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Find us at heritage radio network.org. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from a Burst Pizzeria on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 in Bushwick. Oh yeah. Well, there's actually nobody here right now because Roberta's is closed.
Uh hey, uh they had their staff party last night, he said. Yeah. Oh me, oh, this every year, dude. Every year. It was like they were mopping up a murder scene this morning.
Every freaking year. Okay, so Nastasi the Hammer Lopez is with us. We got Dave in the booth. How are you guys doing? So what the hell, man?
Porter has to come in. I see the freaking poor Porter has to come in and move stuff around. Yeah, they party and then they can't go to work. Listen, listen, you know who I told you, you know who I respect? No offense, you guys here, Roberta.
You're not here to be offended. But like the freaking guys at like Nomad at EMP, they will burn their freaking four-star restaurant to the freaking ground. Right. They'll they'll like be like they'll be swimming in the in like pools of their own liquor and vomit. They will somehow manage to like pressure wash the nastiness off of their bodies and show up and deliver impeccable service the next day.
That's true. That is the way it is done. That is true. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.
This place. No offense. Hey, look, I like you guys. I like you guys. I'm just saying.
Nastasia intends to offense. Did you walk in that way? I walked in through the it smells like beer. It smells like there's like sticky on your shoes. There's a wine bottle in the entry here.
It's like a movie theater. It's awful. Let me ask you a question. Would you be angry? Look at this guy with his like look at him.
So the porter has covered himself like Batman in a in like some sort of cape of a recycled bag so he's not showered with the disgusting stuff that he has to like wade through now. He literally has a Batman cape on. A blue plastic trash bag as a yeah. As a as a Batman cape to protect himself from the horror. Dave, is that to come?
Oh Dave, oh my god, Dave. Family show. I think that's one of the servers. Oh god. Family show, family show.
Miss, do you need help? Family show, Dave. Jeez, Luis. There's a disco ball here. I might steal that.
I love disco balls. Still going. Yeah. I don't think they would notice. I built a disco ball.
I told you that story, right? I built a disco ball. I made it myself. I didn't have the money, so I I literally took a mirror and cut it with glass cutters and glued it to a styrofoam ball. Found my child, this is in college, found my childhood erector set motor, glued like two by fours together, had a bat I took I back in the day we used to have these um power supplies on our computers so that they wouldn't go down.
Strapped one of those to my back with a strobe light and like a blender and would walk around playing like disco music with a strobe light and a disco ball over my head. I like disco balls. Who doesn't like disco balls? So you were the party. I was the party.
I was the party. I uh we had a gig one night and I brought it to the gig and I actually played with the disco ball over my head because we were playing in some crappy bar called Poco Loco. And Walt, the guy who ran Poco Loco, made some inappropriate like hand touching of uh the guitarist girlfriend. Anyway, that aside the point, I lost the disco ball that night. It was uh This is uh we can get in trouble for this.
We were not playing disco though, Dave. Uh uh in case you did not know this. I said you walked around with disco music playing. Uh I walked out sometimes, but when I was at the gig, I was playing, you know, our early 90s kind of grunge punk grunge funk punk. That you know, we were that part of that, well part of it.
We were at the same time as we weren't part of anything. You're a big Chi Peps fan there. We were uh well, first of all, they they lost me. Mother's Milk was the last album that I liked. So everyone that knows the Chili Peppers now, like I was uh an uplift mofo party plan kind of a fellow and a huge fishbone fan.
I was a giant fishbone fan. Like, so like I started, I just had nothing to do with anything, but like that in that era, like I was listening to for California stuff, I was like Chili Peppers Fishbone, but early stuff. As soon as Anthony Keatis started doing ballads, I was like, No, no! You know what I mean? And then uh what else?
I don't know. I I used to listen to I don't know. Like of that style, that's what I listened to. Uh, plus I listened to all the actual old stuff, and you know, we like Jane's addiction a lot. Do people still listen to Jane's addiction?
Uh I don't think so. Really? That was such good stuff, nothing shocking. Such good stuff. Uh anyway, so so oh, by the way, Nastasia, and the search goes on.
Uh, we still do not have a space for the new bar. I thought we had a new space for the bar, and uh, you know, my partner went to the community board, and they're not granting any new liquor licenses in that area. Nothing! Oh my god. They're such jackweeds, man.
It's so hard to start community. What uh number is it? It was on Avenue A. No, but what's the three. So like uh like the uh th the thing yeah, three, right?
So I think like so for those of you that don't know, start like New York, as I said before, as much as I love it, it's incredibly unpleasant for a large number of reasons. One of which is like starting a business in New York City, the reason they say if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, is not that the customers, it's it's like literally, if you can jump through the freaking hoops to do what you need to do here, then you can basically do that anywhere because the city is designed to stop you from doing anything. Whether that is like, you know, it's to stop you from like being able to build anything because you literally can't get anywhere to do anything, or like we've had this discussion before, like when you you know how when you go in the suburbs and you buy something, you can leave it in your car for for like at least like five, ten minutes. You can buy it at a home depot, then go to a stop and shop, and you'll know your car will still be there. Yeah.
Oh, it's not like a taxi. You'd be like, hey, taxi, uh, or or Uber, hey, can you hold like this 35 tons of crap that I need to actually do or build something? No, which is why here in New York, people hire people to do the simplest freaking things. Because everything here is impossible. So starting a uh starting a bar, which is one of the reasons I like it, like I like things.
