Today's show is brought to you by Bob's Red Mill, sharing nothing but the best in whole grain nutrition and committed to their mission of good food for all. Learn more at Bob's Redmill.com/slash podcast. 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 live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly uh 12 to like 1245, one o'clock from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brook Brooklyn. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stas?
Good. Yeah? Doing all right? Yep. Got uh Dave in the booth.
Hello. How are you doing? Good, how about you? Uh I'm I'm doing well, and I'm happy that uh even though this has been another uh terrible week in the United States of America, I'm glad to say uh, you know, I have some friends here today, so hopefully we'll have a good discussion that is, you know, not about the horrible things that are happening outside of our little container box studio. Uh I'm joined today uh by uh Mandy Aftel and Daniel Patterson.
Uh Mandy is the world-renowned perfumer. Is that the correct term? Yes. Perfumer par excellence, who's uh who's kind of, oh, if if if a human has a main thrust to their life, it's that uh she is interested in uh fragrances that are derived naturally, sourcing them, finding them, collecting them, compounding them, using them, thinking about them, writing about them. Yes or no?
Absolutely. Yes. Uh and now Daniel's a little more difficult to kind of because uh, you know, uh being in the you know food world myself, I know how everyone hates to be kind of boxed in, but I will say that uh, you know, uh I guess I first had your food at Kwa like a a billion years ago, and then at Kwa again like a you know, half a billion years ago. Uh but you know, Daniel's always struck me as very uh he's one of the thoughtful chefs. So he's one of the kind of uh, you know, um that generation of chefs that just really um to the uh advantage of the food, I would say, uh, is just very thoughtful about kind of what he does, how he does it, why he why he does it, why he uses what he what he uses.
Also, uh a serious control freak. I'll tell you guys a little story from Kwa. Daniel's actually uh he was like, so Nastasi and I were on a massive citrus tasting. I think it was a citrus tasting, right, Stas, or was it uh Merle Haggard? It was it was Merle Haggard, I think.
It was Merle Haggard. We were going uh back when Merle Haggard was alive. We were going to a Merle Haggard concert so that we could get him to skull. We had this series where we were getting people to drink shots of uh aqua vete and we were taking pictures of them uh you know, before, during and after, which you know someday maybe we'll start again. I don't know who knows.
Anyways, so we're there, and uh, you know, we go to the we go to the restaurant and uh after the meal, uh Daniel comes up to me, he's like, uh, so uh how do you like it? He's like, uh, I think I really enjoyed it, which I did. We had this great meal. And hey, well, first of all, he was standing, remember, he was standing, we scolded him, and he was standing, because remember, it was right next to a strip club, and there was that painting of the strip stuff outside. Anyway, so he then he asked me how my meal was last time I was there, which had been like maybe two or three years prior, and was super angry at me that I didn't think that the first meal I had there was absolute garbage compared to the current meal I'd had because and this is super interesting, he had learned so much more in life over those intervening like two to three years, and was mad at me at not being able to discern immediately the extra kind of knowledge, and it just goes to show kind of like uh a person who's always kind of thinking about what they do.
Now, uh they the reason they're here, uh not just because you know they want to be here, but they're on a uh a book tour. They just released uh a new book called uh Art of Flavor, right? Yes. It's with uh Riverside, which is River Head. River Head Head, should have written it on a file card for me.
River Head, which I can only remember as being apparently, I've been told, the greatest of all the penguin imprints. Like penguin classics are are useless, like piles of garbage, or as Nastasi would say, paperweights and or things to separate. You know, the only thing Nastasi uses my book for is to separate hot foods from cold foods when she's going to uh potlucks. It's the exact smart. Yeah, it's the exact correct insulator thickness and fitting into a tote bag to separate, you know, like a McDLT style hot from cold.
So um, yeah, so maybe other penguin books can be that, but this this imprint, not like that. This imprint is great. Yeah. That's all. So this is not the first collaboration you guys have had, right?
This is our second book together. Okay, and the first one Aroma. Which was what we did that for with Artisan, and it was about the it it was had real um as it had essential oils as components of recipes for food and for like personal care and fragrance things. This book is completely different. Right, and and both of you, you know, aside from when you're writing together, write apart, like you know, um obviously Daniel, you have books, but also you write for like you've written for the New York Times magazine, right?
And uh, you know, do you do like straight up West Coast writing too? Or like I I read you in the New York Times, but do you do all those like evil papers out there on your side of the they don't want me? No. Well you've always had kind of this like weird relationship with San Francisco, right? I mean, like it's kind of it is your town, but I don't know, you like I don't I don't s you've never said it to me, but it you always seems that you are bucking whatever trend happens to be current there at that time, right?
It's like you're kind of a no a little bit different, like a little bit I don't know, man. I think you had it right the first time. A little more difficult. Right, you could have stopped this. Yeah, it would have been right.
All right. So now uh when you guys are writing together, how does it how does it uh how does that work? Do you like parcel it out into pieces? Do you lump it all together? Are you like, I'll take this chapter, I'll take this chapter.
Like how does it how does that work? So the way the book started was um I was at Mandy's studio and we're talking, and she was actually talking about her creative process when she puts together uh a perfume, and it was just very much like like how I think about putting together a dish. And so and he said, Well, you know, we should write a book about that, you know, like we wrote about aroma, we should write about flavor. And I thought to myself, yeah, let's do it. How hard can it be?
And that was three years ago. Yeah, no, writing is hard, it sucks. I hate it. Do you like it? I know you do it.
