This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the emergent circulator for Sous V by Chef Steps. Order now at Chef Steps.com slash J O U L E. Hey, hey, hey, I'm Jimmy Carboni from Beer Sessions Radio. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more.
Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from like, you know, 12-ish to like around one o'clock. Uh, you know, from uh Roberta's Pizzeria. And where is it, Nastasia? Bushwick.
Bushwick. Bushwick. Brrrrr. Join, as usual, uh, with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez in the studio. How are you doing, Nastas?
Good. Yeah, got David in the booth, right? Also good. Yeah. Uh we weren't here last week because I was in um Barcelona.
In fact, I just gave uh by the way, like if you have like a co-worker, it's a good idea to bring them some some crap back. Sure. So I went to uh Barcelona. Uh first of all, I had for the first time uh that Spanish style gin and tonic. Although they're like Catalan style, catalan.
I'm like, okay, okay, okay, whatever. Catalan style, gin and tonic. Uh so we can talk about that later if we have time. Uh but I went to uh one of these uh old and very well-known um bakeries in Barcelona. This one's called Colmina Colom Colomina, it means honey like beehive in uh Spanish, and it's these hard candies they've been making since eighteen forty-night.
What do you think? They're weird flavors. What flavor is it? It tastes like a cough job, but it's called Molomani. I'll have to look it up.
It's some of them are herbal, some of them are fruity. They're all different. Anyway. Call in your questions to 718 497 2128. That's 718-497-2128.
Uh also in the cooking issues uh style of news, this weekend, Sunday is the first day of the uh Chow exhibit, the general one. The we tomorrow we have our Kickstarter benefit, I guess, or VIP benefit or whatever. And then on Sunday is the opening. So if you want to head down to 72 uh 62, rather, 62 Bayard Street, uh right off McCarron Park in Brooklyn. They say it's Williamsburg, but in the real life it's Greenpoint.
We all know it's Green Point. Uh right, Sasmi. If you have to so for those of you that never been to New York, like there's this like horrible road called the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the BQE, and it basically cuts a whole section of Brooklyn and Queens off from the rest of the universe, like towards the waterline. And generally, like once you cross under that, you're not in Williamsburg no more. You know what I mean?
What do you think, David? You agree with me on this? Uh yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I mean McCarn McCarron Park, that's like Greenpoint, yeah?
Anyway. Uh yeah, sure. He's like, I don't really care. I live really far away from there, so I kind of don't. It's like, yeah.
You know, the the thing is that like the individual neighborhoods in in uh New York uh have become so hip that so when I was like, you know, twenty something years ago, like uh when I w worked in a metal fabricating shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, called SFW, as in so blanking what metals. That was literally the name of the shop where I worked, inhaling like black metal dust all day long. Uh but so what? But so what? But but there was no one there.
I mean, like it was like that, like the idea of a hipster, like with you told someone you were moving to Greenpoint, they're like, Where? What? Now it's so hip in Greenpoint that the people in Greenpoint never leave Green Point. So they're like, in other words, the point being that they're so insulated there in Greenpoint land that like what like why be so close to Manhattan? Like, what's the point?
Like, you might be anywhere. It could be anywhere. Anywhere. Anywhere. Columbus, Columbus, yes.
Exactly. Right? Because it's not like it's not like those. There's hipster hubs in those places. Sure.
And like, you know, I guess there is a theoretical G train connection from Green Point to the rest of New York City. But not really. No, it's kind of just theoretical, right? Yeah, I mean, I live in Didmus Park, so that is definitely theoretical. It's it's like 20 stops on the G or something to get from Williamsburg to Dipmas.
How close is that to the Ditmas Avenue stop on the F. Um I'm about a 10-15 minute walk from that. I'm closer to the B in the Q. Do you go to Train World ever? That's like an awesome huge model train shop right on Ditmas.
Nope. Missing out. If you're a model train person, as uh my you know, my son Booker is just that you were gonna say as Nastasia is. Would you imagine like the idea of Nastasia sitting in her room? You would hear me talk about trains and then go home and hear Booker talking about it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because all of Booker likes his trains, but like subway trains only, but like I now I have this image of Nastasia going home, putting on one of those blue and white engineer hats, you know, those like caps with my bottles. Playing with your model trains all day. Maybe it's her secret obsession. And when I call, it's like you hear the you hear the wee clack clack clack clack.
I'm like, what is that, Nastasia? Nothing, shut up. Just running her model trains all day. That would be that would be the ultimate secret. It'd be right amazing.
It's just not in your character at all. Like you have like five levels, like going all over the room. I would though have one, like a Christmas train. Oh, around the tree? I would, yeah.
Do you do you want one? I would, yeah. I can bring some. I don't have a lot of I can bring some tracks home. I don't have any room.
If I have a big I can give you the case. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. For the tree. The minimum oval is 30. But then I want all the little Christmas houses too.
Yeah, then now you're talking a lot. The minimum oval on an O gauge train is 27 inches. It's called O27. That's small. I'm telling you, you can get a small track.
You know, but you have to only certain engines run on the O27. Maybe. Yeah. The rest run on the O31. Booker would loan you one of his Santa Fe's because he does not care.
He only cares about a Santa Fe? I have plenty of track. Do they have uh Metro North one? Uh now you're talking money. Once you're licensing stuff, like so like this one company, MTH used to have the license for uh the subway, the New York City subway, until they put out a graffitied model.
MTA was like, crap on you, crap on you. So they gave it back to Lionel, but because it's an official license, Lionel like totally rakes you over the coals for the money. So what MTH did is they started selling non-licensed things that look exactly like the MTA things. They just don't have the MTA stickers, and then other jokers are selling the MTA stickers to stick on it. Yeah, of course you would.
It's because you're just like me that way. You're like, yeah, I don't really care whether it's real or not. A couple of scam artists for the Christmas tree, you know. Anyway. Well, it's a couple of scam.