I like self-punishment, right? Which is one of the reasons I like, you know, kind of like New York. But I mean, starting a bar in New York, first of all, if you want to get a liquor license in this city, right? You if you don't if you don't want to apply fresh. Let's say I wanted to be uh on Avenue A, which by the way I do.
Here's the thing: it you'd need to take somebody's liquor license who's still operational. You'd need to take them on as a 20 at least 27% partner for two years. Otherwise, it's basically a new application. Now, they might grant uh a new application to a place that already had an application, but you never know, they might not. You know what I'm saying?
So you you're taking someone in for this this two years, then you know, so if you if you try to get a new liquor license, they're like no, or they're like beer and wine only, right? And and here's their thing: it's this neighborhood's already saturated. They don't want the bars. It's like, what the hell do you think you're doing? Listen, I'm f I'll be 46 in March.
I remember what the East Village, what Alphabet City was like in the 80s. It was a stinking hellhole. All right. Now, what is it that these people want to go back to? Like, what is it?
Is it that like five-year period, like between when the heroin addicts left the park and when all of a sudden like all of the NYU students and people started coming into bars, is it that five-year period that they're Jonesing for? In the mid-90s, right? You know what I mean? Or is it, or is it that like these old geezers who are on this thing, what they really want is they wanted to live in their leather pants and grunge and punk life back when that was that because it was cool back then, and now they just want to live in mellow senescence for the rest of their life with nothing else happening. Bars need to be where other bars are, and they don't get that, right?
So they're like literally, if you want a license, there needs to be uh not like what they say, not a saturation uh of places around. So if you're opening a restaurant, this is the theory I've been telling everyone, and they need to listen. If you're trying to open a restaurant, right, you can be in a neighborhood that doesn't have a zillion other restaurants around you because if I'm gonna go to lunch or if I'm gonna go to dinner, I'm only gonna go to one place for lunch or dinner. One. One place, and then I'm probably gonna go either to another part of town or do something else.
It's nice to have bars and other stuff around, but I'm I'm giving you a big chunk of my time if I'm going to a restaurant. A bar, on the other hand, right? Either you want to be near a bunch of restaurants, so people will go to you right before they go to dinner or right after they go to dinner as a second thing to do, or you want to be where there's a bunch of other bars around because a huge chunk of your population is going from one bar, having a couple of drinks, and then going to another bar and having a couple of drinks. They don't want to spend all night with you. And so and also, if there's another bar near you and they're full, you can send them back and forth to a different bar.
So bars, especially cocktail bars, they all want to be together. The uh the exception is like local hellhole bars. Like my favorite uh hellhole bar is uh the Holland Bar. I haven't been in years, but I was a regular at that bar, it's up near Port Authority, which is the nastiest, was the nastiest kind of place I'd ever lived. And I've lived in nasty places, but you know what I mean, like physically nasty place.
But I love that bar. In that bar, you show up at like 5 30, you start, you go out, you get a slice of pizza, and you come back and you close them down. That's the kind of bar it is, but that's not the kind of bar we're opening, right? And so they don't care, right, that that they don't care in these community boards that you know you're not uh you're not like doing a club based thing where a bunch of like, you know, underage kids are gonna come and party all night long. They don't take it into account, they just don't give you the freaking license.
Uh so like uh one of my partners was at the meeting yesterday and they wanted to grant somebody, get this, a restaurant, beer and wine license. This is in the East Village in New York, beer and wine license only, with never near never the possibility of liquor. Right. Now you can get along with a beer and wine license at a restaurant. At a restaurant, you can get along with it, especially because there's so many bars in the area.
Guess what? 10 p.m. max on the service. 10 p.m. max on the service.
What is this? Are we or like what is this? San Jose? Listen, you need to serve stuff in that neighborhood. People are out in that neighborhood.
Doesn't even get cranking until then. Ridiculous. So anti-freaking business. Just really ticks me the heck off. Speaking of business, do you want to maybe like read that piece of paper I gave you?
Yeah, yeah. Hey, family show stars. I didn't say anything. I I heard you. I heard you start to drop an S bomb.
I heard you. Yeah. Don't get sidetracked. I want you people to know something. Today's program is brought to you by, and I've not got to say this in a long time.
I'm pleased to say this because I used to, back in the day, for those of you that listen to the uh you know years ago, Modernist Pantry was one of our uh main spot sponsors, and so I always got to say, modernist pantry.com. And and by the way, they are again. So today's program is brought to you by Modernist Pantry, providing magical ingredients for the modern cook for free videos, recipes, tips, and tricks. Visit blog.modernistpantry.com. Uh by the way, they're also the people who we uh part with you right with that, Dave?
You that's the monster trucks version. That's good. We'll come back to the longer one later. Yeah, but you like the monster trucks version? Yeah, it's great.
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Yeah, oh my god. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Amazing. Yonkers Raceway.
So listen, um. So that's that. Um, enough of the anger with with the thing, but isn't that tick you off like that's crazy. Right? Yeah.
You know, I know people I know people, right, who have gone in and for whatever reason, they've gotten investors, they put all of their own freaking money, plus all of their own freaking time into trying to try people like like the on the community board, they think that like restaurant tours somehow these fat cats. No, it's like, especially here in New York, it's like a lot of like cooks who want to do finally their own restaurant. They scrape together everything they have, they call in all their favors, they get an investor who basically at this point now owns them, right? Because they put this chunk of money in. They put all of their time and effort to try and open a place, and they think they can get it done with a beer and wine only license, and then their restaurant freaking fails.
