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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 like, you know, 12-ish to like almost like you know one o'clock. Uh at Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick. Brooklyn. How are you doing?
Yeah. Listen, listen, I need you to call in all of your cooking related questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. We have uh no one in the studio today with us.
It's just uh engineer Dave and myself. How you doing, Dave? Good, how are you doing? But we have uh Nastasia the Hammer Lopez uh joining us from Washington, DC on telephone. And do we have our special guest in DC?
Yeah, we do. And folks, you ready for it? Jackie Molecules, Jack Insley from DC. What's up? What's up, Dave?
Nothing. How you doing? So have you started this new uh radio thingamajig down there yet? What's going on? You know, uh it's under construction.
I'll be opening uh it's gonna be called Full Service Radio, a entire podcast network here in DC in an awesome yet-to-be-opened hotel. So it's basically still a construction zone. But uh 11 DC so far, man. It's really cool over here. So do you like wear blue blazers every day and like uh what?
Do you no no no? No? The Nick Chat stays on. Yeah, do you like do you like just wake up in a Starbucks every morning and hang out with the political people? Is that what happens?
What's going on with it? Man, I I have had more Starbucks here in DC than I have my entire life in New York, unfortunately. That's actually true statement. Yeah, yeah. So are you uh are you busy rigging the election while you're waiting for the construction to happen?
I've been rigging it, yeah. I've been actively rigging it um and doing everything I can. Yeah, I mean that's I did get to tour the White House though, Dave. I got to tour the West Wing, which is pretty awesome. Yeah?
So what what do you like like uh what did you do? Did you notice stuff that you had seen in all the television programs or what? Well, I mean, you know, I got to see like pictures of Michelle on Bar on Barack's desk. That was kinda cool. Wait, you got to see the oval office?
Wait, you look wait, you like you were in the oval office's restroom, but not in the oval office itself? Yeah, there's like a bathroom right outside. Guys, like, you know, if you want to use the bathroom, now's your chance. You could use it at the White House. You peed in the Oval Office's bathroom.
Yes, I did. Now people who know Nastasia Lopez will know that she cannot be in a new place without using the restroom. This includes like, you know, if she could have used this Elvis' death toilet at Graceland, she would. You definitely would have been all over that Oval Office toilet. Am I right, Nastasia?
Oh yeah. There's still time. I'm still here for like twelve more hours or something. Now are you allowed to say why you're there or not? What?
Are you allowed to say why you're in Washington or no? Uh no, I don't think so. So we could talk about it next week? Sure. Alright.
All right. Well, uh, so uh that's exciting. That we know you're in DC rigging the election, but we can't talk about exactly what you're doing. All right, we'll talk about it next week. Uh so in other news, Booker and Dax the Bar is officially closed.
Booker and Dax 1.0 at Sombar is officially closed. Uh so you know, that's that. Um it was a crazy Mastasi was away. It was a crazy, crazy Saturday. It was uh it was fun though, it was good.
Uh you know, people are like, Are you sad to see it close? I'm like, No, because it's gonna be better the next time when we reopen it. You know what I mean? Yeah, were there pinatas? Okay, so uh I had two pinatas uh on me.
Uh I went to a place, a local place in New York called Economy Candy, and uh bought a bunch of candy for these pinatas. Um the pinatas now are are freaking horrible. I went to Party City. Pinatas have been going downhill for years and years. They've just turned into garbage.
You know what I mean? Like first, like this, they started making them out of this cardboard that doesn't break right, you know. I mean, no one, but no one makes a ceramic pot anymore. You know what I mean? But whatever.
I I'm I'm okay with not having the ceramic pot like traditional star pinata, fine. Uh those are awesome, right? Because you knock the like those star points off, and then eventually you get to the pot. You know what I mean? But it will break.
I've seen these new cardboard pinatas where like I've seen kids break on them for like like 20 minutes and they're getting bored and they walk away from a pinata. What the hell is that? You know what I mean? I mean, what the heck is that? So, like uh, so anyway, so I hate the modern piñata, but over the past couple of years, Nastasia, they've gotten even worse.
They're now just flat. Most of them are just flat cardboard with like a picture on them of what you're supposed to hit. And a little and a little crepe paper around the outside. I was like, yo, like give me a traditional donkey and a unicorn. You know what I mean?
Which is basically it's like it's like Carvel ice cream, like they make Fudgy the Whale in DeSanta. They took the donkey and made it into a unicorn. So I got a unicorn and a donkey, but I'm just saying I think that they didn't trust me on the last night to be reasonable. So they didn't allow me to uh break the pinatas uh uh there. So we all went to uh you know, my uh someone who you know used to be working at Booker and Dax, Reynolds opened up his own bar, Black Crescent.
So we did a late night after party pinata breaking at uh Black Crescent. So yes, pinatas were damaged. Some pinatas were harmed in the making of the closing night of uh Booker and Dex. I will also just mention this. Um for so Nastasi, you're familiar with Diet Coke and Mentose, right?
Yes. Yeah. So you take the mentose, you stick it in the Diet Coke, and Diet Coke is the one everyone uses. You stick the mentos in the Diet Coke and you throw it down, uh, you get all of these nucleation sites, and the diet coke bottle basically turns into a rocket, right? Okay.
So you can do that with uh liquid butane or with uh liquid nitrogen, and you know, you could see it on the internet, you could see people doing it with the liquid nitrogen and the thing. So I'm like, uh I'm not saying I tried this. What I'm saying is is that if you try it, be extremely careful to not put too much liquid nitrogen in. So what happens is is that theoretically, I did let's not say that I did this, but if you were to pour out like, you know, half or a third of the bottle of the oh, I just did a trump sniff. If you were to pour out like half or a third of the lic of the uh diet coke from a fresh bottle, and then pour in um pour in some liquid nitrogen, right?
