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I'm HRN, Communications Director Kat Johnson, with a preview of this week's episode of Meet in Three, HRN's weekly food news roundup. This week we're focusing on water. You'll hear some disturbing news from an NYC investigative reporter. Here lies the problem. How much we don't know about water tanks.
Katie Kiefer reports on water woes in the Heartland. Their water is heavily polluted with nitrates, which are coming from agricultural chemical applications on fields and running off into their water table. And we'll check in with Dave Arnold, who's about to open a new bar that will serve some pretty fancy H2O. It is hardcore. So pour up a tall glass of ice water and be refreshed by this week's episode of Meet and Three.
Available on Heritage Radio Network.org, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Nastasia? Uh, we do not have Dave in the booth today because Dave is moving from Ditma's Park, Ditma's Park to Sunset.
Sunset? Anyway. No, no, no, no. I live in Sunset Park. He's moving to Ridgewood.
He's coming closer, remember? Ridgewood, Ridgewood, Ridgewood. Ridgewood, home of the Ridgewood Pork Store that I've not been to, but I hear I need to go to, where they they have whole, they do whole heads of cabbage as a sauerkraut. You buy the whole head of cabbage. Cool.
It's apparently it's like super hardcore old school like uh white enamel and oak place. And everyone's like, You've never been to the Ridgewood pork store? And I'm like, no, I've never been. And they're like, why? And I'm like, well, I don't know.
I'm stupid. That's why. I need to go. Maybe uh, although you think if I go there and I see Dave on the street, he'll pretend he doesn't know who I am? Probably.
Yeah? Yes. Yeah. So instead of Dave, we have uh Matthew in the in the booth. Matthew, is this your first time doing uh the cooking issues?
Uh I think I sat in once during training. It was a formative experience. Ah, yeah. So uh what's uh so just so I can get a feel, uh what uh, you know, what did you eat anything interesting in this last week? Uh yesterday I did um yesterday I did one of these things where I look up a recipe and then uh like retain 10% of the information and just go for it.
So it was a Portuguese hake recipe, hake, like the fish? Oh yeah, yeah. Um a little bit of cornmeal, fried it. Did this uh salsa that was like tomatoes, uh Mexican hatch chili or New Mexican hatch chili, uh olives, some other good stuff. It was it was good.
Are you from New Mexico or are you just a like a hatch come lately fan? Uh hatch come lately, although I mean it's been a little while. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, but I mean like when I was a kid, everyone was like, you gotta eat hatch, hatch. You know what I mean?
And then like it became a thing, what, like six years ago or something like that? Hatch became a thing, something like this? I think the New Mexico people are pissed off. Now the New Mexico people have other chilies that they can try to be like out chili you with if you're not a hatch guy. So again, when you did the cornmeal, you did a a cornmeal breading.
Did you do a pre-dust? Uh what do you mean by pre-dust? I I basically slapped the fish. It was it was pretty half-assed as far as breading goes. I slapped the fish onto a plate of cornmeal on both sides.
No salt? Whacked it. Uh dusted the salt on in while it was in the pan, because I was, you know, I was kind of just shooting from the hip here. Yeah. I recommend in the future that you do your salt pepper on the naked fish before you slap it onto the cornmeal.
Oh, this is why we're here today. Yeah. So you were doing, so you did a straight straight into the cornmeal on a on a plate. Did it make an unholy mess or were you okay? Uh the the that process?
No, I was good. I was good. And you used uh a like a finer, a finer grind of cornmeal or more of a coarse ground cornmeal. I it was cornmeal, so I used to work at a distillery. It was cornmeal that I took off of our meal.
It was like extra cornmeal from our mill. So I think it was pretty coarse. It was pretty coarse, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I would sometimes I would cut in some finer stuff too, just to you know, increase increase your adhesion there.
This this cornmeal was free, which was mighty fine. Free is the best, free is the best kind of cornmeal. And then what did you uh what did what kind of uh fat did you fry it in? Uh butter. Okay, butter and corn do love each other quite a bit.
Now uh was it greasy or was it good? No, it was great. I don't know. No, it's great. And how long did it sit around?
Did you like what what's interesting to me about cornmeal crust? There's various various schools of thought on cornmeal crust. I like cornmeal crust, but cornmeal crust, um there's a big argument when people are frying, because people have different kinds of taste, right? Whether you like your crust, there's a difference to me between crisp and hard, right? And so cornmeal ends up, I think, being a lot of times hard on the outside.
So it's crunchy, but it's crunchy in a kind of very hard way, it has a very specific kind of break to it when you go when you go through it which I like but it's different from like a shatteringly crisp crust do you agree with me? Uh yeah sure I'll go with that. Yeah. Nastasia you like a corn uh cornmeal crust? Yeah.
Do you like uh fried polenta sticks? Mm-hmm. I love a fried planta stick. You know what I did the other day? Uh remember when I went to Charleston?
Yeah. Uh I got some of these like super fancy, I think they're called Geechee Boy grits, like Jimmy Red corn grits. They're real good grits, very high quality grits. And I cooked the grits and of course I cooked them for dinner, you know, as one I did it in the rice cooker, put a bunch of like put a bunch of butter in and salt, right? You know what I mean?
Cooked it. I cooked it fast, Matthew, don't get mad. Have you ever seen my cousin Vinny Matthew? I have. Yeah.
You know how the whole thing turns around the whole the whole plot turns around. Okay, you can't you're what you're gonna have like a spoiler alert request for a movie that's older than me. That's pretty that's fair. So I will go ahead. So the whole plot revolves around how long it takes to cook grits.
