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And we are back after a two-week hiatus because of random crap. I was in uh where was I? I was in Dublin. I was in China working on spinzalls, but uh we're back and we have as usual Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing?
Good. Yeah, I noticed that uh you have your bike helmet and it's hot as hell out of here. Now I went to Union Square in the night. Oh, I was gonna say, but still, I mean, like, the only reason to bike in this weather is because you want to increase your hatred for mankind. To bike in New York.
I mean, like to bike in New York City in this weather, I'm fine with it, right? I mean it's fine. Except for like every second on the bike. In other words, your your your gas tank of hatred must have been damn near empty. So for you to like get on the bike to top up that much hatred.
You know what I mean? Maybe I'm sure that at lunchtime, I'm sure at lunchtime I'll uh I'll I'll be you know treated to some of the classic Nastasia invective, right? Yeah, no, I went slow. Still it's not like riding the subway lowers that hatred either. Right, that's true.
Oh my gosh, especially these days. And in the booth, we got Dave, how you doing? What up, good? So uh Nastasia and I have a question. So there's a uh there's a relatively new Heritage Radio Network t-shirt over here.
It says Heritage Radio Network, food radio since 2009. It's got a cow skull and like some sort of Star Wars like uh X-Wing Fighter targeting grid. Yep. So uh I like it. Nastasia doesn't understand it, so she wants yeah, she wants you to under explain this t shirt.
What uh what don't you understand? Like what's with the cow head, what's with the grid, what's with it together? It's just we're all of those things. You're a grid? I don't know, man.
I like it though. I don't know, I think it's just a cool design. I don't think there was any real uh purpose behind it. So how do people how do people get their hands on on this if they want it? Well, if you go to Heritage Radio Network.org backslash donate, you can become a member today and get a t shirt like that.
Yeah, nice. Nice, I like that. Uh the Tron aesthetic. Oh, that's it, the Citron aesthetic. You know what?
You know what the thing is? Uh I was having this discussion with uh Jack Shram, who is, you know, he's been on the show before. He's the uh was the head bartender at Booker and Dax, and we're discussing the merits and demerits of having uh uh you know old school arcade games at at bars. What do you what are your thoughts, Dave? What are your thoughts on old school arcade games?
They're great. Why why wouldn't you want to have that? Well, it's a different vibe. It's a different vibe. I don't think you should have them because it's too hipster, but what you should have is the log.
Wait, hold on. Too hipster, that's not a reason. Like what does that mean? It's like I mean, I am I a hipster? No.
Do I like them? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, of course. I mean I grew up with it, but like doesn't have the log and the nail game. I'm not allowed to have the log and the nail game.
Everybody okay, so for those of you that don't know, I mean, I we've talked about it on the show probably a million times. I don't know. But there's a game that Nastasi and I played. Against Peter and we kicked his butt. Yes, Peter, Peter Kim, favorite favorite object of derision here on the show.
Uh we love that. I mean, like, look, you know what I mean. He's love him. Love him. Yeah, uh, so the the issue is is that we were driving up from um from what was it, Chicago we flew into?
Yeah. Chicago to uh Madison, Wisconsin to visit with Johnny Hunter, friend of the show and uh, you know, the Underground Meats Collective back in the day. And we stopped at this uh German place in Milwaukee that had the log game. Don Lee went back there recently and got me a t shirt. Uh you see my t-shirt, right?
My log game t shirt. So anyway, they give you an old cut masonry, you know, uh uh sorry, uh cut nail, steel uh nail, like this big triangle one, and then you have to knock it into the into this big old stump, and whoever takes the longest to knock it in, basically the most number of blows to knock it in, they buy the next round of drinks. Yeah, anyway. I'm not gonna say that Peter was trounced, but he was but he was completely trounced. But the the thing about it is is that like I was like, I want one of those, but then everyone's like, you can't do that in New York.
Because if you hit the first of all, people are drinking, and if you hit the nail even a little bit wrong, a nail goes flying across the room. Like flying across the room. That's a good point. What? How do they have one?
I guess in Milwaukee, like people don't sue each other. I mean it's more of like a an old style of the. Right. I mean, I imagine like, look, everybody knows each other, right? I mean, this is the kind of place where people have their names on their mugs behind the counter behind the bar.
So it's like, I imagine that if anyone like if you and I went there and hit ourselves in the eye with a nail and we're like, we're gonna sue, that like we would end up like at the bottom of the river. You know what I mean? Like it just wouldn't happen. So anyways. Any Milwaukee people in the chat room, feel free to chime in on that one.
Yeah. But the uh but anyway, back to uh the kind of Tron aesthetic, not Tron specifically, but like the early video games, I really love, and it's really hard to find uh the old vector graphics games. You know what I'm talking about, Dave? Well, yeah, and you mentioned Star Wars. There was that one at I forget exactly what it was called, but at the uh public pool that I went to as a kid, they had that game where you were like, you know, flying in the Death Star and it was all vector graphics.
Yeah, so cool. That's the the original hard to beat. The original one, the 1983 Star Wars, is one of the all-time classic vector graphic games, and it was interesting because it was a color vector graphic because it was using all three um all three tubes. So the interesting thing about a vector graphic game as opposed to a raster graphic is that in the vector graphic games, they're literally controlling the electron beams, like in old CRT styles. This is why you can't emulate them accurately with you can, but it's very hard, with uh modern kind of screens.
They're literally drawing the lines with the electron beam, so you don't have um you don't have pixels really. They're literally drawing the lines, and so it has this kind of amazing sp you know glow that looks very, very specific and very awesome. So you think you're asteroids, your tempest. Anyway, but I would like to game like that. But do you think that's too hipster?