Please. Oh. Oh my god, Dave. If I did the MTA train, then you'd have to build. I mean, the Metro North, you'd have to build a little um Leatherman.
Oh my god. Did we talk about Leatherman on the air? Yeah. We talked to Dave, we talked about Leatherman, right? The guy who walked around Connecticut guy who I would be, were it not for the fact that I have a wife and kids.
Maybe it is Leatherman? I don't recall that. You don't want to call it Leatherman? Uh-huh. So uh Is it like a like a dungeon kind of thing?
Leather daddy. No, it's not. Oh god, no. It's not really cooking related either, but there's this guy. There's this guy, and nobody knows his real name.
People say they know his real name, but they don't. All that crap was made up. They know he was like French-ish, like he could speak some French, kinda. And in the 1800s, from like I guess just after the Civil War until he died in I think 83 or 89, 1889, he would just walk a uh a 300 and uh something mile trail uh looping from Westchester right over by the Hudson by Ausning all up over through into Connecticut, down to Connecticut River, down the Connecticut River, and then along the shoreline and just loop it. And he would walk about 10 miles a day f every day of the year, rain, wind, snow, the biggest blizzard of the century they had in the 1800s, stopped him for I think three days, put him three days behind schedule, and he would just sleep outside under these rock overhangs, which they call leatherman caves, even though they're not actual caves because Connecticut doesn't have real caves.
And like occasionally people give him stuff to eat, and he sewed all of his clothing. There are pictures of him, you can look them up. They sewed all of his clothing out of discarded boots that he cut the tops off of and laced them all together into this like big like uh outfit. So there are there are photoshopped images of my face over the leather man's body. Why?
Because I would if it wasn't for the fact that I had kids and a wife, you know, those are those are your only anchors to prevent you from spinning out of control into that world? Pretty much. Leatherman reenactment. Someone already did it though. Well, the other reason look, like I have a place in Chester, Connecticut, and he used to walk through Chester, and like I spent a good portion of my childhood in Chappaqua slash Mount Kisco, New York, and he used to walk through Mount Kisco.
In fact, he died on the Westchester side. So basically, I'm already living the Leatherman life anyway. I already I'm already so cheap that I'll walk anywhere for no reason, like without having, you know. Uh so you know, I feel like what's the point? What's the point of anything?
He's just walking. So existential. You know? It's like I know, but what would the point be for you? Point for me?
Yeah. What else am I going to do? I've already lost my house because I haven't paid my bills. I've already like this is hypothetical. I'm saying if I didn't have a family to attack me down, you know what I mean?
I'd be a nightmare. Anyway, so back to cooking related things. By the way, we had a question a couple uh weeks ago on hickory syrup, and I report back that I made some. So hickory syrup is not like maple syrup, and that you don't make it from the sap of uh hickory, you make it from the bark. And um, you know what?
Um, okay, so for those of you that don't know, the the the most famous kind of hickory tree in terms of the nuts anyway, is called the shag bark hickory. And uh there are some other ones. Uh many of them have awful flavored nuts, like the um pig nut hickory taste and the bitternut hickory, clearly are terrible tasting uh hickories. There's also the mocker nut, which doesn't, I don't think taste bad, but it's just very difficult to crack. Uh, and the shell bark, which is a variant on the shag bark.
But anyway, I digress. So the nuts are delicious. And then, you know, we've talked about it a couple of years ago. We went on a hickory nut cake. We love hickory nuts.
Hickory nuts are awesome. I love them. They're delicious. They are like, you know, pecan is a good nut, which is closely related to hickory nut, but the hickory nut is actually, in my opinion, a superior nut, just much harder to get to. So, and smaller than a pecan.
So, so the pecan wins from a commercial standpoint. Whatever. Whatever. Uh in nostasi, that's another thing you don't like, right? Pecan pie?
No, not really, no. Oh my god. Um, I do like your pecan sours. Yeah, those are good. Yeah.
Yeah. Remember, well, Nastasia, we won't get into it because it's not fran family friendly what Nastasia did at the event where we were making those things. No, that was Oh, yeah. No, that was you. You got so angry they wouldn't let you behind the bar at the YMCA.
That's not Jack. It's not safe for work, what happened in that situation. Uh that's you know, for the next time we have an unexprigated uh uh cooking issues, then uh, you know, someone can call in and request that they get the Nastasia Lopez YMCA pecan story. Let's do that. We'll get Johnny Walker to sponsor.
Yeah, all right. We can say that we made it with Johnny Walker, who knows? Uh I mean uh I don't even remember what we made it with you. No. I have no idea.
Anyway, I I just remember the story, the anger and uh well, whatever, gotta get it. It it involves it involves dietary laws, it's it's a nightmare. So the religion, dietary laws, uh Nastasia's uh, you know, lack of respect for either. Anyway, so uh so back to hickory. So shag bark hickory, uh one of the interesting things about it is that it is one of the most aptly named trees that exists.
The bark looks shaggy, almost like uh like a 60s rocker's feathered out hair, you know what I mean? Like it just comes off in big kind of strips and it's layered as it comes down the tree and it peels off. What that means is you can harvest the bark rather easily without damaging the tree because you can just rip off the pieces. In fact, I have some pictures of the bark, I'll post it later. Uh you know, after I post my obligatory post for uh, you know who uh Nastasia's getting mad at me.
Uh because it turns out if someone this is separate, but if someone pays you money, you have to do a certain number of posts, and they don't pay you the money until you've done said certain number of posts, and I'm terrible at that. And so Nastasia's been riding me like a trick pony for like a week and a half. Put up the last post. Whatever, please. Okay.
I'm a bad man. It's stipulated. So the um, so anyway, so someone asked me about making it any takes trips or they're not tips or uh tricks that I had. So I went out into the woods because I know where I have a shag bar kickery. It's actually on the neighbor's property, but whatever.
There they what the hell do they know? They're not using it. So I went up and I ripped some of the bark off uh without damaging the tree. And by the way, so I didn't measure anything, but I harvested enough for about three liters of syrup, and I harvested it in like under two minutes. Because it's just like snap, snap, snap, snap, and walk out.
