Today's program is brought to you by Corin, supplier of Japanese chef knives and restaurant supplies. For more information, visit Corin.com. I'm HRN's communications director Kat Johnson with a preview of the next episode of Meet and Three, our weekly food news roundup. We're fresh off our trip to Slow Food Nations in Denver, a festival that brought together advocates to discuss the future of food. And this week we're bringing you a special episode inspired by the new Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Manifesto released by Slow Food USA.
If we're gonna solve food security, we need to say these people have a right to good healthful food. But we have to do that in a way that kind of insulates this system from the beggaries of the market. Because when you're at a table with somebody, you recognize their humanity. And when somebody cooks for you and serves you food, in a way they're saying they care about your survival. How can we put things into our own hands and have the people of Puerto Rico gain real access to healthy local foods?
Listen to Meet and Three this week for our highlights from Slow Food Nations. Available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live 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, Stas? Good. Yeah, got Dave in the booth. Good. Yeah, good.
Good. Yeah. Yeah. Calling all of your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.
Uh, Nastasia, I am decidedly getting old. Yeah. So, like, yeah, I mean, like, you know. You know, age ain't just a number. I was on bike today.
I was biking across the bridge. On bike. On bike. I was biking across the bridge. It is hot and nasty outside.
I'm wearing, of course, all black because I'm going to the bar after this, and our uniform is all black. I'm going over the Williamsburg Bridge, the wind blowing in my face. That's good at least. Well, no, it's like pushing me hot. Hot wind.
Hot wind bl like trying to stop me, acting as an air brake. And I said to myself, you know what? I could use an extra gear on my bike. You're getting old. Because I only have the one gear on my bike.
Uh-huh. And I was like, you know, who needs who needs more gears? What do you? What's wrong with you that you can't make it over the bridge with your puny legs? Yeah.
And I was going over the bridge. I was like, you know what? I don't have anything to prove. I could use another gear on this thing. So are you gonna put a gear on?
No. Uh-huh. No. That would require me to do it. That would require me doing something.
Yes. Doing something. You mean like dropping it off at a shop? Whoa, whoa, dropping off a shop. Since when do I have anyone do anything for him?
Yeah, yeah, I know. You know? The last time any every time I have somebody do something for me, how does it end up? Not the way you want it. Right, wrong.
Here's the thing. I'm okay with like. I'm okay. I'm actually not okay. I'm really cheap as Nastasi knows.
But like, if I spent money and like the stuff came back to me like better than I could do it, I'd be like, wow, you know what? That was worth it. But it's rare. It's so rare. Yeah.
Nastasia, tell tell me about it. Like when you spend money on other things for your business for a pasta flyer, how often are you like, that was money well spent? That person did an excellent job. It's not the money, it's giving it to somebody to an employee to do, and then you're like, oh my god, I gotta do it over again. Yeah.
That's the thing. Yeah. Well, but tell everybody how great my hospitality skills are. Yeah. So Nastasia, by the way, existed existing conditions, the bar has now been existing for uh this is our third week of existence.
Uh I took uh a couple hours off on Sunday. Whoa. You don't deserve that. I I did not do that for a while. You you never left.
I saw you leave the business. You were here when the business was open. Yeah, no, but I didn't take time off. I was only here. Okay, so I saw my son for two hours on Sunday, and I don't feel bad about it.
Literally, it's the only hours that we have been open that I wasn't at the space. Yeah. Like including prep. Okay, talk about my hospitality. Uh okay, okay, okay.
Less about me making fun of you and more about me. Uh so like everyone knows that Nastasia is uh uh hates people. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and is mean to people, right, Dave?
Uh I mean, yeah, from what I can see. Yeah. I mean, I mean, what I what I'm saying is is that I only see her an hour a week, though. So what I mean is is that her only joy in life is to extract pain from others. Well, that's usually you, so that's not really the full picture.
What do you mean? Extracting pain from me? Yeah. Well, it's just because she's around me more. Yeah.
You know what anyway. Right, and I'm only around you two together, so yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, point B. Uh, that, you know, and I've worked with her at many, many, many events. Many, many events, where she is intensely uh uh what's the word?
She's like, does not care, but like actively does not care about the welfare of the people at the event. Right? Actively doesn't give a crap whether you enjoy what she's doing or not. Really, beyond could care less about whether you like the cocktail or food or whatever, into I would I was what's the way active indifference, I would say. Yeah, uh, you know, bordering on smoldering hatred.
Bordering on hostility. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Bordering on hostility. And this has been my experience over the past ten years of how it's gonna be 10 in the next month, and we're gonna effing do something. Yeah, what are you guys doing for your anniversary?
I want to go to the champagne lounge at the top of Rockefeller Center. What? Yeah. Oh, yeah, you gotta guys gonna go for dinner and dancing? Uh no.
Um yeah, no, it's not gonna happen. Anyway, uh so point being that I was like, Nastasia is terrible at service because in general she is, right? Also, terrible at being a judge of whether she's gonna be good at something, but Nastasia, after going to friends and family, was like, there's no way they're gonna pull out of this in two days because this is such a this is such a poop toss. Yeah. Dave, stop clicking that pen.
Yeah. But we did, we didn't know. Already? Wow. Wow.
Anyway, uh, so Nastasia, and it pains me to say this, came in and did two shifts on the floor, and she did a good job. A great job. She did a good job. I was happy to have her there. That's so nice.
Why just describe how did she do it? First of all, she shows up day one. She there's a lot of things. I mean, look, if if we're gonna if you want me to be negative, because I clearly you do. No, I just wanted to.
If she tries to serve someone a cocktail to go. Oh. Like getting rid of our liquor license. No, no, no, bottle cocktail. Because we we give wine, closed wine at our restaurant.
