Today's show is sponsored by Bob's Red Mill. With natural foods, they support organic, vegan, paleo, and gluten free lifestyles. Learn more about their commitment to good food for all 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 alive on Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick.
Brooklyn. It's all falling apart. I'm not gonna say who it was, Dave, but somebody spilled like an entire like coffee plus Coke plus slushy freezy into the mixing board. So we're having some mixing board issues. What a waste.
That sounds delicious. Yeah, I know, right? In fact, like we in the studio here can't hear Dave in the booth, so it's like a weird. I feel like we need our headphones. Yeah, hear nothing.
Why are you right now? It's okay. I think, Dave, are we okay? Yeah, keep going. All right, so we're okay.
So you can hear us, but we can't hear you. That's fine. Um Happy Halloween, everybody. There we go. We have uh, as usual, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez.
How are you doing, Nastasia? Good. Yeah? Good. Anything interesting happened over the past week?
What a freaking liar! You're the worst liar in the world. What interesting happened to you last week? Oh, I didn't moron. She's like starting a new business and like like leading right into it.
Mark Ladner. And you came to Friends and Family. Yeah, oh. And your son broke the elevator. Listen, listen, listen, people.
Like this is this is what it's like dealing with Nastasia. So like anytime you hear her say, nothing happened. Nothing. Oh yeah, friends and family on that new restaurant I'm opening. What?
Yeah, yeah. So how's it other than the fact that Booker came and broke the elevator? You know what it was? A copper wire had. So that's not Booker.
That's your that's your whole uh busted the 120, whatever. Yeah, but that's not Booker's fault. That's the incompetent weasel you hired to come fix the elevator. Yes. Right?
I mean it's like here I first of all, first of all, we have uh I want him to be able to chime in. So we have uh Paul, Paul Adams, friend of the show. How you doing? I'm good, although apparently I am not Nastasia's friend, nor families. Oh, wow.
Paul, you can come whenever you want. Wow, so uh Paul, uh formerly known as Pote. That was how I used to know him via email P-O-T-E. What did that stand for, Paul? Uh POTE is a domain name that I bought back when you could buy a four-letter domain name, and after I bought it, I made it stand for Paul's online text editor before Google Docs existed.
I wrote my own online text editor in 1999, and I'm here on the show to promote my online text editor? Yeah, Paul. Can you go to that other microphone? Uh I don't see another microphone. The one like way across the way.
Sorry, we're just having some we're having a day today. No. It's like, you know, the gremlins have invaded. So I don't know if you could hear over the crackling. Uh oh, my microphone's moving as Paul's passing by.
Uh I don't know if you could hear over that. Happy Halloween. Yeah, the crackling, but we have some serious gremlins in the uh in the board today. Uh okay, so we have POT, do you hear me? Paul's online text editor, which he started in 1999.
And uh let how should we put this? Failed to monetize. Let's just put it that way. Failed to monetize. Okay, where are we?
It's a free online text editor. Much well, so I've used been using it to harvest the email addresses of African medical students who are the primary users. Is that is this real? It's real. Yes.
It's hugely popular in at least one East African medical school. Which can you call it by name or that would that be like where? Like what I haven't looked at the site since probably 2010, so I don't remember the name. But how many users do you have? In the three digits, I would say.
So like there's uh a medical school in East Africa that's like, I don't know what this pod is, but that's what we use, because I'm giving my stuff to big Google. That's what's happening? Exactly. Hey, is your stuff available in China? Are you an alternative to Google Docs in China?
Yes. Oh, hey people. If we have anyone that wants a an online shareable free text editor document source, and you're in China and can access Google Docs and don't have access to a VPN, I'm sure they have their own solution now, some sort of something. But uh, you are welcome to use Paul's uh was it Paul? Paul's online text editor, which I believe is no longer currently functional.
If you're in China, please hold while I did you try to get around to it. I just tried the live. Did you just leave an entire medical school high and dry? How many people have died as a result of you not keeping your online text editor current, Paul? I don't know.
I think you can't sign up as a new user. If you're an existing medical student, you're fine. Oh, all right, all right, all right. Okay. So of course, uh, if you're in medical school now and you were in there in 2010, which is the last time you looked at it, you are an extremely poor medical student, and probably, Paul, you don't want to count them as your users.
Well, now you're a doctor. Oh, so uh Paul, for those of you that don't know, uh, is uh what's your title over there? Senior editor? My editor is senior research editor. Senior research illustrator.
At Cooks Illustrated slash America's Test Kitchen. And his uh his outfit, which Nastasia will uh Instagram out maybe later, is uh America's Test Kitten, and he's got cat ears on, which is I like it. The unusual man dressed as cat uh situation. Paul, a long time love affair with uh cats. Yes.
I bought these cat ears, cat ears, Halloween, probably 15 years ago. Is it just every year? Every year I come up with a new way to get my money's worth. Yeah, for me. For me, it's uh luchador masks.
I love luchador masks on the Halloween, and my favorite favorite, favorite luchador look is luchador in uh suit and tie. Like luchador mask, suit and tie, I think is just like the look. In fact, I'm considering just having that be my look in general. I mean, like no one wants to no one wants to look at my face. So you put a mask on, a suit and tie, all of a sudden.
Because I think maybe luchador without the suit and tie, I mean, people don't want to hang around someone with a cape all the time. Or they definitely don't want to hang around me with my shirt off. Definitely not if I'm all greased up like a luchador. That's a horrible in in like in those little spando shorty things. But luchador mask, so you get rid of the face, that's plus one, and then suit and tie, right?
