This episode of Cooking Issues is brought to you by Bob's Redmill, an employee-owned company that has been offering organic stone ground products for decades. Their flowers and whole grains are the highest quality and are minimally processed at their stone mill in Oregon. Visit Bob'sRedmill.com to shop their huge range of products. Use Cooking Issues 25 for 25% off your order. I'm HR Renz, Communications Director Kat Johnson with a preview of this week's episode of Meat and Three.
I I think we should realize that we more or less have a broken food system. When 800 million of us go to bed hungry, uh 600 million are obese. Uh we waste 30% of our food. Then something is fundamentally wrong. We'll introduce you to one food waste solution happening in Asia.
They introduced a system where residents were issued an electronic IP card that would open an automated bin and enable them to weigh the food waste being dropped off, and then they would be charged, you know, in a certain amount of money for the weight of that food. And we'll take a look at some of the real struggles happening closer to home. How is it possible that a meal that was perfectly fine to consume at 1059 p.m. then becomes waste at 11 p.m.? So tune in to this week's Meet and Three on Heritage Radio Network.
Available wherever you listen to podcasts. Like one o'clock from Bernard's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez and Matt in the booth. How are you doing, Matt? I'm doing great.
Yeah? How are you doing, Nastasia? Good. Yeah? Everything for real?
Good? Yeah. So Nastasia and I did an event at uh Cesare's farm at the Center for Discovery on. I had to bring Dave a toothbrush. Yes.
What day of the week was that? I pounded so much coffee on the way up. I'm like, I'm on this train. You made me get on this train way early. Bring me a toothbrush.
Tell him about how you accidentally bring the wrong toothpaste. Well, it's not the wrong toothpaste. It's not toothpaste. So when I travel, I try to like, I try to, you know, bring the the what's it called? The travel size stuff with me.
And so, you know, like travel size toothpaste isn't in our normal medicine cabinet where the toothpaste is, because why would it be there? I'm not traveling out of my medicine cabinet. You know what I'm saying? So we have this like bucket full of stuff, and I'm always like, oh, it's like, you know, it's always like, you know, zero. Whatever.
Whatever it happens to be. Lamas something horrible. And like it's some horrible thing, and it ends up like it's like, oh, there's the travel toothpaste, and you throw it in and you take it with you, and you never notice until like that night, you know, or whatever, and you you put it on the toothbrush, and you're like, that does not look like toothpaste. It's very a couple of times I have almost gotten it. I've actually had a situation where that like whatever product it is has actually reached my lips and my my mind only at that split last second processes.
That didn't look right. And then you pull it away, and you're like, oh, hey, and I can't be the only person that this happens to. It has not happened to me. Matt? You know, now that you've inspired such confidence, you already have someone with a question for you on the air.
Really? Alright. Caller, you're on the air. Hi, this is Jeff from Los Angeles. How are you doing?
Good. How about yourself? Doing well. Great. So, quick question for you.
I have the older champion centrifuge. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Champion made a centrifuge? Oh, champion. The blood centrifuge, not champion juicer.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The champion uh, whatever it is, O3. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got you, got you. And so I have a spinzall too, but I have the old one.
And wanted to know if I could use that centrifuge to basically get yeast for beer. So, in other words, after the fermentation's done, what layers would I harvest in order to get the yeast if I was going to use that? Right, I've never done it, but the champion actually is probably pretty good for that because it's a pelleting fuge. And so I would guess that, you know, uh you'd get like the large amount of I I've never done it, but I mean, my guess is is that you would um just take the stuff, spin it, they take the solids, resuspend it in some uh fluid, let it like live for a while, then spin out the deads again, and then it's you should have an active thing. This is a thing that's knowable though.
I just don't happen to know it off the top of my head. I researched it once, but uh for this you definitely want a pelleting fuge. Like um, I mean, the spinzall would work for it if for larger quantities, but if you're only looking to get small quantities, I would say that that champion probably does a good job. And um the question is are you spinning out the live stuff and the dead stuff? That's why I would I would pellet it and then get that pellet a couple of times and like build it a couple of times, then eventually the pellet should be more healthy.
I think what you want is the pellet, because I don't believe the yeast is going to be um it's I don't think it's going to be in solution. I think it'll pellet out. Pulling along some dead yeast shouldn't be a problem anyway. It just provides nutrients for the living yeast. So well it depends on how much though, right?
Sure. I mean that's why what I would do is is like assuming that you're harvesting from an exhausted system right you got a like a lot of deads a lot of a lot of auto uh you know autolized yeast stuff in there which again not terrible in in smaller quantities but like not a lot of nutrients left if you want mainly healthy stuff I would take the pellet and then uh I mean you could probably if let's say you're in a cloudy environment I'd throw away the stuff at the bottom because that's almost all dead stuff right then I would spin out the the cloudy liquid and then boom that pellet has still has a lot of dead stuff in it. I'd grow it once more and spin it and then you have deads plus a lot of lives I'd bet. If you want it healthy right away. If you're going to rebuild it it doesn't really matter.