Now the liquid nitrogen is floating on the top of the bottle. Now, if you flick that, if you like tilt that bottle down, what happens is the liquid nitrogen will rush through the liquid of the diet coke, trying to float to the top, and while it's doing that, it's explosively boiling and creating super multiple nucleation sites. So theoretically, it makes a really nice rocket. Uh, it turns out that I guess if you wait a little bit too long, or maybe you put too much liquid nitrogen in, that when you turn it upside down, it like takes off for like a foot and then explodes with like the sound of like of you know, like a like like bigger than bigger than a Grouchy firework. We're talking like a very loud explosion.
And you definitely do not want to do this in Manhattan at like four in the morning. It's definitely not something that I did or that I would recommend that any of you do. Um anyways, so uh oh, another thing, uh Nastasi and I uh a while back, okay. So uh Nastasi and I got paid, right? Fine for something, finally, right?
So Nastasi and I got paid, John Johnny Walker. Not yet, not yet. All right, well, theoretically paid, promise of payment, baby steps, Nastasia, baby steps. So um basically they these guys came in and they're saying we have this new Johnny Walker, red rye cask, you know, uh that our you know, our new one of our master blenders, uh Emma Walker, no relation, came up with, and we want to come in and do like a cooking issues where you talk to her about this product, right? Nastas is basically how it went.
Yeah. So it wasn't one of our normal cooking issues things, and yes, we were paid, but it turns out Nastasi and I had a good time. We liked the product, and we actually liked uh Emma Walker. We thought she was fun. And so we have the cooking issues episode.
Dave, how do we how do they get to where it's not going on our normal feed? Because listen, I I bleeped out some of the crazy parts. I redacted somebody's name who I didn't want to publicly embarrass. Uh, and uh I cut out some of the cursing, but it's still not really a family show. It's about drinking, and there are some uh, you know, it's it's PG 13.
Yeah, there's some off-color stories in it, let's say, even with the bleeping. Uh Carlo Maraci from uh uh Carlo from uh Robertas makes an appearance towards the end. So, Dave, how do they how do they get to that? Because it's not part of our normal feed. Right.
So if you go to the Heritage Radio Network website, HeritageRadio Network.org, and if you just use the search bar at the bottom and look for cooking issues, Johnny Walker, it'll come right up. All right. Now, now so you need to actually go to our website to get this. You're not gonna, it's not gonna appear in your iTunes or whatever. You have to actually go, which is always a good idea, don't you think, Dave, to go to our Heritage Radio website?
Absolutely. Forget iTunes. Yeah, forget that. Uh I you know, I wish I had used that bleep. I was talking about bad ways to like you know, like in the 1980s when they used to uh overdub curses, my least favorite was the forget for the F bomb.
Forget you, you know what I mean? It just doesn't make sense. It doesn't feel doesn't have the same force, you know what I mean? No, bad replacement. That's a bad replacement.
It's a it's a bad replacement. Just say F U. Just say F. I think that's better. Or just like silence it or something.
So my friend uh Eric Bonenstiel, uh, who uh I was hanging out with, you guys don't know him. I mean, maybe you do, I don't know. Uh he was hanging out with him over the weekend. He said that he saw something and literally they dubbed the full like F U as get this, you ready for it? And it became his favorite thing to say as a substitute curse.
Chinese dentist. Say that again, Chinese dentist. And it's good because it makes no freaking sense. Yes, Chinese dentist. Has no meaning.
So, like whenever he would like smash his hand with a hammer or something, he'd go, Oh, Chinese dentist, like that. And it would it makes no sense. And he said it was literally racist, I think. That's racist. How is it I mean like it has no meaning?
It can't be racist. Like, what does it mean? How is it? How is it racist? It happens to have the word Chinese in it.
Does it have any relationship to it? We just looked it up and it says it's a mythical person who is said to exist in remote areas of China but has never been cited by a reputable source. That's what a Chinese dentist is. What does that mean? What does that even mean?
Saying they have bad teeth. Oh you racist? Oh. See, that's racist now. That's you're being racist.
That's so deep that I didn't even I didn't even get the reference. I get it now. But why would they use that? Why would they use that as a as a as a dub in a movie? Bad.
Some some, you know, some clansman was uh doing the overdubs. Dang, I'm gonna have to tell Eric never to use that. Yeah. We shouldn't have told you. Uh see, now this is classic nostalgia, right?
She would prefer that I walk around like accidentally insulting people than like tell me what's going on. I want you all to kind of realize, you know, where Nastasi is on this sort of a thing. Crazy. Crazy. All right.
Speaking of uh things that may or may not be offensive, uh Elliot wrote in, can you discuss a cook's integrity as it relates to trying to replicate dishes and techniques seen on social media? Um what is crossing the line and what is the sharing of ideas? Curious what you think, and hopefully there is a guest today that can also weigh in uh Elliot. Well, I don't know, I mean you guys can can weigh in. Um I can't believe you looked it up that fast.
Yeah. You guys are crazy. Well, thank you. Thank you for saving me from going the entire episode without knowing that I was like uh accidentally spewing hatred. Yeah, who knows how many more times you would have dropped that.
Right. Throughout the episode, like eight billion, and someone would have like written in and been like, uh uh, you know what I mean? Anyways. So um here's what I think. I think a lot depends, right?