Right? The whole thing is this northern guy Joe Pesci like somehow it soaks into his head because I I think because anyway I don't remember exactly but it the whole plot hinges on that you can't kind of rush grits. But turns out you you can rush grits in a in a in a rice cooker on on fast because it can boil off the water very fast without scorching it. You see what I'm saying? So you just you know open up the rice cooker every once in a while turn it anyway grits were delicious but because my kids are low quality individuals they did not finish all the grits I had grits left over and you know what I did with those grits?
I blended them into pancakes, the cooked grits and plans cake. You ever blend cooked rice into a pancake when you have it? Cooked in so I have it sitting around. It's gonna go to waste because my kids also aren't. I know, I know I I don't want to hear anything about it.
They're not huge fried rice people. So like I try to make them the fried rice once a while and they're like, nah, right? And then like I figured if I just made kind of like fried like grit cakes, they wouldn't do it. But in the pancakes, what's amazing about it is it still retains the pancake was had that gooey grits. Do you like grits by the way, Nastasia?
No, not really. Matthew, you grits? I love grits. There we go. Uh so it retains some of that kind of gooey grit texture.
It was halfway in between a pancake and a grit. It was kind of cool. Grit pancakes. That sounds great. What?
It was good. I will make it again sometime. Uh how the heck did we get on grits? Oh, we were talking about cornmeal. All right.
So uh Nastasia, do you eat anything interesting uh this past week? Nope. Nothing? Nothing. You ate nothing interesting this past week.
Nothing interesting. And you call yourself a food professional. You own a restaurant and you ate nothing interesting last week. No, I did not. Just feeding the body.
Literally, yes, just feeding the body. Just feeding the body. All right. Well, we have another week of me not being open with the bar. Very super depressing.
But uh we have been doing a lot of presentations. I have an interesting thing I built for the bar. I finally built uh a working glycol system. I went through three or four different systems. See, at Booker and Dax, when we were chilling our drinks, we would we were using these refrigerators, but the problem is is it was hard because we only had the one refrigerator because it had to keep it at a very low temperature because anyone Nastasi doesn't want me to talk about carbonation, but the stuff has to be really cold.
So I built, I called Philip Preston from Polyscience and bought like a big glycol chiller. And if anyone's interested at some point, I can tell you how this rig works, but it's super sweet. Every bar station now has a you ever do you ever go to wine stores when you were a kid, Nastasia? No. You never went to a wine store when you're a kid?
No, never. Never once. You're freaking lies. I swear. Nastassi has lied more to me in the past 20 minutes.
I never went to a wine store when I was little. Yeah, it was fun to go with my dad. No. There you go. A human being.
Thank goodness. So like they used to have these, like, and I think some places still have it. They have this weird, like circular thing with like kind of a blue liquid. And when you when you buy white wine, you throw it into the chiller while you're shopping, and then like honestly, like five minutes later, the sucker's chilled, so you can like drink it right away. So we ha every bar station has the equivalent of that for uh carbonated or any other cocktails.
It's pretty sweet. Cool. I'm excited. You're just being a jerk. You know what, Nastasia?
I work real hard because you wouldn't even think. What do you think? What do you think is the problem with it? Yeah, okay. Why do you think it's a difficult problem?
You don't. But it is a good idea. It's a difficult problem because you're dealing with a bunch of different bottles, some of which are full and some of which aren't, and you don't want to add enough weight to the bottles such that they sink even when they're empty. So it becomes an issue of how to keep all the bottles properly corral without them rattling around your bar in the minimum amount of space. It is an interesting technical problem, and I think I have solved it.
In fact, I would like to convince Philip Preston to make some self-contained ones. Maybe we can if we ever open this bar, and then if we ever open more of them, I can you know roll that out, or maybe you know, have them sell it to other people. Did you hear the International House of Pancake change the name of their restaurant? But why? Because they're stupid.
But the bees were what? Burgers. But they're it's a different type of restaurant? I think they just ripped the pee off of their thing or flipped the pee upside down. Now it's iHob.
I'm gonna call it iHub. Have you I've never I haven't been to an IHOP in like 20 years. But like every other burger change, just like ripped them new one. Were you you ever go to the uh house of pancakes? Yeah, when I was little, but not recently.
No. Do you like pancakes for dinner? No. I like it, but I haven't done it since the kids because we make pancakes on the weekend. But I used to like uh I used to like a a breakfast for uh dinner sitch.
You don't you hate that? I used to like it. What about you, Matthew? Are you a breakfast for dinner person ever? I'm more of a dinner for breakfast person.
Dinner for breakfast? I like that. Like what? Like steak and eggs, or like what do you mean? I don't uh I just eat all sorts of foods that are not breakfast foods at breakfast time sometimes.
Because you got I get in a rut. I get in an egg rut. I don't want to do it anymore. Egg rut. That sounds like a band.
Egg rut. Maybe it's an album. It's more of an album. Egg rut. That was during their egg rut years.
Egg rut years. Was that good or bad? The egg rut years. Uh so some uh sad news before we by the way, calling your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.
Uh so last last week, uh John Lermer died. Uh, you know, very well-known bartender in um in Florida. Uh he was younger than me, he's 45, well known, sweet, uh, smart, sensitive guy. Uh and you know, I think it's gonna be something we're gonna I know that Don and I, when we're opening the bar are talking m you know, more about this. I was talking to Jim Meehan yesterday of PDT.