You know what I mean? Yeah. Make sense? Okay. I mean I'm sure someone on the chat room has uh has something to say about this which by the way Matt is a question somebody had the question they had was uh this is from uh Kieran can I get a link to the cooking issues chat room I Google it every once in a while but only the dead links from the blog appear my Google Kung Fu is pretty strong but I'm not even sure if this is a cooking issues thing a heritage radio thing or some other third party.
So where do they get to this yes so I have told uh Kieran but I will tell everyone what I told him. So it's actually a mixler thing. Mixler, M-I-X-L-R is what we um use to live stream. And so you would go on there and uh follow Heritage Radio Network, and that is how you get to the chat room. So you so you can't, is this something that can be searched after the fact?
I would think that searching for this via the Googles would be very difficult. Then why do we why don't we use something that's easier to search? I mean, if the idea is to let people chat and therefore get new information and or search old information. I think what would make sense would be including very obvious links to this at various places, like on the website for the show. Are they a competitor to Google?
Why is Google so bad at finding it? I don't know. I haven't tried it, only he has. Oh, geez. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Well, anyway, hopefully that helps. Let us know.
Tell us about your yeast, your yeast experiences. Um, yeah, so Nastasi and I did uh an event at the Center for Discovery Farm, which was good. Uh that was, by the way, people, our 10-year anniversary. For those of you listening to the show, you know that Nastasi and I fear fear bonded out of having to share a ride where we were being driven around by a rabbit anti-Semite. For those of you that listen to the show, you'll remember that.
And so, like that kind of He was there. He was there, we saw him, and I wasn't like, oh my god, Anti-Shemite. But I kind of said that to Nastasia. I was like, Oh, we're there, here he is. Uh, but uh yeah.
We also heard a good comeback to a joke, but we can't tell. I cannot tell this joke. It is not safe for work, but it was the best comeback to a joke. Yeah, that I've heard in a while. I've heard in a long, long time, especially like it wasn't like written out of a show or something, it was just like a live comeback, and it's not the kind of thing so like you know, you know how like I mean I don't know you because you're gonna come to the bar and hear it.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know who you are, but you know, you probably have stored up somewhere like a list of like 20 or 30 comebacks. You know what I mean? Like ready to come back at somebody, you know, no, you uh stuff like that. You know what I mean?
But it's like this comeback had to have been boom right off the cuff, like it could not have been pre-constructed, which made it even better. Yeah, yeah. So then the day after that, we had the Star Chefs opening uh party that Nastasia did not do. I did with the bar where we served waffle turkey, but it was not wild turkey. There was our sponsor, so we did it with Buffalo Trace, which means it was it was Waffalo.
Oh, that's uh and then uh that went fine. So Star Chefs is going on now. I haven't been yet, but for those of you that want to go off to the Star Chefs, go check out the Star Chefs. Where is it, Nastasia? Green Point.
Green Point. It's called the Brooklyn What? Expo Center. Brooklyn Expo Center. And then I feel like I have another event.
You did a thing yesterday, last night. Oh, we had Taste of New York for City Harvest. What is it? Just one freaking event after another. We did uh we did Don Lee's uh Joy of Mango Drink There existing conditions bar, and then I have an event also tomorrow.
We're doing a museum of food and drink, but I it's a fundraiser, but I believe it's a closed fundraiser. I don't believe we can we're selling tickets to it. Why can't I go? Who said you couldn't go to it? We could talk about it.
Did you ask someone at the museum and they're like, not for you? No, I didn't ask. But if you're doing whatever, we'll talk. Yeah, yeah. People, I mean, maybe they care, but they're not gonna hear.
Just like they're not gonna hear what that joke was. But it was good. And I have to say, it was a joke that was very quick to deliver, and the comeback was very it wasn't like this guy was like, oh, I could see this punchline coming. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm gonna like, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. John Arnold, no relation as far as I know to me, right, saying, My name is John Arnold. I discovered your work through Kenji Lopez Alt, and have recently benefited greatly from the very thorough and detailed information you posted on cast iron pans and seasoning.
I don't know if you take questions via email. Nope. It went to Nastasian, so I saw here. Uh, but I thought I'd reach out to you, see if you do. I have three uh vintage Griswold pants.
These are cast iron pants people. I have some Griswolds, I like them. For those of you that don't know, the difference between like uh most modern, there are some modern people who doing it, but like the the most standard cast iron pan you buy now from Lodge, right, is not what we call polished. And so it's not polished in the sense of mirror polish. What it means is when you when you make a pan, like I'm pretty sure this is still how they do it, but back in the day, you ever do sand casting, Nastasia?
No. No? So what you do is you have uh like a wooden mold, let's say, of the pan. It's all like waxed and pretty mold of the pan. And you make an impression in green, it's called green, it's not really green, but it's called green sand.
It's like like damp ish sand that takes the impression of the pan, right? Then you lift up the mold, you lift up the thing, you take out your your you know, your your wooden, you know, model of it, then you put it back together, and then you pour the the molten metal into that. So, like anyone who's taken like casting or shop in high school has like done this typically with aluminum, so it's sand casting. Now, the and you can always recognize something that's been, and they can make giant parts with sand casting. This is the way, you know, giant things used to be made back in the day.