Uh I'll g I'll give you a short story uh uh about uh the the the bar and then we could talk more about uh other stuff. So like I've had many bartenders at Booker and Dax uh who have gone on to do um, you know, bigger and better things, their own programs, uh go to work at, you know, the best bars in the country or run them. And um the thing is is that they tend not to take some of the um some of the core technique, most of the core techniques from Booker and Dax. Now some of that is because, you know, they can't afford a centrifuge or or whatever, but a lot of those recipes and techniques tend not to get uh taken from or you know, did not get taken from Booker and Dax and and kind of promulgated to other bars. And I always wondered why.
Now it could just be that those techniques suck and nobody wants to use them, right? That's the first way, right, Stuzz could be that. Uh right. Just maybe they just they're just not good. Or uh alternatively, um I put such a um I put such a uh uh kind of a a premium on not doing anyone else's stuff, like not doing other people's specs, uh not using techniques uh that were developed, modern, recent techniques that were developed by uh, you know, other people or people I knew uh, you know, or that we hadn't come to independently.
And I think um that kind of made them feel that using that stuff would would is bad, right? That using it would be a rip off or whatever. And I it and that's actually the opposite of what I want. Like I want those techniques to be um to be used, right? I mean, the issue of anyone what people don't like, I think it it everyone wants their stuff to get um used, uh their recipes and techniques to get used.
What they want out of it is to be honest, it's like some sort of like uh credit, right? So what they don't want to have happen, like the worst thing that can happen, and it's happened, Stas, how many times this happened? Like you come up with something, somebody else uses it, they're the more famous person, it gets credited to them and you're hosed, right? That's that's the worst case scenario. Um the other thing that you love that's my favorite, it's my absolute favorite.
But the the other thing that happens is that um the other thing that people hate is when you know someone uh will take a technique or a recipe to a different market and then allow reporters and other people to say that it was their idea. That's also not kosher at all. But um you know I I think if you use a recipe or a technique or or anything and as long as when the reporters come and ask you you're like yeah this was an awesome recipe from whoever from Sean Brock from Wiley Dufrein from Johnny Azini from Dominique Anself whomever. You know what I mean? I think um I think it's that's that's the the issue what people don't want is someone to take credit for a recipe.
I mean there's you know it's famously said you don't patent you know the these recipes that you know they're basically they're open source as long as you can figure out how to make them uh but there is in the in the higher end uh food world uh and drink world at least like uh a some sort of sense of honor uh in it and I think that I think as long as you are respecting um that kind of code of uh honor and ethics you know use it I would love it if people used you know uh recipes Jim Meean uh kind of famously said from you know PDT that you know the goal at least of a bartender is to create a recipe that becomes a classic and is made everywhere right I mean uh and I would think the same thing would hold true for um you know a chef what do you think guys yeah yeah, I agree. Yeah. I mean, just you know, don't separate techniques. Tell them what your technique is that people saw which one? The uh rapid infusion.
Oh, yeah, but no, people know that I I came up with that. With the ISI infusion? Whatever. I mean, it depends. The right people know.
You know what I mean? It's like what are you gonna do? The the Again the the issue is that this is why like people like Ferron Adria put a year on everything that they do so that they can kind of date it and plant their flag in it. And it and the only reason it even really matters at all is I mean, it's weird. When you're a cook, you're in the business of making ephemeral things that get consumed on a daily basis, right?
Uh, and yet you still for some reason, and and I think part of this has to do with kind of the group of people that are becoming um cooks these days, is you still want to have some sort of uh um you you wanna exist past the last meal you made. You wanna have some sort of um uh impact or some sort of uh, you know, note that you have existed other than the fact that you just happen to have cooked. And so that's why, you know, people and and you look back at old chefs that have famous dishes or famous cook famous cookbooks. It's another reason why it's a good idea, like if you're well known to uh actually make a cookbook, you know, because then at least you plant your flag in something and people can look back on it. Um that's initially why we started Cooking Issues blog years and years and years ago was so that we had some sort of record.
So it wasn't just we would do stuff, teach other people how to do that stuff, and then you know, it just gets forgotten. Um, but it's kind of a weird, it's a weird impulse. I mean, I do have that impulse to want to plant that flag, but it's a weird impulse to have in a business where you're making stuff for people to eat. You know what I mean? Yep.
Yep. Yeah. Uh I mean, because you know, you know, in the old days, and it's entirely honorable, right? To all you care about is good execution, right? Like you don't care necessarily about making a name for yourself, whatever that means, or uh having some sort of posterity.
All you care about is the food that's in front of you right now. I mean, that's the Zen way to go. You're not supposed to care about your own kind of personal um baggage or what you know what you need out of uh, you know, so that you can when you're you know you know an old person and people come up and you're like, you were the great cook, blah blah blah. You know, you know, like that's not necessarily what it needs to be about. Um and as you know, especially if you're one of those kind of uh cooks, like these kinds of issues aren't really um a problem.
So the short answer is is that if you fancy yourself an extremely creative cook or someone who's doing cutting edge uh things, or if being original is important to you, uh it is still uh okay. In fact, encouraged to use uh other people's ideas as long as you're not a dirt bag about it, right? Right. Yeah. All right.
Uh Jerry. Yep. I actually have a question from uh a listener that I met here in DC. If you want to take that real quick. Sure.
Yeah, cool. This one's coming from Josh Sieberg. Um he wants to know if he can find a practical use for a vegetti behind the bar. Oh my God. Oh my god.
Well, I mean, I in my mind, Jack, I had about 8,000 inappropriate references immediately pop up. And I have suppressed them all. Thankfully, I no, don't suppress it. No, no, no. I can't especially racist today.
That was unintentional. That was unintentional. You might as well just go all in, Dave. No, no, no. No, especially in today's political climate.
I am not about to like. Now more than ever you you have uh license, you know. Not gonna be driving. So dropping vegetti bombs all over the thing different. Well, I'm gonna actually attempt to legitimately.