I think everyone in this industry has to just help each other be a little bit um be a little bit better to themselves because anyone who's gonna stay in it a long time, uh, you know, you don't want to end up, you know, dying because of your lifestyle uh well before well before you should. Um I mean, it's obviously been a tough week with uh Bourdain and all that for for a lot of people, but anyway, I just wanted to say our thoughts are with uh the friends and family of John Lermer. Um I should have said that first, or maybe last. Because now what am I gonna say? Yeah, you can't really come in to anyway.
He was the for a while he was the rep for Krug Champagne. What's the what's uh what's some interesting facts from Krug Champagne, Nastasia? I don't know. Uh Krug Champagne, one of the few champagnes that most of the time does not go through malolactic fermentation. This is why Krug Champagne tends to have an Applee note because it still has uh a good bit of malic acid in it.
You like Krug, right? I love it. You like any kind of champagne? I really like Krug. Yeah?
All right. Nastasia Lopez, uh, even though she's going to come and drink free at my new bar, existing conditions. But only not the cocktail. We'll never drink a cocktail. If you want to have a terrible friend, become friends with Nastasia Lopez.
Because Nastasia Lopez, not only will she not support what you do for a living, but she will come in and for free drink the stuff that you're paying more for and rub it in your face and anybody else's face, that she doesn't want what you have worked hard to try to achieve. She instead just wants a giant fish bowl of sparkling wine. Yeah. Yep. Yeah.
That that is uh that is Nastasia. Uh okay. So uh you want some crazy? Yeah. Before we get to the question, do you want some crazy?
So this is actually, this seems like one of the things that I probably has nothing to do with our show, but I have never seen anything on the internet that had more to do with our show than this. Okay. So this is via Twitter. I got uh, you know, someone sent me this on Twitter today, Brian Pittman, and uh it is to a Vice story about, and I I have to say, I don't think there's a good possibility that this is a a hoax. Okay.
A very strong possibility. Don't care, just go to it. Okay, someone was interviewed on Vice who cooked his own foot and served it to his buddies. Did they know? Yes.
Okay. So this is amazing. Check this out. Guy got, so apparently uh his uh handle, he's an he's anonymous, but his handle because it came to people's uh attention via a Reddit thing. Shiny.
We'll call him Shiny because we don't know his real name. Was in a motorcycle accident. Uh-huh. This is like our thing. I'm saying, yeah, was in a motorcycle accident, his like leg and foot were shattered.
He's in the hospital, and the doctors are like, We're gonna amputate your foot. And literally, shiny says, Well, can I keep it? Literally, it's on his back, well, can I keep it? And they're like, Well, it's your foot. You know what I mean?
And so they gave it to him in a bag. He originally thinks, I swear to God, this is what it says on the thing. He originally says to himself, Well, maybe I'll get it freeze-dried, and I'll have my foot freeze-dried, right? Looks it up, takes it home, washes it off, puts it in the freezer, looks it up, freeze-drying costs too much money. Yeah.
So he doesn't know what he's gonna do, so he's like, Well, maybe I'll make a plaster cast of it. He says that like he and his buddies were tossing it around the room, like his foot, because it's like he says it's I mean, I imagine it is surreal to have your foot just sitting there. And before he takes the plaster cast, he cuts off a piece of it, puts it again in the freezer, and saves it, and then decides weeks later that he is going to cook it, right? Now, this is the smartest thing. I mean, I don't really necessarily agree with the way that it was done, but this is the smartest thing I've ever heard.
He's like, I don't want to mess this up. Finds a chef friend of his. By the way, kudos to Shiny for finding a chef friend. Finds a chef friend who's going to prepare the uh the piece of the, you know, the upper part of the foot, the shin there, for the for the for the table. Invites 11 friends over, and they all have tacos.
With they marinated the cookie onions, they have tacos, they have tacos with it. Now, here's where it gets crazy. Here's where the shout out is especially important. He goes, everyone wanted to know what it tastes like. Apparently, only one of his friends refused to eat it.
Only one of his friends refused to eat it. Says, you know what it tastes like? He's like, I've had heritage pork before. I swear to God. He's like, I've had heritage pork before.
He says, when people say people taste like pork, it's not like the pork you get in the supermarket. It's more like heritage pork. Wow, Patrick Martins. Yeah, he says it's like redder, and he says more beefy. So I think what he means is just like a higher kind of blood content, like obviously older.
The guy's 38, so obviously like older, like more flavorful. I mean, obviously that deserves a spot. I mean, I would have, if Shiny wants to, I mean, I don't have any contact with Shiny. I would have Shiny. You have vice contacts.
I, you know. Yeah, but like, I mean, like that is right up the that's right up our alley, though. Remember how angry you were at the Japanese guy that overcooked his penis? Uh yeah, yeah. I was I was like horribly, I was upset.
I mean, like, I have to say You get one shot. You get one shot. Now, the the you know, look, the issue is I don't think they had that much. They wanted to divide it up between 11 people. He said it was a little to be honest, Shiny said it's a it was a little bit kind of disappointing on a textural level.
I mean the the real issue is I think that's where you're gonna have to spend your time is getting the texture right. You know what I mean? I would say if you were gonna do it, no matter how you now marinating it is great because it's gonna soften up the protein. But the issue is is that the the kind of connective tissue that you have in a cut like that, even just like standard fajita working, isn't gonna do it. You're going to need to do some serious.
