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You'll hear your generosity and action for the year to come. Help keep our lights on and our mics hot by pledging your support today at Heritage Radio Network.org slash donate. Thanks for listening. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you alive on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 from Roberto's Pizzeria in Bushwick, br br Brooklyn, joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez.
How you doing, Stas? Good. You weren't here last week. Why? What were you doing?
Um I was Uh-huh. You gonna you're not allowed to think? No, no, I'm thinking. You uh your life goal, it was your life goal. My life goal was to feed Saturday Night Live, and I did.
Yeah, and uh you got you got Instagrammed out. You gotta check by Michael Che. Now, so you check out Michael Che's Instagram. And he became the first black writer in Saturday Night Live history to become head writer that same day. So big.
Yeah. So uh also if you want to see what Nastasia Lopez can do if she actually likes someone like Michael Che, you can check out Michael Che's Instagram and look for the pasta flyer thing like you know. You can be thoughtful sometimes. Yeah. And creative sometimes.
Sometimes. Yeah. So this is how it go. Uh I think it went well. I think it went well.
They liked it. You made a cocktail for them. I think it went well. I did. You were like Woohoo, he cheated.
What? You you cheated. I cheated. I did cheat. It's not a cheat.
You know what? I'm I'm all for this. Listen, peoples, peoples. Peoples. Listen, when you're making a cocktail and there's a flavor that you like, right?
Only maybe you're lazy, or maybe you don't have also they told us the day before. Yeah. And you don't have the time or what you know what's really good is like high quality if you don't mind the cook flavor, right? So the thing is that like a lot of the stuff that we do, we're trying to get like a super fresh flavor, and that's when we bust out like you know, centrifuges and you know, cold clarification techniques and all that kind of stuff. Uh you know, roto vap, if you want like cold reductions, like we remember when we used to do the port syrup cold?
Mm-hmm. That's the delicious uh, you know, for those kind of things. But if you don't mind a cooked flavor, jelly is delicious. And so you just hit jelly with pectinex, and then you jelly. What was that?
What was that? Uh what was that character on Rudolph who's full of jelly? Yeah. A water gun that squirts jelly. Remember that?
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so uh so you take jelly. Always the root of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you take the well, it is the Christmas episode after all.
So you take the uh the jelly, you hit it with uh pectinx and um then you put it with uh uh liquor so that it's completely stable, and you can make these delicious jelly syrups. So we did that with Concord Grape because you know, we like a Concord Grape here cooking issues. What about you, Dave? Dave in the booth. I didn't say hello to you yet today.
Hi Dave. Yeah, I'm right here. No, I'm gonna go ahead. Yeah? What do you what are your thoughts on Concorde Grapes?
Uh ambivalently. Are you French? Do you like peanut butter? Well, yeah. I don't I don't often make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
No, but I mean, did you not grow up with that? Well, yeah, sure. Are you part of the allergy generation? You know, there's a whole generation of kids that don't know what it's like to be an American. You know what I'm saying?
I mean, seriously, like they grew up. I mean, like, I'm all for not having that stuff in schools if people are gonna if people are violently allergic now, which I guess they weren't in the 70s, or at least we didn't pay attention to them. Maybe I don't know what happened. Maybe they were there and we just we wiped them out because we were so well, we were so non caring in the 70s that we just didn't care about people, and so we just you know sprayed allergic people with peanut butter on uh I don't know. I don't really know.
I haven't thought about it. But point being that that uh you know, my kids' generation did not grow up in school on PB and J's, at least not in New York. Oh, really? Yeah. So like mercury poisoning action, like a lot of tuna fish?
Like, Jeremy Jeremy Pivin style. Remember when he went crazy and got arrested and said it was because he ate so much sushi that he had mercury poisoning? Yeah, vaguely. Sounds sounds suspect, but you know, so is his acting career. Well, now, yeah.
Well, uh, I love any kind of crazy like there's been like a number of insane food defenses over the years, and they've often been linked, well, of course, because you're it's a defense, right? Been linked to like horrible behavior, like uh in the what was it, 70s when Harvey Milk was uh murdered, and then they they the murderer, instead of just saying, I'm an evil, like hater, homophobe, was like I ate too many Twinkies. Remember that? It's called the Twinkie Defense. Literally it's called the Twinkie Defense.
And he blamed uh first of all, why would you like if you're gonna blame something? Does it have to be Twinkies? Like, you know, like our our favorite childhood sponge cake with cream filling? Does it have to be Twinkies? I mean, it it actually wasn't only Twinkies, it was just like uh I believe it was it's been a long time since I've researched this, but like I believe it was steroids and lots of sweets, and so they called it the Twinkie Defense.
Uh I don't think t Twinkies were actually specifically implicated. Yeah, it was probably more the steroids. Or Mel Gibson. What did Mel Gibson blame it on? The Jews?
No. Oh my god. How does he always? How does he Yeah, alcohol? That's different.
Alcohol, I mean, alcohol's been blamed since time memorial. Have you heard that song uh alcohol where it's all about uh anyway? Uh was that Brad Paisley sings alcohol? You don't listen to any sort of country at all. All right.
Uh all right, so calling your questions, uh food food music related or not, too. 7184972128. That's 7184972128. By the way, everybody's favorite punching bag. Peter unfortunately not here.
Peter the punching bag, Kim. Hey, listen, any if any of you people out there are uh game designers and are into what? Oh, not here? Yeah. Anyway, listen, seriously.