Hipsters don't care about that. They just want to play Dig Doug, right? I don't know. But you have a bartender game license. Wait, what'd you say?
You have a cabaret license. I don't have any license yet, people. We're not announcing where the new bar's gonna be. We have an accepted. I will say this.
Uh Don Lee and I and uh our other partner, Greg, have an accepted offer, right? Someone has accepted our offer on a space, which means that I feel more confident than I have in the past because I've never had an offer that was accepted by all parties that we will have a space that we can announce in the near future, but I can't yes. Don't jinx it. Yeah, yeah. Do you believe in it?
Do you believe in that? No. No? I only believe in it on when we're in traffic, and someone's like, We're almost home. This is so when we're not in traffic.
Oh, yeah. And then you're like, Where do you what's the origin of the word jinx? Is there some sort of stupid racial slur in that? Probably. I don't know.
What does it mean? Where does jinx come from? It's about gypsies, right? No, that's to to that's yeah, can't you can't use that. First of all, no, I don't think so.
You're thinking of the of the slur-based word to rip someone off, which when I was growing up, we had no idea that it was a slur. Yeah, that was so common. Who uh who knew? I I did not. And then someone was like, Dave, you can't say that.
I'm like, why? I'm like, because of this. I'm like, oh. And uh, yeah, so you can't uh you should not do that. Um okay, so we got a boat ton of questions to get to because we've been I've been out of business here for talk about big things first, right?
What? To get it out of the way, centrifuge. Oh, spins all let's do the spins all stuff toward towards the end. We never have enough time. We'll do it at the end.
Or in the middle. How about this? We'll do it in the middle. We'll do it right when we come back from the break. I don't have enough time to even take a break.
What? Oh, yes, we are. Oh, yeah. Gotta do some babies. We gotta pay those bills.
You gotta pay that pay those bills. So Nastasia, do you have any good food recently? No. I had some good food. Let me know.
Why would you not have it? Because you're like, let's get to questions. Yeah, but I like you know. Curious whether you haven't had it. We gotta transition from gaming issues to cooking issues somehow.
That's right. Uh Dave, anything? Anything interesting? Uh I'm eating a nice cup of yogurt right now. It's pretty good.
Come on, how good can the yogurt be? What is it? Like, what the hell? It's just, you know, whatever. It's full fat, I should say.
Because you got it on the city. Am I allowed to say that on the air? It's Baye. Okay. Oh, yeah.
It's just what's in the corner store. Did uh Bobby Flay convince you to buy that? No. You bought it without Bobby Flay? Did Bobby Flay's endorse?
Did you follow Angry Bobby Flay on Twitter? I don't. I should. Yeah, he's funny. Is it the real Bobby Flay?
I don't think so. I'm like 99% sure it's not. Okay. Uh I had some interesting food when I was in China. I had one interesting thing I should say.
And uh we went to this restaurant. It's actually the second time I've been to this straight okay, so Shenzhen, Nastasia is like 13 million people in Shenzhen, right? 13 million. Even though the city's only like 40 years old, thirty million uh thirteen million people there. And for some reason, two separate people brought me to the same freaking restaurant that the expats like in Shenzhen.
What are the odds of that? Crazy. It's crazy, right? Uh so I went there, but I had this really, really good kind of like semi-fusion eggplant dish that I'm gonna figure out how to make because it was a grilled eggplant, but it was completely flat, like super garlicky, super buttery, and like uh lots of chili, and then they put like which is this fusion-y, they put well first of all, I guess the butter, but then they put uh bonito flakes on top. So like Yeah, so it had that, like, you know, you've had bonito pizza before, right?
Where the stuff's it was like that, but it was really it was really good eating stuff style. So I'm gonna I'm gonna work on that as soon as I get back to Connecticut and have a grill that I'm gonna work with. Then maybe I'll adapt it for a regular place recipe, you know, that where you don't need a grill, but anyway, I was psyched on that. Anyway, okay. And that would have been if we were talking about the spins all now, an entree because I was in I was in China.
Do you ever flown? So this is the first time in my life I've flown all the way around the world, like all the way around. Like I flew from New York to Dublin to then to London, then to Frankfurt, then to Hong Kong, then back to Newark. Wow. Kind of sad to fly all the way around the world and up in Newark, huh?
No offense to Newark. No offense to Cory Booker and you know, Newark and all that, but I mean, come on, Newark. You know what I mean? Yeah. Newark.
Uh Dave, you're not a fan of Newark, are you? I mean you're not against Newark, right? Yeah, I guess I'm ambivalent. Yeah. All right.
Uh Trenton, on the other hand. What do you have against Trenton? No, no, though. I just love the sign. Oh.
Trenton takes or Trenton makes the world takes. Dalian? Love that sign. What's the one uh near the turnpike that's like world capital of embroidery? You seen this one?
You've seen this one, right, Nastasia? There's like a like one of the towns. Yeah, right before the Lincoln Tunnel. Oh yeah. World Capital of Embroidery.
You're like, wow, who knows? Oh, it's gotta be Bayonne, right? I don't know. I don't know. I love all of those town names, Passaic.
You know what I mean? Like Hohokus. Hohokus. Mawa. Ramapo.
Like all these like words over there. You know what I mean? It's like Mawa. Okay. Eddie Danell wrote in on the Twitter.
Um question is uh he's making a uh walnut ketchup recipe. So you're using your unripe uh you know your green your green walnuts. Um and you're making so ketchup obviously originally wasn't the uh heinz style ketchup, in other words, it wasn't tomato-based sauces in general. There was mushroom ketchups, there was everything, blah, blah, blah. And in fact, if you go back, if even modern, right?