I mean, if his foot wasn't already jacqued hard enough by like, you know, smashing it into a tree when he flew off of his bike, you know what I mean, off his motorcycle. I mean, that's some serious tenderization there, right? But I would have I totally would have taken like, you know, if you're gonna do it, get the jack card, right, and do some serious jackharding on it so that you can get the taste you want, but not have it kind of be tough because he said it was tough. And science has figured out not even science, like classic butchery has figured out, like with your cube steak or things like this, how to get the texture right of anything by just pulping the hell out of it with a bunch of needles. I would have suggested that.
Are you saying that if Shiny had been like a religious uh acupuncture fan, he would have tasted better? Well, no, no, I'm saying, like, I don't think any amount of acupuncturing of the live stuff, because remember, there it's not like trying to turn you into Hellraiser into pin cusher, although, you know, I guess you have a lot of needles in you. Like jackharding is like relatively large, they call them needles, but they're almost like little, like um it's like a dog brush. Yeah, but it's like but they're thicker. It's like uh, it's almost like uh like uh kebab skewers, you know what I mean, but sharper.
And you and they're in one of those like uh like a spring-loaded pinhead thing, and you're like chugging, chuck it, chuck it, chuck it, chuck it, chuck it, and just shreds the meat into something so that you never gonna have I mean it basically removes the texture. It's a mechanical means to remove texture from meat instead of grinding it. Grinding would be another way to go. Emulsified sausage. If you want the flavor, but the texture is terrible, get some fat, make an emulsified sausage with it.
Tell the tell the Japanese guy's story. But we said this on the air many times. You never did. I know. What?
I I know you never did. Well, this is not family friendly, it's a human body. It's not like the guy he was a he was a guy, he wanted to be completely genderless. This is a true story. He wanted to be completely genderless, he wanted to be completely asexual.
So he had his private parts surgically removed, so that he just has a or I mean, I don't know what I don't know what pro town, but I don't know what pronoun, I don't know the the favorite pronoun that was chosen afterwards, but so there was just a uh like a flat spot there, and then cooked up the junk and auctioned off on eBay rights to come eat his junk. How did we know it was overcooked? Because one of the one of the people who had paid, one of the paying guests, was like, it was rubbery, it was overcooked. And and for years I've been very upset at this person for for doing this because as Nastasi said earlier in this in this speech here, you've got one shot. Right.
You got you only cut your junk off once. And if you're gonna do it, do it right. This is why like I think shiny is onto something here shiny got a chef friend to do it and you said you would have circulated the thing the junk oh defin definitely for well the thing that the the it's like one of my life missions I think I've said this before but one of my life goals is to cook woolly mammoth meat like not Nouveau like Jurassic Park style woolly mammoth meat but I mean one of the one of the side effects one of the I guess like you know posit you know possible positive side effects of uh it's not a good side effect I don't even know why I'm saying that of global warming is that the tundra is melting at a ferocious rate and as it happens like these woolly mammoth uh woolly mammoths mammoths mammi mammoths are are like are getting thawed out and they're finding all over Siberia these woolly mammoths and apparently some of them are still fresh enough to eat even though they're like you know 12, 13, 14, 15, 20 thousand years old right life goal is to cook some of that but the key the key to cooking anything that you've never cooked before is running some tests right you have to run some tests. So uh yeah I mean I would definitely circulate some to see kind of what happens to the woolly mammoth meat. What does that have to do with penis?
Oh because what you the mistake that I'm sure first of all this guy clearly not a cook from the way he cooked the stuff right he just I think you just you know fried it up I don't know I I don't remember like what kind of uh garniture uh was added to it. But what you need to do is you need to take a small a small enough portion away. People are afraid when they have a small amount of something to take some away to run some tests so that yes, it's true you only have a finite amount of this product and you can't get any more, but you risk ruining the whole thing by not running a small test first, right? So you gotta cut off a little bit and run a small test. That's what I that's what I would have done.
I think this is a mistake everyone makes. They don't they don't they they just kind of roll the dice. I know he garnished them with mushrooms and parsley. That's so weak. And they paid 160 pounds each, so that's 300.
Like again, weak. All terrible. Anyway, how do we get on this? Oh, yes, shiny. So if anyone out there knows Shiny, Matthew, you think we should get him on the show?
Obviously, yes. Shiny, call in, please. Yeah, please, shiny. Please, shiny. Uh, okay.
Uh, this is in we got another question from Scott who writes in looking to do a low sugar sorbet for personal consumption. My understanding is that a Paco Jet would handle this with ease, but it is five thousand seven hundred dollars retail. Is that really what a Paco Jet costs now? Damn, it used to be like 2500, right? It used to be so Nastasi is now showing me pictures, which oh my god, Nastasia.
Remember, this is a workplace. I know. Even though we're not getting paid, this is a workplace, and you have shown me some not safe for work photos, and I don't appreciate it. I just didn't want to be the only one that's all it's. See, that's people, people.
This is what Nastasia Lopez is like. She's like, I looked at it, and I don't want to have that image burned into my brain without you having that image burnt into your brain as well. This is classic Nastasia. She can't just make a mistake and live with it. She makes you live with her mistakes.
Anyways. Uh so we were talking about Paco Jets while you were busy looking up uh overcooked uh you know junk being sold on eBay with mushrooms and parsley. And do you remember when Paco Jet, they used to cost like three grand, right? Or 20 something hundred. They're up to five thousand seven hundred dollars.
