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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. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network. We're a member supported food radio network, broadcasting over 35 weekly shows live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Join our hosts as they lead you through the world of craft brewing, behind the scenes of the restaurant industry, inside the battle over school food, and beyond.
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 pre-recorded from the Manchester Hilton here in beautiful San Diego. Join this to Hyatt. Where are we?
The Hyatt. So hello. Are they giving us promotion is promotional consideration being provided for by the not in this case? So we're we're paying straight boat. So I'm a demarriad.
We're stealing the space, to be honest. I can be anywhere. I am uh, you know, like you know, pimp out the place of your choice because I have no feelings one way or the other for them. Oh, I will say this though. We are at a a grand hypoth, not at a park hyatt, which, you know, if you've been at a park hyatt, you're never gotta, you know, that's it.
That's all you gotta. So I am not even though I am in the great state of California, uh, I am not joined, as usual, by Nastasia the Hammer Lopez because she's in New York where she belongs. I, in fact, uh am out b uh uh because Prinot Ricard is hosting a series of events called uh Bacon, which stands for uh what does it stand for? Bartender Advocacy Convention. Bartender Advocacy Convention.
So don't bother calling your questions in to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Don't bother calling because this is pre-recorded. But I am joined today with uh uh you know, oftentime guest, uh evil cocktail overlord Don Lee. How are you doing, Don?
I thought I was the benevolent cocktail overlord now. Now that we're partners, I'm supposed to switch you to benevolent, huh? That's what I said before. Yeah. Do you prefer to be benevolent or do you uh the best evil is the secret evil, not the overt evil.
So what's your like what's your favorite, like what do you mean? Like who's secretly evil? Yoda? The devil. The devil's not secretly evil.
The devil is evil. But yeah, but the devil's convinced you that there is no devil, which is the secret evil. What? Since when did the devil convince you there was no devil? Listen, how many people believe that there is an actual devil?
The Charlie Daniels band? Yeah, most people don't believe there's a devil, though. Uh like some of the greatest stuff is all devil bait. Look, like you have uh uh Paradise Lost, Milton. That's true.
Devil, best characters. I see devil though. Devil. Charlie Daniels band. Yeah.
What do you guys think? But we also have in the, it's not in the studio, it's in the hotel room, but we also have in the hotel room with us today, Kevin Den. How are you doing? Hello. So uh I knew Kevin first when he was the uh bartender, head bartender, beverage director.
I don't know. What was your title over there? All those at one point or another? At uh WD50 restaurant. And uh by the way, we are kind of brothers in the having the restaurant shut down for losing the space kind of a situation.
Slightly different because your crew got uh handsomely paid and they knocked the building down, whereas I was just like, Yeah, you can't have the space anymore. That's what they told me. They're like, eh, I want that space back. But you know, similar kind of a situation. Yeah, I don't know how handsome it was, but they got paid something.
I'm not saying I'm just saying it's like they got paid something. They didn't they weren't like it's over. It's a very large building now, it's really weird. Yeah, you know, when I walked past, so WD50 was uh my brother-in-law Wiley Dufrein, and I have uh do's donuts, new donut shop out there in Williamsburg. Um is that really Williamsburg or is it like pseudo Williamsburg?
It's Williamsburg, yeah. It's prime Williamsburg. Prime Williamsburg, yeah. But how close is it to Sam Mason's uh ice cream shop? Eight blocks.
So close. Yes, and twelve. It's right around the corner from Brooklyn Brewery. It's the back of Brooklyn Brewery, if you know where that is. I know where Brooklyn did as Brooklyn Brewery moved.
I used to work at an art studio on that on the block where Brooklyn was back in the day. Back in the day, I think I've said this. I've said this on the on the radio show before, but when I used to work out there, there was a Mr. Softy ice cream truck, which is like the ice cream truck of the of New York, you know, the Mr. Softy.
But uh this one had only like two or three of the notes worked, and they didn't sell any ice cream, they just went around on the streets selling drugs, and it only like two or two or three of the you know, music things worked. So it was like burn, burn, bing, burn. Like traveling around in uh Williamsburg. It was pretty sweet. It was nice.
Was that packable's canon you were just doing? Uh no, it was like uh I was trying to remove all the notes from beep from Turkey and the Straw. Like the classic ice cream song is Turkey and the Straw. So anyway, so Kevin Denton was uh at uh WD-50 and also at uh Alder, right? Sure was and then went uh straight from there to your current job, and that I'm gonna let you say what the title is.
Oh, are you gonna make me? Yeah. I'm the national mixologist. Right. At Pernot Ricard.
Right. So Perno. So for those of you that don't know, this actually might be interesting. I wish we could have callers in because this is kind of a fascinating job. So like bartending is in general, in general, like a young person's kind of game in the in the modern world, right?
So you, you know, you work kind of these uh like kind of long crazy hours. You tend to, yeah, I'm not gonna say you tend to drink a lot, but you tend to drink a lot. Um a lot of people burn out, go do something else. But the kind of like the viable career paths after that, you can go be um, you can go try to open a bar, you can be a brand ambassador, you can go kind of do your job is a little more rare, right? It doesn't come come up as often.
So why don't you describe kind of what you do? So it's um I would say about 30% of the job is developing the drink strategies for all our different brands in our portfolio. So every year they have a plan for how they want to market their spirit, and uh I come up with recipes or ways of drinking that product that they're gonna highlight that year. Uh so you kind of follow the trends and see what people are into. Uh, you know, a couple years ago, the Moscow mule became like the thing that everybody wanted to glom on.
Bizarre. Was that your fault? Who did that? That wasn't me, but uh there's backlash now. You know, there's mule backlash.
