This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the emergent circulator for Sous V by Chef Steps. Order now at Chefsteps.com/slash J-O-U-L-E. I'm Damon Bolte, host of the Speakeasy. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit 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 you know whenever's to like about one o'clock. Broadcasting from Robertus Pizzeria in Bushwig. Call in all your questions to 718-497-2128. It's 718-497-2128.
Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? Good. Yeah. Got uh Dave in the booth.
Yo. And we have Paul Adams, formerly of Popular Science. Hello. No longer at Popular Science. No longer.
So is it the science is the science is not popular or science is still popular. I am, however, unpopular. So, up until very recently, Paul was the editor of uh Popular Science's web content in general. Uh, but he most especially was their drone editor and their food editor. Yep.
Yeah. Not drones and food. Although I was discussing yesterday, uh Nomad, the restaurant Nomad, might be the first. I mean, I haven't spoken to them about this, but it makes sense that they would be the first, like, drone operated pepper grinder. What do you think?
Why does that make sense? Because like they're always at the cutting edge of that kind of thing, and like, you know, you want like pepper to just kind of appear. You don't necessarily want a waiter with the giant pepper grinder. Pepper. Drones kick up a big downdraft.
Well, that's something that has to be worked on. I guess. What about an overhead pepper gantry, like an XY pepper gantry? And like an X XY truffle shaving gantry and an XY, like fresh Parmigiano gantry. What do you think?
Dial in the coordinates of the plate. Yeah, and just hit that. We love that. Wouldn't you love that? Yeah.
I think drones are optimal for slicing meat. The fast rotors. Well, uh, you know that the people have worked on the butcher robot, but the butcher robot is actually one of the most difficult robot problems that exists. Because in fact, the we are one of the interesting things if you read um mechanization takes command by uh what's his name? Siegfried Gideon, which is kind of the classic uh work on um the rise of mechanization.
Like one of the interesting things about uh assembly lines is they were all like first really applied to food preparation problems like baking, but also uh things like butchering pigs. But the problem is is that unlike things like guns and cars, they can't be fully fully automated because pigs themselves aren't widgets. You know what I mean? Well, we've tried to widget the pig as much as we can and and the chicken and whatnot, but still requires some human intervention because there's like a lot of stuff. So people have been working on the uh the butcher robot, something they can actually robotically take a non widget and break it down.
So it's a it's a tough problem. There's a ways to go. Yeah. But I think like hanging a prosciutto above the table and manually flying a drone into it, so shreds of it go everywhere. That's pretty pretty hardcore.
Pretty hardcore drone. No. What do you mean? Like prosciutto is tough, and you want you don't want like it hacked to bits. You don't want pulled pork.
I can see you doing pulled pork. Like you throw a pork shoulder up in the air and fly a drone through it. You might jam the rotor into the pork though. And not into a prosciutto? No, because it's more stiff.
You could really just kind of have a grating effect. Stas, would you would you burn a restaurant down that attempted to do that with prosciutto? Would you just walk up to the restaurant and just like light your drink on fire and throw it in? Uh yes. Yeah, probably.
Speaking of drinks, uh yesterday uh I had my first uh of the four Mondays I'm gonna work at uh Oto slinging drinks, and Nastasia hated the drink that uh I made for her. Uh so I will say a little about it. Yeah. Uh sounds great. I I liked it a lot.
I think other people liked it a lot. You know the uh Amaro Chicharo? Yes. It's like you know, the central of Italy thing. So it turns out that if you uh add water to it, uh, and then uh the problem with the straight carbonating like Amaro spritzers is that they tend to lose body as they're diluted down.
Like the whole point of a carbonated Amaro spritz thing is to have kind of a low alcohol drink, right? So you're not clocking in at like 13%, 13, 14%, you're clocking in closer, like nine, ten percent, eight, eight, nine, ten percent. Yeah. So when you're down there, in fact, this is exactly yeah, it's right around there. So like the the problem is is that you start losing body, like viscosity.
Now, you don't want to dope that up by adding sugar because the whole point isn't to be pounding a sweet soda, it's to be pounding something kind of refreshing and bitter and whatnot. Right. The answer is, of course, you add glycerin. So that's what I was gonna say. Yeah, yes, you add glycerin, of course.
The answer is the answer is always glycerin. So you add it doesn't take a lot, by the way. So like, you know, like a whole liter bottle of uh of product can you know would have like 15 uh mils or so of uh glycerin or or less. It's much actually it's it's less, it's way less than a percent. I put in like l way less than a percent.
So maybe it was 15 per bottle of chicharro. Anyway, so it's like not a lot. Uh but it makes a noticeable difference. Salt, right? And then uh carbonated it, and then uh I served it with a squeeze with a lime wedge that you could squeeze in, and it tastes remarkably like a Coca-Cola, strangely, even though the acid's not there, but that the overnotes of it.
So uh so we called it Roman Coke. Get it? Get it? Get it. But it sounds tasty, dude.
Uh it's good. Uh the but for the first time in my life ever, I served a carbonated drink over ice. Kind of like Spanish style. So I put the ice into a Collins glass, stirred the Collins glass down, dumped out the extra water, poured in the drink, and Stassi's like, I don't like it. And I just realized Nastasia hates ice in in her carbonated drinks.
That's why she didn't like the drink. If I had just poured her the freaking drink in uh in a wine glass, she would have enjoyed it. And you know what? Like, crap on me for not remembering what Nastasia likes after all these freaking years. I was so caught up in like the fact that I was doing something I hadn't done before that I stopped thinking about what Nastasia liked.