Yeah, brilliant. Good news, right? I just gotta I gotta go find a resource for some of those super wide 70s ties. I have one, at least one. You have that place in the Eastwood.
Oh yeah, I'm not gonna blow up my spot where like the like every once in a while, someone exactly my size goes to die and gives all their clothes to this place, and I snap them up. And you know, right now is the sweet spot for people from the 70s dying. You know, people who had these suits in the 70s are starting to kick off. You know what I mean? Like people who are in their, you know, 40s, like people who are my age in the 70s, are like dropping, you know what I mean?
And like leaving their suits to this this uh to their kids, and their kids are like the kids are like, I don't want dads, I don't want this. You know what I mean? And they give it to this uh thrift store. You know, uh my so you saw the picture I had up ago. My my stepfather's father who died fairly recently, was a butcher.
I have all those sweet knives. I have his scale. I just hung his lamp, which no one else wanted in in my place, this giant awesome 70s lamp. Nice. I wish I had a high enough ceiling because originally where it was, it was in a high space and it was a hanging crazy crystal lamp over a table lamp.
And it looked like you know, it looked like something out of the Death Star, like Obi-Wan might be going around like disabling the tractor beam on it. It was sweet, but I just don't have the space for it. Wow, it's in your New York home or not enough. Come on, my New York home, like like it like if you hung it in my New York place, it would be hitting the floor. Like, what am I gonna do?
You know what I mean? We we don't have high ceilings up here in New York. Anyway, call in your questions, your Halloween or otherwise related questions. Two seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. That's 7184972128.
Got one? All right, caller, you're on the air. Oh, hi Nasassio. Hi, Dave. Uh David, sorry about the tech issues.
Um glad to report. I'm I'm calling from Europe again and uh calling by a google, which is free. I don't know if maybe that's uh good information that you can see. Thank you, thank you. Sorry?
Yep, good. What do you got? What do you got for us? Yeah, so um I'm part of a rugby club, a student rugby club in the Netherlands, and um we have like Tuesday boat nights. It's actually based on a uh a houseboat, believe it or not.
Anyway, we we cook for the the whole club, and typically we'll we'll try and cook for like 50, 60 people and aim at a euro twenty-five, a euro fifty per person, which in dollars is about let's say a dollar and a half to a dollar seventy right per meal. Um the big issues is that food quality is often pretty poor. We'll sometimes get uh students who've never, you know, they've hardly cooked for themselves that much, let alone cook for a lot of people. So often the food quality is super poor, and uh unfortunately sometimes we we uh waste a lot of food because they cook too much. Anyway, as a as an older member, I'm trying to improve things, but I was hoping that someone on the panel had experience talk um cooking for large numbers of people on a shoestring.
Uh we also have uh you know quite limited equipment. So I was wondering if you guys have any thoughts on that. What's your equipment? First of all, um I'm I at first I thought you said oat instead of boat. I was like, oh, we were gearing up for an oat related question.
Uh and do you you cook off board or on board? We we cook on board. It's a 30-meter long steel hull houseboat. Nice. All right, so what equipment do you have on board?
So we've got uh like uh we've got a go-to large pot, like kind of cauldron style. Uh it's really huge, but it means that people can't get the water to the boil when they're trying to do pasta and stuff. We got some pretty high BTU portable gas burners with uh obviously the gas canisters. They're kind of let's say large mobile cooking stations. Uh a couple kettle kettles, uh, a paella pan, uh some smaller pops and pens, and then you know, the tiny oven and microwave are hardly worth talking about.
So they're so small. The paella pan is is self-fired or it goes on your burners? It goes on our burners. And the kettle is separately fired? Kettle are you know they're electric, just common household things that are probably don't donated by uh members in the past that are like small households.
So how many le how many liters is this kettle? Sorry? How many liters is this kettle? Uh like literally 1.2, maybe maybe one and a half liters. Oh, so okay.
Like really small. Uh all right. Now uh so in reality you have uh six six gas burners and you're feeding how many people? No, we got two gas burners, two large gas burners, and we're feeding like 50 to 60 people. How uh how large how large are these?
When you say large gas burners, like what are you what are you talking about? How large is large? Like candy stove large, like rip roaring, like like uh 10 inches? What? 10 inch diameter?
How many inches? 10 inch diameter burner. 10 inch. Yeah, but are 10 inch. I'm trying to figure out like do they rip or I mean can you just tear off on these things?
In other words, could you just purchase or steal a large, large kettle and then like yeah. Oops, sorry, sorry, the quality's uh a little sketchy. Uh go go ahead. Story of my life, quality a little sketchy. I mean, in other words, like like are these burners strong enough to cook, let's say, soup for 30?
Yeah, you know, you can get it to a simmer, but but if you need to get it to a boil, it it's a losing bottle. You're never gonna get there. And and you're not underway when you're cooking, right? So you don't have to worry about sloshing. No, no, no.
No, it's totally stable. Uh-huh. And no fire regulations or anything like that. Because you can always supplement with very cheap candy burners. You can get candy stove burners or wok burners, and you can supplement like from power wise off of gas.
Those things tear like a mother if you need more hot side. Nastasia, I'm sure she hasn't said anything, but I'm sure Anastasia is wondering whether that budget includes liquor. I'll look into those. Yeah, I've never heard of those. Yeah.