Now, um here's the techniques I used in case you know. I thought it came out very uh well, so you follow these techniques again with no measurement. I took them uh back inside, I scrubbed them to get any sort of moss, lichen, or like you know, buggy, like you know, you know, caterpillary tentee craps off of them because that's gross. Um I snapped uh I then snapped it into pieces that would fit into my uh oven. I toasted them in the oven.
Well, I baked them in the oven at 350 to 375 for like 10-15 minutes until I started to get the aroma out. Opened it, the oven, let them flash off and uh get uh you know dry, snapped them into small pieces, um, you know, fairly small pieces, like I don't know, like an inch, an inch and a half. I wasn't too anal about it. Here's the one kind of tech trick I did. I then put them in a vacuum machine and sucked a vacuum on them in water, like uh two, three times to infuse them rapidly so that they'd be rapidly infused with water, wouldn't float at the top.
Uh, I thought that was a good idea. Then I put them into a big pot uh with uh water. I covered it and added a little more, but I wanted to keep it a fair, I wanted to have a very high see. See, people have problems with this becoming bitter, and so I didn't want it to become bitter, and usually the way you do that is you do relatively quick steeves with relatively large amounts of product in into not as much water. Uh so I did that.
And then I brought it up to a boil, uh, turned it off, covered it, let it steep for a while, kept checking it when it was brown but not too bitter. I strained it, discarded the bark back outside. Then uh I reduced the um product down by a factor of two. So uh I started with about four liters of uh stuff, uh liquid, uh four or four and a half. I reduced it down actually more than twice, reduced it down.
Um then after it had been reduced down to a little less than half, I added uh equal weight in of sugar, stirred it into a syrup, and that was it. Uh and it was good. So the things I recommend, I recommend if you have a vacuum, you do a vacuum infusion so that you have the water on the inside really quickly. Uh I recommend like bringing it up to a simmer, then letting it steep and keep testing it while it's going so it doesn't get too too bitter. And then I recommend uh draining and then reducing it substantially to increase the flavor profile before adding the sugar.
And I've used it so far in uh I made an old-fashioned with it that was delicious, uh, in my opinion. Uh and that was just, you know, three-eighths of that hickory syrup and two of uh whiskey and uh a dash or two of ango and an orange twist. I also um because it does have some uh tannins in it, is it slightly has some slight bitterness in the back. I did a I used it in a shaken sour, which was actually uh interesting, but not with bourbon. I did a daiquiri.
I did an aged, uh I did an aged um rum egg white uh hickory syrup daiquiri, and it was really good. And some of the yeah, the egg, yeah, the egg white. Interestingly, I also tested that recipe, Nastasia, just for the just for you know giggles. I tested it in an ISI whipper and Misi whipper to see what would happen. I was like, you know what?
Uh I hate doing cocktail foams, right? I've always hated doing cocktail foams, so I don't do it. Uh so but since I'm not on a bar anymore, I can kind of do whatever I want. So I was like, uh, well, what if I were to put this cocktail into like uh a foam with the egg white? So I did a dry shake in the thing, then I added the ice, shook it, added that nitrous, shook it, and then pumped the cocktail out.
And Nastasia, the cocktail filled like three glasses, one cocktail filled like three glasses, a hundred percent foam, hundred percent foam, no liquid. I was like, what the hell am I gonna do with this? But it was good, but like, do you want to drink a foam? You can put it on pie, right? Oh, that's a good idea, like a cocktail pie.
Eventually it settles out, but you have like minutes. You have on the order of like minutes. Yeah, if you put it on like a pumpkin pie. That's a good idea. A daiquiri on top of a pumpkin pie.
That'd be good. That'd be really good. Yeah, nice. Uh I mean it needs to be contained a little bit, so what you maybe you'd have like some pie in the bottom of a cup, like a like a parf parfait cup, and then uh some of that stuff on top. That's that's smart.
That's smart. I like pumpkin pie. You know what I don't think? A little bit tipsy on the foam. A little bit, yeah, a little bit, yeah.
In fact, I could probably dope it back with cream too and make it like really now. You have little Jayquan going through my head. Everybody in the club, everybody in the club with tipsy. Anyway, so that was what uh that's my results with hickory syrup, and thanks for whoever brought it up uh so that I could test it. I recommend going out and foraging for that crud.
Um here's a question on fryers from 80 in Russia. Uh you've spoken uh on about this before, but I can't find your answer. Like espresso machines, traditional deep fryers in British fish and chip shops. What do you think about the fish and chips? As opposed to like French fries, chips.
What do you think about calling them chips as possible? I guess they called it first, right? Who says that? I don't know. They're not called British fries.
I don't know. Traditional deep fryers in British fish and chip shops worked by the thermal mass of the huge fryer warming up, fired by gas, and recovering after the addition of bucket loads of cold potatoes to make chips. I see uh, excuse me. I see commercial line fryers, meaning continuous fryers, I guess, that make potato chips like uh Lay's or tortilla chips uh that have uh PID uh controllers and internal conveyor belts to move the product through the oil. If I want to increase consistency and temperature recovery, is it worth adding a PID over the thermostatic control on a bench top electric deep fryer?
Best 80, a cold Englishman in Moscow, Russia. And PS, before I answer this question, PS, Nastasia, is there any chance you could get Mark Ladner on to talk about the Del Posta cookbook on the air? I, for one, am interested. He said you do it next Tuesday. Really?
Mm-hmm. All right, there you have it. Next Tuesday, people, tune in, be ready for it. Um if they're still talking to me. Next week on Monday is the first installment where I go to Oto, you know, the Mario Batali's pizza restaurant.
And I have to go all the time, right? Every time you're there. If you don't, I'll murder you. Uh and so I have to prep. So I'm doing I'm going to Otto and we're and I'm gonna be making cocktails behind the bar at Otto.