Because now maybe it is that the restaurant wasn't meant to succeed anyway, but restaurants are so hard anyway that any sort of crap you stack on top of it makes it that much harder. It's it's oh by the way, that scraping you're hearing in the background is like bodies being scraped around on the floor of Roberta's outside. I am not providing these sound effects. Those are real actual sound effects of like garbage and like you know, Detritus being lugged around the outside of uh Roberta. The only yeah, it's like you know, we're gonna come in here after after the show with uh Luminol to see what's kind of uh what's going on.
There's an app for that, right? It's gotta be a fake app. That was a joke. No, but I'm sure people have done it. People have done fake uh infrared uh camera app.
By the way, in the new book, I'm using an infrared camera to try and figure stuff out. I'm doing a lot of fun stuff for the new book. We'll talk about that later if we have time. By the way, if you have a cooking question or a rant-related question to how hard it is to start a restaurant and liquor licenses and community boards, calling your questions to 718 497 2128. That's 7184972128.
Which, that we didn't get that space? No. The liquor license, non- I don't know how it used to be uh like years ago, it would you it was easier like when we f when we first did Booker and Dax, obviously I'm I was using Sambar's liquor license, but I know we looked into it prior to that, and it wasn't that onerous at that point. Um you know, the the community boards have really tightened down a lot, and a lot depends on every bl every block or area blocks has a block association, and if that block association is a really squeaky, squeaky wheel, they'll um they'll they'll you know they'll hose it. Another tactic people will use on extant places with liquor licenses, if they have a very uh strong community board, is they'll just phone in complaint after complaint after complaint after complaint.
Uh and they try to do that at Som actually for a while. They phone in complaint after complaint, and then they go in front of the SLA, which is the liquor board, and and they'll and they'll uh try to get your liquor license revoked. In fact, one place we looked at was a place that it had its liquor license revoked. Now bear in mind, so like places in this neighborhood, because they're talking about the East Village again, it's basically perfect for like bars, especially like restaurant bars, but that's the kind of clientele that goes down there, that's what the businesses are. These places vacant for like three, four years.
They can't you know, because no one else wants to, there's no way to rent it. What are you gonna do? What do you you know, what are you gonna do? Open another juice shop? Yeah.
I don't know. Juice shop. What are your thoughts on juice shops? Nah, too many. Too many juice saturated.
I don't want to grant any no juice shop licenses. Too saturated. Juice shop. I like juice shop. I mean they're fine.
I've like I think people should be able to open the businesses they want to open. That's all. Is that so bad? Nope. Never thought I'd be like the hyper pro business guy.
I know. But you know, or the hyper anti-regulation guy. I'm all for people keeping their neighborhood nice. I'm not trying to say that these people don't have a right to try to like look out for their neighborhood. I'm just saying they are blunt force instruments mentally.
They don't they're not thinking. Well, it's it's like if my sister was moving here and said, What neighborhood should I move into? What do you think of the East Village? I'd say, There's a lot of bars. You know?
Which is what it is. Right, which is what it is. So what are they gonna do? It's like it's like closing the freaking barn door after the horses have already freaking left. Oh, groomy, smashing.
Yay, capitalism. Is that Dave? Do you know like uh did you see you see Nancy Pelosi's town hall? No. Do you know a huge chunk of uh the millennial people, which I haven't you know have my issue?
I love you millennials, not really. But they like the point is is that like a huge chunk of them in quotes don't believe in capitalism. What does that even mean? I don't know. Do they tweet that to each other on their iPhones?
Like, what the hell? Like, if you don't believe in capitalism, Nastasia. Now I know I'm an old fogey here, but shouldn't you like renounce it? Yeah. Like, how do you not believe in capitalism over your Twitter account?
How does that work? You know what I mean? Yeah, it's more bodies. All right. That was a juicy one.
Yeah, it's like literally crazy here. Okay, uh question in. I have a question on thermodynamics. And this is from uh Simon Stillwell in Charleston, South Carolina. You know, I have still not been to Charleston.
How crazy is that? You've been to Charleston, right, Syas? No, I have not. No? Well, I guess so we we should have some sort of reason to go down.
Maybe festival. Oh, right. Oh, yeah? Yeah, stoked. Yeah?
Nice. I've never been before. Nice. Well, I've never been. Nastasi and I are in the food and wine business.
You want to come? Uh you know, I'm sure I can I'm sure I can it's soon. Maybe your friends at Modernist Pantry can get you a ticket. Uh why are they going? I don't know.
No, I don't know. Now, you know they'll sponsor your like Nastasi and I, first of all, are so freaking cheap. We're so cheap that like it literally, unless someone like hauls our behinds to places, we never go. Right? I mean, at least I am.
You're the same way, actually. Right? You're pretty cheap. I'm cheap. If I had money, I'd spend it.
Okay. I have a question on thermodynamics, but first some background info. Uh we're working with a pretty standard chocolate souffle recipe. Uh by the way, if anyone's on the chat group now, that they might be helpful on this. Butter and sugar prep on the Ramekins, stored in a fridge until fired.
Uh and when I go into an averagely crappy tabletop convection oven. I like averagely crappy. That's that's my new life's motto. That's your new band name. Well, it's more like a life, more like a life strategy.
Averagely crappy. Uh it's like the cause, you know why it's so awesome? Because the assumption is that everything is crap, right? So you start from a baseline of crap. So it's not like av average goodness, it's average crappiness.