So well, I don't know what they call them in Europe. You know what I'm talking about, right, Paul? Like the candy stoves, like the sh they're low, they're low down. The advantage of these burners is because they're low to the floor, um, if you're doing a big kettle full of stuff, it's uh a hassle to move around a big kettle when it's high up. So these we used to call them candy stoves or candy burners.
We would also use them for stocks and for everything like that, is they're down low. Okay. And in it's a lot safer to move those things around when they're down uh low. Now, uh one or two liters for for like your the other kettle thing. I mean, like, you know, what are you gonna do with one or two liters for 30 people?
You know what I mean? Um I mean, I'm sure if if you get one of those candy burner style things, now all of a sudden pasta becomes a reality because you can get a big bowl on it, a big uh sorry, kettle on it, you can rip that thing up, get it boiling, you know, salt the hell out of it, and then you could just go in batches, stream out and go blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, you know, out and you can get it because ain't ain't nothing cheaper than doing pasta, it's just you need to be able to do it in um you know in quantities such that you can get it out and hot and good and not turn it either into mush or have it be rocks on the inside. Yeah. Uh that's exactly the thing that we struggle with, yeah. Yeah, but you know, pa Nastasia enjoys cooking po right.
Nastasia, as the owner of a pasta restaurant, do you have any recommendations other than just going to your new pasta restaurant? Uh yeah, yeah, he can freeze it. Well, he can't freeze it, only you can freeze it because you have the special IQF like pasta freezing thing. Nastasy's like, you could invest in a three hundred thousand dollar freezing machine for your pasta. Um also obviously, you know, uh soups are much appreciated as the cold weather kind of uh, you know, rolls in, like a hardier stick to your you know soda, like a ribolita kind of a situation.
Well, yeah, it takes a long time. Yeah, but here's a risotto. Well, also, but you know, like uh but he says he has a giant paella pan. The question is is are his burners good enough to do it? Everyone loves paella.
It's just a question of what you're gonna throw in it for cheap, right? So you're gonna have to short out. Right um, and then we can cook with that guy pretty well. But what we really struggle with is like making nice like pasta, it just kind of turns into a big block of mush, and that's a real shame. What about beer broths?
Oh yeah, beer brats, right? You put one of your things on there and do beer brats. You know, beer brats are delicious. Do you have a power on this boat, electrical power? We love that stuff.
Yeah. Yeah, you have power on this boat? Like electrical power. Oh, yeah, we got power. Yeah, yeah.
So you could also move you could also move into uh low temperature, right? So if you have some screaming burners, you could do, for instance, I was hoping. Yeah, you could do something. I was hoping you'd say that. Yeah.
We're yeah, we're we're we're an engineering uh student club, so we can I can probably get a team of engineers to try and work on like a large sort of uh immersion circulator or something like that. Yeah, so the only things you have to worry about, obviously, is uh you know, I don't know what liability insurance is like over there. Nah, it's okay. All right, cool. Yeah, you want to make sure you don't get any um you want to make sure you don't get any stray voltage in your um in your water.
So, like, you know, uh I you know, you could use a GFI or or whatever the equivalent is over there, GCFI, but um, you know, a lot of the cheaper heating units that you know, for for instance, people used to make over here um immersion circulators out of the uh immersion coffee heaters, and the assumption from the manufacturers of those immersion coffee heaters was that you weren't gonna shove your fist into the cup of coffee while you were uh heating it. And so they have stray voltage all over the place. When you put it's very disconcerting to put your hand into a liquid and get electrical tingle out of it. Very disconcerting. So you just want to make sure that you don't have like a lot of uh stray, like I like I say, stray stray voltage, but hell yeah, turn a bathtub into a uh into a circulator uh is you know not a problem if you have the power.
The other thing, by the way, if you have a lot of gas, one thing you can do for low temperature is let's say you said for instance that water limps along, right in the pot in a big pot on your stove. So if you have water limping along, you put in a gas input where whereby you know the gas input's never gonna take you over the top of the temperature you need, and then you electrically heat the rest. And so I used to do that for like very large things. You would put your pot yeah, on the burner, he heat up the water, and then take it that last couple of degrees and just use the circulator as a as the as the the finisher on in the same way that like uh uh that guy Kernig Kernig's egg has his car with electrical and uh and gas, but not because he cares about energy and hybrid, just to get the fastest possible acceleration. You seen that car, Paul?
No. Kernigzag, this guy, Swedish guy, I think he has this car that it gets so fast that he electronically limits the speed to 250 miles an hour. And his 60 zero to sixty is limited by traction of tires and his sixty to one twenty is limited by traction of tires. Wow. Yeah, yeah.
And you can have his car for the paltry price of one point nine million dollars if you had bought it back when he's first offered them, because they're all sold, but he hasn't built them yet. Yeah. Yeah. Tempting. Yeah, my son Dax is into it.
So if I just said that correct, you you kind of get like uh sort of temperature baseline with with the gas and then whatever you need and and the accuracy to do that electrically and you can control that. Yeah, if you have unlimited amounts of electrical power, just do it all electrically, right? But you know, a lot of times you're you have a a limit to the amount of electrical power that you have, and if you do have a limited amount of electrical power, then it you can use supplementary stuff like gas as long as you know it's it's not gonna go over. And if your heat input from the gas is constant, right, so you don't porpoise it around and have it go up and down, then a PID control loop can just account for it and use the electrical to take it take it up the the last little bit. All right, nice.