So I'm doing a uh, I think I'm I'm using uh some of them, I'm doing a carbonated amaro uh like you know, spritzer with uh probably with lime. Uh and I'm doing a uh apricot into bourbon uh Hustino, and I'm gonna do a Italian basil nitrom uh gin sour. What do you think? I think I'm gonna add a little bit of stream to that son of a gun. How long are you there for?
How many hours? Like, I don't know. I think from like something till close. What time do they close? Four.
In the morning? A pizza joint? Yeah. Really? I don't think I'm gonna be there till four.
I mean, I don't know, it doesn't really matter. As soon as soon as my kids are asleep and my wife's asleep, it doesn't matter what time I come up. Go straight Leatherman, yeah. Yeah, go Leatherman to start walking. They're like, where are you going?
Straight Leatherman. Go straight Leatherman. It's like, well, I gotta get up out of the city so I can get back on my loop. He didn't like traveling in cities because people in the cities used to pick on him. So he would avoid the he would avoid the main the main routes.
And for those of you that don't know, who've never been to the northeast here, like a lot of that kind of land where he used to walk around is forested now, but back in the day wasn't. It was all cleared. There weren't a lot of like you know, forested trees around. SF's all second growth. So yeah, so he would just like there'd be these rock outcroppings where he'd go hang out and like you know, cook whatever in the heck he was eating, because he also had, I think, like a tin pot.
Apparently he a lot like me, he would carry like 60, 70 pounds of gear around for no reason. Just for no reason. Like all the time. He's only walking 10 miles a day. So you just say the encroachment of civilization is hurting Leatherman?
Well, he he he he did. He died. He had cancer. Oh yeah, he died in the 1880s. Yeah, yeah.
He was he was doing this in the 1880s. I think I may have come back and say he he had a uh some sort of horrible mouth cancer that was eating away at his lips for the last year, year and a half of his life, and someone tried to take him to the uh the hospital. He's like, and then got back out and started walking again. Now that's commitment. You know what I mean?
Never stop. Never stop. Don't stop till you drop, man. That's it. Boom.
It's like, why are you doing you know, why do you engineer, Dave? Like, why are you sitting there engineering? And it's because they pay you, but why do you need the money? So you can eat Leatherman ate. He didn't have any money.
You know what I'm saying? It's like, what's the reason to doing anything? He's like, I'm walking. Anyway. So we should all just walk, is what you're saying?
No, I'm saying it's like, you know, he had a goal. I'm gonna walk ten miles a day. I'm gonna carry my crap with me, I'm gonna wear boots. Was that his goal to do 10 miles a day, or that was just incidental? I think it was incidental, right?
He was pretty much, he was like a watch. People would people be like, uh, it's time for the leather man to come around. He wasn't like a pro walker, he was just like a survivor. Mm-hmm. So, okay, so if he liked you, like if you he didn't really want to talk to you.
So there's this one group that took a like that like would give him soup or whatever, and he'd stop by and you'd take it, he wouldn't talk to him or anything. But one time they set up like uh a camera with a sheet over it, and then as he was sitting, they dropped the sheet and took the picture, and there's this picture of him where he has this kind of like look on his face. I thought this was in the eighteen hundreds, you said can't be eight hundred man, get with it. Yeah, but didn't it take like hours for it to take a photo? This is like the eighteen seventies.
I think they've it's a little bit better than like in the eighteen sixties where they're like not up on my history of photography. I mean, it wasn't like instant, but anyway, so anyway, they surprised me. He never knew there weren't Polaroids. Right. He never went back to that uh house again.
So like what happened is like if if you were nice to him and he like liked you, he would come back to your house every or your whatever every 34 days. But did he talk? Not much. There's a lot of holes in this story, or anything, Nastasia? Uh I mean, look, I've read all of the relevant literature.
So the point is is that he would just show up and then but if you were mean to him or like were like trying to force him to he'd be like, You'd never show up again at your place. He's like, You're I'm done with you. Give you wide birth. It's kind of a good thing, right? If he doesn't show up.
Everyone kind of wanted him to show up. At that time in the US, there were a lot of what's called anti-tramp laws because a lot of people were uh roaming around, a lot of people were displaced um from like traditional farmland, traditional jobs. So there was a lot of wandering, a lot of tramps, like hobo style, but like earlier. And um they were widely hated, and a lot of people like passed anti-tramp laws, and in fact there was lots of beatings, murdering of tramps, people like had uh doing all sorts of terrible things to vagrants. Uh so this is not just a modern phenomenon.
Uh and um he was the one exception. People were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anti-tramp law, but don't mess with the leatherman. He's dumb. No.
You know what I mean? In fact, like these one group of people basically got the snot beat out of them for messing with the leathermen. Can you post a photo of the leatherman? Yeah, actually, chat room just linked me to the Wikipedia page and there's some photos of it. Nastasia's talking about the one that's my face on the Leatherman's body.
Oh, yeah. I didn't spend that much time photoshopping it. Like I didn't, for instance, although it's a perfect look it's in black and white. Yeah, I mean, it's not. What you really want to do if you're gonna fake the photo is obviously pose yourself in the same sort of pose that the person was in and try to match the angle of the camera.
I just like found the fastest photo I could find on the internet, cut out my face and stuff it onto the leatherman's body. And really, if you wanted to go full method, you would have to be like living like Leatherman for at least a week or so just to get into that mindset. I think it takes a couple of years. I'd have to learn French, first of all, and then not speak it to anyone. That would be like the first the first thing.
I mean, I used to know some French, but not enough. Anyway, back to the question. But we were talking about here. Should I add a PID controller to my fryer so that I can approximate what happens in continuous frying, uh, 80? And the answer is no, you should not, and here is why.
Uh, or as Mirvo would say, here is why you should not. That's a mix between Mirvold and my professor Raymond Goyce for the first time. Or as Leatherman would say, pork well. Yeah. Or just what he would say.