You're not allowed to do that. Yeah, we looked it up. We'll we can talk after it. You're definitely not you're not a wine store. And I am definitely not like on Seamless, you can put your beer in the water.
If you sell it and you open it and they buy it and they want to take it home and then it's in a closed container. Yeah, no, she's saying it's not been opened. It's not you were definitely not allowed to sell an unopened bottle of wine to somebody. You you can sell you if you if they open the bottle and they want to take the rest home and they cork it and take it home. I think that's fine.
But you're just gonna look up the rules. You're definitely not a wine store. If you want a beer with your order, you can we put a beer. Look, I don't know how seamless does like the illegal crap that they do. Like, but the like think about it this way.
Are you a wine store? Can you have like just like a shelf of wines and someone walks in and says, Hey, I would like to buy wine from you, and you say, Okay, here is some wine to take to a party. No, you're not allowed to do that. That is what do we illegal in the state of New York. You know what I mean?
You can't do it. Anyway. I mean, I would love to do that. There's nothing I would love more than to sell cocktails to people so that they could go drink them on other people's property. But I can't do it.
I'm not allowed. Uh, what was the other thing that was hilarious? So she shows up, Dave, you'll appreciate this. She shows up in the you know requisite black uniform. Dress.
Dress. Dress is not the uniform, though. Just black. Black dress, yeah. No, not black dress, black.
I wore a black dress. You wore a black dress, but that's not the unit, whatever, anyway. It's like, I need a notepad. I had two. They saddled me with two parties, one in a fifteen, one of what your mom was like, you know, 28.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're gonna have to memorize the order. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So she's like, I need a notepad. We're like, fine, okay, notepad.
She's like, I'm gonna want both hands free. I'm going back to get a fanny pack. It was a black fanny pack. Literally goes out, shows up, wears a fanny pack. Wait, how does the fanny pack substitute for the notebook?
No, no, she can put the notebook hands free. I can carry more things. Oh, because you're wearing a dress and you didn't have pockets. Okay, I gotcha. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And then the next day I wore pants and it was fine. Crazy. All right.
So uh also, have you ever noticed, Nastasia, that you do a good job on the things you care about in a restaurant, and then the other stuff falls by the wayside. Isn't that true of everything though? Yeah, but what and we see this at events all the time. It's like the things that like impact on the guest experience, you just don't think about because you don't really think about them. Like to this day, three weeks later, there's still no signs on our bathrooms saying what the bathroom is.
And so, like, 30 times a day, I'm like, the bathroom's down there. And listen to this, this is the exact language I use. Both of those doors are bathrooms. The one that is uh straight ahead is intensely loud and we don't know how to fix it. Now think about that.
How many times have I said to guests, hey, those two things that are unlabeled, which we could easily label? Yeah, yeah. Are bathrooms. And the furthest one has a speaker, which is so loud as to be unpleasant. Probably in some way.
I mean, we could just shoot it. Like, I could just, I could just, I could just take a spike and run it straight through that freaking speaker and be done with it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like just obliterate it.
Just wipe that speaker off the face of the planet. Yeah. But yet I don't because if I have 35 seconds, I'm gonna make more strawberry juice. You know what I mean? It's like it's weird.
And like the other one, the one that I do care about is like, and I I looked at the uh there's a table here uh in front of us at Roberta's foretop. Stop with the phone that has an intense wobble to it. It's like super wobbly. Like the table in front of us, every time this lady lifts her elbow, the table moves like an inch. And it makes me so angry to have tables wobble, and yet the floor in our restaurant, in our bar, is so uneven that every table wobbles.
And then when you fix it, if they move it like half of an inch, it wobbles again. And do you know how it hurts me inside to see people with wobbly tables? So I tried to move to as many tripods as possible because everybody knows God invented the tripod so that it couldn't wobble. Tripods can't wobble. But what's the problem with the tripod, Nastasia?
I don't know what a tripod is. You don't know what a tripod is. You know what a pod, a foot tripod, three feet, three foot in the. Yeah, but what's a tripod table? A table that only has three supports on the ground.
Okay. They're inherently stable. Okay, like a tripod. Okay. Because you can't make a three legged thing wobble.
Okay, so what's the problem with it? The problem is is that on the side that has uh the one leg sticking out. If you lean on the corner hard, you'll flip the table. Right? So it is stable, but unstable on that side.
So here's my idea. You ready for it? You ready? Ready? Okay.
So you get a tripod table, and then off of the so the the two, the two sides of the of the bottom of the triangle are towards two corners. And then you have the centerpiece going off towards one side, right? So now you have a big tipping moment there on those two corners that are on that one side. You understand what I'm saying? You see where I'm going, Stas?
Okay, okay. Now, off of that tripod, you have little outriggers that come out but don't touch the floor. They hover like an inch above the floor. Normally, sucker won't tip at all. But then if someone's like, I'm gonna get up, and then they press on the side of the table, it'll just move like like a half of an inch until that outrigger hits the floor, and then the table's like, I got you drunk D-Bag.
You know what I mean? Yeah. Did somebody flip a table? Oh, not yet, because we didn't have tripod. We don't have many many tripod tables because we're worried about some drunk person flipping the flipping the table.
What do you think? Yeah, that's a good idea. Or someone out there, they make these things, Nastassi, called auto-levelers garbage. Garbage. Whoever invented that thing and sold it to people should be taken like out behind the woodshed.
Like, you know what I mean? It's like they they just don't work. So yesterday I was on the beach and I was enjoying myself, and then Booker calls me from work. My son Booker. From work.