Like, so like whenever, like and it's so crap on me. My fault. My bad. Last night I was blaming her. I was calling her a bad person.
True in front of people. Which is also true. But in this case, it's like it was totally, totally my fault. A lot of people don't like rocks. Yeah.
Yeah, well, they shouldn't order a drink on the rock then. I mean, if it says on the rock. I didn't even see it. No, no, but no, why would Nastasi think I'm gonna serve a carbonated drink on ice when I've never done it in my life? So uh, but on the other hand, like what's pathetic about it is is that well, you know why it is is because I remember very unusual things that come up a lot.
Like, so for instance, Cesare, Casella, friend, chef, salumi maker extraordinaire, uh, only enjoys sparkling wine. Really, he'll drink anything you hand him, but really what he wants is is sparkling wine. Uh, and he wants that with ice in it. Sure. That's what he wants.
So I get it for him. Cause I don't want him to have to walk up and deal with some bartender person who's like, you want what? So I I always as soon as I see him, if I'm working, but I just get it for him. That way there's no sort of any sort of interaction, right? Because you don't want to have to have that interaction.
But I feel, and I think I've said this on the show before, I think Cesare has earned the right, really anyone has earned the right to have a drink exactly the way that they want it. As long as you know what you're getting into. Yes. Within reason. Like within reason.
Like, you know, if someone wants to do something that's literally vile and revolting, you know, at a public place, well, they they shouldn't do that. Huh. You know, you like your ability to have your drink the way you want, like, stops when I wretch. You know what I mean? And certain things hurt me, but if I'm not a customer, it's not a problem.
You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't hurt you if you see someone having ice in their in their champagne, does it? Doesn't hurt me. It hurt you, Stars? What?
To see someone do something horrible to a you don't care, right? They're they're drinking it. Yeah. Oh, I mean, it's still What do you think about like when someone takes like uh a fine wine and dumps like Pepsi Cola into it? Like with that, would you be like, would you just get up and walk out?
It hurts me when people drink a fine wine quickly. Does it hurt you when I eat good food intensely quickly? Yeah. Jiro dreams of of fast, fast food. That's basically fast.
It was fast casual restaurant. Jiro's fast casual. Uh so the uh I mean I was dressed casually. Yeah. We were Mark had to be dressed casually because he was still on the he was still yeah, he he he was uh his behind was still set on spray from his uh trip that he had taken right beforehand, so you know fast casual.
Those yeah, those formal looking. You said they let us sit at that table forever to eat the cantaloupe? Was that what it was? Uh whatever it was, yeah. But you know, like men's men's formal pants, do you know they have a second button on the inside that you can't see?
Did you know that? Yeah. So like formal men's pants like have a little button over on the left side, like right where the thigh is, and I don't know why it's there, to be to be honest. I don't know why why they have that. To even out the tension, I guess, from the button that's on the right side up above.
I don't know. So anyway, so you can't wear that kind of pants if what you need to do is rip those suckers down because you're set on spray. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's a short situation.
I'm anti shorts. I detest shorts, but in that kind of situation, or some sort of baggy thing. You had a lot of people there last night. I did. You were in your funeral suit.
Oh, yeah, so well, I was uh bartending in a three-piece suit, and everyone's like, Oh, you look so nice. I'm like, Well, I was at a funeral, and they're like, Oh my god, I'm sorry, now I feel bad for saying anything about it. Which is kind of the best. Uh well, and from Nastasias, you know, there's uh Peter Kim who couldn't be here today because he's uh tool uh from the museum food and drink it wasn't his funeral right yeah yeah no no not yet but the uh I saw him last night and yeah his voice was very froggy yes yeah froggy as in uh little rascals froggy remember little rascals froggy um I forget what I was gonna say about Peter but he was something something about what were we talking about it'll come to us anyway funerals funerals so uh but Peter wasn't involved with so you never did the the cherry thing that you were gonna do with the three generations you missed out oh my god that's totally right well let me describe what happened that cherry probably still exists I got a text Gerard he can't eat that cherry now we're gonna just so my stepfather's father uh like uh died uh on Friday he's 96 96 years old it's a good run uh kind of an amazing guy up until uh he was sick for about two weeks maybe uh so you know prior to that 96 years old born in 1920 ate like a horse lived in his own house uh you know loved loved life a hundred percent of the time loved life uh was the last in a long line of butchers so like for generations basically there was an alternation in names it was he was Archangelo Arcangelo Carmen Adonisio and then it went back then his father was Carmine his father was Archangelo the next father up can you guess uh Carmine. And they and they're all butchers from like these tiny towns uh you know in uh Avellino area in uh in Italy.
And they came over uh the you know the grandfather the the grand you know my what would be my great grandfather uh Carmine whose name went by Nanu that was his name Nanu that was the name that they called him to his face. Everyone also had nicknames that they were called not to the behind their back. Everyone, everyone in the family has it, like and they're all mean, like horse's head, three curls, like all sorts of some of them? Uh no, no, too too young, uh not worth not worth an epithet. So they uh I wasn't part of the politics so much, you know.
I'm sure but I'm sure I did, but because they never told me to my face. You know what? I should ask someone, like what was what was I called? You know what I mean? If if indeed I deserved a name.