Really? I just started making mules. I literally just started making mules like last like last month. They're not Moscow mules, but you know, I started making like you know different kinds of mules. So what was the backbone?
Typically a poorly made drink. So for those of you that don't know, it's uh it's uh like uh well a vodka would be vodka and ginger beer, and what else is in that lime lime, right? In in a in a copper cup, if you have the money for it, right? Or some sort of metal cup. A mug.
Yeah. In some sort of a mug kind of a situation. Cocktail King would sell these mugs. Yeah, we would. The original mugs were sold by the Smyrnax Corporation, correct?
Uh the original mugs were actually made uh in-house by the Cock and Bull Tavern in Los Angeles. Uh and so it was their house drink, and they made this mug and uh a lot of people stole it. And eventually uh a bunch of uh liquor companies, including Spirinoff, decided to use it as a promotional item. So yes, in what the 60s? What are we talking about?
50s 60s. Do I look like Dave Wondershire? I'm the science guy. Yeah, I think it was the 60s. 60s.
So then uh what's your favorite, by the way? What's your favorite like go out in New York? You like the gingin mule, like Pegu's gingin mule they've had on the menu forever. You like that drink? Yeah, ging in mule, I like that.
And has the old uh, you know, Kente used to do the the uh two pieces of ginger with the skewer resting on the glass as his thing. Yeah, I like candy ginger, I like that. But the mule often horribly made drink, right? Like, how often do you have it out and you're like, wow, that's a well-made drink? Well, it I think the whole thing hinges on the acidity, right?
Because the ginger beer is typically a little sweet, unless you get the right one, it doesn't have that ginger bite that you're after. So unless they're putting fresh lime juice in it, you're kind of losing uh what makes it exciting to drink. You know, it's kind of a structureless nightmare scenario. It's like a dark and stormy, you know, if you just have the rum and the ginger beer, it's like, what is it's missing? Oh, acid.
Right. But it's also like the lime wedge, right? It's like the JGL. You gotta have that. You gotta have the L.
Yeah. J G L. Oh. Oh, man, you guys are just pushing for no products like the end of the freaking world is coming. These people, let me tell you something about liquor people, people.
For those of you that aren't actually in this business, like these are for a bunch of crazy reprobates, they are the most on message people like on earth. Like, I have spent my whole life kind of like needling, not my whole life, like professional life, needling like liquor people. Like, okay, so who used to own, can I even say this? Who used to own, they don't make it anymore, Nivon. Who used to make this?
It was a Grand Marnier. Grandmarnier owned that. So, like, I was mercilessly making fun of the name. I was doing a demo for them at uh the French Culinary Institute. And it was a French guy that actually showed up, you know, repping the product.
This was before they reformulated. This is when they first came out. Well, I'm not gonna say it tasted like poison, but like, you know, you draw your own conclusions. I won't the words it tasted like poison won't come out of my mouth. But the original formulation, like, I'm not gonna say I was a giant fan either.
You guys, did you have it? Uh it was a vanilla liqueur, yeah. I remember having it a long time ago. And they did a pretty heavy push on it. You know, they got some pretty good people behind it.
Uh, I think Will Goldfarb was doing some work for him anyway. They did a uh demonstration at that French culinary, and uh I did it, and the French guy was there, and he, you know, no one knew me from Adam, anyone at that point in my life. And so I would only call it Navin. Like I would only like in all the backstage and everything, call it Navin, Navin. And he's like, he's like, it's no fun.
And I was like, come on, man. I know it's Navin. I'm doing it, but like during the demo, I didn't mess him over. But like liquor people don't have a sense of humor about their product. True?
I don't know about that. I think that um if you're new to it or over everybody is overly precious about some things, you know, and they don't they take certain things really seriously. I would say there's a there's plenty of people, particularly people that came up on the operation side that worked in bars, that then they make the jump over to work for brands that you know have a sense of humor about what the what they do and about you know selling out, all those other things that go along with it. And then there's you know, brand owners and people like that that maybe you know, they're sinking a lot of dough into these things, so they take it pretty seriously. Empathy, you know, we gotta have a little empathy.
I have I'm um well, I'm not really empathy. Yeah, I'm not an empathy. No one's really accused me of like being Mr. Empathy. Here's another thing.
So let me let me just stir up a can of worms because Kevin, you don't mind. So Kevin doesn't mind. That's like uh so here's the thing, right? You have a whole group of people coming into the liquor industry, and so hey, I apologize. A lot of we're at a liquor conference, and I got liquor people here, so we're gonna be talking about the liquor business a little bit.
Um so there seems to be kind of two classes of people that kind of go into this business on the liquor side, and this is something I think that again that hopefully the listeners find interesting, but they're you know, probably not exp unless they're in the business, aren't exposed to how this works. Even young bartenders, I don't think really know how this crap works. You have two major classes of people. You have the people who actually did the job and love product and go, you know, love the bar world and love the people and go into it. These are people like who have been doing it for a number of years and you know, who are now moving in into that world.
And then you have the marketing people who just came out of school and they could be selling, they could be selling cars, they could be selling boots, toilet paper, toothbrushes, yeah, whatever. So how do you deal with those people? Honestly, the problem isn't even necessarily they're like right out of college, this is their first job and their background is you know, school marketing. A lot of times the executives and the higher-ups, they're people who also came out of like the packaging industry as well. They're, you know, worked for Johnson and Johnson, a family company, uh, you know, uh as an executive there, and now they're running the liquor business.
So there is a huge disconnect uh, you know, from the bottom to the top, not only on the marketing side, but just on kind of in in the corporate executive side as well. I think that's exactly right. And there's certainly a frustration that is bred out of like spirits unlike almost anything else, like you don't go in and say, um, you know, give me this brand ice cream. You know, you don't call your ice cream brand at a place. You don't call a brand most places, you know, maybe when you're buying a car, but that's like a big purchase that happens infrequently.