So for those of you that don't know, the Vigetti, aka the spiralizer, uh was one of our favorite topics back in the day. Uh who was it, Nastasi that originally sent us the Vigetti? Claire. Yeah. And I think that, you know, it doesn't take someone with a dirty mind to see how stupid that name is, right?
I mean, it's it's a it's like a a thing with uh an orifice that you jam like cylindrical things into and it shreds them in its teeth, and it's called a vegetti. I mean, you don't need to travel too far mentally to get to the scads of vegetti jokes, because Claire, Nastasia's friend, would call in kind of seemingly unaware of what she was talking about while we were asking her what manner of things she was shoving into her vegetti. And she would say things that were in like, you know, i if your mind was taking the leap that everyone's did would seem in inappropriate. But I think the problem with making vegetti jokes behind the bar is that while the bar arena is less sexist than the kitchen arena, I'm talking professional, it still has a long freaking way to go for um gender parity. So I will merely say this.
I want to see as many vegetes behind the bar as is humanly possible. Uh because uh I think it's uh it's uh it's a problem, but it is it well, but it is a no sh it is an area that I'm taking it on the metaphorical sense here. It is an area of food service, I think that is making inroads faster than the back of house kitchen is. And so I think anything that goes that direction is good. Now, to the serious question of should I put an actual vegetable spiralizer behind the bar.
If you are the kind of person that prefers to drink your cocktails with chopsticks, then I say go ahead and just fill your cup with whatever kind of vegetified garbage you want to like put into it. But I can't imagine um, I can't, I mean, uh maybe it's just because people like I don't like gloppy drinks. I don't like tons of garbage in my drinks. I don't like I don't I don't like drinking my cocktails through a brillio pad of fake uh spaghetti. So uh I I mean I can't conceive of something, I mean, I could conceive of like, okay, okay, let's just say there are people might do this.
People might take some sort of uh like apple, let's say, and uh, you know, shape it such that you could jam it into your vegetti, vegetify the apple into these strands, pour a liquor over it uh with some acid that causes the apple not to go brown, and then you have it'll fairly rapidly infuse because of the high surface area of apple, or you could do a light mash down of the apple, but I wouldn't because then it would get ugly. Then you drink the apple flavored stuff, and then you could take chopsticks and eat it afterwards, but it's just not my style. I would not do that. You could answer though, yeah. And you could substitute anything for that.
Like I could see someone doing like some sort of like uh Lady of the Night, which is a clarified bloody Mary, and having some vegetified vegetables in there that would you know infuse and then be a meal afterwards, because let's face it, a bloody Mary is basically a liquid alcoholic meal, anyways. So I don't know. What do you think, Nastasia? Uh that was a nice way to answer that question. All right.
Um now, uh Jared wrote in about uh zucchini. Um thanks for answering my questions in the past. This one is about zucchini and it's sticky, slimy residue. We never actually finished this one last week, right, Dave? I don't think we did.
I don't think so. When I dehydrate raw zucchini pieces, much of it tends to stick together, and I suspect that this residue is the culprit. Do you think that's the case? Yes. Residue.
Get waity, Nastasia. I'm gonna use the word exudate. Uh which is yes, I'm imagining Nastash. Yeah, maybe you should have seen her face. Wow.
Exudate. Um, yeah, it's like she like that because you know why? Because when it's and whenever you say exudate, she's thinking like pimple popping. That's what she's thinking about. It's like I can nah now.
Jack's got the Nastasia face on. Exudate. Uh she uh whenever like for instance, this is a little like knowledge, drop knowledge on how Nastasia's mind works. Nastasia, like Nastasia doesn't like look the reason Nastasia, and I'm guessing, this is a guess. We haven't actually had this conversation, but um, the reason she hates looking at pictures of uh like leaf fungus and like those weird things that grow on plant leaves, is because in uh in her mind, I think she instantly equates it with human skin.
That's that's my feeling. I think so. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah. Wow, is that that's Dave on the on the vomiting sound effects?
Do you know I used to be able to do a very passable uh fake throw up noise, and uh as I've aged, it puts too much pressure on the back of my eyeballs and like I almost black out. Nobody does it better than Stephen Colbert. That was him? No, no, no, but I'm saying he has the best fake throw-up sound in the world. Well, he better like keep using that now, because I think the older you get, the less good you're gonna be at the fake throw up.
It's just like like jamming up your diaphragm like that, just puts a lot of internal pressure on your system. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. Just like a bigti.
Whoa. Okay. Um anyway, do I think that slimy stuff is the case is the is the culprit? Yes. Uh now, the going on, Jared writes, other than making sure pieces don't overlap.
This is gonna become a not fan family friendly show at this rate. We got vegetis, we got accidental racism. Horrible. It's horrible day. Uh, other than making sure pieces don't overlap when dehydrating, which is unavoidable for my application.
Can anything else be done to neutralize this sticking? Um, the main issue is when I reconstitute the zucchini with water, the pieces tend to remain stuck together. I'd prefer they come apart within a few minutes. Thanks for your help, uh, Jared. Okay, so I looked up a uh an article called uh this extrafascicular phloem is made for fighting, which it's like like nowadays, all these scientific papers have uh like these catchy titles.
So um zucchini, strangely, I don't have the good uh version of of the uh thing here, but zucchini is uh is a a cucurbit, right? The same way that pumpkins are cucubits and watermelons and uh uh say pumpkin already, cucumbers, zucchini, all that stuff, all same. Same family. And they all have these uh exit, like these like like this f they say it's phloem-based, but they can be like exudates. So for any of you who've ever peeled a pumpkin, like for soup, like you'll notice it gets that weird stuff and your hands get that like crazy skin on them from like that stuff uh drying.