Um for those of you that don't know, uh Paco Jet uh takes a blade, you freeze your your your product solid. Now they say that you can do all sorts of savory things, which is true. You can make fantastic textured mousses, but let's be honest, most people use it uh as an ice cream maker. You freeze your base solid, right? And this is the advantage of it, is that you you freeze it solid, then it stays good forever, unlike not forever, but it stays good for a long time, unlike ice cream, which has uh a lot of problems with uh recrystallization and kind of loss of texture after it's been spun.
Uh the Paco Jet, you kind of make that texture a la minute because a blade feeds very slowly into the solid frozen mixture and creates uh the texture uh of an ice cream or a sorbet as it goes on. So it's like first you create the the base, you freeze it solid, then you make the texture. Now, uh they are very expensive. Let me finish the question here. Wondering if you've ever heard of anyone fashioning something with a Paco Jet blade and a modified drill press.
Since I would want to do a full bri uh beaker at a time and have no commercial application for such a device, I'm trying to figure out as close as I can get on the cheap. Any advice? Uh, okay, here's the problem. The Paco Jet isn't just it the blade is important in the Paco Jet, but what's most important in a Paco Jet is the feed rate. So uh the feed rate on a Paco Jet is very they they also say that the exact kind of pressurization of the container in terms of getting the overrun, getting the air whipped into it is important.
You can read, and I have read many times because I was thinking about trying to build something, the patent that Paco Jet uh has, and in the patent for PacoJet, they let you know various things, like the optimum RPM uh to get uh the right texture. If you get too much RPM, you have too much heating and you don't create the right texture, too low an RPM uh and it takes too long to feed through and it also melts, so there's an optimum RPM. And then there's an optimum advance rate. So how far the blade advances uh down for every turn that it makes, and that the advance rate is what determines the crystal size in it, and therefore the smoothness of the ice cream. So the Paco Jet is all about having a large enough blade that you can get a good texture over a large amount of product, and that's the problem, frankly, with the smaller versions of the Paco Jet, like the uh FrickSair, which uh I have the Italian one.
The blade's too small and it can't really create the kind of large uh area of nice, beautiful homogenous texture that a Paco Jet can. But then uh it feeds down a very specific amount for every amount it goes forward, and there's also the way the blades are oriented helps uh kind of create uh the right texture and then feeds back up. But you have to get a big combination of things right. You have to get the feed down rate right, the speed of rotation right, and then also the correct amount of air uh air pressure or kind of tamping down on the top of the of the thing to get the um overrun correct. Overrun is uh in ice cream in Sorbet, overrun is the percentage air that's in your product.
So a hundred percent overrun means that your your ice cream is half air and half uh you know base. So most you know, premium things or things you do at home, you'd be shooting for a much lower, much, much lower overrun. Anyway, the other problem you have here, so no, I don't think you can do it with a um with a drill press. The other problem you're gonna have here, and this one is more severe, is that a PacoJet actually cannot make a very good low sugar sorbet. A very low sugar sorbet is very difficult to make because sugar isn't just a flavor, sugar also provides texture.
Remember, Nastasia, when people try to make low sugar stuff at the school and it's always grainy as hell, it becomes out more like a granita, or it's like an apoco jet even because it's so cold. It's like super dry. Remember, you've had like those like uh like low sugar ice creams or low sugar sorbets, people and then there's dry, dry, dry, dry, dry because it's like a powder. Like that they don't have like the textural effect that sugar has. So you if you want to go low sugar, you have to add something else to overcome the fact that you haven't put sugar in to get the texture right because uh sugar is the main thing that's doing freeze depression, so making it such that you still have liquid left at your ice cream and sorbet temperatures, and that's what's gonna provide the mouthfeel so it doesn't turn into like a snow pile of dry powder.
Uh and um I you could use things. I mean, I don't know why you want low sugar, whether it's for taste. If it's for taste, you can use non-sweet uh sugars, or whether it's because you're not allowed to have sugar, in which case uh, you know, that's a different thing. But anyway, uh so have you ever you ever found any technique for like kind of like at home making a good sorbet? No.
I mean, you can if you have a champion juicer, you can take frozen cubes of sorbet base and like push them through. The first couple will melt out, uh, but you can actually make that chum something into a sorbet. I've never really had much luck with a vita prep. You could probably vita prep the frozen stuff and then reset it in the fridge a little bit and probably get a good bit. But you're gonna wanna, you're never gonna get like the perfect texture, so I would add some fat to it in the form of like coconut milk, and that'll probably help get your texture right.
So you can do a smoothie and then a refreeze or the champion juicer. Uh but yeah, if you're gonna do that, you have to keep a lot of kind of structure in it because it's not gonna self-hold the way a sorbet is. That's why they do that with like frozen bananas, they do that kind of crap because the banana provides enough structure. Anyway, what do you think? You're like, you know what?
Don't care. Uh Matthew, you wanna take a break and come back? Yeah, let's do it. All right, come back more with more cooking issues. Uh just this last week I was uh using Bob's Red Mill uh almond flour.
And uh, you know, what I wanted to do with it was kind of make a version of an angel food cake because everybody knows that one of the main things that is not necessarily so good about an angel food cake is that it contains no fat. But if you add fat to an angel food cake, it deflates uh somewhat. So I thought maybe almond flour would be a good substitute in for the cake flour. Also, the structure of an angel food cake is almost entirely from the egg whites, and so you really don't want a lot of protein structure from something like a flour. So it's really a perfect application to A, make it gluten-free if if that's important to you, and B to uh really kind of reduce down to almost zero that kind of gluten uh protein kind of feel that's in the cake.