So um came over in 1908, saved up, bought a uh a butcher, uh, you know, a shop, had his own shop in the uh in the north end of Boston in the 20s called Adenizio Brothers, because he was and they would go, and so Gerard's father, you know, the the you know, um Addy, uh Arcangelo, Papa, who just died, he was the last in the generation that was running this kind of old style of butcher shop where they would drive a truck up, canvas-colored truck, pick up live lambs in from farms in New Hampshire, come down to Boston, slaughter them, and then hang them up in the shop in the old days. So there's a picture from the 30s, uh, which I, you know, if I get a good copy, I'll put it on on Instagram, of like sheep with the fur on hanging in the shop in Boston with a live sheep in the back that they were like, you know, not really talking about. Nice Gerard, my stepfather remembers like him bringing live goats in and the goats like smashing uh, you know, one goat butted him. Uh and so they had live, live all this live, live put they're doing their own slaughtering, they would slaughter their own cows, although I don't think they would go by necessarily their own cows. So they were like real old school uh butchers in the north end of Boston and just crazy, insane stories about getting ripped off, like preventing getting ripped, getting back even at people that had ripped you off, like these guys would rip them off on the price of live lambs.
So they would drive the truck in, and then they would put uh they they would have canvas in the back of their truck too. They would put all these rocks in like a hold in the truck that couldn't be seen. Then they would weigh the truck, then as the lambs were coming off, they would like dump the rocks onto the back onto the ground, and then when they weighed it, they would have the difference in that because this farmer had ripped them off for something else on like a land that they had sold them before. There's all sorts of crazy there's such crazy stories. I don't even know if I should get into some of the crazy stories.
Like one of the crazy stories they would tell is that you know they no one wanted to lose any money, like everything, everything was, you know, down to the T. You bought a live animal and you sold every scrap. So like with with cows, they would take the skins uh over and sell them to a t a tanner who would make leather. But with uh they they sold a lot of meat to uh actually the Chinese community and the uh Jewish community in uh in Boston. And so they'd hire a rabbi to come and do the uh the koshering thing, right?
So one of the things he would tell me is that, and this is gonna horrify people, so prepare to be horrified. So, like what would happen is is they would like they had to pay the rabbi to do the certification on the animal, one way or the other. So, in other words, like animal passes, animal doesn't pass, rabbi still gets paid, right? And this is good from a rabbi point of view because you don't want the rabbi to think that it's like you know, uh that their paycheck is dependent upon how many animals they pass, right? So one of the things they used to uh search for inside the cavity was that the that I guess that the lung, the pleura was not attached, right?
Or something like this. So they used to know this, so they would make a small incision in the upper part that wasn't where uh they were checking, and they would stick their fingers in and just verify that that and separate out the pleural lining from the thing so that it was all kosher. They would they would kosher the animal. So it's like not cool, right? But in the in the same way, I kind of I don't respect I would never do it, but it's kind of an interesting story, right?
The other thing is is that Gerard's grandfather, so the great grandfather, in the in the twenties, uh twenties or thirties, made a bunch of brandied cherries. And I had one when I was a kid. They were still good in the in the like eighties, which is when I had one, and there's still I think three left. And now I have the regret. I was I wanted to have you waited so long, you made a thing.
I wanted three generations of Adenesios to get together and and have the last three cherries, and now it's too late. We'll have to wait for another generation to have three generations for the last three cherries. Maybe we'll wait for the cherries to be uh a hundred years old. I'll not sure whether he still has the cherries. Anyway, um you got a caller online if you want to take that.
Yeah, call her, you're on the air. Hi, this is Jeff from Las Vegas. Thanks for taking my call. Hey, how are you doing? I'm great.
I I have a question about canning. Uh I'd like to do some canning for the holidays for friends and family, and uh I was looking at some some recipes to do that, and they were really pretty simple recipes, things like strawberry sugar, lemon juice. But they say that you can't double the recipe. And so I've been having a hard time figuring out when can I double these recipes or not double the recipes, and I was wondering if you had an answer. Huh.
Well, so do you have the recipe in front of you? I I don't. I unfortunately I don't have the recipe in front of me, but does it involve boiling? Yes. So it's it's uh water bath canning and uh you know, straight up breakdown, say like the strawberries, add sugar, add lemon juice, cook down and then and then process through water bath canning.
Right, but in other words, um there there's two things that are gonna go there's two things that can go wrong with recipes that say you can't uh double well, three, I guess. There could be actually something that is like changes when volumes get scaled up and scaled down. But usually what happens is uh in a a recipe that says, for instance, boil for five minutes, you're gonna evaporate a different amount of liquid out of that recipe in five minutes than you would if you were doubling or tripling the batch, right? So one place a recipe can go wrong is at that stage where you're doing the initial boil with the sugar and the acid and the strawberries. In that case, you know, I think uh obviously with a larger batch, you're gonna need to boil uh for the same surface area of pot, you're gonna need to boil a little bit longer because what you're worried about there, and this is not a safety issue, like what you're worried about there is that the texture of the product is going to be right.
So I typically don't ever listen to what a recipe says in terms of minutes anyway, on a boil for something like a jelly or preserve. I always just pull some out and test it and take a look at it and see whether it feels right. Um better recipe. The problem is also you're not typically boiling those kinds of things until they're at a very high temperature because you're not relying on the sugar to s you're only relying on the high solids to help set the pectin. And it's the pectin that's doing the setting, right?
So it's hard to test uh from a temperature standpoint, usually. So uh that's one reason why people can say that recipes can't double, but you can kind of get a feeling, and I always just if you boil longer, like unless you boil a long time, in which case you're gonna hydrolyze the pectin because of the extra acid that's in there, uh, you know, boil like having it simmer for a little bit longer to evaporate off more water is not gonna really hurt you. It's probably gonna give you a little bit of a harder set, the same way that if you're doing like a cranberry sauce and you and you don't, you know, boil it long enough, you don't get rid of some of that water, then uh you know, you get a looser set on your cranberry than if you evaporate more water off, or use a wider pan, is another thing. Now the second thing is more of a, and by the way, let's be honest, like jams mold, it's gonna be mold. It's not gonna be something that kills you.