You're like, uh, Leatherman, how is the food? And then you would just walk away. Anyway, uh, do you trying to get me back off, Dave? Trying to get me back off topic. Uh I don't like the way you praise that sentence.
Anyway. Oh, come on. This is one of the family shows. So anyway. So anyway, so uh you don't want to do that.
Here's why. Um in a continuous continuous frying is exactly what it says it is. It's continuous. That means you don't want any change one way or the other. They are extremely they're typically very long and they're very, very highly regulated.
So uh, you know, the first like two, three, four hundred pounds, I don't know, it depends on the size of a line, but the first whole bunch uh of stuff that comes out of the fryer is not gonna be right. Uh it'll be over, it'll be under, whatever, until everything comes into equilibrium. And so typically these things take a long time to calibrate, but then they run them for you know, forever. So like they have a P ID controller on their oil because they want to keep the oil at a certain place at exactly the same temperature. They know that they're adding X number of pounds of potatoes or tortilla chips every hour, and they eventually know what heat average heat input they need into the oil to keep it at the at the right point.
And there's a gradation probably uh definitely in the oil temperature from the beginning of the line to the uh to the end of the line, but everything stays constant because they have a relatively constant heat input, they have a really relatively constant potato input, and they're also adding fresh oil because the miracle of continuous frying, the miracle of it, is that you can you absorb oil, uh, you add oil at the rate that it is absorbed by your potato or your tortilla chip, and if you get everything just right, then the oil is always perfectly conditioned because brand new fry oil is not good and old fry oil is not good. The reason brand new fry oil is not good is uh it actually is um too pure and it doesn't bond as it doesn't uh um transmit heat as well to the uh chips. A little bit of breakdown makes it uh slightly uh more polar and transmits uh the energy much better to the chips. So you actually want it to slightly break down, uh, but you don't want it too much. And so in a continuous fryer, you can keep everything perfect by uh adjusting the rate of uh product in potatoes or tortillas uh and the rate of oil in so that the oil in there is constantly right.
So it's all about juggling these kind of that's why you can't make just a few things in a continuous fryer. And for that, PID is perfect, perfect. Everything is perfect all the time. The oil is always the same, the potato chips or whatever are always the same, everything takes exactly the same amount of time. Awesome.
Uh by contrast, uh in batch frying, you are dumping a load in to a single batch, the temperature is gonna drop, and you need to get that temperature back up. Now, here you don't want a PID. Now, you could have a PID that realizes, but it's just very aggressively tuned, so that it rockets back up close to your finished temperature, but then knows to slow down a little bit as you're coming up so that you don't overshoot a lot. So there might be a situation where you don't where you can win over a standard like bang bang uh thermostat, but depending on the amount of temperature rise you're gonna get. Usually, let's say let's say you dump a bunch of stuff into a deep fryer and it temperature drops real low, it turns the heat way on, and you're rocketing up through to your set point.
Now, if you have only a small amount of product in there, maybe it can overshoot a lot, but odds are by the time if your fryer is really powerful, by the time it hits that uh hits back at its temperature, you're still boiling a lot of water off out of your product, so you shouldn't get that much of a rise out of it, theoretically, especially if you have good convection in it, which is why real tube fryers are awesome because they don't uh tend to locally overheat your oil because they have a much larger surface area uh to put heat into the oil. Anyway, so uh if you have an actual commercial fryer with a bang bang thermostat on it, it doesn't tend to overheat your oil. Um, and they're pretty awesome. And really, you don't need single degree control over the oil uh temperature anyway. You just don't want it to get too too low, and you don't want it to go high, and you want your recovery to be fast.
So I would say no, do not PID it. Although, um, the converse, I'm gonna go back, I want to say if you're going to pot fry, uh, I think having a um using one of those controlled like induction units for frying can be very useful because it's very hard uh at home uh to pay attention to a fryer all the time when you're doing a bunch of other stuff, and it's very easy to overheat your fry oil on uh on a stove top. And so one of these inductions like the Breville one that I got sent or any of the other ones can be very useful in keeping your fry oil uh so it doesn't go up too uh too high. And certain of those, like the Breville, can have like an aggressive setting where it can get back up to a temperature aggressively. Uh it's not as much as like on off, but it's much more aggressive than uh the more standard PIDs.
And uh a lot of PID technology, by the way, in terms of cooking and a lot of what's different between different circulators, is how aggressive their uh strategy is. A more aggressive strategy will get you to the temperature faster, but have some overshoot. Anyway, what do you think, Stas? Good job. Okay.
Um Anthony from Nashville uh writes in about Booker Index. Uh hey Dave Hammer, uh David and guests. Uh I was wondering if you could talk a bit about closing down Booker Index in the process of finding a new location. What you'll be looking for in a new spot, and what kind of changes will you include in the new bar and why? Maybe it's me, but it seems like you didn't talk about it too much on the show, which is why I had to get information from the internets.
Sorry if I'm bringing up a sore subject. Anyway, you guys are great. Uh love the show, Anthony from Nashville. Well, the problem, Anthony, is that um there's only so much that I can say uh because I'm not allowed to say like exactly like who's gonna be involved or what uh you know what the arrangement is gonna be, what the name of the bar is gonna be, etc. etc.
Because we're we're all in negotiations for these things uh at the moment. I can say this. I'm looking for space. I've looked at several spaces. I haven't found a space yet that I think is um is right.
Um as for what's gonna be different or the same, um, you know, what uh what I want to be this uh I think the core of Booker and DAX was uh the bar. The core was that we were gonna work very hard um to make the drinks uh as good as we can make them and present them in a non-pretentious style. We were you know using uh new techniques and trying to focus on uh working on flavor. So it's a very specific uh idea behind uh drink creation, and from a customer service standpoint, we really wanted it to be, like I say, friendly and non-pretentious, and uh, you know, a place that you'd be uh comfortable to go and hang out and ha and have some fun. So that was the goal.
