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This week on Meet and Three, we're bringing you highlights from Feast Portland, like our chat with the one and only Andrew Zemmern. I'm super excited to be here because for people who do what I do for a living, we do tons of, you know, desk side chats and podcasts and interviews and stuff like that. And you circle the handful of ones on a year where you get to talk with people that you're really excited about, talking with. So this is this is awesome. We picked up on some recurring themes while talking to our impressive roster of guests, including the current state of Portland's food scene, personal identity, and believe it or not, the influence of great chef's grandmothers.
Mima never touched a droppable booze in her life and now has a distillery named after her. But I grew up in her garden and just really she taught me all good things come from scratch, and women can be anyone they want to be. So tune in for this week's extra special episode. Subscribe to Meet and Three wherever you get your podcasts. Coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every well, not every, right?
We've been gone for a long time, but most Tuesdays from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick Brooklyn. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. But sad news for some cooking issues uh or cooking issues listeners out there. Dave in the booth is no longer Dave in the booth. Dave in the booth has left Heritage Radio Network.
Yep. Today, we have Matt in the booth. Matt Patterson, how are you doing? Matt, who's dropping? I just dropped the microphone the minute you said my name.
Hello. Yeah, but like dropped it in like a I'm out boo. But it was like I was supposed to be I'm I'm in. That's not that doesn't work. Did I tell you, uh, did I ever tell you about my uh my business idea that I'm never gonna do?
Go. Probably not, because we just met him. Uh well no, but he's done the show before. Oh, really? Yeah.
I didn't look at his face. Oh, good job, Nastasia. Nastasia's like, I'm gonna pass by and not even look at their face. Just run by as quick as you can. Yeah, every every show people get a little bit more of an insight into Nastasia Lopez.
So, uh, so anyway, so the idea is is you have these um uh little mics that you carry around with you, microphones, and it's just like the foam head and the bass, and it's just got like a one-time use button cell battery in it, like the ones that greeting cards have, right? Uh-huh. And a tiny accelerometer. You just carry this in your inside jacket pocket, and then when it comes when you have a mic drop moment, you pull it out, and you you like as you pull it out, you like engage it, and then you just drop it. When you drop it, it goes poof, woo, and you just walk away from it.
What do you think? Never to return. Like you leave it there, you're done. You leave it there, you're done. That's amazing.
Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That kind of price. You just have it in your hand, you have it in your pocket all the time, pull it out. Poof.
Woo! New York City would just be littered with microphones. Yeah, right. Because you could use it anywhere. You could use it like, you know, whatever.
You're sitting at a table, someone says something stupid, you have the sweet come back, drop the mic, go to the bathroom, and then walk out. Leave them with the check. Crap on 'em. You got a mic drop moment. You know what I mean?
Every time I quit a job, mic drop. Oh, yeah, hell yeah. Hell yeah. You know what my uh like my dream way to quit a job back when I used to have jobs? What do you have now?
I mean, like, you know what? What am I gonna do? Like, you know, quit quit to myself? You know what I mean? So it was always like, um I can't say actually I can't say it on air it's not it's not appropriate.
It's not. Anyway, uh you know, so if if you come meet me at the bar, I can talk to you about it. Well, what it doesn't bother you anymore, someone coming meeting me at the bar. So when's the last time so uh Matt? It's Matt, not Matthew, by the way, Nastasia.
Got it. Uh Patterson, but not related to the singer Mike Patterson, right? Uh not to my knowledge. All right. Um question, uh, what are your food likes, dislikes?
Like what do you do you cook? What's your deal? I need to know what your deal is if we're gonna be working here. By the way, he has not agreed to work here. They're having discussions at Heritage Radio uh Network about who is going to handle us, because apparently we are too tough to handle.
Well, just pain in the pain in the intense contractual discussions about this show. No way, really? Yeah, yeah. Are you joking? Nobody wants to.
Yeah. So since you're forced to do this for at least a couple of weeks, so what are your food likes and dislikes? Um, I do like cooking quite a bit. However, I will tell you that the only cooking I've done recently is I just I washed some gooseberries yesterday and I just ate them right now. That's about the closest I've come.
Does that count as cooking? Washing something? No. No. Yeah.
Yep. So other than that, uh, it's been a lot of dollar pizza and uh bagels. Where do you live? Uh I live in Sunset Park. How's the dollar pizza there?
Um there is none, which is why I have to yeah, it's horrible. You travel for dollar pizza? That's an interesting idea. I travel for work and then I end up at Dollar Pizza. Is there dollar pizza here or does that mean you just get a discount here?
The dollar pizza is what justifies the fact that I have to go through Manhattan to get from Brooklyn to Brooklyn from home to work. Oh, so you use the West Fourth Street dollar pizza, the one at uh on eighth street? Uh I was there the other day. You know it. Let me tell you something, people.
For those of you that have never been to New York City, everything here is expensive except for the dollar slice. Now, it sounds like they're all the same, but it's not the case. There are different quality levels of dollar slice. No one has done like the no one has done the the citywide tasting of dollar slices as far as I know. Now, there's there's dollar slice, which is traditional size slice, and then there is you ever had like huge slice, like uptown, way uptown there's cornette pizza, and their thing was huge slice, right?
Not a dollar, but huge. But the dollar slice, I have to say, for a one dollar food item is not bad. What do you think, Matt? I think it's great. I think people sometimes unjustly lump it in with actual pizza that costs more than a dollar, and that's not fair.
But otherwise, yeah, I'm I'm very pro dollar slice. Yeah, me too. And the things we um they toss the pot they toss the cheese and potato stuff and they use bad cheese. Yes, it's a dollar. It is a dollar.
It's a dollar. One dollar. And I'll tell you something else. It's the the only time panhandling is effective on me is when I'm walk because the dollar slice is less than a block from the bar from existing conditions. That particular dollar slice, which I happen to think is a high quality dollar slice.
