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. You're also cooking issues coming to you alive on the Heritage Radio Network from a Burns P3 in Bushwick, Brooklyn! Every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245, 1 o'clock, you know, Tuesdays, you know how it works. Listen, very special day here in the studio, joined with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez.
As usual, we got Dave in the booth. Yo. Yeah, I like that. Cut your cut your applause off like just a boom, applause gone. We have.
Yeah, yeah, there you go. There you go, Stasy. Uh we have uh formerly from Popular Science now, uh now uh what Paul Adams, what do you what do you what do you what do you what do you call yourself now? Paul Adams. Yeah, just just plain Paul Adams.
That'll do. Master of drones, master of uh you but you like how much of your mental life is devoted to each component of things you're interested in? You're interested in 100% of everything. Yes. So it's like 100% drones, 100% food, 100% cocktails.
Yeah. Science. High functioning science. Radio, 100%. All of it.
All of it. I like that. This is uh it's a good good technique. So it's a very special day. Call in your questions uh to a 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. Should we just start with the Okay, okay, folks? The uh by the way, happy Thanksgiving. This is the Thanksgiving episode of uh of the cooking issues. Uh so if you have any Thanksgiving questions, please uh call them in.
We were going to have today uh Mark Ladner from Delposto. Uh uh talk about his new book, but I think we're gonna do that right after the break, right? Yep. So that you know, we're gonna push, although it would have been nice because then people could on Black Friday go out and purchase his book. I know.
Well, you maybe purchase purchase the book and then we'll come and we'll talk about it. He'll come in uh next week. Is he already scheduled? Mm-hmm. All right.
Um so uh for those of you that are listeners to the show, uh we at Booker and Dax have been working for it seems like forever. Yeah. Forever. On um centerfuge, building a centerfuge specifically for the kitchen and bar. Uh and that's actually why Paul's here.
Paul's helping us out with what's about to happen. Uh we are at the point in production where uh we are actually getting the tooling made for the actual uh item, and so we are going to put it on pre-sale on Black Friday. So yay, pre-sale. So um Nest Nastasia, do you know uh like when we're gonna put the video? Are we gonna put the video up before the pre-sale?
So that people can watch the video or no? I don't know. You know, we haven't decided yet. This is the first you've asked me. Yes, I know.
This is why they call it live radio. What do you think? Oh my god. Well, maybe people on the chat room can weigh in. We have a we have obviously they'd want to see the video.
Yeah, the real problem, the real problem with the video is I know here's the reason I don't want to do it, right? There's a first of all, here's one thing. Our videographer had a family emergency. So uh, you know, we had to shoot it ourselves, and uh actually I'm I'm late today for a decent reason. I was actually editing the thing.
So listen, I am not a video editor. So if you're like blah, blah, blah, you I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it. Would you rather bias interviews made by a professional video editor? Or by a professional center view editor?
That's a good point. It seems like you're trying to get an award for this video. I'm not trying to get an award stuff. Like, I don't want to hear the hate from people of why'd you do this? Why'd you do that?
Why is it? I got it from my wife. Yeah, from my wife. Even from my own wife. She's like, why'd you do this?
I was like, because I didn't have the other shot to put in. But you didn't go to school for video editing. I had to go to school for fine arts, but not for video editing. That's true. Anyway, point being I don't want to hear if you have any complaints about the way the video is shot, I simply don't want to hear them.
Like keep them to yourself. Anyway. Shoot your own promotional video. Yeah, yeah, right. Or you know what?
Look, uh you should have a contest. Make a promotional video. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. Uh you know what though?
I take I take it all back. As long as you buy the centrifuge, say whatever you like. As long as you buy it. Uh yeah. Um, so anyway, so the point is uh we uh made the video uh with the proto.
The name of the centrifuge is Spinzall. The spinzall. Spinzall. Spins all. The culinary centrifuge.
And I already got someone on Twitter when I hashtag it, someone's asking me whether it only spins some things. No, spins everything. Won't necessarily clarify everything, won't clarify a rock, but you can spin a rock as long as you have enough liquid in it to balance out. So I think I've talked about it before, uh, but it's it's gonna go on pre-sale on modernistpantry.com slash spinzall. Uh that the link is up now, but it's just a splash page.