And apparently, in pumpkin, anyway, there's like hundreds of compounds in them. There's sugars, there's proteins, and they're surface active. And I think that that's what's what's going on, because they're also present in in zucchini. Now, the problem is you can't just peel it to get rid of it, because I think these things are pretty dense into the zucchini, so I don't think you can rationally just peel it and get rid of the stuff. Uh what I think, and this is just a uh a guess, uh, is you maybe if we treat it, and I didn't have a chance to look it up, what the components in cactus slime are.
But for those of you that use uh nopolis, like you know, cactus things, they're slimy, and you can either do a quick pre-boil on those to help out with the slime, or like you know, you cut it, you do a little pre-boil, which I guess boils the slime off, drain it, rinse it again before you dehydrate it, or um you could salt it, right, and then rinse it off, and the salt will help dri dry out, uh, you know, pull out the slime. So I would bet that either one of those techniques, and a little let's be honest, a little bit of salt's not gonna hurt the zucchini. Am I right, guys? I mean, come on, please. Uh if you salt, yeah.
If you salt the zucchini out a little bit first and then rinse the salt off and then dehydrate it, I think that might uh help too. But I would look up um like treating cactus slime, and I'll do a little more research. Maybe I'll run a test on it, although I don't have scads of time to be cutting up zucchini, which is one of my least favorite vegetables, anyways. But you know, maybe uh Nastasi, maybe we can get Claire to vegetify a bunch of it and uh and test it out. She's still making her zucchini, her zucchini vegetti strands.
It's evolved, it's evolved into uh a bigger and and more space. Yeah. Vigetti strands, good lord. Yeah, well, Nastasia's Nastasia's friend, so I guess because she didn't want to carbo load, I don't know what her deal was. Like um, was making fake zucchini spaghetti, but then she would overcook it and then fry it.
She fried it. She fried it, yeah. Yeah, yeah, alright, whatever. I don't mean I try to imagine something more horrifying than like just an oil-soaked strand of zucchini. How do you ate it?
Was it actually bad? I didn't eat it. I've never eaten it. You were sitting in front of it and you couldn't bring yourself to taste one bite? She would just tell me about it, how great it is.
Well, you need to have some at this point. I mean, I feel like we've talked about it enough. You need to have it. Uh Jack's like, nah, nah. Yeah, nah.
Uh Simon wrote in about uh ultrasounds. I recently have acquired a centrifuge in a laboratory ultrasonic cell disruptor, which is a is so basically it it's a like they're powerful ultrasounds, and they just they vibrate so rapidly that the cavitation from it at the tip causes things like cells to kind of break break apart. Uh and Nastasia, you you hate the sound of it, right? Uh oh, I hate that. Yeah, that high-pitched thing.
Yeah, yeah, people go running, it's crazy. Um anyway, I recently acquired a laboratory ultrasonic cell disruptor from a restaurant closing down. I'm very familiar with the centrifuge, but I have very little experience with the sonicator. Being a bartender, one of my main interests uh in this piece of equipment is to make infusions. I'm waiting for a replacement cap for the probe, so I haven't had the chance to use it yet.
Do you remember when Ford used to have a uh Ford made a car called the Probe? And they literally the commercial was is there anything hotter than a hot new probe? And and I could not have been the only guy who was like, Are you kidding me? You just said whatever anyway. So he's waiting for a new probe.
Uh are there any benefits to using a sonicator versus uh classic infusion or ISI infusions? By the way, uh, I'll probably also have access to a rotavap soon. Uh should I make ultrasonic absinthe? Thanks, Simon. Well, listen, if you're gonna rotovap, but you just blend that stuff, you don't need to worry about any sort of like high highfalutin infusion stuff uh because you're gonna distill it afterwards.
The one trick that actually Nastasia, I think, came up with for the rotovap, is when you're going to distill something that has plant matter blended up in it, add a little bit of Pectin X Ultra SPL to the product that you're going to distill. Why? Because uh pl blended plant residue without it tends to foam up a lot, and one of the main problems when you're running a rotary evaporator is getting boil over into your distillant. It ruins everything. How many hours have we spent cleaning out rotovaps after failed boils like that stuff?
So many hours. So many hours. So Nastasi was like, Dave, idiot, why don't you just put some SPL into it so that it the pectin breaks down and then it won't boil over? I mean, that's pretty much how it happened, right? I do not remember that.
Maybe you just did it by mistake. I don't know, but you did it and it caused me to never ha and never boil over uh habanero pepper into my if you boy if you blend habaneros or uh Naga Jolochias or Fatali peppers and you boil those over into your roto vap, I used to clean it twice with soap, lick it to verify that it wasn't hot anymore, then re-clean it to get rid of the fact that I had just licked it. It would take forever to clean those things. And so the SPL trick in the roto vap, I think is uh a good uh a good pro tip. Versus the uh now you talk about the ultrasonic uh homogenizer.
I have one. I never really came up with uh, you know, I know people who use it for infusions, but I've never had a side-by-side where I'm like, yeah, that stuff's delicious. Philip Preston sells them. Uh I know some people that use them, but I'm not the guy. I mean, I could test it, I still have one, but uh I just never built it in as part of what uh what I was doing.
Maybe because it sounded so freaking god-awful that I never wanted to hear it. Um I think some people who have them now have these like soundproof. It's even worse than that. It's even worse than that noise. It's like, how do I describe it?
It's like someone's drilling a hole in your head, but at like a super high, high uh thing. The closest thing without buying it is when you throw a dry ice chunk into a um into a hotel pan. Any of you ever done that? Nastas, you know that noise where you drop a chunk of dry ice in a hotel pan? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Okay.