So if someone's panhandling outside that so that they can obtain a dollar slice, well, hell. That makes a lot of sense. I'll buy them a dollar slice. You truly are brothers. I'm not gonna give you a dollar, but I'll buy you a dollar slice.
What about you, Nastasia? I just gave a kid a dollar for his basketball team, and then he said, cheapskate. And then I said, What? And he said, Thank you. Well, Nastasia's the kind of person that would take a bite out of the dollar slice before she gave it to somebody.
But the uh the thing also is like I actually I shouldn't say this. I sometimes we do second family like shift meal at the end of the night sometimes. If it's been like a rough night, people have been working real hard. And sometimes I get them the dollar slice. I got I got I walk in, because you know, the business doesn't reimburse for that.
It's out of my own pocket, I'm cheap as hell. And people they uh you know, they appreciate the dollar slice at the end at the end of a work day, especially because I, you know, put a whole boat ton of crushed red pepper flakes. By the way, Nastasia and I not only do we put huge amounts of crush red pepper flakes onto our pizza, but if you don't, we will judge you. You know what I mean? Yes.
Huge amounts of crush red pepper flakes. Uh so I spoke to the uh dollar pizza guy, uh Jack Shram, our head bartender, and I went to the this is about a month ago. We went to the the and I said to the guy, uh, yo, how many slices of pizza do you sell a day? And he said, uh I forget it was either five or six or six and seven hundred, but somewhere in that range, somewhere between five and seven hundred, right? A day.
So they're only pulling in, because I hardly ever see anyone upsell. You know, occasionally some some idiot will come in and be like, Can I have pineapple on my pizza? I was like, you're at the wrong store, my friend. So wrong of doing it so wrong. So wrong.
You hand the you hand the dude two dollars, he hands you two slices. That's the way this works. Anyway, so point is is that uh, you know, they're not selling a lot of ancillary crap. I hardly ever see people dipping into that drink case. It is just a like like a uh a line of slices like going out that door.
And so to have two to three human beings working in a place where you're renting something, and by the way, providing an actual food item for people to eat, to only have a revenue in the range of six hundred dollars a day and still like pay all those people, I don't understand how they do it. It's two hundred and sixteen thousand dollars a year. Yeah, but you're you have to you have to pay rent, you have to buy pizza items, you have to pay for the electricity to run the pizza ovens, because I don't think they're gas, maybe they are. And then uh, you know, yeah, you I mean you have to pay the people who are working there. So then we're like, so what do you so I'll say it's uh six to seven hundred, right?
So Jack was like, how many slices do you sell a day? Between six and seven hundred. And then Jack goes, okay, what's the most you've ever sold in one day? He goes, Between six and seven hundred. So like maybe it's like a robot.
Maybe that's how they get away with it. It's a real the guy always has the exact same look on his face. Like he always just stares about like three hundred yards away, even though the wall's only three feet from him. Just there's three hundred yards away and provides pizza for people. It's an interesting cross section there too, because you have people who actually like need dollar slice, but then you have like a wide spectrum of other people.
Like uh I I have a song I want to write that I never will called uh party dress dollar slice. Because you'll see like you know, people in their party dresses like pounding dollar slices in between whatever kind of you know party events they're going to, and you have like you know, you know, weasel school kids. It's kind of cool, you know what I mean? It's like it's interesting. Dave, you got a caller.
I got a caller? Hopefully it's about dollar slices. Caller, you're on the air. Hey, what's up, Dave? Doc uh Matt.
Hey, you're you're breaking up a little bit. Can you hear me now? We can hear you, but your connection is bad. Yeah, your connection's a little bad. What's up?
I have a problem right now. Um I've been making, I try to make uh lemon maccoons, and they spin out total crap. And I was wondering, because most of these recipes that you find online for the building for the macaroon, they call you to use lemon curd, like basic lemon curve for your lemon merengai. Right. But I wanted to make something like uh gelet, like a big jolle.
I was wondering if it was possible to make something with uh like ten diffused lemon juice and then maybe add some coloring and then adding some ultra tech or something that can thicken it up without making it too cloudy. What are your talking about? Okay, so uh what I'm hearing between the because your phone's real break really breaking up. If you're making uh macarons and you want to do a lemon filling, but you don't want to use traditional lemon curd, you want to make something with uh lemon juice and then thicken it up. And you were saying maybe I could use ultratex or something like this.
I would not use ultratex. Uh typically when we when we're doing stuff like this, I mean you can use some uh ultra text, but that's gonna be kinda yeah, I guess you could. I mean, um I would probably make a fluid gel out of it. So I I would probably make a um a lemon a lemon fluid gel with uh either agar or gel an 'cause you can make that r really thick and then it it pipes pretty well, right? So thicker than you would for something that's gonna be a sauce, so like a really pipable kind of fluid gel because those tend to have a a r really nice mouthfeel when they eat and they set really well.
But if if you don't if it doesn't need to wait a long time, if it doesn't need to sit a long time, my favorite thing for mouthfeel with uh with high acid stuff that's a little uh kind of out of the ordinary is if you do a a fairly stiff lemon fluid gel with agar and then add that to cream and then put that through a whipper, it's not a traditional like like super shelf stable mac macaroon filling because whipped cream isn't s that stable, but it forms like an acid mousse, an acid cream mousse, which doesn't break for like at least an hour. And that stuff is sick because it's got lemon and the cream, so it provides a really cool mouthfeel. But in general, if you just want more of the standard kind of jelly flavor and you and you because you're using something clarified, like um uh if you're gonna clarify the lemon juice, you want it to have more of like a uh you know that kind of like jelly like feel. I would do like a fluid gel with either agar or gel in, probably jelly perfect. And and then you said make the uh make the lemon agar mixture and then add some creamy and put it through eye thigh.