It's gonna go uh that's not the actual link. What's not the actual link? What you just said. What is it? It's blog.modernistpantry.com slash spinzall.
Well right now. But it's gonna be it's gonna be modernist pantry.com. I was gonna say because the video the video also says that. So anyway, back to what I was saying. The reason I don't necessarily want to put up the video live is because it says order, pre-order your spin's all now.
Only it's not now. It's in three days. Right. And we're gonna hear about it. If I put it up, we'll hear about it.
Anyway, should I even talk about it? Should I talk about it or should I just say watch the video? Talk about it. Talk about it. Okay.
What is the spinzall, Dave? How does it work? Well, Paul, that's an excellent question. Uh so uh basically in a nutshell, it's this. I'll give you the pitch.
So the centrifuge is if you ask anyone, if you ask, and we didn't have time to go out and get their uh what's it called, their um, you know, uh testimonials, but we'll we'll get them at some later point. I so Chris Young, uh back when he was I think he wrote that section of modernist uh cuisine, but um, you know, the m all the modernist cuisine crew, uh, I believe this. Um I think Wiley believes it, I think uh Tony Calliaro believes it. I think you know a lot of people believe that the one piece of uh modern gear that is kind of beyond a lot of people from a price standpoint, it isn't the roto vap because that one's not as necessary to your day-to-day work in uh in a kitchen. Um it's the centrifuge.
Now, especially for bar work, centrifuge, you need it. You know what I mean? It's you don't need it, but if you're gonna do the kind of stuff that I like to do, you need it. If you're gonna make your own orjaws, it's extremely useful. If you're going to um you know do carbonation, you need to clarify things.
If you want to do uh Houstinos, just a wide variety of things. Uh for cooks, it makes like fantastic herb oil, you got the no-churn butter. There's just a bunch of like good techniques that it's really, really good for, but it's the one piece of equipment that's really kind of been beyond um most people's capabilities, both home and pro. So uh for professionals, the problem is that the centrifuge is extremely large. So it's you know, it's the size of uh it's basically like takes up the same room that an oven would take up uh in a kitchen, but you also need to be able to get to it, right?
It also needs balancing because they have big buckets, super heavy, it costs like eight to ten thousand dollars. But those are nice because they do like they do like three liters at a time, really like more like two because you don't fill the buckets up all the way, but like they're called like three-liter centrifuges. Um but anyway, so you're looking at eight to ten thousand dollars, ten thousand if you need the refrigerator, and most of you do because those centrifuges tend to heat products up quite a bit. Um on the home side, I mean that's just ridiculous. Who's got a house?
I mean, I guess if you live way out in the burbs and your kitchens in your garage, you could have the space to have a centrifuge there, but you just don't have the space. And also it's very hard to justify at home spending eight to ten thousand dollars. But uh the alternative for a centrifuge to do all these things has basically been the two hundred dollar, uh we'll call them the champion, or you know, Paul, you had what's yours called? It's clinoceal. Clinoceal, which is designed for the veterinary blood market, I believe.
Oh, really? Yeah. Really? Veterinary blood market? Mm-hmm.
Huh. Hmm. So the uh but clino seal is a terrible name. It sounds like seal the musician. No?
Or like seal the animal? Like, why would you see oh, seal because it's for blood, so it's sealed so it doesn't spray like dog blood in your eyes. It sounds like some form of birth control. Ooh, that's rough. It's going to go into a weird place, Dave.
No, actually, it's named for a sealed musician who invented it. Oh, okay. Well, then I like it a lot, and I want to buy one even though I have no use for it. But these small units, the problem is they use these tiny vials that are impossible to clean out. You're really only making like uh all said and done, like like uh, you know, eighty milliliters at a time or 100 milliliters at a time.
Yeah, it's hypothetically. It's it's horrible. So, anyway, so the idea is is how do you get uh something that can make a reasonable quantity in a small package and you move to what's called an open bucket. So we built a 500 milliliter rotor. The rotor holds 500 milliliters at a time, but a real 500 milliliters, not like, oh, the capacity is 500 milliliters, but it really holds 300, it holds 500 milliliters of product.