I I think I'll fix this to to the rest of the guys. We're obviously, you know, students on a on a shoestring, but I think I can kind of make a case that we don't need to upgrade the equipment. I was kind of hoping you'd say that. Yeah. Uh I mean it it it's kind of obvious.
And then um I I I like the idea of the the beer brats. Um obviously like chili and stuff is good for for the winner as well. And uh and like just quickly and uh and then I'll uh stop taking a few guys time. Um what other recipes do you think are go to that are simple enough for people to follow? Um so you know, recipes that can have a pretty simple method good quality robust not too sensitive does anything really come to mind for the rest of you guys anything but I mean like I obviously like things that are like bonehead easy are things that people make in huge quantities for families.
So stews, soups, I mean they're not it's not so exciting. If you here's when I say if you go uh if you're gonna go the low temperature route I would start with uh zippies right Ziplocks uh as opposed because you probably don't have the money for a vacuum machine right now although building a DIY vacuum machine is cool right uh I would just um I mean the pr your problem is is that you you're looking at an inherent hard limit on the input cost right and so like most of the time when you have a hard limit on input cost you want to have the majority of your calories come from cheap stuff like grains and pulses and then uh then you supplement it with the high grade stuff like meats. This is why things like paella seafood wasn't so expensive, right? If it's more of a sausage base with like a little bit I'm sure muscles are cheap where you are so if it's like primarily things like mussels and and uh you know and sausages then you know you can you know your pie is not nearly so expensive and you can splurge a little bit on the rice and get the good stuff because even expensive rice isn't that expensive. Do you know what I'm saying?
Uh you know same goes for soups or like you know Ribolitas, bean dishes things like this is why this stuff is peasant food because it's made you're ex stretching out the expensive ingredient by using cheap ingredients. As soon as you're going into full protein cookery then you have to find a protein that you like to eat that is not that expensive, right? I just went to a Dutch restaurant in Canada where I had stomp pot, which is as far as I can tell, potatoes and bacon. Yes. I did not I did not know it got further than than the Netherlands.
That's actually kind of great to hear. Stump pots in Canada. Interesting. In Toronto, restaurant called Menorgan. Here here's a good one for you.
Let's say you get a candy burner, right? And you don't have a big old big old oven. Here's what you're gonna here here is a good recipe for you. You're gonna make a low you can make it doesn't actually have to be low temperature because you don't actually want it that low temperature. You can do it in zippies at relatively high temperature.
But like Schweinhoxa is pretty cheap. I think even in the Netherlands, Schweinhoxa is super cheap. So what you do is is you get your circulator and you uh heat, you know, you heat this the stuff up, you cook, you cook your your Schweinhoxa through until they're done. Pull them out when they are hot. I can't stress this enough.
Pull them out when they're hot and let the skin flash off so that you get rid of the moisture on the skin. Then if you could get a candy burner, fire that sucker up with your oil and fry off the Schweinhoxa until they're crispy on the outside and serve with some sort of a brazen sauce. I love Schweinhoxa. I mean it's not traditional that way, but you can make it that way. Um's or whatever you call it.
What is this? It's not the hocks, it's whatever. It's like it's like lamb shanks for pork. Yeah. Yeah.
So whatever you call that. All right, I'll I'll report back if there's success. Any any quick notes on food safety for for cooking for that many people? Like we don't have any training and we're probably gonna kill each other by the end of it, but don't aim for very, very low temperatures on your stuff. And um if a bag blows up, just toss it.
You know what I mean? Like if a bag inflates, just toss it. Uh start out with uh, you know, relatively short term or relatively high temperature uh stuff. Um and if you're gonna do cook chill, you know, get a bath, you know, not a bathtub but get a large enough vessel to chill your stuff down. And uh, you know, are you ice challenged or no?
Like all of Europe is ice challenged, right? So it you know, you gotta chill the stuff down at a reasonable a reasonable rate. In the US, you know, you know, mm we have more ice than we know what to do with in general. Not in houses, but that's not really the case here. Yeah.
Maybe maybe when it gets cold outside we can steal the ice from the canals. But I wouldn't drag it behind the are the canals clean there. You can't drink out of those things, aren't they? Cesspools? No.
Yeah. Oh, they're terrible. If it's in a bag and stuff if you ever go to Holland never jump in the canal. No? It's like it's like all like the like our equivalent of the guanis over here.
I guess so. Like it was literally the the first thing that the mayor said to us is like, but seriously kids don't jump in the canals and everybody's like anyway, let us know what happens. Good luck. Yeah. Thanks a lot.
Okay. Bye. Um wait so we were talk Paul, we were talking about what America's test kitchen? No, we were talking about his old program. No, we had gone on from the old program I thought, hadn't we?
We we're talking about your well whatever let's get to some questions. I like the idea of this stray voltage cocktail though. Stray voltage cocktail? It's kind of like Seshwan buttons. Oh yeah sure caller you're on the air.
Hi happy Halloween. Hey happy Halloween. So I was um lucky enough to grab some of the um elusive Ashmeats kernel apple you love so much. I do love it. I do love it.
So I'm gonna please tell me please tell me that you stored it in the refrigerator before you processed it. Please good all right. Um and so I'm gonna make some Kentucky kernels um from liquid intelligence but what else should I make and will the juice freeze well? And if it will, should I clarify it first? Juice will freeze well.