It's uh it's like uh it's like I told you my favorite thing about the German language can be encapsulated in a in a side-by-side translation I saw once, where the English said works great, and the German said does not cause problems. And so it's like it's like that kind of a glass half full, half empty. Well, yeah, it's like yeah, it's like it's it's not even half full, half empty. It's like it's you always measure in degrees of emptiness. You see what I'm saying?
Like that, like that that's the thing. There is no there's no word for full. It's like, you know, how how empty is it? Uh which is a good way to look at it. Yes, I think.
You know what I mean? Just you know, which is weird, because we're actually actually we're actually optimistic people somewhat. Yeah. Somewhat. Okay.
Uh my high pop. What? I was gonna say leave the nihilism to the your millennial friends. Fake nihilism, yeah, like like fake hope, fake. I don't know, don't get me started on millennials, man.
Someone someone needs to come on the show. You know what we need? We need a millennial to come on the show and explain this crap to us. What about Nastasia's sister? Anyway.
All right. My hypothesis is that the thermal mass of the ramekin is so high compared to the battery and is such a poor conductor of heat that the majority of the time is spent bringing the ramekin from the fridge temperature up to the cooking temperature. Instead, if you were to put the batter into a silicon mold, same size shape as the ramekins, and freeze it into a puck, uh, then uh simply to fire it, simply put the puck in a room temp ramekin, uh, that it would reduce the cooking time. Does this hold water or is there a better way? Uh someone said that it would just turn into a molten cake, uh, that this is a crazy idea that it wouldn't rise, etc.
Thank you, Simon Stilwell from Charleston, South Carolina. Well, I am I think the room temperature ramekin probably would uh work fine, but uh if you're talking about like a fridge temperature ramekin, right, so you're talking about um let's call it four degrees Celsius, right? So you're looking at the rise from four degrees Celsius up to a room temperature ramekin of like 23 degrees Celsius. Now I don't know how long that's gonna take. We should run you can run some thermal modeling on that.
Um but it needs to it's gonna rise over the bake time up to like a hundred, roughly a hundred degrees Celsius. And a little bit, a little bit over, possibly, if you get some dehydration of the souffle around the edges and it's browning, which it is. So if the souffle edges are browning at all, then it's getting above a hundred, but let's just call it a hundred, which is the boiling point of water Celsius. So what you're saying is is that you're worried about that first 20 degree or 22 degree rise in, or not even probably 20 degree rise in in temperature when you're looking from fridge temperature at an overall 94 degree uh temperature rise. So I would say that in the baking time that it takes your uh souffle to go through, uh I don't know how much of a jump you're going to get on um on the cooking by having the ramekin being um room temperature.
Maybe some, I don't know. Um but it's it's an interesting question. I mean it's something that like you know you could it you could probably study with uh a thermocouple, you know, just take a you know if I wasn't working so hard on like uh reading thousands of pages of incredibly boring meat science books and texts, you people would not believe how boring and contradictory meat science documents and books are. Like not just boring, contradictory. Uh but the uh, yeah, so if I had the time, you could like strap some thermocouples to the inside of the ramekin uh and actually measure in the two cases kind of what's happening.
Now on the other side, would a frozen uh souffle work? I don't know that a standard souffle recipe would work as a frozen situation because I've never tried it. But I know there are people, um, the cuisine solutions guys, uh, for instance, uh developed uh tubular souffles. I think Paula Perlis maybe also developed some tubular souffles. So what they do is they literally, now they're hydrocaloid-based, but what they do is is they're freezing um they're freezing souffle, not in in uh in silicone molds, but actually in long logs and cylinders, freezing them solid and then slicing them into pucks and dropping them into ramekins and cooking them off, and they're working fine, working great.
Now, I again I uh you know what what needs to happen there is everything needs to first melt and and then uh rise before the outside sets too much. But so I know that it can work. I don't know that it would work with a classic souffle um recipe, but I do know that it can work to have a frozen souffle. But uh, you know, I'll try to look into it more over the next week or so. I I don't know if I'm gonna have time or if I'll remember.
I need to remember this kind of stuff with several days in advance to do some uh work and to call the people that I know that have worked on these systems. So it is possible, but I don't know how much you're going to for them. The win was they got to basically have these incredibly dense stored logs of souffle that they could ship across the country, sh uh chop them into discs, and any monkey could then have a good souffle at their at their you know point of service um you know at their restaurant. Uh and so that was a huge win for them. Um but I don't know, I don't my answer is I the answer is I don't know.
Uh so sorry, not very good, not a very good help today, right? No. Not a good help. Anyone on the anyone in the uh chat group alive and well uh on uh on uh souffle ramekins? No, they got nothing to say about this.
No? Do you like souffles, Dave? Uh I don't really have a strong opinion, Dave. You why? I guess I haven't had that many souffles.
So when I was a kid, the souffle was pretty popular in the 70s and 80s. So when you went to a high class, you went to a high class French restaurant, they would show up and they would ask you at the beginning of the freaking meal. Now, this is the baller part of it. This is the ball or service part of it. Will the sir be having the souffle?
Because like you're at the beginning of the meal? They ask you at the beginning of the meal. The implication being that they have to work up to it. You know what I mean? That like they're gonna do this preparation, they're gonna get their freaking mishigash in order, they're gonna do everything.