Uh yeah, like you can do it like pretty high ratio, actually. Um I forget because I haven't done it in a while, but you know, I added more acid, I added more lemon to it than you'd think, and what it does is that the the lemon fluid gel, or you can do cassis fluid gel or whatever, like whatever, like the fruit fluid gel you add to the cream, uh, just makes the cream texture unbelievably dense. So it's just like this like super dense foam. And it and at least when I've done it in the past, it takes a long time to break up. It's cool.
I like it. Perfect. And do you recommend when making it another question? When you when making the uh the macaroon mixture itself, do you recommend shifting the flour and the powder sugar? I look, I'm like, here's the thing.
I I like hesitate to even give any advice on uh macaron making at all because it's like people have devoted like many, many thousands of words and many hours and many batches to this on the internet. I would go to someone like Brave Tart and see what they say. But in general, um, for things that are light and airy and aren't gonna be beaten the hell out of when you're when you're making them. I almost always sift this stuff together just to get rid of lumps. Perfect.
All right, man. Thanks for your help. All right, let us know whether it works out. Perfect. Have a good one.
All right, you too. So we've been gone for a while, Nastasia. How long have we been gone? A long time. Like two, three weeks.
Let's talk about LA first because I want to say a nice thing to you. No, it's not nice. Okay, so I want to say something about LA. So we're in LA. I was gonna say something.
Let me say this first. We're in LA. We're in LA. Nastasi and I are in LA, and we're doing uh Spins All Demos. Spins all demos.
Uh Booker and Dax outreach to, you know, the other coast, the coast we don't live on, right? So we went to LA. And Nastasia has this deal with Tesla. Ever since yeah. Ever since we ever since we've ever since we've, I don't know, she has some sort of, I don't know how the hell she knows the Tesla people.
But anyway, point is she loves Tesla. She's on the list to get one of the cars when when you know they finally finish making them all. Like she has been a Tesla supporter since way back in the way back, right? Huge Tesla supporter. So somehow, check this off.
Also, Nastasia, I don't know if you know this people, huge risk taker. You think so? Nastasia rented from Tesla, they were gonna give her like the $40,000 Tesla. No, they weren't. They were like, we're giving you this one.
No, she got like a hundred and fifty thousand dollar Tesla rental for the weekend. And like, and they said, Do you want to take out the insurance? She's like, nah. And she doesn't have her own car insurance, which means she's completely uninsured, which means if she smashed that car, she's out 150,000. Oh my god.
So anyway, the reason she wanted this particular vehicle, Matt, are you a car person? Uh no, not really, but you know, go. All right. So she gets the one with ludicrous mode, meaning like all the wheels are driven like a mother, like hardcore, zero to sixty miles an hour in get this 2.5 seconds. I did the math on that.
That is faster acceleration than free fall, i.e., it's going faster on the ground than if you dropped it off of a building. No. That is awesome. That is awesome. Except for when she does it on a side street in LA, you're like, ah.
Her mom burst into tears when she did ludicrous mode. Or Nastasia puts her mom in the in the shotgun seat, or as we used to call it, the death seat when I was a kid. Hits punches ludicrous mode and makes her mom burst into tears. The worst was when the wheels weren't aligned and I did it and I had to swing it back. Oh, you did uh you did like a racing 180 other thing?
Ah jeez, Louise. I have a question though. At the end of the day, did she need the insurance? No. No, you know, Nastasia's very lucky.
Like this other time, like I was uh with the I mean Nastasia has many things. Lucky is one of them. Like we were in a we were in a zip car. It's not just luck, she like also like Nastasia. I'm like a man when I drive.
What do you mean? I'm not like what do you mean? That has no meaning. Anyway, so like Nastasia Lopez is renting a zip car. And I don't know if any of you have ever parked in New York City, but a lot of our parking lots here, like it's not like in LA where valet means someone's gonna actually come get your car and take it and park it and like pretend that they care about you as a human being.
Like here, it's like you're not waiting for a valet, you're waiting for the attendant. And the attendant does not give a crap. So there's a long line of people waiting for the attendant. Like long line, like a 45 minute line. Yeah.
Like just to park your car. And these people are all getting super pretzel, super bent. You know what I mean? And we, Nastasi and I, where have we gone? We had gone to Cosmer.
We had gone to talk to the soda people back, and we thought we were gonna be uh soda entrepreneurs, uh, which we are not. And so, like, so we come back from talking, and by the way, that soda guy was a freaking lunatic. More on that later. If we ever have to if anyone wants to know about soda lunatics, we can talk about soda lunatics. Uh and we can talk about, we we will we will not talk about, but you if you find me at the bar, we can talk about Nastasia's family's feeling about how soda bottling plants work.
And and the You would never guess. You would never guess. And Nastasi and I are gonna make for her mom a special towel we can describe later on, you know, when buy it on Etsy. We talk about how the Lopez family thinks soda is bottled and or can't. I'll give you a hint.
It requires callusing and genitalia. And genitalia. Anyway, but so like like uh we'll leave it right there. Anyway, so uh we're back, there's a 45-minute line, and Nastasi just pulls around the line into the get out zone. She's coming into the oncoming traffic area because ain't no one leaving because the cars are way in the park, right?
And people are honking, honking, honking, honking, and uh a guy gets out of his car with you know that like eyebrows straight, like that eyebrow is like diving into his the bridge of his nose. He's so angry, like you know, snot and spit flying out of his face. He's like, we're all waiting here. He's like, Nastasi just looks at him and goes, not my car, don't care. And then walks away.
That guy's job satisfaction was through the roof at that minute. It's true. Anyway, back to LA. So we had a barbecue, and Dave was right. He was like, I don't think this is a good idea because it's not gonna be done correctly.
The cooking is not gonna be done. It was just me and our PR person, Rebecca, and we had a bunch of stuff that we were gonna make. And the barbecue was gonna start at 6 p.m. Dave Sight got in at 5 20, so we got there right at 6. And when you entered, what was going on?