Whereas people drinking happens with relative frequency, and then the fact that you call out different brands, that you have allegiances to these brands, um makes it sort of a weird, unique animal. And I think if you grew up working in a bar and you love certain brands and you love what sort of they're about, like you like their story, you like the people that are surrounding it, um, then you have this like affinity towards it. Um so then if someone is coming in and telling you whatever, it could be it's a cog, it's a whatever, you know, it's like, well, no, it's not. You know, we spent all this time really falling in love with your brand and and telling its story when I was working behind the bar. Like, why don't you get that this is something more than just uh a commodity?
Right, but you also I get the impression that the people who come out of the actual bar world have more of an appreciation for kind of like how to take care of people. Like I can't tell you how many bar people I've spoken to who have either become brand ambassadors or working on corporate side, you know, you know, other than ambassadors like in your kind of position, who just get like virulently angry at people who don't kind of understand how the flow of information or how the how the kind of job works, and it's to the detriment of the what's weird is it's to the detriment of the industry and the product, but also so much freaking money is spent in such weird ways. The weirdest ways. I mean, it's just crazy, right? Yeah, I mean people make decisions based on um surveys and studies and marketing assessments the same way like we conduct presidential polls.
Like you're calling someone on a landline at 10 o'clock in the morning, like you're gonna get crazy people, you know, the responses that you're receiving for these studies are not necessarily skewed towards the actual consumer. And I think that maybe that is like laziness on the part of the people that are conducting the surveys and you know, trying to get re mine real data about how people use their products. Maybe it's maybe there aren't good tools for figuring out that information, but you know, it is I think bartenders are a wealth of information. You know, they're the ones sitting behind that invisible line every night, like eavesdropping on everybody and getting a uh you know, a sense for what people like and what they don't like. You can spot the trends, you can see what you know what the masses are drinking, and uh I think Spirits brands try to talk to bartenders, but maybe they don't talk to enough bartenders.
Right. And you also mean like uh, you know, again, hopefully you don't mind talking about this crap, but like you deal on with both like kind of like the higher-end cocktail bars and also like QSR restaurants, like uh, you know, similar in style to Applebee's, let's say. I deal directly with Applebee's. I didn't want to call it out because I didn't know whether you're allowed to say it, but it's like you know, you're dealing with these very kind of different levels. So, what's that like all of a sudden having because you know you spent the entire you're you're you know, for years, the years that I've known you, you know, you've dealt almost exclusively with a very like high end slice of the cocktail world.
And then all of a sudden you're like, boom, now you're dealing still dealing with that slice, but now you're also dealing with Applebee's. What's that like? Uh it's the most challenging and rewarding part because I think that when it's blue skies, when you're creating drinks with zero restrictions, which Wiley was really great about sort of letting me do whatever I wanted creatively, um, that is, you know, in some ways limiting, you know, like when you have constraints, when you have uh, you know, a certain cost that it has to come in because you know, these places sell their drinks very inexpensively. Um you have a set number of ingredients that you can use because if they have thousands of locations, you know, the supply chain alone for getting stuff is difficult. So you have a lot of constraints, and then it's you know, it's all little uh puzzles, right?
You know, it's like I've got X, Y, and Z. I have to create something at this price that hits, you know, these touch points that people are into. You know, what does someone in Kansas City want that you know, someone all in Atlanta wants that someone, you know, you're really trying to hit a common denominator with a broad slice of different types of people. So I don't really think of it as dumbing down as much as it is like try to be 90% comfortable and maybe like 10% aspirational. Like try to pull people that maybe don't get exposed to high-end cocktail bars, like try to bring them up a little bit through quirky ingredients or different ways of doing drinks.
Um it's not uh it's not a bad thing to get out of the like ivory tower and see what the the masses are into, you know. And like uh I just did a big project with a a large national chain that everybody, all the listeners would know. Um, and working with their bartenders, like the age range was 21 to 63. Like one uh participant in this training had uh three of her kids that worked at the same restaurant that she did. So, like you have these multi-generational, like in smaller communities, like it's pretty wild to think about that.
You're creating something that then gets disseminated to the four corners of the globe, and you want to make sure that it's cool and then it's quality. Has to be bulletproof too, though, right? Totally bulletproof. Because there if there's a will, there is a way to screw these things up six ways to Sunday. Like they just butcher stuff sometimes.
At every minute in my life, I learn how easy it is to have someone else screw up your idea. Yeah. Every second of my life I learn a little bit more how easy it is to have someone screw up your idea. So now, correct me if I'm wrong, this is how it works, right? So let's just say Applebee's because it's coming to my head.
Applebee's, right? They have X number of slots on their menus for drinks, right? So you're there, you're on Prono Ricard side. Let's say Prono Ricard is like they own beef eater, for those of you, right? They own beef feeder, that's like the gym that they own.
And so you're going in there with uh your beef eater thing, someone from Diagio, Diagio owns Tankere. So Diaggio is coming in, you're coming in, and you're each trying to sell this new recipe to Applebee's, so that they'll be like there you sell them on the recipe, right? For someone, I'm assuming someone like Applebee's you're selling them on a recipe idea, right? On a concept and a story that they can push out on their menus in a very easy way to execute. So when someone pulls the trigger on the beef eater drink instead of on the tank array drink for something like that, like how much quantity am I talking here?
Like how many cases is that? I mean, it it it all depends on how popular the drink is, but if you have to keep something in stock because it's on your menu, and if you have a say there's a thousand locations, um, you know, there's a thousand bottles that you have to purchase right there, and no one's buying a single bottle at a chain, so there's a thousand cases. So without really even selling a drink, that's already a thousand cases. So it's a big whoopty deal. It's uh it's a big deal.