If any of you out there are game designers or rom hackers, you know what a rom hacker is, Nastasia? A ROM hacker is someone that takes old uh game ROMs and then hacks them. So if you guys, let's do that. So listen, here's what I want you guys to do. I want you to go get, don't do anything illegal, but go do something illegal.
Go get the ROM for punch out or for super punch out, and I want you to modify Glass Joe's sprites to make it into Peter Kim. I will say if anyone can do this out there, if anyone every time he gets hit, he has to make the sound that's on your phone. No, it's a body blow, body blow. But he's gonna go. Well, I don't know how they a lot of this sounds, I don't remember whether punch out is a sample-based sound or whether punch out is uh computer generated sound.
But anyway, anyone who's out there who's a rom hacker will know what I'm talking about. I will get you the correct images. I will get you the pixel art for Peter Kim in the various Glass Joe positions, and we can do a super punch out of of Kim. Peter Kim. And I think it would be it would be a great gift to him to have the super punch out version of Peter Kim.
Wouldn't that be amazing, Dave? Oh yeah. I mean, it'll be a great honor. I mean, I would love to have myself get the crappie out of me. I mean, look, you don't we don't have to make Peter into Glass Joe.
We can make Peter into like Mr. Sandman or any one of the characters there. But, you know, Glass Joe be I never beat that game. No? No, I couldn't beat Mike Tyson.
Really? Well, there's Mike Tyson's. But there's okay, so I I don't know, I guess that's true. There's the any there's the Nintendo version, but there's also the arcade version. I guess you could choose whatever's easiest to hack.
Oh, I never played it in the arcade. Whatever's easiest to hack. Uh arcade was interesting. The original punch out was our interesting because it was a dual monitor kind of a situation. Wait, how would you hack the arcade?
Don't you need to have the console in your possession to do it? Clearly you are not up on ROM hacking much. I guess not. You have a meme emulator and you have a the ROM, and it's it's easier to hack, I think, the the uh console stuff because more people have done console hacking. But you can't because another dream, someone has actually already done it, but my editors don't uh work.
I wanted to hack the editor, the uh Sprites for a game called Tapper, where it's like a bartender thing and put like my favorite bartender's faces. Yeah. I want to put my favorite bartender's faces in place of that person's face and then have like selectable like which ROM you open, and you could have, you know, you could have any bartender you want be the tapper. It'll be great. First of all, they need a female tapper, and then you know, swap out the dancing ladies for somebody else when you give them a tip.
Anyway, all good stuff. And bring a current. What? It's got current guys, come on. Yeah.
Anyway, so someone out there has to know how to do this. Anyway, Peter's on you. So Peter Kim is not here. He was supposed to come here and make a pitch for uh the museum. Instead, literally he's like, I have no time, because he's sitting there hitting refresh, waiting for you to donate to the Museum of Food and Drink.
So he's sitting there constantly refreshing his email, waiting for donations coming in, and his refresh finger is so like, you know, so hurting that he, you know, couldn't come into the radio show today. He doesn't even want to go out for our Christmas party. Yeah, he well, by Christmas party, Nastasia means that Nastasi and I are gonna go out for drinks and pretend that we have a real company. I mean, true or false. True.
All right. Uh by the way, are we gonna get Karen on later or no? Do we have her so nobody's responded to me? All right, listen. Uh I will say this before I go in.
We had a question, a relatively in-depth question. Uh on it, she just emailed him. Oh, yeah? Is she does she have time? I don't know.
Well, you figure out, we'll talk about it later. Okay, so uh listen, you guys gotta pretend that I'm uh your favorite uh Mofad punching bag, Peter Kim. Body blow, body blow. Uh reading this. Actually, I'm supposed to pretend that I'm me reading this, right?
Yeah. Anyway, so the Museum of Food and Drink, this is actually serious business. Museum of uh Food and Drink desperately needs uh your funds for its continued operation. Um what's what's hilarious what's hilarious is is when he wrote this promo out for me to read and doesn't realize that you it's hard, believe it or not, folks, like it's hard to add like to combine ad libs from a promo in the middle of uh actually reading out the promo. So it's like if I could either just completely ad lib what I'm gonna tell you, or I could just read something, but the combination of reading something and an ad-libbing is relatively difficult to get it to come off properly.
You never notice that, Dave? Like where you're supposed to insert stuff. Yeah, like insert, you know, insert information here. Um I don't know. Most people seem to have a handle on it.
Yeah, well, not me. I'm more like, I'm more like, you know, what I when I do it, usually what I like to do is insert like uh a fake, a fake voice in the middle of it. Anyway, so listen, I'll I'll answer some questions. We'll do that towards the middle of the show, and I will just look over kind of what the points he wants me to get, and then I will just tell you guys something from the heart about the museum of Food and Drink. But I will say this donate you like what you're gonna want to do, regardless of whether you listen throughout this entire program or not, you're gonna wanna go um to uh donate.mofad.org.
Donate.mofad.org to help uh support the Museum of Food and Drink. And then I'll talk more about it. I'll give you the extended uh PSA later, maybe after we come out of the break. Um should we do a question first? Real quick?
Okay. Let's do it to a question. We're not gonna do the complicated brioche. Look, we tried to get in touch with uh emailing it to her now, but we tried to get in touch with uh uh Chef Karen at who used to teach bread at uh Bournemouth, who used to teach bread at the French Culinary Institute. Um and now she's at Hot Bread Kitchen and does education there.