So what I did was I took uh 360 mils of uh egg whites, which is 10 extra large egg whites, and then uh 125 grams of the si now you have to sift this. Now, old school uh angel food cake recipes, you know, they have you sift all the ingredients. It's like super important with almond flour because nut flours tend to clump together a little bit. So push that through uh, you know, a sieve or a sifter or whatever you want. But 125 grams of uh Bob's Red Mill uh almond flour, then uh I use 150 grams of granulated white sugar and 150 grams of confectioner sugar.
Uh I add a little lemon for the egg white, which I'll just talk about in a second, salt, uh, which I don't measure. I mean, to be honest, I don't measure, I just do it by eye. And uh uh vanilla extract. Uh and here's a little something extra. So normally, like that ratio of weights would be perfect for an ancient food cake, but because uh almond flour doesn't work exactly in a in a moisture management technique uh like flour does.
I also added 50 grams of cornstarch to it. Uh so you sift all the um, do not sift the granulated sugar, but sift all the other dry ingredients into something, then uh take your egg whites, start them up, whip them up. Uh as they're coming whipping up, add your granulated sugar, add your vanilla, add a little bit of uh I add a little bit of lemon juice uh and salt, uh whip it up till it's uh stiff peaks, but don't whip it too much or it's gonna get granulated, you're gonna lose all of the volume of your cake. Then uh fold in the sifted almond flour, cornstarch, and powdered sugar mixture. Bake that sucker in an angel food cake pan for like, you know, I don't know, it depends on your oven.
Like I actually did it in my uh brevel toaster oven because it's you know it was too warm to fire up my big oven. And the the toaster oven was a little too small, so I got a little brown on the top. But it made a super moist, uh super delicious, gluten-free angel food cake that had a little bit, I think, better mouthfeel than a normal angel food cake because it contains both almonds, which are delicious, and fat, which as everybody knows is delicious. So go to Bob'sRedmill.com and use the code cooking25. That's one word, all caps, cooking 25.
And remember, the number 25 and not the word 25 for 25% off your order. We are back. How are you doing, Nastas? Were you able to survive listening to that? I didn't listen to it.
Oh, there you go. There you go. Like Nastasia, like she's like, Don't I hear this jerk enough? I have to also hear him during the during the break. But thankfully she can just take off the uh did you listen to you?
No. Nah, no. Uh okay. So we have another question. Let's do it.
Also, you got a message from the uh chat that I don't even understand. I had pretty good success with uh erytheretol in a blackberry sorbet. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, as I well, it's an alternative sugar to get the texture right. Yeah, good.
Yeah, keep them coming. Keep suggestions coming. But do any of you have techniques for making a decent sorbet without having any sort of decent machine? I mean, that's the real, that's the real kicker there. You know what I mean?
And I think it's gonna be some combination of hey, you know what else you could do? If you're doing a um, you know how uh you ever done uh where you just kind of like you know make a whipped cream base and then freeze it, or like a mousse and you freeze it. It's not quite like an ice cream, but it's good. You ever done that stuff? Yeah.
Do you ever do anything? Yeah, but you never do anything. Anyway, you can do that. I bet you could do something like with like uh like a make a like a almost like a sorbet mousse, like with a hydro gel or something, you know what I mean, and then freeze that, it would probably be pretty good. Like you could probably do.
I mean, that's the thing, he wants it to be not cream-based, cream is so good that way. You could do like a like a reinforced like fluid gel, uh, like fold it in with whipped cream and then freeze that sucker, and the texture would be great, but that's not a sorbet. You could probably, the problem is is that unreinforced, you know, you could do a very dense, like uh methyl cell foam and then maybe freeze that, but it's gonna be really airy. It's like gonna be a huge overrun. How would you dense that up?
If you can make a nice dense foam with a uh if you can make a nice dense foam and then freeze it relatively quickly, uh you could probably make a decent uh sorbet texture without any sort of machine. But I don't know. If anyone on the uh chat room has tried this, uh let me know. You remember when they used to do, they used to put like the ice cream base when like Alex DuPac used to put the ice cream base into a uh vacuum chamber and it would turn almost into a cake. Did you like that stuff?
I like that. It's crazy. I made it once? Mm-hmm. What, just for just for giggles at the at the place?
Yeah, that was a fun technique. Uh okay. So we have this call in from Kyle Youngblood. He says, hey, cooking issues team, and the rest. Uh I'm looking to make a lobster shell stock.
I have five one gallon bags of lobster tail shells in the freezer and was looking to use them for staff soup. Soup. Remember when we made that milk soup? Were you there for that one? And like people were coming up, they're like, What are you serving?
Milk soup. Remember that? Yeah. We were like, what? We're like, it's like a variant on a Colombian milk soup.
Changwa, have your milk soup. People were like, no, I don't want it. We're like, it's delicious. And really, and they're like, no, you like lost me with the way you said milk soup. And we're like, come on, man.
Oh, by the way, here's another thing. If you we did the event, uh existing conditions, even though we're not open yet, we did uh city uh city meals on wheels, like their giant gala at Rockefeller Center. When are you doing that? It was yesterday. Remember when we did that at uh a similar event and Jean-Georges dressed up as a sailor boy?
And you dressed up like not cracked. Yeah, well, no, no, you made me buy, you see Nastasia again with the bus throwing. Nastasia goes. Nastasi and I right. We we we go to a thrift store, Nastasi's like, you have to buy it.