It's gonna be that you didn't pasteurize and get rid of all of the mold. So there's no reason not to, as far as I can tell, and please someone in the chat room chime chime in here if I'm wrong, but there's no reason not to double treble quin quingip a lot, whatever you're gonna do to it, uh a recipe, uh, as long as the individual containers in which you can are uh all the same size, they should react the same way as long as the vessel you're canning in, so if you have a pressure canner, can uh actually bring all of that product up to the right um temperature, right? So as long as you as long as your stove top has enough thermal output to get a larger canner up to canning temperatures, right? Then everything should be uh okay-dokey, as long as the size of the cans themselves. Now, if all of a sudden you're gonna be like, well, I have a jar the size of a number 10 can, well then you know, that's gonna take a long time to heat up in the middle, and that's not that's not so so good.
Um but you're dealing with what I like to call a non-deadly product, right? Strawberry with sugar and and and lemon juice is not going to be deadly. It at worst will you know, you won't kill all the yeast and you'll get some sort of nasty, yeasty, moldy thing in it. Um but uh, you know, your chances of death are very low. Well, because of that.
I mean, our chances are 100%, right? But like you know what I mean, but uh in terms of that, I think you're okay. So it should be more of a textural thing then because you're just not getting the evaporation in the larger quantity. That's my guess. What do you think, Paul?
Yeah, I agree. I'd say it's not just texture, but the more water you cook off, the better your preserving will be if you have Yeah, I mean, sometimes though, like preserves can be too hard. I mean, like, you know, it depends on the kind of level of of uh of pectin. And then also the other problem is like sometimes you don't want I mean a lot also like the tech like the more the strawberry breaks down, but you need the strawberry to break down or you won't release the pectin. I mean, there's no wind there, right?
I mean it's like you just don't want to can uh super unreduced jam because it will not keep it a lot of water out there. And nobody, yeah, nobody wants also nobody wants a really watery jam. And Stasi, what happens when someone hands you a jam and it's so watery that it like rolls off the side of your toast? It's the worst, right? You're like, well, who's this person?
Why'd they make the jam? Why didn't they just go buy smokers? Smuckers doesn't run off my toast. Is that what you say yourself? But if you're gonna make a small batch, you can make a batch and see how your strawberries work.
Because you could always add pectin if you need to. You know? Um you can even cheat. You can even cheat. Even though you're not supposed to reset, you can always just dump more pet, reboil it and do it, but I mean, not not ideal, or add more sugar.
Sure. Um is this helping or no? I think so, yeah. It's the best explanation I've gotten so far. So and it gives me a good place to start.
All right, cool. Hey, uh Dave, is anyone in the chat room chiming in on uh on jams and doubling? Let me check and get back to you. All right, we'll check and get back. At the top of the call, Dave, you said there are three times when you can't scale.
Will you get a little bit of a little bit of a third one? Well, the third one is that there might actually be some reaction, right? So, like if you you know, if you're like uh trebling the amount of uh baking soda in a in a Maillard reaction thing, it might not scale right because you know you you're probably added a little more than you needed that first time around, but doing that three times in a row might not scale out right. You might not break down the extra, there might be more residual. I mean, I don't know.
I'm just there might there is there's a possibility. I haven't run into a lot of things that don't scale, but the another thing that's interesting, like in cocktail batching, um the uh the other problem is is that when you're scaling, you're usually saving a product longer than you would otherwise. And so when that happens, uh things can change, and so sometimes people think it's the scaling that went wrong. Well, no, it's the whole time that went wrong. You know what I mean?
So there's there's uh whenever you're messing with a recipe, it's just you have to analyze, well, what is different now from when the first time that person made this recipe, right? So is it is it the fact that you're using different equipment when you scale it up? Probably. Is it that you're using it in a different way, i.e. for a different length of time, maybe.
Uh, you know, and those are the main things. It's like what pro what actual process variables are changing when I'm scaling it up or down. Typically, most molecules don't know how large their environment is beyond a very small scale. And so uh you know, they can't know uh what's going on. Um yeah Chad Room's also saying scaling up without scaling the pan size will change the water loss.
Yeah. And I think that's pretty clearly what's going on. But I don't know why recipe people aren't clear on that. See this is the problem. If you're ever in a position where you're gonna write a recipe right your editors will will will beg you to make it as simple and stupid as possible and I think in a way that they're right there's a whole bunch of people out there in Amazon review land who don't want any actual information.
But then I feel like that's not us, right? The people that are listening to this show or or or or me, like we would just prefer to be told quickly, right, like this is why this is like this. Like you could do it in the introduction to the book. You can do it uh you know short thing at each individual recipe um you know C section on scaling recipes, right? Just a little friends, C section on scaling recipes.
But no one ever does this. And so then they're like they they they you know they propagate these um they propagate these weird like myths and and especially people who are technically minded if someone says something specifically like you may not double this recipe right it's more like, well, why? You know what I mean? And then if they don't write the the the you know the section to go with it, this is why, you know. And then you put a big thing at the top of it that says you make if you're not gonna ever think about recipes, ignore this section.
Yes. But if you are not an enemy of quality, read this section. You know what I mean? Nastassi and I think Yep, go ahead. I'm sorry, I guess the last part of the question for me then would be is there any particular instance you can think of where it would be dangerous to try and and and double?