From work. And you know, there's like five managers there. Needed me. And was like by the way, Booker refers to Nastasia Lopez as Roz from Monsters Inc. What?
Do you got your papers, Mike Wizaski? It's so hard to be angry when he says that. This is so funny. Um so he calls me and he said, a man just said, You're irritating me, kid, a customer. And he said, It made me really sad.
And I was like, it's okay. Old men are mean sometimes. All the time. Yeah. All the time.
Yeah. But what about my that makes me sad? I'll tell actually I won't tell Jen. That'll make her sad. Yeah, don't.
I'm not gonna tell Jen. So but it's hopefully she never listens to the show. Of course not. Can't imagine why she would. I mean, she hasn't seen me in the past month, so maybe she would listen to it to remember that she has a husband, but like uh other than that, uh, not the way she would want to remember you, though, I would think.
What? I'm not being mean. No, I just mean in general. Oh. Uh your cooking issues persona.
Like cooking issues. There is no cooking issues persona. Oh, that's true, actually. I'm like this all the time. Anyway, registers?
Yep. Anyway, so my favorite booker at work story is this one. Uh Nastasia tells me that first of all, Nastasia to troll me makes Booker need to get to work at 8 a.m. to sell ice cream sandwiches on the street. Even though it guarantees I will never see anyone in my house.
Oh, oh. Anyway, so like, so she has him out there selling ice cream sandwiches, and uh Gothamus wrote him up, put a picture of them on the on the internets, which I thought was very nice. And then uh Nastasi's standing next to him texting on her phone, as she does, like for instance, I don't know, on this radio show. And at this very moment. At this very second.
Actually, she's not right now. She's just sitting down. I think she's too tired from driving to text her driving. Yeah, she's too zoned out. But um, he goes, Hey, get away from me.
You're hurting my business. Uh so proud. So good. Not a boy. I'm like, you know what?
You know what, son? Love you. You know what I mean? Yeah. All right.
Not a boy. Here we go. Focused on the bottom line. Yeah, we have a question from uh Yvonne. He writes in and uh he goes, I'm a bartender working in London that will be stopping in New York on my way back from Tales.
Oh, he's sitting in the restaurant right now. It's the guy in the orange shirt. Yeah. He's like, I've met Dave, meaning me, different times in London Edinburgh. I was wondering if it's possible to attend cooking issues while it's being made.
He's right there. I'm waving to him as I'm speaking to him, but he doesn't know. No, he's on the listening live. Oh, how do they do that? I imagine I see headphones in their ears.
Oh. It's an experience I would very much value and joy. I don't know if Dave and Nastasi allow this. About what? Like about what?
Be here, in here, or out there. I don't know. Anyway, my point being that they brought me some very nice toffee. He remembers that I like to like toffee, Stas? Like English toffee.
The hard stuff. You don't have enough of an I mean, it's a delicious candy. Why don't we sell that stuff here? I don't know. Because we have the Werther's originals.
That's not the same. Worders original is like not even close to a real English toffee. People, any British style folk out there, why don't we have just like oodles and oodles of traditional British toffee? You know what I'm talking about, Dave? Nope.
Oh my god. Do you like caramels? Craft caramels. Do you like them? Yeah, sure.
Okay. Imagine if they tasted better and were much harder. Would you like that? Yeah, sure. You guys are the worst.
Seriously, if we are. Um. Uh okay. The meatball flyer. Oh, someone wrote in about the meatball flyer.
This is Ken. The meatball flyer reminds me of when I was in Brooklyn College in the late 60s and early 70s. There were two barbershops across the street from each other, not far from college. Each charged a buck and a quarter for a haircut. For no reason, one put up a sign saying haircuts 115.
Shortly, uh the other sign had haircuts at 110, down, down, down, down to 60 cents. Then the other side, other haircut sign put up uh uh back to a buck 25 and said we repair 60 cent haircuts. It's Canberra. You like that? Can I tell you a finance story real quick?
Okay. Uh for those of you that don't know this. I used to be fascinated with the history of robber barons in uh New York, financial robber barons in New York in the 1800s. Real wild west time here when uh it was even easier than it is today to pay off politicians. Wait, before you go on, can you tell your story about Uncle Diamond after this?
Which which story about Uncle Diamond? The bank, the money. Oh, I didn't I tell that on air before? No. We should get to some cookings.
Look up the uh I you said you sent me the old questions, and you didn't. I don't have the old questions on this, and I don't have my iPads. You look up the old questions and we'll deal with those in a second. But to finish, there's a guy named Jay Gould and Diamond Jim Fisk, who bought the uh Erie Railroad in the 1800s, and it was uh competitor to Commodore Vanderbilt's railroad. Commodore Vanderbilt's railroad eventually became the railroad that comes in and out of Grand Central Station that we use today as Metro North, among other things.
Uh so they were shipping cattle uh up the line in boxcars. And so they started to have a price war. They're like, hey, Commodore Vanderbilt was like, I'm gonna run these sons of you know, sons of guns out of business. I'm dropping the price of taking uh, you know, a load of cattle from like I don't know what it was, like ten bucks to like eight bucks. Jay Gould comes back, you know, seven bucks, six bucks, finally it goes down.
Vanderbilt's like, I'm shipping any cattle, any cattle, on my railroad for a dollar, a dollar a box cart. Instantly, Jay Gould and Jim Fist put their price back up to what it used to be. And Vanderbilt's like, these sons are gonna be out of business in a week. And I'm gonna take over the railroad. This is how monopolies are supposed to work.
This is before monopolies were illegal. Turns out Jay Gould had bought every head of cattle on one end of the line and shipped it for free and made a fortune off of Commodore Vanderbilt's railroad. Boom boom, boom. And that, my friends, is how the robber barons used to do business. Of course, they also crushed the little people.