Do you like it? No. No, it's uh terrible. What about you, Mandy? You like it?
No. But uh one thing one thing I was to say was Daniel and I did really spend like once a week, every week, going over we did do the writing together. There are areas that are much more Daniel's than mine in the book that are are his, like complete chapters. I don't think I had much input in a few things, and a few a few for me as well. But the bulk of the whole book is this combined mind that we had together, finishing each other's sentences.
You know, he was really there with me together, the two of us. It was very exhilarating and exciting. See, that sounds like an utter and complete nightmare to me. It was good. So here's what's awesome is that I learned so much in this process.
Like I could have never written this book myself, right? So I thought I knew about flavor, and I did intuitively. And uh we got this great quote from Jacques Bocin about how it was like was it the Cartesian theory behind all of his intuitive process, which like was kind of how I felt. And and once you start unpacking like the process of how you think about what you put together, right? So like carrots and orange, they go together, everyone knows that, but no one ever tells you why they go together.
And so that was really what the book was about was like a million books can tell you what to put together. But but you know, for especially for the home cook, it's kind of mysterious, right? So so the process by which we we found our way through the book was as much as anything else, not a writing thing, but a structural thing. How do you take something so nonlinear and make it in linear, which is what a book is, you read one chapter, another chapter, another chapter. And the process was that um, you know, we would Mandy would lend a lot of her language that she had developed for perfume in terms of locking and burying.
So when two flavors join together to create something that's new or burying where something is very, very strong, and you have to push it down so it doesn't dominate like like rosemary or or anchovies or something like that. How how to think about what the next process is, and what I realized is a cook, and you can probably relate to this, a lot of the decisions we make are compound decisions. So one of the things I realized early on is that a cook does something, it seems like you do one thing, you actually are deciding like three or four things at once. What's the cooking process? What are you adding?
Uh, and and then what what is the herb that's going to come later, and all of this stuff kind of becomes one. And so what working with Mandy really helped me with was teasing this out to be able to see with some kind of clarity all of the different steps that happen along the way. Well, so to that point, you know, you I you know I've heard Mandy talk many times about kind of the structure of like a perfume breaking it down into, and I I wrote it in my magical book so I wouldn't have to do it from memory, uh, top, middle, and kind of base notes, right? Uh and then what was interesting is seeing that translated into kind of a cook's flavor thing, and it didn't actually necessarily get translated 100% the way I thought it was going to get translated. So it you know, it it it's either.
Well, here really yeah, so it's interesting to me. So you I don't know if you want to spend a minute talking about it in terms of perfume, and then how like that rubric then was applied in the book to food. I will, I will. I just want to make one comment on Daniel's comment first, which is I I was kind of more the research person about you know, researching flavor and thinking about flavor, and I thought for a while, in fact, I asked Harold, you know, can you just tell me where I can find like you know how people thought about flavor? I how people put things together, how what were the uh the ways they were thinking about creating flavor?
I I was shocked at how little there was. There was a lot historically about what people use, but not about the thinking. You know, because the creation of flavor is stuff that's moving and dynamic. It's not static. You can't just when you put this with this, then you have that, which reminded me so much of perfume.
So in perfume, we talk about top, middle, and base notes. And so top notes are things that reach your sense of smell very quickly and disappear quickly. They often kind of sharp in their smell. And then middle notes have kind of usually more layers to them, and they bridge that distance between the top notes, which reach your sense of smell quickly and disappear and last kind of longer. Then there's bass notes that are usually deep and rich and heavy and come from like roots and barks and heavier things.
And so when you're thinking about smells, you're thinking about that kind of shape and dynamic and what they do to each other as they're evolving. So where we came to with we applied some of that to food, which I think is one of the more abstract ideas in the book. I think like bearing and locking and stuff are easier to get your head behind. But you should say the four rules. I think you should, because that plays upon the.
Well, but even before we get to the four rules, which we yeah, obviously you need to get to. So like it's interesting. So on a perfume, you know, you have these, how do you contrast like a base note, like you say bark, with more of uh whatever you call them, fixatives or uh what do you think? They are. The the base notes are the fixatives.
So base notes are the things that last the longest and they make the perfume stay the longest. They're the heaviest molecules. But on the food side, it translates into the more I don't want to say bland, but kind of like the more overridden notes. So when you transfer it from a perfume where it's literally the thing that's holding, literally, by the way, apparently, according to McGee, I was talking to him, holding the high notes down. You know what I mean?
So that they stay there longer. Yes, yes. Um, by the way, whenever she says Harold, it's our good friend Harold McGee. I assume, unless there's another one. There is only one Harold.
He's like he's like the Madonna of the food world. So the uh mine too. So the um so in like uh in a food context, Daniel, you're talking more like the beans side of the equation. So like that seems to me to be an interesting, an interesting shift going from the one regime to the other. Yeah, so one way to think about it.
So I did a couple of um braised chicken recipes. So the chicken would be because one of the things about the book, there's no luxury ingredients. It's all the stuff you can get at the supermarket. We really want this to be a book. There's like 80, 85 recipes.
They're all easy. Because I think that's really important, is if you're gonna show something, you know, you gotta show it in a way that people can actually do it, right? So braised chicken, all based on, you know, basically water, onion, water, uh, you know, but then there's a middle note. So it could be um, for example, uh uh orange, saffron, and then a top note, which could be tarragon, right? So that is a top middle bass where you have your your depth, you know, the thing holding it down, which is the the stew and the all those things locking together.