So we had a question on brioche, um, and it was a really complicated, in-depth question, specific stuff on brioche, and as I told Nastasia this morning, uh Karen can like wake up and you know, and toot out some brioche, like no problem. I mean, like and by the way, interesting fact, you know, uh I like to say, you know, as has always been said, those who cannot teach do poorly. You know what I mean? Everyone's used to say, those who cannot do teach. This is crap.
If you actually teach something day in and day out, you learn so much more about what you're doing because people ask questions, people mess up in ways that you don't understand. So if you really want to ask a question about something like brioche, go ask a bread teacher who for years taught students like day after day how to make brioche and saw everything that could go wrong, go wrong with brioche, and that's how you figure out what's going on. The same way that like with low temperature cooking or any of that stuff that you know uh I used to teach on a daily basis, is just seeing people mess it up day after day after day makes you as a teacher so much better because A, you have to be able to explain to them how not to mess up, and B, you get to underse, really see how things get messed up over time. By the way, I'll say one thing before I get I'll do a question and then I'll say. But remind me, low temperature, I have something to say, okay?
What? Low temp, got it. Low temp, got it. Aaron wrote in and said, cold brew coffee on radio show, interested in hearing more. Well, Aaron, I wish I could help you out because here's why.
I mean, I know how to make cold brew coffee. I'm doing some interesting work on cold brew coffee uh in the spinzall, and I actually have some really interesting uh so Paul uh Adams, you know, friend of the show, and uh he promoted his kitten the last time he was on the day. Yeah, came on the air and promoted his his new kitten, right? Which is interesting. I mean, I like the fact that you know he feels like he has to promote something, come on.
He's he is our um resident cold brew expert. And so occasionally he will come to me and say, Can we do this or that with cold brew? My problem is it's hard for me to develop stuff without Paul because I don't like cold brew coffee, and so I can't judge whether or not I have done a good job or a bad job on the cold brew coffee because I don't enjoy it. And I don't even think Nastasi enjoys it. No, I don't.
So uh I like Dave. What? What kind of coffee do I have? Oh, Nastasia likes the like the crappiest coffee in the world. Like if you any street corner.
Oh, I remember this episode. This was the greatest hit. Any street, any street corner that has some sort of quilted stainless and uh and like yellowed acrylic window box where the coffee was brewed like in the last century, sometime, and has been sitting in a pot moldering and turning to garbage, and is then poured into a substandard paper cup that excoriates your tongue and makes you realize that you're a crappy New Yorker, and then has plastic that cuts your lips. Yeah. And that is the kind of coffee that she likes.
That's what she enjoys. Right? And she enjoys it because, like my grandpa, right? Like my crazy dead racist grandpa. Like, she likes to like crappy stuff on purpose just to piss off people that care.
That is not true, Dave. There's no other thing. This was where the conversation diverged last time as well. Yeah. The intent behind it.
Is that the kid from Stranger Things? Wait, what? It's not the kid from Stranger Things. See that kid sitting right there? No.
With the bowl haircut? No. Which one? No. The lead kid?
I don't want to. Why don't we just make it up? Why do you make it up? Hey, is that uh is that David Hasselhoff sitting there in the corner? No.
Is that the flannel? That's an Asian man. What? I mean, this kid looks nothing like the guy from Stranger. That kid in the flannel.
Yes, he looks nothing like the kid. He has a kid in flannel. Nastancia, you're really going over the edge here. Anyway. She's seeing stars everywhere now.
Right. So, anyway, so back to Cold Brew. Aaron, what I'm gonna do in the in the new year, I have to say this. Uh, Paul Adams is getting on my case to design a standalone cold brew uh brewer in the 200 range that can make cold brew in under 20 minutes with good extraction. And the short answer is yes, I can do it.
I've figured it out. But the long answer is is I haven't mocked up a working prototype, and then I would have to actually talk to Nastasia and see whether she wants to get into the business of selling said piece of equipment, and then I would have to go. I will do that if you build the wine zombie. The wine zombie is a different that's a different thing. Hold up, what's a wine zombie?
What's a what the hell? What do you mean what's a wine zombie? Where have you been? It is the it is the piece of equipment that most people would want that Dave will not get behind. It's the piece of equipment that Nastasia Lopez and Piper Christensen designed and built on Booker and Dax time and water.
So therefore, Booker and Dax owns it. So why doesn't Booker and Dax build it? Because it is not part of the it's not in the ow. Wait, so what is of Booker and Dax style equipment? A wine zombie slash wine Santa Slash wine football player, whatever you want.
Is a mannequin that shoots uh alcoholic beverage, chilled or warm, depending on how you want it, out of its mouth into a punch bowl, and it can be made to look like it's vomiting. So in the zombie case, it's more of a vomit. And then uh the final iteration, Nastasia had one that was uh had a motion sensor and a uh voice recorder on it such that Santa would say things to you when you walked up to it. It would Santa would say things to you like too much eggnog and then it was like he was throwing up wine. It was like vomiting Kermit.
Yeah, see, isn't that a good idea, David? No, no. Yeah, sounds great. You how much would you pay for this? How much would you pay for it?
Life size mannequin. Oh, life size? Life size. Oh well. Yeah, I by the way, Dave.
Live in a Brooklyn apartment. I'll give you well, no, you rented for parties. Here's the thing. It's it's freestanding, right? So b you know how like the old joke is that guy's got a wooden leg.