And if you get something, if you get a drink on the menu that's popular, like uh I remember when I was at Alder and I had a a drink named after Dr. Dave, uh, who is a uh infamous lower east side uh medic that would take care of uh people in food and beverage. Um when I tallied that we had sold uh 10,000 Dr. Dave script pads, I thought that was a huge deal. And then I got a drink on a menu at a big national chain, and that happened in like a month, you know.
So that sort of stuff. The scale is pretty crazy once you start digging into it. That's gotta be rewarding, huh? Super rewarding. All right, now here's another one.
This is a tough side. So, and you again you've been on both sides, obviously, because you started in the bar world. There's the way that the bar, the way that the liquor business works is the liquor business hires like nice, friendly people that other people like, right? So that you will hang you, being you one of these people, will hang out with the people who are purchasing liquor. We then, because we like you, when we're coming up with another spec, or if we've done an uh event with you, you force us to come up with a spec for the event, so now we have a spec with that product, we use that product, that seeps down, and it's all done on this kind of friendship basis, but it ends up actually being a big monetary benefit for the company, not that the bartenders who are using the product are losing.
And I always kind of think like, is this kind of okay or is this weird? Do you know what I mean? I know what you mean. Um I didn't really do much with brands when I was a bartender. I kind of wanted to be agnostic so I could do whatever I wanted and not be beholden to anybody.
Um that said, I think that business has generally been run off of relationships. And just because it's a liquor company that's you know hiring you to do events and coming into your bar and spending money, like I don't know that that's any different than the way business is run generally. Um it's certainly not quid pro quo. Um, but if you I would I would venture to guess that if you like the people that work for a company, you're more likely to utilize their stuff, be it shampoo or vodka or toilet paper, whatever, like getting personable people. Toilet paper I buy strictly based on the product.
Has nothing to do with the people. It's like it's just between me, the paper, and my behind. That's it. That's it. Yeah, does it does it take care of the cheeks?
That's why you although that's you know, that's actually a freaking lie. My my wife's grandpa used to work for the Scott Paper Corporation, and so I buy freaking Scott. Wow. How about a seventh generation? You know, you're thinking seven generations ahead.
You're not thinking of the people you're buying from, but the future. Come on. You want to stuff that's gonna be good to the environment. Okay, okay, but where what's your thoughts on paper? Do you know that every time you save a tree, you hurt a farmer?
It's not like it's not like your toilet paper is being produced from the Amazonian rainforest. You know what I mean? Like there is some dude in or do that, there's some woman in Oregon with like growing like hair plug trees, you know, like in those, you've you've driven past them, right? And they're coming up, and then they pulp those suckers and they make paper. So as long as the toilet paper is produced in a way that doesn't have it, paper used to be an environmental nightmare from a waste stream perspective, right?
But if this person, if you know, she wants to have a farm and she wants to grow trees so that I may wipe my butt, like you know, and I have the money to buy the tree product to wipe my butt, like what's so bad about that? Well, if you uh if you really like that woman that's got that farm, you're gonna go with her stuff, right? If I knew who it was, yeah. I mean there's not a lot of transparency in the toilet paper industry. No, pulp is pretty much commodified.
It's like you know, you know, you don't care who now now you do buy, you do buy, so you know, Miley Carpenter runs the Food Network magazine, badass. My he my sister-in-law, my wife's sister, she is like sh she is a has very specific paper towels that she likes. She they don't pay her or anything, but she only uses uh what's the brand name? Viva. Oh really?
Yeah. Interesting. She's a Viva woman with her paper towels, finds them to be a superior quality paper towel. They're a really good paper towel. Yeah.
I like a bounty. You're a bounty paper towel person? Why? Yeah, it's very absorbent. What's their motto?
The quicker picker upper? It is. Can you believe that? I don't know how quick it is, but it definitely picks it up. I don't know that I need my paper towels to be luxurious.
Although I do detest, for instance, on the TV when they're marketing a paper towel, they're like, look, I can use Windex and then I can uh I can wipe it up, I can wring it out and use it again. Nobody does this. Nobody does that. Nobody does this. No.
It's like if I'm gonna use it. Clearly did not grow up in an immigrant household. Because yes, totally ring up paper towel and reuse paper towels all the time. Well, if you're gonna reuse the towel, then you use a cloth towel, use a bar towel. It depends on the job.
But paper towels, definitely reused all the time growing up. What? For real. Yeah, for real. In California.
In California. And and to this day, like I don't always reuse paper towels, but depending on what I'm on what I'm washing, if I'm using a paper towel, I will often like rinse it, wring it out, and then like continue to clean with it. That's fair. I mean, I I cook a ton and I just keep it a paper towel around, use that like my side towel, and it'll be dirty, and then you it gets multiple uses. I wouldn't wash it and hang it up or I wouldn't dry it.
No, clearly not. Look, if it's a quick wipe, I'm using like I'm using a bar towel, a kitchen towel, and like that stays with me like the entire time, which is why like when my kids go to wipe something off the floor with one of the kitchen does like you know what I mean? And then they try to put it back up on the counter. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, oh my god.
You know what I mean? Yeah. Don't you hate that? Like, once the towel hits the floor, it's on the floor. I don't give a five-second roll to those suckers.
You don't you don't have a little red bucket in your kitchen and you put it in. I don't do the sanitizer bucket. Uh you do the sanitizer bucket? No. No one does a sanitizer bucket.
I would venture to guess a lot of. But you Wiley doesn't even do sanitizer bucket at home, and he's a freak. Yeah. But anyway, my point being that if I if there's a possibility that it's something that I'm not gonna mind, like I bust out the paper towels when something horrible has happened. You know what I mean?