You have this middle note which connects with like maybe a little bit of Anna's flavors, a little bit of orange, and then the the sharp tarragon at the top, which kind of lifts it up, but it could also be with carrots as your bass, right? And then you need a middle that maybe is miso and maybe a top that's like uh like cilantro or something. So it's relative, right? So if you think about playing a piano, anything, right? Uh a musical instrument, you could have a chord where the the C is very high or very low, but the r the relationship between top middle and bass is what's important and not a a static base always has to be this.
Right. So conceptually, like going to beans for a second, like if you're gonna go like Mexican, you're gonna have like uh you know, certain ones, like you're gonna have like Oja Santa or something inside the beans. An herb like that, although it's very on its own, I mean, and even if you're if you know it's there, it's very itself. You know what I mean? Um yet it it seems to me to be part of the baseness of the bean.
So it's like so mentally, even though something I guess what I'm trying to get to is when you're thinking about it, it seems like it's not just oh, the like the herb is gonna function as a top note in this case, because some herbs can be part of the base aspect of it too, right? So so that what you're talking about is this kind of magical transformative ability that's like kind of at the heart of the the transformative effect of of cooking, which is that some things bind. And so this is a big thing that um and many can probably speak to this more because she was more versed in it uh than I am. But each every plant, I mean all things, but especially plants which have hundreds of aromatic molecules, um they like we we call it nature's the original flavor. So the way that if you look at the composition of an herb is put together, there'll be two, three things at the top, aromatic molecules that are dominant, with a ton of other stuff.
But it could be something way, way down that's 0.005%, that makes you know an herb what it is. And it could be that herbs share similar top two or three, but then slightly different ratios. So how you mix things together and how they bind together makes things what they are. So that's just within one ingredient. So each ingredient contains a multitude.
So the way we describe it is facets, right? So you have a predominant flavor, but then you have these facets. They could be floral, they could be peppery. But in in the case of the the beans and the um the uh the herb, there's some uh connection that happens with those facets that makes it bind together. So it so it yeah, so it and and and we which we call locking.
So it sticks out a little bit on top, right? You can recognize it, but then something else kind of dovetails into the beans and makes something that wasn't there before. And that's kind of like how to anticipate that, how to build on it and how to actually plan for it is one of the things that we tried to talk about in the book. Nice. By the way, call your all of your flavor-related questions in too.
718497-2128. That's 7184972128. So do you want to talk about the four rules of the case? Oh, we gotta call it caller, yeah. All right, caller, you're on the air.
Dan. Caller. Hello. Still alive. Yellow?
Well, we got another one. Uh caller, you're on the air. Hello? Hello? Hi.
First, so let me first some caveats. Are you do you want to stay in the United States of America or no? Doesn't matter. All right. Well, I'm gonna let I'm gonna let Daniel first of all, like I like I've lived in New York since like forever, so I'm a huge New York guy, so I'm gonna step away from my New York microphone here for a minute.
I'm gonna let Daniel take this guy. So you're in Philadelphia now. Is that right? You're in Philadelphia now? Is that what you're saying?
Yeah. So my personal opinion is that there's good food everywhere. I uh from what I Philadelphia has a great scene and a lot going on. So one thing I would say is, or wonder is how deeply you explored, you know, your own environment. Because I think a lot of people are doing a lot of different kinds of things, not necessarily the things you might see in magazines and stuff like that, but there's a lot going on.
And then beyond that, uh I think everywhere has something to offer. It's more like um the culture that you want to live with and the kind of people you want to be around and the kind of people you want to cook for. So those are the things that I I would think about. But no matter where you go, like food is about people, and and so however you connect to people, that's that's like the most important thing. But do you like going to a place that has like major, like in other words?
So there's obviously places that are known for having a boat ton of people who are working hard in the in the food industry, right? Like New York, San Francisco, this kind of stuff. You have places that are known for good ingredients. You have places that are known for one particular like style of uh, you know, one particular style of food or one one particular kind of um restaurant tour. But you think yeah, I d yeah, I think it's like you're the kind of guy, Daniel.
It's more like it's it's like I like you almost prefer a constraint, right? I mean, like it's it's like it's like he'd r you know rather be like you only have this stick and this fire. Let's see what you can do with it. And so I think w what he's saying is it's almost like your your location is kind of like that. Like your where you are is kind of like that.
Now, I will say though that I think it's extremely helpful, not that I get to do it that often, but to travel around and taste a lot of food, go to a lot of places, especially you know, if you come from uh uh like an eastern seaboard kind of reality where you you tend to believe that kind of all there is is kind of what you see in life, it's a huge advantage to go like taste other people's stuff, taste uh other people's um and it is helpful I think to look, you know, who d who's the best at X, Y, or Z. Like I hate to say it, like West Coast is still the best coffee place if you're interested in like learning about what's fresh and in going on. I mean not fred, but you know, in coffee. Did you say it's the best coffee and food place? No, best coffee best place to go to learn about coffee, I was still the West Coast.
Well, I don't know, the best place to learn about citrus is definitely in uh right now, I think probably in California. Um but I think it's like if you want to go to a particular restaurant, like I had a guy I used to work with that went out to California to work for you. You know what I mean? Like uh Nguyen, Mikey Nguyen. Oh yeah, you know, years ago.
And um I think like it is useful to find someone that you think is interesting and go to work for that particular person rather than working for a particular place because I think you can learn a lot about you know, even in, you know, I mean, I guess the chef and you probably says that you, you know, how long do you want someone to devote to you, like a year at least. Yeah, and you know, but but like I I got out of this day-to-day chef thing a couple years ago, and so maybe my opinions have changed a little bit. But I think the m the most important thing is whatever you do, commit yourself to it a hundred percent. And it's not about a a time, it's about like are you gonna open your heart to this? Are you gonna are you gonna listen?