I think there, you know we we hopefully I think succeeded on those uh two counts. I think uh in the future I want to uh I'm interested now in the fact of why people go to the bars and and I think it's to feel awesome, right Stas. Like I think you want to look awesome. Uh not necessarily that everything looks awesome but that you feel like you look awesome. You feel like you are awesome.
I think that's almost it's not almost it's more important than the drink, right? Like the fact that you feel kind of special or like that you know uh that you just feel good. Like why else would you go to a bar? If you want to feel crappy you go home. You know what I mean?
Not that going home makes you feel crappy Stas, I'm not saying that. But uh so I'm gonna focus on those kinds of uh things more in the in the next go-around. Not that we didn't focus on them before but I'm gonna kind of put those prime in prime place. And also I want to make our carbonation system a little better. Uh you know there's a bunch of like tweaks and things uh depending on the people I'm working with new techniques might be available to us that weren't before because I was so I might not be as uh uh vehement about not using some techniques.
I don't know. Uh the qu look will will we use garnishes? I don't know. I doubt we'll use a lot of garnishes. We're never gonna be a garbage heavy uh cocktail bar with garnishes but I don't know it's yet to be seen.
Uh so it's not that it's a sore subject it's just there's certain things I can't say and I found also that like until you have something concrete to say it's usually you know best not to say much at all, right Stas? That's true. Yeah. Jeff from Los Angeles writes, uh, hey gang, I recently got into brewing. I'm thinking about using a circulator to do a brew in bag all grain setup uh during mash, running the circulator outside the bag and probably with a hop sock.
What do you think about that word hopsock? What does that mean? It's like you know, like a like a dance you go to in high school. Uh now you have like at the hop anyway, but like going through my head, but no, it's like it's like a bag to hold the hops so that they they can pull them back out again. Uh around the circulator as insurance in case anything escapes the bag.
It looks like ANOVA tacitly approves this based on the two thousand and fifteen interview they did on brewing beer with the ANOVA. Uh but the owner's manuals for each of my circulators, I have a poly science professional and an ANOVA one, state that they shouldn't come into contact with food, in quotes. Uh I also contacted ANOVA customer service and they said no to what was done in the article. So what's the deal? Is this safe to do with either of both my circulators?
If so, is there any particular cleaning that you recommend before or after to ensure long life for the circulators and that no off flavors are imparted to the wart. Thanks for your help. Uh FYI, uh you meaning me, Nastasia, yelling at you, Nastasia and Peter during the carbonation uh segment a few weeks ago was some of the most uh best comedy I've heard on the podcast, Jeff from Los Angeles. Also, uh I stand corrected, the blue man episode, which was the not safe for work, was even funnier, so there you go. Uh not a family show.
Um so here's the thing. The re there's a bunch of reasons why people don't say things are food grade, and I can tell you this as an equipment designer. One, uh they simply don't want to pay to get it certified as food grade. Uh so for instance the original poly science stainless steel circulators were not didn't have NSF approval, uh even though everything in contact with the food was in fact food grade. Now, there's two issues uh that you come uh across with uh well there's a bunch of issues.
A, is it gonna is the food gonna harm the unit? The answer in most of these cases is no. You don't want to clog it, right? So you want to make sure nothing can clog the circular circulator part, but in general, no, the food's not gonna hurt the thing. Uh two, although I forget which one it was, but one of the lower price circulators would not circulate oil.
You remember that, Stas? Were you at that with me? You yeah, it was Wisconsin. It was in Wisconsin. We were at doing that demo with Johnny uh and uh Hunter, and we couldn't get the one circulator to go in oil because we were doing that oil water test.
Anyway, uh I think that's either the viscosity was a problem or one of the sensors was like this is weird and it didn't didn't sense right, so it wouldn't work, but that was oil. Um so anyway, so there's uh is the food gonna hurt the unit? No. And then there is the unit gonna hurt the food, and this can be in one of a number of ways. One, the material itself could be unsafe for food contact, i.e.
poisonous, or what most people worry about is oils uh from bearings or uh plastics leaching out uh nasty stuff into the food, right? So that's the primary concern. In the old circulators, there were no like the the stainless steel uh poly science ones, there were uh there was nothing in contact with the food. The bearings were all up top and it was all just a stainless steel impeller. There was literally nothing but stainless steel in contact.
So I'm gonna take that one as the as the base. And also, the newer poly science um ones, they're not rated for food, but the plastic, I believe, is uh food safe. Uh I had this conversation with Philip Preston, but it was years ago. I can't speak about the plastics that are used in the ANOVA, but I will say this in general, most of these designers would only ever specify food grade plastics simply because why wouldn't it costs a little more, but in general they know that people are using it for food contact, and even if it's not, even if they're not gonna go get the ratings for it, they would make it that way anyway, if they're good people, which most of them are. Okay, so back to what we were talking about.
And the jewel, I don't know. Did we ask uh Chris Young on the jewel whether or not we'll find out uh because you know he sponsored the show in fact. So we'll find out whether or not that one is uh food grade. Um but the materials in general are food grade, they're in contact with the material with the food. Uh so that's not an issue.
Even if it is a food grade material, you have to get special certifications. The factory charges you more for those certifications of food grade. And finally, you have to get NSF approval for it, which is um, you know, uh an actual certification, which also costs tens of thousands of dollars because we're going through it with the centrifuge, getting our NSF approval. Um so there's that, but the the difficulty in getting the NSF approval isn't solely based on the um um materials it's made out of, but also how easy the material to c is to clean. So any uh portion of the unit that can't be disassembled and cleaned uh in a way that uh the people who are certifying it are happy with uh means that it's not gonna get NSF approval.
So in fact, even the centrifuge is another example. Certain design parts of the centrifuge are actually not ones that I like. I hate them, but I have to have them there because the factories tell me that I won't be able to get NF certification, for instance, unless certain parts can be broken down and washed separately. So uh a lot of whether or not something is rated for food contact might be whether or not uh the NSF people said that it could be washed out. Now that said, that doesn't mean that you can't wash the stuff even if it's got like crevices, it just means it's more difficult to clean out.
