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Help keep our lights on and our mics hot by pledging your support today at heritage radio network.org slash donate. Thanks for listening. On the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick. Brooklyn. Not joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez because she has family obligations to attend to.
We do have my man Dave in the booth. How are you doing? Doing good. How about you? Doing well.
And special special guest, special guest host today, Jack Shram. Jack Shram, formerly the head bartender of Booker and Dax, future head bartender of the as yet unnamed, as yet unannounced bar that we will be starting sooner rather than later. Isn't that our hope, Jack? I think you just announced it. Well.
Everybody knows there's gonna be a bar. It's just what, where, when. Okay. How. Also, some of you uh who came to Booker and Dax and had some of Jack's fine drinks may not know this.
Uh formerly worked at Milk Bar, can answer all of your milk bar questions. Uh, also uh formerly was a food studies person at NYU. So he when he went home uh on breaks, what do you study some? I study food! Food ma!
Right? No, Ma was very supportive. Everyone was supportive of it. They yeah, they're food food humans. Yeah.
So care about what they eat. You didn't have to think about it all. No, there was no no need to explain. Or did a butcher in high school. Like it it made sense.
All right. It was a logical move. What kind of butcher was it? Just a small family-owned. It was like a hundred years old in the community in Alamo, California.
Where the heck is Alamo, California? East Bay, the just like 40 minutes east of San Francisco, in the not very exciting part of the Bay Area. Remember the LMO? Exactly. That's a that's a different LMO.
Different, very different. Thanks, Dave. But it is maybe Alamo the car rental place is from where you where you were working. I doubt it. Is that from Alamo, Texas?
I would assume so. Hey, interesting fact. So um so I I think I told Jack this, and some people have heard this. My uh my stepfather's father, who you know, died this year in his mid-90s, was a butcher for many years, and his his father actually started the butcher, came over, came over from Italy in uh in like you know 1906 or whatever, started the you know, worked for a couple of years, started a butcher shop in the north end, and uh when he died, I got the you know his butcher knives, and I just hung it up his scale. Oh, that's awesome.
I don't have a picture of it, yeah. Check out this, it's 1912 patents, so you know it's before like 1924. So it was like early on in their shop and stayed in their shop the entire time they were open, and it was made in Boston, which is where their shop was. It's still got like the inspection sticker, the legal for use inspect like tag on it. And it's an old spring scale.
Oh, it's pretty sweet. Does it still function? Oh, yeah. That's amazing. Yeah.
Craftsmanship. But here's the thing, right? It hung low in the butcher shop. So the top of it was impeccable. Like clean, impeccable.
Yeah, because people could see over the counter. Underneath, right? It had like where the two, because it's a hanging scale. It's an old school hanging scale. And where the two rods go down to hold the platform onto the spring weight thing.
Uh like decades of like lamb grease had oozed over, and there was like this like, you know, like these dams of lamb grease underneath. That's pretty sweet. There's no dirty floor, like the areas of a butcher that customers can't see. It's it's terrifying. The things that you'll find.
Yeah. Decades of animal, just raw animal buildup. Well, I mean, it solidifies over time, right? No, absolutely. But still, you know, it's like it's like layers of sedimentary rock.
Yeah. But made of animals. And it has that, it has a texture of like asphalt. Yeah. It's like, you know, some thick fill.
Fully firm. Fully firm. Nice. I like that. I'm gonna use that in my next, in my next band.
Great. That's that'll be the title of the episode. Thanks. Fully firm? Yep, yep.
Nice. And we're not even talking about pectin methylesterase, which is something I wanted to use at the bar. Oh, by the way, call in all your questions. I said this before, but calling all your questions too, 718-497-2128. That's 718497-2128, or you can uh send them on into the chat room.
But Jack Shram has all of the Booker and DAX specs that I do not. So for instance, he actually sent them to me, but I can never find them fast enough. But probably in his head, he still has most of them. So all of you, you know, who are like, how do you make the thunder nutton? I'm like, well, I know roughly how it works, but I don't know the actual actual specs.
And so we can, you know, Jack here. It's been over a year, but I've still got them all pretty good. Yeah. So Bloppins asked me for one when he sent me those uh beers to spin out, and I never sent the specs to him because I don't know. Uh, you know, like I just don't know some of these specs.
Like, unless it's my actual personal spec, I didn't have to make it on a day in, day out basis, and so I just don't know it. But Jack does, so call in all of your spec. And we're still gonna do that uh a Booker In Dax reunion uh we should do it maybe like at like as we're about to open, do a Booker In Dax reunion special. Yeah, that sounds great. Here I know everybody would be super into it.
Yeah, it's before shift, so people can come in absolutely. Yeah. So any uh any news in the world of uh foods and or drinks, Jack, that you can think of. Not not in the broader world of food. I feel like what what's exciting right now?
Is anything everything and nothing? Life is always exciting. As long as you're long as you're learning, everything's exciting. What about you, Dave? You have any cooking issues over the weekend before I get into these uh uh made beef stew and the slow cooker, nothing remarkable.
What kind of slow cooker do you own? It is oh god, I'm blanking on the name, of course now. What style? Are you an Instapot person? Well, it it is oh wait, it is an Instapot, yeah.
All right. So it's like combo, slow cooker, pressure cooker. It's great. So you're you're part of the Instapot revolution, are you? I guess.