You can always recognize a sand casting because it's bumpy. So Nastasi, you've seen castings that are like a little bit bumpy, right? They're like a little bit bumpy. That's the actual, you're seeing the actual sand. You're seeing like the the impression of the stuff in the mold.
So this is the way cast iron pans are made or were made. I think they're still made this way. So what a lot of old time companies did was they would take an abrasive and they just you know smooth out that bumpiness on the bottom of the pan, it was called a polished pan. Now, it so happens that those pants season a lot better and become a lot slicker and smoother. Eventually, a modern non-polished pan will get a nice nonstick surface, but it's always a little bit bumpy, and I prefer the old polished pants.
Uh, and I have some old griswalls that are polished. So, anyway, so if I happen to mention it, which I might not even mention, who knows? So I went through that whole explanation for nothing. Whatever. Stasi's like, I hate you, I hate you, Dave.
I wish I wouldn't be working for 10 years, 10 years with you. Ten years I've been working with you. Worst. That was this was the actual Nastasia tricked me into buying champagne for a theoretical 10-year anniversary of working together uh like a month ago, when in fact it was just now that it was 10 years. No, it wasn't.
So Nastasi's a liar. No, because they did the event earlier. No, it's always in the fall. It's always in the freaking fall. That's why there's always freaking pumpkins and stuff there.
No, I swear to you, I have the email. We can have champagne. Listen, listen, listen. I don't know. I don't know if you know this.
I don't know. No, I don't know if you know this. Nastasia is an inveterate liar. That's not true. The Rainbow Room has this weird thing where they have they have certain champagnes and sparkling wines that they'll pour into a cocktail, but they will not serve you a bottle of that because they're like, any a-hole that's gonna buy a bottle here is gonna spend more money.
True or false. We've saw their cocktail list, and we could see what they were pouring into their sparkling cocktail. Oh, yeah, they had a crappier. They had a crappier, and we're like, we don't deserve the one that's spending a lot of money. Can't you just give us a bottle of the crappy one?
And they're like, nah. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, so back to the cast iron pans. Uh I have three Griswold vintage Griswold pans, but one of them is baffling me a little bit. The seasoning seems to be very dark in some areas and light are more or less missing in others. I've used it around 40 times and seasoned it after each use by heating on the stove top with canola oil until the surface temperature is close to 500 degrees. Uh Fahrenheit.
Uh my other pans are very uniform, but this one has not gotten there yet. I've attached an image of the perplexing pan. Does this look like I should take it down to the metal with steel wool or just continue to season and hopefully it gets more uniformly seasoned over the entire surface? Um so I'm looking at uh John's pan here. And for those of you that don't know, I'm sure that you've seen this before on your pans.
Um on the bottom of it, it's black, which is good, and then there are areas that have a little bit of a light uh kind of almost reddish, like almost like you think it's rust, but it does not look like rust. So this could be a number of things, right? This could be that there are some spots that are only getting partially polymerized um oils on them. It could be some marginal sticking of the stuff. I would not bother uh like going through the full seasoning over time.
But the main question is this is the pan sticking? If you're having sticking problems with the pan, then I'd start worrying about it. If it's not sticking, right, then what it looks to me like is you have high spots, and those high spots are getting hit by um your spatula or whatever else you're using, and it's creating those marks by like scraping partially polymerized oil on top. If that's the case, I just give it a hit underwater with a scrubby like normal, uh, you know, a normal like Scotchbrite scrubby after uh each use and see whether it just gets better if you just don't worry about it so much. If it's sticking, you might have to do something more aggressive, but it's hard to tell from the picture.
I would guess that it's not sticking too badly, and that when you're using it, it's just gonna kind of get better and better as those spots get worn away. Don't be afraid of using metal implements, don't be afraid of using like a scotch bright uh pad on it. Uh, you know, just don't leave it wet. Uh that's the one thing I never do. I never leave my cast iron wet.
I scrub it and then I throw it back on the stove for like 10 to 15 seconds just to heat it up long enough to blast the water off of it. Yeah. Okay. Nastasi's like, don't care. Um Serena writes in, Serena, uh, first and foremost, thanks for doing your show.
I'm a food process engineer, and your podcast has made me remarkably better at my job and has helped me maintain my interest in my line of work. That's nice to hear. It's nice. Stas is like, yeah, nice. No, it's nice to hear.
You're being sincere for once? For once. Did I tell you people that uh how many? I can't ask you because you can't answer me. It's freaking internet.
Jeez, more on. Oh, you know what you have to do it. How many of you have seen Monsters Inc. though? How many?
My son, for those of you that see Monsters Inc., my son calls Nastasia Roz. And Roz is the character who ends up turning uh should I spoil it for them? Sure. I don't think I spoil it. Anyway, there's a twist at the end about Roz.
I don't know the twist. Well, I won't spoil it. Anyway, he goes, do you ha she do you have your paperwork with Askey? Like that. And so, like, she's like the boss, like the administrative boss.
Yeah. But in terms of the boss, uh, Booker started calling her Roz. Do you have your paperwork, Booker? Do you say that to him all the time? Yes.