You know what I mean? They're gonna like massage it, they need X number of minutes to cook it, right? So they need like 15, something, 20 minutes to cook it, whatever. Uh, and then this is before people had figured out how to like par cook and then finish cook their soup, all this like stuff that people can do. So the um so yeah, so like in the and they would ask you, and then invariably, this is the way people to upsell your desserts.
Invariably be like, hmm, do I want this man? If they're gonna work that hard, man, yeah, I want the souffle. So I would get the souffle, and then they would bring it, remember they would bring it to the table, and they would stick the two spoons into it, bust that sucker open, and then pour the sauce in, which is a ball, it's baller. I mean, like getting a nice, awesome souffle that is like really good where it's like still creamy but not goopy on the inside, and like has that nice fluffy thing, it's risen high, and you can see the steam when they bust that sucker open. That is a baller dining moment.
But I feel it's fallen by the wayside, it doesn't really fit into the structure of most um you know, kind of hit restaurants, you know. I don't know whether it's too state or or whatever, but I have I haven't been asked that in years. I haven't been asked that. You ever see have you seen that recently, Sunday? Oh, yeah.
Well, that's old school French. Did you get it? Nah. I think so. Oh, you did?
Was it good? Yeah. What salt was it? Chocolate souffle with the fashion fruit souffle. Yeah, that goal.
Yeah. Gotta be chocolate. Uh well, no, I mean, look, orange flavors, chocolate flavors, uh, you know, with a contrasting sauce depending on which way you're going. These are all good, but like passion fruit, I love passion fruit. But first of all, one of the things I don't like, and I've said this a million times about uh the way we in America, we think of passion fruit as being a thing, and like the the basically all of the Passiflora species ha all have radically, radically different flavors.
They all share that like weird acidity, but in terms of like muskiness and like you know how sometimes passion fruit can have that weird musky overriding note? I don't want that in my souffle. I want that for different stuff, but I don't want that in my souffle, and neither do I want it in my cocktail people. Even though I like those fruits. I like eating those fruits.
Learned a new way to open a pomegranate the other day. So, you know what? Uh I I went into a YouTube hole and uh where I was researching uh things and went to a YouTube hole, and then I realized that like, you know, the old technique I had gotten for pomegranates is basically you slice that sucker in half and then you beat on the you break it a little bit and then you beat it with the back of a spoon and you get the stuff out of it. But I saw these guys, like these pomegranate ninjas, and they take it. Did you see that terrible second uh uh Hannibal Lecter movie where Ray Leota gets his head chopped off?
No. Where they where uh what's his name? The Hannibal, what's the famous actor? What's it Anthony Hopkins? He cuts the top of Ray Leota's head off and then removes it and then serves Ray Leota his own brain.
Remember, you didn't see this? Dave, you see this? Uh no. Terrible movie. Uh, as much as I like both Ray Leota and Anthony Hopkins, terrible movie, and a gross scene, like overridingly gross for no reason.
Anyway, you do that to a pomegranate. So you take the pomegranate and it's got the little the little tufty thing on top. You put the knife to it and you cut around and you lift the top off, like you were lifting the top of Rayleota's skull. And you have like those things there, and then here's the cool part, Stas. Here's the part that you're gonna like.
Then you can see you know how there's those uh septa of uh those membrane septa that go around? You can see them, right? Like the five, typically, I think five going down. And then you take your pairing knife and you pair along where those septa are down, almost like the lines in a basketball, just along, not too deep, just the skin. And then you can go and you break all of the sections apart, and the all of them are just there.
They're just there. And I saw this guy do it, not one drop of juice on his table. Not one drop of juice. And I was like, sir, thank you. I went into another, I was looking up uh Japanese uh uh shrimp shrimp techniques and then devaining techniques, and I've learned that my entire life my deveining technique has been garbage.
Garbage. Well, yeah, so Nastasia is making the cut down the back move, right, to devein to devein the shrimp. Now, my peeling game is okay because it's basically just a brute force technique. I don't think there's any sort of like there's no sort of like God's way to uh take the shell off of the shrimp. Although, if you take it, I mean the old trick of taking a pairing knife, holding it upside down and zip unzipping the shrimp from the back, also scores the back, so you can get to the vein fairly easily and rip the shell off.
But then you have that line down the back of the shrimp, which I don't really think looks that good. I think it's fine. Yeah, see, but you but you don't really care. Say if you're gonna go to a if you're gonna spend a like eight boat tons of money on like a giant shrimp, don't you want it to look nice or do you want to have a raggedy back? You don't like when it butterflies out?
Not particularly. I mean, like, I guess I can live with it if it looks like it's on purpose. Anyway, so this guy, he's like, here's what you do. And I can't believe I didn't know this. No one on top of me is hey, crap on all of my teachers, and every cook I've ever looked at for not doing this.
The guy just takes a skewer, right? He bends the shrimp close to the tail, bends the shrimp, shoves a skewer, like basically, if the shrimp had a backbone, like right underneath its backbone, right? And then just lifts the skewer up and the vein comes right out with the skewer, boom, and the shrimp. You still have uh you still cut through. No, no, no, no.
Just one tiny skewer mark at one location in the shrimp. And you're basically like, it's like uh how to explain this. It's like, imagine if you were to bend me over and shove a skewer under my spine. Family show. Right.
What? Shove a skewer onto my spine, as uh as Arnold would say, which is what he said. Whose spine do you say is gonna rip out what movie was that? I don't know. It's probably like total recall.
