Enjoy food the way nature intended. Alaska Seafood. Wild, natural, and sustainable. For more information, visit wildalaskaseafood.com. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Users coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from I don't know, like you know, like 12, 1215 to like, you know, 1245, like one, you know, from Burst Pizzeria in Bushwick. Brrrrrrrn. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. Hi. And we got Dave in the booth.
How are you doing? Good. Things are getting off to a tense start. And oh, it's because Nastasia's all mad at me for some. We'll talk about that in a minute.
We also have my bar partner and evil cocktail overlord, Don Lee. Secret. Secret Overlord? Secret Overlord. But official partner now.
Official partner. We can talk about that now. Seek secret overlord. Yeah. So call in your questions to 7184972128.
That's 7184972128. Nastasia said to me this morning, by first of all, she's mad at me because we have colliding email. We have colliding, I have colliding meetings. Don and I need to go get some actual Don't worry, I canceled the 181. We're all good.
I need Don and I need to get some actual, like, you know, building crap work done in advance of us opening the new bar existing conditions. Uh, because, you know, we're members, actually, Booker and Dax is member of New Lab, which Nastasia, by the way. New lab. A collaborative. I hate collaborations more than almost anything is collaborating with with random people, but this is kind of a collaborative workspace, right, Don?
Well, story checks out. Yeah. And so, like, in like you know, Don and I are members of it for the for the shops. Like, you know, they have a shop bot I can use. They they have a larger laser cutter than Don owns.
They have 3D printers that I don't own. So, like between all this, you know, they have a spray painting booth, they have a vinyl cutter, all this kind of stuff that you would a full wood shop, you know, stuff that we would want to be able to access here in New York, but can't because New York's not a reasonable place to do anything. You know what I mean? New York City is the worst place to actually make or do anything. It is a freaking horror nightmare.
And I've known this since I stupidly moved to New York City to become a sculpture guy. There's no worse job on Earth than being an unsuccessful large metal sculptor in New York City. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, that's what I came to grad school to do here. But it's hard to move stuff around.
Long story short, we're part of this uh collaborative space. But other people I've asked about it have said, I didn't really join for the shops, I joined for the community. There's a lot of lonely people out there, you know. But who the hell wants community? People who don't have families.
Really? Friends, families. Do you think it's community? What other I don't like, I don't like like I think I think look, I like the people at New Lab. They're very nice.
I like all the people at New Lab. This is not an indicative of New Lab per se, but I think all of these things are like they're foam unities, they're not real communities. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, I have enough trouble keeping in touch with my actual friends, family, and co-workers. Like I'm gonna have a that's a you problem.
Yeah. People actually like to spend a YP. That's a that's a that's a that's an MP? No, it's a YP. Well, well, if I'm saying it.
If you're saying it, it's an MP. Yeah. Alright. So you're saying people that's why people enjoy the social media. Well, it's uh as people have gone more and more into like a distributed workplace where they're not near really working from an office with co-workers, they get lonely.
They want to work with other people, they want to be around other folks, other like-minded people. So it's the rise of co-working spaces like we work, and uh new lab is just another version of that where it's a little bit more focused and it has all these shops as you know, the the reason why we're there. Nastasia, can you imagine actually having to sit next next to like-minded people every day, to you and to me? Like would that be the worst thing ever? It'd be horrible being.
Yeah, we're already pushing the limits here. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. I mean, even Nastasi and I are like uh oil and water isn't right. It's more like water and sodium.
That's not true. Because we are very similar. Uh no. Yes. Yes.
I was thinking more like water and naphtha burning on top of the water. Yeah, which one of us is the naphtha? Water and lie. We all know who the napta is. Oh.
Anyway, we'll let you we'll let the listeners choose for themselves who gets to be the naphtha in this in this scenario. But that look, the the truth of the matter is is that Nastasia enjoys nothing more than getting me virulently angry. There is like it it basically seems to me that she has chopped a good five or six years off of my life just for her own humor. Like, just like in order for her to like crack a smile, she will she will do anything to make my blood boil. Say that something is broken.
That was a long time ago. Yeah, like the last time you saw me. Yeah, you you still do that all the time. You'll say bad things have happened. I see you do it to other people too.
And the great thing about Nastasia is she gets you to co-sign on doing this to other people. So she also makes you into a worse person. That's the best thing I think about Nastasia. She has the ability, like to when you know, when they go low, she'll make you go lower. She brings up the worst in all of us.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She has like this like ability to like sink you down to your base level. Like if you want to know like what like your low level of operation is, she'll take you right there. Like right there. She'll take you there.
Oh my god. She'll take you there. Anyway, we're gonna have to pay some ass cap fees. Speaking of which, Don and I are uh, you know, dealing with and we Don has decided. I f first of all, I never realized what a pain in the butt it is to go full legit on the music you play.
Are you guys legit, Nastasia? At the Flyer of Pasta? No. No? Shouldn't admit that on the year.