The the phenomenon that took the uh New York culinary scene by storm like eight years ago, ketchup manice, uh, right, is ketchup manice is like that sweetened kind of soy thing, which is I think it's delicious. Remember when Nils and I used to put ketchup and east in everything? Yes. Like, what does this need? Uh ketchup anise.
You know what I mean? It's like everything. So um so ketchup was a more generic thing. Now, of course, ketchup is uh what's the brand of ketchup, Dave? Yeah?
What brand of ketchup do you use? Oh, Heinz, obviously. There you go. So it's like, because that's Heinz ketchup, and everything else is in order, everything else is just a different sauce that is in other words. Even if you're not a huge fan of Heinz, which I don't understand why you wouldn't be, because Heinz ketchup is delicious, but if you weren't a fan of Heinz ketchup, you would still rate other ketchups relative to Heinz.
You know what I'm saying? You would say it's like Heinz but thinner. It has the flavor of A1, but the texture of Heinz, which doesn't happen, right? Right. Anyway, uh so anyway, so ketchup used to be a more all inclusive thing, and there are old recipes for much mushroom ketchup, which I made.
It was okay. It wasn't great. You ever did I give you that ever when I made that? I was told last weekend that Sir Kensington's was the same as Heinz at dinner by someone, and I got so angry. Were they a food person?
They work in food. What as what? As a cashier. I didn't have my rim shot sound right. Like what?
Like what's their They are in food. They are in food media. Food media? They write about food of food. No, no, no.
They do production, like film production. Oh. They work with food network people. Right. They know from food.
They know how to take pictures of food. They know everything about food, but in this case. How could they say same as? Same as just no high fructose corn syrup was their thing. And I was like, I don't care.
I I I seriously don't care. But like well, my point is that like not the same. Not the same. It's like not ketchup. Like, you know what?
Well, I look, I'm not gonna go that far because you know what? I have to be honest, I've I don't know that I've had their ketchup as a as a as a tasting, but of course it's not the same. Nastasia Lopez, Peter Kim, same. Same. Low quality.
Same. You know, the only difference is uh there is no difference. They're the same person, right? They both have two eyes. Wow.
Nose, mouth. Cold discs. Full sets of digits. That is the coldest of disses, since Peter Kim is like who's that a diss to, though? Me.
But my point being like it's ridiculous to say it's the same, and whoever that was should be ashamed of themselves. They were just trying to piss you off. No, they were not. They were that we don't have that relationship. I have a friend who honestly believes hunts is better than Heinz.
You're allowed to believe these kinds of things as long as as long as you're as as long as you um you know, as long as you don't think they're the same. It's like if you say they're the same, that's when I'm like, well, nothing you say has merit. You like you're willing to just stand up there and say things that are false. Alternative facts. Yeah, alternative facts.
It's like, you know, anyway. So uh this is a an alternative ketchup, is not meant to be a substitute for uh the Heinz style of ketchup. So uh recipe is about fifty green walnuts, uh some salt, some uh two different kinds of vinegars there. You got your malt vinegar, your cider vinegar. Uh and of course, this is one of those recipes that you who's clearly written by someone because it's partially in cups, partially in ounces, partially in teaspoons, one of those.
Uh malt vinegar, cider vinegar, anchovies, uh, onion, red wine, uh, or port, ground nutmeg, uh, black pepper, cayenne, grated horseradish, uh, ginger, and here's the problem. Here's what uh Eddie was wondering about um Xanthan gum. So the the issue with this is is that you macerate the uh walnuts in this vinegar melange for uh a while, and then you heat it up and then you strain it out, and there's solids in it, right? And it's thin, like Worcestershire sauce thin, right? So it's not at all like a kind of a modern kind of ketchup that we would have.
It's not thickened because it doesn't contain any real uh like fruit pulp. Uh remember tomato being a fruit. So the his question is isn't that gonna be make it snotty? Now uh I didn't have time to do the calculations uh on this or look up how much uh a teaspoon of Xanthan gum weighs, but you definitely don't want to add enough xanthan to uh this ketchup to make it snotty. I think like I like I've said many times um uh on the show, there are cultures where like you're allowed to have really snotty xanthan uh textures and like it's kind of accepted, but obviously here in the U.S.
we don't appreciate um snot sauce so much. You know what I mean? Which is why a lot of people have problems with uh okra based sauces. Nastasi, do you like kind of snotty okra? No.
Dave? Yeah, I'm okay with it. Yeah, see, there you go. Do you like do you have you been to Spain? Do you enjoy snotty Spanish sauces?
I have not, but I think I would. They're not, but by the way, I'm just being harsh. Like back in the modern, back when like the modern wave was hitting like real hard on all cylinders, like in like 04 in the in the U.S., uh a lot of like like the like supermodern um people were do using a lot of Xanthan. So I'm not saying traditionally Spanish food has Xanthan, because of course it's not a traditional ingredient. I'm just saying when those very high-end chefs were making uh thickened um sauces in that era in that 04, 03, 04, 05 era, they didn't have any qualms about using a good bit of xanthan.
That's all I'm saying. I'm not making any comments about traditional Spanish cooking. So, yes, uh, but when you read the recipe, Eddie, the Xanthan is really, it's not there to thicken. That is not a thickening agent. They are using the Xanthan as a suspending agent.
So there's lots of fine, fine particles in this uh you know, walnut ketchup that will settle out over time. And a small amount of xanthan, and now it will add some kind of surface, so if you were gonna drink it as a beverage, you would kind of notice that it has a little bit of that jiggle to it. But if you're keeping the amount of xanthan very low, like you know, we you know, well under a quarter of a percent. And I have to like test the you know, I have to look at this and see what you know what they're what they're talking about. Um I think you should um I think you should be fine.