It's a sailor theme. You have to buy, you made me buy a shirt with a sheep on the back. And a rainbow. And a rainbow, and the sheep was like made of sodon like cotton balls, such that it was a puffy-backed sheep with a freaking rainbow. And Nastasi was like, you must buy this, or I won't work with you anymore, and you must wear it.
So she makes me wear this to the freaking event. Jean-Georges came in a very, you know, Jean Chef Jean-Georges Vangeriction came in a very natty sailor boy outfit with the round sailor hat with like the with the little blue tassel coming off of it. You know what I mean? Jean-Georges is like calling the amazing Alzheimer. Anyway, so he shows up at this event.
And so Nastasia, who forced me to buy this freaking shirt, is now is giving me crap saying I was not dressed properly when in fact it was she that made me do it. And this again is classic Nastasia Lopez. Anyway. I'm gonna find that photo, yeah. I'm gonna post that.
So I did this uh event yesterday with existing conditions. So uh who went with this? Uh Jamila, Jack, Bobby, you know, like opening crew. I don't even know. What are we talking about that?
How do we even get to that? Nothing. Oh, there it is. Why did that how did that come up? Why did that even come up?
That we did a city. Oh, I know why. Nastasia and I are the worst at everyone who does these events, they have somebody whose job it is. And if anyone listening is doing these events, Nastasi and I are always embarrassed because we spend all this time and energy working on the product and zero time thinking about the booth. Am I right, Stas?
Yeah. So like everyone is like, people have like river stones and buoys and like multiple levels of freaking serve wear and like it's all fancy looking, and then we're like, it milks soup. You know what I mean? And like the our table looks like a like a crap show. It's like everything's spilled everyone.
Same thing last night. Like we never take the we spend so much time on our our ingredients and on the on the stuff that we're preparing that we never take the time to to like make our little booze look good. And by we're changing that. I'm now appointing somebody at the bar to whose job it is whenever we do an event to style out the booth. You think that's a smart move style?
Yeah, totally. You're gonna do that. Do you do this with pasta flour? Do you style out your booth? Yeah, no.
You need to hide you need to get someone at the pasta flour style it out. When Nastasia is the queen of styling out like her boxes, like if you are a famous person and Nastasia likes you, so it's a very small subset of people because she hates most people, and there's not that many famous people out there, but she is still like why don't you tell the people about some of your styled out boxes? I mostly do black men really well. And in terms of styling out their boxes? Yeah.
Yeah. I found out that I'm a great um hand cut construction paper male black person, artwork person. Yeah, I'm just gonna let that stay right where you put it. And I'm not gonna say one damn thing about that at all. But it's true.
Uh okay. Okay. The roots. Yeah. Who else?
Yeah, pasta flyer just did the roots picnic the other day. No, it's fun. Yeah, in Philadelphia. But tell tell them that tell them what made you the most angry. Oh.
No, I don't want to. Because I don't know if I don't want to. She had to leave early. Yeah. Made her angry.
I still do not. I can say this because both my grandparents are dead, but I still have never forgiven them for uh making me leave my mom and stepfather's wedding early. So for what? Really? Oh yeah, because oh my god, I never told you this story.
No. Okay. So my stepfather's family, you know, uh, you know, they're Italian, right? The father who died last year is butcher, right? And you know, Gerard was, you know, Gerard is the you know, the son, and even though typically, you know, my mom's family would have paid for the wedding, you know, grandma and grandpa were too cheap.
So, and you know, they didn't have the money. So Gerard's dad throws this huge wedding, goes all out on the food, all out. So for months I'm hearing about the food at this wedding, the food at this wedding, the food at this wedding. And how old were you? Uh, how old was I?
This uh 12, 11, 12. So they tell me, they're like, we're getting this special Italian pastry from the North End. Juspidi. We're getting just speedy. I'm like, just speedy, what's just speedy?
They're like, it's this thing. It's like this, it's like this ethereal, amazing, it's the shuspidi. Oh man, oh Laddie, you're getting the shuspidi for the wedding, you're getting the just speedy. Oh, there's just speedy, oh there's just be the speedy. Everything, everything, every day I hear, oh, oh, are you sure you're gonna have this peedy?
Yeah, we have the shuspidi, we get the shuspidi. And then they're like the day of the wedding, did you pick it up? Did you get speedy, yeah, just speedy? And so, like, you know, I'm waiting for this whole wedding. It's you know, I'm not, you know, I'm young, I don't drink, it's boring, and it's not boring, my mom's getting married in Gerard everything.
So it's great. But we're all sitting around, I'm like, I'm like, the whole thing, I'm like, okay, the dinner, great, yeah, the lamb, great, great, great. Oh, food food, good, yeah. Just beaty, just beatty, she's speedy, she's beepy, she's beaty. They start doing the dancing, they're getting ready to bring out the thing.
And grandma and grandpa are like, we're leaving now because we're getting in the motorhome and we're driving back home now. I'm like, no! And I never got to have the freaky Juspidi. And here's the worst part about it. We get in the freaking motorhome, leave the wedding early.
We drive. By the way, my grandparents lived in my driveway for three years in this freaking motorhome. One day they just showed up, put the motorhome on blocks, and plugged into our house and didn't leave for three years. When they finally got that thing out, there was dent. There was a dent four inches deep in our freaking driveway from the blocks of this motorhome.