Um and it spins that much, and it's huge and open, so it's really easy to get the stuff out of. It's got fins, it balances kind of like a dishwasher. So the way a dishwasher balance uh sorry, washing machine uh balances is it uses uh a liquid ring balance. So, as luck would have it, or as I say as physics would have it, when something spins, uh, if there's a liquid in it, that liquid will tend to uh move such that it counteracts imbalance that's inside the rotor, it tends to self-balance. The trick with it is, and I can say every I mean this is patents on this are go back decades and decades and decades and decades because washing machines have been a problem for a long time.
Um and spinning ring balances have been around since since forever. But uh one of the problems is so you need to keep the liquid from sloshing so that it can actually balance properly. One way to do it is to increase the viscosity of the liquid. I can't do that because I don't know what you're gonna spin. So we have fins inside the bucket that uh keep the the entire ring of stuff uh rotating as a torus, but then we also have to allow movement in between.
So part of the art is figuring out the shape of the fins on the inside uh to get it to work right. But also, nice thing, you take the fins out and you have access to the whole uh inside of the bucket. The other trick is is that I want you to be able to do more than 500 milliliters at a time. So we have what's called uh tube feeder that fits into the rotor that allows you to add product into the centrifuge as it's spinning and then it it pours out. Um so that's basically that's how how it works.
Now there's some some facts about it that are kind of cool. Uh for those of you that haven't used a lot of centrifuges before, uh spinning buckets is what we all use because you need the capacity, but fixed angle rotor, which is the kind of the crappy clinic seal model, actually clarify a lot faster and a lot better uh at a given G force than the uh than the swinging bucket ones do. And ours acts like a s like a fixed angle rotor, but is like is like a big bucket. So the funny thing is is that we can actually clarify things most of the time faster than the big centrifuges can, uh even though we're actually running at half the G forces and like half the noise level and like infinitely more safety than the other one is. And the whole thing fits uh into something um slightly larger than a food processor that's it's so easy to lift, in fact, that I have it in my backpack.
Oh, you'll like this Nastasia, you'll enjoy this. This is Nastasia's favorite kind of story. So, right after this, we're going to uh food and wine, right? Anyway, so I'm running up the the subway stairs to get here. Uh and you know how you sometimes you just don't lift your foot high enough and you kick the stair?
Yeah. So I don't lift my foot high enough, I kick the stair, and I start going down. Now, I have the centrifuge, the the spinz all on my back. And so I say, okay, as I'm going down, I'm like, I could try to catch myself. But if I try to catch myself, there's a possibility that I will spin and smack my backpack into spin.
Like you know when you catch yourself, if you only catch yourself a little bit but you continue to rotate, you'll spin over and you'll smack in on the other side. So I just went straight down on my knees, right on the stairs. Boom! Like straight like boom. I was like, ah, you know what I mean?
And then got up and went, but the centrifuge is fine. Centrifuge doesn't care. Well done, Dave. Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, oh, some more interesting facts about the spinzall is that it will run, it runs on either. Now, for those of you that don't know, the United States power supplies that we use here are 120 volts. Well, whatever. They're like 105 to 125, depending on where you are. But the key thing here is that they are uh 60 cycles per second.
60 cycles. That's the that's the frequency of the power uh mains. Now, in Europe, right, mo mo Europe, mo almo all of Europe actually, runs at 50 cycles per second, 220 to 240 or something, somewhere in there. Now, uh it's not really the voltage. The voltage is easy.
You just put a transformer on it and you can change the voltage. The real problem with equipment is changing the number of uh the frequency of the power because it changes the speed at which motors operate. Um the good news in the spinzall is that it doesn't care what frequency you put in. So you will need a transformer to use it in Europe, or um, or actually, you won't need a it's interestingly you won't need a transformer in Japan. Japan's the weird one, it runs at 120 volts 50 cycles, which is crazy.
That is weird. It's the only place in the world, I think, that it uses our voltage, but like a European standard for the frequency. It's crazy. I think someone will correct me on this. But anyway, so um, yeah, so it'll run anywhere in the world with a transformer and an adapter.