So as long as you're willing to take the time to clean it out, I would feel safe serving that stuff to my family. What do you think? Yes. Okay. Um Andrew writes in about pork.
Uh I think I think uh yeah, Andrew writes in about pork. Um I wanted to apologize for ripping on Dave the other week for disliking sweet tea. If I had known that he respected Eastern North Carolina barbecue so much, I would never have questioned his like of uh dislike of sweet tea. And for the record, if you get sweet tea in one of those amber colored glasses, it's guaranteed to be too sweet. That's what we were talking about, those now.
In fact, I'm staring at some of those amber colored glasses. Thank goodness they did not serve sweet tea in this establishment. Although they do basically they serve their lemonade here as a concentrate and you have to add water to it. What do you think about that concept? Do you like the fact that you get more lemonade for your money?
No, no. It's expensive lemonade. Right, because you're supposed to mix it with water. Well, they don't tell you to mix it with water. That's the thing, they don't tell you to mix it with water.
So, like a friend of mine was over yesterday and someone was serving him coffee, and uh they have this way they're like they're serving the coffee and it's the coffee is too cold for his taste, and they're like, we want to serve it at that temperature. He's like, I just want my coffee hot. If you're gonna serve coffee at some non-standard temperature, standard temperature for coffee in the United States is piping hot, like crotch scalding, McDonald's sewing hot, right? So if you're gonna serve your coffee at any temperature other than that, you have to be like, the guy's like, but then you had this, you had this happen. Hey, I want a coffee, right?
And then you're like, uh, sir, I don't know. Do you sure you want a coffee? Because the coffee was served as like you're kind of like lukewarm. And he's like, Well, what do you mean? He's like, and then you have to go through the whole rigmarole.
This is why it's hard to do anything that's outside the norm when you have something that already has like a fundamental, like everyone knows the way it's supposed to be served. There's gonna be some mishigosh, but I don't think you want to have that happen after the person has a cup of coffee that they think is too cold. Yeah. Because the guy that I was doing at dinner, he was like, he's like, I don't care. Where's where's the hot coffee?
What can I do to get coffee that's hot? Do you like uh coffee that's not hot? No. You like it hot? Right.
Yeah. Back to Andrew's question. Uh as I mentioned, I live in Boston. I'm unable to cook outdoors and have trouble smoking food indoors because of the poor circulation in my apartment. I miss Eastern North Carolina barbecue terribly.
I miss going to a pig roast with one of those big oil drum grills and just pulling some meat off of a carcass. What do you think about pulling meat off a carcass though? That sounds terrible. Oh yeah, but that's fun though. Any advice on replicating it here?
It probably goes without saying that I can't cook a whole pig in my closet sized kitchen, but I want the spicy, sweet, vinegary, smoky, meaty flavors of Eastern uh barbecue pork. Uh I'm completely open to covering my cooking uh slash uh smoke detector if it could help. But I'm not sure what the best way to do this is without endangering myself or losing my security deposit. I have a baby-sized oven. Ooh, cooking babies.
Terrible. Terrible. Uh a circulator, a torch, uh, an EC whip, a crappy coil electric stove, and a toaster oven if those would help at all. Speaking of my circulator, uh, I was given an ANOVA precision cooker circulator. Uh, I want to use it uh with other fluids such as oil and vinegar, but also don't want to ruin this wonderful gift.
Uh I know officially, uh I forgot this was even here. I uh shouldn't use anything with water, but I'm wondering if you know enough about this specific circulator to let me know if I'm safe to use other fluids. So I can't remember whether it was the ANOVA or the sandstair that wouldn't pump oil, uh, but it came back to life. So you're not gonna hurt it by doing the oil. It's not gonna hurt the unit.
I'm gonna put it that way. Um I'm still catching up on the cooking issues podcast, but I've learned so much for you guys. Um it means a lot to amateur cooks like me that uh someone like yourself is interested in our questions. Keep on being great, Andrew. Ah, very nice.
Okay. Um so what would I do? So the here's the thing. So let's just to get over what talk about traditional, like North Carolina style pulled pork. So you're supposed to do in the real world, I mean like old school, what you're supposed to do is chop wood, burn wood down to basically coals, put uh a whole hog on a split uh onto um you know on there and cook it, and I think flipping once, I think, for many, many, many hours at a low temperature, uh b basically uh you know, breaking down uh the collagens, forming a nice uh what they call like uh bark or crust of of uh uh of dryness around the outside.
Uh then after many, many hours the inside is moist and tender, the outside you hack it up and you put a mixture of vinegar um and uh cayenne pepper and regular pepper uh you know over it and and you eat it. Okay. So the good news about replicating this at home, and a lot of people get really uh bent out of shape about how to do it, is you basically uh almost any low cooking technique is gonna get you the internal structure, internal taste of the meat to be relatively accurate. So you'll find online many people doing uh um slow cooker recipes or doing Kahlua style where you're wrapping the pork in uh aluminum foil and throwing it in an oven. And what that is doing is allowing you to get the high temperatures without uh drying it out too much.
The problem is you're not gonna have um you're not gonna have that crust on the outside. Uh so w people can get around it two ways. Now, if you're gonna do it in a vacuum bag, which you can do, uh, you know, um circulate it, the problem is is you're never gonna get a pulled pork texture doing low temperature. You're always gonna need to do a higher temperature in order for it to break down. So if you even if I cook like let's say short ribs or pork uh or pork belly uh for you know days and days and days, so it's very soft, but I do it at a low temperature, the structure of the meat is never the same.
Uh it doesn't render out in the same way. So the structure of the meat is never the same as kind of a traditional pulled pork. So what I would do is get the traditional cut that people do when they when they do a single cut, and that's the Boston butt or the pork shoulder uh section. Um now you you can either you can go wet all the way, but you're never gonna dry out the outside of the meat, and it's never gonna have quite the same thing. So what you can do is you can either you can do uh a pre you know rub it down with salt, you can use a liquid smoke.