Like I'm picking up glass. There's a spill of blue liquid. Yeah, which is always the case in a paper downbreaker. Like what I do is someone brings me blue curtaus as like, you know, here, thank you for inviting me to your house. I smack it onto the floor.
I do like a DeKembi Matumbo, nothing my house, bam! I smash it on the floor, and then all that glass and blue liquid is being soaked up in my paper towel, and that's how it goes. And you want the quicker picker upper for that? Yeah. I don't know.
You don't do the cat litter like for like oil spills, and then you just sweep it. Yeah, the garage, you know, in the shop. You live in a garage. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, you know, in a shop where you got oil spills, you got you got the cat litter. I'm for the cat litter.
So you you like that as opposed to like the more expensive, like uh spill absorbing things. Cat litter, that's a good way to get it. And then where do you dispose of it? Do you take it to the dump like a real person or do you throw it in the trash like a butt hit? No, you you clearly put it with the oily rags, which didn't go like you know, separate hazardous pickup.
Come on. Hazardous pickup. We don't have hazardous pickup. Everything's hazardous. Well, what kind of shop are you running here?
Look, we have like where I am in Connecticut, when I'm in Connecticut, we have our own special dump. You have to drive your hazardous waste out to it, and there's a guy who yells at you if you do it wrong. Yeah. That's where you take your batteries. You know, you're up, you're not throwing your batteries in the fire, are you?
Well, we just talked about that today. Like, we're like, you're not allowed to put batteries in the fire, although now I have an extreme desire to dispose of all my batteries in the fire. So, anyway. Alright, so uh Kevin, I was told that you had some interesting questions about uh how cocktails work with milk. What do you got?
So it's popping up a lot, and um uh something that I do is field a lot of meat uh media requests, and I see like whey popping up in cocktails a lot. Like how people are using it. How people are using it? Are they literally buying whey powder and adding whey powder or I think they're splitting milk and using it, you know, as uh you know, something to froth it up. I've seen whey tonic out here in California.
Whey tonic, what's that? Whey and tonic. As a just a straight no alcohol, just whey and tonic in California. I think in LA. First of all, are you making fun of LA?
If you mix whey and tonic, it will foam like an egg cream because the whey has a lot of foaming properties to it, and the tonic has bubbles in it. This seems to me to be um a nightmare. Like, does it taste good? Have you tried it? Egg creams.
I don't. Okay, I want to. I've tried so hard to like egg creams. I even like the fact that it contains neither egg nor cream. Like everything about it, like seems right up your alley.
See, well, it's totally right up my alley. Like Fox's You Bet Syrup. I don't actually like it, but I like the idea of it. I mean, it's it's garbage, it's not a good product, but like I I the idea of it I love. Like Lower East Side, New York, like Jewish history, seltzer based, all of that.
Awesome. Egg creams, blow. They're just not good. I'm I'm not gonna argue with you on that point. I think you know it's it's not what I want.
But Don, what about you? Are you an egg cream fan or no? You know, I didn't grow up on an egg cream. It's interesting. It's not really something I ever pined for.
I'll take a root beer float, but uh, root beer float, dad is a coke float, delicious. Coke float, do you know what I was you know who I was? I was that kid who would have the Diet Coke float. I used to literally order Diet Coke floats. That's strange to me.
Because I liked I liked Diet Coke because I I only I grew up this people is probably indicative of who I am as a person, but I grew up drinking Diet Coke as my water. So like, you know how you might come in. No, you know how you might come in and have water? I would come in and have Diet Coke. See, I I ended up loving Diet Coke when I was an RA in college because that was the one thing no one drank.
And that meant that as the RA, I just had a lot of it and I'd end up drinking it. Why'd no one drink Diet Coke? Yeah, I don't know. You know you're an RA? I was an RA.
I was actually John De Berry's RA. Wow. John DeBerry was a bartender at PDT, and then now is a uh what's his title at uh Mama Fuku? Uh head mixologist. I don't know.
Wow, is that true? Bar director, I'm I honestly know I don't know. I was just poking fun of Kevin. Why the hell did people not drink Diet Coke? What's that all about?
What do you think? You know your metabolism is how you can just drink the uncut stuff. But why would you do that? You know, they they they went to the Mountain Dew, wanted to live the extreme lifestyle. Well, everybody who knows me knows that when I was in college when I wanted to stay up, all I would drink is Diet Dew.
I would have cases and cases of Diet Mountain Dew. And if I was in a car trip, I would just load the back of the car up with Diet Mountain Dew, then pretzels, because I like pretzels, just like box after box of pretzels, and then uh believe this or not, this works because uh it's just the right amount of prunes. Just boxes of prunes. I was gonna go with fiber capital. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was like prunes, pretzels, and diet dew, and you would just load that into the car, and you'd only have to stop for gas. So I would drive from like Connecticut down to uh like deep Florida, like Sarasota, in one shot, 24 hours straight, boom. It don't do this. It's really stupid. Like any young people out there driving for 24 hours straight is really stupid.
It's dangerous. Don't think of other people, not just yourself. It's really, really dumb. I remember one time uh And if you're having that many prunes, like you're gonna need to stop. No, it's like if the thing is is if you're not eating right and you're sitting, your body kind of shuts down.
So you're just like you need something to even keep you like relatively human. And so you're just pounding this stuff and you know, going down the highway, but yeah, it's just really stupid. I can remember being so tired as I was driving that I was like, I remember this is the worst. I shouldn't even say it's so horrible. I was I nodded off, and I as I nodded, I w woke up and there was I was like kind of drifting into a cop car.
I was like, pull over. Pull over now. He didn't say that because he didn't see it. Like I was like, I need to pull over now and sleep. But it's really stupid.