Yeah, well, it's a genius move. I mean, like for years I was saying, why don't they combine all this crap and then, but I'm too stupid. Instead, I'm building like torch it torch attachments and and and you know spinzalls and all this other stuff. Vegetis. I never built a vegetti.
Oh, you just like to talk about it. I love to jam things into vegetables. Well, who doesn't? Yes. I like the jam.
I like to jam. You know, when I have a carrot, I like to jam my carrot into a vegetti. Obviously, that's that's what the vegetti is for. That's what the vegetti is for. Accepting carrots.
That was maybe one of our all-time greatest running gags was people calling in vegetti stuff. Anyway. So how was your beef stew? Oh, it was delicious. Yeah?
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so my problem with pressure cooked uh beef stews in general and uh all pre pressure cooker in general is fantastic for a lot of things. And you should get the hit pressure cooker book and all this, but the issue with it is remember that in a pressure cooker there is not a lot of reduction. So when you're throwing meats into a pressure cooker and cooking them a la stew style, uh they tend to be very liquidy when you pull them out. Like let's say you're doing a chili or some something like this.
And so you need to adjust your liquid levels going in, but buddy buck but but if you adjust your liquid levels too low, you scorch, you scorch, which is no good. So in general, a lot of times what I'll do is is I'll try to hover that level right around where it where it's gonna scorch. And I if you had like a real maybe your Instapot never scorches, maybe it's like good at that, or like you know, I use the uh I use the brevel now, what's it called? Like the what's it what's that the brevel called? Like it's called like the temperature freak.
It's literally called I think the temperature freak or something like this, or the precision freak. I think it has the word freak in it. Did they understand that you were their target market when they named it? I think so, because they sent me one for free. There you go.
You know, but but like is it called it Dave? Look that up. Is it temperature freak? Something like this. I don't know.
Yeah, give me a minute. Um, but so with that, you know, you're not gonna scorch uh your product because it's never gonna overshoot too much. And I guess, you know, I uh I haven't a lot of you know work with like the Queens Arts and stuff like this in terms of uh scorch. I mean, really, when you have a pressure cooker, the advantage that my problem, in fact, my uh I shouldn't say my mom doesn't listen to this, so it's fine. So my brother-in-law was like, so should we get this Instapot?
It's only a thousand watts. He doesn't talk like that. We usually get like a thousand watts for your mom because you know I thought maybe we'd get her one of these things, and I was like, thousand watts is kind of weak, right? Because my problem with these electric pressure cookers is that you're gonna want to brown your crap before you cook it in a stew form. Dave, did you brown your crap before you did your stew?
Uh no, I did not. Jesus, why? Were you following some sort of dump meal? What'd you pour freaking Dr. Pepper in the damn thing beforehand?
Yeah, I mean it essentially was like a dump meal, I guess. Yeah, I just yeah, I I've done this before. I just it's slow cooks for 12 hours, so it doesn't need browning. What? Doesn't need browning?
Oh god, here we go. What liquid did you pour in? Uh I used a combination of A1 and water. I told you this is nothing remarkable. It's just oh for God's sake.
Oh, Jesus. What's the point of being alive without the myard reactor? Don't shame me for my slow cooking. I'm not shaming you for your slow cooking. Well, slow cooking, by the way, is different from pressure cooking.
And slow cooking, you you know. Yeah, exactly. Slow cooking is a good one. We definitely brown stuff before pressure cooking. Yeah, well, uh I mean, what you're doing is you're faking those those things by it with the A1.
You're just you're using is it what is A1 anyway? Is A1 Worcestershire sauce plus ketchup plus water plus vinegar? What is it? What is A1? Sounds about, right?
But uh yeah. By the way, Worcester sauce, fantastic. Delegious product. Yeah, absolutely. Love it.
By the way, it's the Breville control freak smart induction cooker. Control freak. Control freak. Or no, William Sonoma, sorry. So it does contain the word freak.
Yes. Control freak. Freak. Anyway, uh, it's a it's a good unit. It's a great unit.
I like it. You know what I saw? Did you saw that the induction? I want induction to take over. Like, I want it to take over.
Like, you know, everyone's like, eh, my pot doesn't work. Really? Your pot doesn't work? You're like, how many pots? Like of the pots that I already owned before I had ever owned an induction, over half of them work on an induction unit.
And the other half can be like, you know, wiggled around. Yeah. The main ones that don't work is if you own any big, like inexpensive aluminum pots, like turkey fryers, which I do, obviously. You know what I mean? Anyway.
Yeah. Point being, like, IKEA now sells an induction unit for like 20 bucks. Eh. Back to what I was saying on the slow cooker. So the Instapot's only a thousand watts.
And the problem is that if you're not an enemy of quality, Dave, uh, you're gonna want to brown your meats before they go in. Or, like, let's say you're okay, did you put any onions into this stew? Yeah. Okay, thank Christ. You put some onions into this stew now.
Did you We're living in a society, you know? Right. Did you did you uh at least sweat the freaking onions? No. Okay, so if you were going to do any such things like sweating your onions or browning your meat.
I need nostasi here to back me up today. Where is she? Family obligations. So, like, my point is is that a thousand watts is a little low for browning meats. It's just a little sluggish for browning meats.
And if you're doing relatively large uh things, it takes a while for a thousand watts to heat your stuff up. Now, if you're slow cooking, who gives a crap? It's not, you know, who gives a crap? I'm a slow cooking. You're slow cooking.