Like I understand what you're saying about the evaporation and and surface area and whatnot, but is there anything I should be looking for particular types of ingredients or something where I'm actually creating a dangerous situation by kind of doubling or something beyond what the recipe calls for? Well, the only time you're gonna get dangerous situations, I'll give you an example. Like let's say you were to uh take a uh cube of mushrooms that is like five feet on a side and pack it solid, and then all you're going to do is uh pasteurize those mushrooms. So you're not gonna kill the botulism in it, you're not gonna wipe out the spores. So you uh heat that very you know slowly over time, and it's a five foot block, it's gonna take a long time for those mushrooms in the center to get up.
You have a very good chance of uh developing uh some uh botulism toxin on the inside of that five foot block of mushrooms that you're cooking uh at a low temperature, uh, because you've made the recipe too big and you can't heat it adequately, and the recipe, if if the recipe then said, okay, well, I'm gonna take those mushrooms up to uh, you know, boiling point and hold them there for a day, you would actually wipe out the botulism toxin, so that wouldn't be a problem. You still wouldn't wipe out the spores necessarily, right? But it would probably be safe to eat at that point. But just taking it, whereas taking mushrooms in a thin pack, bringing them up to pasteurization temperature or whatever you want and dropping them down is 100% safe in that situation, as long as you're not trying to hold them that you you know, as long as you realize you haven't wiped out the botulism, you like you know, it they're safe to eat at that point, right? Not to keep forever.
So, you know, that's a situation, or like for instance, when people cook uh too many uh pieces of meat together in a bath and they get bag bloat because they have local bacteria growth because the product doesn't heat up fast enough because they've overloaded their equipment, right? That's where the thing, that's where it usually starts getting unsafe. It starts getting unsafe when there's equipment overload um uh and so that you're not adequately heating in the times or with the profiles that the recipe uh, you know, the recipe asks for. Most of the time, that's that is also still just a quality issue, but sometimes that can be um a safety issue. I'll give you another one.
Let's say you're using um, you know, a curing salt or or something like this. If you scale up your recipe to the point where you can no longer efficiently coat all the pieces of meat with your uh with your salt if you're doing a dry uh salting, well now you've got a problem. You know what I mean? Or if you increase uh, or let's say you're making uh a sausage and you have to do your primary bind, but all of a sudden, you know, you've been making recipes in a kitchen aid, uh, you know, uh, and now you have to scale it up and you're doing it in trash bac uh trash cans, you know, like 50 gallon trash cans, and you no longer can move the the uh the product around it. Well, now you might get big chunks of meat at the bottom of that thing that ha don't have adequate salt, don't have adequate whatever.
So it's like when I'm scaling up, usually I'm asking myself, am I introducing a problem based on the and scaling down too goes the same way? Like there's some minimum amount of water you can evaluate. So like scaling down is actually to me the hardest. Like especially with sauces, trying to make a very small amount of something is almost impossible because you know you heat up your your pan, and by the time you get around to adding the next ingredient, the other thing has turned to like caramel burnt caramel at the bottom of your pan. So it's like to me, scaling down is a is a bigger problem, but you're always thinking about um how the shift is changing what's going on with the product.
And I think if you as long as you're thinking that way, you'll be okay. Well, thank you very much for your time. All right, thank you. Um do you want to do the announcement or some questions? Announcement, because announcement.
Okay. So uh so here it is. So uh Nastasi and I uh are planning on uh hopefully on Black Friday, because we just can't stand not ruining Thanksgiving for ourselves, right? It's just like we can't stand it. Like anytime that Nastasi and I have what might be a decent Thanksgiving, we're like, you know what?
Uh let's ruin that. You know what I mean? One way or the other. Like, you know, maybe Nastassi will have a fight with her family, or maybe like she'll you'll serve Thanksgiving at 7 p.m. Yeah.
Which, by the way, is fine. And then like the, you know, it's like, you know, whatever, I'm gonna get into this later. So the uh so here's the thing. So uh we are planning on, so in other words, get ready for uh a uh Booker and Dax Centerfuge pre-sale to happen uh on uh the Black Friday. Now, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the reason why is that we uh we are almost uh done approving uh the tooling. So uh we we need to pay for the tooling. It turns out that you need money to pay for the tooling and a bunch of other things. But we are going to we have the prototype that is uh fundamentally a production a production prototype, pre-production prototype from the factory. So we're gonna show you a video of that.
It does um 500 milliliters uh at a time. It's a little bit bigger than a Cuisinart food processor. Uh it also has the ability to do uh continuous um centrifugation. So we'll have a video out about that. And I have tested all of the relevant uh all the some of the relevant recipes, so I can talk about that um a little bit uh in advance.
But for chefs, it's gonna be really great for herb oils, it's fantastic for herbal oils, it can do it in large quantities. For uh bar, obviously, you have uh you know all kinds of citrus juices like strawberry juice, um, it can do Hustinos. Um it's uh I mean it's it's it's gonna be a lot cheaper. We're we're the retail price we think, we think, we think, don't hold us to this. We think the retail price is gonna be 799.99.
But then we want the pre-sale price, don't hold us to it. $699.99. Yeah, so and what we're gonna do is is we're gonna have a um because because we're we're gonna do a pre-sale, probably not a Kickstarter. I won't want to say who we're gonna partner with, but you know who they are and you probably like them. Uh but the uh because Nastasia and I are going to talk to them, in fact, like later this week to iron it all out.