It's gonna suspend, but it's not there to thicken, it's there to suspend. If you want to thicken it, I definitely would not thicken it with xanthan gum. Uh well under a quarter percent. In fact, let me see what I was thinking. So if you're using three grams of uh ticket 0.6.
I have to do the calculations, but you you only want just enough to suspend. You can do it by testing and add a little more. Remember not to add a boat ton of xanthan at once, uh, even when you're working with very small amounts, because it will hydrate over time. And so you'll if if you try to thicken Alaminute with Xanthan, you'll a lot of times you'll find that 10-15 minutes later, because you haven't hydrated it uh properly at the get-go, you've over Xanthaned it, and then kind of then you're in Snotville. So a small amount of Xanthan's just there to suspend.
If you want to thicken it, I would use uh something else. Like, for instance, if you thought that maybe a fruit might be nice in there, choose like a less sweet fruit that has a lot of kind of uh, you know, uh a lot of uh body to it, and you could cook that into it, but um, you know, to really get it to you know be thick, you'd need to add something that has bodying. So you I wouldn't necessarily thicken it with I mean you could thicken it with something like um like LBG, I guess, or uh one of these things. But the problem is anytime you thicken something, you really deaden the flavor out, right? If you're thickening it with a thickener and you you're basically turning it into a more solid, it has a tendency to lock in flavor uh and kind of inhibit flavor release.
So anyway, that's my my feeling. What do you think, Sas? Yes. Stas is like, guess what, Dave? Don't care.
Uh Claire wrote in. Yeah, Claire wrote in, but not your Claire, right? This is a different Claire. I don't know. No, it's probably not my Claire.
This Claire cares about food. I'm just being mean. I'm just being mean. I still can't believe someone who works in food said that like that they're the same. I know.
Were they name names? No, I can't. Name names. I can. Which company were they trying to insult?
Heinz. They're trying to insult Heinz. Not insult, just very like calm, like, oh yes, try Sir Kensington's. It's the same. With no high protection corn syrup.
Why wouldn't they just say why wouldn't they just say try Sir Kentington's, I like it? Yeah, I think they said I like it too somewhere. Oh, yeah, that would have been fine. If they said I like it, then that's that's a valid opinion. Fine.
Because it's an opinion. Right, yeah, that's passable. But to say it's the same, that's just not right. Try this, try this Peter Kim. It's the same as Nastasia Lopez.
You know what I mean? It's like my sister and I have become rather obsessed with the flavor of habanero and manzano peppers. I've never really um worked with uh Manzano peppers before, but they are a medium sweet, a medium hot, like you know, hotter than a jalapeno, but not anywhere near a habanero hot, but uh supposedly kind of very fruity, has a lot of those kind of fruity floral notes that you get from a habanero, but again, I don't know, because I've never really worked with them. Uh we've been trying to create a dish where the sweet floral flavors of these peppers come through and are not overwhelmed by the spice. We thought a buttercream frosting for cupcakes might do the trick since it has such a high fat content um that could counteract the spiciness.
However, we had some problems getting enough of the pepper flavor into the frosting to be detectable. Uh adding blended up peppers at the end results in a buttercream that is kind of sweaty and too watery. What do you think about the sweaty gross? Gross, right? Sweaty.
Sweaty peppers. Sweaty peppers. Sweaty peps. Sweaty peps. Uh but you do you like shweaty balls because you love Alec Ball.
You love Alec Baldwin. I do love Alec Baldwin. Yeah. Do you know that Nastasia Lopez went to uh Alec Baldwin's wife's yoga class just to be closer to Alec Bolwan. It's actually good.
I have to say. Yeah. It's one of the few good ones. Did it smell like shweddy balls? Shwedy balls.
Um the buttercream is kind of sweaty and too watery, but only just barely taste of pepper. We serve this stuff at a family occasion and nobody actually noticed the pepper taste at all. So, well, the answer there is put more freaking pepper in. I'm okay. Uh well, I am, but I'm not.
Okay. So our second attempt was to actually infuse the egg whites for the buttercream with the peppers for a while uh to get the flavor in that way. We let chopped up peppers sit in egg whites for about 24 hours, about a cup of chopped up peppers with three egg whites. We did three types of peppers habanero, manzano, and chilaca peppers, which are milder. Basically, the egg whites with the chilaka peppers in them whipped up fine, but didn't have much of the pepper taste.
But the egg whites from the Manzano and the Habanero peppers were fairly flavorful, but completely failed to whip up at all. We uh even tried cut whip. We even tried cutting them with fresh egg whites and no luck. What's going on here? Is the capsation disrupting the egg white proteins, or is there just so much more oil in the habaneros and manzanos uh than in the chilacas?
Is there anything we can do to combat this or some other way to get that lovely pepper flavor into our frosting? Thanks for the show. I've been listening to all your back episodes. Well, driving across the country as I move from Connecticut to Vancouver. That's a long move.
That's a long move. Long move. You ever been to Vancouver? I like Vancouver. Great.
It's nice. You know what's the problem with Canada is? Boost price too high. Oh. Oh.
Wait, what did Nasasia say? Canadians. Oh. They're not our worst customers. Canadians aren't bad customers.
Canadian customs are a pain in the ass. No, it's not that. Europeans are bad customers. It's not that. No, Europeans are fine.
Canadians. Jeez. Anyways, uh, I would say I don't know. It was interesting. I tried to look into surface.