The good news, I mean I don't, but you could use like a liquid smoke. The good news about uh North Carolina, specifically Eastern North Carolina barbecue, is it's smoke-esque, it's cooked in smoke, but it's not smoke-e. In other words, it doesn't taste overly smoked, so you're not gonna require a a lot of it. It's not like a heavy smoke um uh cookery, even though it's in smoke for a long time. So you could um you could put it in a low, low oven.
Uh you know, you look up uh you know uh Meathead Goldwyn's uh recipes on this. You could do a combination of uh wrapping in foil uh and putting in an oven, uh letting it come up, then take the foil off and then let it flash off. Uh I would do some maybe some salt beforehand. Um and that's it. So you could definitely do it, do it inside.
Uh, but I would look up I I haven't done that specific one, but do I do it similar to the way they do a clue? What? I can't keep talking about pork or something. One minute. One minute.
Oh man. Pedro called in from Lisbon about uh melon melon pan, you know that that kind of thing. And I actually have some let's see if I can get through this. I also had one more question, I guess I'm not gonna get to on uh Jer Jeremy on measuring alcohol. Jeremy, I'll get to you next week on measuring alcohol.
Let's see if I can bust through this melon pan question. Good morning, uh Dave, Miss Lopez, David in the booth, and fellow members of the chat room. I'm Pedro from Lisbon, Portugal. And last uh June I visited Tokyo and Kyoto as part of my honeymoon around the world. There we tasted Japanese melon pan, and as since uh, and I want to try it's so good, I want to try making it at home.
Uh melon pan, by the way, is like a a bread dough, like a ja tip typical Japanese like semi-sweet bread dough encased in a cookie dough and baked. That's what it is. Okay. You like that idea? Sure.
No melon inside. Okay. Okay. You know, you've seen if you saw it, you'd know it. Uh however, I followed the recipe to uh to uh to the tea and already baked them twice with different results.
I would like you to explain, if possible, why the difference in the outcome. On both times, the outer layer, so this is the cookie layer, was difficult to work with, uh being very sticky and brittle, and I couldn't make a uniform layer. Does this have to do with the butter quality? Uh as those fellow listeners from the bakery in Seattle had the problem. Does the butt does butter with salt or without salt have any difference?
And could that explain the issue? I don't think so. Uh on the first time, uh uh the re the bread dough also contains dry milk powder, by the way. On the first time I didn't use dry milk powder in the bread dough and realized on the second time with the dry milk the dough is lighter and more fluffy. What's the role of dry milk in the bakery?
Uh and these are from this uh recipe site called Japanese Cooking 101, uh their Japanese basic bread recipe and their melon pan recipe. Once again, uh thanks for the show, uh Pedro uh Paiva. Okay. P.S. You should visit Lisbon.
Yes, I should. I would love to visit Lisbon. I love uh Portuguese wine, I love port, and I also love Portuguese cheese. Uh you did you ever go to Portugal sauce? No, yeah.
I want to go to Portugal. I really do. Uh so anyway, uh short answers to your question. Uh your problem with the cookie, I looked at the recipes and let's let's hit the cookie dough first, because in case they rip us off the air. Uh the video that they shot for the cookie dough, I don't know what they were doing in the video because the cookie dough they made looked fine, but the method they used for making it was terrible.
They obviously didn't cream the uh butter and the uh sugar enough. You want to c you first of all, take your butter out of the fridge, don't bother warming it up. And according to uh Stella Parks, uh, you know, the uh you know baker who uh writes for serious heats and has her own blog and all this other stuff. In fact, you shouldn't ever let your butter get above uh 68 when you're creaming. I don't know, I haven't run these tests, but she swears on 10 stacks of Bibles if that's the case.
But here's what I do. I take the butter out of the fridge, I hit it with a rolling pin, turn it 90 degrees, hit it with a rolling pin a bunch of times, turn it 90 degrees, I go all the way around until it's malleable but still cold. Throw that into your kitchen aid or equivalent, hopefully with a scraper blade on it with a silicone scraper. If not, you have to scrape down a bunch of times. Cream the heck out of that for minutes with the butter and the sugar to whip air into it.
That's gonna plasticize your dough. I think the your main problem was that uh it was uh kind of too dense and uh wasn't uniform in structure and so it was brittle. And also when it's when there's not enough air whipped into it, once you chill it, because you had to chill the dough to uh to roll it out, uh, it's going to chill such that the outside's gonna be too hard and the inside's still gonna be too soft. So, in other words, uneven chilling might be an effect, and the the denser your dough is, the less nice it's gonna act when you're rolling it out once it's chilled. So, anyway, so cream the heck out of it.
When you add the eggs, scrape down and whip whip those in until they're fluffy before you're adding the flour. And I think uh along with not over-chilling it, chilling it for a longer period of time, but not as hard, like don't freeze or chill it, I think it's gonna make a big difference on it because uh with more air, it's gonna be more plastic, it's gonna work better, it's not gonna be brittle. I don't think it's your butter, I don't think it's a salt. I think it's strictly that if you follow the recipe the way they did it, they just didn't cream uh the uh uh the butter for their cookies properly. As for the milk powder, um the the function can be different milk uh depending on what's going on, whether it's a whole milk powder or not.
If it's a whole milk powder, it has fat in it, uh, and the fat is gonna tenderize. But in general, uh, as long as the enzymes have been deactivated in milk, which it usually is. I also don't know whether Japanese bread baking people 101 are using UHT milk, uh, which has been completely deactivated from enzymes, which can uh reduce gluten, uh, or whether or not they scald the milk beforehand. Uh, they call for lukewarm milk, but the milk powder in general, uh, you get a browner uh version because of the sugars. There's uh you're adding extra lactose.
Uh typically you get a fluffier and softer product when you add uh milk powder. Um the actual mechanism I'm not sure of. Anyway, so I hope that helps. Uh, and we'll get to the other questions next week on cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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