Are you gonna contribute? Are you gonna learn? Because if you do, naturally you'll stay there a long time. Right. I think what do you think about when you get somewhere and you realize that whoever you're working with, you don't respect them anymore.
Just get out right now or stick with it. Oh yeah, be honest and and and be polite and just say this isn't the place for me. Give a proper notice, move on. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's not necessarily it's not necessarily bad to cut and run. It's bad to cut and run if you're doing it just because you're lazy or uh right? I mean that's the main thing.
Like, you know, actually if you're lazy, we definitely want you to cut and run. I can see that one coming. Oh man, that's hilarious. Can I ask caller a question? Oh, should I Can I Can I ask the caller a question?
Yeah, that's that's Dave. That's Dave in the booth asking you. Hey, caller, what's your favorite photo place in Philly? Uh still alive? I don't think so.
I don't think so. I think we lost them. All right, cool. Never mind. All right, so let's go to uh well if we have another caller, they put 'em on.
But like while we're doing the Can I do these? Oh yeah, why don't you tell people what you're doing? Yeah. So when Daniel talked about nature being the original flavorist, I have these little examples for it for you guys, and then you can you know discuss them on the air. So i inside of every we have this thing in the book called the flavor compass, which is really i uh part of my world, which is the aroma essential oil-rich ingredients that people use for cooking that don't really take up a lot of real estate on the plate, but are incredibly important for flavor.
So those are the flowers, the herbs, the citrus, and the spices. And people usually turn to those and think of those as something that's really going to create flavor. And I think they often think of them with a very broad brush and a kind of interchangeability. So he made this flavor compass to kind of really delineate the differences in flavors between things that are very near each other, like the differences between the herbs. Because one of the things I had found in perfume is really picking the specific thing you want, like lemon over lime or or basil over tarragon, and then taking that basil and putting it together with another flavor and thinking very creatively about it can completely change what you're doing.
Not just any citrus, not just any spice. And also a lot of the spices that make it to the market are depleted of their essential oils. So I'm always very, very keen on telling people to stick their fingers in them and see if their finger smells, like stick their, if they can touch them and smell the ingredient, how important that is. And so in nature, you just gross nostasial, by the way. No.
And so well, if you have a clove, I think it's like important to make sure it smells like a clove. So one of the one of the things that I brought for y'all to smell is just within, just within one species like basil, of which there are many different kinds of basil, certain ones are much more spicy and certain ones are much more floral. So sweet basil, which is what most people think of all the time and they use, is has a very large amount of an aroma molecule called linolol. And linolol is kind of, I don't know if Harold's talked to you about linol, but it's very important to him. Linolol is the floral aroma that's in so many herbs.
So a lot of times if you're using an herb or an herb has gone to flour, the linololil in there is making it much more floral. So in a certain way, you're already using florals. On the other hand, Thai basil has a lot of eugenol, which is the main aroma molecule in cloves. So I just wanted you to, if you can, just to smell the difference and smell the difference between the two basils, but then about their operating facet, which is what we call it, which would then lock with something else and make your dish more spicy or more floral. So your sweet basil has a huge anise hit like Thai does.
Like this has. Yeah, but like globe, the standard globe does not have nearly this much of an anise hit, at least when you're using it as a fresh leaf. Yes, that's a much more anise one. That is a much more anise. Which is why it's so good in drinks.
All right. That's a very from a practical standpoint. I mean, because all this stuff, you know, that's it's very esoteric and you're talking about aroma molecules, but the reality is that um, you know, if you know that something has more of a floral component, let's say you're doing something with Myer Lemon and you want to do something with basil, you're gonna pick the basil that has more of a floral component that will lock with the the floral of the Meyer lemon. Or maybe you have something like really sweet and flat, like orange, you might want to take something spicier. So knowing those kind of um components allow for either kind of something that's consonant or something that's uh kind of different, but either way you're doing it consciously.
And so knowing a little bit how things are put together, you know, kind of let you also with substitutes for like what's the worst question you ever get when you're writing a recipe? What can I substitute for that? Well, you can substitute this recipe for another recipe. But but I think I think I think most I'm gonna use that from now on. Can I use that?
As long as I credit you? That's the cloud that's now the Daniel Patterson substitution. You can s you may substitute a different recipe. I think the whole idea of of thinking about ingredients is having facets and thinking about those facets as locking together is what creates flavor. And just having that key, just having that tool and thinking that way will impact the whole way you think about cooking and the whole way you think about creating flavor.
So let me go to your compass for a minute because it's interesting. It's also interesting kind of what you chose because it is part of a specific structure. So like I always think about like what uh what a cook's toolkit is, like where that where are they going? Where's their head at? Like what are they what are they reaching for, right?
Yes. Because there's whole groups of people that don't really cook with citrus at all, right? Now they gotta, they unless their food sucks, they have to have some sort of something to brighten it up. But it's interesting that like, and I, you know, like you guys, like I'm reaching for the citrus because I'm you know, I have access to it all year round now, and like it's there even though I live in New York and not in California. Uh by the way, uh the citrus in California is ri freaking ridiculous.
Especially the peels, the citrus peels in California are preposterously good. So like the fruit, like you know, like if you like the f it's okay, you know what I mean? Like like if you're gonna get like a pomelo or something like that, yeah, okay. It's like all pith, but like the peels out of California are just freaking gorgeous and smell amazing. You know, you know the peels are where all the oils are.