Oh, where does he put all that? You know what I mean? Like because he's not getting drunk and he's drinking all the stuff, you know what I'm saying? So, like, this like Santa literally has let's say it's like more of a plastic leg. It's like filled with liquor, and then it just like circulates it up with a s with a pump and then like goes down and and the uh and don't give away the the IP.
Oh, I think people can figure out how to put a tube in the bottom of a bowl and run it down Santa's sleeve into his boot. I feel like this thing would kill it on the startup party circuit. Like all those all the bro dudes would be wearing it for their parties. Well, remember, remember Booker and Dax is we are the trailing edge technology. The thing that could fall off the airplane and it flies just fine.
They notice like three fights later that the thing fell off. Oh man. Remember that blinking light. What that what was that for? I don't know.
It fell off the plane, like, you know, a week ago. Yeah, it can't be that important. Yeah, it can't be that important. And then Dave's there, like, eh, but it made it five percent better, guys. Uh pound.
Uh so anyway, yeah, that's that's my life. That's how it's cut. Are you gonna take a call? Yeah, sure. Call her, you're on the air.
Uh hey guys, this is uh Will in Chicago. How you doing? I'm doing well, how you guys doing? Alright. Uh and just uh first off for the survey, uh I'm 30-year-old man, married, my wife loves kitchen gadgets, I'm a serizol and spin ball owner.
Love it. Uh bartender. So love it. So uh I actually have a thin ball coffee related question. Uh-huh.
Not to belabor the dead horse here at all, but um I'm gonna be making uh a batch of uh oats out uh with my brew buddy today. Uh we're gonna get started probably right after the show. And uh we want to turn it into a coffee stout. And I think that the stinzall is an excellent application for this. Uh I was wondering it's like um you could just give me a little bit of a cup around maybe what you've done, or I also was thinking about maybe using the malt to extract the coffee.
But I just wanted to run it by you before we did anything. Sure. So I've done more recent uh coffee experiments since I've uh did the since I did the manual. Uh in the manual, I think I used like a like a relatively uh fine grind. The issue on espresso, right?
Yeah, but uh recently I've actually been using, and I think it's probably better, uh coarser grinds. Um because I think I'm getting better kind of forced percolation results through the the coarser grinds. And so uh what I've been doing is and it's just I've you know made it I think simpler on myself, is uh you know, I pre-moisten the the trick is you cannot pump grounds, like period. You cannot pump coffee grounds. Um so what I've been doing is uh mixing it, putting it into the uh into the thing, spinning it up.
Now the trouble with the the spinzall, especially if if there's any sort of vibration with it, is just getting it to start up. So sometimes people have had issues with it going into into flashing mode with coffee grounds, uh because uh if it doesn't spin up fast enough, uh it doesn't settle out fast enough and go into flashing mode, and so sometimes people have had trouble where they need to do it a bunch of times to get it to go. But once it goes, once it's going, uh and I hope to fix that problem. Once it's going, then I would just recirculate uh the just recirculate the water through it and just walk away from it and let it recirculate. And I was able to get it on recirculation.
I was able to get the TDS, I forget, I forget what the correct numbers were, but I got it into the range of a regular concentrate just by doing it on research mode, and I got to do it kind of relatively relatively quickly. And so it was it and it ended up uh working well. Keep the extender tubes on it, because the idea here is you're trying to force the water to the inside of the rotor and then have it percolate under pressure up through the up through the grounds. Um the issue with the spinzall and the cold brew coffee and where it can be improved is that if you were to stop the unit in the middle of uh circulation and look at the grounds, you would notice that some of the grounds are more heavily percolated than others because where the tubes are, it had it's like preferential to have the stuff percolate through there. And so you know, one of the things I'm considering doing is making a um like a forced percolation attachment or uh for the for the unit.
Uh that but again that would be sometime next year, or just doing a standalone cold brew thing. But those are the basic tips that I have for it if that makes sense. Okay, and uh just uh what do you think about using the wart to do the extraction? Good idea, bad idea, or useless. Uh I mean stickier.
Definitely stickier. Yeah, the th the issue is this, right? So um your extract as you know, as a brewer, your extraction uh like your extraction medium, right, has more profound influence over what you extract than you would imagine, right? So uh I would say that you know the coffee might strip something, for you never know, like something's going to adsorb onto the coffee out of the wort. So, you know, definitely you'll lose probably only a tiny bit of sugar.
I mean, it depends on how much you're gonna do, you know what I mean? It might work, it might be, it might be delicious. I mean, I would just I would make some extra and and test it. You know what I'm saying? Remember though, the advantage of cold brew for this over other things is that the idea being of cold brew, I guess, is that it is more stable because it doesn't like the cold extracted stuff doesn't um self-autolize as much as the uh as the hot brew stuff.
I mean, I guess theoretically that's why. Yeah, yeah. Well, the good news with the, as long as you don't um overpump it, it's is that is the spinzall is so much better than um regular filtration at it's like a zero fines, zero fines, especially if you're using the coarser ground stuff, zero fines. Uh so I would try it with uh I would try it with wort and see what what's going on and and please, you know, shoot me back at cooking issues and let me know whether or not uh you had success with it or not. Yeah, I mean, the nice thing about the spinz all, I'm gonna do a couple test patches, so I'll uh I'll keep track of my results and I'll let you know.
Alright, cool. Let us know. Yeah, thanks for your help. All right, cool. Um, all right.
So where are we by the way? Do we should do we need to take a break or are we how are we doing? Dave. Yeah, let's take a quick break. Alright, cool.