Yeah. Uh who gives a crap? Even as a rice cooker, really, who gives a crap? Unless you're making a boat ton of rice. It's just really not that much of a load, and the amount of time it takes that much of a load.
And the amount of time it takes to get up to that. Like have we have we spoken about the Limbomaniacs on the show before? The song? I don't think so. But Toilets Flooded, the load won't fit.
Anyway, the uh terrible song. Terrible song. But really good musicians. You know, that's one of those Limbo maniacs. One of those Limbomaniacs was one of those groups that had a lot of good musicians with terrible lyric ideas, terrible ideas, rap terrible songs, you know, bad vocalizations.
Kind of like you two live. Yeah. I never saw them like you two. Yeah. You two, all I can think about with you too is like they lost me when they lost the ning-a-ning-a ninga.
Like I'm a big fan of you two back in the n-a-nga nga dang. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mean like all jangly sound? Yeah, the greatest guitar pedalist and that.
That's that's like when you two is when you hear that ning-a-ning-a-nga, you're like, oh yeah, you too. So yeah, the streets don't have a name. Yeah, I mean, but then like, you know, I'm still with them in the day two. I'm fine with that, like later on, but like this newer stuff, it's not, it's not my cup of tea. It's not I'm not with them anymore.
Anyway, lines are being drawn. So back to back to this Instapot thing. I think a thousand watts is uh what I would love to see is a 1500 watt uh induction uh cooker instapot. So like, you know, like my Zoji Rushi rice maker, which is like very high, like high wattage uh induction uh unit. I saw one, by the way, I think I mentioned this on the air.
When I went to China, I realized how far behind we are in rice cooker technology because I thought I had a really nice rice cooker, and I have the nicest rice cooker that the average person could buy here in the US. I got it as a gift, I didn't spend my own money. But I went I picked up this one in China, and I was like, damn, this is a nice rice cooker. I was like, holy crap. I picked up the rice pot and I was like, I would be proud to own this pot.
Like this, just the insert pot. I was like, this is nice. High quality. High quality. It's a rolls rice.
Oh, by the way, Jack, one of our head punsters, and we'll talk about puns and names or something. Do I need to cue up the rim shot? Oh. I don't know, James. Give me a minute.
Oh, anyway. So I asked, I asked the guy, I was like, how much does this cost? In the in, he's like, that's a that's a thousand dollars. I was like, ooh. I was like, you know what?
It feels like a thousand dollars. It feels I guess if I was gonna get married again and I ate rice every day, and everyone was in that wedding spending mood, I'd be like, get me this. Link this rice cooker. I want this thousand dollar rice cooker. You know what I mean?
Because I would use that rice cooker at least one thirtieth as much as a car. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And a car is like $30,000. Yeah, absolutely.
So, you know. You know what I mean? And you can't drive, you know, you can't, you know, I guess you can use your car as a cooking implement. There's several books written on this on using on using your tailpipe. Uh no, usually the engine block.
But most of the stuff was written for relatively older vehicles. Uh, I don't know if they ever did a motorcycle follow-up because first of all, like, you know, where the heat on your motorcycle is is really dependent on how the engine layout uh works. But I think they expected you to have some sort of like, you know, uh, you know, straight six or something like that. I don't know. I don't know what the heck they were, I don't know what they were expecting you to cook on, but they have a bunch of recipes that all, you know, boil down to wrap your crap in aluminum foil, strap it on, you know, to your engine block.
Or I think just like kind of jam it into the top into like the valve cover area and then just drive until it's done. So it's mainly items that you're not worried about overcooking. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I I would never never attempt, but in a pinch.
Well, I mean post-apocalyptic. I you wouldn't you would never attempt it. If you were driving from like San Francisco to like Yosemite or up the Sierras, you would never be like, you know what? You know what? Why not?
I'm gonna save some time at the campsite. Yeah, yeah. So you you know did I tell you that I'm not gonna get into it, I'm not gonna get into it. Like uh you're you when uh last time I was over there, I had a picnic at where the Donner Pass was, and uh literally a a picnic where the people were you know eating the people and it was all I could talk about. My wife was like I was like, A, that's disrespectful, and B, like what the hell?
That's gross. I'm trying to eat. We're talking about people eating people, and I'm like, yeah, but we're eating our picnic where the people ate the people. You know what I mean? It's like I couldn't get around it.
We're far enough removed that Donner Party jokes I think they're okay at this point. Not too soon. What about the what about the people from that plane alive in uh in Chile where they crashed and the people ate the people? They're still alive, those people who ate the people. The people who got eaten were not alive anymore.
Don't make the jokes to the people that ate the people. Don't make the people that ate the people. Yeah. All right, anyway. Oh, you got the rim shot up.
So anyway, back to the Instant Pot. I would love to see an Instant Pot like that. And also, uh, you know, you were saying before, Dave, uh, enemy, enemy of quality. I'd like to make a distinction so that everybody knows. We are all, this is the difference between a low-quality individual and an enemy of quality.
We are all low quality individuals because we are all fallible. We're all weak. We are all low quality individuals, right? The enemy of quality, we we aspire to be better quality than we are. Absolutely.
And that's that's what makes us redeemable low-quality individuals as opposed to you know, non-redeemable, right? And that's the whole thing. We are worth I feel we are worthy of making ourselves better, and therefore we're we're okay. But right, and in fact, as I've said many times, as everybody knows, if you don't have a little bit of you know, of self-loathing, how are you gonna get better? Absolutely.