Oh my God. We had a lot of important people there. It was an awesome house under the Hollywood sign. So the house is crazy, first of all. It was clearly a sex party house back in the 60s.
Because it's like a lot of giant bedrooms with a lot of mirrors and a lot of windows. Under the Hollywood signs. Very little privacy, right? So it's like it's designed such that there's no way you can take a shower without everyone seeing that you're taking a shower. So much so that Nastasi was like, you have to go downstairs and lie face down while I take a shower just to ensure that you don't accidentally go outside and you know, it's crazy.
And you know, uh, you know, this you know, Mama Cass, I guess they say introduced uh Nash DeCrosby there, and the association lived there, and they're recording Cherish and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Cool house. Yeah. Anyway, Dave walks into this party. I walk in, and it's supposed to be we're showcasing the spinzall and the and the sears all.
Let me keep in mind, people, that Nastasia Lopez is a business partner in Booker and Dax LLC and has theoretically been using centrifuges and Sears all for years. Let's just start with that. Right? It wasn't a Sears that the worst. I'll just give you a hint.
I'll give you a hint. So we're doing steaks and we're gonna do, we're gonna finish them off, right? Uh, with the cereizol. And so I walk in, Dustassi's like, how do you want me to cook a steak? So I'm like, Really?
You don't know how to cook a freaking steak at this point in your life? Just do 55. You will do 55, put them in a bag, no salt, because it's gonna be cooked more than you know, four hours, more than that later. If we talk about it, I want you to do it uh, you know, an hour and a half to two hours at and she lied. She said they were two inches thick, they were like an inch thick, which is a different number, Nastasia.
Two in one are different. Uh I said, cook it at like 55 because I thought it was two inches uh steak for like two hours, drop the temperature to 52, let it ride and drop for maximum four hours on the drop, minimum one hour, maximum four hours on the drop, and we'll finish them off. It'll be perfect. I walk in. It's a man with the beard and a dress cooking all your food.
That's true. That is also true, but you know, not germane to the discussion hand. The steaks are in a metal pot, which for those of you that know, I don't advocate using a metal pot because garbage way to do it, uncovered, right? So the thing's uncovered, so it can't retain the heat. It's being used as a doorstop on the floor.
But the good news about not covering it and not retaining the heat is they had failed to turn the circulator on. No, it was at 55. Oh, yeah, sorry, it was at 55 Fahrenheit. For four hours. For four hours.
No. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, Nastasia, you know that the circulator doesn't have a freaking cooling function, right? And then it's 88 degrees in this house, which is still not enough to cook the dang steak.
So rookie, I stick my hand in, and Nastasia's like, well, we're still gonna serve it. And I was like, okay, incubation queen. You've been incubating bacteria in this mother for four hours. First of all, didn't follow my instructions to drop the temperature, even regardless of what's going on. I can't believe she didn't drop it to 52 Fahrenheit.
That was the thing that screwed it up. So, like, and you know, and also like the stuff hadn't been like clarified right because she told, so Austin Hennelly, who's at uh Major domo, who knows how to use a centrifuge, because we've been using a lot, he was like, Should I use D1 and D2, which are you know, wine finding agents uh in the centrifuge? And Nastasi was like, nah, don't bother. And I was like, What? Austin, of course, was right.
Nastasi's like, nah, no. Why add steps? Why add steps? So then the idea was is we're serving champagne, well, champagne, champagne in the generous sense of champagne. It was kava, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So we're serving like sparkling wine cocktails, because it's easy and it's fun. So we were doing California peaches, which by the way were delicious. And strawberries, delicious.
We were making clarified you know stuff and then adding the clarified stuff to the thing. So I was like, so I was like, I'm bringing a regulator, I'm bringing all this stuff. I was like, and Don Lee, my partner, has this awesome regulator where it's like you just bring this tiny regulator, tiny, and you screw it onto a soda stream and you can carbonate with the soda stream. No soda stream. None of the product is cold, so I can't carbonate it anyway, even if I theoretically had a soda stream.
And worse than that, because I showed up as the party was started, they had drank all the kava before I could put the stuff into it. And and she only bought four bottles of kava. No, there was eight. So Austin Hennelly, by the way, former BDX guy now at at you know Major Domo came up with what might be the greatest drink innovation in the world. So I want to give credit to.
So we had a shall we say, some extra strawberry after the kava ran out, Nastasia. And so what I typically do with strawberry is you clarify strawberries, strawberry fresh strawberries are anywhere between the area of uh eight and like nine and a half bricks, meaning nine and a half percent sugar. So very wide range of sugar, depending on sugar. Depending on where oh my god, I know also. Also, she's like, Dazi's like, Can't you use powdered sugar?
And I'm like, Nastasia, powdered sugar has freaking cornstorch in it, and you want me to stir it into a dang clarified thing, and then put that into freaking kava. Why don't you just take the kava, shake it, and spray it locker room style all over the damn deck. Jeez. Anyways, so you take your strawberry juice, and uh you can bricks test it or not, and someday I'll give you guys the formula, but it's super boring, so I won't do it on how like how given what the bricks of something is, how to figure out how much sugar to add to take the bricks up, but take it up to about 20 bricks, right? So now you have it, it's not simple syrup, it's still very much strawberry.
You add a little bit of sugar, take it to 20 bricks, do the same thing with the peaches, take it to about 20 bricks, add some salt to that, and then here's here. So we were supposed to pour that in the kava, but what uh Austin did does is he he pops the corona. The coronas were blessedly cold. Yeah, so you pour a couple of ounces out of the top of the corona and you top it with the strawberry until the whole thing turns red. And he didn't do this, but I wanted to shove the lime in.