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Learn more at Bob's red mill dot com slash podcast. And we are back. So uh we have uh Chef Karen from Hot Bread Kitchen on the phone. How are you doing? I'm good Dave how are you?
Doing well hey and since we love hot bread kitchen you want to explain a little bit what it is to people? Sure. Um we are a bakery in East Harlem but we're actually a nonprofit organization and we make and sell bread so that we can provide on the job training to women who face barriers to employment. We train women from all around the world and they spent time um working in our bakery. We pay them a wage and um this the sale of our bread supports all these efforts.
So if you can look for us in green markets and buy our breads and your purchases will support training for a woman to go through our program and get a great job in the industry. Yeah but beyond that also I mean like that's great and I love helping people but the bread's really good. I mean that's the other thing. The bread is really good. The red is really good and you're gonna find bread promotes that you just don't find anywhere else.
Our Moroccan M Temen is this really unusual flatbread which I don't think you can find anywhere else in New York. We make these great Persian breads and nani candy which is also sort of a flatbread with honey and butter and a nani barberry, and we also make tortillas. We do a true Nix the mall tortilla. And I don't think there are too many people in the city doing that. So they make great tortillas with organic non-GMO corn with the real mixed mall process.
Who do you use? Do you like uh do you deal with the La Tienda people for uh for uh who do you deal with? Who do you get where do you get the corn from? You know, we're going through um through the green markets for some of it because some of it is local. Um, but I'm not entirely sure who who we're getting the other two from.
One of the three we're using is local. We have blue, white, and yellow. Um, and we're going through the green markets for the local corn. And I'm not positive who we're going through for the others. And I know you don't do it anymore, but you guys used to make the only uh all Teff injira that you could get in New York.
I know, and we've been talking about trying to bring that back. We've had a couple Ethiopian bakers through our program recently, and they've both been amazing in Jira makers. So we're trying to figure out how we can scale that up and get that back into the markets. Yeah, so it's one of these rare kind of situations where the product quality is really high and you're doing something and interesting, by the way, as Karen says, there are breads that they make that you just simply don't see or can't get, and these folks do a great job and are doing something great at the same time. So definitely something worthy of worthy of your uh support, uh, if simply just by buying their product, you should keep a lookout for hot bread kitchen.
Okay. So thank you so much. Hey, no problem. Uh and so we know each other from the French Culinary Institute. I still refuse to call it the ICC or whatever the hell they call it nowadays, French Culinary Institute.
Uh, where you were the uh bread teacher, and uh we had a question in from Josh Galliana, which is too mean too long to go into not at all. Yeah, you yeah, we emailed it to you, but it's like it would take the entire rest of the thing to read. I didn't I that's why I couldn't call you back too quickly because I was trying to read through all of the very dense information in his email. Right. So the the the short the short of it is is they used to have a a good quality brioche.
Uh they moved to a new location. They're using uh actually like high quality ovens uh now, but they're having a problem with the kind of wrinkling on their brioche and crust uh separation, I guess on on reheat or retoast because they're uh it sounds like they're doing it commercially and then selling to places like hamburger joints. Yeah, it's funny that I just have to tell you that I actually already knew about this guy in this problem because an equipment guy that I know referred him to me for a a consulting job. So I may not have the consulting job, I may be able to give him the answer uh through the radio. But this is how small the bread world is.
Right, but you should pay Karen by the way about Josh and his brioche problem. Josh, Josh, you should pay Karen for this answer anyway. Well, if it if it works, I mean there's a there's a lot of information here, but my initial reaction any time I hear about crust separation, it suggests to me that the bread is overproof. And so I think that his he says that he thinks that the issue is with the proof, or I think he might be right. I don't think it necessarily has to do with the temperature, the humidity, but I think something is changing, and he might think about just underproofing it a little bit, proofing it a little bit less than usual.
As a test to see whether it helps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's also he's changed so many different things, and I and I assume he's sort of making one change at a time, but if he's not, I would definitely recommend that he do that because you know too many changes you can never identify where the solution is if you get to it or or where the real problem is.
Um she's changed his formula, he's changed his ovens, he's changed his group around the whole thing. Right, everything's changed. I mean, uh, you know, like it'sue is, yeah, I mean that that's the thing is being able to trace kind of what happened and and the that's why keeping records is so important and also just focusing on every aspect of what you do is so important. You know the famous uh, I think it was Armor, the famous sausage story where they moved. You know that story?
Have I told this one on air, Dave? Uh not sure. There's a famous story, I believe it's Armour Sausage, where they had a new factory and all of a sudden the sausage didn't taste right anymore, and nobody liked the sausage that they were making. And they tried to look and they looked at every process they were doing, and it turns out they had um in the old factory, they had to wheel the uh batter, the sausage batter, all the way across the factory, like a huge factory floor. It took a long time to get the batter from the uh mixing stage to the stuffing stage.
And during that time it underwent uh heat slash whatever bacteria related change, right? Uh and it was that step that that that step that removing that step, because in the new factory it went directly from the mixer to the um to the extruder, like removing that step changed the changed the complete flavor profile of the sausage. So yeah. In production stuff like that in bread all the time. Yeah, because every step in bread, look, you only got like a couple, brioche has more ingredients, but you only got a couple of ingredients, so every step makes a huge difference.