Why do young people always want to do that? You know, the brain is not fully formed yet. You know, it's a dangerous time. Really dangerous. But uh still to this day I like to diet too.
Diet too. Anyway, we're gonna come to uh gonna do a quick break. I actually, because we're pre-recording, I don't know who's sponsoring me. Perhaps it will be modernistpantry.com. Go to modernistpantry.com for all of your modernist needs.
In fact, we actually went to modernistpantry.com for some of our modernist needs from the seminar I did today. We get back, maybe we'll talk a little bit about the seminar. Maybe I'll be brought to you by Jewel, the immersion circulator from Chef Steps. Perhaps this show will be brought to you by Bob's Red Mill, which by the way is not. There is an actual do you know this?
You know Bob's Red Mill, right, Kevin? No. Wow, Bob's you know Bob's Red Mill. No, you don't know this? So if you go into the supermarket, they have like this like uh now a lot of supermarkets have an entire section with all these little bags, these little like one-pound bags of like every random grain, pseudo-grained.
Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Bob's Red Mill, Xanthan. That's where you get Zanthan also. Anyway, so there's like, and there's a picture of this guy, Bob on it.
And you know, for years I was like, that's horse crap. There's no freaking Bob. Bob's not a real freaking guy. This is like a marketing gimmick. There's actually a Bob.
Who knew? I well, I I didn't know that. I found out there's actually Bob. But here's the weird thing. There are real sticklers about this, is that it is not like if you if like when they were first doing the promos and they made us do the promos for talking, right?
They said, uh, just make sure you don't say Bob's red mill. I'm like, what do you what do you mean? What are you talking about? They're like, they hate it when you say red mill as though the red and the mill are separate, like they might have some other kind of mill, some other color of mill, or perhaps like there's Bob's red mill and also Bob's red truck. You know what I mean?
It's not like that. You know what I mean? So it's I thought you were going with like a communist angle that this was like the people's mill. It's like the red mill. Well, they probably also hate that.
But it's like Bob's, it's red mill. Red mill. Red mill. Red mill. Not is that a kind of mill?
No, it's a thing. It's red mill. Okay. It's red mill. Bob's red mill.
So Bob's red mill might actually be. But here's the other problem with doing Bob's red mill, very good. I use their products actually occasionally, but uh they made me say a bunch of stuff about nutrition, and as you know, I'm anti-nutrition. Like I am vehemently opposed to almost every form of saying that X, Y or Z is a healthy thing. Yeah.
You know what I mean? I find it's almost entirely horse crap. Yeah. You know what I mean? To me, like health in, and this might only make sense to liquor people, but the the health spin that's put on things in the food world is akin, exactly akin to me, the marketing spin that you know different companies put out about their liquor, which what percentage, not of what Pernot Ricard says, which is all gold dripping from the from the mouths of angels, but like other liquor companies, what percentage of what they say is horse crap?
I mean, everybody bends the truth a little, right? So I think I think we might be over obsessed with the authenticity origin story. Like sometimes a product is just made somewhere and it's made in a factory, and like you can be straight with that. Yeah, well, that's my point. My point is is that is that every everybody like wants there to be kind of something bigger, right?
Sure. Well, stories, we we as a people want to hear stories, right? Right. But it's the same thing with nutrition and food. It's like these horse hockey stories that like have that make no freaking sense.
Anyway, so perhaps they are sponsoring us today. I don't know. Uh they probably, if they play this, if this doesn't get cut out, they will probably never sponsor me again. But my my point is is that let other people make their false nutrition claims and you know it's fine. You know what I mean?
Uh as for me, like I focus on taste, and I think that they have some, I think that the good thing about them is you can get some interesting products you couldn't otherwise get. That's all you need to know. You don't need to have, you don't need to say, oh, good source of thiamine. Do you need to say that? No, you don't.
You know what, Kevin, when was the last time? Do you go to doctors on a regular basis? Do you do your yearly checkup? Once a year, yeah. Yeah.
You ever had your doctor, and then every couple years they do a blood workup on you, right? Yeah. Yeah. You ever had that doctor say, you know what you need? More thiamine.
Well, it's because I have so much of Bob's Red Mill that uh my thiamine levels are off the charts. And niacin, just like through the free. Alright, alright. Alright, so we're gonna do a quick commercial break. We don't know who's gonna bring it to you, but we'll be right back.
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And don't forget to follow Modernist Pantry on social media to keep up with what's new and exciting in the world of culinary ingredients and tools. And we're back. Okay, so listen. Uh Kevin, you were talking about Way, but we never actually. Oh, Kevin's fixing himself a tocate.
Well, how exactly are you doing the Tikate? I want to know how a true professional prepares their tekate beer. First of all, he's using a bar spoon to open it, which is an approved method to open uh. What do you think about people, Kevin, who can't open a bottle without a without a real bottle opener, just low quality? Uh yeah, you're not really trying in that, you know.
You've never been in that position where you had to figure out how to open a beer and you didn't have the proper beer opening tool, like you improvised, right? Mother of invention. As I've always said, the world is your bottle opener. What what here is not a bottle opener? Everything here.
Well, so like how many times, when was the first time you had to push a wine cork in with your fingers to open the wine? Um I've actually never done that. I um stand back. He uses a sharpie. Come on, he's civilized.
Yeah, there you go. You have to hold over and go down. Yeah. Yeah, I've done the the sharpie thing. I don't even think it was a sharper.
It was like a dryer race, like a skinny dryer ace. Um, and then uh once I just broke the top off, which I don't recommend. Someone who is it? Was uh someone was telling me today, so like uh people again who've listened a lot know that I have a particular hatred for South American tamper fruit proof liquor bottles. Oh yeah, Leo.