I did a uh brief uh search on surface active properties of peppers. I was not able to find that. Uh if I was looking into um I couldn't find anything specifically on whipping egg whites uh and capsation or any of this stuff. So I wasn't able to find uh anything specific, but it sounds like from your test that you know that there is something with these hotter peppers, it's probably um messing with the egg whites. So my my feeling is is that you might want to move on to a different kind of um buttercream frosting, one that doesn't require whipped egg whites.
So a good place to start uh in in terms of like figuring out what you want to do is uh Nylah Jones has a uh it was like three or four years ago, did something on the series. It's called the world of buttercreams, six varieties to try at home, uh, and just goes through the various different kinds of ones. But I think the one that stands out that I think you might want to try for this is um the kind of flour-based. So you make what amounts to a roux with milk, uh, and then you heat that with uh the flour and with flour, making like literally like a roux, and then you let that roux cool down, you make sure her skin doesn't form, and you beat that into the butter. Uh and that is a prime candidate, assuming that the hot peppers don't break the milk, which I haven't tested whether super hot peppers will break the milk, but I don't think they will.
Uh you can get that pepper flavor into the milk, and there's a fairly high quantity of milk uh per unit butter. So I think you could do well to get a good kind of flavor into your uh buttercream that way. Now I'd always thought you just made a straight um kind of milk flour uh kind of a roux, even though it's not butter, but kind of a roux. You just have to make sure you blend the hell like blend the hell out of it so it doesn't have um uh part you don't want like um starch particles in it. You want to make sure that you you know like either slurry it first, slurry the flour with the milk, or um, or you know, just make sure that you break it up before you heat it, otherwise you're gonna get clumping.
But and I obviously you have to cool it all the way, or it's gonna mess up the butter when after you put it into the with the butter. But what's interesting is she actually adds the sugar to the um milk mixture and doesn't cream the sugar into the uh butter and then add the stuff. And she says that it's a much smoother uh result than you would get if you creamed the if you fluffed up the butter, cream, you know, cream the sugar into it uh and then added the stuff, which is interesting. So I had never thought about that before. But I would do that kind of uh situation because I feel that you'd definitely be able to get a very heavy um pepper flavor into a milk base uh and then whip into the buttercream reading.
Good stuff is like again, don't care. All right. Sounds legit. Look at this. What?
Oh yeah, Nastasia, I think rightly so, loves any sort of new hot mess of a server that we get here at Roberta's. And uh you want to describe you can't. You can't? It's kind of like a German type thing, right? Uh like Kraftwerk.
Yeah. Like uh I listened to Kraftwerk, but the uh I don't know, like the speaking of which it's a weird day in New York. Like when I was when I was walking here in Bushwick, it was like I can't describe everything because there's no polite way to describe everything I saw on the way over. But it was like I was living just that brief walk from Flushing Avenue over here through Bushwick was like living in a Terry Gilliam movie. I don't know what it is.
Like Time Bandits or like uh Brazil. Yeah, like in other words, like like there were like crowds gathered around dead rats. There was a giant set of hands coming out of the back of a pickup truck that were attached to a giant white boot ahead. There was just like just there was trucks parked in the middle of the road on uh the street here more, like big trucks just parked, and then cars driving on the sidewalk, like some backwards reality, like and other things that literally I cannot mention on the air. It was like living in one of those movies.
I was like, wow. Family show. Summer times. Summer times. Uh summertime of New York.
So Mark writes in from Pittsburgh PA, who I I guarantee you, Mark from Pittsburgh. He likes Heinz. He likes Heinz. He's not sitting there, like, you know, telling us someone else that it's the same, man. This server really is kind of messed up.
Explain it, Dave. I can't. I can't. Hey, look. I don't know.
He's not messed up. He just has a look. He has a very specific look. You know what I'm saying? Like super specific look.
Like here. Dave, what do you think about this? My feeling on uh is like a place like Roberta's is interesting because I love it here. Yeah, place like Ver I love it here. Like what are you?
The Manchurian candidate for Roberta's? Jesus. What I'm saying is is that Roberta's is interesting because it was built on this idea of we're like gonna do whatever we want, like rock and roll, blah, blah, blah, right? Sure. Right.
So like I think Robert's can pull it off. Like Roberta's basically, you can do almost anything you want like that. But I mean, I think not everyone can pull that off. What do you think, Dave? Yeah, I think that's true.
Yeah. I don't know. It's just it's it's interesting. Like I like looking around at places as we're looking to open the new bar. I'm just looking at kind of what you know, what you as a place, the culture that you make in a place, like what that gives you permission to do with your customers, but also at the same time, kind of how that can guide your future.
So here it's like, okay, look, like established with this kind of rock and roll vibe, we're just gonna do it, and it's kind of a miracle that this this place's been here for what, over 10 years, right? Yeah, but it's not just that, it's like flourished, you know what I mean? And so it started with this kind of like, you know, like uh the odds when you started that it was going to be successful, right? With it, I don't know, I don't know what the odds are, but it's kind of amazing that it like flourish in this kind of huge thing. But now there's a place where yeah, you can have cutoffs, you know, you can wear, be a dude wearing cutoff shorts so short that I can basically see your junk and like you know, wear like you know, a bunch of like super tight choker necklaces, and like I can see your midriff and like all this other stuff.
You can do that as a server at Roberta. Which is what we just saw. And your customers aren't like, wow, your your junk is up in my face with those hyper short cutoff shorts. They're just like, oh, it's for Bertus. Right, right.
Show me your junk. Show me your junk. But the thing is, is I think that that's fine, but it's just it it great. You know, it's that the interesting thing is is that like how many places can do that? You know what I mean?