Did you clean the trash booker? Anyway, so like, wait, what are you gonna say though? Oh no, it was about the fundraiser tomorrow. Oh. Oh, right.
But why are you talking about it? You said don't talk about it, and then you bring it up anyway. You're just gonna I know why, because you know that we can't invite people to it and you want to rub it in their noses. We can't invite people to it? No, we cannot.
No, no, no, no. I was gonna say that that I know a good fundraiser for it that we had talked about before. For it meaning the museum? Yeah. Okay.
Just remind me later. Okay. Alright. Because our listeners would like it. Why don't you just tell them?
Because I can't, because I don't really want it, because it includes me. Think about it. Oh, jeez. Well, it's a long drawn-out thing. Do you know what it is?
You're talking about like dinner? Yeah. Yeah? I'm gonna ask. I'm gonna ask whether people think it would be something that people would be.
No, no, no, no. Let's not. That's I don't want to talk about it right now. Alright. Jeez.
You brought it up. I know. Let's not forget people. Nastasia brought it up. Alright.
Now, onto Serena's question. Uh, or as she puts it, into the meat and potatoes of her question. I'm getting married in a week. Congratulations. Uh week and a half.
Still, congratulations. That's very close. I'm getting married in a week and a half and I want to make questions. What? Depends on when she sent the question.
She was married months ago. Yeah, because it we have it on in two weeks. What's her name? Serena. Do you not read these questions as they come in?
I hope that I mean, if you had been married, I hope that you're doing well. I'll tell you right now. This was sent on October 15th. So. She's getting married today.
Oh, hey, hurry up here. Wait, today, Dave? A week and a half. What's a week and a half from October 15th? If you don't answer the question right now, her marriage might fall into the city.
Oh, this weekend. Okay, okay, okay, hey. Serena, I got you. Here it is. Uh I'm getting married like right now.
Uh, and I want to make homemade caramel sauce as a wedding favor for my 15 guests. Okay. What can I do to either process or uh what can I do, either process or formula wise to make it fridge stable for a hella long time? Must be like uh West Coast, north like uh Northwest. Hella long time or even shelf stable.
Thanks in advance. Uh sincerely, Serena. Uh, and okay, she uses a recipe, uh, the caramel sauce from the sticky toffee cake that Rachel Ray does, recipe in a minute, I'll give it to you. And uh then she adds a postscript. Uh my mom keeps it in the pantry whenever I make it for her, but she lives by Filipino mom food safety rules, i.e., keep it on the counter until it looks weird.
I don't want to accidentally make my whole wedding party sick, so I'm seeking your advice. Okay, first of all, I see how you are different from Nastasia in that there is nothing Nastasia would like more than to make her entire wedding party sick as long as she was in on the joke. Let's not forget that Nastasia is the person who served sun chokes to people in massive quantities to give them GI upset while she was like, I'm not hungry. Remember that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
True, true story. Uh but we're not here to talk about inulin. So here's the recipe. Let's take a look at it, Serena. In a small heavy saucepan, bring one cup granulated sugar and three tablespoons of cold water to a boil without disturbing.
Boil until the mixture begins to turn amber about five minutes. Alright, so the heavy saucepan here obviously is to prevent scorching. The three tablespoons of uh cold water is just to get everything liquid before it scorches on the bottom. Uh, and you're turning it amber. And what that means is the vast majority of those three tablespoons of water is gone.
Since uh a cup of sugar weighs uh just remember here, a cup of granulated sugar weighs within 10 to 15%, depending on the exact grind you're using. Within 10 to 15%, the same as the exact uh cup that measurement of um water, okay? So just keep that in mind. We got one cup of sugar, you added three tablespoons of water, almost all of that stuff's gone because you boiled it until it was amber. Alright?
So you have a very high sugar substance here. Swirl the pot, and when the color, and the reason they say without disturbing, is they don't want to get uh crystallization on the side. So if you overly disturb something, you can get some uh flex on the side of your pan, it will recrystallize. That recrystallize stuff will crystallize the whole batch. If you get crystals in Christmas is ruined, etc.
etc. Uh, you don't have to worry, I don't think, about massive crystallization afterwards because of what's about to happen. Swirl the pot, and when the color is deep amber removed from the heat, stir in the remaining two tablespoons of butter, right? So it's gonna foam off the liquid in the butter, blah, blah, blah. It's gonna get the the oil in.
Then stir in two-thirds of a cup of cream and stir over low heat till smooth. Stir in the remaining quarter teaspoon salt. So what do we have here? We have two thirds of a cup of cream, a third of which is uh a third of which is fat, roughly a third of which, and the other uh two thirds of that are um, you know, fundamentally milk lits slash liquid. So you're looking at one cup of sugar to about, give or take, half cup of water plus you know, the balance of that two-thirds of a cup in fat plus a two tablespoons of butter.