No, listen, but just so you know, this is what's irritating me, right? So, as I'm sure any of you that have actually researched this know, you cannot, and Dave, you know, you know, as a musical dude, you know, as a as a sound engineer, as whatever, you know, whatever, whichever one of your hats you wish to wear here, that we cannot simply just play music, even if you quote unquote own said music. You can't do it, right? Well, if you owned it, it would be no problem. Well, I mean, own your copy of it, is what I'm saying.
You own the copy that you can play for personal consumption. Personal consumption. But yeah, I thought you meant a copyright to it. No, no. Yeah, difference there.
No, but here's the here's the nightmare, right? So the problem is that you own these CDs, you bought them, or CDs, what the hell am I? You own the MP3 or whatever. CDs, you you own the vinyl, you have the the you know, you well, you have the wax cylinders. You own the wax cylinders.
No, like whatever technology you're you're using to like get your music. Like, like you own those, does not give you the right to play them in public. Except you can play radio, uh, you can play anything that you own a copy of for your workers as long as c as long as like guests and customers can't hear it, right? That's one you're allowed to do that, that's not public. Two, you're allowed to play radio and or television if your bar is under, I think 3,500 square feet, and if you have fewer than I forget what the number is, like five or six TVs, you're allowed to play broadcast TV and broadcast radio.
Um however, that that's it. That's those are the only things. If you own a jukebox, you can buy a single jukebox license from a company that does that for jukeboxes. If you want to play music, you are hosed. You need to, if you want to do it legitimately, you have to buy not one, not two, three separate licenses to cover almost almost everything.
You have to buy your ASCAP, you have to buy your BMI, and what's the other one, Dave? C C Cap, whatever it's what's it called? I don't think it's C Cap. Something like that, though. It's a the third one.
Well, that's those are the two biggest, though, BMI and ASCAP. But you have to get the third one because like like in any given song, like there could be like part of the rights could be owned by BMI because that you know this songwriter is with BMI, this one's with Ask Cap, this one's with the third one and starts with NS. So you have to in in the real life, you have to buy all three. But you can't buy all three from one person. Like you can't like walk up to one guy and be like, hey Vinny, I want to get three licenses, you know, for the whole thing.
He's like, hey, okay. And then he bundles it. Take a walk around the corner and my guy will see about you. Come back, I'll give it, we'll laminate it. Anyway, but you can't do that, right?
And and literally, like, if you're if you're a big enough player, or if for some reason you get under somebody's skin, someone like BMI will go, and let's say you have an ASCAP license, someone from BMI will show up at your bar, they will, you know, soak up your booze and customer service on BMI's uh nickel, and then they'll listen to all the songs, and they'll wait for you to play a song that is not uh you know from BMI. It's you know they that's not from ASCAP, it's BMI. And it's get this $750 plus lawyers fees per song that you play. That's great maximum, right? You like that, Nastasia?
So anyway, so the fact of the matter is you have to play all three. So I went on the website this morning, I went on ASCAP, and I'm like, how much is it gonna cost me, Ask Cap? I just went to Ask Cap, I didn't bother with the other two yet. And they were like, well, you know, tell me a little bit about your something first before we, you know, how big are you? What's your name?
Where are you? What's your address? You know what I mean? Like they really want to know a bunch of information before they even give you the price. Because if you're in New York City, it's gonna be like Well, I mean, look, a lot of it has to do with your square footage.
They want to know how big you're they really don't care the square footage, they want to know how many seats you have, how many nights a week you're gonna play music, they want to know what kind of establishment you are, and they also want to the big things are you gonna have live music? Because here's the kicker if you hire a musician to come in and play at your bar, unless they own all of the rights to everything they are playing, you have to pay a much higher licensing fee for that music. So for a lot in order for them to play covers, for example, c covers or their own songs that they don't own all of the publishers. Right? So it's and that's a much higher fee.
So if you're a no-live music venue, and you know, it you're looking at somewhere on the order of between $500 and fifteen hundred dollars per license per year in that range for non-live music, depending on the size of your establishment and how many hours a week you're open and how many people are gonna Google it, right? So that's let's say it's 15, 15, 15. That's three, that's $4,500 a year. There is still a possibility that you could get sued by somebody else, but pretty much you're totally covered covered at that point. Now, the other way you can get around this, this is for people who are actually gonna try to go legit with their music.
For some reason, I went down this rabbit hole. I was just gonna wild west it like they do at some other places. I will not mention who they are, but some other places where I used to have worked and or maybe been, you know, involved with that play music in the wild west style. The wild west style. First of all, you should never stream music at your location illegally.
Satellite radio considered radio. Well, no, but you're not allowed to play. You're if you're under a certain, you're under a certain size, so you can play radio at Pasta Flyer. No, no, no. You're not allowed to.
Specifically, you're not allowed to play satellite radio. You can buy commercial satellite radio where you are allowed to, and it's not that much more, but it's just you can only play from those channels. Now here's the deal. So Spotify now, there's a bunch of these businesses. Spotify is one of them, where they're like, hey, Spotify for business, right?
And so you can have, in quotes, access to the entire Spotify song list, right? At your business, but the dildilio on it is, and you can even get this, Dave, you can upload your own playlist to it, right? As long as it's more than three hours. As long as it's more than three hours, because why, Don? Because they are they're doing a music license under radio, like Pandora.