You need you need to have that drive to improve. Right, all the time. If you say you're like, oh, I'm great, I'm so efficient. Everything I do is awesome. You're useless.
It means everything you do is garbage. You're done for. You'll never get better. No, you're horrible at it. You know, there anyway.
Not not not my point. But go going ahead. You want to take a call? And yeah, but an enemy of quality. Oh, although you're done.
An enemy of quality, as opposed to a low-quality individual, is someone who actively works against quality, a Satan, the devil, enemy of quality. Making the choice to not get better and to not improve systems, yeah, and actively ruining things. Yeah. Right. Like, I'm not sure where I come down on pre-browning, but we'll get into it.
Anyway, so we have a caller, Dave? Yeah, yeah. I call you on the air. Uh hi, Dave. Hi, Dave.
Um, quick uh comment about the instant pot discussion uh and the B SQ thing, just since y'all were on it for so long while I was on hold. Um instant pot. No, it's alright. Uh I'm a big fan of the Instant pot, as many people are. I was really surprised at how nice the liner in that is.
Um I sometimes will take that out and use it on the stove top. And in fact that's my big uh because the power on it's not super great like you were saying um you can get things jump started on the stovetop with the liner and then move the hot pot liner to the instant pot. So you can do all your searing over a high BTU burner and then move it you know to the instant pot proper and then it'll get up to pressure uh really quickly. Oh that's an excellent point because yeah I can't do that for instance with my rice cooker insert or with the Queznard insert because they're Teflon coated and they're not rated for that kind of stuff. But from my reading the Instapot is a an uncoated stainless insert and so it shouldn't care what the hell you do to it, right?
Yeah and the uh and the the cladding on the bottom is actually pretty thick. So it it it does a relatively good job. The only complaint is that it's sort of narrow just because it's a you know liner pot so it's not really gonna evaporate off a whole lot but it's uh it's quality. I mean it's you know for I think 65 on prime day for an instant pot. Nice.
Well that that's a really good tip actually like and I didn't because I didn't think about you because like I'm so used to those inserts not being A, either being so thin that you wouldn't like it would scorch like a like a mother if you put it onto a burner or B you know not being rated for it. Like I would never put my rice cooker bowl on a on a burner. That's a good tip. And and I are you like me when you do that? Like what I typically will do is I always uh do meats in in bat in batches and then throw them in the bowl, then throw the liquid drip off back into the thing to evaporate a little before I dump in just so I don't water everything down too much.
You follow the same kind of protocol when you're doing the pre-brown? Yeah, I do the same thing. Sometimes I'll even uh, you know, I'll get a couple of uh Dutch ovens going and then move it all just because I'm I hate, you know, it'll take you an hour to properly brown everything separately. But then if you have a couple of big things on the stove, you can just get your miropoix off, you can do your meat in batches uh more cleanup but faster. So yeah, I mean the one, yeah, I mean it'd be nice if someone figured out something because I it's just the multiple pot cleanup thing, and we'll talk about this if there's time later.
I tried I attempted to try a new cleaning technology over the weekend unsuccessfully. So and and while I have you on the air, before we go to the question that you're gonna talk about, what are your thoughts on not pre-browning or pre-sweating your alliums? Uh the alliums in particular? Uh either one, just so your thoughts. Um, I don't know.
I always uh brown it off uh beforehand, but um I I very rarely I'm always going for the darkest uh jus, the darkest gravy, the most Miarty roasty thing. And that's the thing is that if you're not doing a conventional braze uh and you don't get that evaporation, you're not getting that browning on top that you would normally get even if you didn't sear it off. Um like if you're doing an oven braise with the the lid off or something like that. So if you're gonna be doing it in a closed environment that's wet, I would always sear off first because uh there's higher uh higher temp Myard products you're not gonna get. So I I'm gonna go ahead and say that you're on the the side that's over here, you're not on the side of the booth on that.
Wait, can can we just clarify? Does the browning need to happen for both slow cooking and pressure cooking, you're saying, or just pressure cooking? Um I'm really both, but the thing is that you're cooking for so long with a slow cooker that it's gonna kinda happen. Right. But you know what this sounds like, people start stuff with the sear at the beginning, all those flavor compounds also develop over the course of the twelve hour cook time.
Right. And as I said, we do brown before pressure cooking. Okay, listen. No further questions. Cooking issues challenge.
Someone take this up, someone take this up. Do it. Two identical pots, two identical recipes, one pre-brown, one don't, cook 12 hours, report back. Someone, someone out there has the energy to do this. Step up, chat room.
Someone step up and help us out. Call in, we'll give you, we'll give you like five, six minutes of reporting time on cooking issues to report your findings. You call in, you let us know whether or not there was a big difference. Now, if you're really a high quality individual, you will, or not as low quality as you might otherwise be, you'll do a triangle test with people so they can see if they can tell it apart. But okay, so if anyone wants to do it, like I'll give you even more time and more kudos if you do the triangle test.
Maybe we'll give you some sort of a prize. Like maybe we'll give you a heritage radio network food radio since 2009 t shirt. I don't know. I'm not saying we will because I don't have the power to do that. But maybe.
Anyway, so now what's your question? Oh, I just one final thing on the instant pod. This would be real quick. Um, I was actually really surprised looking at their little recipe book that came with it, how um friendly to quality they are. Um, so like in their beef stew recipe, it's uh brown brown everything off first, and then there's uh after you've cooked the meat, then you strain out the mirepoix and get the stock back to normal and add like vegetables and stages.