So hopefully more news next week. But the um what we're gonna do is is is that unless we have a certain amount of interest, we're just not gonna do it at all. So we're doing we're basically saying you you sign up for the pre-sale if we get our go number um you know of sales of pre-sales and we need to sell quite a few like I forget what it is for our go number but it's not a small number because it's expensive really expensive to make one of these things um then uh then you're charged your pre-sale and then we hope to deliver uh sometime in like June next year in that in that area but more details to come as the Black Friday approaches and good news it will work in Europe with a transformer you like that so it it you it will work on 50 or 60 cycles but it is a 120 machine but all you need is the transformer and we'll figure out which one you need to buy so I don't want to hear it's not like the Sears all where it's a free and international nightmare it's gonna be much easier to work with. Is there anything else I should mention about that stuff? No that would be did you say that it's only gonna run at that price for a certain amount of time yeah until we make the number we need to go and then you'll never be able to get it at that discount price again.
Never again no and also to revive something else on the on the uh booker index oh it's not more of a cooking issue stitches Nastasia started work again on the enemy of quality shirts yes look for them at the end of the month now you have uh first of the month going through my head you know that song yeah that's all right Paul sing it I will not sing first of the month I cannot get a is it a Broadway it is no it's uh no. It's the first of the month. Uh okay, let's get some questions. Uh do you want to take another call or yes, call her, call her. Caller, you're on the air.
Hey y'all. How you doing? Um here's my question. I'm doing great. Thank you.
How are you guys doing? All right. Uh after Thanksgiving, I've got to do some huge format cooking. And uh I would prefer not to have to buy a gigantic pot. And by gigantic I mean like four or five feet across.
Ooh. Um I'm wondering if I was to just buy three six gauge sheet of steel from metal shop, is there anything I have to do to it before I could let food going contact with it for cooking? And but the same question kind of goes for like rebar and stuff like that. Is there anything I could do to it? Well possible even.
What why does the rebar need to touch the food? Well, I I asked that partly because I don't really have a menu in place yet. I was gonna kind of figure out what my cooking tools are gonna be first and then build a menu around that. So really it's like either or is one better is one easier to prep for food. Got it.
Well, you can get used uh food grade um barrels, right? And the problem is most of them are coated with uh with paints. You can burn them off. I don't know of cheap source of like you might be easier just to get like a giant cheap used pot somewhere. But the answer is is that cold roll steel is fine.
You have to rub it, scrub it, and then um you're gonna have to probably season it or it'll or it'll uh rust out. You can season it with uh uh if you get spray grease like like Pam and a weed torch, then you can um you can season uh anything you want. It just takes time to season the stuff out. Rebar, I haven't studied rebar in a long time. Rebar is often coated with stuff, um you know, to have it bond better with the concrete.
So you're definitely not gonna want to use the green rebar. Uh, but I don't I don't know whether or not regular rebar, uh by the way, for those of you that rebar is the is that is the um this the steel pieces that are meant to reinforce concrete and they have that weird kind of pattern on it. And rebar has the this one advantage. It is so cheap. Rebar is so cheap.
Uh and you can weld to rebar, but I just don't know whether anything's in it um, you know, that is gonna cause you problem. Cold roll steel, fine. Um so really quickly, so you think if I bought a food grade like 50 gallon drum barrel that I could have somebody just cut that thing in half and use it like a pot? Oh yes. Yes.
I mean uh where would I get one of those in New York City? I mean, I'd have to look like there they're these are expensive, but people sell them stainless, but you can get them used. Like I don't know I've never I haven't bought like I used to I mean back when I was younger, I used to just get ones and just burn them out. But like that was it's disgusting. Have you ever burnt out a fifty fifty-five gallon drum before?
No. It's disgusting. It's like really bad. And like the paint fumes were just going and going and going. So we like we were doing grills.
We were doing the old 55 gallon drum grills, and so we just uh torch cut in half, and that was a paint, that was a paint nightmare to begin with, just burning the paint off when it was torch cutting, because we were we didn't have a plasma. We were using old school like oxyacetling. No one had plasmas back then. And uh I mean some of them did, I didn't. And then we just put them up on uh on cinder blocks and just filled them full of stuff and just burnt them for hours and hours and hours.
Nasty, nasty. And we were in our grates for it, we were just using like uh that expanded mesh stuff. Actually, stuff works okay. Uh I have no regrets on that. But um, like that's the kind of place if you're gonna do something like that that you put rebar underneath it to like support the grate, and that's where you want to worry about um worry about that.
But uh, I don't I'm pretty sure that those drums will still hold water once they're cut open. Um you want to do it the long way? I mean, that's what I would do if I got one just because it would hold, give me a little bit more oxygen. I don't know how the top seals work on mean the there's some that that have removable tops on them, and those things have elastomer seals, so I would stay away from those, but the old the like those ones that are actually just crimped shut, those things should work. And at the very least, if if you're boiling, you could just put some uh silicone sealing on the inside of that thing, and they'll stay they'll stay good to go, especially if you don't need to use it forever.
You know what I mean? Yeah, um and in fact, I want to say that I saw someone doing nictemalization and cutting half 55 gallon drums. I think I saw someone doing like like large-scale nixamol, underfired horizontal, half-cut 55-gallon drums. Gotcha. Yeah, and you know what you know what the good thing about boiling in a in a in in that shape is a lot like a wok, uh, you get uh reduced surface area as it goes down.