Definitely. And temperature, I mean, whether you load the pan at the top of the rack or the bottom of the rack can make a big difference in the way the dough behaves. Because it could be two degrees cooler at the bottom of the rack than it is at the top. And I think that people underestimate these, these uh the impact of those small changes. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so definitely look one one step at a time. And you say try the proof or first, just proof it for less, don't change the variables, just proof it for less time. Yeah. I mean, I don't think he says in this email how much yeast he's using, so it's hard for me to sort of estimate how long the proof should be, but he's got a pretty good amount of fermentation on the dough, especially if he has the sponge too. Um and adding that on top of the one and a half hours in the final fermentation.
Maybe he wants once to cut that down by 30 minutes or 15 minutes even and start there. But that's always my first reaction when I hear about crust separation in any bread. Well, it's so it's interesting because I think uh proofing time is kind of the least one of the least well understood uh aspects of what the heck's going on with bread, right? Overproofed, underproofed. Um why is that?
Is it just because you're like, well, it's gonna expand anyway, so what does it really matter if it's overproof or is it I mean, like is it like what is it? Like why is that the Yeah, I mean, because proofing is not just about um the yeast activity, it's also about the gluten development and formation. And if it's sort of reached its limit, you know, you have these kind of two tracks. You have the dough development and then you have the yeast activity, and you want them to happen at the same pace. And if one sort of pulls ahead of the other, you know, the dough is reached its maximum sort of development stage, but it's still proofing, that's when the gluten structure starts to break down and you can see weird stuff happening to the crumb or the crust.
So and again, so many every point of the process can make a difference in that. Maybe they're even over mixing it. That's possible too. Right. All right.
Well, anyway, uh, so hopefully, uh, you know, hopefully uh Josh will try this out. Hopefully, Josh will, you know, somehow, you know, reimburse you for your uh excellent advice. And Karen, by the way, always uh always a badass with the baking, and please uh I don't can people can't can people just people can't stop by your bakery, right? They have to go to the green market. Which days are you guys there?
Oh, we're you know, you can look at our website. We're at many different green markets throughout the city, I think at least 12 different green markets, so you can find one that's close to you and find out what days were there. Um, but our production facility is in East Harlem in a building called La Marqueta, and we operate a little storefront up here, and people can walk to the back and see our bakers in action. All right. All right, well, thanks so much.
Uh support hot bread kitchen and thanks for calling in. Nice talking to you, Dave. All right. Bye bye. Bye-bye.
Tell them about the Amazon email. Oh, yeah. So we had a, I forget who it was, but it was one of one of uh, you know, one of our friends on Twitter was like, all they said was Google Jeff Bezos question mark email. And so we did. It turns out that if you by the way, this is about the fact that that Sears all's uh, you know, for some reason Amazon, even though they have thousands of them, like can't manage to sell them properly, uh and it's like killing us.
We just got another email in today. I don't know if you saw it. Are you responding to these emails? It's Matthew. Yeah, uh, about Sears all's not being in stock on Amazon.
So it turns out that if you email Jeff Bezos uh personally, and somehow it like I guess a certain number of them, he probably has an algorithm to look at it. And I use the word algorithm. Nastasia sent an email to Jeff Bezos saying, your algorithm sucks and is ruining our business. Yes. And and we got a Jeff Bezos question mark email.
So what happens is Jeff Bezos then just forwards your email to one of his uh you know lackeys with just a question mark. Like, what the you know what I mean? And so like, and apparently, if if Jeff Bezos forwards your email to one of his folks with a question mark on it, everyone runs around like a decapitated. So I got an email from one of these people that said, uh, I got this email from Jeff Bezos, and we want to help you. And I was like, yes.
So people, we are on it in the worst possible way. Another email from them saying we're still looking into it. Well, I mean, like, Amazon cares that we're sitting here insulting their algorithms. Like that's like that's hurting their feelings somehow. Yeah.
Uh all right, so are you gonna do this? Oh, yeah. Okay. So back to the Museum of Food and Drink. This is the last money pitch uh of the of the year for us because we're not back until when.
You're shut down until when, Dave. It's the week of January 14th, so that would be what, the 17th? Is that Tuesday, I think? Wow. Wow.
No. No, I'm sorry, 16th. That's after my kid's birthday. Yeah, wow. All right.
So we're we're gone for a long time, people. You'll have to ask your questions on uh No, just wait. Okay, just wait. Just wait, have a little self-control. All right.
So, uh, as you guys know, the Museum of Food and Drink is incredibly important to me. I mean, I came up with the idea. I mean, it's uh I I like to say this when I'm at events, but uh, you know, my desire is that on my deathbed, it I will say, you know how like uh uh what's his name? What's his name? What's his name?
Hemings. What's his name? President of the United States. Farm, Virginia. The hell.
Uh Thomas Jefferson. With Thomas Jefferson was like Hemings is the first. Well, my point is is that like uh Thomas Jefferson was like, my proudest achievement is UVA. Like for me, it's like what I want to say is like the thing that I want to look back and say that I did was the Museum of Food and Dream. He did not, he did not do the nickel himself.
Yeah. Anyway, the Museum of Food and Drink will have been the most important thing I worked on because it's a way for us to take something that we all love. Um, food and drink, obviously. You know, some of you do it professionally, we all we all eat it, and to try to create something that isn't just for uh, you know, the wealthy people that can afford $14 cocktails or can afford to go to the French Culinary Institute or can afford to go to one of the restaurants we work at or to buy fancy food, but really to focus on um the community aspects of food on what it means to break bread with someone, what it means to understand another person, another culture, another time through food. Um and so we rely, and by the way, the museum is in kind of a we're in a we're in a tight financial place right now.