Uh no, running man, I think. Anyway. I think you said that about Trump, too. So you shove the uh you shove the oh my god, so uh Dax accidentally said these words, Donald Schwarzenegger. So now I have a that mashup in my head now.
Anyway, so you shove the skewer under my spine, and then you lift it out. So my body stays there, but imagine the spine just like brr comes out. On the skewer on the skewer, you can't. And all you have is that tiny hole that my spine has come out. Why does it latch onto the skewer?
Because where else is it gonna do? It's stronger than the tissue. And so it just comes out. Because when you do the cut down the back method on the shrimp, like invariably you cut the vein, so you get part of the vein out, but then you even if the vein a lot of shrimp come clean now, so there's not a lot in the vein, but the vein is there anyway, and it's kind of unpleasant. I got shrimp at a place in Brooklyn, like uh like a barbecue place on the water, and it had all the veins in it, all the scoop shoots.
And I went back and I was like, Do you can you get you know, this is kind of gross. And the guy was like, Yeah, we're not that kind of place that takes them out. And I was like, But are you that kind of place that charges me money? Right. Here's the thing.
Like, they should just invest the extra money then in the pre-cleaned Ike IQ uh, you know, individually quick frozen IQF stuff. Anyway, so should we should we take a break and come back with some more cooking issues? Yeah, let's do that. All right. This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the immersion circulator for Sous Vide by Chef Steps.
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So uh time to do a little more business, right? Right, Dave? You got it. We're gonna do some business, some honoress pantry business. Wait, we're doing more?
Grease those palms. Yeah, man. Well, first of all, we like the modernist pantry people. Yeah. Yeah.
But I'm gonna read this one in normal voice. I'm not gonna do uh because I haven't actually read it in advance, so I don't know whether if I can maintain full Sunday, Sunday, Sunday monster truck voice for the entire thing. I mean, I pr I know I can do it, but like I have I mean, like, don't challenge me people, but I know I can. But uh I just don't know whether I whether it merits like that style of voice or whether it wants a more mellow voice because I have no idea what I'm about to read. Yep.
Not that I not that I don't support entirely what I'm about to read. Sure. Just I have no idea what it is. Okay. Um Modernist Pantry was created by food lovers and cooking issues fans just like you.
Janie, Chris, and the modernist pantry family share your passion for experimentation and have everything you need to make culinary magic happen in your own kitchen. Professional chef, home cook, food enthusiast, no matter your skill or experience, Modernist Pantry has something for you. They make it easy to get the ingredients and tools you need and can't find anywhere else, so that you can spend less time hunting and gathering and more time creating memorable dishes and culinary experiences. Visit modernist pantry.com today to discover why cooking issues listeners call modernist pantry the cook's secret weapon. Be sure to check out their new kitchen alchemy blog at blog.modernistpantry.com for free recipes, tips, and tricks.
And don't forget to follow Modernist Pantry on social media to keep up with what is new and exciting in the world of culinary ingredients and tools. Hey, Dave, can you believe I read that whole damn thing, No Flubs? That was amazing. What up? I should do that for a living, man.
Come on, people. I heard the Sunday, Sunday, Sunday creep in there just a little bit. I can't help it. It's like, you know, when you grow up and you hear that commercial over and over again. It's a part of you.
It's a part of me. Do you know that I was never taken as a child? I'm gonna give my poor little, you know, I was never taken to a monster truck rally as a child. I had to wait until I went to college to go to a monster truck rally. Oh no.
I wanted to mention that Modernist Pantry now carries our screens for internationals, especially Canadians. And uh our uh callers. Adapters. Is that your new impolite term for people? Internationals.
You internationals. And our Sears all adapters for when you over tighten. And the cocktail cube they have now. Yeah. Yeah.
So almost a full service dealer. Yeah. By the way, spins all people. We're still uh waiting to get back in touch with China's still not back online, people. Our factories in China are not back online until next week.
Uh at which point we will um reconvene with them. Uh at which point we will uh get back together with those guys and figure out exactly uh what the current uh estimates are on chip dates, and we'll get back to you guys. But looking looking pretty good, right? Not looking bad. No, which is the new looking good.
It's the German. Yeah, yeah. Not looking bad. Looks not bad. Um, dear Dave, Nastasia.
Oh, this is old school. Oh, still wish like Jack and Dave. So still wishing Jack love. Wishing you, Dave love, but also wishing Jackie Molecules love. And he's you know, I miss Jackie Molecules.
You know what, Dave? He said he was gonna come visit us. You know what he hasn't done? Come visit. He hasn't come visit.
He's full of lies. Like Peter Kim. He's chilling in Washington, D.C. Like Peter Peter Kim is Peter Kim, known liar. Peter Kim.
So mean. The guy who runs the Museum of Fruit and Drink. It's not a known liar. Alternative Facts. Known liar.
Uh he invented alternative facts. First of all. Crazy. Known liar. How?
How? When was the last time he told the truth about anything? I love the man. I'm just kidding. He's not an you guys don't know the lies he tells, so he's not a known liar.
Anyway, uh, I'm a huge fan of the show and regularly apply things discussed here in my cooking. Many thanks. Uh Dave, I also want to give a shout out to Liquid Intelligence, looking forward to your next book. I'm not looking forward to this writing process, I tell you what. We were at a ramen shop, and you were and in with all these ramen masters, and Peter said, I make ramen at home sometimes, and you said, You're a known liar.
He's like, well. He is so mean. Yeah, because he doesn't make ramen at home. Unless by ramen, you mean like couple of noodles or whatever. The man well come on, please.