If you stick your finger in I'm always talking about putting I mean I'd be banned in grocery stores. I mean, if I ever was like really successful, they'd see me coming, they'd like say, put up like garlic. But if you stick your finger into the peel of any citrus, you will have the oil right on your fingers. Whereas the juice is different, it has some, but not like the peels. Yeah.
So by the way, my grandma used to get the chocolate sample boxes, and she would push her freaking thumb through the bottom of every freaking candy. Love me too. Me too. Me too. To find the good ones.
Is there such a thing though? They're all filled with good. Okay, yeah. Yes, there is. But but with chocolate, I don't understand.
Like, what's it gonna do? Release the uh aroma? No, you get to find out how hard it is. I I've done this. I am like this.
You get to find out what's inside without having to go through the top, and then you can just quietly put it back. Yeah, so you would you I would go and I would turn everyone over. I'm like, grandma! Like, you know what I mean? It's like anyway.
Wait, uh Dave, you say we got someone? You want you want to take a quick break and then we'll take a call? All right. Oh, you want to take the caller first since they're on the freaking line? Yeah, all right, fine.
All right, caller, you're on the air. Hello. Hi. Hi. I am calling about a question for a wedding.
I am calling because I have the great idea. My partner disagrees to have a punch bowl of orbits at our wedding. And since orbits stopped existing about 20 years ago, how do I make my own? Okay, the very first thing I would do is do exactly what the person you're getting married to says to do. Regarding your punch bowl.
That's the very first. All right. Uh orbits, uh the the recipe I I don't remember whether Kimos uh published, uh, Martin Lair's published the recipe for orbits, but CP Kelko, who makes gel-an, orbits is a gel-an trick. Uh CP Kelko uh released the recipe uh an um a number of times. What it is is is the the balls are gel-an balls, uh primarily low acyl gel-an balls that are suspended in a very light gell-an fluid gel.
And the trick of it is this. The density, first of all, the balls need to be small, uh, and you can set gel-an into very small balls, just like you would drop agar, presuming you have a uh a good enough sequestrant so that and you make the base so that you don't have kind of any kind of free uh calcium in your liquid at all. You can make a straight gel-an ball much like you'd make an uh uh an alginate ball if you wanted to make those things, which I don't. Uh, and then uh the the major, major, major trick here is one, you're gonna want to store those balls in colored fluid until just before the uh of the same relatively isotonic fluid, uh right up until right beforehand, and then rinse them off so they don't bleed into your liquid. And the other thing is the density of the balls has to almost exactly match the density of the uh fluid job.
I don't mean the thickness, everyone always gets this wrong. Dan, you notice this, everyone always miss, you know, misconstrues density and texture is the same thing. Density is just weight for volume, texture is how thick something is. So you need almost exactly the same density. So same sugar levels, same everything in order for it to get it to float.
The problem with it uh uh is um that if you're just picking up with a with a with it, you can get it to suspend, it's not a problem, but uh the the surface of orbits, so when you drank orbits, you probably drank it out of a bottle, and so you never saw the surface of it in a nice big glass coming up, but it's got a Santa Claus jiggling bowl full of jelly belly kind of a situation going on on the surface. Right. And it's impossible to not have that. They also dope it with a slight, slight bit of Xanthan. So it's a slight bit of Xanthan and gel in.
But if if your spouse to be does not wish you to do this, don't do it. Because it's just a nightmare. You know when you should do it, you should do it on your first anniversary. I think I think I can, I think I can get away with this one. All right.
All right, man. I'm pushing for it. Understand, look, I've been married, I've been married 22 years now. And like most times that I've said I'm just gonna do it, I regret it. I'm just gonna say that.
And you know what I mean? Most of the times when I'm like, I realize that I should not do this. This is not even just in marriage, this is just in life in general. Most of the time, when I'm when I know beforehand that it's gonna cause problems, and I do it anyway. Like sometimes I'm like, no, this is gonna be great.
And then like I do it, and like I was like, see, that was great. But most of the time I'm like, man, they were right. I was I should not have done that. All right. Well, um, thank you for the answer.
Um I have one more small confirmation of something if I can ask. Chocolate bars better out of the freezer? Uh what do you mean? Like like what well, the chocolate bars are best stored in a low in a low humidity, cool environment. Uh, because the thing is when you freeze a chocolate bar, it's gonna get a lot of condensation on it as it comes up to unless it's like vacuum wrapped or something like this.
I don't really know. Do you guys know the effect? Why aren't you eating them sooner? Well, maybe he's getting has a specific one he wants to keep it for the wedding. Like maybe he was gifted some like unique chocolate bar and he wants to save it for the wedding.
Wine vacpack, wine cellar, it'll be fine. There you go. Vacpack, wine cellar. Just don't let it go through a lot of temperature fluctuations so it blooms out. Alrighty.
Same same thing by the way, coffee. Coffee in and out of the freezer. Highly problematic. Highly problematic. Open it, vacuum it once.
Well, you just use it right away. Roast it, use it right away. That's that's the correct answer. All right, so you want to take a quick break? Billy Bills.
Coming right back with some cooking issues. Bob Moore is the founder of Bob's Red Mill, top quality supplier of grains, flowers, and general nutritional goodness from Oregon. He's talking to us about their signature millstones, a very specific way of making whole grain flour. So what's the secret, Bob? Follow me into the millroom.