Okay, tell the other story. Which one? Your Uncle Diamond. Which one? The money in the bank with the ants.
Oh, geez, this is not cooking related. Just do it. It's good. Okay, okay. You got some cooking questions for me?
I forward them to you. Why don't you just read them? I will. Get ready to read them. Okay, so Uncle Diamond, Crazy Uncle Diamond, crazy Uncle Diamond, never had a social security number, never paid taxes in his life, kind of had jobs, uh, was like a kind of a strange kind of a uh, you know, old school, like uh Italian ladies' man, jewelry guy.
Uh jewelry guy. So he used to do all of his work off the books because of course he didn't have a social security number and he never paid taxes in his life. So he always lived on the fringes of American society in Boston. And he never had a bank account because in order to have a bank account, you needed to have a social security number, right? So he goes to, he's my stepfather's uncle.
He goes to uh the aunts. His one was his sister and the other two were cousins. These three aunts never married anyone. We called them the three, you know, you know, made uh old made aunts. They lived together until they died, until they all died.
And they were classic old school, like Italian, unmarried, like you know, they used to cook me like uh a pound of bacon and then fry like a dozen eggs in that pound of bacon and make me eat it all. Like old school, good stuff. Uh and they go, they go, they're like, they're like, he's like, hey aunties, I can't get a bank account. Take my money and put it in the bank account so I can save it up and take a trip to Florida, right? So he's like giving them money, money, money, money, all this money, all this money, putting it in the bank account.
Now the aunts also never had a job, so they would constantly steal from Uncle Diamond's safe deposit box, constantly steal from it, steal, steal, steal, until there was like nothing left in Uncle Diamond's safe deposit box. Of course, he doesn't know because it's not in his name. He can't go get the money. So one day, he thinks he has like thousands of dollars in here. He's gonna go have some sort of like, you know, tour it affair in Florida.
He's like, hey, Annette, I'm gonna need to go to Florida. Can you go get me my money? And they're like, oh my god, oh my god, there's no more money left in the bank. Oh, geez, oh my god. In the Medford Savings Bank, right?
God, God was looking on the aunts that day, and right after Uncle Diamond requested his money that they had diligently stolen, right? There was for the first time in history, a bank robbery of the safe deposit boxes in the Medford Savings Bank, and it was one of the biggest safe deposit heists of all times. Now, here's the kicker. Here's the kicker. The way that the thieves did it is they is they broke into the vault, into the safe deposit vault, and they started taking the safe deposit boxes from the top, pulling them out, dumping the contents, and dropping them on the floor.
So everyone on the top half of the safe deposit boxes had everything taken. And everything on the bottom half of the safe deposit boxes on the floor, right? All of their safe deposit boxes were safe because they were covered by the empty safe deposit boxes, and they needed to get out of there, right? So here's the funny part. Guess where Uncle Diamond's safe deposit box was?
On the bottom. On the bottom. But he didn't know because he'd never visited it. So the aunts were like, oh diamonds! Oh no, diamond!
The safe, it's all gone. It's all gone. So that's how the aunts were saved by the people that robbed the Medford Savings Bank. That's so good. It's good times.
Like you only get that lucky once in your life. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Alright, give me some food questions. Uh Japanese knives.
Did we do this one? No. Okay. Well, that's convenient since Corin was our sponsor today. Wondering if you could break down recommendations on Japanese knives.
I'm in Japan right now and I'm overwhelmed by choices. What sort of style shapes do you use? A higher carbon steel, are higher carbon steels worth the trouble? Thanks, Russ. Okay.
So when you're dealing with the everything depends on what you mean by Japanese knife, right? So in general, there mean I haven't been current in a long time. But in general, there are uh by the way, Joel Joel Gargano stopped by with his wife at the at the shape. Anyway, uh, there are three main styles that you want to contend with. Um I guess there are Japanese manufacturers who make traditional Western style knives, but I'm just gonna talk in general.
So you got your your Western style knives, which is your Germans, your French style knives, uh, which are both different from each other. Anyway, then you have your Japanese Western knives, uh, which I find actually like they're nice, they have very thin blades. Um I find them a little bit irritating because uh they're they don't have an even bevel on the bottom. Like typically, and maybe they've changed some of the makers now, but typically if you look at a German or a French knife, both sides of the knife are beveled equally, right? So you have the angle that the main blade makes going down, which is very, very, very steep angle, like very steep because they're you know some you know thin.
Then at the very edge of the blade where you cut, uh it is a m a much shallower angle, and that's the actual angle of the cutting edge. Now, if you were to cut the knife down the center and look at it, right? On in a German uh or a French knife, both of those bevels on both sides are gonna be the same, i.e., the angle is the same. I find these to be easy to sharpen because you only ever have to remember and find one angle, and your hand can easily just find that angle and do it time and time again because eventually it will sharpen to the angle that you choose. And depending on the quality of the steel, right, you can sharpen at a steeper or steeper angle and therefore have a sharper or sharper edge.
The the danger of sharpening too steep, obviously, is that the edge becomes so thin and brittle that it breaks very quickly, and then you can get large chips in your blade and it becomes very problematic. Okay. Uh better steels, better and better steels uh make things better and better, so you can get uh thinner and thinner edges. In addition, old school Japanese knives, right? More on this in a second, have different kinds of steel, so you can have a very um you can have one kind of steel making the the inside of the knife, which gives it kind of toughness, and then you can have a harder steel on the outside, which retains its edge better.