So they shuffled the songs, and you don't get to pick the actual play order, nor can you inject a song midstream. You have to just get the shuffle version. And that's the stuff. Well, that sounds stupid. Right, Dave, right?
That sucks. And it's such a stupid workaround because they're letting you pick three hours of very specific songs, right? You know, you can I could play, you know, like but if I've but if I want, if I want to go like two short Mac Dre, like Looney's, and then I want to go down, you know, further south in California, and then I want to scoot down to like, you know, Texas, you know, do some, do some uh, you know, I don't know. I don't know what choose your Texas, choose a Texas rapper. I don't know.
Pick one. Uh Paul Wall. I don't know why I chose that one. And then like go over to like Atlanta and then like go up. You know what I mean?
You can't, because you can't choose to freaking order. It's just gonna rando shuffle it. But it lets you choose those songs, but it doesn't let you choose the order. This is so stupid, right, Dave? Yep.
Yeah. And we are we tested this because Don and I, now it's real cheap. You don't have to you don't have to convince me, Dave. It's real cheap. It's like $25 a month or $26.
Between between $17 and $30 a month, depending on how you sign up and when you sign up. But like So is this what you're running into with Booker and DAX right now? Is this what you're trying to say? Well it's not the new Booker Index, it's existing conditions. Excuse me, excuse me, sorry, sorry.
Come on, man, get with the freedom. Existing conditions. Come on. Yeah, this is what we're running into. And as for me, as for Don, Don doesn't care that much about shuffle or not shuffle.
That's not the as they say enfrancay, the hill that he wants to die on. You know what I mean? But like many hills I want to die on, not this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like there's some nice ones around here.
Oh my god. Uh, we'll get into that later. This neighborhood, Dave, is a trash pit. I hate this place. Stay on target.
You try to park in this place? You ever try to park here? No, I don't drive. Uh-huh. They took your license and now you don't drive.
No, I left Philly, so I wouldn't have to drive anymore. This is great. You left Philly. You don't have to drive in Philly, do you? You of absolutely have to drive in Philly.
There's like two subway lines, and they are Yeah. It's useless. Parking there is also crazy. Yeah. Uh you know, not to go too far on a tangent, but if you're driving, I'm like, this is gonna sound ridiculous, but like I try to reduce my internal stress level.
I try. I try, right? So I don't want to get road raged out. Like I don't appreciate getting road raged out, right? It's like have you ever drive with taxi drivers, Nastasia?
And like you could tell there's two kinds. Those who will have an aneurysm and fall over dead, and then I would rather they be my taxi driver. Well, no, but then there's the people who are just like, nah, I don't like that kind. I don't like that kind of I think that's the only that's the only sustainable. See, you don't care whether it's their life is sustainable or not.
That's the reason why. You know the type that stop at yellow lights? I'm like, keep going. What about the kind that they always hits the accelerator and the brakes, so you're like that's terrible inside the taxi? That's what it sounds like, too.
Yeah, yeah. Like those guys are the worst. They're not getting sick because they know when their foot's about to hit the brake. You know what I hate is when I'm walking and there's a car about to cross through an intersection and it stops and it's trying to wave me through, and I'm like trying to wave them through. Like, no, you're in the car, just all you have to do is step on the gas and you're through in one second.
Like, I'm gonna have to walk across this intersection. It's just much more efficient for you to go go, right? Right, right. Well, but in in a really in a well, yes, I think that's that that's accurate. But Nastasia, I'm for my taxi driver having a sustainable or Uber driver having a sustainable life.
So I prefer if they could zen out a little bit. I'd just like to take this moment to uh encourage anyone that's currently listening live to call in with your gripes on it really grinds my gear. As a matter of fact, we do have a caller on the line. Here's the thing. If you if you are going to pull out in front of someone who is going the exact like vision zero speed limit that we have in New York, the exact speed limit, and you pull out directly in front of them such that they have to slam on the brakes, you are obliged to go the speed limit.
You do not pull in front of somebody and then crawl looking for a freaking parking space. True or false. True. Okay, caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, uh, this is Mark Collin.
How are you doing, everybody? All right, how you doing? Doing well then. I'm just uh stuck in a crossroads here. I do a lot of wood-fired oven cooking.
You're not literally at a crossroads right now. I'm standing in the middle of the road right now. I mean beach. Let me tell you something. No, I'm just I'm stuck with a recipe I've been trying to work on.
And uh spin a lot of pies and uh sear a lot of meats in there, and it comes out really great. But when I get to frying chicken, I've been stuck because I tried to do it like an open, sort of like an air fried chicken, but uh obviously it's it's burning up so fast. So I tried to do it in a Dutch oven. Right. And uh what I'm getting is uh like a pre pre cooked sous vide chicken, all dark meat.
And uh when you bite into it, it's just perfectly cooked, tastes great, but all the breading comes off in one bite. Gotcha. Trying to find a way. Okay, okay. This is for freaking, this is like perfect because this is the argument that Kenji Lopez Alt has all the time, and he's just doing it wrong.