Love Peter. So mean. Peter's a good cook. Yes. Yeah.
Um. My question is about chicken and other meats in the most people find them disgusting if undercooked categories, such as pork. My wife is of Haitian descent and has a strong food tradition around proper preparation of these meats. A key element of the preparation is an extensive process of washing the meat uh before cooking to remove an unpleasant, in quotes, make you gag flavor. Uh the washing process consists of the following steps.
Thoroughly wash all exposed surfaces of the meat under the faucet. Optionally, pour a kettle of boiling water over the chicken. Three, scrub the surface extensively with lime or vinegar and rinse under the faucet. Repeat this step for a minimum of three acid wash rich cycles. Now I have the genes in my head.
Ashid wash jeans. They're not coming back. Please tell me they're not coming back. I've seen them on people here. Really?
Yeah. I don't like acid wash jeans. No. Bad. Oh my the color of my jeans today is it's just faded.
It's not acid wash. Whatever. Do you believe in putting lemon juice in your hair? No. I thought all people in California put lemon juice in their hair.
I tried when I was little. Yeah? Did it work? Mm-mm. Uh okay.
Uh three uh wash rinse cycles. Marinate the meat in an acidic marinade. What about idiots who say marinade? Mm-hmm. Weirdos.
Poor guy. Hanging up his cape to dry. All right, no, no, no. Before I get to the question, I'm sorry. Listen.
So yesterday I'm looking up brioche recipes because I'm about to go on a brioche cake at home. It's not for the show or anything. I'm going on a brioche cake. You don't like brioche, Nastasia? It's fine.
Why are you doing this? I can't talk about it. Listen, I can't talk about it. But listen, so like, so Dax looks at the screen and goes, Brioche. And I was like, yeah, Dax.
Freaking Briachi. That's good. It's classic, right? Brioche. Wait, why can't you talk about it?
Because it's a freaking secret. Are you coming up with a new technique? Uh maybe. Maybe I'm coming up with a new technique. Are you ashamed?
I'm not, I'm not ashamed. If it works, I'm so jacked about it that I want to wait until you'll tell everyone, and then someone else will take it on the big announcement coming. I want to wait until the new bar opens, and then you will see. Brioche. Sounds like like like uh like that's something that Carlo would make.
Yeah. Carlo Briochi. Right? I think I went to school with that guy. Yeah, Carlo Briacci.
Yeah. Um, repeat this step for a minimum of three acid wash. Remember, we're talking about Haitian meat washing people. Chicken, and I guess also pork. Marinate the meat in an acidic marinade for uh for at least overnight.
Parsley is also a key element of the marinade to remove the unpleasant flavor. Other ingredients typically include green pepper, onion, garlic, thyme, bullion cube, magi, and maybe a scotch bonnet pepper. Well, that's gonna ride over the top of every freaking thing. You rub a Scotch bonnet pepper into that, and it's good night. Uh I mean, I like Scotch bonnet, but that stuff is some strong.
Uh you don't do you ever wipe one of those things into your eye by mistake? Really? I would think you would. You're the kind of person, but you don't like working with it that much. So you don't work with them that often.
I don't work. Do you work with chili peppers a lot at all? No. No? Alright.
Uh however, from what I can tell, it is the lime and parsley that is supposed to be removing the off flavor while the other ingredients are primarily for flavor addition. The whole washing process takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes to complete properly before the marinade step. My problem is I do not have any idea what's going on here. In gest I call the off flavor gamma rays because it's a total mystery to me. I can't identify it or tell if it is present.
I don't know if the wash is effective in removing it, and if so, uh, I don't know when I've washed sufficiently to have removed the last of the gamma rays. I have frequently followed the wash steps and been told that the off flavor is still there. I initially thought that it was just a placebo effect, and she was being skeptical that I actually wash the chicken because I can be admittedly stubborn, especially in the kitchen. Can't we all be, my friend? Uh however, even when she prepares the chicken herself, sometimes she tastes it and determines that the flavor is still present.
Uh now for some additional confusion. We frequently eat chicken at restaurants, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Spanish, Mexican, etc., and she will enjoy the chicken and detect no off-flavor with the assumption that they too are washing the chicken. They are not. They are definitely not. They are definitely not washing the chicken.
They may marinate the chicken, but uh I've never seen anyone in a restaurant go through this rigmarole uh with the multiple steps and the boiling and all this other stuff. Have you? No. Never. Never.
Um brining, marinating. Yes. Uh this incredible like all washing step. No. Uh I don't believe any of these restaurants are using the washing process, but don't know for sure.
I pretty much can tell you for sure they are not. Uh this leaves me in a difficult spot. The off-flavor seems to be a real thing, but I don't know what I'm looking for. And it seems to be more uh more than a preference for a specific marinade flavor since it crosses cuisines. Also, the wash process is really time consuming and sometimes ineffective, not to mention that it results in all chicken tasting Haitian styled.
Well, this is delicious, Haitian styled. Well, this is delicious. I also want to be able to make other styles. And the restaurants are somehow getting it right. Do they have special chicken?
I'm swinging in the dark here. I need some knowledge. Uh, have you ever run into anything like this? What's the deal? Thanks, Todd.