So you're looking at a two to one simple syrup or something that's very close in sugar to maple syrup. Now, if you do it right, you shouldn't have too much risk of massive amounts of crystallization because it's not much higher than uh 66 bricks if it's higher than 66 bricks at all, but it's also probably not that much less than that. So the only real microbiological problems you're gonna have with this. Now, if the product stays good, i.e., if it does not um, if it does not uh crystallize, like you're not getting weird lactose crystals coming out of it, or it's not forming weird little uh chunks or milk solid things, whatever you get out of it, as long as it's structurally stable, right? And by the way, it could separate a little bit.
So, like I make a cream syrup much the same way as this, but with no heat, we make a cream syrup and it separates, right? But then you can put it back together. It doesn't get granular. The texture of it doesn't go bad. Uh the main danger you have to this product is yeast, right?
So I don't you're not gonna get any kind of pathogens growing in something with that high of a sugar content. So what I would do is I would put them into jars, and then I would put the jars in a water bath, and I would bring that water bath in, and you're not like canning to kill bacteria, you're just uh pasteurizing it to kill yeast. Like yeast is your main enemy here. I mean, maybe there's something that grows in there, but I highly doubt it. I've never heard for instance, like if you have maple syrup and you open maple syrup and then you put your maple stirrup on your shelf, right?
Then you have the chance of getting a disgusting mold on the top of your maple syrup. That would have any styles? Uh no. Oh, it's gross. Like mold slash yeast.
It's disgusting. Disgusting. So if you're not going to use your maple syrup uh very often, it's a good idea to uh if you buy large quantities of maple syrup, which is always cost effective, uh remember that it's already been a heated product, so you're not hurting anything by heating it. Uh you could put them into smaller mason jars, close them, and then kind of uh, you know, bo you know, boil the boil the water around them, and as long as it gets up to the temperature that's gonna kill all of the kind of yeast and mold in it, then you're good, and then it's not gonna go bad forever, fundamentally. Uh and so I would say the same kind of rule happens here.
I would say a very light um, you know, seal in a in a in a mason jar, or even like pour it hot into a mason jar and then seal it and then immerse it in in you know simmering water for a little while, because I have to look up the temperature to kill yeast and mold, but it ain't that high. And remember, you're starting with something that was you know kind of on the warm side anyway. So I would not worry about damaging uh your guests because of the incredibly high sugar content of that product. Does that make sense to us? Yes.
Yeah. And good luck with the with the marriage. Um I mean, not good luck, like good luck with that, but I mean, like, you know, have fun. My experience with getting married, I've only done it once and only hope to ever do it once. What it was more emotional than you thought it would be.
Cried Stasia's just a terrible person. My experience is that you're in a good journey. You know what I mean? It's gonna be a good journey. I can't possibly bring your mumbles up to a audible uh volume.
She's look, Nastasia. Here's some things Nastasia hates. Uh people who have like kind loving relationships. Not true. And people with children or who like their children.
These are the things that Nastasia hates. Beta males, beta males, don't be a beta males. You know why, but but her definition of beta male is someone in a kind loving relationship who cares about their children. That's how she defines it. I just don't like doormats.
And by doormat, she means someone who doesn't say F you, I'm not taking care of those kids that I spawned. That's not true. Yeah, true. True. Nastasia turns out hates women.
No, no, no, that's the show title. Break time. What's the female equivalent of uh of an alpha uh versus beta? But you don't like you but you don't like it. You don't okay, but you don't like alpha males.
I do like alpha males. Whenever you see someone that I would consider an alpha male, what you say is like you know what I mean? Like you you you turn on the repeat douche stutter. There's a middle path that she's promoting. Yes.
So you she likes a guy that's kind of a douche like that. No, not douche at all. Soft spoken douche. Soft spoken douche like that. Like that?
Like who do you like? He does doesn't like douchebags. Which is how I define alpha male. No, not every alpha male is a douchebag, though. Oh yeah?
Okay. All right. Look forward to more explanation explorations of this topic on future cooking issues. Yeah, yeah. You know, we got a comment in on the thing.
Someone's like, yo, this you keep after the beta meals. I don't even know what that means. I don't even know what that means. I really don't know what that means. All right, Caesar writes in.
Wait, we are taking a break. Oh, we're taking a break. Right back with more cooking issues. We now bring you our Bob's Red Mill Food Fact of the Week. Cornstarch is a dense powder made from the endosperm portion of the corn kernel.
First of all, I would bet that Nastasia hates the word endosperm. Cornstarch isn't really dense. I think of it as kind of a slippery feel uh powder. Uh I like it. Uh, what do I use cornstarch for mainly?
Let's say you have AP flour and you want to knock down the protein level in AP flour. Let's say you're making cookies, you're worried the cookies are gonna be tough. Or you're making pancakes, you're worried the pancakes are gonna be tough. Anything where you're using a flour and you don't have a very low protein flour to use, add a little cornstarch up to about 10% of the weight of the flour in cornstarch, and you'll soften the flour up. It's not the same as having a completely soft flour like you would a cake flour, but it goes a long way towards reducing the tendency of those flowers to get tough in in uh baked things.
Thanks to Bob's Red Mill for supporting cooking issues. Visit Bob's Red Mill.com to shop their huge range of products. Use Cooking Issues 25 for 25% off your order. That's cooking issues 25, no spaces, 25's a number. And we are back.