I I don't think it'll matter too much whether you clarify it first. You want to hit it with ascorbic acid as you juice it so that you keep the character of it. Yeah, uh you know, I usually I juice it uh right away. If you you know, if you have access to um very high proof high grade ethanol, and we'll get into this later if I ever get to the questions. Um you can do the auto hustino with actual.
These are the questions. No, no, I meant the questions that written in the whatever. You know what I mean. Dave Dave Dave has to give me the giving me the nudging. Anyway, so the uh like you can do an auto hostino on it, which is a pectin trick, which uh, you know, one of the written in questions uh deals with um later on.
But yeah, I would you know you yeah, you can freeze. I've never frozen unclarified juice, but I'm sure it'll freeze fine. Uh and then uh if anything, it should be easier to clarify when it thaws out. Uh I don't think you're gonna get any more oxidative damage in it uh by freezing it before or after. I don't think, but I've never tested it, so I can't say for sure.
Uh the one thing with ash meads or any other apple, and that's why I asked you about uh the refrigeration, is um ash meads in particular, all apples, ash meads in particular, if you leave them um, you know, warm, especially if they're aspiring together in a case or in a bag, they will relatively quickly um reduce their malic acid content substantially. And this is and actually this can be a benefit for cider. I think one of the mistakes people make when they're making ciders is uh they use uh uh apples that are too high in acid content, and then when the sugar ferments out, it's unpleasantly acid. Uh, you know, and you know that can be a a big issue, but in juice for cocktails, you want to maintain all the acidity that you can. What happens to the mallet?
What does it get converted to? I don't know. Uh no, I think it just gets consumed. I don't know. I should look it up.
But it's just, you know, the acid levels, starch levels go down, uh, acid levels go down, sugar levels go up, uh, and I think sugar levels go up absolutely and not just relative to acid, but I can't be sure. Uh, and um volatiles go up. So overripe or senescent apples tend to have that more flowery aroma that you get. Uh, you know, and if they're allowed to overripen on the tree, you get that greasy skin phenomenon. Um but yeah, ash meads like it's very depressing when someone buys uh you know a bunch of ash ash meads and then uh lets them kind of go too far and they lose that amazing kind of rich acidity that they have because they really are just a remarkable um when they're good, they're a remarkable uh apple.
Yeah. From the 17, like or very early 1700s, English, like 1701 or something like that, same year that the post was founded by Alexander Hamilton. Uh I believe. Anyway, uh it's been a long time since I've looked at the history of ash means. But anyway, yeah, so I that that's what I would do with it.
And uh please tweet on back and tell us how the cocktails worked out. Great. Because I think they're good. Did you eat one? Aren't they good?
Yes, very, very. I spoke to this guy uh whose name just went out of my head, but he's like the most famous uh Virginia apple grower of uh old varieties. He has a book out, he's got a he's got a huge apple orch, I forget his name, but I was I I talked to him once about ash meads, carnal is like they're too good to juice. And I was like, hey, it's my job, man. I mean, I make cocktails, you know, I don't serve slices of apple to people for a living.
Um remember our acidus tasting? Well, oh yeah, what about it? Didn't like it. Nastasia is like, how many times have we brought this up on the show where you can't get past the worst lunch of our life? It was not that bad.
It was not that long. It wasn't not a big deal. Tell me about it. You know, Dave, it's like, you know what? It's like, here's I am.
If I want an experience, right? Like, let's say I want an experience that you can't get anywhere else on earth, right? Right? And you said to me, hey, Dave, uh, in order to get this experience, I'm gonna run over your foot with uh with a medium-sized car. And I'm like, okay, will the car break my foot?
No, it's just gonna hurt for like a second and it's gonna be over, but then you get to do this amazing thing, right? You do that, and you don't keep complaining about the freaking car that ran over your foot. That's an interesting analogy. We get to go to this like tasting, it's unbelievable tasting that you can't have anywhere else. And Nastasia had to sit inside and watch someone else eat whose conversation she didn't enjoy.
For three hours, it was not three hours, it was not three hours, it was not three hours, because that would have meant that we left after dark, which we did not, and in fact, we were there for a little bit of time. All she had to do is sit there and pretend she was dead. When you're in a place and you don't want to be anywhere, just sit and pretend that you're dead. No, seriously. Everyone.
Everybody knew to bring their own lunch except for us. So we sat there. Because we were horning in on somebody else's property and somebody else's lunch. It's like you invited yourself to their lunch that they were having, so that you could steal all of their freaking citrus fruit, and you can't just sit there and pretend that you're dead for for three hours. Just sit and pretend that you're dead, that you're not alive anymore.
That's how I get through half of my life. I just sit and pretend that I'm not alive. Oh, that's bleak. It's so grim. But how how else are you supposed to get through if you're bored out of your freaking mind, right?
All you have to do is pretend that you don't exist anymore. And then it's okay all of a sudden. Is this what it's gonna say about it? So, that's working. No, it's how a it's how you grow up ADD.
If you grow up as an ADD kid who can't see the board and doesn't have glasses yet, and you have to live through all of school, what you do is you sit there in your seat, not like seeing anything that's going on around you, and you pretend that you're not alive anymore, and you learn how to daydream like a human being. You know what I mean? It's like it's like just take yourself out of the situation, have an out-of-body experience. Like think about the think about the freaking universe. Go Zen.
You want to take a quick break? Take a break, we'll be right back with some cooking issues. Bob's Red Mill has been milling whole grains since 1978. When you mill whole grains, you get all three parts of the seed. You get the bran, the germ, and the endosperm.