Okay, well, um, well, Todd, I don't know specifically what this uh off flavor is, but I did some research uh on the uh internet, and there is a one board I looked at where like a bunch of uh uh, you know, people, Caribbean people were like, uh, if I like would literally say things like, I saw this guy cooking his chicken and he didn't do the proper washing step like I was taught by my parents, and so I just wouldn't eat it. I wouldn't eat it at all. There's a very, very strong um kind of sanitary bias, right? So there might be a flavor bias, right? There might actually be something flavor-wise going on here, but there is definitely an extreme sanitary bias.
And if you ever want to like know that those biases are real, right, then just uh go take a look, go try to watch a YouTube video of someone butchering fish where they discovered tapeworms and other parasites on the inside of a fish, and then go try to tuck into a fish filet. It's hard because you have an extreme sanitary bias about this. So, like I'm wondering whether the times that your wife has prepared the chicken and it still had the off flavor, whether or not that chicken was maybe on the edge or not. Now, another thing I noticed by looking at uh a lot of the boards is that uh along with the washing that you uh prescribe, and by the way, the boiling water on a lot of these things are things that are meant to do several things. The acid is going to um neutralize uh uh some of the off aromas that develop on the surface of uh meats.
Um the pH may have some sort of uh um antimicrobial effect. Um it's unclear to me whether it would over such a short period of time, and you're gonna marinate it in an acidic environment anyway, so I don't know how important it is there. But there's an extreme uh dislike of sliminess, and so meats like chicken, even when they're not even when they're fresh, right, can have kind of a sliminess to them, and there seems to be a very intense dislike for that sliminess. And also, by the way, if you look at fat, so a lot of the people like are very careful in getting rid of any fat on the ex on the uh external part of uh chicken thighs and the what's returned uh termed as the kind of heel end or the fatty looking end of the drumstick. So it's possible that um some of the off-flavor is actually chicken fat flavor, perhaps uh maybe on the edge or edge or rancid or over overdone or you know, uh over chick or you know, kind of gone chicken fat flavor, or a dislike of that chicken fat flavor in its entirety because there was a huge uh amount of like uh verbiage spent on the websites about getting rid of fat.
Um the other thing is that the acidity uh will definitely help wash off the kind of natural any kind of natural slimy. Now the chickens, like I say, have a natural kind of um feeling to them, but also as bacteria multiply over time, uh they create their own kind of mucus and slime, which is disgusting and terrible. So um, and especially if chickens have been packaged in a bunch of goop. So a lot of chickens are uh I buy I tend to buy air-cooled chickens. Um they tend to not be as goopy slimy, but if you get the normal ones that are chilled in big ice buckets and pack together, they're giving up uh fluid over time that's being leached out of the meat.
That fluid has uh proteins in it, uh, so they have a viscosity that's kind of gross and they look gross. And plus in confinement, there is bacteria, even not spoilage bacteria, but bacteria that can grow, it can make kind of off aromas, things are called, even in vacuum packs are called in quotes, it's a gross term, confinement aroma that tends to kind of go away. And so scrubbing that with um with lime uh would probably help alleviate some of the aromas that are present, uh, you know, neutrali you know, neutralize them. And then B might have some bacteriostatic and also like just help to like w wash the thing off. The boiling water over it uh is not going to probably overcook it because it's there for a short amount of time, but it will kill the surface uh bacteria, and in fact has been in many cultures, including ancient uh Roman, was uh a standard cook step in something like a bird um to um as as an initial as an initial cook before finished roast or whatever else.
Um so yeah, so there might be an effect there. Now I am currently reevaluating my um my knowledge and ideas of uh what happens to meat during marination and during salting. So uh I can't really say what the specific effects are over short periods of time. I doubt the effects are very great over short periods of time. But I am like I say, reassessing um I'm reassessing my my views uh on the subject.
So a lot of people don't like, and I might have talked about this, a lot of people think that marination is useless because it doesn't penetrate very far into the meat. But in fact, a lot of the aromas that are there in cooking, which are very important um to how whether you enjoy the meat, are really only present at the surface, and the composition of a marinade, specifically its pH level, but also other precursors that are in the marinade, can very much affect the volatiles that you get when you're cooking them at higher temperatures. So marinade, even if they are only at the surface, can do a lot of uh can change uh a lot. And I'm currently trying to reassess my own view on this. This is what I said this kind of uh you know, maybe a month or two ago, that I think the only way to really get better is to kind of reassess all of your core ideas from the beginning.
Another thing that I'm reassessing is uh is trying to figure out how actually tenderization works. So you know, um, because when you think about uh when you think about meat, uh you know it's always you know said, oh, collagen, it's collagen that causes meat uh to be tough and it's rendering collagen during long cooking into gelatin that causes it to be um you know tender again. But I've just recently started to investigate kind of all of the effects of what what tenderizing really means. Turns out, uh I mean what time is it, Dave? Anyway, one o'clock.
Oh, so I can't get into it now. But but you know, maybe if someone asks me about it, we can get into uh, you know, intramuscular connective tissue and um specifically the paramecium, which is a uh um it's not called paramecium, it just went out of my head. The the muscle fibers are grouped into bundles, and it's the collagen that surrounds those bundles that tend to buy most of the research. That's what determines the texture of the meat. And so then the question is is that can that part be specifically uh changed or the eating properties of it be changed via marinade via salt treatment?
And and and I'll leave you with this on the way out. So uh is the fact that I have very specific ideas about when to salt meat and when not to salt meat based on the texture of it. Is it radically dependent on the amount of connective tissue and the type of connective tissue present in the meat beforehand? Answer maybe. If you want to know more, ask me questions, cooking issues.
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