Uh we have uh Darren wrote in about a transglutaminase. He said, first of all, this is not hate mail. Uh uh, by the way, transglutaminase, for those of you that don't know, uh, transglutaminase is uh an enzyme, it's uh meat glue, right? So it's the it's the protein that you use to glue any one meat to any other, but it also strengthens uh doughs, right, by by reinforcing uh protein bonds in doughs. It also uh can strengthen cheese, tofu, but it's colloquially the chefs know it uh as meat glue.
And this is gonna become important later to this story. Uh meat glue, the transglutaminase that we use in the kitchen is what's called microbial transglutaminase. It's derived from uh you guessed it, microbes. Uh and it is different from and another fact that you that will become important later to the story is that your body is filled with transglutaminase because it's necessary for a bunch of things like blood clotting, hair growth, uh you know, skin, um, you know, manufacturing skin, all these kinds of things. And it also uh occurs in your intestine.
Uh now, tissue transglutaminase, which is the stuff that's in your body, there are there are many. There's not just one, there are many tissue transglutaminases in your body. Uh they do relatively similar thing to microbial transglutaminase, but they are in fact different, and the structure of the proteins, the structure of the enzyme is different. For instance, among many things, the transglutaminases in your body require calcium to work, whereas microbial transglutaminase does not. Now, a genomoto, like I said, makes the microbial transglutaminase and then sells it uh to chefs.
All right, so that's the background for what's about to happen in Darren's question. All right. First of all, this isn't hate mail. I love the results of uh transglutaminase has produced in my limited use of it. I've never eaten a chicken mousse that didn't can that didn't contain transglutaminase that didn't also have uh an odd grainy texture.
Uh aside from this, uh uh I was reading a study with a um with a link below that they give me, and it reminded me of another study that was done showing the dangers of transglutaminase for celiac patients. Uh further reading could not unearth this supposed groundbreaking study, but I came across several sources indicating that celiac uh disease uh attacks certain kinds of transglutaminase series that our body naturally produces. I'm no chemistry uh professional by any stretch, but this makes culinary but uh but this um makes sense because autoimmune syndromes attack our own body functions, suggesting that culinary transglutaminase is similar to the transglutaminase our body produces, giving a theory as to why it helps some celiac patients, as I remember you uh mentioning before. Now, already it's starting to get complicated, which we'll we'll get into. What bothered me after reading uh this is the discovery of several studies indicating the use of transglutaminase in several gluten-free products to strengthen protein crosslinks and mimic the texture and spring gluten puts in bread and pasta.
If celiac uh disease is in fact targeting transglutaminase series in the body that may react to gluten in their body, then adding it to gluten-free products seems counterintuitive. Again, this doesn't affect me, and I don't really condemn any food additive as I can uh as I accept it is it a fact of our food cycle now. But if you or anyone you know might have something that could shed some light on the subject, I'd be grateful. Meat glue already gets a bad enough wrap as is, and then below are some links in the studies that uh Darren linked to where the function of tissue transglutaminase and celiac disease, uh, and then something about uh some stuff of how they they use. Um there's an interesting article again with the funny article names food industrial micro microbial transglutaminase, that's not the funny part.
In celiac disease, treat or trick, which is apropos for Halloween that's coming up. Now I was reviewing some of these articles, and I gotta be honest, it's a little more than my morning perusal could uh get to the bottom of in terms of what's going on. But basically, here is here is kind of what's known, not known and what's going on. So in your gut, there are uh tissue transglutaminase, human transglutaminase in your gut. When you consume um uh gluten proteins, which can contain gliadin, which is the protein, that protein makes it uh through your gut relatively undigested because it's difficult to digest proline.
Uh uh, yeah, well, anyway, uh protein. But it protein. But what gut. But what happens is is that the transglutaminase there, gliadin is uh relatively uh interesting in the fact that it has many, many, many sites that transglutaminase can use, many free glutamines to bind it to other things. So uh gliadin reacts very strongly with uh tissue transglutaminase.
This like further bulks it up and maybe makes uh it more uh reactive for celiac diseases, disease uh suffers. Maybe. What also is known is that trisk tissue transglutaminase not only cross-links the proteins, but also does something called deamidate them, which means it's knocking off uh a functional group. And as far as I can tell, that really is one of the main problems that is causing the autoimmune response is this deamidation. Okay.
So uh that's what's happening to this uh gliadin uh that's in your system. Now, furthermore, uh transglutaminase in your gut might also be implicated in other aspects of the pathway besides simply its functioning with um gliadin, right? So there might be multiple things that are, or gliad, I don't know how you pronounce it, that might be happening, and all of that is unclear to me. Now, when you go to read the studies on um microbial transglutaminase, because remember that stuff's transglutaminase, it's already in your gut. Uh microbial transglutaminase, you are first of all, uh basically, if you cook it, you're deactivating it, the greater part of it, you're deactivating it.
And second of all, it functions uh slightly differently. The problem is when you go to look at the studies, right? So so some people have said this. Some people have said uh if you add uh microbial transglutaminase to things that uh contain uh gluten proteins, uh what you're actually doing is pre-react, you're making them stronger so you don't need to have as much of them, and you're also pre-reacting uh those proteins together so that they can't really undergo those reactions in your gut. Therefore, maybe it makes it uh less reactive uh for uh celiac sufferers.
That has been, as far as I can tell, inconclusive. Uh the uh on the other side of the coin, perhaps these larger um proteins that are made by crosslinking actually are more uh inflammatory and actually um cause more inflammation. This has also not been shown uh conclusively one way or the other. The third question is is if the microbial transglutaminase somehow uh survives cooking or if you're eating it raw and makes it through the gut, could it mimic what's going on with tissue transglutaminase in your gut? Also, this has not been conclusively uh tested one way or the other.