And the reason is that um in order the the centrifuge, most motors, most AC motors, alternating current motors, uh are locked to some fixed number, uh or not locked, but they run based on that their their RPM is based on uh some multiple of the line frequency. So when you're running uh a motor, an AC motor at uh 60 hertz uh with 60 hertz power, and you take it to um a country that runs on 50 hertz power, you're running it at five-sixths the speed, slower by you know, by a good chunk. Uh and that would not be good for the centrifuge running it at a slower speed. But luckily, this in order for the spinzall to work properly, part of the patent, it's patent pending. Did I mention patent pending?
Did I mention that? Patent pending uh is that the rotor speed moves up and down slightly. So once it reaches its full speed, which by the way is about 4100 RPM, uh it will decelerate and ex accelerate it like kind of sinusoidally, it'll oscillate up and down. And the reason it does that is to create a little bit of angular acceleration of the ring torus on the inside of the spinning thing, and it allows the puck, the the solids, to uh form more evenly around the ring, and it actually helps to sediment the stuff faster uh because it kind of from experience, I mean I haven't done maybe this is just anecdotally, but it kind of helps the particles dig in. It gives me a faster uh clarification.
So um, yeah, so it moves up and down, but to do that, the spinzall actually creates the frequency that the motor runs at, and consequently it doesn't care what frequency you put into it. So you can run it anywhere. Um what else am I missing, Paul? Anything else? Oh, it will be NSF certified, UL certified, and CE certified.
We're going for all the certifications. Now, you might ask, how much would I have to pay for such a thing? Well, the retail price is what's the retail price, Astasia? 999 dollars. Do we add the 99 cents or no?
Sure. 999.99? Wait, 999.99. Yes. Uh but for this pre-sale only, we're going to sell it for $6.99.
Yeah, we're not even gonna charge the extra 99 cents, just $6.99. Um shipping will be included in the United States, but foreign people will have to pay for their own shipping. Now here's the thing. And Nastasi and I don't just don't have the money. I would pull the money out of my pocket if I could, but I just don't have the money.
So we're gonna pre-sell them at uh that price, but if people don't buy them, if we can't get the pre-sales to uh do it, we just won't make it. So the way the pre-sale is gonna work is you're gonna uh you're gonna basically pledge to buy one. It's not actually a Kickstarter, but it's gonna run similarly to a Kickstarter, but on the modernist pantry website. You're gonna pledge to buy one, and then only after we reach our target number, do we do we've officially set the target number yet, Nastasia? I think it's the thousand, right?
Thousand units? So $700,000, basically, $699,000. So once we reach that number, then we charge your cards and we go into full production. And when do they get them? Uh they will they will ship in June or July of next year.
Uh now, this is not, by the way, for those of you that were uh part of the Sears all thing. Here's how the Sears all worked. The Sears all was Nastasia and Piper, back when Piper worked with us and I in the basement of the Booker and Dax lab, um we bade we literally made the prototypes for the Searzol, which is the little torch attachment that we sell, uh, out of uh cocktail shakers. I went to uh the Bowery restaurant district here in New York City. I bought the smallest three-piece cocktail shaker that I could find.
I took a plasma cutter, cut it into the uh Searsol shape. That's literally how the Sears all shape was developed. It was built around the smallest available uh three-piece cocktail shaker. Uh then we shipped, we we did the Kickstarter. Uh Piper and I in the basement made, I think 20, right?
We made like 20 uh cocktail shaker Sears alls in the basement uh, you know, on Eldritch Street here, mailed them out to chefs, and we did the video with those protos. That's how we did our Kickstarter thing. And we hadn't yet found a manufacturer uh or any of that stuff, which is one of the reasons why it took a long time. I think if you've never made something, like uh produced something, making a single prototype is blindingly easy compared to actually getting something manufactured. It's very there's there are more difficulties than you would probably think, right, Nastasia, when you say it's fair.
This is not what's happening with uh the centrifuge. With the centrifuge, we not only have the manufacturer, we have the subcontractors, we've already gone through uh like five rounds of protos, and we're actually in the place where uh we're going to make the tooling. So I feel a lot more confident uh with with my uh dates and numbers than I did when we launched uh the Sears All. You say that's fair? Yes.
Yeah. Um so what am what else am I missing? Anything? The prototype looks great, it runs great, it's tiny, it's very quiet. It's like a little food processor.