First of all, air frying Not frying. Yeah, right. Here's the thing about frying. Here's the thing about there's this group of people, they're evil, and I don't want you to speak to them anymore, who are worried with their frying foods, that they're worried about the oil content. Just freaking deal with the oil content and make the sucker taste good.
And if you're really worried about it, then eat your freaking poached, skinless chicken breast garbage, right? Frying is God's cooking technique. Yeah, it's delicious. This is the way God was like, I have given you a medium that will not dilute the flavor of your product. I've given you a medium that instead of making something soggy will make it crunchy.
I have made this medium a liquid so that it can surround every nook and cranny of your food. And I've made this medium so that it can get to a high enough temperature to make everything crunchy. I have given you this. Why, if God gives you this, would you mess with it? Do you see what I'm saying?
And like air frying is some miserable, miserable freaking attempt to take a breading, spray some puny amount of Pam or other oil garbage on the outside, and then use an impingement oven to make it crunchy. This is the only reason I approached it that way in the first place, because I I didn't know about the safety aspect of putting four inches of oil in a Dutch oven with a lid next to an open flame. Right. Well, that's a good question. And we'll and we talk about that one in a second, because I don't know what the lid will do.
What the lit I mean, look, there's a group of people who believe that putting the lid on is going to drastically increase uh the temperature and or the pressure. Not true. Uh what is true though, I mean you could slightly, I've never done the study, so it's interesting. I don't know as the way frying works is when the when the product is immersed in the oil, and this is the problem with air frying too, is that when you're quote unquote, I won't even want to use it, when you're air destroying your food, what happens is is that locally the oil plus bread coating can get up to a very high temperature, and in other places it it can't it doesn't. And that's why you get scorched areas and blonde areas when you're using that kind of a technique, unless you have a very, very fast impingement oven, which you don't because you're using like you know, another one of another one of the great cooking techniques, wood, right?
So you're not gonna be able to do that, and so you're gonna get scorched parts and you're gonna get blonde parts. Now, um, oil obviously doesn't have that because as the water is boiling out of your product, right? It's one getting crispy, it's two, like modulating the temperature of the inside of the food to make it lower, and three, um, it's convecting a bunch of stuff around such that your oil is pretty much within the area of the of the actual product, going to be a relatively uniform temperature. In a large fryer, you know, you have a uh a big pit in the bottom of it called a cold zone, and that cold zone is where all of your breading drops down to so that it doesn't scorch, right? So you're not actually, you don't want an even temperature over the whole kettle, but from the place of heat, which is where the tubes in a tube fryer are up, it's a fairly consistent temperature because of all the convection going on, right?
So uh, so that's about the the frying. Now the safety with the lid, the the question is I again I don't know what effect, because you are gonna increase the relative humidity in there, right, by having the lid on, but I can see why you would want to have the lid on from a safety perspective because of the sloshing and whatnot, right? Uh and I mean, I doubt you're gonna get enough radiant heat to actually flash fire the oil that quickly, assuming the chicken is frying. As soon as the chicken goes, uh, like if you were, let's say you were making tortilla chips instead of chickens, right? So the way you make a tortilla chip, if you want to do a good job, is is that you put it into relatively high enough temperature oil to boil the water, but low enough temperature such that the outside's not gonna go uh overcooked before you get rid of all the water.
Because when you're cooking tortilla chips, the name of the game is complete moisture removal, right? And so, like if you overfire a tortilla chip, you'll find that the outside browns and the inside still isn't cooked yet, and this is a sad tortilla chip. So you tend not to go super high on your temperature when you're doing tortillas, and tortillas and potato chips are a few of the things that you can actually do a perfect fry from a cold start, right? Okay, and one where you can overload your oil. If you're not worried about like water damage in your oil, which you really shouldn't be over short terms, like you can overload your oil on things like potato chips and and tortilla chips because you actually want the temperature to drop down a bit, right?
But once you get to the end of a tortilla chip and you see the bubbling starts to slow down, indicating you've gotten rid of most of the water, right? I don't know then whether or not, because you're not gonna have as much convective force and as much liquid coming off of it, whether at that point the radiant heat from your oven becomes a risk with the top of the oil, I don't know. I've never tested it, okay? But um, to your problem on adhesion, when you said you are getting low temperature cooked chicken, does that mean that you are cooking it low temperature? And this is back to my gripe with Kenji Lopez Alt, or are you low-temping the chicken yourself?
I I take, you know, usually about eight pieces of leg inside a time, 65 C for about two hours. And uh it's marinated overnight in buttermilk, and then I poach it and then I dry it, and then I've tried three different uh bread batches with the spices. I've used double zero flour, I've used all purpose, I've used uh buckwheat groats, I've tried to use brown rice, and it just it all they all come out slightly different and very nice looking and great tasting. It's just as soon as you bite into it, it all slips and falls right off. Maddening.
For some reason, when you said buttermilk, I had the the wham song go through my head. Buttermilk. Instead of Jitterbug, buttermilk. But the uh, so wham. You know, George Michael, rest in peace, right?
Anyway. Uh absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Freedom. Freedom.