We're still a startup, even though we have the lab, the lab is not really uh, it's more of a test bed. It's not, we're not a full-running, sustainable museum yet. We need your support. So uh we rely like very much so on donor support to run the museum and to stay independent, we don't take money from uh big food and haven't taken money from big food uh because we want to appear to we want to be and also appear to be um straight shooters. Uh so please consider Mofad in your charitable giving this year, especially because this might be the last year you can ever deduct it off your taxes.
Um it's mean a lot to me. It would mean a lot to the people who come to uh use our programs and to the future of the museum. So please go to donat donate.mofad.org. That's donate.mofadfad.org. Every little bit uh helps, and you can become a supporter of the museum.
Um back to uh the show here for for a minute. So I I probably shouldn't tell this because it's one of the things that's going to be in my book on low temperature cooking, coming back to low temperature cooking. But for all of you that have put up with like all of the crazy rants and raves over the years on cooking issues and have just been for some reason you've been tuning in for some actual tip that could help you cook better. I'm about to give you that tip. All right, so here it is.
Uh whenever someone says, How should I cook X, Y, or Z? God says, but I invented the deep fat fryer. I knew you were gonna say that. Right? And then when whenever you're like, but God, my oil, it goes bad for centuries.
God's like, I invented the tube fryer with a cold zone, right? So basic basically anything can be cooked, almost anything can be cooked to perfection using deep frying, right? And not least of these is low temperature cooked uh meats. Um they're very good, very good finished deep fat fried because I mean it's obvious to anyone who has taste buds and a brain that what you want to do is put maximum heat energy input into the entire surface uh and ain't nothing better than deep frying to do that. Uh it's easy, it's quick, uh, it's repeatable.
These are all things uh that everyone uh everyone likes. Everyone likes things that are quick, easy, and repeatable. Uh doesn't create a lot of smoke, does create smelly oil, but it doesn't create a lot of smoke, so it's not gonna set off smoke detectors. The problem is is that um foods with batters like French fries, uh well, they're not batters, what's wrong with me? Uh but like things that uh are meant to be fried that are oil absorbent, like French fries, like potato chips, like fried chicken, like donuts, we all expect to have a certain amount of a fry taste.
Instead of like wake, it's like fry hay, you know what I mean? Because it's like it's like that like essence of the fact that it's been deep fried, right? And uh the problem is is that even though uh a steak won't absorb fat, there still remains some fat on the outside. And to be honest, there is unless your oil is brand spanking new, and if it if it is, brand spanking new oil, by the way, as everybody knows, as everybody knows who knows anything, brand new oil is no good because you need to you need to break the oil down a slight bit for it to have really good heat transfer characteristics. Because if it's completely non-polar, it can't in the molecular sense touch your food.
So it needs to have a little bit of breakdown. Anyways, uh back to the story. So there's always a little bit of uh fry oil clinging to the outside of your meat, and it has an off-putting aroma that people don't enjoy, and some people are more sensitive to it to others. So even if you can't sense it, and this is by the way, going back to teaching for a minute, uh one of the things you learn when you teach, or if you run a restaurant and you actually listen to your customers, is that just because you like something, or because you can't sense an off uh flavor in something, doesn't mean that other people can't sense it. Because all of our equipment, our noses, our palates, our tongues, our brains are all a little bit different.
And so uh, I'll just tell you that even if you can't sense this on the outside of uh a piece of meat, there's a lot of people that can. And uh, so here is the solution for you. Go make like go. This is like I did a test, I've done a couple of tests now on it, and this thing works like a charm. Make some broth, right?
So if you're doing steak, you can use uh beef broth, but I've actually just used chicken broth. I've used uh I've used a bunch of different broths, and it really doesn't seem to matter much what broth you use, but get like a container and keep it hot, right? Then after you deep fry it, now if you're gonna do it only once, you don't need to even get complicated with it. You can just use like a quart container or a lay ladle or something. But if you're gonna use it again and again, get a sauce gun, which is you know one of those depositing funnel things that are amazing.
I love my sauce gun. Or if you're just doing it at home, get a uh uh gravy separator with it. Basically, a gravy separator is a small pitcher that pours from the bottom. And the the reason why is that grease floats. So you take a strongly flavored broth, hot, and then as soon as you pull it out of the deep fryer, you you hold it up and you pour hot broth over the steak, flip it, pour hot broth over the other side of the steak or the chicken, or whatever it is your or fry.
Well, you wouldn't really do this for chicken, but anyway, right? It's not an it's not there long enough, it's right when you pull it out. It's not going to hurt the crust at all. It will not hurt the crust. And what happens is is that when you recollect the broth, the fat floats to the top.
And so because you're pouring from the bottom, you can use the broth again and again and again to wash the the uh fat uh the deep fry flavor off the surface of your meat. And it's a win-win-win-win-win. So you can sit there and bust stuff out of your deep fryer like all day and all night, and you're not going to have anyone, no one, absolutely no one could detect that I had fried uh these pieces of meat, and I did it with substandard oil. I I I used oil that was over the edge to see whether or not I could get rid of the uh aroma off of the meat when I did it, and lo and behold, you can. So, one of the things, if you really want to use deep frying as a finishing technique because of its inherent positive uh characteristics, but you're worried about that aroma, just get you some broth.