So I've been doing it at the bar with mini uh high life ponies, the mini highlight ponies. I've been making like strawberry high life. Because you know, if it's meant if it's meant to be a champagne cocktail, you should use the champagne of beers. Champagne of beers. And I have to say, uh, you know, it is a low-quality individual kind of a sitch, but it is straight up good.
I would drink eight billion of those things. I swear to God. And the one thing I asked Dave was not to yell at me in front of my parents, and he did. Uh yeah. Just that doesn't sound like Dave.
That's the one thing I asked. Well, that it's not the one thing you asked. The one thing you like uh show no display. Matt, you you've heard the scenario I was involved in here, right? Yeah, I heard it.
I heard it. So like World class bar owner. How how am I supposed to kill the like James Beard? Creating the conditions for innovation, which is exactly what happened. That's true.
I like that. You're you know, you should belong in every Silicon Valley meeting. You need to move out there because that's how, you know, they think out there. But uh but the point being that how am I supposed to I didn't specifically yell or say anything mean. I was just like, I was shocked and uh uh appalled.
You know, I was appalled. In the end it was a great party. How am I supposed to show look, one of the things that my favorite things about my wife is that when she is shocked and appalled, you know it. You know what I mean? And it's the same thing with me.
Like like if I'm if I have to do something, so i i it if if random person comes up to me and says something shock and appalling, I generally just put a blank confused look on my face. Right? That's in general what I have. Blank confused. You know what I mean?
But if it's someone I'm working with, I can't hide that. You know what I mean? It was a great party. We're gonna do it again. We are gonna do it again.
Nastasia's in talks to make an even more exciting party. But I like that house. So if you should hear of somebody who owns a house near the Hollywood sign who mm, let's say randomly ends up dead and all of a sudden you hear on this radio program that Nastasia is moving to LA. You know what happened. It's a nice house.
It's like it's it's it's kinda stupid. You can't believe that it exists. The only problem with it is is it's hard to. We're talking about the house you really like and the fact that the view is the same from. Oh, well, so like, you know, I'm not an LA guy, but I was watching that show Bosch, that that Amazon detective show Bosch.
And uh that guy's house, like the view from that house, you see, the pollution, something about the pollution in LA makes the lights in LA. If you're up in the hills looking at LA, it's like super pretty. You know what I mean? It's like a paint, it's always scintillating. I love it.
Like, if I could have that view, I might live there. You know what I mean? Especially because it would mean, you know, like the thing that I love most about New York and hate most about New York is that you're constantly interacting with people. And I feel that in LA you never need to interact with anybody ever. Mm-hmm.
You know what I mean? Anyway, I don't know. Uh, should we answer some some questions? Or should I I'll talk about Harvard later if I have time, which I'm not gonna have time to talk about, right? Um we'll do some questions.
Uh okay, so Mildred from how do you think you pronounce this town? Watervliet. Watervliet? Water Water Vliet. Vliet Watervliet.
I think it's pronounced Watervleet. Sure. Watervleet. I don't know. I made it up.
So someone tell me. Someone tell me when I'm wrong, which I always am. Everyone knows I can't read things and pronounce things. What am I? You know, Mr.
Pronounce? Anyway. She writes in about an interesting sauce I had never heard of. My household has been using the highly underrated barbecue sauce from upstate New York named Cornell Sauce. Uh recipe below for over a decade now.
It's also what I grew up on as chicken barbecue. And it's not that overly sweet tomato-based stuff. You know, if people know I'm not a huge fan of uh barbecue sauces in general as a basting thing, but I am actually kind of pro the style of this, which we'll read about uh in a second. The style of it. Not that I've tried it, but theoretically I like the idea.
Uh it's what I grew up with for chicken barbecue, mainly at functions catered by Brooks Barbecue out of Oneanta. Uh, instead of just using it as a basting sauce, we've also been using it as a marinade, which I always like to butcher as a marinadum. Right? More on marinades later, by the way. If we do get time to talk about Harvard, one of the things I talked about at Harvard was uh the federal government's idiocy with liquid nitrogen, which I've talked about as nauseum here.
Uh there was there's been more since I talked about it, but I don't have time to go down that rabbit hole again. Um but the other thing I talked about was uh salting meat and and in the process of working on my book, reevaluating um salting meat beforehand and also re-evaluing marin marination. But again, probably won't have time to talk about that. So we've also been using this sauce as a marinade in part because one batch makes enough to cook five four to five whole chickens. How many times have you seen the Blues Brothers, Nastasia?
Once. What about you, Matt? How many times have you seen the Blues Brothers? Uh half a time a decade ago. Oh, come on, man.
Uh he orders uh four whole fried chickens, I think was what what uh John Belushi orders, uh, from Aretha Franklin. Uh and she's displeased. Uh we also have had success using it on boneless and skinless cuts of chicken and pork. Uh although, you know, you should not do that. Boneless, skinless chicken.
What are your thoughts on boneless skinless chicken? Boneless, I'm for skinless? No. Yeah. I don't mean my uh well, I don't I can get into it.
Okay. Now that I have an immersion circulator, I've been experimenting with using the sauce in a Ziploc with the chicken at 140 Fahrenheit, which is 60 Celsius Nastasia. For those of you that can tell the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius. Uh we love the results, but since there's a lot of extra uh tasty sauce uh in a bag, it's a shame not to do something with it. We've been trying to reduce it as a pan sauce of some sort, but there's been a couple of problems.
I hope you have some ideas on how to address them. It takes forever to reduce, even in a wide shallow pan. This means that the meat can cool off too much while I'm trying to reduce the liquid. This is a classic problem with uh pan sauces in bags. Uh not for this sauce, but in general, what I recommend doing if there's excess sauce in the bag and you know you're not gonna um use it right away, is tur depends on the temperature you're using, but uh for most temperatures that you're using in the bag, if you're doing a zippy, pull the bag, dump the sauce out, do a quick reseal on the bag, drop it back into the bath and let it sit in the bath for a couple of minutes while you futz with the sauce.