Anyway, uh, that's a different one that's Aretha Franklin. Anyway, but the uh dude. No, I was going into the different. I was going into uh into the song she sings in the blues brothers. Like when you said Freedom, I was l I heard George Michael, and then my mind jumped to Aretha Franklin singing in the Blues Brothers, which is maybe the greatest rock and roll movie of all time.
You don't like the Blues Brothers? I don't think it's the greatest rock and roll movie. What's the greatest rock and roll movie of all time? Uh I'll give you a minute while I talk about this chicken. So here's the thing.
Spinal tap. Spinal tap is Spinal Tap. No, I mean, when I say rock and roll movie, I mean like the rock and roll. The rock and roll in it, like the blues, the rock and roll, the RB in it. I mean like, I mean, like do you like Stonehenge is an interesting song, right?
As good as Ray Charles singing Shake Your Tail Feather? No. No. No, no, no. Just it's not.
You know, as good as John Lee Hooker doing ah ha ha ha. No, not. Not. Uh, just not. As good as James Brown in the church, no.
As good as Aretha Franklin, like, you know, stepping from behind cooking the four fried chickens and the toasted white bread? No. Just not. Uh, you know, uh as Spinal Tap. Now we can make an argument over whether Spinal Tap is funnier than the Blues Brothers.
This is not an argument that I'm willing to have. Because I feel like, you know, you wouldn't ask me to choose between Booker and Dax. Wouldn't I? Yeah. Anyway, so back to the chicken.
Nastasha totally would. Nastasia would, because she's a Sophie's choice kind of a lady. So the uh she's uh yeah, Nastashi. Is Booker still gamefully employed? Booker, yeah.
Nastasia is Booker's employer, and here's the problem. If you're going to employ somebody's son, you have to set some ground rules. Because if you've been friends with them for a long time. Right, you don't want them to do that. Booker's like, can I change my shift?
Can I do that? I'm like, she's your freaking boss, Booker. You're not allowed to do that. Anyway, back to the chicken. Adhesion.
What? Adhesion. Adhesion. Chicken adhesion. So first thing I will say on this is buttermilk.
Please do an assessment. When you're going to do a long-term, are you low temping in the buttermilk or not? Yes. Okay. Here's what I will say.
If you're gonna do a very hard fry on it, it might not be. I'm just gonna go point by point and at the end I will address your problem. Uh the the issue with acidic, I actually, when I do my chickens, especially when I'm gonna low temp them, I do not use acidic uh brines. I'll use salt, obviously, casalt adds some protection against overcooking. Um, and I will use sugar to balance the salt so it's not as sharp.
I use milk, right? And I don't know why. I've never done this side by side. It's just ever since I was, you know, ever since I can remember, I've used milk in my soak. But the reason I don't use buttermilk, I'll use acid if I'm gonna do tandoor, right?
If I'm gonna pound thin and hit hard, or if I'm only gonna uh if I'm only gonna soak it for a couple of hours and then cook it right away, I'll use uh acidics. When I say acidic, like I'll use yogurt, I'll use lemon juice. Uh in a tandoor situation, and I'm pretty much a yogurt lemon juice kind of a person. Um in or I can do a buttermilk. But I want you to just assess for yourself whether or not the texture of the meat gets too mushy, right?
Because what the acid is going to do is break down the fibers of the chicken. It'll make it soft for sure, right? So if you were having problems with it being like kind of hard and dry, for sure buttermilk is going to make it softer. But just do a side by side and test to see whether or not you actually, if you're gonna low temp it, right? If you're gonna cook it traditionally, this is why buttermilk marinades are so good in traditional fried chicken.
So, like if you go to somebody's house and their breasts are perpetually dry, they're probably not brining it, and they could probably use some buttermilk because they're overcooking the beejesus out of their uh chicken breast anyway, right? But if you're gonna do low temperature in a fast fry, consider doing like either I mean I've never done a water soak, so I can't say that, but consider doing a milk soak instead of a buttermilk, and choose whichever one you like better. I'm not here to tell you what's better or worse. I'm here to tell you the thing. But the answer to what I've actually you you mentioned on an earlier show that you when you do low temp fried chicken, you do milk and sugar.
So I've tried both the buttermilk and the milk, but the results were the same with the breading falling off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just talking about flavor of the inside. Here's what here is here is my thing about the breading. Here's where I get to the the actual reason you called in, however, long later the thing is.
You must you must remove the chicken from the bags or from whatever you're putting it in while they are hot. You must put them on racks, put them into a speed rack and let them dry for let them flash off all of their moisture and let the outside get tacky before you bread them. After you bread them, they can then sit for as long as you want and can be re-refrigerated or whatever. When are you are you doing that step? The first step that you mentioned, I actually did 24 hours uncovered on a drying rack because I I got so tired of it.
I'm like, it may it's gotta be moisture, it has to be the problem. You pulled them hot? I let them air dry in a refrigerator uncovered for a day, but I did not bread and let this the breading sit overnight and become tacky. And that's what a spice rep mentioned to try. But I didn't know what your thoughts were on kind of letting it sit in the breading, you know, becomes moist and then actually like pasty.