Um it's very built, very linear, very clean, and it's um you know, it follows best practices, which is kind of weird in this uh appliance, which is sort of sold as like a you know, it's an eight in one wonder thing, and all you have to do is press a button and walk away. But then you look at the recipes, and they're like, Well, if you were a decent human being and you gave a damn, this is how you would actually do it. Well, I like to hear stuff like that. Maybe the people who make it are cooks. I don't know who makes it.
You know? That sounds like good people, though. God bless them. You know, I anyone like first of all, like anyone that like advances quality in a non-uh judgmental way, unlike what I was doing today. Uh I like that.
So judgy, so judgy. Yeah, look, we're among friends. You can be judgy among friends, I think. Anyway, so your what was your question? Okay, so here's my question.
Uh I got a quarter boneless Suriano ham coming from West Wallace Edwards. Whoa! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop. Is he selling them again or is this old stock? They are back in stock.
The bone in just sold out. They've got some boneless quarters uh and fully boned out ones available, but they're going fast. Let me interrupt you for one second. S. Wallers Edwards, who is a longtime supporter of the radio uh network here.
I've known him for many, many, many years. Um, you know, since I don't know, like oh four or something like this. Uh was is one of the finest uh ham producers in the uh Surrey area of Virginia, Tidewater, Virginia. Uh you know, family's been doing it for eight, you know, eight bazillion years. His you know, grandfather wrote an article in the 60s about how hell was going to a ham was going to hell in a handbasket because they got rid of peanut feed.
Oh, the whole nine. The guy, real deal guy, as well as Edwards. Anyways, uh a couple of years ago, his uh his establishment burnt to the ground. There were wild dogs running on his property eating scorched hams, and we all cried bitter tears because uh his especially his high the his high-end ham, which he called Suriano. I dislike that name intensely, but it's uh it's a very good product, and I'm I'm happy to see that it's back.
All right, now go ahead. Uh yeah, and also just had to like go get it because it's gonna be gone if you want some to anybody listening. Really high quality ham. Really beautiful. Nothing brings the salt or the funk like Edwards.
Yeah, how uh how old are they right now? Are they are they what are they are they are they four? I think they're saying 400 days. 400 days? Nice.
All right, that's good. That's good cutting aid. Good cutting time. All right, so go ahead. Um, and so the only time I've ever had this ham was on my one visit to Booker and Dak.
Did you get the taste in or just the Edwards? Like a one kind of random night that I happened to be in New York City, like unexpectedly, my flight got canceled. And someone said, Is there anywhere you want to go? So I went there. Um, got the ham plate uh and the pork buns because we had dinner reservations afterwards.
So did you do it? Did you put a slice of ham? Did you tuck it into the pork bun? Because that that was always time that that was that's a turbo bun. Really?
In a new place. The new place, by the way, will not have buns. One thing it will not have is pork buns. Because to be honest with you, like there was a guy named Sinaido, who was the original pork bun maker at Booker Index and prior to Booker Index just at Sambar. And he would it this is how he operated.
He he always had the same pleasant look on his face 100% of the time. And it was air went in, buns came out. Air goes in, buns go out. I love that. Remarkable stuff.
Just a feat of endurance and strength. Every bun perfect. Every bun perfect. No, no like no dry edges. Oh no, just the perfect layer of hoisen.
Oh, it's beautiful. No misplaced placed cucumber slices. No, absolutely not. Every like when you looked at his station, people would order like uh uh eight billion buns, please, and like they would all look like perfect, like you would like decapitate or cut Kermit the Frog right through the mouth, open because that's how he would lay them out. You know what I mean?
And oh my god. And he maintained the steam level in his bun basket perfectly. They're always so pillowy soft. Yeah. Never soggy, never dry or cold.
Sanaido was a good, a good man. Yeah. Yeah. I mean he's not dead. He just went to go work somewhere else.
Yeah. For more money. Anyway, uh, I didn't say that, but I did. Okay, so you have this, you have a uh a quarter of a which quarter of the of the ham do you have? Uh I don't know yet.
It's uh coming in the mail uh later, but it's boned out. Um I guess my question is, you know, do you have any serving sugg I mean I would just put it on the plate and eat it. Uh correct like pairing suggestions, or I mean, I was thinking about doing the sort of espresso powder uh red eye gravy and air quotes that like the the Mamafufuku group guys didn't have to be. To me, that is the best thing they ever came up with. Delicious product.
Yeah, I love that product. And so like I'm gonna go ahead and say that you know, of all the things that that crew ever came up with, the that red eye gravy mayonnaise is maybe the best one. I love that stuff. I think it's somewhat polarizing. Some people don't like it, right?
Bad people. I've never met anyone that doesn't like it. Right. If you didn't know what was gonna happen beforehand, first of all, like red eye gravy. I mean, I grew up with it because my grandma used to make actual red eye gravy with coffee and you know, and the drippings and stuff, but uh, so I have a a particular soft spot for it in general.
That stuff is delicious, but I will tell you what you can do. You know, the old joke uh is uh, you know, a couple and a Virginia ham is the definition of forever because it lasts forever. Yeah, but don't cook it. Whatever you do, don't don't cook it, right? I mean, obviously, you know, yeah.