It's extremely impressive to see and operate. Oh, well, thank you. So uh so listen, swear to this is this is how this is gonna work. Either from Dave's mouth to what is it? Oh, I can't, that's not safe for work, Nastasia.
No, I thought it's oh your version. Yeah, yeah. It's supposed to be your lip to God's ears. But that's not my that's not my version. Yeah, it's not my version.
My version is not part of the family show ethos that we try to maintain here at Cooking Issues. But anyway, so that's the that's the extent uh of the pitch, but I will just say this that um if you do not uh if if if it is not something that you guys are interested in, then we'll know we will know, and we won't build it. And to be honest, Nastasi and I will fold up the equipment company. I'll just go to a separate bar and just go write books. What do you mean?
Oh yeah, yeah, sorry. I'm going to well, no, I have a family. I can't be the Leatherman. If you didn't tune into the show where you talked about the Leatherman, was a guy in the 1800s who never spoke to anyone and just wore clothing that he made himself out of discarded boot leather uh and like a tin pan that he carried around with him and walked a continuous circuit of 340 or 50 miles once every 34 days, 10 miles a day, and never slept inside uh, you know, a day in his adult life. And just did that until he literally dropped dead and was found in one of his caves dead from the mouth cancer that he had the past year, the last year and a half of his life.
The Leatherman. Uh uh, if you look him up on the internet, it is Leatherman Perren's Vagabond. You know, vagabond used to be such a horrible vagabond now sounds like vaguely romantic, right? Because we use we use bum when we mean vagabond, but like back in the day, vagabond was a you know was bad, very bad. You didn't want to be a vagabond.
Right. Yeah. Um anyway, so uh let's go to a commercial and come back with actual cooking issues questions. This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the immersion circulator for Sous vide by Chef Steps. If you're listening to this show, you're probably a pretty good cook.
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I was in my head, I was thinking you only did one. I was thinking, no, but you never had the chill to the next episode section in there. Yeah, no, that's always been in there. We just never take the midway break. Um so uh I uh for the for the like first time, my wife is actually listening to what I was saying on the thing, and she was like, Hey, thanks for making me look like the bad guy.
Which you know what again, for like throwing her under the bus. I was like, you know what? That's fair. Fair point. Here's the thing, right?
One of my all-time favorite things about my wife is that she is like straight up honest, no sugar coating, like tells it as she sees it. Like this is like honestly, my one of my favorite things. Like, unlike, and so like when something is not like the way that she wants, like, she thinks it's bad, she's gonna say so, which is why she was such a fantastic editor for my book. And I mean, without my wife, my book I people think I'm like saying this to be no, without my wife editing the book, the book would not have been like anything. It would have been horrible.
And uh, so you know, she is like an amazing editor, but on the same side, when you just come from an editing session with someone who's actually a good editor, it is painful and it is there is friction involved in the editing process because they take something you've worked on and they shred it into tiny pieces, but only to make it better. But it just, you know, so anyway, so I should not I should not have tried it, I should not have accidentally thrown her under the bus. Nastasia, on the other hand, is like, I don't care, I don't care what it looks like or what it reads like, just get it out there, right? Well, you we have a different perspective on things where I think getting it done is better than perfect, and you think perfection is it's not perfection, it's like well, anyway, whatever. Whatever.
Um, so let's get to uh some questions. Um, before I get to well, I'll get some questions first. Uh this one is in you have the answer from Del Posto, right? I have some comments beforehand. By the way, do you like the word and do how do you pronounce induja?
I always say like induja. What do you say? Paul, you're you're an induja man, aren't you? Sounds good. It sounds not pleasant.
Like, is like, right? Yeah. Right. What would you rather have? Would you rather have some delicious salumi or induja?
Dave. Would you rather have lomo or induja? Would you rather have suprasata or as we call a supersad, or would you rather have enduja? Would you rather have spec or enduja? prosciutto or induja.
Enduja sounds like what it is, though. Like, okay, so what it is is a super it's like a very spicy, you know, very red, very stain your clothes, very fat, heavy, pasty cured meat product. Yes? Yes. The answer is underneath there.
You know there. Yeah, but aren't you gonna read it so that like not have to read both like a chunk? Yes. We need a what? We gotta wrap up in five.