So as far as I can tell, none of these things have been tested. Now, what has been tested, because the Genomoto is worried about this, uh, are the very the these things. But I will say this, when you read the studies, uh, some of the studies that I've uh gone through, I think, including that food in industrial microbial transglutaminase article and some of the other ones, um, that uh if they're paid for by a Genomoto, just take that into account, right? Uh that the people that make the transglutaminase uh are have an axe to grind in this in this situation. Now the and their main points are are these.
One, uh they took uh pasta and they transglutaminase the heck out of it, and then they tested to see whether it uh created more reactive uh antibodies, I guess, uh in the human in the human body, and they were not able to cause that to happen. So they're basically saying it doesn't seem to make uh things like pasta that have been reinforced with uh transglutaminase more reactive than they were before. That's their first point. Their second point is is that is that uh you know you should not if if you have are suffer from the celiac or or are intolerant to gluten then you shouldn't contain thing you shouldn't eat things with gluten in them uh to begin with and therefore if there's gluten and transglutaminase then that won't be a problem right now what what that kind of leaves out is the fact that there's still the possibility as yet untested that things that are react that that might cause uh a response um i in in you when they're cross-linked by transglutaminase um wouldn't have caused a reaction in someone if they hadn't been linked by transglutaminase so it's theoretically possible that you could have two things which someone with celiac could consume without without without problem you meet glue them together and all of a sudden now it will cause a problem this has never been shown that there's a case of this but it is a theoretical possibility that needs to be uh looked at now a further thing that a Genomoto says is that look at the real problem with transglutaminase in um in in your gut isn't the cross linking the real problem is the deamidation and in fact they say microbial transglutaminase is much less likely to deam uh deamidate uh the protein than tissue transglutaminase and they did that not here's the problem though they didn't do that in someone's gut they did that in vitro and so their in vitro studies of microbial microbial transglutaminase did not effectively increase how much the protein had been deamidated. So that's their argument that it's not going to do that deamination thing.
Uh and their last and final argument is if you eat raw fish, if you eat raw meat, uh, they're full of transglutaminase anyway, actual tissue transglutaminase from the animal uh sources, and you consume those things raw. And so if those things don't cause a problem, microbial transglutaminase doesn't cause a problem either. But as far as I can tell, that's the long and the long, frankly, because uh all of that was long. Uh current story on um transgutaminase and celiac disease. That makes sense, Daz.
Yeah. You're already asleep. Yeah, she's got all that. She's already asleep. All right.
Hey Dave. Uh no, she's been taking notes. Yeah, sure. Taking notes about about how to call me a racist when we get off the air, even though I had no idea. So she's taking notes on.
Oh, yeah. Hey, can I just interject really quickly? I just want to shout out, um, I want to shout out Ed from Milk Cold Ice Cream. Remember he sent you all those ice cream sandwiches? Yeah, so do you get to go there on a regular basis now?
Yeah, I've been I've been hanging with him. He's a cool guy. Cool. Really good guy. Just want to shout out uh Ed from Milk Cult.
Shout out. What do you got, Dave? That's it. Dave, I got chat room is asking if you ever had a chance to look into that nitro tini thing. Did you read about this?
Oh, I forget. It's this bar in Charleston that serves uh a martini made with liquid nitrogen at like negative 320 degrees Fahrenheit. Wait, is it with liquid nitrogen and not with nitrous? Liquid nitrogen. All right, Dave, in the next couple minutes, if you can call up, or actually, Nastasia, if you can call up how this is done and figure it out so you can give it to me, then I'll I can rant it out real quickly.
Oh yeah? All right, read it. So this is the warning label that comes with the martini. It says liquid nitrogen is served at negative 320 degrees Fahrenheit. Nitrotines should be given the same respect as fire.
Avoid rapid ingestion of any nitrogene before consuming. Please allow a minimum of three minutes. Wait for the cloud-like liquid nitrogen LN2 to completely dissipate or evaporate entirely. Do not attempt to inhale the water vapor during dissipation, as it may disrupt the balance ratio of nitrogen to oxygen gas in the air that you breathe. Failure to follow this warning in its entirety may result in severe burns, permanent internal organ damage, and other detrimental health problems.
Please enjoy safely and responsibly. Why would you serve that? An eater in Charleston describe the taste of these as it says tastes like type 2 diabetes. Well, you know, uh Leo Robachek, one of my favorite uh bar uh people here in New York, whenever he drinks a drink that's too sweet, just goes, diabetes. That's all he says.
That's his only thing he says, diabetes. Like Wilford Brimley? Like Wilfrid Brimley, my favorite, my favorite diabetic pitch person. But the um he's the best. I mean, it doesn't get better for pitching uh uh diabetes stuff than uh Wilfred, you know, than him.
You know, I got diabetes, right? I mean, it's the best bitus. So anyway, so that's what Leo Robachek says. Uh, here's my thing. Why the hell would you serve that?
Right. Why the hell Also they're $19. That's I don't care how much you charge, right? Charge a billion dollars. Doesn't matter to me.
Like, if you know, God bless restaurants out there, bars out there. If you can charge something and somebody wants to pay it, God bless. You know what I mean? Like everyone's got to make a nickel. Think of how much money, Dave, people make for doing things that we don't respect in life.
Think of how much freaking money people go out and make for anything. So the fact that a restaurant or a bar can charge whatever they want to charge for whatever they're doing, God bless. What do you think, Stas, right? No. Yeah, I guess so.
Yeah. I mean, like, you know, if you think they're if you think they're ripping you off as a customer, don't go there. I don't like when people are like, I can't believe what they're charging. I drink should only cost $12. They go to a place that charges $12 for drinks.