Almost all of the benefit of the sauce and all the marrying of the flavor between the meat and the sauce has already happened by that time. And you can keep it at cirque temperature while you're futzing with the sauce. This it's easy to do, it's not even that messy. Uh, it's totally fine. So that's one thing I would do uh right there.
Um so that hopefully I've solved problem number one. Two, the sauce stays well mixed in the bag while in the circulator, but starts to split the moment I pour it into a pan. I can deal with a uh good deal of uh I can do a good deal of whisk work and bring it back, but the moment I take it off the heat, it starts to split again. And since there's so much oil in there, I haven't given you guys the recipes yet, I find myself trying to pour off a layer of oil before I bring the bowl of sauce to the table. Uh and once it's uh at the table, you know, it breaks again.
Is there any way to stabilize it? Thanks. Uh I'll try to call in, but I'll give you the recipe, Mildred from Waterlet. Okay. Uh here's the recipe Cornell chicken recipe.
One cup cooking oil. I first of all, like for some reason, Cornell, this was actually done by Cornell and it's published all over the recipe, but they don't give it in standard recipe format. I appreciate standard recipe format of giving you the ingredients in the order in which they are used because it means that when you're reading the shorthand of the recipe, you have uh some conception of how the sucker is put together just by how they list the ingredients. Do you like it when people do that, Nastasia? Yes.
So uh I'm gonna this is not in in order. Uh one cup cooking oil, one pint cider vinegar. Talk about an old recipe calling for a pint of anything, right? Mm-hmm. And you say how much?
This is a pint. You mean two freaking cups? You mean 16 ounces? Jerks. Uh three tablespoons salt, and then they put a little asterisks because everyone has to be pseudo-health conscious now.
They're like, if you can't have this salt, don't use this. I'll put the salt in, please. Uh, one tablespoon poultry seasoning. Some people on the webs don't know what poultry seasoning is. And poultry seasoning is like God's gift to the 1970s.
It is the smell of Thanksgiving stuffing for me. Love that stuff. Uh, you know, it's a it's a mixture of dried powdered herbs and it tastes and smells like like old school like American 70s stuff. You like that stuff, right, Stuff? Yeah.
Poultry seasoning. Uh one half teaspoon uh pepper, and here is the key ingredient: one egg, one whole egg. So uh to give you an idea, what they're basically doing here is making a mayonnaise. You're making mayonnaise, but you're making a whole egg mayonnaise. So the recipe states that you put the egg in, you beat the hell out of the egg, you add the oil, right?
And then you know, you add the uh see what else they have. You add the oil, and then they mix the seasoning and all that, all the water-based stuff with the with the uh uh cider vinegar and add it at the end. So a whole egg mayonnaise, you don't need to add the liquid at the beginning because you have the egg yolk, which is an emulsifier, and then you have the egg white. And the egg white contains enough liquid to form the initial emulsion, and also, I think, and I've read this on the line, although I've never made really whole egg mayonnaise before, but the whole egg, um, the whole egg, the thickness of the white, I think also aids in forming the emulsion. Now, mayonnaise is a an oil-in-water emulsion, meaning the continuous phase.
The, you know, is if you put a fish into a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny microscopic fish into mayonnaise, it would be swimming through water around oil droplets, right? So the oil droplets aren't connected to each other. The water is what's called the continuous phase, and that's being formed by the egg white, and the proteins and the thickening in there probably help to uh what they call sterically inhibit uh or you know, stabilize the emulsion as it's being made to make the emulsion formation a lot easier than if you just use egg yolk alone, which is a standard mayonnaise. This is my guess. Then afterwards, so you have probably have a fairly thick uh mayonnaise there because it's one egg and a cup of cooking oil.
You then add a pint, a pint being two cups, which is quite a lot, of uh cider vinegar, which in you know my guess is gonna thin it out considerably, right, and make it tart. Now, the acidity from the vinegar is what's going to cause it to be uh food safe, even if it's not really cooked, right? Because the acidity is gonna prevent uh any kind of salmonella problems you're gonna get from the egg, yada yada yada. Okay, so that's how this this recipe works. Now, uh the problem when you're cooking it in, there's a couple problems from cooking it in the bag.
Now, when you're basting this on, by the way, listeners to this show will know that I'm an old-time believer in uh in basting grilled stuff with mayonnaise. Everyone knows that when I was a small child, I learned to baste fish in Cape Cod, especially specifically blue fish with mayonnaise before I grilled it. And I'm a huge fan of basting stuff with mayonnaise for a number of reasons, it you know can help form a nice crust. I also like mayonnaise and then panko over the mayonnaise, but it can help form a nice crust. The oil, uh it gets a good way for oil to stick to uh your stuff.
It tastes good. I like it. I'm a big fan of mayonnaise in grilling applications. This is fundamentally a mayonnaise, and you brush it on thin and you go thicker and thicker as you cook. So, you know, I'm cool with it.
Uh, when you're putting it in the bag, uh a couple of problems happen. Is one is the chicken is leaking out liquid, so you're further diluting. So when you're cooking normal chicken barbecue and you're basting it on, you're actually flashing off some of that moisture from uh the vinegar as you're cooking. You're reducing liquid. Here you're adding liquid because the liquid's coming out of the chicken and going into the sauce.
So one thing you could do right from the get-go is reduce the amount of vinegar that's in the sauce by a good chunk. And doing that will help you uh just by having a lower total liquid level in the sauce. Uh now to increase the acidity, you could use a higher acidity vinegar. So a classic American uh, what do they use? They use cider vinegar or something like this?
What are these cider vinegar? Uh, you could use like partially cider vinegar and partially the super strong Swedish stuff and still get a relatively because that's you know, cider vinegar is what, like 5% acidity somewhere there, you can get in that kind of range, you can still do it by reducing the liquid level. Um, so that's part of it, right? So that'll stop the need to reduce it so much because you won't have added that much liquid at the get-go. The other thing I would really recommend doing uh is uh and I think one part of your problem here with the breaking might have to do with the fact that you're using whole egg.