Well, these are just like the millstones that the Romans use to grind their grains. In fact, these stones came from the same quarry near Paris, France, where the Romans got their stones. The company that makes our millstones pulls their quartz from the same quarry, and they make mills for us that are just wonderful. Bob explains how the millstones grind much slower and at cooler temperatures than modern steel rollers. The process keeps the grains cool, preserving the flavor and nutrition.
Look at what they produce. I love how they keep things simple and just right. All the nutrition is there, just like nature in the chat. After almost 40 years in the milling business, they're serving up over 400 organic, gluten-free, and whole grain foods right here from the mill in Oregon, sending them off to destinations around the world. We think we can make a difference by sticking to the traditional way of stone milling.
And so that's what we're doing. To learn more about Bob's Red Mill and their mission to bring good food for all, visit Bob's Redmill.com/slash podcast. And we are back with Mandy Aftel and uh Daniel Patterson. By the way, Daniel, what's the name of that author who writes a million books that has a similar name that writes like novels? What's that?
There's a Patterson that writes like a boat ton of novels. James? James Patterson? You ever get confused for him? No.
No. There's like famous Arnolds, but they don't do anything. They don't write any, they're like you know, famous musicians. You get confused for a Tom Arnold ever? Yes, all the time.
Cool. Um, I wish. That would mean that I was uh confused for anyone. You know what I mean? That would mean that somebody cared.
So uh so I want to hit like a couple of pity party, oh little violins. All right, so nice. So um all right, so we're gonna get back uh into uh kind of the flow of the book in in a minute, but I wanna a couple of things. One, I want to talk about the flavor industry a little bit because I know there's some serious issues here. Mandy especially has some bones to pick with them, and so we'll we'll get into it.
Uh but one is a recipe that just jumped out at me so hard that I have to talk up to ask and talk about it. And it's carrots and coffee. It's um so it's very rare that you see a recipe where you're like, what? You know what I mean? You're like, what'd they do?
And then you like you like you have to go and you have to look at it. So I'll I'll set it up, right? So you get uh you turn on your oven to 350, right? You um wash but do not peel your carrots, correct? Do you dry them?
No. It doesn't matter. Do you oil them? Oil them, right? Uh salt them.
Now here's you put it into a baking dish, but before you put it into the baking dish, you line the bottom of the baking dish with whole roasted coffee beans. You then cover the dish so it's sealed in effect, which means that presumably as you roast for the next at 350 degrees for the next 45 minutes to an hour or something like that, they're not gonna get too they're not gonna get too dark, they're not gonna lose that much moisture because they're sealed in, right? So uh this this just struck me as like the craziest, like like not crazy, but just like I haven't seen this before. So why don't you talk about this recipe where it like did you did it come from the restaurant? Is it something you guys discussed?
What what is that? Tim. So that recipe, um that was a fun one. Uh I was actually cooking with uh Renee Rosepe from Noma Restaurant. It was at my house, it was for uh magazine article in 2011.
And there we we did like, I don't know, 15, 18 recipes over two days together, and and at one point uh we'd bought a squash, right? A winter squash, a small like turban squash or something, and and Renee had in his hand, and I was at the coffee machine because we were both drinking coffee constantly. And and and so I was grinding coffee and he looks at me and he said, What do we do with this? And I don't know, I just looked at the coffee and I looked at I said, Well, coffee and he and then he said, Why don't we bury it in coffee beans? And so we did, and it was pretty magical the way that the coffee infused into the squash.
So then I took that back and started roasting. Uh I thought, well, how can I adapt this? And so uh we did it with baby carrots. And and and then Renee went back to Noma started burying things and in spices. So the general idea of burying something and roasting it in an aromatic environment is um uh is kind of magical because what happens over the time is that the the softening of the fiber and the and the steaming that happens creates this um this environment in which the carrot, which is kind of sweet and earthy, locks with the the coffee, which is earthy and bitter, and it creates something that's neither carrot nor coffee.
So these things happen all the time, but this particular one was just like crazy. That's the definition of locking right there, which is where you put two things together, and you very simple two things, and that their aroma and flavor locks together to create something that's just fantastic, it's very simple. You ever notice being a locking and steaming these together that people like a lot of times nowadays omit the citrus allium herb inside of a chicken when they roast it, even though it perfumes the entire meat? You ever notice that people kind of say I feel people have been skipping that recently? They don't put anything into the bird to let the aromas come through as they roast.
But doesn't it take an extra like like 30 seconds? You go into your fridge, you're like, I have a you know, a line, chak chack, boom. It's a different kind of coming together, that kind of locking. I agree with you. It's it's perfume.
It's kind of like bleeds over into my area. It's perfume. So how much carry of the coffee into the uh carrot is there? Like a lot? Yeah, so it's really interesting because literally the carrot and the coffee both lose their individual identity to become something else, right?
So the chicken that's stuffed with your your thyme and your your citrus, what's gonna happen is you have a roasted chicken flavor that has this under layer of this perfume of citrus and thyme. In this case, those two things merge completely and give up their individual identity to create a new identity. So that's something that's fundamentally different. That's like cola. Yeah, exactly, like cola.
No. Yeah, cola is cola is yes, yes, exactly. That's exactly right. But which it was true in your fantastic exhibit. But that that's a thing that goes on in perfume.
You know, a lot of times in perfume, there's this idea of, you know, can you pick out the notes? And I think I've always thought that was kind of who cares. I think when something comes together, it becomes chalamar, it becomes Chanel number five. Shalomar, what's up, 70s? Or it becomes this really fantastically flavored roast chicken.