The germ is only about 2.5% of the kernel. It's actually the sprouting section of the seed, what's gonna grow into a plant. It's usually separated during milling process because it contains most of the fat and therefore has a shorter shelf life. So what you want to do once you buy whole grain flour is keep it kind of wrapped so that oxygen can't get to it so it doesn't go rancid. But the good news about having that fat is that it has a lot of flavor.
If you want, you can actually buy the wheat germ, for instance, and add it back to flowers. But if you buy Bob's red mill product, it already has the germ in it, so you don't have to. Learn more at Bob's Redmill.com slash podcast. And we're back. So we have a caller on the air, but Nastasia's giving me the dirty look.
So let me quickly answer one of the writing questions. Uh Cody write in, uh Cody Cody Brown wrote in about grilling. I'm interested in in a grilling setup I've seen in photos and videos from professional kitchens. It's essentially a smaller medium box with charcoal in it and a great slapped on top. I've attached the pictures below.
Um I'm interested in a solution for quickly and efficiently finishing meats that I low temperature cook. You know, you can buy a steers up, just kidding. Uh I would also like to I'm not kidding me. You can you can't because Amazon, whatever. I don't want to get into it.
Wait, wait, just say why Amazon won't. Amazon won't Amazon has over a thousand, Nastasia? Yeah. Over a thousand back orders for the Searsols, and they're not, and they have 2,500 of them in stock, and they're not selling them because they're afraid they're gonna run out. I swear to God.
Uh that is what's happening. They have how many thousand are on the water right now? 2400. 20. No, on the water?
We have 2400 on the water. Maybe then they'll start selling them. Jerks. Um okay. Uh I'm interested in a solution for quickly and efficiently finishing meats that I low temperature cook.
I would also like to char vegetables. Uh uh, I would also like to char vegetables to get that woodsy uh ember flavor. I have a gas grill, but it doesn't put out quite enough heat. Yeah, of course not. Gas grills are by and large horrific uh monstrous things.
Is there any gas grills you like, Paul? Nope. Okay. That was fast. One's with the infrared panels.
Can I tell you this? Can I tell you this just because I have a uh No Dave, you can't. I can't. All right, well, never mind. Well, because we have the patent on the Sears All technology.
Because we have a because we have a patent on the Sears All technology, my dream, and I would like to do it in the next, not it's not the next product we're coming out with, but I'd like to develop it uh maybe in 10 and maybe not, is it's outdoor only because I can't possibly make this indoor legally. Uh but the Sears All V8 that's like uh a Tepanyaki uh grill that's like maybe 12 inches uh or that's longer, like maybe 16 inches by uh like uh 10 inches, and just have like the power of it's probably in that space, so it's about the size smaller than a garland uh salamander, but with like 40,000 BTUs or 50,000 BTUs in that upfired, how sick would that be? It's not handheld. Uh no, no. No.
But it would be instant on. So you would click it on and it would stay and it would get hot within 10 to 15 seconds. You do your like you know, Tepanyaki from hell, and then you pull it off. What do you think? Yes.
All right. Okay. So uh look for that sometime in my lifetime, assuming my lifetime's longer than a year, which you never know. Um anyway, um I have a gas grill that doesn't put out quite enough heat to finish low temperature meat. A full-size charcoal grill doesn't seem time or charcoal effective when I'm just searing off a steak for my wife and I.
Uh, this uh setup, the one he's talking about, you see, seems like it'd be great for my purposes. I looked online but couldn't find information about this type of grill box. Do you have any experience with this kind of setup? I'm looking for advice on how to build or procure one if it's a good tool for my purposes. I was also curious about the safety of such a rig.
Uh thanks for any guidance you can provide. Uh love the show, loving the spinzel, thank goodness. Uh just made a fall punch with burr, cognac, and clarified lemon, clarified apple cordial Cody Brown. Uh so and then he included a picture from McGrady's uh McCrady's in Charleston. What you have there, my friend, is a Conroe grill.
So you can get those at Corin.com and they are for uh like uh Tepanyaki style stuff, and they amount to uh it's like a imagine if you had a box made out of fire brick with a uh thing grate over the top. You'll have to replace the grate quite often, and there's a little uh door at the bottom to let you increase or decrease the amount of air that comes in from the bottom. And the reason chefs use these is because you don't list them on your plan. So if you want to have something uh grilled, you can carry this box into your kitchen, put it on your kitchen. Everyone throws in binshotan because people have this like feeling they need to spend an in orbit an exorbitant amount of money on their charcoal, so they buy Japanese binshotan.
And maybe it's partially you know a little bit cleaner burning, but you can buy fairly clean burning American charcoals. You ever done uh American hardwood charcoal versus binsoton? No. Yeah, I've never done the test either. We should sometime.
I live in an apartment, so yeah, but resources are limited. Yeah. Yeah. Creating tremendous amounts of smoke in carbon memory. Andy, Andy Ricker brings in cheap uh cheap Binchoton, cheapoton from Thailand.
People love it. The his cheapoton? What does he call it? Do you have a name? He does have a name, which I don't remember.
Is it called Andy Andy Ricker's cheap cheap binsoton? I like cheap. What did you call it? Uh cheapoton. Yeah, that's good.
Yeah, anyway. Uh so get something like that. But the one of the main uh advantages this has is portability. So any restaurant that doesn't have the permits to have an actual uh flame thing, and they're only doing a couple units at a time. So if you're doing like a you know, if you're doing a steak for a billion people, you can't use something like this.