So b because you get reduced surface area as it goes down, it's easier to kind of control kind of what's going on. So if you're if you're flat all the way down, then uh you know, once you get low, you can go from like I'm okay to I'm hosed, really quickly because it doesn't kind of taper down. Uh and also for expansion, uh you know, you have more expansion space if you're boiling in something that uh is has sloped uh sides because the higher up you go the more volume you get per unit height, and so it kind of is a help on uh it helps for self-boilover problems. And the insides of those things are relatively easy to clean out. The the the line of gunk around the rims is a little can be a little bit tricky to clean out, but the actual slope part of it is relatively uh easy to um clean out.
But you're gonna want to weld probably something like uh like angle or something on the cut edges for two reasons. One to provide stiffness to something that's no longer supported around itself, and two, so no one cuts themselves on the on the cut edges. Do you have a plasma cutter? Gotcha. So just really quickly, like I have no idea where to start.
Where would I find one of those? I mean, am I gonna find it like at Jetro or like restaurant depot, or am I gonna find it at a pickle shop? I mean I've gone on well, pickle shops tend to use uh um HDP or uh uh you know um I think they use those plastic ones, which aren't gonna be good for you. Um I once looked on Craigslist for this time, and like on Craigslist, people have this problem where they have like boatloads of these suckers like sitting around or eBay uh or one of the before I go to McMaster and pay full price. There's tons of people around who and if food was shipped in it, you know it's food grade.
You know what I mean? It's like you don't want to buy one that someone was shipping hazardous waste in. Yeah, you know. Um yeah, but I would check, check Craig's list. I I looked on there once because I thought the museum was gonna need a bunch of these things.
We didn't end up buying them, but um and did anyone in the chat room have any suggestions? I mean, New York is such a pain in the butt to do anything in. I mean, I love it here, but it's a pain in the butt to do physically do or make anything. Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway. Thank you very much. All right, good luck. Let us know whether you found anything. All right, have a good one.
All right. Um let me see. We should get to the ones we had uh before, right? Jeremy wrote in, hey cooking issues, thanks for all your work uh researching and teaching methods to make food. Uh delicious food.
I just I took out the delicious because, you know, if you haven't had my food, how do you know whether it's delicious or not? And by the way, speaking of delicious, next week I'm teaching a class uh at the International Colony Center on cocktails. Your time is running out to sign up. Running out. Uh we're doing liquid intelligence.
It should be fun. Uh I managed to stop into your last night at Booker and Dax and a fabulous plate of country hams. Had to leave early, so I hear we missed the after party. Oh my god, now I have that song going through my head. Reignation, best song ever.
Best song ever. You even like that song, Anastasia. She said yes. She grudgingly said yes. I do like that song.
Looking forward to hearing about your next incarnation when it's ready. We didn't talk about this, did we last week? Yeah, you did. I did? Mm-hmm.
Already talked about measuring alcohol? Yeah, you did. Oh, well, so I don't need to get into it, Jeremy. I answered your question. Jeremy, if I didn't answer your question, then uh get back to me.
If Nastasia is just being like, I can't stand listening to Dave anymore, so you know, I don't you know want to hear it. Uh hey, uh Dave and Cooking Issues Team. This is Quinn from LA. Uh I heard you briefly talking about triple ex uh extraction chicken stock in one of your back episodes, and I'm intrigued uh enough to try to want to make my own using a coon recon pressure cooker. I've made pressure cooker chicken stock many times, but only extracting flavor and collagen from the bones once.
With double or triple extraction, do you pressure cook with the chicken bones slash carcasses? Then strain the stock, then add a fresh batch of chicken bones, mirapoi, and other aromatics to the fresh stock, then pressure cook again. If you could please elaborate more on the procedure, it'll be greatly appreciated. I can't seem to find recipes online. Thanks for your help, Quinn.
Yes, that's how you do it. So here's what you do. You you well, if you're making, if you're browning it, which I almost always do, I don't really make white chicken stock very often. You make white chicken stock, Paul? Almost always brown.
Almost always brown. Me, that's me. So you don't, you yeah, you put it in, you smash as many bones in, and you just fill up to cover the bones. So you're trying you're trying to make the richest stock possible, so you're you don't want to add too much water. The classic mistake everyone makes with stock is they try to make too much of it and they add too much water and then they end up reducing it down, which is I think not what you want to do.
So you you pack as much in there uh with some miracroid, more onions, obviously, although it's going to increase the sweetness. The problem with pressure cooked stocks is that uh onion flavor drops off, and then to counteract that, you increase the onion amount, but what that really is doing is increasing the sweetness. So you have to be careful on that. Don't triple mirapoix, right? You're mainly looking to meet it up.
So what I would do is it sounds like a scaling problem, Dave. Uh well, this is a repetition problem, right? Because every time, like what you're trying to, you're not trying to add that much more veg, right? So after the first extraction of veg in the pressure cooker, and then we're talking short stocks, so not like like you're trying to do like very fresh tasting stocks, so you're not doing like a 45 minute extraction, you're doing shorter extractions on the bones. So maybe you're not pulling everything out, but everything tastes like really good and nice.
So you're doing like 25 minutes, like 20, 25 minutes, second ring, let it come down uh naturally, otherwise you don't want to emulsify the fats in, so don't do the fast release on it, right? And then you strain it out, fresh carcass, uh, maybe not Mirapoix, hit it again, then taste it to see whether you or not you want to add any more fresh veg to it, and then you can like you know tune the stuff out there, maybe throw in a little pepper at the lat at the last one, bring it up, and then you'll have like a very, very extracted, uh, like very like rich uh stock, and you can do it all in like an hour and a half. And it tastes good. Is it efficient? No.