That's what happens when you create flavor, and that's a concept that the two of us put into the book to kind of be a guideline of something to think about. Nice. My mom used to use shalomar. So tell me about the cola. So cola is, and I'm gonna get it wrong, but like uh one of the things we did at the museum, we worked with a flavor house, so we're gonna get to get into Mandy going anti-flavor house in a minute, but it was uh so uh forget which which cinnamon relation it is.
It's like it's probably coffee. Yes, yeah, acasia, like, but all actual essential oils. I know. Like uh lime, oil, orange oil, cinnamon, and van and vanilla, right? Are the and there's other ones too that, but those are the four bases, and you smell each one of them individually, and they don't they don't actually smell like they're referent, because essential oils we should probably also talk about, don't always smell like they're referent.
That's true. You know what I mean? But uh especially I think citrus oils don't smell a hundred percent like they're referent because they're not they're not expressed right then. They must change or something. I don't know.
Some are cold pressed, some are distilled. The cold pressed and distilled are different. The cold press smells more like the referent? It does. Yeah.
And so distilled or cooked. Right. So then but you press all four together and you're like, oh, cola. And it doesn't smell like any of the it doesn't smell like any of the ones individually. And interesting, there, they're all actu they're actual product.
The ones we were using are actual products. They're not like uh they're not synthetics? No, right, they're actual products. You know, coke was also in coke, as in cocaine was the other one thing in there. Well, you know, when you're get up and go is got up and went.
And that's you know, uh, when when did that when did that when did the cocaine drop out of coke? I don't remember, but it was a quite a quite a while. But there's a lot. There's a lot. It was done in a pharmacy.
Yeah, well, you know, it's like uh done in a pharmacy original. As you point out, a lot of these original things were kind of uh, you know, medicinal. A lot of that really only survives in the in the drink realm. Like a lot of the old like medicinal drinks, which taste frankly horrible, like are uh, you know, are now revered or liked for their taste. That's you know, I was talking to people about things in general.
You learn to like what you like. Things that taste horrible the first time you taste them, for some reason you learn to crave them. I still haven't figured out. I've talked to scientists about that who are like, yes, I have an explanation, and I don't know whether it's because I've been drinking, but I can never remember an explanation that I can give to somebody else to say why things that are kind of uh strictly speaking horrible, like why we end up craving them so much. Yes, but but that's different.
So that's how flavor connects to experience, right? So what you smell and taste connects to what you you you feel, you know, and remember. So that's just kind of how we're hardwired, right? So that if you if if we get together once a week and we have this great time, we eat something that's really not very good, but it's it's surrounded by this feelings of of love and contentment, right? Ten years from now, you might be looking back at that and saying, I love that dish.
You don't really love that dish. What you really love is the what it created, but then those two things merge over time. So in fact, you actually do that. Right, like like twinkies. Like straight up, they're not really well-made cakes, but I like them because they are twinkies.
Yeah, I mean, think about like the the um, they did this great um test back, I don't know, oh, quite a while ago between wine, right? So you blind taste wine and people say what they like and don't like, and then they do it again the next day where they can see the labels. And of course they like it's like the Coke Pepsi thing, right? Of course, they change their their opinions. But what's really interesting was they tracked brain activity.
And so the part of the brain that that registers pleasure lit up with one wine when it was blind and lit up with the other wine when it was because of a brand. So it's not just because things taste good, it's because of all of this other stuff going on in our brains. But what we try to do in the book is to kind of take it out of the cultural and and larger context and bring it down to like what is flavor, how does it act? Because the other stuff, the cultural stuff and and what you're talking about, man, there's a lot of books on that. You know, you know Dana Small out of uh Yale?
I used to talk to her. You guys should talk to her. You'd you'd enjoy it. She does she does a lot of like uh MRIs of people while they're tasting and eating and like seeing how that uh affects what's going on. Interesting stuff.
So your next book, should should you should you ever uh choose to write another one? Um I could go on forever for the stuff I read, but well, let's get to the the part. So they got the four, what are the four main rules? That happens about midway in the book, right? The four four main rules you have for working with and they seem they they s I'm gonna sp spoil a little bit, it's like a lot of yin and yang.
Don't go. Yeah, which is how like life works. You're like, you know, don't go too much that way, don't go too much that way. But you know what's really interesting? So we we reached a lot of these moments in the book where we're like dead end, dead end.
You know, we rewrote this thing so many times, like it's a miracle it even got published. And there's one moment where we couldn't figure out this bridge between one place and another. So I went back and I looked at all my old recipes. I'm like, why did I do that? And and those basically everything I've ever done is one of those four things.
Now, these are primary indicators of direction. They tell you generally where to go, but not specifically. So the the the something like the um flavor compass will tell you, should I pick lemon or lime? These tell you I need to brighten it. So the the idea so the rule number one is if things are close together, let's say potato and leek, that's kind of that's comforting, it's wonderful, it's kind of boring.
So they need something to to spark them, something that's different. Counterpoint. It needs a counterpoint. Black olive, anchovy, whatever. So I'll give I'll give the four rules here.
Similar things need contrasting elements, that's one. And since I already said that spoiled in the balance, contrasting elements need unifiers. Need a bridge between them. Heavy things need a lift and light things no. No.
Okay, you mean heavy. Heavy. Yeah, heavy things need a lift. And light things need to be grounded. Those are the four main rules.