Like, how is it that the culture you choose at the beginning of starting your restaurant allows you or your bar allows you to do certain things, but I think also can shackle you, right? Because you can't do other things. Like if you make a choice to be this kind of rock and roll that you can't all of a sudden be like, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna spiff it up a little bit. You know what I'm saying?
We're gonna you know what Dave Chang famously said, right? He said, uh Dave Chang said, uh, you can be a hundred millionaire and still be a good person, but the minute you become a billionaire, you must have killed someone to get there. That's his theory. True. Yeah, you think so?
But he hangs out with billionaires now. I don't think so. Hey, you want to take a call? Yeah, call her, you're on the air. Hey Dave, absolutely love your show.
Um hi everybody. Hi, hi Natasha. Hi. Um, Nasasha, you come from Covina, right? Yeah.
Yeah, me too. Whoa. Do you also like Good Burger in the movie? You like that movie? Don't like those.
How old are you? Nastasia's leaning forward to a display. How old are you? Oh, I'm older than you. I'm I'm day-age.
Oh, okay. So Goodburger. Anyway, go ahead. Sorry. Um, my son loves to get into welding.
He's six years 16 years old. Um what do you suggest for a small stick welding rig? Okay, this is a great question. It's a fantastic question. And I will say this.
When I was learning to weld, um, they still made you do the very old school kind of uh thing, which is you start learning how to use uh an oxyacetylene torch uh and then you know learn to cut with an oxyacetylene torch and ferrous metal and then learn to braise and actually do torch welding. And from there that you graduated to uh welding with a stick welder, and from there they taught you MIG welding, and then if you were lucky, you got to learn TIG, right? And so that's kind of the progression that we were uh taught. I never uh you know, and I the I and by the way, Lindy, the compressed gas people, Lindy, uh have an old uh book which is I think almost free, the oxyacetylene uh handbook, which I highly recommend you buy. I think it came out in the 40s or 50s.
It's really cool. It's not up to date, obviously, but it has everything you need to know about torches if you care about torches, which you know, why wouldn't you care about torches? Um I'm gonna have to say that I don't know that I agree with the old school uh pedagogy. Now, if your child is the kind of person, so like let's say I was gonna teach uh Dax, which I am teaching Dax how to weld. I'm not taking him, I'm not making him do the the stick and all that.
I just went straight to MIG. And the reason I went straight to MIG is is that you know you could teach all the safety and everything, but if you really want someone to get into it and they're the kind of person that gets frustrated easily, like learning to do uh good work with a stick welder is much harder than learning to do like decent work with a MIG because a MIG is basically just like a hot glue gun for metal. So and I think that you obviously I think you should learn a stick welder because it's going to give you kind of the control over the um you know over your hands and over the um the the metal and the the you know the the melt puddle uh there and it it's really good but I would say get a decent quality um stick welder. I would also say that um sorry MIG welder um and I don't know kind of how much space you have or kind of what kind of power you have but they make some decent now like um uh 125, 220 like uh that can go kind of in both on the small side that are very portable um you know it's very easy to get the the you know the the kind of the gas hooks up hookups for them and if it's that you don't want to worry about the gas and that's why you're doing stick flux core is also a good way to start with um with uh welding with uh you know with with a feeder I just think it's a lot easier. Um, but if you really want to start with a stick, I mean, I don't I don't haven't used a a stick on a daily basis in it's gotta be oh 20 years now.
I haven't used a stick on a daily basis just because I've always wanted to have access to a uh a MIG welder. But I would say that like if it was modern, I would still teach how to learn how to use a torch. I would get a MIG welder, get them into the welding, and then after that, I would go to where I never actually went, which is I would get into TIG welding, because TIG welding is a real art, and you're gonna learn a lot of the kind of control, patience, and um and you know, craft work with a TIG uh like more than any other kind of welding, right? And so I think an entree into that, uh especially if it was gonna be my you know my teenage uh boys who like you know are hard to kind of get to focus for a long time, especially if they're just practicing making weld beads one after another, um, I would go that way. The the other thing to note is that you're gonna want to get someone to teach them serious um safety when they're learning to weld, and that doesn't just mean safety when they're welding, for instance, like making sure they don't get sunburnt from the arc, uh making sure that they don't uh burn themselves, making sure they don't uh weld onto things that have zinc and and you know get um overcome by zinc fumes, uh, you know, making sure they're kind of making sure that they don't catch fire to uh their surroundings.
So there's all this safety, but there's the further safety of all of a sudden you can weld uh metal together, which means that you can make very large, very heavy, potentially dangerous things uh that can kill you. And frankly, I was not taught these things when I was uh taught to weld because when they teach you to weld uh at a liberal arts college in art art classes, they're you know, they don't expect you to make big giant dangerous things that can kill you. And so if you don't have a thorough understanding of the theory of of uh welding, it's very easy to do things like make a giant uh thousand pound spinning uh you know articulated um kinetic sculpture where the main axle has been welded on with a hundred and ten volt uh welder in the bathroom of your dorm, and it looks like a good weld because you don't know you're you're behind from a hot rock, but instead you've really just crystallize weld on the outside and the two pieces of metal aren't joined, and the entire thing falls and just barely misses killing you by like fractions of an inch. Like that is entirely possible if they don't have training in um kind of what constitutes a good weld, how to evaluate a weld, making sure that you you you know you get good um weld penetration and are using the um using the pro you know you're not trying to uh go over the capacity of your welder. So I you know, like that stuff I would kind of inculcate early, but I'm not necessarily a believer in having to start with the stick.