But if you know you're only gonna fire two or three small pieces at a time uh for a particular table, then they're kind of ideal for this, and then you can put them away, and then when the inspector comes and says, Do you uh you guys using uh you know charcoal in here? You're like, charcoal, what are you nuts? I don't have the permits to do that. What are you stupid? You know what I mean?
And then then that's it. That's like the technique they always have to be like, what are you what are you, jerk? What are you moron? You know, the other way you can do it uh professionally, people used to do in New York. Now you can get permits for it, I think.
It's just hard. But it used to be people would buy these gas grills that you could throw in wood chips in quotes, and so people would just build wood fires in these gas grills, but the get they were technically gas, and that's how they got in on the plans. Brilliant. Yeah, everything in New York's about messing with people. Anyway, okay, let's take a call and then we'll uh and then we'll uh come back and answer some pectin questions.
Caller, you're on the air. Yeah, it's crazy because that's what my question was about. We were uh hey guys, how you doing? Uh this is uh Cameron in Delaware. But my question was about uh charcoal.
You know, I'm using the pop-pop charcoal bricks right now. I use all kinds of hardwood bump charcoal. The uh oven that I'm cooking on right now is a uh kind of like a it's a Maraforny, it's a new kind of Josper style oven, um, which is it's beautiful, you know, it gets great Myard reaction and caramelization, but really for the uh test kitchen, what charcoals do you guys cook with? What do you recommend for that type of cooking? Paul, is there a is there a party line in uh in America's test kitchen?
There's almost definitely a party line, but I do not know it. I'm not on this show as an official representative of America's test kitchen, which in fact is in Boston, so I'm almost never there. In my home kitchen, I use Royal Oak hardwood lump charcoal, and I use electric assisted airflow to get it super hot. Is that the uh red bag stuff? Yeah, yeah.
Well, red brown bag with red trim. Sometimes red bag. The stuff I use is red bag. I think it's called Royal, and it looks like hunks of wood. Yes.
They come out. Um we had um we had uh Mead Head Goldwyn on, and he said something against those things. Uh you know, he's very pro-briquette. Uh, but uh then I went and ran my own test briquette versus uh hardwood, and I really think it's just a matter of preference. And I prefer using the Royal Oak.
Um I just prefer using the Royal Oak. You see, you have so Paul, you do a chimney starter that's uh air assisted, the same way that those little ovens are that you can buy the solar-powered. You've seen these? You seen a solar-powered ovens? No.
They have it used as they use a sil uh no, they're not solar. They have a Peltier in them, and they use the heat energy from the beginning of burning of the kindling to fire fans to force the air through. Oh, that's brilliant. And so they're extremely efficient at converting small amounts of fuel to very you know short duration but high intensity flames. And you can charge yourself on the phone.
Any idiot can do that. You gotta get a Pelletier and there's also a brand of it's a Canadian brand of wood grill called Cook Air, which has a fan built in, which I've never turned my cook air above power two out of eight because it gets too hot and too powerful. Oh, I like that. It goes through a hunk of wood in like a minute. I like that a lot.
I like that. So I wonder now you when you it's Quebecwa, cook air. Well, if it's Kevic quiet, like it doesn't work during lunchtime, and at any given moment it might be out skiing with the family, so we can you know we cannot work, we have to go ski, otherwise we are not queuing. You know what I mean? It's like they're good, they're good people, it's just you can't get them on the phone when you're trying to work.
That's all I'm trying to say. You know what I mean? I think we maybe we work too much. That's that maybe maybe in you know in America we work too much. Um look at the man in the mirror, Dave.
Which, oh, anyway. Well, my point is is uh now you got Michael Jackson going through my head. Uh so yeah, so the Paul doesn't have a party line on it. I tend to use the uh Royal Oak because it's incredibly available. Um I also I need to scale back the way that I think about cooking in general because I have so much wood.
Would when I do outdoor cooking and you guys talking about the servers? No. What'd I say? I have so much wood. Oh, geez, you guys, you freaking guys.
Literally, if I started if I started burning, if I started burning trees right now, I would be dead before I could burn all the stuff. You know what I mean? And so I tend to produce burning trees. You guys are like, oh, what the stuff? Like, no, like uh, although my my son Dax, the younger one, likes broccoli by Big Baby Dram, and he was like, Dad, do you know that he's talking about burning trees like marijuana?
I'm like, you know, Dax, by the time it's an issue for you, it's gonna be legal everywhere, so you know, whatever, right? I mean, anyway. Um point being that like I I go through profligate amounts of uh burning things that contain lignant or contained lignin at one time and are converted into coals. All right, is that neutral enough for you guys? You can't make some sort of drug or sex reference out of it.
Freaking people. We'll find a way. Uh anyway, so I I don't know. Um Andy Ricker is a good guy, and I trust him. And so, like, if he's hawking, I haven't personally used his charcoal, but I'm sure it's good because you know he's one of those, he's one of those people that if he says it's good, I I believe him.
His charcoal is nice because it's uh a lot less adventurotawn. It's also like compressed, so it's not just you know, the pieces are uniform, they burn really hot and they last a long time. It's a good value. Uh didn't know, you know, I'm using Fogo charcoal right now, which is very similar to just didn't know what your thoughts were. So thanks so much.
I appreciate it. There is a website, I have no recollection what it's called. It's one guy's endeavor to review all the hardwood charcoal. Is it similar to the guy that reviews all of Hershey's chocolate batch by batch. Have you seen that guy's website?