Grandma who only like used electric blankets, she used electric blankets constantly. We constantly blow out the circuits in our house because there's freaking umbilical cord coming out of this motorhome, which contained get this grandma, grandpa, two dogs, and a parrot. I swear to God. Anyway, so they drive back from this wedding, and we end up in the bottom of the driveway, and then they look at me, they're like, Do you have keys to get into the house? No!
I don't, Grandma. I'm 11. Why did I leave my mom's wedding early so that we could drive through the night and end up in a driveway, and I can't even get into my house, and now I've never had just speedy. And to this day, I don't even remember what a Juspeedy is, but it was so much like I like I just walk around sometimes and just goes, just beatty, just beattie, just beatty, just beatty. Anyway, back to lobster shells.
So uh who is this? We have oh yeah, we have uh Kyle. Kyle's making lobster shells. He has five one gallon bags of lobster tail shells in the freezer and was looking to use them up for staff soup. That's how we got on that.
That was a long way to a long trip afield from soup. Wait, did you have to sleep in the motorhome? Yeah, I had to sleep in the goddamn motorhome. By the way, they one of the dog's names was Taffy, it was a chow, and I've only recently overcome my hatred of chows because of this dog Taffy. This dog was the meanest dog ever.
So uh like honestly, I hated this dog so much that when whenever grandpa would walk Taffy when when when he looked the other way, I would make a face at the dog so the dog would growl and grandpa would yank its chain. That's how much I hated this dog and how much this dog hated me. The dog really hated everyone except grandma and grandpa. But I, when I slept in the motorhome, I would sleep above the driver's seat in that little like bed that's like sticking out over the highway there. Dog would not let me out of the bed to pee.
So I would like whenever I stay in that motorhome, I had to this is how I learned to fly for like 14 hours straight without peeing because once you were in that bed, there was no bathroom visits the whole freaking night because Taffy would sit there with her satanic freaking devil dog eyes and just growl at you if you ever tried to put your feet over and get down and use the restroom. Nightmare. Nosia speedy. Uh five one gallon bags of lobster tail shells in the freezer, and was looking to use them up for staff soup. I know if you boil shells too long, they give the stock a bit of a calcium taste.
This is a true story, Kyle. Uh, would making a double or triple stock out of the shells lead to a bad tasting stock? I don't think so, but I don't know how much of a gain you're gonna get. You know what I mean? Like, I think you're probably gonna be better off making the uh a single stock and then reducing it.
Um but anyway, I'm I'm not sure. I've never tried it. Someone in the chat room maybe has some uh advice on this. I've never done a uh triple stock on um on lobster. Uh I would plan on doing a short simmer on each infusion of new shells around 30 minutes to an hour.
That's about right. I just like I say, I've never had an experience with triple stock. Uh besides shell stock, here's where I do have some ideas. Besides shell stock, do you have any suggestions on what to do with all these shells for the employee dinner? We have a lot that we can go uh that we can go through, and I'd rather not throw out the rest of the shells when everyone gets tired of soap.
Thanks for the episodes, Kyle Youngblood. Yes. What you need to do, Kyle, is you need to make lobster butter, lobster butter, lobster, lobster butter. Don't you like lobster butter, Nastasia? That is it.
Well yeah, take the shells, you roast them off. No. What? I don't like any shell stocks or anything with shells in it. Like anything of the flavor of shells.
Hate. But when they're cooked too long in a cal sam or at all. Just hate. Okay, well, Nastasia is a low-quality individual here. Here's what you need lobster butter.
So you I typically you roast off the shells a little bit, right? You roast them off. Then you you you you toss it, you chop them up real small, you know, fine, cut them up real small so you get like fast extraction, and then you you throw it in with butter, and you can do it in the oven almost like you would for clarified. You can do it stovetop, you can do whatever you want. But you steep the shells, you could do it in a in a ziploc bag.
I've done that before. Um the problem with ziplocks and lobster shells is it's super easy to puncture the zippy, so then that's the one kind of reason that you don't necessarily want to bag this stuff out, but whatever. So you you kind of steep it for a long time, and that in the the butter will extract like a beautiful color from the shells, and you'll get beautiful flavor from it. Then you strain the whole sucker off, chill it, and then any scum that floats or any liquid that you somehow inadvertently left into the into the butter, you skim off beforehand, otherwise it won't keep, right? So you you chill it, you get rid of anything that's on the top or the bottom of it, and now you have like a solid chunk of lobster butter.
Roll that real tight, get rid of all the air, and you can freeze it to use for a long time. But the way that God wants you to use this lobster butter is making lobster rolls. Now, Nastasia, you're a hot lobster roll fan or a cold? Uh either. Matthew, you uh I do hot.
Yeah, me too. I like a hot lobster roll. And I like a hot lobster roll where it's just like a soft, almost like uh Martin's hot dog like split, but like the one with the flat sides, you know what I'm talking about? Not really Martin, you know the flat side hot dog buns, split, toasted, and then just toss big chunks of lobster meat. I like some tail, but you gotta have claw.
You gotta have claw in your in your lobster roll. You like claw sauce? Yeah, you gotta have claw, right, Matthew? Indeed. Yeah.
Make sure you have enough salt in there, and then toss that stuff in the lobster butter, put that on the bun, it's all you need. It's all you need. You don't need to gussy up your freaking uh lobster roll, people. All you need is butter, preferably lobster butter, chunks of lobster, and then uh on the on that bun, which I also like to toast off a little bit, and then man, the good news about that is you just cook more lobster, so now you have more tails to make more butter. Uh cooking issues.
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