Oh no. Yeah, we have another uh five ten. Hi Dave, uh the Hammer and Heritage Radio Peeps. I decided to try the induja recipe from Mark Ladner's excellent del Posto cookbook. And intend to offer it to my guests pre-Thanksgiving dinner.
By the way, Nastasia and my editor, Maria Guarnicelli, hate pre-meat and cheese at uh at a large meal. Paul, what are your thoughts on pre-meat and cheese? It will fill you up. So what it's tasty. See, they hate it because in a classic restaurant, the cheese course comes, of course, at the end.
Yes. My feeling is at home, home is less formal than at a formal restaurant. That's why it's home and not a formal restaurant. That having cheese, because it's more like cheese, the cold antipasti kind of idea, but it's with doesn't have to be Italian, right? So you have cheeses, meats, bread, wine while you're waiting for the thing to come out, and then at the end of the meal, that's when you bring out the port and the stilten.
So you bring out cheese again at the end, but I think you can bookend a meal with cheese, and it's not problematic. But Nastasia doesn't believe that. Not for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving in my family, we always assume like when people Because I assume we were gonna eat at three. Okay, well, sorry for your assumption that was incorrect.
But the uh the point is is that the like when you have the like no but you say this in every meal. No, really. I always have cheese at the beginning of everyone. Maria hates it, and you agreed, you nodded your head up and down that you thought that she was right. You're saying maybe just about Thanksgiving.
No, she we weren't talking about Thanksgiving. We were talking about meals in general. So basically, make Maria happy. Oh, so you so you I did not know that you were the kind of person that says stuff you don't believe just to make people happy. That wasn't the kind of person anything.
Oh, I owe the I owe her another book. Okay. Uh I had my butcher grind uh the shoulder for the we're back to the question, folks. I had my butcher grind the shoulder on Saturday and I prepared it within a few hours. The grind was somewhat coarse, and I used plastic wrap to form it into a log.
Now, if the if you thought andugio was a bad word, and doja log sounds like even worse. Um I like it though, but I can't have a lot, so fatty. Yeah. How much can you eat of that? Not much.
What about you, Paul? Like one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if there's a lot of bread, it's like, you know what I don't like?
I don't like when they used to serve you like a sh uh a boatload of foie gras with no starch. Like the thing is if I'm gonna have something really fatty like uh Lardo or like I just want some starch to cut the fat. Yep. You know what I mean? Yep.
Okay. Um the grind was somewhat coarse, and I used plastic wrap to form it into a log. The cook, no one can form plastic wrap logs like my man Nils. My man Nils Norin is the plastic wrap log king. I learned from him and I got pretty good.
But Nils Norin can take any the man can take like a tractor trailer semi and form it into a perfect cylinder using only purity brand plastic wrap. He's a plastic wrap genius. That's true. Yeah. Um the cookbook says a three-day cure is sufficient, but since I've never had to rely solely on Prague Powder number two before, I was hoping for some assurance that this sausage will be safe to eat by the holiday.
Thanks a bunch and keep up the good work. Nick from Cleveland. Now, uh, because this is a Thanksgiving question, Nastasia sent uh uh into Del Posto to get an answer for you, and then Mark can talk about it next week when he comes in on the radio as well, but it'll be too late because your family will already have been poisoned by that. Just kidding, we're not gonna poison your family. But the uh a couple comments I'll make straight off the bat, um prague powder or instacure number two is a curing salt.
For those of you that don't do any curing, it's a mixture of uh salt and uh powder number two is a mixture of sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate. Trit and trite. Now, uh if you don't know, this this is all you need to know. Nitrite, ITE, is the fast-acting version of nitrate. So what these things that's what caused the cure color in meats, it's what it has a specific cured taste.
It also specifically, those nitrites and nitrates uh specifically in inhibit botulism from growing. So in sausages, which by the way, botulism I think comes from the Latin for like sausage. Yeah, um, like it's classic because you're taking meat that's been exposed and folding it into an oxygen poor environment, and that's why you can get botulism from it if it's not either uh cooked or cured properly. So the the nitrites uh help to uh prevent or or prevent botules, stop botalism from growing. Now, uh nitrates are really just the long acting version of nitrites.