Then that place. Don't order a drink. Go somewhere else. Right, but this is also a drink that can cause permanent organ damage. That's the problem.
So like it's the cost of it is not a problem. But why would you ever serve that? That's like, first of all, that's like straight up gimmick. Second of all, no drink, it's very hard to get an accurate chill with liquid nitrogen. Very hard.
And believe me, I've been doing it for years. One of the reasons it's really hard is because uh you can't even see what's going on. It's very hard to judge how much you've added. So unless you have some sort of special volumetric liquid nitrogen adder, it's very hard to figure out. You need more than you think to chill it down.
So odds are you're gonna get some nasty crust on the top of your drink and then a liquid underneath. Very hard. If you mix it while it's got liquid nitrogen, it'll froth and spit and boil over into some in into the face. And what and I don't like being told to wait. Someone's gonna drink it.
Someone's gonna do it. You know what I mean? I think a better uh drink would be to hand someone a first of all, why is there sugar in a martini? Why the hell is there sugar in it anyway? I did they just hit me.
Why is there sugar in this martini? It's not a martini if there's sugar in it. Why is there sugar? I I don't have that answer. Okay.
So I think a better thing to do would be to uh uh have a bunch of spinning razor blades that you suspend from the ceiling right in front of the patron's face, and then say if you lean forward, your face will get cut off, and then just serve them a normal drink because it's the same amount of danger if they don't follow the instructions, they get their face cut off, but at least the drink will be good. You know what I mean? Like I'd rather have like some other physical harm, or like have a whole bunch of uh chef knives sticking straight up uh out of the bar surface, and if you put the drink down wrong, you'll impale yourself. Like it's the same same level of stupid. Why would you hand somebody a drink that can harm them?
It's just really, really stupid. What do you think, Nastasia? Yeah, no, it's very, very stupid. And you know, when somebody messes up, as they will uh in a situation like that, you know what's gonna happen? Like, people like us are not gonna be able to use the liquid nitrogen anymore, even though it's completely valid, because someone will have will have ingested uh the liquid to me.
It seems like it's the same level of shock as any one of the any one of the other weird shock things that people do. I mean, look, again, God bless your place. If like this is the way to get the customers in, just don't do it in a way that could theoretically harm a your customer, and B, other people who want to use the technique in a different way. This is why we can't have nice things. This is why we can't have nice things.
Exactly. That was what's the name of that comedian that she when she said that about her own body when she got cancer? She says she's hilarious. What's her name? Yeah.
She said she had she got cancer and then said, This is why I can't have nice things about her own body. Awesome. Amazing. So hilarious. Uh if you can laugh about that, like you are a strong person.
You know what I mean? Anyway, uh, so okay, I got uh a question here I want to get to before we go. Emily Burns writes in all right. I've been wanting to make hickory syrup, and all the recipes I've seen use the bark of a shag bar kickery. So this is not a tap the tree in the early spring, uh, like a maple situation.
You're making a bark tea and then adding sugar to it. A bark tea. Stus, what do you think about bark tea? Is that bother you or are you all right with that? She's gone.
Cherry's still out. Yeah. Uh my neighbors have a shell bar kickery tree. So I've been searching to see if there would be any difference in a syrup made from that bark. I haven't found any answers online, so I'm wondering if you had any idea.
Thanks, love the show, Emily Burns. Well, first of all, I looked it up again. So for those of you that don't know, shell b uh shagbar kickery is like one of the great nut trees of um the United States. It's carya ovata. It's related uh to pecans, and I I've cooked a Nastasi and I and Piper when he was with us did a lot of work with um Shag Bar Kickory nuts.
They're amazing. They taste freaking amazing. I like them more than a pecan, but they're just really hard to get the nut out of. Now, there are various uh one of the things about shagbar kickery is it's called it's one of the most aptly named trees you can find because the bark looks super shaggy and is coming off in big things. So you can go into the forest, grab the bark off of it without hurting the tree, make a tea.
Uh uh there's some art to making the tea, apparently from what I've read, and then you dope in of because it gets bitter, you dope in uh sugar, and there you have your syrup. Uh now the uh shell bark hickory has is also known as the king nut, is has the largest, I think hickory nut, and then nut itself is as sweet as the um nut in a shag bark hickory. And I think its bark, while not as shaggy as a shag bar kickery, is still quite shaggy. And so if you can remove the bark without damaging the tree, I'd say go ahead and do it. I have some shag bar kickeries uh up in Connecticut, so then if I can ever get back up to Connecticut, I'm gonna try to get some and make some of this.
Now, what I don't know, you know, a lot of the other hickories, I have a lot of what's called like mocker nut hickories and pignut hickories. Uh pig nuts especially have terrible tasting uh uh nuts. They're super tannic. I've you know I've always tried to find ones that are they're completely nedable. I don't know if that would translate to the bark, but the other problem is those trees don't have the kind of bark that sheds off properly.
So I'm gonna go ahead and say that shell bark hickory will probably uh make as good a syrup as uh shag bark, and one of the reasons you don't hear about it is that shell bark is uh a lot rarer than shag bark. And I also read that in some places the shell bark is also called shag bark, even though they're actually two different species. The the shell bark being uh caria uh uh la seniosa, which I don't know, but carry all vada is the one we get shagbark. So give us a try and let us know. I'll try to make it with my shag bark and maybe we can compare notes over the radio.
Uh shout-outs to uh Raymond uh Lochero. Is that how you pronounce that, Dave? Lochichero? I don't know. Uh what?
Donor, I was giving a shout out, I was giving a donor shout out. Thanks for donating. Oh, thanks. And uh that's it. We'll back next week.
Back next week with more 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.org.
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