Yeah, oh hell yeah. Yeah. But uh and and are you you're letting the and the first part you're letting them flash off when they're hot, right? Don't let the bags cool. No, no.
As soon as they're done cooking, drain, pat dry with paper towels, air dry overnight. But then uh I I haven't yet let that I should after that first day then bread and let it become really tacky. I think that I would like to try that, but I wanted your thoughts. Yeah, yeah, try that. And then also the regimen that I use is I'm um so I find it very difficult to properly spice uh straight flour, right?
It's very hard. So typically what I'll do is I'll spice, I do a I do pretty much a straight flour for the dust. You know, if you are worried about it, you can add some of the higher tech starches to it. I never bother, uh, but you can crisp coat or whatever peep, whatever the kids are using these days. And then I always spice the buttermilk egg mixture so that the and and I don't know whether or not my lack of adhesion problems have to do with my breading mixture or not.
So I'll just tell you what it is. I go into straight flour, and then my buttermilk mixture is a uh it's about um a I think it's one egg per, is it one egg per cu it's one egg per cup of buttermilk, right? And then I add uh both soda, the reason I add soda is it neutralizes the acidity in the buttermilk. Uh if you don't fully so people, there are people on the internets who say things like, it only takes a half teaspoon of baking soda to completely neutralize two cups of but don't listen to these people. Because the fact of the matter is is not only do you need to neutralize the acidity, you actually need to push your mixture into the basic realm so that the sucker browns right.
If you if you have a buttermilk mixture and you do not use soda, right? If you use only powder and you only use you only use powder and not soda, it will never brown properly because it's too acidic. All right. So which is is it baking powder or baking soda? Because I I wrote down baking powder from a previous uh episode that you had.
Los dos. You need the you must use both. That's the key. So you use soda and you use powder, right? And I gotta be honest, I'd love to give you a measurement, but I do it by eye.
The uh but uh food and wine, uh food and wine like 15 years ago or 16 years ago, printed my recipe. So it's in there, and I bother, you know, you know, look up Dave Arnold fried chicken food and wine, whatever. And uh, but uh then I that's where I add salt and pepper and uh spice. If you want to go spicy, I add it all to the buttermilk. So it's in the flour dredge, the straight flour dredge, then into the buttermilk, then back into the flour.
That's the regimen that the regimen that I use. So it's a double bread and you and and you have no adhesion problem. I don't no no. Well, depends on what you consider double. I go flour, liquid, flour.
Okay. And then you can let it sit. Usually I let it sit for, you know, whatever. I do it like, you know, way early in the day, and then I pull it out and fry it. And the advantage there is obviously the inside of the chicken's cooked, so all you have to worry about is the outside.
I mean, that's the advantage of it. Anyone can, you know, if if you're willing to sit there and, you know, like uh Sean Brock, you know, uh and uh when Josh Azirski visited Sean Brock back when he was still alive, you know, uh Sean Brock did that thing where he would cover the pot and lift the pot, cover the pot and lift the pot to get the moisture just right on the crust. This is why I'm saying I don't really know a hundred percent what the what like exactly how the effect of covering it is, but it does change the moisture level in there and probably therefore slightly the temperature. I've never done it, like whether the evaporative cooling off the surface changes, like do you actually get that 10-15 degrees difference by covering uncovering? Who knows?
Not me. So the um, so you know, if you want to sit there and adjust it, I used to back before I did low temp, the way I would have to do it is I would fire up my fryer and I would do all the chicken first. I would start the breasts first at the lowest temperature, cook them all through because I was buying whole chickens, and so I had to cook the breasts whether I wanted to or not. And then I would uh go to the thighs and the leg balls, because I only cook leg balls. I don't cook legs with bones in them because my family doesn't enjoy that.
And then um after that, then I would go to fries and rinks, you know, jacket. But you know, now I can just go in any order I want, you know, any all around the town. But listen, if you're actually having problems like with the suggestions, getting your adhesion, call back and then I'll have a mental argument with my or a verbal argument with myself, and we'll try to figure it out because this is the gripe that people like Kenji Lopez Alt have about it. It's just I've never had a problem. I cook a lot of I cook a lot of fried chicken.
I would think that if like you know they started coming off like the hoods of trunks, you know, like like like if it was like you know, cars shedding their skin, like I would be like, dang, I gotta change that. It just hasn't been a problem. I'm a fairly observant guy. You know what I'm saying? What would you say about uh that's why I asked you?
What would you say about using a Dutch oven with like a like not as much oil? So it's more like a pan fry. So you'd uh halfway through have to flip it. What's the advantage of that? Just less oil?
Because less oil, then you don't have to worry about it. Yeah, but he's doing it commercially though. So in a wood fire oven. Yeah, but are you doing it? You're doing it commercially or doing it at home?
Well, I'm I'm preparing to open a nano brewery here in Pittsburgh, and I have uh I have a wood oven in my backyard. What's nano? What defines nano versus micro? Is it a batch size? Is it is it a brew size?
It's an order of magnitude. It's it's like a three three-barrel system with probably eight taps. But like, but in other words, are you brewing like what size vessel are you fermenting in? Are you fermenting like in a Sankey keg size fermenter? It's just it's just a standard three barrels.