Uh I mean you can, but you you should you should not. So uh what I like to do is um when when God invented the American country ham, he really wanted you to eat it with eggs. You know what I'm saying? So, like uh like raw slice, like so, like let's say you're gonna make a pizza, uh, you fire up a pizza, and then you uh do like a fried egg on top, and then after it comes out of the oven, you put some thin slices of this over top of that. That is delicious, or even like you take scrambled eggs and you cut some up thin and put it over the scrambled eggs after it cooks, that stuff's delicious.
Uh I just eat it straight on sandwiches, it's good and cheese plates, it's good. I mean, anything that it would be good, uh anything that you would use a uh you know, a prosciutto style thing for, you could use it here. But I particularly love it with eggs, and so uh because I like eggs more than the average person, when I cook for myself, when I'm alone, which doesn't happen hardly ever anymore, when I'm alone, all I consume is eggs. And so, like, you know, poached eggs, fried eggs, scrambled eggs, on toast, and if I have country ham, there's country ham all all over up and down that. Um I think you'll find that if you're a person like myself and Dave, if you have a ham in your home, it's not gonna last that long.
No, you're just gonna be slicing, slice, slice, you know. You're bored, you slice some ham. You're hungry, you slice some ham. You're tired, a little bit of ham. A little bit of ham.
A little bit every situation. Now, here I'm gonna go a little bit against what I normally say, and I'm gonna tell you some of my own personal things that I don't like with that style of ham. Now, because uh American hams have that kind of uh funk and a little bit of that kind of I guess it's lipid oxide uh lipid oxidation style. I don't know what it is, but there's a little bit of thing I don't think it pairs well with uh carbonated beverages. I can agree with that.
Yeah, so like I wouldn't do like I'm not big on like uh a champagne and country ham tasting. Not. I mean, if it's like super oxidative champagne, like into the the nutty side of things, then it then it could be nice. But the bubble just drink sherry, get some sherry, get some really good sherry and eat a ton of ham. Yeah, but but be aware that you will have a horrible headache the next day.
You will have just a rotten now. There's been recent evidence that um that hangovers merely mimic the symptoms of dehydration. But let me tell you, you will have the actual symptoms of dehydration if what you're doing is pounding nuts, cheese, ham, and cherry. Even though that is delicious, yeah, you will have a severe headache. I'm gonna tell you this.
It is worth it. Absolutely. I would, I would, I would take that headache any day, but just remember, when you're pounding a lot of ham, hydrate in the in professionally, by the way, when you're tasting, should you ever become a uh country ham tasting professional, like Dr. Norman Marriott was, who used to be the food safety guy at Virginia Tech and who wrote some of the books on how to make country ham, uh once told me uh apple cider. So, like, not carbonated, not alcoholic, although I like them both carbonated and alcoholic, but uh apple cider is the palate cleanser of choice when uh doing country ham.
And so also any form of thing like that is a natural pairing with a country ham. So, like your apple butters, your apple sauces, uh your your that cooked that cooked uh apple note that you get out of a cider. You know what I mean? Yeah, uh that's great. Yeah, so I mean the situation that I have is I'm gonna basically be using it as like an appetizer sort of situation on Thanksgiving uh for my like family.
So uh I think apples would be kind of like a festival like seasonal accompaniment. Um you know what you might want to look into that's fun is uh I like to do uh if you can get any cooking pears or pears that don't get too uh messed up when you when you cook them, what used to be known as uh wardens, like I like I love like a mixed apple pear sauce. Like in if you look at the old medieval recipes, like chardwarden, it's like these uh old pear sauces back when people used to do cooking pears a lot. I mean, it's not it's kind of gone by the wayside, but I love an app I love a like a cooked down, like little bit sweet apple pear mix. And that kind of a compote would be delicious with uh with a ham.
But like honestly, like I would just sit there chewing on that, I would just be sitting there slicing a piece of ham for myself. Do you what form of slicing are you going to do? Um, so my plan right now is I have a uh uh Yanagiba, like 300 uh centimet uh millimeter sushi slicer. Right. Uh that's got the chisel grind only on one edge.
So I'm gonna try to use that. It's a little thick, so I don't know if that's gonna work, but I have other slicers to uh try out as well. But it'll be done by hand, and I don't, you know, just kind of slow I've so have you ever been to Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have not. I've never been I've never been to Ann Arbor.
Killer Deli there, and they they have a bunch of hams behind the uh counter that you know they slice off the ham on the rack by hand. And so if you want like three ounces of ham, it'll take them 20 minutes. Yeah, yeah. They they were the first big chain. I know this because I spoke to someone there back in like 04 or 05 when I was doing a lot of my you know, right after I had done my initial country ham research, and they were the first uh big place to start serving uh American hams this way, and you know, and like literally I would go in whenever I went into a store, I would go into Dean and DeLuca's and I would say, Your ham selection is garbage.
Why is your ham selection so garbage? And they would they were like, Who are you get out of here? You know what I mean? And uh and to my knowledge, even though I never got to visit them, Zingerman's was the first and for a long time the only establishment that uh gave a uh a crap about it. So yeah, I'd love to go there.
Yeah, it's a beautiful place. Um anyway, well, uh, thanks for your recommendations. Yeah, but hold on a second. Before you go, listen. Uh here's the question I have, because when I say quarter ham, the the real question is which part of the ham are you gonna get?