Yeah, and uh Leo DeGroff was here at the conference. But um I have a hatred for those and the 700 uh milliliter European bottle, which is just a dumb measurement. I mean, not the 750's not dumb, but it's our it's like it's a dumb method. Uh to finish painting the word picture for the listeners, uh Kevin uh then squeezed a a wedge of a lime, pushed it into his taccate, and then uh was a few dashes of uh Cholula, uh not Tabasco, which was his first round. He's upgraded.
Uh any salt in this one? Not yet. But uh the Tabasco, while I love Tabasco and would carry it around with me, um, like right out of the gate when you put it in the beer bottle, like that'll get you right in the uh in the soft palate. Because of the vinegar. Oof, man.
Because it's high vinegar. Yeah, that one stays on your lips. Apparently, if you visit Avery Island in Louisiana where the macal macalini, that's the name of them, right? Where they live, like you like it's like like not possible to stay there. It's like it's like from the fumes of the Tabasco.
You know, they also bribed a bunch of Louisiana judges so that they could trademark the name of what is essentially a pepper. Like anyone should be able to make a Tabasco sauce because it's like saying, imagine if you trademarked jalapeno sauce. You can't do that. Right. Tabasco is a pepper.
Isn't there all sorts of crazy stuff with Avery Island and that family? Like I don't know. Yeah, yeah. They're like old school, corrupt Louisiana, but they also make like a great sauce that everyone loves. Yeah, it sounds a lot like new school Louisiana.
Yeah. Louisiana, well, you know, anyway, we're gonna we'll leave Louisiana to itself. Like you what are your thoughts on uh we we're gonna go there soon. It for Tails the Cocktail, but what are your guys' thoughts on that whole uh props to the city of uh New Orleans for taking down uh some Confederate uh you know statues? Uh I think that's a long overdue.
Did you see that guy in Mississippi? No. What was the guy in the Mississippi? There was a state rep in Mississippi. I'm not making this up.
Literally, literally said that he wanted to go lynch somebody for taking down those things. And I believe he's a funeral director in his daytime job. Not that there's anything, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying, like, just painting as you know, Don said, painting the full picture. But he is a state rep, think in Mississippi, and that is literally what he said.
Listen, Texas state reps are uh threatening uh or reminding people that they are currently armed and you know have a gun before other state reps vote on uh different propositions. So it's wait wait, wait, wait, they're like threatening people with violence in the state house. It's not a direct threat. It's just, you know, might I remind you that I am armed at the moment? Sounds like a threat.
Anyway, uh how do we get on that? Uh we should be like, whatever. We should back backtrack. Um we're talking about whey. Kevin had a question about whey.
What's the question about whey? I would say, are you seeing milk and dairy products in lots of cocktails? I mean, you get around, you see a lot of the world. Um that was one of those ingredients that I think sort of fell out of favor for a number of years, and like people didn't want to deal with it, and it was gross, and most adults don't drink milk. I mean, I use it a lot.
I use it a lot, like a lot. Like a huge chunk in the menu at Booker and Dax had was was milkwashed. You know, had had uh, but like almost no drinks were perceptibly milky. And that's the thing, but that's the problem with it having on the menu at all, is that if it's people there are some people who won't order it because they don't want something milky. Right.
You know what I mean? Um, but I think that's where whey, I think, is kind of an interesting proposition because it sounds gross. No one wants what are you gonna do? Oh, you know what? Whey.
It's just got whey syrup in it. That's what I'm going to do. But there's so many clever puns. There's yes way, no way, C Way. Oh, what's uh one of the bartenders attending the seminar was like, oh man, what if you made like a a Way and Nephew cocktail with some like you like that?
Like that. But like you're saying we one of those, which one of those Ways was like way like Mexican Whey? Uh the one with tequila. Uh remember, do you ever see uh what was that famous uh movie where he would go to every bar and they would try to hand him a beer and a glass, and he'd say, in a bottle way? What movie was that?
Una botea whey. Remember that? No. It was one of the early Rodriguez movies, I think. Anyway, whatever.
Random. So, oh yeah, I know what I want to tell you about Mexico. So, Leo de Groff, who was here at the conference earlier, basically said that these bottles, these tamper-proof bottles from South America and Mexico, that have those freaking little balls in them, so that you can't, which every they're execrable. They should be eliminated from the universe. He said that he knew these Mexican bartenders he was working with, who literally could just grab the bottle and smash the, like literally smash the top off without breaking the bottle on a consistent basis.
But he claimed that they would hit it, hit the bottle in some kind of horizontal fashion that would knock the uh the like the preventer, like that would keep keep you from uh pouring back into the bottle, such that it would go flying across the room and land in a trash can consistently. He did say that. I'm now remembering that he in fact did say that, which seems I'm not gonna say impossible. I'm gonna label that as improbable. There's a it'd be badass if it was real, though.
If I could, I would sit around for like days just being a little bit more. Just buying cases of it and just chink, chink, chink, chink. There's a certain uh lawyer, bartender from Mexico City that I think we can ask. Yes. Who may or may not be working with us on our may or may not next project, which we may or may not announce if we ever get a freaking lease.
You should not, people, you should not get me started on New York City, especially on community board three, and how anti-business, how what a just a rancid group of like protein scum, they are. Like they are the nastiness around the outside of a bathtub that hasn't been cleaned properly in the last five decades. Like, that's where they are from a standpoint of humanity. They care nothing about what their fellow human all they want to do is crap on the dreams of their fellow citizens. That's all.
They have no dreams of their own other than to crap on your dreams. And that is what fulfills their lives. So speaking of protein scum, what you say it's accurate? I'm not being inaccurate, am I? But am I being inaccurate?