Is this make any sense or no? Yeah, that's and you've addressed all my concerns because I'm I mean I don't want him killing himself and I don't want them burning the house down. Um I'm trying to find somebody to teach them, but it's all welding classes that are you know thousands of dollars. I'm trying to find somebody to teach them because I don't know how to do it. My husband knows a little bit about it, but trying to find somebody that just is like a hobbyist around here in South Florida is a little challenging.
Right. I would do like, you know, I would make sure that you look the sparks in these things can cause they fly a long way and they can go uh really far. Um stick welding throws off. So the garage is full of wood. Yeah, you gotta be careful.
Get welding curtains, um, and just make sure that you know you've clean, you know, you you the area doesn't have any um stuff, and really the curtains can help if they go all the way down because sparks do go a long way. Sticks tend to throw a lot of sparks because of the uh coating on the outside. Flux core tends to throw uh more stuff off than straight MIG does. And um, you know, torches when you're cutting, obviously, they're literally burning through the metal, they throw off a lot of stuff. And so you you kind of really want to be um you know cognizant of of that.
Um, but that stuff that stuff can be made safe. But I'll tell you what, nothing is more uh goofy than a welding sunburn. You know what I'm saying? It's like it hurts like hell too. I mean, especially like I'm so fair that I, you know, the first couple times I burnt myself, sunburnt myself with a welder by letting a patch of skin stay uh, you know, for hours, you know, in in arc light.
It makes you feel like a real moron. So I just be you know careful of that. Also, uh I would not get the cheapest possible uh MiG welder because um if the feeder mechanism is not very good, it's just uh you're gonna get a lot of jams all the time, and it just is a real uh disincentive to um learning. But uh, you know, get some books, do some research. Um there are probably some art people who will do it who where anytime you're they're teaching someone to do it professionally, they're it's gonna be pretty hardcore and it's gonna cost a lot of money.
But you might be able to find someone who's doing it for an an art uh for art, and then I would just talk to them and you know make sure that they're that they're serious about teaching like long term uh safety in terms of what you're building and safety for yourself. I would I would do that. And that might be a lot cheaper. There's a yeah, there's an AI an art institute up in Fort Lauderdale. Maybe I could get like a grad student or something.
Yeah. Yeah. Slip them some booze, slip them a couple bucks, and you know, see see uh what's going on. Just you know, uh it's fun, it's awesome, but again, it just requires like a little just a little bit of caution at the beginning so that you don't kill yourself down the road. Yeah.
I have another question too. Um I've got the tank, I'm doing my own seltzer now. I've got the carbon in air cap, but it's not holding the bubble past like the next day. Like it seems a little flat the next day. Okay, so every time every time you take a uh sip, you just recharge it.
So what you do is is you you take your bottles, you you're not carbonating straight Florida water, are you? You have some sort of filter to get rid of the sulfur note. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Oh, thank goodness.
Florida, I mean, no offense, but every f every Florida tap water I've tasted that's unfiltered is like horrible carbonated. Do you find this or not? Terrible. Horrible. Like horrible.
Um, so yeah, so that what you do is is you um make sure that the stuff's cold, uh, carbonate it. Uh usually water, unlike cocktails, really only requires a double carbonation to really get it ripping. I would keep your pressure somewhere in the area of around um thirty-five to forty PSI. Uh do it twice, and then after you pour your first glass, squeeze it, re put the carbonator cap on, and give it a shake at full pressure again, and then it'll be as it'll be as good as the first time um on the next day. If you don't, there's nothing that's gonna preserve it because w it you know, it's it's basically gassing off all that CO2 into the headspace of your bottle up to the pressure that it was in in the bottle, and so you're constantly decreasing the amount of gas in.
So w like we n I never put one back in the fridge that I haven't uh charged back up to full pressure with CO two. Okay, cool. I'll try that. Thank you. And we went to the I took my daughter down for the first time to the spice park a couple weeks ago, so that was fun.
Awesome place, right? Yeah, that was fun. Yeah. Anyone who's in anyone who's in South Florida, South Day, go down to the fruit and spice park. It's a state park.
And make sure you go with someone who's gonna let you steal some stuff off the trees. Remember, Stas, we went twice, and one time we could steal the stuff off the trees, and the other time we couldn't steal the stuff off the trees. I was in the You didn't go the second time? Maybe you didn't go the second time. The time we went, we stole all the stuff off the trees.
That's the thing, man. If you like, because I because you're not a huge plant head. You just you're a flower head, not a plant head. You like you don't like vegetable plants. You like the vegetable.
Yeah, but you don't you're not you're not gonna be able to do it. I'm you don't stare at the plants. I don't stare at the plant. You want the vegetable. Yes.
What are you growing this year? Lots of tomatoes, 16 different tapes. I told you what happened to me last year with tomatoes, right? Mine were bad too. No, no, I had giant plants.
My plants were amazing. We didn't get one tomato because they were all eaten. Oh. Here we should take a quick break. All right, quick break.
Come back back with cooking issues. Bob's Red Mill has been milling whole grains since 1978. One of the nice things about Bob's Red Mill is it's the only that I know of, national supplier that's easily available for lots of interesting, hard-to-get grains and other seed products. So, you know, before Bob's red mill became widely available, you couldn't go get something like quinoa very easily, or you couldn't go get spelt easily in small quantities. But now you go to any one of the huge number of stores that carry Bob's Red Mill, and you can get smaller amounts of these really interesting, fun things to play with.
Learn more at Bob's Redmill.com/slash podcast. And we're back. Uh Mark from Pittsburgh wrote in about uh garlic. We won't talk about ketchup, we'll just talk about the question really quickly. Uh big fan of the show.
Love my Sears all. Looking forward to my spinz all. Been cooking for many years in different facets from diet fine dining to basic approachable catering. In a recent review of a blog discussing the dangers of vacuum sealing garlic, I was getting conflicting information regarding the safety of it cooked versus uncooked. My question is to you.