It's a micro brewery. It's just a uh probably a poor buzzword. Alright. No, I like and I like anything nano, except for like well, nano, I mean it's a good word nano. Nano.
Anyway, um, I mean, the advantages at home of using less oil are that you use less oil. The disadvantage is uh in commercially is it's gonna go bad faster, right? So commercially, just get a deep fryer. No, but you want if you want to do it in the wood oven as part of if the shtick is all the stuff's cooked in the wood oven, including my fried chicken. Everything's coming out of that oven and and I did try like just a regular cast iron skillet and to to do the pan fry but what what seemed to happen is the unexposed parts of the chicken happen we got the uh you know the leoparding you know the charring of the certain spots of the flour that weren't submerged yeah yeah yeah because you've got radiant heat see the reason that works in a in a stove top scenario is because you don't have radiant heat hitting from above right here's another thing that's about I mean it's it's it's kicking up those the uh the dome of the oven's probably sitting around uh 1200 degrees right and uh yeah the floor the floor is uh probably around n eight eight nine hundred so for safety right another reason for the lid here now that you're telling me your temperatures is i i the the problem is is if you've ever like hung out above a fryer for a long time which I highly recommend right as one does you get covered with a uh oil mist right because like oil gets volatilized and that's actually gonna be the danger if you locally overheat and you get the stuff into like if you were going thin like if you're going in a skillet I think you get a much higher danger of making an oil burst cloud you know above the above the pan you know what I mean than if you're doing it your way so I think covering is definitely the way to go in this in this scenario.
Also from a long term safety perspective uh make sure you uh clean out and maintain your hoods um between the the carbon that's going up there and the oil mist that's gonna go up there, you're gonna inside the fire. He's outside. Yeah, it's still the same thing. You don't want to. No, no, the oven's inside.
Oh, the oven's inside. I I'm I'm outside, but the oven will be inside and vented directly out on it through an outside wall. Can you remove the oven to the center of the crossroad? That's originally. I thought he needed help jacking his oven out of the crossroad because cars were honking for like miles behind him.
Here's another thing. I'll say, like, use my words wise. All right, here's another thing. Uh, I mean, obviously, you know this, you're doing this. I think like uh, you know, if it get, you know, you you need your chimney cleaned out or your flu or whatever cleaned out on a re a regular basis.
But I think, you know, a lot of people, because you burn an ungodly amount of wood when you're actually using wood to to cook. And I think there's a lot of temptation to um use under seasoned wood because you know, you haven't planned in advance or the wood's not seasoned enough. And you're obviously going to get a lot. A, I don't know if you know this, but if if uh if you look up the number of BTUs of heat you get per uh cord of wood, if the wood is not properly seasoned, if you use actual green, which no one does, but actual green wood, like half of the BTUs are used in heating and uh um and uh vaporizing the water that's in the wood on the order of half. I mean it depends.
Like very high BTUs, like very high BTU wood like hickory, like probably not a full half because there's probably the same amount of water in hickory as there is in a in a crappy wood like birch, which has a much lower BTU per pound than hickory does. But the green wood, uh you get a much lower uh use out of it because you're you're spending all of that energy heating water in the wood. Secondly, you're really gunking up your flu with with that stuff, and so you want to make sure that you have uh, you know, it's worth a little bit more to get wood that's seasoned properly and not from some joker who drops you off stuff that they just chopped this season. You know what I'm saying? Yes, sir.
Yep. Yeah. I'm sure you already knew that, but I was just saying that for other people. Um, no. Yeah.
Good good information. All right, David, all right. Well, anyway, let us know how your adhesion problem works, my friend. Hey, thank you, everybody. I appreciate it.
All right, talk to you soon. All right, taking a break, coming right back with more cooking issues. Think about what it takes to swim a coastline longer than the entire eastern seaboard and leap tall waterfalls in a single bound. What does it take to survive 200 feet deep in icy salt water? What would you be made of?
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Ask for Alaska on the menu, grocery store, or smart device. For more information, visit Wild Alaska Seafood.com. All right, listen, listen, Dave. With the wild Alaska seafood, first of all, eating food the way nature this that by the way, if you somehow skip. Dave, I don't have time to edit all this out later, so let's just let's just skip it.
No, no, it's important. So wild Alaska seafood, so like the like the way that Dave, I don't have time to edit all this out later, so just skip it. I'm not gonna say anything negative about the seafood. First of all, Don wants me to cook him the live Alaskan king crab. I've never had one live.
I've been promised by Dave that it is delicious. I used to get them from True World Foods. I don't know whether they still get them, but they used to get the Alaskan live king crab. Alright, we got five minutes. Five minutes?
What? I'm talking about King Krab. Look at the time. Talking about King Crab. Alright, get to it.
What about why do you want to taste Dave's King Crab? It's delicious. I've never had one live. Didn't you have one, Nastasi? Or did we cook that before you showed up?
Remember we used to we got remember? We got the entire live? What do you mean live? They come to the colour. It is a live moving.