The two like because I don't know whether I'm assuming he's not breaking the cushion off, and then I'm I'm assuming they're boning it out, and then they're gonna cross-cut it. So you're getting some section of a cross-cut of a ham. And the I think that's what it's I think that's what it's gonna be based on the picture. Right. And so American style ham serving is a cross-cut kind of a phenomenon.
But as you're I'm sure you're aware, the Spanish and as Cesare Casella will tell you, whose ham is delicious, by the way. I need to try Chesare's ham. Yeah, yeah, uh. Yeah, he you know, he uses the old style hand cutting. An old-style hand cutting is not a cross-cutting technology.
It's he they're cutting uh long ways, and they're doing that, you know, what you would think of as the hand cut that they would do in Spain. And so there it's just a jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, jiggle with the slicer and making those like kind of long wave. I used to not like that. I have come around to liking them both for different things. So uh just be aware that the easiest way to get cross-cut style things with a Yanagi if you have an entire piece of ham, is to remove the harder, smaller part of the muscle that's underneath the bone.
You'll see it's very much darker, and then that is hard. You put that down, and you can I would not shave that one with a Yanagi. I would use something a little bit a little bit with a firmer of a back, and just shave that as you would something harder because it's usually harder. Then take the the cushion section that you have, lay that down flat on the board, and that you can get long, nice draw slices with your Nagi if you trim the you just trim only trim the skin back on the area that you're about to cut. That'll preserve the kind of the rest of it.
So trim back just the area on the and obviously not with your Yanagi, you something else, put that down, and then those you can get nice draw slices off but I would not attempt to slice the entire thing as a piece and if you have a quarter cut thing I would not attempt to do the long um uh Spanish style cuts because you just don't have that that the length of ham to do it on all right nice uh yeah thanks for the slicing suggestion I hadn't even uh thought about those issues yeah that's what we're here for cooking it should be cooking and cutting issues instant pot issues call in your question anyway all we gotta take a break well uh thanks for the uh thanks for the advice also thanks for the wonderful experience at Booker and Dax uh my drink order was the gin and tonic the wanger and the uh thunder nut uh that's okay so the what the wanger was that your spec Jack yeah so what was it for the record uh I'm struggling to recall exact measurements but it was uh a mango Houstino and uh Louis Royer cognac with sweet vermouth yellow chartreuse uh lemon lime and bitter so it was tiki style served tall named after the one and only Nick Wong who for some unknown reason was called Wang Wanger. Yeah and it was served with the dance oh yeah the dance oh we gotta have Nick Wong on get him in the booth have him fly back here just to do the dance at some point. Nice all right wanger yes strong secure thank you. All right and uh well gin and tonic specs we can get into later if we need it but thanks for calling in happy Thanksgiving we'll be right back with more cooking issues. Bob's Red Mill has been milling whole grain since 1978.
One of the nice things about Bob's Red Mill is it's the only that I know of, national supplier that's easily available for lots of interesting, hard to get grains and other seed products. So, you know, before Bob's Red Mill became widely available, you couldn't go get something like quinoa very easily, or you couldn't go get spelt easily in small quantities. But now you go to any one of the huge number of stores that carry Bob's Red Mill, and you can get smaller amounts of these really interesting fun things to play with. Learn more at Bob's Redmill.com slash podcast. And we are back.
Dave, you say we got a caller on the air? That's right. Caller, you're on the air. Oh yeah, Dave. Dan, Seattle.
Hey, how you doing? So simple, straight up question. I I can't deal with garbage vacuum vacuum sealers anymore. I'm trying I'm planning to get a real one this Black Friday. Nice.
Um, so there's the Polyscience 300. Which uh last time I checked, I haven't checked recently, but last time I checked is a relabeled mini pack. Okay. There's a VACMaster. Um the one that's very price comparable to the Polyscience is the VP 210.
Wait, how much is the Polyscience one? Okay, so on Amazon at this moment, the Poly Science is 800 and the Vacmaster VP 210 is 760. Huh. How much is the comparable small mini pack? I I I uh mini pack does not come up on Amazon.
So that that was one of my questions. Is it is it is there a name brand I'm not seeing? Does the well, okay, so the the professional ones, like a lot of people have multi-vacs, they're really expensive, and I for years have used Mini Pack. Uh my question is, what kind of pump does the poly science have in it? Is it a is it a dry pump?
Dry pump. Dry pump. I haven't I I'm gonna I don't have any personal experience. No one has ever sent me to evaluate hint a uh a dry pump uh vacuum. I have always been a very like uh uh very pro oil pump fellow with my vacuum machines, and um but I have only really used professional level vacuum machines before, and my only experience with dry pump ones is of the kind of food saver variety, which are not good.
Uh yeah, but I I can certainly back up that part. Um, but then one more quick question here. Have you ever used any of the Western I mean they're they're truly industrial machines, but they're not chamber vaccines. Have you uh do you have any experience with those? I don't.
I I only uh you know i no I don't. Uh but back to the VAC Master, I I've not used the if if the poly science is a dry pump one, I haven't used uh I haven't used that one. Um I I have not used the Vacmaster, but I have spoken to people who like it. In other words, like chefs who've like they sent one to the French culinary after I'd stopped teaching their um low temperature sous vide class, and Erve Malavare, who's was, you know, teaching it with you know with with me uh, you know, before I left, uh says that he thinks it's fine, he thinks it's okay to work with. Um I have not used it, and I've never spoken to anyone in depth other than him, uh, you know, who has a lot of experience with real like oil pump based chamber vacuums uh and it, so it's hard for me to make a judgment.