They have uh certain goals that I do not think are realistic, and uh, you know, it's to each their own. Uh it is the world that we live in. No, but people that we will. No, listen, listen, listen. If my own, if the if the my own that you're leaving me up to is to just spend my days trying to prevent you from doing something that's not gonna have any bearing on my life, is that valid?
Well, that's your your assumption is that it's not gonna have any bearing on their life. They believe it has a direct bearing on their life. I mean, maybe they're just getting prepped for Congress. Anyway, so on Whey, so I use Whey. We were we still talking about Whey?
Seaway. Seaway. So I use whey, but I've never added direct like whey powder. Like it's just I've always used like whole milk and then broken it. Um I don't know.
Like milk powder, milk solids and anything? Nope. Um what do you think about using uh whey instead of aquafaba? Oh gee, why are you trying to do this to me? Don't just try this.
Listen, uh you know what I use milk powder in? I use milk powder in uh English muffins, which by the way, I'm not too proud to say, uh too proud to say I use Alton Brown's English muffin recipe. And he uses milk powder in it, and I think Alton Brown has a fine English muffin recipe, and you can get it on the internet on the Food Network website for the for the serious, it's not serious, so what's it called? Good eats, right? Uh I think his English muffin recipe is is good and it uses milk powder.
I'm also getting uh I've been working on trying to do Chinese um the uh lava buns, you know, the uh like the custard lava buns, uh and those use evaporated milk. And so I'm getting interested, and there's a huge there's a whole train of thought on mac and cheese with evaporated milk. Ooh. Yeah. Interesting.
Doesn't break. Right, it's already concentrated, and you know, it adds that kind of like I'm a little worried on some of these preps that if you because the problem is if you over dope on milk solids, you can get uh lactose crystals uh condensing out, and then it's grainy. So like one of the reasons not to go too high on milk solids and ice cream, let's say, is that at low temperatures, especially, you get lactose crystals that kind of ruin the texture of the ice cream. But I've been working on these condensed dairy things. So I'm also like, you know, Don and I, you know, if we ever get this bar open, like we're gonna have to have some sort of snack program.
We're gonna do something interesting. So I've been looking at it. So what else have I been playing? Not with whey, I've been playing around, I've been very obsessed recently with dried mushrooms. I've been on a dried mushroom cake.
I've been eating uh preposterous amounts of wood ear mushrooms. Just like stupid quantities of wood ear mushrooms. It's one of the most satisfying things to bite into. Yo, yeah. Oh yeah.
The texture of a wood ear mushroom is just like like on point. Yeah. It's an on point texture. I would imagine, like, if you're like, I don't love tripe or some of those like kind of gelatinous, chewy cartilaginates things, but the woodier gets me there without the like squeamish, I'm eating weird animal parts. Yeah, and they're so easy to keep in your house, and they gain ten times their weight in water.
I measured it. It was ten times. I got it ten times like the thing, and like uh, and it's just, I don't know, yeah, they're so satisfying, and you're like, they're so s but you know what I realized recently is like uh you want to buy the higher quality woody mushrooms. If you buy the cheapest possible woody or mushrooms, there's still substrate left on the mushroom where they rip it off, and then you can get grit. So if you spend a little bit more on your woody or mushrooms, it takes a lot less time in the prep.
You know what I've been working on now though? You ever have the you ever buy the snow fungus? No. So that's the the snow fungus, I forget the name of it. Uh it starts with a T.
It's the one that looks like that looks like a scrubby pad, like a white scrubby pad, right? And those are amazing. Also, like a texture-based mushroom, but you can do a lot of funky stuff with that. So I've been working a lot with that. It's another like absorbs an incredible amount of stuff, but I've been working on these these mushrooms for I don't know why.
Huge dried mushroom cake. There's uh any kind of correlation to your children now being vegetarians and enemies of quality. Uh, well, again, for those of you that haven't tuned in recently, Booker and Dax have both decided to be vegetarian, but they're that they're vegetarians who don't like mushrooms. So Jen, my wife, was making so Jen's decided for some reason that she's gonna start cooking. I'm like, well, if you learn to cook, then I'm just afraid she's gonna divorce me because what is she gonna need me for anymore?
She already learned how to make coffee. Like, like two, three years ago, like she's like, All right, Dave, I'm gonna learn how to use the espresso machine. I'm like, really? You're gonna learn how to make your own coffee? She's like, Yeah, so I taught her how to make coffee, so she doesn't need me for that.
You know, she's the one that pays the bills. Uh so if she learns to cook, like I'm done. The hell does she need me for? You know what I mean? Dog walker.
Thank you. Yes. I'm still the one who, but she's doing that right now while I'm here in California. But yeah, yeah. So I'm just getting grim.
Yeah, it's toast. Toast. Like, you know, I'm a firm. I'd be the world's worst bachelor. If I was not, if I was not married, I would be homeless.
Like I would you'd be the leather man. I would be the leather man. I mean, uh, I'm like, I would be like, I am like, but for my wife and my family, I am a non-functional human being. Like, like, I'm like, even like this is honest truth, is like, is like I need a support network to live. Because I am not like, you know, what's the word?
Like uh connected to other people in a normal way. You know what I mean? Like, I don't communicate. True story. You know, uh, I don't do things that people think are reasonable.
You know what I mean? So it's like, you know, it makes it uh makes it difficult. But anyway, so listen, people, uh next week we will also be doing uh this convention. We'll be in Pittsburgh. Uh so we could actually bring the same crowd back again um next week.
But uh next week we're gonna try to actually get some questions from Nastasia, maybe get Nastasia a call in because we're gonna be on the same time zone. Uh, but we'll look forward. And so I didn't answer any of your questions from this week. I apologize. We'll try to get to it next week on cooking issues.
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