Well, whatever. So the in a Japanese Western knife, you have two different, typically, you have two different bevels, right? And that's because they're a hybrid between a Japanese uh knife and a Western knife. I find the two different bevels to be intensely irritating and without any help. Uh, because it just means I have to remember like why why would I want like 15% 15% of the bevel on one side and 85% on the other?
Oh, they're also spec'incredibly in an in an incredibly irritating way. So you have in a German or French knife, you just specify the sharpening angle, right? In a Japanese Western knife, you specify the ratio between the two, and you almost never specify. So the bevel's 85% on one side, and you very rarely specify what that angle is, right? Um, you know, 15, 17, 18 degrees, whatever you're you're sharpening to.
Anyway, so traditional Japanese, and by the way, Japanese Western knives very can of varying quality, but can be intensely awesome. And most people I know uh rock Japanese Western knives. They love them. I am the outlier in this. Um, and you can also sharpen a Japanese Western knife in the Western style.
You can make it into an equal bevel so if you should so choose, because in general the knife blanks are symmetric. Um Japanese Western knives are also typically can be a hybrid between a French shape and uh more traditional Japanese shape, or you can get ones that are more traditionally shaped, like a French knife with the you know, the belly or German knife with the belly and everything. Anyway, traditional Japanese knives are much thicker, so the back of the knife is much, much thicker, much, much thicker. They're heavier and they come down uh in a straight, heavy line, and then abruptly cut in at an angle like a chisel and are sharpened basically 100% on one side of the knife. So they're sharpened like a chisel.
I find that they are extremely sharp when they're done well, and they are extremely easy to sharpen. They are much easier to sharpen than a Japanese Western knife, and I find them much easier to touch up than a uh a German or a French style knife. I love them. Now, that said, uh those kinds of knives require uh almost daily uh touch-ups. So like if you're using a traditional Japanese knife, uh I touch it up before I use it every time I use it.
Now, do I touch up my Germans and my French every time I use it? No, I touch up my German and my French knives maybe every third or fourth time that I use it. And it's true that it doesn't take me that long to touch up uh a um a German or French knife, but the Japanese knives, traditional Japanese knives, because of the single bevel, it's very easy to tell that you're at the correct angle and that you're touching it up properly, and it sharpens very quickly. So you just take and you make uh the edge on the bevel and then you turn it around and just knock the burr off and the suckers like like razor sharp. I love them.
Now, I have only ever owned the uh the regular kind of uh carbon steel easy to stain knives of the traditional Japanese, and I still like them because you I think with a knife like this that you're intended to touch up every time you use it, they're not meant to be low maintenance knives. So to get one that's stainless and to pretend that you're gonna get good qu cutting quality out of it if you're just gonna put it in a drawer and leave it and abuse it and like not touch it up, is not getting the most out of that kind of a knife. So it never bothered me that I didn't have any of the stainless or any of that stuff. I just got a very from Corinne actually, Dave, going back to our sponsor, like uh their like kind of entry-level high quality, uh, because I didn't need all the bells and whistles or like the nicest uh you know, the nicest handle or anything like that, or the nicest saya cover. I got their lowest uh level of high quality uh Japanese traditional knives, and I would go for get a Yanagi because you will regret not having a Yanagi, which is the long slicer.
Get a long one. Like, like, why the hell would you want a short slicer? Because the entire point of a Japanese slicing knife, a Yanagi, is that you take your cut in a single draw. One draw. One anyone, anyone who sits there sawing at fish should be punished.
I don't know what kind of punishment you would give them. Or tomatoes. Or tomato, right. Well, you don't like to see saw marks in your stuff, right? Nastasia, believe it or not, although she hates many things, does not hate sushi, is a connoisseur of sushi joints here in the city, goes out to sushi joints.
I think it's the only thing she and Mark like to do together. I think yeah. Jeez. I mean, that's fair, right? Yeah.
So, like, if someone sat there, if you saw like the sushi chef like go back on their stroke with the Yanagi, I mean, you just get up and leave, right? You're like, what the hell's wrong with this person? No? Mm-hmm. Anyways, so uh long, right?
Then uh I like uh Adeba. I like it a lot. Uh so that's the shorter one that it has like a like a kind of like a big belly, it's like a fish butchering knife. I use it for a lot of stuff. I like it a lot.
I'd get one of those. Uh and if you have the extra money, it's nice to have an Usuba, the vegetable knife, which looks like a cleaver but is not. That's the thing that some jackweed at the French Culinary Institute picked, took mine out of my kit, out of our uh office, which was in a garbage room. It was a garbage room, took mine out of it, use it as a cleaver. Took the entire edge out of it, so it was like looked like it looked like the moon, like like half moons taken out of my edge, then put it back in my kit wet so that it was rusted and ruined.
And if I ever find you, I will embed that knife in your forehead. Like, don't why would anyone pick up somebody's knife? Especially a knife they don't know how to use. You know what I mean? Do you just walk out into the street and be like, oh, baby, this is a zip car?
I'll take it somewhere. No, you don't. Why would you pick up somebody's knife out of the kit? It's not like I left it on the counter and was like, oh, this person doesn't care. This is look, every kitchen, listen, people who have kitchens, every kitchen should have an assortment, uh, assortment of beaters, right?
And like, by the way, when I say beater, I mean beater knives. Everyone should have some beater knives lying around. And if you don't have a knife with you, if you're not like a cook who's brought their own knives or whatever, then you gotta use the beaters, right? And the cutting quality is what the cutting quality is. It's a beater knife.
Nobody cares about it. That's why it's called a beater, right? But don't pick up anyone's real freaking knife, right? Uh part of it is on you people. If you don't have beaters in your kitchen, somebody's gonna sneak into your kit and take your knife.