Now, typically an oil pump machine is gonna clock in at $1,500 minimum. You know what I mean? And so, you know, it's twice as much money. So my you know, the question is is it twice as good? What are you gonna what are you trying to do with it?
You know what I'm saying? Like what it what is it that you want it to first of all, what is it that you want it to do, right? Well, I mean I feel a lot of different stuff, but the the thing that just makes me climb the walls is when I make sausage and I'm trying to seal it in four-ounce packages for like to put on things on like pizza and pasta. Right. So I want relatively small units, and I and I wind up with like 40 of them.
And the Cheapos, uh the Cheapo models, I get steel 15 quickly, and then they start overheating, and then it takes eons to get it finished, and you've got sausage sitting there getting warm. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Oil-based pumps, the more you run them, the better they are. Literally, the more you run an oil based pump, the better it gets at sucking a vacuum because the it the pump heats up, and as it heats up, it gets better and better because it gets better at rejecting moisture that's in it.
So it's just like uh, yeah. And I I I'm assuming what's happening in in in also with the overheating is that as liquids get sucked into a dry pump, the uh liqu like the liquids uh actually inside the diaphragm area don't get ejected well enough, and so you reduce your pumping uh action there and you have to run it, even one of those things, you have to run for a long time to redry out the inside of the pump to get like decent fast vacuum levels again. This is my experience with dry pumps and rotary evaporators, which I have a lot of experience with dry pumps and rotary evaporator situations. But those dry pumps also have such a lower CFM rating than the oil based pumps do. Those oil based pumps just rip and rip and rip.
And so, like if you're gonna spend $800, I mean, I'm not telling you to go buy, but here's the other thing, right? If you if you get a like a decent like mid level um chamber vac, and this is the one thing that I think people don't invest in. I've said it back when I used to advise professionals on this constantly. Get a get a machine with two seal bars. And everyone's like, oh, the second seal bar takes up so much space in my chamber vac.
And I'm like, you can take the seal bar out when you're not using it so that it's not taking up room in your machine. But especially if you're doing portion packs, imagine if you could seal two packages every time you close the lid. How much better would your life be if you could seal things twice as quickly? Oh, I see I see what you're saying. So you some of them you can literally seal like two relatively small bags at once.
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. So you have like you get a machine. Yeah, right. You get a machine that has a seal bar on the front, a seal bar in the back.
It's a it's uh an add on, usually, it doesn't usually cost that much extra. And then when you need the extra space in your machine, you just pull the bar out of the back and you're fine. You know, it doesn't stop you from bagging soups if you want. You know, some of the machines, like the mini pack, the one that I use, you can also uh you can reverse it so you can have a super long bag outside of the chamber. If you were bagging, let's say a giant striper that you were gonna cook or something like that, or you know, if you're out in Seattle, whatever in the hell, salmon, whatever they have out there.
Dave, we gotta wrap up. Final thoughts. Oh, oh man. All right. Uh anyway, uh let us know what you choose.
Next week we're gonna have a long cooking issues, uh, right, Dave or not, for Thanksgiving. That's what I hear. Yeah. Thanksgiving gift to you. Okay, uh Nick wrote in and wants to know when uh the uh spinzalls are gonna be available on Amazon.
Hopefully by Black Friday, spinzalls will be on Amazon. We're working on it. They're flying into the country now, but you never uh you never know. Um we have a bartender question, uh, Dan from Chicago, uh, about uh Christmas cocktails. Since it's for Christmas, we'll do it next time.
Um, I'll tell you what I did on the way out, Jack, see what you think. By the way, do you have the spec for the Wanger? Do you want to give it to him? Uh yeah, I do have that spec. It's well, if you have a spinzall, you're gonna need to get a bottle of Louis Roy cognac and do 150 grams of dried mangoes blended into the cognac, spun out to make the uh the mango Houstino that we used.
And then it's uh a half ounce of yellow chartreuse, a half ounce of pineapple syrup, which is just one to one-to-one uh pineapple juice and sugar, uh, quarter ounce of uh Carpano Antica and three-eighths of an ounce of lime juice. And give that a whip and put it on crushed ice and a high ball, top it with angle. All right. Yeah. Uh, and so uh, but if you guys want more specs, we're gonna do our Booker In Dax reunion episode.
Or if you want Jack to come back on, let us know. Do a request, maybe he'll uh out of the goodness of his heart come back in. Here's what I did on the way out. I was using a pressure washer. So, like, you know how like you have things that don't fit in your sink, like sheet pans and stuff like this.
I was using, I said, what if I use a pressure washer outside, because I had access to one to clean all my stuff. So here's the thing. Oh, geez. On sheet on sheet pans, great. I didn't have access to warm water.
I'm gonna do a warm water pressure washer outside with a hose in a couple of weeks. Hopefully, I'll see how that is. But fantastic on the sheet trays. Do not attempt on your Vitape, uh, on your Vitapep container. I was like, uh Vitapep container, it's kind of a pain.
The sink's full of stuff, so do not attempt. And on big stainless steel bowls, like big salad bowls, like that don't fit in your sink. Do not attempt, do not attempt. But anyway, I'm gonna work on pressure, pressure washing as a as a uh a wear washing technique, and I'll get back to you with more information on cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network, food radio supported by you.
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