That's that's it. But you know what's interesting is that like a lot of times where this hits me is like, so for those of you that have never, I don't know, had to write a recipe or come up with something specifically for an event, like literally typically you have like a set of parameters, what you're working with, and you think out the dish first, and then you mentally think about this stuff ahead of time. But what's interesting is a lot of these rules are applied after you do your primary mental work. So you're doing your primary mental work, you have the main structure, you're like bah ba, and you're like, ah, that needs some Zaz, raw onions on top. Uh, that needs ba, hit it with some zest.
You know what I mean? So it's like, oh, this hit it with some cream to bind that sucker together and drop it down. But like, don't you find that a lot of those rules like almost always you're applying that after you've already gone through your main mental structure of figuring out what's gonna happen, or no? I mean, like you you think about them all the way, you never want to go out of balance while you're cooking, but it's always at the end I find that you correct in things like that. I have a I have an answer.
I mean because I just taught perfume this weekend, and I applied the four rules right while I was teaching. I think it doesn't happen at the beginning, but I don't think it happens at the end. I think it happens midstream. So I think you start in, and that's what we were really trying to do is stop the dance. If you think that making flavor is a dynamic that's taking place, no one stops, stops it, stops the motion to think about it in the middle of it.
They just get to the end. I think that happens earlier on, where you're starting in with the potatoes and the leaks, you've got that, so that's ahead, maybe ahead of it, and then you think, what am I gonna do with this? But you're not totally at the end yet either. So it's kind of stopping that thought process long enough to be able to have something to hold on to and think about, particularly if you're like standing at a farmer's market, standing in a grocery store and thinking, okay, I like this and I like this, but what am I gonna do with it? You haven't started cooking, but you're cooking in your head.
So Dave, let's let's cook a dish right now. Okay. Give me one ingredient. Nastasia, pick an ingredient. I don't know.
Pick an ingredient. Squash. Okay. All right. What kind of squash?
Go, Dave. What kind of squash? Like a freaking zucchini or like a freaking butternut squash. So what kind of freaking squash? One is garbage and one is good.
You're giving me zucchini. How about that? Sorry, Daniel. Now what are we gonna do with this piece of garbage? Okay, so you gave me zucchini and.
Yeah, zucchini is garbage, unless you're making bread out of it. I'm getting I'm giving you back uh bacon. Oh, you give me a bacon. Now what? Wait, so we're gonna use zucchini and bacon together in the back of the country.
You got two minutes, Dave. What? Look at your watch. I don't have a watch. Someone turn the clock away from me, Dave.
Uh wait, so zucchini and and bacon. Uh I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna blend all this crap into a soup. I'm gonna cook onions, I'm gonna make it into a soup. There you go. And then, but then you've you've created this thing, and then you're thinking about cooking, right?
So you're like, wow, the zucchini really doesn't taste like much, so I gotta take some of the water out of it. So I'm gonna roast it over high heat, right? Before it goes into the soup, and then I'm gonna think about flavoring that liquid, right? So I'm gonna take onion and bacon, cook it together, add maybe a little white wine, maybe water, and then I'm gonna put this concentrated zucchini in, right? So then you get to the end, you have something that has a little more power, but it's kind of dark and deep, right?
So it needs something brightenings are gonna do lemon zest. Maybe you're gonna say, I'm gonna take raw zucchini, I'm gonna mix it with, you know, uh black olive lemon and uh and and and then a shitload of herbs, and I'm gonna drop that in the middle. And then I think I want a little bit of lactic something, right? So a little crumb fresh around it. There I have a dish.
And so that's really you add a crunchy element? I always like a crunchy element on the top of my side. Oh yeah, but I mean I think the the theory. How about the backup? I don't know, it's already.
Oh, wait, wait, wait. So the whole section of the book we haven't talked about, and that's like where you get to the synthesizer section of it or the mixing board section. And we skipped the flavor flavor industry too. Well, and well, we'll talk about it again today. But uh, I should also mention that uh in a perfumer's art, like they have what is the it's it's they use the language of music.
It's called an organ, right? Yes, where you keep keep all of your sense. So why don't you talk about that kind of like final synthesis of the of the book at the end of like operational. The seven dials. Do the seven dials.
In one minute. Sweet, sour, salt, bitter, add umami, add fat, and add spice, like as in chili heat, right? So when you get to the end, the dish is almost done, but it's like a song that hasn't been mixed down. A little bit of salt, a little bit of lemon, uh, maybe you need some fat to round something out. And this is also how you fix things.
You get to the end and it's a little bitter, it's a little sweet. This is how you bring it into your own language, into your own style. And so the last chapter in the book is about how to use these things and how they interact with each other, that salt pulls up acidity, pushes down sweet, all of that kind of stuff. So that last chapter is like A, how do you perfect things, and B, how do you save things? Because that's really most of what a cook does.
So what's the most unsavable thing? If you burn the gravy. And that's where we learn about burying. Okay, so listen, we didn't get to have our knockdown drag out fight about the flavor industry next time. But thanks Mandy and Daniel for coming on the book is the Art of Flavor.
It's put out by River Head Head Press, the the greatest of all penguin and prints uh thanks for coming guys. Uh see you next time on Cooking Issues. Thanks for having us for listening to Heritage Radio Network, food radio supported by you. For our freshest content and to hear about exclusive events subscribe to our newsletter. Enter your email at the bottom of our website heritageradio network.org connect with us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at Heritage underscore radio.
Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization driving conversations to make the world a better, fairer, more delicious place. And we couldn't do it without support from listeners like you. Want to be a part of the food world's most innovative community? Just click on the beating heart at the top right of our homepage. Thanks for listening.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.