But don't ever break into somebody's kit. So evil bastards. Anyways. Uh uh take a break and then take a goal. The reason we don't let people in sit in on the studio randomly if they're in town, is because Heritage is a nonprofit, and we sell the studio time for a lot of money.
Well, I think we sell ourselves. I did not know that. If you want to sit in the studio, talk about or ask us about how much it costs. Yeah, money talks. Wait, were you singing some sort of ACDC song?
Love me for the Money. It's a good song. Money Talks. Back more. Cooking issues.
Today's program is brought to you by Corrin, supplier of Japanese chef knives and restaurant supplies. Corrin is proud of their Japanese culture and traditions, but they want you to know that their products are not just for Japanese restaurants. Their knives and tableware bring out the best qualities of food from every culture and fit into every restaurant, from French to Pan Asian to American. And that is why they're located in New York City, where people from every country in the world come to eat. Corrin's unique store in Lower Manhattan is home to perhaps the most extensive collection of Japanese chef knives in the world, including Japan, plus the rarest natural sharpening stones and exquisitely designed tableware.
They also host special events such as knife sharpening demonstrations and parties with New York's most famous chefs and restaurateurs. Corrin is dedicated to this ideal, bringing the implicit and elegance of Japanese culture to your table, be it in your home or in the finest restaurant. For more information, visit Corrin.com. I think I asked you this before, is that the molecules on that? Yeah.
Yeah, of course. So uh some molly Jackie Molecules came to the bar the other day. I like the way he says Japanese. Japanese. Uh speaking of which, you know, we use Corrin's wine glasses at at the bar.
Oh, that's lovely. Because the cocktail kingdom does not make uh those. Hey, you gotta talk into the mic, Dave. Oh, really? Yeah, there you go.
All right. So Stas, what is your n what is your name? We have a color, right? Oh, we have a caller? Yeah, we do.
Caller on the air. Hey, how you doing? I'm good, how are you? Good, good. Um, so listen, I wanted to make the flat leaf for a crowd.
Sure. Uh and I wanted to see what your I don't know how well the blender modeling goes when you scale it up. Okay, uh, so the flat leaf is when we made the flat leaf, I can't remember whether I used acid OJ in that or whether I used actual sour orange juice in that. We had a said you can do either in the book basically the book says either lime juice or uh acidified OJ. Yeah.
So you definitely with the parsley want um OJ, so you can either do acid OJ or you could get sour oranges. At uh Booker and Dax, we put a variant of that on the menu called the parsley situation, which was with actual like Seville oranges, uh and which are sour and delicious and they're not that bitter. And um because the bartenders made me do it, they put a little bit of um a green Tabasco in it, I think was what they put into it, some sort of green based hot sauce. Uh just FYI. Now, uh parsley is a relatively stable herb, so it will last uh with blender modeling.
The problem with parsley as opposed to um other herbs, and I've I've noticed this, is by the way, there's a huge difference we've been noticing recently um between uh muddling curly and flat leaf. So all of my original recipes are made with uh flat leaf, which even though people sa some people have always said that curly parsley tastes more than has more flavor than flat leaf, but in our experience of uh muddling, nitrile muddling, we if you need to add more green, uh but you don't want more parsley flavor, add curly because it adds less of that kind of like that bitter back that parsley has uh versus the flat leaf. So all of my old recipes are written with flat leaf parsley in mind. The one problem with flat leaf parsley, even though it's a relatively robust herb and doesn't brown out or oxidize that quickly, so it can be blender muddled effectively. The problem with it is that it also settles out of solution much faster than let's say Thai basil does or Yeah, I noticed I made one uh over the weekend and I noticed that actually.
Yeah, so you have to constantly uh resuspend it. So um I have never done a test on whether the second time around it settles faster. Uh but mixed herbs, so I and I I don't know why parsley settles so much faster. Maybe it's because the leaves are so much heavier, and I also don't know whether curly leaf uh settles less quickly than uh flat leaf does. These are all things that bear experimentation.
But the current drink we have on the menu um at existing conditions, uh nitro muddle drink, is with uh celery leaves and parsley, and it does not settle out that fast, but it does brown rather quickly. I think the celery leaves must brown rather quickly because that sucker browns. I tried to keep one for an hour because we were making so many of them that it was becoming problematic for our bartenders. Um and I wasn't able to successfully keep it for two hours. I could probably keep it for like, you know, half hour or something like this.
But parsley itself should be robust. Have you noticed whether re like shaking it, does it make it better or no? Uh well, I only made it a couple. I was just like uh doing a little bit of a test batch. Uh so I made I only made two uh and I so I didn't really uh A B it.
Yeah. Well what I'm saying is that like I would try to I would make two again, put them in a bottle, let it sit an hour, and then shake it and see whether if you shake the bottle before you pour it and shake it on ice, if it comes back. You know what I mean? Like if it if it comes back to where it is, or whether it's like kind of perma-settled out. And the the reason it could perma settle out is there could be something uh there could be something with parsley that I don't know about.
I mean I doubt it, but there could be something with parsley I don't know about where the leaves not only settle but reagglomerate, right? So if they because Thai basil or the other basils don't settle as much, they don't ever touch each other as hard. Maybe they don't agglomerate, but if maybe if they were to settle on the bottom, they would turn into uh a puck that's harder to resuspend. I don't know. Um but yeah, I mean uh it's shocking straight parsley.
It's shocking how fast it settles out, like 10 minutes. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean mine settled out in the course of uh the time it took me to take to drink the drink, and I don't take that long to drink a drink, so yeah. That's why uh I can't remember in the book uh whether or not I added any auxiliary herbs, but it helps to add um auxiliary herbs. I've also never added any sort of stabilizer to it to try to see whether or not I could stabilize parsley.