I am placing my am I placing my guests or family in danger with the current practice. I adopted a batch roasting pounds of peeled garlic. I salt, roast, blast chill, and then toss with oil and place into half pound vacuum bags and freeze. If I need it for a function, I can pull out the amount of bags that I need, uh, have them at home, I can nip a corner and squeeze out the few c a few cloves to puree, saute, smear on bread, and keep the rest frozen. Please uh reply via email if possible.
I don't have the email in case I missed a show, although that's highly unlikely. Mark in Pittsburgh, you're totally safe. Here's the thing garlic in oil is unsafe from a botulism perspective if you're going to keep it at room temperature. If you're going to store it at room temperature in an oxygen deprived environment or anywhere near room temperature, botulism can grow. And the issue is cooking the garlic is not enough to kill the botulism, so that's unsafe.
You, however, like there's no you're not making it less safe by cooking it. So if you're willing to take garlic, freeze it in a bag, and then eat it later, then cooking it is not gonna make it less safe. In fact, it will make it more safe. It won't make it safe as a shelf stable thing. So it's one of those things where as soon as you say garlic and oil.
People are like, ah you know what I'm saying, Stas. You seem to have botulism, but you're not gonna get botulism if the stuff's frozen. You're not gonna kill the botulism by freezing it, but you're not gonna get botulism uh either. So it sounds like your procedure is uh a hundred percent um good. Uh Jeff Given wrote in, and I was gonna go on a long uh thing about how to patent uh cooking equipment, but it looks like we're not gonna have uh time because I'm gonna do a spinz all thing.
Uh Tim Rupar wrote in with a bunch of questions. I'll answer just this one. I'll answer the rest uh next week, but uh one question was um why Celsius? I understand metric measurements in weight and volume, but it seems like Fahrenheit is actually more precise than Celsius. And the answer is well, nothing like it depends on what you mean by more precise.
If you're going to cook to decimal degrees of Celsius, then I guess it doesn't really matter, right? Because you're cooking to decimal degrees of Celsius, and that's really precise, more precise than anyone uh needs to be. I think it's just a question of who you're talking to. So typically, you know, when I was doing a lot of work um with my original kind of sous-vide low temperature uh stuff, uh I was dealing with a lot of Europeans, and a lot of the recipes and people I were talking to were Europeans, and they all deal in Celsius. And so I started doing all of that kind of stuff in in Celsius, but stuff that you know I've done uh since I was a child, uh, I do in Fahrenheit because my mind speaks Fahrenheit.
So there's no real reason. It's just as the world becomes more international, as our world in the Americas become in America becomes more international, um, and you know, with the internet, it just is easier to do a lot of these things kind of in Celsius. What do you think, Stas? All right, now Nastasia wants me to give the spinzall update. So, for those of you uh who are just coming to this, uh is that the beginning of uh Lenny Kravitz, It Ain't Over Till It's Over?
No, definitely not. Now I have that going through my head. Do you have that song going through your head? Yeah, yeah. D D.
You like that song? Are you a Lenny Kravitz fan or no? Let me get crazy, man. That's a good song. That's a good song.
Because it ain't over till it's over. Uh so uh Spinzall is the world's first culinary centrifuge. And actually it'd be interesting to talk next week uh about patenting and like what the patent procedure is like. Because I think people don't really understand if they have an idea for a kitchen implement or anything else, kind of what it's like to go through the patent procedure and what it's like to actually start a business that way. So it's an interesting topic.
So you know, I could talk to Jeff about that or anyone if anyone's interested. But um so here's where we are. We've gone through what's called pilot production, which means they have made the actual units with the actual parts with the actual workers on the actual line that they're going to do the production run with. Uh this week they're taking that production pilot production set that they've made. They made 40 on the pilot production, just the way they made 40 for what's called the engineering build uh run.
And they're putting it through the test to make sure that they are going to withstand the quality controls uh that that we're imposing on them for the mass production run. That testing should be done this week. Uh the rest of the parts are in by uh the first week of August, and they are all gonna get built between August 7th and August 10th. And so, in anticipation uh of that, uh we've also decided to ship the um this batch directly from China to customers. And so um we are opening up the orders again when, like tomorrow or the next day?
Yeah. So if you place your order by, I haven't figured out what the actual cutoff date, but I think it's basically the manufacturing date by August 7th. It we're gonna open it up again. And if anyone wants to order one and they order it by we're not 100% sure when the cutoff date is, but I think around August 7th, if you order it by then, you will get yours with the first batch that uh comes in until obviously we we only have a uh you know a fixed number, but if you order them, then you'll get otherwise you have to wait till October because we're gonna put the rest on a boat and ship them over here on a boat to mod to Modernist Pantry and Amazon to sell from here. Um yeah, so that's uh what do you want more on the update?
We've uh been dealing with individual rotor balancing. So the stuff we're dealing with is like making sure all the individual rotors are balanced properly and again meet meet our uh QC, but everything's looking good, everything's still on sketch. Yeah? Is that a good update, Stas? So you want to hear?
All right. And I'm gonna be going to Tales of the Cocktail on uh Thursday and on Friday. I'm actually gonna do a spinzall seminar at Tales of the Cocktail, and I will have there in the house one of the actual production units uh as well as some of the engineering build units. So anyone who's going to be in New Orleans can come check it out. I'll probably Instagram out a few pictures.
I have a couple pictures of the actual assembly line if people want to see it, but I don't know. I don't know whether people actually want to see the assembly line or not. But anyway, that's uh cooking issues back next week. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you.
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