We are now joined in the studio by Kat from the home office at Heritage Radio Networks. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you, Dave? Doing all right.
Nastasia? Uh presumably you do not hate women, Kat. Uh I don't. I don't. Neither do I, which is uh something we haven't used in.
Do you someone who says they don't like beta males? That's not. Isn't that basically some sort of like crypto anti-woman called? What is a what do you define as a beta male? What does that mean?
I think there has to be a balance in a relationship where like if somebody cooks, somebody cleans, right? Okay. And then we have a lot of beta males who are like, I'll cook and I'll not buy the equipment that I want, and I'll wash the dishes, and I'll okay, we won't have sex tonight. Like, whoa, whoa! So you're saying that shoes callers.
That she just said an intensely anti-woman thing there. What? What did I walk in on? Well saying that. That's anti-beta male.
I don't understand what it has to do with it. So you're saying I feel bad for the women. So what you're saying is is that if she what I just heard you say was if she doesn't want to do it tonight and he's like, okay, I'm gonna do it tonight, that that somehow is anti, that's good. Like, that means it's bad for him to be like, you don't feel like doing anything tonight? That's a bad thing.
No, I'm saying he d he's done doing all this stuff, but for what? Like cooking? Like cooking and cleaning and not buying the equipment he wants. Like a lot of our guys are like, she won't let me have anything. Oh gosh.
Is this not just working on alienating the entire cooking issues? I think so. Is that the goal? I think so. I think I think Nastasia should have her own savage love-esque spin-off podcast.
Oh my gosh. I mean, I mean, I'm clearly am not qualified to be on that podcast, so you know. You could call in. I'll call in. So uh wow.
That's just yeah, I don't know where I don't know where to start with that one. I don't know where to start. So why don't we talk about something else? You had uh you were here to talk about the Heritage uh radio fundraiser. Are we gonna do this?
Yeah. So um on Monday, December 3rd, we're hosting our second annual winter in the garden, part two. And why do I want to spend winter in a garden in New York City? I mean, this is not Miami. Well, because we're it's gonna be in the palm house at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
So it's it's it's inside. Yeah, it's a beautiful glass house, like over by all the conservatory. Is that the right word? Area in the garden? I guess, yeah.
So they keep it like, don't worry, climate control. Here's the best thing about how many of you out there, show of hands. Don't worry, I can't see you. How many of you've been in the dead of winter to a botanical garden? I have.
Dave has. You know what the most I have. You know what the most fun is? Having your heavy winter coat on and then walking into where they're growing palm trees in a jungle sweat box. Dave, have you been to the uh the bonsai room at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden?
Uh probably. I do like bonsai's, and I have been to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, so I don't specifically remember it, but yes. It's pretty cool. We're fingers crossed, we're gonna be able to do something in there. Listen, that's all I can say.
Do not put your cocktail on top of the bonsai. No, never do that. No. You ever you know what's a lot of fun? Uh so I had I I was one of those kids in the I guess this is mid-80s, who bonsai's were like be started becoming a like a big thing in sometime in the 80s.
There was like a p a bonsai push. And that's why everyone started selling. It was always those junipers. It was always those little junipers because they could look older and the leaves are so tiny that you know, it was all so people would sell, unscrupulous bonsai salespeople would sell these things, and then what would happen is is they'd all be infested with spider mites. And you'd have them for a couple of years, and then there would be an explosion of red spider mites.
Right? Yikes. Bear in mind these are indoor plants as far as you're concerned, because the bonsai. So where the freak are these spider mites coming from? So it had to show up from them.
Nastasia's mom once sent a a mighty batch. We've said this before on the air spider mites. A mighty batch of tomato plants wrapped in newspaper that somehow made the transcontinental crossing uh to Nastasia via UPS, and she planted them in her garden in those in a community garden in New York City. Yeah, and those those those like hail and hardy outdoorsy type California mites just freaking wiped out everybody. Nastasia's plants fine, because it's like I grew up in California.
I could take this. And like all the New York City plants were like, oh, ow! Yeah, yeah. What have you done? So anyway, so like I was wared I I kind of like w shied away from bonsai's after the traumatic red spider mite explosion that happened in my house when I was a kid.
I used to growing up associate bonsai trees with the beach because growing up in Alabama, we would drive down to Panama City Beach, Florida, and there was on the way back a bonsai tree store. Oh, nice. In Florida. And so I was like, bonsai trees are Floridian, right? No, not.
A way to piss off a bonsai person is to walk up to the person and be like, yo, how old's that bonsai? They're like, they're like, it's not about how old the bonsai is. It's the shape. It's the shape and how it's been trained. You know what I mean?
And you're like, yeah, yeah, that's great. How old is it? Can I give you the definition of a beta male in the urban dictionary? Oh, Jesus. Oh, oh, oh.
Paragon of accuracy, urban dictionary, where literally any Tom Dick or beta male can go add any definition they so choose. A beta male would never do that, and you know it. Okay, it's an unremarkable, careful man who avoids risk and confrontation. Beta males lack the physical presence, charisma, and confidence of the alpha male. Yeah, and so I think, but I think what you're doing is trying to reinforce what I think are toxic masculine stereotypes.