Uh in general, you know, I've kind of shied away from putting stabilizers in drinks. I did some tests years and years ago with uh making uh Xanthan syrups. Uh the idea being to try to like not a lot of Xanthan, a little bit of Xanthan, right? Not so that it tastes snotty, but just to add a little more of uh texturizing um such that it would hold air longer to try to prolong the life of a shake and drink. And I was, shall we say, unsuccessful because um what happens is is it the effect isn't very noticeable on the front end, but the last couple sips of the drink are clearly not as pleasant as they would have been had you not added the Xanthan to it.
Um but it might help parsley settling, I don't know. I don't know, these are all interesting. Did you do like uh could you do like a Houstino style where you hit the whole like say you like you did like 750 uh gin with uh parsley and then spin it out with that work? Well, the color, as you probably remember, the color of it after it settles is not the greatest. You know what I mean?
Um and I don't remember how much of the flavor is present after the settling. Has a very light green, uh has a very, very light green. I can't remember how brown it is after it settles, once it's sitting in the bottle. I mean, look, everything's worth trying. Um I have tried nitrumdling and spinning out herbs before, and I have never had a fantastic result, but I've never tried it with, let's say, excess herbs, right?
Um I have I think tried it with ascorbic acid and it hasn't helped out much, like trying to like prevent the browning um over time. But that's a lot with like uh I most of my experiment spare experiments. Most of my experiments are with very fragile herbs like mint, which I just I just never can get mint to last. There's just nothing I can do that makes mint last. Fresh mint.
I know that other people do it. I just I just can't do it. I've just never made something off light. Right. Okay.
I will uh I will try some things and I'll uh let you know how it goes. Yeah, let me know. Okay. How was it? He loved it.
He learned to sail these little dingies who's sailing around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, the next question. Okay. Um hello all.
First, thank you for creating such an informative program. Second, I have a couple questions for you guys. Nastasia, have you had one? Oh, Jesus. Did you see what it's like, Nastasia?
Now now that you're talking to you, it's like that's okay. And Sassy, have you had to deal with a lot of sexist BS in your culinary ventures? And if so, what do you think about it? Or what do you do about it? Two, for any and all of you, I've been cooking for myself since I was went vegetarian over 16 years ago at the rebellious age of twelve.
This past winter I took a personal chef gig and loved it. I'd like to expand this personal chef career and I want to know if culinary school would absolutely require eating, tasting. Oh, yeah. That one we answered. We didn't answer the first part because you said I have too much to talk about.
So go. Oh no, I just yeah, sex is BS, yes. Uh that's real informative their stuff. I mean, I've been called the C word a bunch of times. I've done that.
Don't don't say that on it. Um I've been told I've been asked you are you as cold in bed as you are in person. Um I've been propositioned by people we know. Um Yeah. It sucks.
I've been treated differently when like there's a same question asked by a guy that I'll ask or but what do I do about it? I hold it all in so I can blackmail them someday. But you're not even doing it. You're not even I guess blackmailing it's a it's a long time. It's a long, it's a long game.
No, but so how mu how much of it like is like do you see a difference between just being excluded? In other words, like this the blatant like I'm saying something horrible to you versus just being like excluded from the places that you should be granted entry to. In other words, in terms of like the seat at the table, the uh being treated as an equal, etc. etc. Like, is there a difference between those two in your mind?
Is it all the same? There's a difference between what's worse. Not being seated at the table. I can take the like word abuse. You know, so I'm not gonna name any names here, but Nasta uh people that we all know, people that everyone listening to this knows, right?
Like uh have said extraordinarily inappropriate things to Nastasia that she has told me about that I a hundred percent believe. Uh and the funny thing and not funny, but the the thing about it is that um yeah, you know that that kind of stuff's not gonna work on Nastasia just 'cause the kind of person she is. Because she's like, what? No. Jerk.
You know what I mean? But like the fact of the matter is, is like people shouldn't have to be like you to not have that not be affected by that stuff. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Like people shouldn't have to be Nastasia Lopez to not fall sway to like the ridiculous propositions. But I think the way the way I am, like, you're always like, you're so mean, you're so like it's the buildup of callus and like, you know from all this crap. I'd rather be like this than be like, what did he say to me? No, but so you wait, so you think it's just you've ingrained it into your life. What?
Yeah. What? Super sweet. When uh you're like exactly 10 years ago before I started working with you. No, more like 12 years ago.
Yeah, so I just missed the sweet. Yeah. Just missed it. Oh, nice. Well, you were like, We were in that anti-Semitic van together.
I was pretty normal. Wait, what? That's how we met. You know this, Dave. I don't know this.
Nastasia and I met, started working together, in fact, because we bonded over being trapped in a van in the dark with a rabid anti-Semite. It sounds like a Seinfeld episode. It wasn't in the dark, Dave. It was in the morning. In the dark in the dark.
It was a dark van. It was a dark van. My vision was going dark and I was like, What did he just say? He was busting. He was like, I didn't know Nastasia from a hot rock.
And she was there and like helping me load in, and she clearly did not want to help me load in. Like Cesare Casella had invited us, who Nastasia used to work for, uh, invited us to do an event at his farm. The farm he where he, you know, he, you know, special needs. Great place, Thanksgiving farm uh at the Center for Discovery up in Hurleville. Great nonprofit work for you know uh people with multiple disabilities, including autism.
Great place. Uh and uh so he invites me up there and he's like, Che, ma, che, ma, Nastasia, Dave, he can't do anything, he can't do anything right. Go help him load. Right? Basically.