As opposed to dead. Yeah, they're fantastically expensive, but they are a boat ton better. We used to get them, Nils and I used to get the live king crab, and then we would do the anesthesia on them with the clove oil. Then we would do I've been there for that. Yeah, then we did the kill, and then we would make the soup out of the bodies and serve it in the giant soup, and then we'd have all the legs.
It is it is pretty uh fantabulous. But here's the thing. Why does no one push the most important Alaskan product, which is Alaskan cabbage? First of all, what's his name, Nastasi? Steve Hubachek, right?
Steve Hubacek. Yes, yes. I wonder if he's still alive. There's a dentist. There's a dentist in Alaska, named Steve Hubachek.
And as of like five or six years ago, ten years ago. Ten years ago, then Nastasia found out who Steve Hubachek was. Steve Hubachek grows the world's largest cabbage. Now, Don, have I talked to you about this before? No.
This is the first time hearing about it. How big would you think the world's largest cabbage is? Hmm. Smaller than a quarter wood? Well, yeah, a quarter wood is freaking big.
Yeah. They're they are like on the order of 150 pounds. Right? Uh yeah, Steve Hubert. Find out what the largest cabbage is Steve Hubac's ever made.
Maybe it's only 100 pounds, but they are, as they say en Francais, freaking big, right? Like so much he uh so much so that Nastassi and I, we were like, yo, Steve, because here's what it is. 125.9 pounds. That's a big cabbage. So we called Steve one day, and we say, hey, Steve, because like everyone goes to the the state fair at Alaska with their giant cab cab cabbages, right?
And they you know have a contest and Steve always wins. So we called him and be like, hey, Steve, I don't want to know the secret of your giant cabbage because frankly, I'm never gonna grow a giant cabbage. It's just not what we're gonna do. What I want to do is buy one of your giant cabbages. Like maybe like the second biggest cabbage you have this year.
I would like to buy that because you're not gonna take it to the state fair. And it seemed like he was gonna do it. Like we were gonna get a truck, we were gonna, we're we were pitching it to television programs, right, Nastasia? Like for like late night and whatnot. The idea is is to, because I said to him, I was like, so does the cabbage being that big, does it make it taste awful?
Does it taste like garbage? He's like, Nope, tastes fine. That's right, isn't that what he said? Nope, tastes fine. Dentist, this guy.
And and uh we were gonna truck it, and then he just stopped returning our telephone calls. But look what he did with this last one. He wielded up some bears. And the bears ate it? The bears ate it.
I like that. So here's what I want to here's what I want to do. I want to buy a brand new, by the way, chainsaws require oil to oil the bar to lubricate the bar. This is a well known fact, right? Now, those of you that don't care about the world, you can get like petroleum based bar oil.
I happen to use vegetable-based bar oil with stuff in it that like stops it from breaking down and has like biodegradable tacophier agents to keep it on the bar. But if you're not gonna do it long term, you could probably just use grapeseed oil, right? You get a brand new electric chainsaw with a long bar. You're gonna need a long bar for this one, right? And this Nastasi added this next part, right?
We get a s first we take the cabbage, right? And we take the chainsaw and we hack it into coleslaw with the chainsaw, and then you switch over after you've done all your food work, you switch over and then you carve a bowl out of a giant ass Douglas fur stump, and then you eat the they like this like chainsaw, like Alaskan chainsaw coleslaw out of the giant tree stump. You in? I won't say no, but I feel like it's a waste to just chop it down to coleslaw. You got this giant cabbage.
What are you gonna do with it? Like, what you like? Can't you make the world's largest like cabbage leaf wrap or something? Like, well, there's enough. We could take some leaves off the outside.
A whole pig cabbage wrap? No, the or the rice and meat with oh my god, Nastasi wants to make a stuffed cabbage with ground meat where you grind like whole animals and stick it inside of a single cabbage leaf. That's a lot of tomato sauce. It's a lot of tomato sauce. Anyway, if anyone out there is from Alaska and knows Steve Hubachek, please I'll start pestering Steve again.
This is in the fall. The reason Alaskan cabbage grows this way, people, is that cabbage size is dependent mainly on number of hours of daylight, right? And so they plant it in this like what would be fertile but not exhausted because the growing season is typically so short, but because they have those long, long, long hours of daylight starting now, uh, they get these giant freaking cabbages. And I want one real bad. Maybe Don, maybe we can fly there.
Maybe the three of us could go fly get one. I think you think you could put it on an Amtrak. That's cheaper. But Amtrak, what do you get? Tell them that you're a student and that you gotta transport it to your dorm.
Isn't that the cheap one? Anything on an Amtrak. Wait, what? Yeah. Why'd you go to dead relatives?
She wouldn't have said that if she hadn't done it. Because she had to once move a dead body. No, Nastasia is not yet realized that the government looks at your search history after you've committed a crime. These days before. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're gonna wrap it up. All right. Anyway, uh, so I don't know. Uh we were supposed to get to some questions that theoretically I've missed. This is a clean slate.
Theoretically, you absolutely missed them. This is a clean slate, people. I don't know what questions I've missed. So if I have not answered your question, email them to Nastasia because they have been officially been missed. I have missed them.
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