Uh so what might be happening is is that as you cook in the bag uh at six, well, you're only at 60, right? 140 is 60. I mean, I don't know what's going to happen to the egg white proteins in that in that regimen. Typically, 60 shouldn't be enough to set the egg white. Maybe in the pan it is, and you're heating it in the pan.
I my guess was that there's something about the protein in the egg white that is uh, you know, kind of almost pargelling a little bit and then causing syneresis break, and by doing that, causing the emulsion to break. My guess is that it's something in the egg white. So I would try doing uh a more direct mayonnaise, i.e., one that doesn't contain egg white. Or you could try stabilizing this, it changes the flavor, but you could try stabilizing this with a little bit of um mustard. You could also try freezing the egg yolks, that'll make a thicker and more stable uh emulsion, salting the egg yolk a little bit before and freezing it.
But I really think it has something to do with uh the egg white. So I would reduce the quantity of overall liquid so it doesn't thin out as much, and then I would try it without egg white to see if that works. And if you like the flavor of mustard, I would add a little bit of mustard because once the emulsion is formed, that should help it um stay. What do you think, Stas? Should we take a break?
Matt doesn't care. This week's secret ingredient is Protein Pancake Mix. Nastasia, tell us what you'd make. Pancakes for one. Wait, what is this for one?
Don't you ever cook for any other people? Not in the morning. Alright, let me tell you something. I've actually used uh Bob's Red Mill Protein Pancake Mix. And here let me make one suggestion to you if you're using this.
Follow their instructions. So uh I looked at their instructions and it looked like the pancake batter was too thin compared to my standard pancake batter, but because of the mix, it needs to look thinner than it would look for a standard pancake mix. So, like, I know if if you out there are anything like me and you like to improvise with things, give the recipe as written on the package a shot before you go, before you go change in, right? Don't go changing. Right?
Because like uh what I when I was like, I'm gonna thicken this sucker up because it looks too thin to me. It they got real tall and cakey. So try their recipe first because your what your eyeballs and your hands tell you is uh what they tell you for normal AP flour pancake mix if you're used to making these things. And this is a different mix, it cooks up differently. So try the recipe first before you go your own merry way.
Thanks to Bob's Red Mill for supporting cooking issues. Visit Bob's Redmill.com to shop their huge range of products. Use the code cooking issues25 for 25% off your order. And we are back. Well, I want to say we, it's me.
Nastasia's actually going to get the pizza right now that we normally eat afterwards because I'm here. You're Matt's here. Matt's here with you. Yeah, and Matt's not. So Matt said that on the uh on the uh chat room there, people were saying uh talking blenders, and should I get uh the question was what?
Should I get a blend tech or an omni blend, or should I just get the Vitamix? Truth. Yeah. Uh I don't have any experience with uh Omni Blend. I like that name because it sounds, you know, like it can like it's kind of om omniscient.
It can blend everything, omni. It's like all knowing and also omni blending, which theoretically I like it, but I can't speak to it because I have never used it. Uh I have used the Blend Techs and Blend Tech and Um although I enjoy their web series called Will It Blend, uh I would highly recommend you get the uh Vitamix. Um the Blend Tech has a couple of things. Blend Tech is the only company that uh seems to believe that a plane bearing in the bottom of their uh blender pitcher is the way to go.
They're also the only people who believe that a blunt blade is uh the way to go. Also, uh they might have redesigned it in the past couple of years, but the one that I used to use, uh the pitcher leaked unbelievably. Now, everybody who uses a Vitamix knows that like the one kind of problem with a Vitamix is that you still need to use that plunger. Um Nastasi's going past me here. Uh still have to use that uh that plunger, but uh look, I I would all I would just go with the uh the Vitamix.
I mean like it's just more it's just more chefy. You know what I mean? It's just more you interact with it better. I, you know, it's like uh the the I've used some of the newer Vitapeps that that do some of the things that Blend Tech does, and I dislike them. I like the old style one.
Here's what I want. When I turn on the Vitamix, I just want, and I said this a million times, I'll say it one more time, and then I'll leave it alone. I want two freaking flap switches and a knob for the speed. That's it. You know what I mean?
So my brother-in-law, he's like registered, he was getting the you know, one of the new Vitapreps when he got married a couple years ago to my sister, and he was like, Should I register for the one with all the like the preset settings like smoothie? I was like, no. Two switches and a knob. And he was like, Yeah, yeah, but it has two switches and a knob, and it has all these other settings. I was like, no, no settings, two switches and a knob.
You know what I mean? Because like everything else gets in the way. And then eventually I was like, yo, Tom, if you don't want to hear what I'm saying, don't ask me. But like, I think all of that other garbage gets in your way. You know what I mean?
It's like, and especially like they're all like auto-ramped up, all this like stuff gets in your way. It's like just give me control over the damn blender. He went, he went with all the fixings though, didn't he? My brother? Come on.
Listen to you. He did, he did. He went, he's like, he's like, but it's just adding stuff. That's where people are wrong. Just adding stuff is actually taking stuff away because usually when somebody adds what they call, as my dad would say with big quotation marks, features.
So my dad's an engineer, and whenever they would break something, like whenever something would get broken or something bad would happen to it. They, they you know, my dad would say, What you need to do is remarket that as a feature, right? Whatever crappy thing you've done, remark it as a feature. So whenever they add a feature or something like that, typically they encrap in the core functionality, right? So it's very rare that someone will like add a we just added a program.
And then what they're doing is they're putting some sort of logic in between the switches, the knob, and the blender motor. And by putting logic in between it, I guarantee that they've encrappened the experience of using the tuned switches and the knob. Guarantee. I'm so glad you used the word encrappen twice, because I was gonna say it's my early nomination for word of the year. Really?