Nope. There's a guy, I forget his name. It's a bunch of random things, but one of the things is he samples as many date batches of regular Hershey's milk chocolate bars and makes tasting notes on every batch. And they're all bad. He uh he finds more nuance in a Hershey's milk chocolate bar, you know, than you and I would find in a fine wine, let's say.
And by the way, Nastasia, this happened to me the other day. So you know what everyone who knows me knows that at home I'm the cheapest human on earth, right? So first of all, from a technical standpoint, boxed wine is is is is good. Technically, boxed wine is the best. Uh you can drop a box of box of boxed wine on the ground and it will not shatter the same way that four bottles of wine will shatter if you drop them on the ground.
Uh you can take one glass out of them and not end up finishing the bottle and it doesn't go bad. Uh not like the way that bottles of wine work. Uh however, like I've been buying this, you know, fairly cheap stuff because that's all they sell in the box, and so I'm trying to push butt, and then like I accidentally opened a really nice bottle of wine and poured it, and we're like, why does this not what's this color? It doesn't look like fresh pressed grape juice. And we're like, oh, this is what real wine tastes like.
Uh Jenna and I were like, oh man. It's so nice to have real wine again. Because usually we only have real wine when we're out. You know what I mean? At home, we're drinking, you know, basically, you know, fresh grape juice with uh doped with alcohol.
Anyway, uh, do we have any more callers we need to get to, or no? Yeah, one more caller and we gotta go. Oh, okay. Caller, you're on the air. Yeah, hi Dave.
Uh, this is Joe from the Bay Area. Um this is a bittersweet moment for me because uh I have years of uh the backlog that I burnt through. Um but now I'm gonna be lonely without uh the ranting uh from you and hatred from Nastasia while I drive. Maybe we'll just maybe we'll just do like uh we'll record some ringtones of just Nastasia spewing invective. And then just get on our 10 a.m.
calls yeah. Yeah, anyone that wants to just subscribe to Nastasia and I have a standing 10 a.m. call that one or the other one always sets the other one off such that it's just like a blood boiling like 40 minutes of straight screaming and anger. Like I've almost been hit by cars walking across the street because the anger is boiled over. Oh no.
Yeah. Anyway, go ahead, call her. Sorry. That'd be a great ring too. No problem.
No, no. Okay. So I want to do a holiday cocktail. And um I like the recipe for the cold buttered rum in uh the cocktail book. Um and I have everything I need to make um uh the butter syrup, but uh I want to do a hot version of that, either with cider or with rum.
And first of all, I wanted to know if that would be stable at higher temperatures and if I'm even on the right path or if you would approach it in a different way. Nope. Yes, and yes. That that uh the Ticaloid is uh not susceptible is not uh broken by heat. So it's uh the gum arabic and the xanthan, and yeah, Xanthan gets slightly less thick at at temperature, but uh it's gonna it's gonna work fine.
And in fact, uh we've we've done that hot and it works works like a charm. Okay, but if I want to burn the sugar in a pan, then I can't put it in the syrup. So yeah, yeah. Um what I would do is I would I would pre-burn I would pre-burn uh some of it and then um because uh you know you you add the sugar afterwards, you could pre-burn some of the sugar and then dissolve it into the into the uh syrup after you add after you shear in the um after you emulsify and stuff, you could dissolve dissolve that in and then just equalize out the sugar level with um you know with fresh white sugar, and it shouldn't be a problem. I've never done it, but it shouldn't be a problem so then no sugar in the butter syrup yeah sure sugar in the butter syrup and you know you can you can go in other words what I was to do is like I I would not add all of the sugar I would burn some of your sugar and then you can actually because it's not the same but a lot of people can't distinguish between caramel and brown sugar when they hit so if you do a mixture of caramelized sugar and brown sugars that contain molasses like they'll reinforce each other and it'll i it'll give people the impression that you've used more um that you've burned it harder that you've burned the whole thing okay cool thank you all right well let us know how it works okay all right cool uh and Dave I know you're gonna kick me off happy Halloween hold on a second surly Dave wrote in uh surly Dave wrote in about pectin uh and uh about he made a quince syrup we could talk about it more next time made a quince syrup and added to alcohol and it gelled look up uh look up uh Dave uh uh alcohol precipitation of pectin what you're getting there is uh is because your syrup is not a high enough acid and so it's not gelling on its own and when added to a high a fairly high proof ethanol and it's been reduced the amount of pectin in it is allowing the pectin to uh drop out of solution and form a gel.
We could talk more about this next week. Uh and then Gordon had a question about methyl F50 that we've never uh answered apparently it came on we can talk more about methylcel F50 puffs but uh Gordon your main problem when you're making these puffs are that you don't have enough solids. Methylcelf uh does not foam well does not whip like egg whites unless you have a fairly high solid system. So don't start with juice, start with puree. Add your methacel F50.
The more you add, the the denser the foam will be. But if you add more than about a percent, you're gonna start tasting the methylcel and it's gonna suck. And remember, everybody, when you're making foams, if you want them to have taste, you need to start with very high flavor base because you're whipping in air, and the air is going to reduce uh the physical quantity of stuff you're gonna eat. So you need to start with very high flavored things if you want a good flavored foam. Also, if you're gonna make F50 meringues, they're extremely hygroscopic, so you need to store them in the dehydrator until right before you're gonna use them or they're gonna go mm-shoggy.
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