So since this is a three-day cure, I don't see any reason why you would include nitrate in it at all. I don't understand why they're using prague powder number two and not instead of prague powder number one. Typically, you only use number two uh on long-cured products, and by that I mean things like hams, where you need uh because what happens is as this stuff soaks into your meat over time, nitrate is converted to nitrite and then converted on further to form the products that actually cure the meat. So if you don't require that kind of time lapse um or time release rather action on the nitrates, you don't want to use them. So I don't know why he's using number two powder.
We can ask him next week, I would use number one. Um that said, there's also a couple of things going on here. The nitrites will immediately prevent botulism from growing. And since you took meat and it was exposed to oxygen, botulism will not be growing in the meat from the get-go. So you will be safe on a botulism count.
This is just my opinion now. I'm gonna read the answer from Del Posto. The only issue you have is that if there are other bacteria in the meat, for instance, E. coli, or if you're one of these people that believe trichinosis is still a problem in the U.S. pork source, which it isn't really, but if you believe that, or if you're using wild-caught meat, uh and it hadn't been pri uh previously frozen for the prescribed number of days to kill Trichinella, that's also a possibility.
But uh, if there is a bacteria in it, for instance, E. coli is one of the bacteria uh of interest in uh muscle in you know mammal meats, um, it will take a certain amount of time for that E. coli to be destroyed by the action of uh salt uh dehydration and the acidification that happens as meat is curing, because bacteria grow in the meat, lactic acid bacteria grow in the meat, uh drop the pH, i.e. increase the acidity, and it's the combination of uh loss of water, uh increase in um salt, and uh uh increase in acidity, decrease in pH, that really prevent uh and killed bacteria that are there that are present already, bad bacteria, uh, and prevent new ones from growing. That said, induja is such a high fat product that I don't know how what the water activity is from the get-go because it's such a high fat product to begin with.
It might start with an extremely low water activity. I don't know. Do you know, Paul? I have no idea. No, that makes sense though.
Yes. So uh, and then uh I wasn't I didn't have time uh to look up like how long it takes for things like E. coli to die in uh certain environments. But these are known curves. But here's the answer uh here's the answer uh from Del Posto.
Uh whenever you are consuming raw, dried or cured meat, there's always a risk of potential foodborne ill illness. However, we take the following precautions to do our best to minimize uh and prevent them. Do you like it? It's like so classic, like classic like build big men menu talk, you might die. But uh first, always start with whole roasts of meat.
The potential for foodborne illness and meats takes place in large meat processing plants where tens of thousands of pounds of meat are being ground together at a time. There is much less risk for consuming ground meat if it is a whole loin to start that you purchase from a reputable butcher and grind yourself. Secondly, when grinding the meat, be sure that all parts of your grinder are clean and sterilized. Oh my god, whenever anyone says clean and sterilized, what do you think of right away? Willy wonka.
The ceiling had to be waiting washed, right? Washed and sterilized so you get nothing. Remember this? No. Like you stole fizzy lifting drink.
You don't remember this? Oh my god, you guys aren't Willy Wonkaheads? You remember it? No. Dave, Willy Wonkahead?
Uh it's been a minute. I forgot. Ah, man. Hey, I I can't believe all you like. You have kids, do you watch that like every week?
I used to watch it before I had kids every week, but then after I had kids, they got sick of it after a while. Thank God they never got turned on to the new one. Anyway. Uh second, when uh grinding uh meat, be sure that all parts of your grinder are clean and sterilized to prevent any cross-contamination. Or you get nothing.
Uh like he was awesome, right? I mean, Gene Wilder? Awesome. Finally, uh, the nitrate and nitrite found in curing salts help to inhibit the growth of bacteria such as botulism that can cause foodborne illness. Yes, the growth of, but it won't necessarily kill stuff that's already there fast enough.
That's the question. Uh eating uncooked meat always comes with a risk. However, by taking these precautions, we limit the chance of foodborne illness substantially. The curing of indujia for this particular recipe is for the flavor development more so than the loss of water that is a result of drying. It is similar to eating a seasoned steak tartar.