But usually what happens is I end up not I'm not cooking at a restaurant, I don't need that much stock in my house, and I tend to accumulate a lot more chicken carcasses than I have need for sacks or soups. And so a lot of times I'll just do like a double or a triple, and I'll get a much more flavorful, uh, I think, in my opinion, flavorful, like fresh, bright stock. Uh because I just don't need that much of it. Does that make sense? Yep.
All right, let me see. Oh no, I stopped Dropbox. Do we have more time for more or are we hosting? Uh Nastasia says we're done, but but but Dave says that we we can go. All right.
Greetings from the UK. Uh first things first, thanks for your great show. Uh wife bought me a copy of Liquid Intelligence, uh, and uh he enjoys it, which is good. But since we don't have time, I won't read the rest of it, but I'll answer the uh oh, by the way. I answered a tweeted question regarding dried peaches and Houstino yield, so you know, dried peaches lower Houstino yield quite a bit.
So he tried pre-blending the dried peaches with 75% of their weight in water, and the yield went up dramatically, so which is good. Good to know that worked. So um, so here's the question. Uh he he's opening a new uh he or she, he or she, he or she, Nick. Uh he's opening a new bar, uh, and he says we're uh we're doing a new bar, we're considering adopting a pre-diluted, pre-chilled batching approach for the stirred drinks on the menu.
These are likely to be about 60% of the menu. The eight is to speed up service and ensure consistency. I like both of those things. The restaurant is located in a small rural town where the finding and keeping of skilled and capable staff is likely to be a permanent challenge. Batching, therefore, seems to make a lot of sense as this will also uh simple uh make it more simple to uh do staff training, etc.
The restaurant bar will have uh a total of uh 50 seats and one to two bartenders. The issue we have is that suitable refrigeration kit is expensive, so like the Randell that we use at the bar. Yeah. Conventional fridges don't appear to be cold enough, and conventional freezer freezers are too cold. So my question is this it would appear that I can use uh like a PID uh refrigerator, like a brew controller, to adopt uh a set point of let's say minus four to minus six Celsius with a conventional freezer whose highest temp would uh normally be about negative fifteen Celsius.
The unit has a default three-minute setting for compressor delay protection. Do you have any experience with these type of plug and play controllers? And is there anything we need to be aware of? Do you think they'll have an impact on the compressor lifespan that makes the whole batching approach a nightmare waiting to happen? So it has a protection.
So the problem with compressors in general is you don't want to do what's called short cycling, where you turn them off and turn them right back on right away because the compressor has to like push against uh it's just a nightmare. It's just like really shortens the lifespan, which is why they have a three-minute cycle on it. Um I think three minutes might be a little extreme for for for uh kick in. You could probably deal with a couple minutes more. I think the the if you're using a conventional chest freezer, uh the nice thing about a conventional chest freezer is when you open it, the cold air tends to stay in it.
Uh, and so I think that should work fine. Uh and and those conventional home freezers have the advantage that they're super cheap. So, like if one dies on you, you can just go buy another one, and your PID stuff should be almost plug-and-play to get to go in. So, I think you shouldn't have a problem there. Uh, what do you think, Paul?
Sounds correct. What is the Randell cost? I don't know. The problem with the Randell is just we we never got it uh what's the word? Uh serviced properly, so the gasket went bad.
What's nice about the Randell is like it the ones that we had weren't designed to drop the FX freezers, they're very accurate, they go up and down, but they're they're not designed to drop the temperature or something, they're maintained to to they're designed to kind of maintain it. They're in effect are big drawer igloo coolers. So you would open them and the temperature would stay very constant because the cold air would move in and out with the drawer and it's very well insulated, so you get very minimal temperature drops, uh, which is good. So the more insulated uh your freezer is, which a lot of home chest freezers are very well insulated because they're meant for like you know, hunters and whatnot who don't want to have a lot of energy input into it, and so they're fairly well insulated. Um so they should work.
You know what I mean? I think it should work. But uh the problem with uh reach in chests is that it's hard to get a first in, first out system because the stuff lower is hard to is hard to get to, so you have a stock rotation issue, but whatever. You can move right to left. Up, down, right, left.
You it's no, it's hard to literally put stuff into one of those things and to have like five bottles tall. You know what I mean? Lower in a rack full of your bottles. Yeah, and then go rack by rack, slide up, yeah. Yeah, there's ways around everything, but it takes a little work.
Uh, an alternative or for possible use of conjunction to reduce the opening of the freezer. What are your thoughts on the insert uh inserted uh insect refrigerated bottle well? So it's basically a bottle well that's refrigerated. Um the one that you showed me doesn't really go that low enough. I am looking into a similar problem, but I'm going to definitely move to a glycol, a glycol-based uh uh refrigerant system that allows me to keep bottles exactly where I want them.
So uh the wave of the future in terms of this, and something I'm working on, like I say, right now, is refrigerated glycol. Then you have to like obviously wipe the glycol off the outside. That's what those if you go into a wine store and they have those little vortex chillers, that's all that stuff is, is uh refrigerated. I'm pretty sure that's all it is, refrigerated glycol. I'm not using salt, right?
You ever looked into those things, Paul? I assumed it was water. Water? How's water can't well you think they're actually going at that high of a temperature? For wine?
I don't know. Well, I'm gonna do glycol. You know, propylene, food grain. Yes, not athletic. I guess I could do salt, but salt's so corrosive.
And then, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, all right. So then uh next week we will get to uh we had some questions, uh maybe we don't. We haven't we talked about melon pan last week too. No.
Melon pan was the one I missed? Yeah. On butter? Right. Son of a gun.
All right, next time. If I haven't talked about the melon pan uh from Portugal, give me a call back and we'll uh talk about it next week. Go vote, cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you.
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