Which reinforcing toxin toxic masculine stereotypes is anti-woman. No, no, I think you're taking it too far. I'm just saying. I'm taking it less than one logical step. I didn't realize you guys had this kind of deep conversation on cooking issues.
When Dave tells stories about his life. Oh, I gotta, I gotta wait, wait, wait, stop. I gotta answer a question, and then you stick around, Kat, because oh, we never even said about the thing. Oh, gardens. All right, go, go, go.
Okay, so it's at December 3rd at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Palm House, and Yellow Magnolia Cafe. Tickets are on sale now. Go to our Facebook page. How much they cost? Um, they are $135 dollars for general admission and $225 for VIP.
And what do you get for general mission? By the way, I hate VIP sections. Why? Because it's always the worst kind of people that are there. We had really fun people at our VIP.
All right. What do you get for it? Um I like general admission people better. It's a taste around event, so we're gonna have 13 to 15 chefs from New York and a couple from out of town making all different kinds of food. We're gonna have uh Dave's gonna have existing conditions team there.
We're gonna have Souther Teague, Damon Bolty doing cocktails, we're gonna have beer, cider, wine. What kind of cider? Um, hopefully Shreksbury. We had Shaxbury last year. We love those guys.
You're gonna get that crazy Maser. Maser? What's that? The mead dude from Enlightenment. Ooh.
Oh, you haven't even thought about mead. Now you have something else for me to work on. Um and then yeah, so we're gonna do some past food, some stations, uh, we'll have a silent auction. Last year, one of the biggest hits of the event was our wine ring toss. We had a bunch of bottles of wine on the floor, and if you you like paid a small amount to like throw toss a ring, and if you rung a bottle of wine, you got to keep it.
And it was like one petruse and a billion yellowtails? Yeah, exactly. That's a really good game. Yellowtail and kids. Just like when Phil comes over.
Nastalia's like lit lays the case of yellowtail. Oh my god. Nastasia. Nastasia has like a bookcase constructed out of yellowtail bottles stacked because her friends bring it. She won't drink it.
Yeah, yeah. Nice. Cheap friends, cheap friends. Um, yeah, so go get tickets. It'll be great.
All right. Now stick around because you want to talk about something else, but I gotta answer this question before they rip us off the air. Caesar writes in if you're still keeping records, I'm 29, male and single, trying to make all of my kitchen gadget purchases as intelligently as possible. Don't have need for a spinzall yet. So, Nastasia, you gotta sell this.
You gotta sell Caesar on spinzel. That's your next job. If you don't buy a spinzel, you must be a beta male. Well, no, he needs to buy it now before he gets married, right? No.
Why? Because who says maybe his he's our listener? Whatever. Disrespecting everyone. Disrespects, but then owns the.
We know that. There are 11. Yeah. All right, whatever. Do you know how many beta males have called in to complain about you?
Zero. All right. Uh I was hoping you could talk about coffee roasting. Specifically, what coffee roaster do you use? Considerations when moving up to multi-kilo units, the roasting cycle, flavor development, smoking, um, like meat and flavor infusing if you're feeling generous.
I'm just getting into coffee roasting. I'm looking for a deep dive into the subject. I've done some walk roasting with mixed results and just purchased a uh Genie Cafe coffee roaster. As it seems to be the only one on the market that is intelligent intelligently designed for its size. I won't want to move up to an approximately two kilogram unit in the next five years if I end up loving it.
Uh love the show, Caesar, uh, as in Julius. All right, so my uh my experience with coffee roast. Now remember, coffee is coffee is a subject that has been, and I've said this a million times, has been moving so radically over the past 10, 12 years that any knowledge that you have of um something like coffee is like you could be completely up to date five years ago, and then if you stop paying attention, you were you are you now know nothing. Like that's how fast something that doesn't seem like maybe to an outsider, like there's that much to know. That's how fast things move in coffee.
And so I'm gonna say that my roasting uh knowledge is way out of date. And so like I can't give you uh the the great news about it is is that there there are a lot of um there are a lot of websites that are completely devoted to this and can give you kind of and you know most of the time you have to I mean the way that I approach anything like this. So let's say I was gonna get back, I'm s I still roast coffee, but let's say I was gonna get back into being a real badass. Like, how do you do it, right? So what you do is is you have to pick up the fundamental skill of weeding out the the chaff from the good information on a website.
I'll give you a a non-coffee example. So like I just responded to a uh a text today, uh not text, but uh uh an Instagram comment that was sent to you know, sent to me. DM, Dave. What? It's a DM.
It's not a DM, it was a comment in the general thing. So get your term straight before you s before you sass me. Anyway, uh where they said it was uh yet another person worried about when they're doing low temperature cooking whether they should sear something before or after. The or is the important part here, because they're like, I always thought you had to do it afterwards. And the correct answer is that there is no one choice.
You can sear meat both before and after. The dichotomy is false. So you have to get kind of good at reading forums and experiments and finding there's typically one or two or three really good people in a scene who also I don't know where the hell they get the time, but they have the time to post a lot of information about it. And you can kind of weed through that and see what is people just kind of harping on minute things that don't really make a difference and what are important. But I will share kind of the my old school, uh like where I have been in coffee roasting.