And this goes back to remember, were you there when we did the hot dog juice? No, I was not. Yeah, when we ran out and got it. Yeah. Yeah.
So, like one of the things I learned a long time ago was that people worry a lot about like, isn't the flavor gonna get diluted by the liquid? No, because you're gonna use an extremely flavorful liquid. So, you know, it's not you're not leaching anything out. Like, if anything, it's like a one-to-one trade. And I learned this most importantly when I went out and bought a cup of New York filthy hot dog water and drank it, and that stuff tasted more like hot dogs than the hot dogs did themselves.
So, anyways, uh what? One minutes. Got two minutes. All right, so actually, I can get to this last question from Nicholas then. I'm planning on doing a pre-batch cocktail for an event, and I'm having problems figuring out how to chill the drink to an appropriate temperature.
Uh, it's kind of a rum source, what? Wine. Wine scent. Nastasi says wine scent is the correct answer. Uh, which you know, you actually could.
So, what you do is you'd get Ziploc bags, fill it with salt and ice, and drop the ziplocks full of sort. You gotta make sure they're not gonna leak and wash them out, and then those will keep the product at the low temperature, right? If you circulate it through that. Just put it on a circulator. Then the only problem is make sure it's not gonna oxidize.
Whatever. I should make one of those things. No. If you do, you own Nastasia a uh a cut. Uh it's kind of a rum sour with hibiscus, so I'm guessing it should be served around minus five C.
Since I don't have access, the problem with hibiscus is that when hibiscus gets really cold, it can get a little bit tannic. So you might want to do a milk wash to the hibiscus uh if it's getting too astringent on the back of your mouth as the temperature get low. Anyway, that's just that's neither here nor there. Since I don't have access to a professional freezer with accuracy temperature control, I was taking up two options putting the cocktail in large bottles into a cooler, filling it all the way up with ice and water, and then adding salt to cool down the ice water to the target temperature. This works great.
I've done this many times. This is how we actually serve things uh when we're going away. The problem is make sure you wipe off the bottles when you uh get them out so that you don't pour salt water into people's drinks. Also, be aware that if you overdo the salt, you will freeze the cocktail, which isn't necessarily a problem. But what you might want to do is every five or ten minutes, check the bottles.
If they start crystallizing, it's okay, but if you get heavy crystallization, you need to pull them out for a while and let them temper and then kind of swap them in and out. But we've done that for years, it works fine. Two, chilling the rum all the way down in the freezer to around minus twenty, chilling the other ingredients uh in the refrigerator, and then mixing the two just prior to serving. This also works great. Uh hoping this will end up with an acceptable final temperature.
It does. It's a little warmer, that's gonna be closer to a Manhattan, probably around minus two or in that range, but yes, that works. Uh but here's the problem. Uh, and if do you have any comments on these ideas or possibly a better solution? Uh, thanks, greetings from Germany, Nicholas.
Here's the one problem. Most sour-based drinks are shaken cocktails. And so, what you're not getting from any of this is the texture on shaking. And when you're serving a stirred drink at a warmer temperature, it has a different balance. So, you just gotta make sure that if you're gonna serve, it's it's very, very, very rare to serve a uh to serve a shape a sour drink as a directly from the freezer drink, unless, and here's the key, unless you're actually serving it as a frozen drink.
And if you're gonna serve it as a frozen drink, then it's a lot easier because you just uh you have to mix it a little less alcoholic, and I have the proportions in the in Liquid Intelligence. You can just go or look it up on the look inside or look at any one of the other people that now have done this, and just load the stuff into Ziploc bags and pre-freeze them and serve them as a frozen drink. Because the problem is is that sour drinks with their normal source now. You could just make a sour and mix it to proportions that are better for stirred cocktails, and what that means is uh you know, you're gonna pull back, you're gonna scale back on the uh sugar and the acid uh and usually make it more booze heavy uh because it's will typically be at a slightly warmer temperature. Anyway, if there's a again in liquid intelligence, I have like all the ratios you can look at it for a stirred cocktail.
Uh I mean unless you clarify, it's not gonna be clarified, and so you'll be an enemy of quality for serving a stirred cocktail that's not clarified, but whatever. You know, we we're all enemies of quality from time to time. Uh but uh consider making a frozen drink in Ziploc bags. Otherwise, just from a strictly temperature standpoint, both of your other two techniques will work. If you're going to take it away to an away game, then salt and ice is the only way to go.
Uh anyway, so we we we're all done, right? Right, Dave? You need a Christmas gift, buy a spinzall or a shirt. Oh, yeah. Or both.
Or buy them all. Buy them all, buy Zem. Not as years old. As they say in uh oh, are we gonna get those back in the I mean, like I've ruined apparently everyone's Christmas. It's not me.
Jeff Bezos has ruined everybody's Christmas. I know. But Nastasio is channeling my favorite villain from uh Raiders of the Lost Dark. Bazam! Bazem Bose.
Remember that? No. Remember, so like uh supposed to be. It's the guy Tote when like they're in trying to get the uh when he burns his hand, Indiana Jones is holding that guy, and the bad the evil Nazi guy goes, shoots them, shoot some boss like that. And then they yeah, love that.
So that's that's a great movie. Did he act in anything else? I've never seen that guy. He did. He died relatively young.
He had a severe alcohol drinking problem and died of liver cirrhosis. Yeah. Yeah, and his wife also had a severe alcohol, but he's a great character actor. Anyways, uh, happy holidays! Cooking issues.
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