Hope this answers your question. Happy Thanksgiving, uh, Matt. Okay. So in the in the few seconds that uh Nastasia is gonna give me left before we need to go, I just want to bring up uh a question. Now we weren't uh this is not a political show, right?
And we weren't here last week, which was the week uh after the election. I'm not gonna talk uh politics, uh, but I'll say pretty much no matter what side of uh you know you were voting for in the election here, it seems like the country pretty much gave a a kind of who gives a crap about um kind of sexual assault. That's kind of what happened. But it's one of the things that happened. It's like we were like all of these allegations flying around, and it was kind of like a uh uh you know, the country was like, eh, it's not important.
Like it's like that's the impression I got. I think that's the impression that a lot of people got, which I think is horrifying. And this is regardless of what side you're voting for. And in the in the wake of that, there was a website, and this is this is going out not to the necessarily the people who listen who aren't pros, but people who are in the industry. A website popped up very soon after the election called The Reality of Sexual Assault in the Cocktail Community dot com.
And when I read it, it was a uh it was a blog where a number of women had come forward and explained uh what it was like to be sexually assaulted by a particular person in the cocktail community I'm not gonna bring up any anyone's name but a particular person in the cocktail community uh and when I was reading it I was horrified by it but also I got the distinct impression that uh this is actually a much bigger problem than I had realized that like kind of like uh not just there there's a there's a kind of gross uh unnecessary I think um non-inclusive broness about the food industry in general yeah and I think like you know I think everyone thinks that that broness is kind of harmless but it isn't really because it is kind of it is exclusionary like you don't talk like you talk to your bros when you're around people in in you know in not normal environments when you want to kind of be nice or or human to at least I think you don't you know what I mean so like taking it into a work environment such that like a a huge section of the people who are working with you feel naturally excluded is not I think a harmless a harmless thing. Correct. Yeah anyway so like all of that stuff I think you know but at a at a bare minimum you would think that someone could go to work and not be I'm not talking about comments like which are also bad but like straight up sexual assault. I was horrified. And I think one of the problems in the uh industry and when we open we reopen I know that I'm gonna change how uh our um our you know our train our training is to be specific.
I think we all need to be when when Nastasia, when we had the training at Momafuku for the like the everyone's kind of making light of the of the uh uh harassment training because the way they do it is so goofy and overly uh corporate, right? So they sit around and we all do these training things. Is this is this harassment, is this not harassment, and it's all kind of goofy things. Here's the truth. The truth is is that I wouldn't want to work in an environment where I can't.
I'm I use salty language in in the real life. Nastasia uses salty language in the real life. Um cooks and bartenders can be um raunchy and salty and like and and you know use bad language and say crazy things, and I think that's all okay. It's but everything has to come from a position of respect, right? And a lot of times uh it doesn't.
There's a difference between saying that someone has to be politically correct and saying no, what you really want to do is respect your co-workers. Like that's the issue. And I think the real thing when it comes to assault, real assault, and uh sorry to go on about this, but I think it's important, not talked about enough, is that honestly we know what what it is. Like having goofy training where you like are the oh wow, that that was assault. You know what I mean?
No, it's like what we need to train on is letting everybody know that it is completely unacceptable. That like the fact that you're a cook and you're it's late and you've been out drinking with your co-workers or you're a bartender and you've been drinking, oh he was drunk. No, he wasn't drunk. He's he's doing something criminal. He is is doing something evil and wrong.
If you are someone who tries to use this as an excuse, stop now. If you see someone doing it, don't make excuses for them. I think part of the issue here is that there's a whole group of women out there who think that they need to remain silent because everyone else thinks it's okay. I think the main thing that we need to do, everyone needs to come out and say, this kind of crap is unacceptable. This kind of crap will not be accepted, cannot be accepted, and cannot be tolerated.
So hopefully this is something uh I don't know, we could talk about more. Do you think this is an issue we should talk about more or should we talked about more in the community? Respecting co-workers, yes. Respecting co-workers, and you know, don't like let everybody know not to, you know, that they shouldn't be silent, that it's not okay. That it's you know, uh uh by the way, if you want to remain it's up to the anyone who's had something happen to them, you know, it's up to them what they want to do, right?
But for the rest of us, don't allow this stuff to take place. Don't make excuses for anyone. Cooking issues. Right. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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