Nice, nice, sweet. People use it. It's the word of the year, it's the it's it's gonna be the word of the year. Just wait for it. Um anyway, have nothing to say about uh omniblend.
So we had a question in from uh Christoffer, who uh claims to be a Swedish low-quality individual, which I like that. I like that people uh all over the world realize that we are all individuals of low quality. Over the last few years, there's been a debate about additives in flour and baking in general, gaining some traction here in Sweden. The most common item to attack is ascorbic acid in flour and industrial flour in general. It is looked down on because, in their opinion, it kills the flour, ridding it of all its nutritional value, uh making it less natural.
The discussion is led mainly by bakers touting their opinions as fact without backing them up with any academic research. Is ascorbic acid in flour evil? Is it uh is it the latest in a row of mind control drugs introduced into our diet by the government? Ooh, wouldn't that be nice? Mind control drugs.
Imagine if I could put mind control drugs in the food that and stuff that we serve. Imagine a pasta flyer, if you could put mind control drugs in. What would you have your guests do? I don't know. I'm not sure.
Like something though. Right? If you had some sort of mind control, you'd you'd start piping. I don't know. You'd need to organize it such that like the mind control happened.
You'd need to organize a flow such that they went in one door and out a different door so that you could mind control on the way out after they've already had the mind control drug. Yeah. Anyway. Mine would be a subtle change. They would just religiously tune into cooking issues every week from then on.
Oh, see? Nice. I like that. Uh so uh, or are these bakers simply elitists who disregard anything made in a factory? Uh thanks.
Uh so the and then he adds afterwards, even more curious is the amount of craft bakers who maintain some claim to authenticity/slash tradition and who use organic flowers but regularly add ascorbic acid to their bread. All right, so it's like a here and there. Uh I think it's not just elitism. First of all, it's it's complicated, right? Uh, this kind of thinking, this kind of religious thinking about bread, food stuff in general, but in bread, uh, goes all the way back to the uh early 1800s, at least in the United States, anyway.
Like you see the first glimmerings of this with uh Sylvester Graham. So in the early part of the uh 1800s, Sylvester Graham was very upset by the new grinding and milling technologies that were being used uh to mill flour, and he thought that the that these milling technologies destroyed uh the flour, and also because they were using different wheat, not using the same wheat that was grown in the in the east, right? They were using this kind of um you know harder wheat, that somehow that was also kind of destroying flowers, but it wasn't, with him. It's really interesting because it was specifically the milling technology and the and the removal of bread from being made by women, specifically mothers and wives, right? Because this is a highly gendered and you know, highly sexist uh environment.
Uh he thought that there was something wrong with it, and that a baker, a professional baker, could not make a good loaf of bread because it didn't have that kind of love factor. It took on a religious tone. And so Graham Bread, he was uh he hated any form of industrialization in bread, including bakers, right? Uh what's funny about it is that if you actually read Graham's uh treatise on bread making, which I've read several times, there is lunacy, and most of the time when people become religious about their foodstuffs, it comes with a whole other host of crazy beliefs. So with Sylvester Graham, it was also, you know, he was big on the you know, no masturbation, don't touch yourself, anti-sex, anti-body, anti-enjoyment.
Uh he was also teetotler, the whole the whole the whole thing. So his religious ideas on bread came with a whole host of other um, you know, weird and demented beliefs uh that were complexed in you know early 19th century uh America. And similarly, people today, not they don't have the same complex of beliefs, but usually when you have a religious feeling about how bread should be made or how anything should be made, it comes along with other beliefs. And if you read some of the websites about this, you'll see a lot of these kind of uh uh buzzwords. So if you see someone saying, this is a website called sourdough.
There can be no claim to ascorbic acid being natural, in quotes, even though the latter term is devalued by modern marketing, it has an inherent meaning, which clearly excludes chemical refining, right? So this is a religious notion. So the idea that uh what's it's telling me I'm running out of time. So like this is kind of a religious notion of what natural means. And if you look, I looked at the Sustained website, which is the campaign for real bread, which is I guess an English outlet uh you know outfit, and it for there it's like showing you as kind of having a natural failing, falling back on an artificial additive, um, etc.
etc. It's seen as kind of a personal failing. Um to me, it it's not evil, by the way. Like if you want to use it, use it. If you don't, don't.
There is an honor, I think, in someone saying, I want to see what I can accomplish using only these ingredients, right? So someone's like, I only want to use flour, salt, water, yeast, right? Or even people, some people, I don't want to use yeast, I'm only gonna use natural leavens, right? And it, you know, and then they're like, I'm all about working very hard to manipulate those particular ingredients by my choice of wheat, by my choice of grinding technique, by etc. etc., by how I need, by my proofing, by all this.
And I'm interested in removing all other aspects because there is a richness uh in only interacting with these ingredients, and by giving myself these constraints, I become a better baker and more in tune with my ingredients, and I feel better as a professional, as a person, and I like the bread I bake better. This is all reasonable because these aren't religious statements. When you start saying that for other people that adding ascorbic acid is bad for X, Y, or Z reason because somehow it doesn't, as I've read on these websites, belong to the great lineage of bread. Like now you're talking bread having like a lineage in that sense is like real weird. Now you're getting into kind of religious speak.
So there is nothing wrong uh with adding it. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with saying I don't want to use anything but these four ingredients so that I can so that I can find out what it means to just play with these ingredients in a very deep and rich way. Uh what do you think? Think I did that answer question? Done.
Done. And we're out of time, so I don't get to answer Austin's question about uh I don't get to add Austin's question about uh um Carbon A drinks. I'll do it next time. Next time. Next time.
We're back next week. We're not gonna miss any more weeks soon. Back next week. And uh hopefully, Matt, you back next week? He doesn't know yet.
Oh, yeah. All right, he's back next week. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you.
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