So I started doing air popcorn popper uh stuff, which was the first imitation of the civets style uh roast, if you're into that kind of like clean air taste, right? I then moved on to I think they were called harvest roasts, which were tailor-made uh air popcorn poppers specifically for coffee. Uh and I they were fine, except for they're extremely loud, and two of them broke on me. I had two of them break on me in less than two years. Uh so I kind of got off of that, um, went back to the air popper for a while, and then started reading a lot of inform a lot of stuff on drum roasting versus uh air popping, and I got into the whirly pop.
So then I started doing whirly pop roasts. Um and I roasted whirly pop for a number of years, and then I got tired of twisting the whirly pop. So I uh and by the way, like everyone, like most of your measurements, most of all of that measurement stuff is like the most helpful at the beginning. Like, unless you're doing this is why I'm hopelessly behind in coffee roasting, is that now people are following very kind of prescribed roast profiles, beginning, middle, end of roast, and how they're ramping up and ramping down. And for that, you always need good temperature.
But when you're just starting, I think it's kind of very useful to like try to hit certain benchmarks, but then also to educate your senses, your ears, your eyes, your nose to what's going on, and then go back to the hyper control so you can kind of see what you're doing. So I controlled a whirly pop, I automated a whirly pop with a motor, and I finally threw away the whirly pop and I built my version of a kind of stove top uh burns sample roaster, which works great, uh, but it can really only do about a kilo. I have no experience with stuff larger than a kilo, except for if I was gonna go anything over what I have now, you need very, very good extraction unless you're gonna do it outside. Uh what I have noticed is that I think I forget which units do it, but some units now have the uh a catalytic burner. So that for those of you that never roasted coffee before, it makes an unbelievable amount of acrid smoke.
Okay. Now that acrid smoke can be controlled by taking a if you have the time and inclination, you can stand next to the mouth of the roaster with a blowtorch and just shoot a blowtorch across the mouth of the roaster, and that high heat will consume the acrid smoke, and you will get very little smoke coming out as long as you maintain that flame. There are people that put uh like a catalytic burner on the out on the on the outflow of gases on their roasters and burn off uh all of that acrid kind of bluish uh smoke as it comes out. And so that is the real impediment, I think, to doing larger uh roasts, not just the power, right? Because I can clearly do a lot more on my stove or if you built a propane burner uh or something like that.
But uh, I'm sure someone in the chat room has more information on this, and I encourage them to uh write it. What? Well, so let me see what I didn't answer, and then I'll see what I didn't answer. Um, Elliot wrote in about the uh Still Spirits Turbo Airstill. Said, is there if there's a show today, can Dave talk about this piece of uh still equipment?
It's cheap. I want to make absinthe at home with dried and fresh ingredients. Thanks. Okay, so uh what the turbo still is is it fundamentally is uh uh it takes a long time, but it does distillation instead of using uh a worm with uh water, right, to chill it off, it's just using a fan and forced air, which is a relatively inefficient way to cool off condensing vapors, which is why this thing distills at a relatively low rate. Uh I'm sure it you can distill something.
If you're distilling an already distilled product and you're just trying to get flavors and aromas out, then I'm sure it's gonna work fine. If you're trying to do actual distillation, which they encourage you to do, where you're taking like a like a uh a fermented thing and trying to get a full thing off, they don't mention anything about removing heads and tails. It's kind of crazy their instruction. They just say uh, well, you you distill it, then you mix it with water, then you put it through a charcoal filter, then you add flavoring. Now, this does not sound to me like a recipe for great spirits.
Now, and the the the structure of every still, right? Because it's not a column still, so you're not doing like hyper-purification, right? You're just you're taking stuff off as it as it comes. It doesn't have I I can't tell, I don't think, but I can't, it doesn't have like a lot of plates, it's not doing a lot of purification, right? So it's acting like uh like the cheapest of all stills.
So you're gonna have to do like a lot of cuts and you're probably gonna have to distill it a couple of times to get kind of the separation uh that you want if you are distilling something that has impurities in it. If you are not distilling something that has impurities in it, then you can act more like I act with a rotary evaporator where we're trying to get total recapture. And if you're trying to get total recapture, which you're not gonna do with an air cool system, whatever, I'm not even gonna get into that. But the point is, if you're trying to get total recapture and you're not worried about heads and tails and four shots and all of that kind of stuff, uh then sure, give it a shot. It'll probably work.
One note is I don't know what kind of safety mechanisms they have in in it to prevent explosions. Right? So, alcohol vapor is one invisible and two explosive. So, this is why everyone seals up their uh stills and makes sure that the fire never comes in contact with the alcohol vapor. Now you don't have a fire because it's electrical, but like, I don't know, maybe you do this next to your stove.
I don't know. Maybe you smoke. I don't know. I don't know what you do. I do not know your life.
So just be careful. And I didn't see any real safety warnings about explosion hazards in uh in their instruction manual. So just be careful out there. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network, food radio supported by you.
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