, but this look across the table from me. So then I started wearing sunglasses, and the next day, even though I literally looked worse with this big giant pussy weeping like eye blob, people were like, you look so much better today.
So I was like, it turns out when you mess your face up, people like it when you wear sunglasses. That's just the truth. That's why blind people wear sunglasses. I don't know. Maybe.
Anyway, so uh so that so uh that's what uh that's what happened to me. Okay. Um anything I feel like other things have happened. I feel like we've had oh, hey Paul, Paul asked me before, because uh Paul also, did you ever end up giving your brevel induction unit back? Or did I told you I gave it back?
Why the hell would you do that? I told him that you were gonna steal that. Nope. Anyway, conscience weight on me. I gave it back.
For real. Alright. Oh, by the way, Paul, for those of you that don't know, Paul is like Mr. Drone. Would you say your Mr.
Drone, or more like Captain Drone or like Admiral Drone? Are you more of a naval drone? Mr. Drone Jr. Mr.
Drone Jr. He has like a collection of drones. He could he could take over a small village with his drones. I have several drones. So I uh are you on board with Dave's uh I haven't told him I'm about to tell him.
Really? My worst, my meanest idea of all time? Yep. So I'm at I'm at Governor's Island a couple weeks ago, and I see this kid flying a kite. Right?
Now, is there anything more oldie timey, awesome America everyone dreams that their kid is gonna do running in a field with the grass, flying a kite, right? And I was like, what if you just sharpened the props on a drone and you were on the other side of a hill and you're just like and just cut the kite. Just cut the kite. Wouldn't that be the worst thing ever? That would be the worst thing ever.
Worst thing ever. Let's do it. No, I can't, but like the thing is, is like it's the kind of thing that you would want to do so you could see the look on the kid's face and then press a button and rewind it and never have it happen to the kid. Because you don't actually want the kid to like lose their kite. And Nastash was like, the kid's flying the kite because his dad is making him fry the freaking kite.
Kid doesn't want to fly the freaking kite. Right? Yeah, that's true. Nastasia. Do you not like flying kite, Nastasia?
Not really. Do you? Shared a bit of problems with tangling kites. Oh, you're a kite tangler, huh? Were you trying to do those stunt kites?
Stunk kites don't work. Stunk kites are sad. Why are stunk kites sad? You need a friend to do stunk kites, don't you? Oh, and neither of us had those growing up.
Both Nastasi and I finally, after all these years, we've shared a moment. This is the first time we have ever shared a moment together for any reason. So on uh on uh back to the uh induction burner, I found another good use for uh accurate induction burners. Ready for it? Yeah.
Rue. Gumbo. Gumbo roux, dark roux. Because like otherwise, you know, like you have Alton Brown, but you're like, Can you put it in the oven for like an hour? Who wants to do that?
If you have an accurate induction, you can just make a roux right on the thing. Like stir it once every never. It doesn't ever burn. What do you think? Good application, Paul?
Sounds very good. Do you like rue? Do you like gumbo? I love roo. You don't like gumbo?
I love gumbo. Okay. I was about to lose it for a minute. I was like, what? Okay.
So uh have like three minutes. Okay. Dave, what's happening with your bar? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, good one, Paul.
So uh this has turned into like a very different cooking issues than normal. So on October 15th. We're here today with Dave. Yeah. Uh on October 15th, uh, we'll be we'll be uh Booker Index, the current Booker Index Bar's last uh service.
So Sombar is gonna close uh temporarily and they're gonna remodel and when they're done remodeling, they will have taken the Booker Index space and absorbed it, job of the Hut style into the renovated Sambar, so there will be no place for us. Uh it's it's sad because there was nothing wrong with the bar. The bar worked fine. You know what I mean? Like uh, but we're gonna we're hopefully gonna reopen soon.
Uh I have no date uh as yet planned because it's all part of negotiations that are ongoing that I can't really discuss. But there's I'm I definitely plan on reopening uh reopening a Booker Index as soon as uh I can because I enjoyed I enjoyed it. Bigger and better? Uh I was I would aim for smaller and worse, but uh it's always kind of my goal is like smaller and worse. But you know, if I have to go bigger and better, like if smaller and worse is not an option, then I yeah, I'm bigger and better.
But um You should trademark that while you can. Smaller and worse. Yeah. If the people around me are any indication, slow and stupid wins the race. Race to the bottom.
Yeah, because it's like uh honestly, like like that whole hair and tortoise thing is such garbage, right? Like, first of all, like fast and steady wins the freaking race. Dave fast and steady. You got like two minutes for this rant, by the way. All right, well, no, I'm not uh I'm not even gonna get into it.
It's like I hate all of those, all of those things like uh the airport stuff. Which airport stuff? Just going through customs. What's the deal with airport food? Oh oh no, well, I had really good I was so kind of I you know I had no idea because I hadn't heard about Dorothy, so I wasn't like depressed about that at that point.
But like my eye was inflated like a freaking baseball. I have to fly in cattle class back from the thing. So I'm in the airport and I see this like awesome like Hamon like in the thing, and normally I'm like, I can't take that back to the to the US. I'm like, wait, I'm just gonna buy some really expensive freaking ham and I'm gonna eat it on the freaking plane. All by yourself.
All by myself. Now you have another song going through my head. That's Daz's favorite. You like that when you I heard you sing it and you're I heard it like vaguely. Anyway, so yeah, so I bought I bought that, and the lady was like, You can't take this back to the US.
And I'm like, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna eat it. And she was like, oh, nice. I didn't say it. I said, you know, it was like but it go mid. And then I walked out.
You know what I mean? I could have my sunglasses on. All right, hold on, hold on. So uh one minute, Dave. Oh my god, wait.
So we had a question on uh rice, and I don't have time to get to Quinn's question on rice. Um Quinn asked me about he was uh he or she, I don't know. What do you think? I thought it was she. She.
So she was cooking rice and uh had a problem where uh the rice at the bottom of the pot was mushy compared to the rice at the top, rice at the top. So I want to answer your question, and I had about 10 or 15 minutes of rice, uh rice information to like start spewing in a ramp, but I don't have the time to do it. So what I want from you, I'll do I'll spew that stuff, including the awesome uh article I read, the impact of pre-soaking on the flavor of cooked rice by E. T. Champagne, best author name ever, E.
T. Champagne, writing about the flavor. And interestingly, the answer is that pre-soaking rice, although we do it, seemed to have a negative flavor impact according to the this document. So you should read that. Another document uh I perused for you was the formation of cracks uh in rice during wetting.
But I need some more information from you, Quinn. What kind of rice are you cooking? For instance, uh I want to know exactly what kind. So some rice is harder to cook uh without the bottom going mushy than others, like certain like jasmine rices. I need to know what kind of rice you're cooking, and I need to know what quantities you're cooking, because you might just need to move to a wider pan, because a lot of times when rice is mushy on the bottom and not on the top, the issue is that your depth of rice is too high for the cooking method that you've uh employed.
So send me back some more information on what kind of rice you're doing, what quantities, what size pot, and we'll tackle your question next week on cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritage radio network dot org.
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