And so she comes in and she's like, I gotta help this freaking Jamok, Dave, whose head's not screwed on, who I don't know, never met, load in. So I'm there, we're loading all the garbage in. And we get stuck in this van together. And I'm my sense, by the way, this is my sense of most people. My sense is this lady does not want to talk to me at all.
She wants zero to do to me with me. She's doing this as a favor for her ex-boss Cesare, and then I will never speak to this person again in my life. And then and then all of a sudden, this guy, this driver, talks about how he's an ex cop. He you know had guns and all this other stuff, and he busts out of those people. He busts out of those people on Jews.
And I just turn around and I'm like, and then that happened. You know what I mean? And that's how we met. Yeah officially. Because otherwise, we never would have talked again.
And then we spent the next like like eight hours at the event being like, did that just happen? You know what I mean? Yeah. That'll bring people together. Yeah.
Yeah. Nothing like nothing like a crazy person to bring people together. Little did I know Nastasi's own fluid said ten. And here we are, ten years later. Ten years later.
And that doesn't get a lot of. What do you get each other? Nastasia just told you she's gonna. He's gonna buy me champagne. I'll buy him champagne.
We'll be even. Okay, cool. Great. Super. Dinner and dancing.
No. Anyway. Alright, was that the last question? Oh, you got time for one more? Now she's looking it up.
Like one more. I don't feel like you gave enough uh like I don't think you gave enough of an answer on that about like I don't think women should I think you should try to blackmail as much as you can. What the hell kind of advice is this? Because first of all, blackmail is oh, what's the word I'm looking for? Illegal.
So like Yes, you're not allowed to blackmail people. That's not officially crime, though. Yeah. You can be charged with blackmail? I think so.
No. No, no, no. Someone in the chat room. Stuff's illegal. No.
Not to mention unethical. I feel like somebody would look the other way though if you're like, you know, putting up with sexual. I also have a lot of crosses. Well, I have a few crosses in my wallet. Do you guys know about the sign of the cross?
We talked about that on air. What? Have we talked about the sign of the cross on air? Go do. My stepfather's father, the butcher, who I've talked about on air past last year, and uh past meats died.
And um he used to say, he used to be like, once he was done with someone, once someone shafted him to the extent that he's like he's like never wanting to speak to them again, never want anything to do with him, he would say, That's it. Sign of the cross. And he would take a piece of paper and he would draw a cross on the piece of paper, fold up the paper, put it in his wallet, and that's it. You're dead to him. Whoa.
So I told Nastasia this, and that's like her favorite thing. Yeah. But she's not as hardcore as Gerard's dad. Like she will eventually sometimes forgive and or lose a piece of paper. I've heard of something similar.
Like freezing somebody out, you write their name on a piece of paper and then like put it in water, put it in the freezer, and like make it an ice cube. Really? Nice. It's like some voodoo. But the two crosses I had, terrible things happen to them.
So it works. The other one that you have to use, the like there's a lot of cross, there's a lot of cross things in the family. The other one is whenever someone's bothering you, you have to say, Imatazio Christi and you hold your arms out because you're like, Stop crucifying me. I like that. Yeah.
I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's a good family to be a good family to be a part of. All right, that's all the time because the other question is really long.
What's it about? What backyard cooking equipment should they get if they buy a house? Well, if you buy a house, you should. Here's the thing. I've said this many, many times before.
Um He likes the idea of getting a walk station, Tandoor. By the way, Chris Young said, uh we have that still have that question on pickles that we haven't freaking answered yet. I know. And Chris said, just schedule it and I'll call in. And guess what I didn't do?
Schedule it. Schedule it. So maybe next week we'll schedule it uh along who else do we have? Who do we have on the show next week? We have uh Applewood meat vending machine, man.
I like the I like So I'm gonna look up this meat vending machine, and then we're just gonna like either like or go to town on the idea of vending. He's gonna is he gonna bring the meat vending machine? No. Okay, okay. Uh so back to what you should get for your outdoor thing.
What you should get for your outdoor uh thing is as much crap as you could possibly get, right? So I ha I don't actually use my tandoor as much as I used to, but it completely changed the way I cook. So having had a tandoor has made me, I think, a different and better cook for large parties. And I'll write about it in the book if I ever write the book, right? Stas Stas is shaking her head.
Uh but um having a tandoor, I think, is great practice uh for other things. I love having the tandoor. Uh uh, just as physically like you want, it depends. Are are you gonna cook for large groups or are you gonna cook for small groups? An outdoor fryer just completely is amazing.
Like having an outdoor fryer is just the best because everybody likes fried foods. Not everybody eats fried foods, but everybody likes fried foods. Do you trust someone who doesn't like fried fruits and stuff? No, because they're stupid, right? They're bad.
Anyway. Uh, outdoor fryer. Wiley likes, he has the Cajun Fryer, he likes it. My one gripe with the Cajun Fryer is it does not have a uh thermostat on it. Um, I don't know if you could retrofit it.
It's dangerous to retrofit gas things, but that said, I have done it many times. Um, and having uh you might want to have a relatively small grill to work with if you're only cooking for one or two people, but having a very large grill, like cowboy style grill, I have a cheap one which gets beat up very easily, but I got it at the Home Depot for like less than I got it for like 130 or 140 dollars, and I've cooked food for 25 people on it, like you know, all at the same time by using the off-on, off on method. I'm a big that that's what the Tandor taught me. I do almost all of my grilling now with the off-on, off-on method. Whether or not I do a pre-cook or not, off on, off on, off on.
And it just makes my cooking so much faster and more consistent. Uh, so I like it. But anyway, that's what I do for outdoor cooking. We'll come back, we'll try to get Chris Young, we'll have some meat vending machines next week on cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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