This episode of Cooking Issues is brought to you by Bob's Red Mill, 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 Issues25 for 25% off your order. I'm HRN's Communications Director Kat Johnson with a preview of this week's episode of Meet and Three, our weekly food news roundup.
Fall is finally here, so it's time to get funky and devote an episode to some of our favorite spunky microbes. Why don't I just provide this beautiful whimsical lens on how the world works? They have so many roles. They're this strange and magical theming group of organisms, but they've got it all figured out. Should you eat the cheese rind?
Can you eat the rind? These are like the biggest questions. We'll answer all of your questions about mysterious mushrooms and crazy curds. Plus, we'll give you a sneak listen to the newest season of Modernist Breadcrumbs. So tune in to this week's Meet and Three on Heritage Radio Network.
Available wherever you listen to podcasts. From like 12. Hey, crap on you. 12, like 1245. We didn't start on time.
Not my fault. I was truly thrown. Matt, Matt in the booth. I was here on time, correct? Oh, before one minute ahead of time.
I turned it. I looked at you and I was like, oh my God, you're early. Yeah, and where was I live? Here in Bushwick Brooklyn Joined as usual with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez. Good.
Matt in the booth. Hello, hello. Call in all of your cooking or beta mail related questions. Two 718497 2128. That's 718497-2128.
How you been doing over the past week, uh Nastasia? Fine. I feel like we've had a lot of crap. Didn't we do a lot of crap? No.
Do it just feel like we did a lot of crap. No, we did the farm, we talked about that. Yeah. What else? No, I had so many events last week.
We did I did Taste of New York. You already talked about that. Huh. So I feel like I had an event every like every day last week. Hmm.
Maybe not. Guess what I did do this weekend? You went to Connecticut. That's not the important part of the Poker. Red Hot Pokers.
It's gonna be Red Hot Poker season soon. I have a slightly new technology with the Red Hot Pokers. And when I posted on the Instajerk that I was going to uh that I was making the Red Hot Pokers, everyone was like, Can I make one? Can I make one? I was like, Well, you can, but they're super dangerous.
How many times did how many times did I have massive problems before I finally figured it out, Nastasia? Uh many. Yeah. What are they? Oh, that's an excellent question, Matt.
What is a red-hot poker? Well, I'm glad you asked. It turns out that in uh pre-Civil War uh America, um, you know, one of the good things that was happening in pre-Civil War America is when you went into a tavern in the wintertime and you ordered a hot drink, they would go into the fireplace and they'd take what's called a flip dog or an and iron, which is like a hunk of metal, out of the fireplace, and they'd shove it into your tankered of garbage. Your tankered garbage might be, you know, beer plus brandy or cider plus some other kind of brandy. You know, maybe some sugar in it and blah blah blah.
Heat it up with the red hot poker, and that's how they'd heat the drink, because you know, they had fireplaces and they had pokers, so the red hot poker. So in the early 2000s, a lot of when a lot of bartenders were worried about recreating a lot of uh old drinks. One of the ones that kind of no one was recreating because who the hell had a fireplace in a New York City bar was uh this kind of old school was called flip with a flip dog with uh with a red-hot poker. Um also called loggerheads, uh the genesis of the term to be at loggerheads. Nastassi's heard this story eight thousand times.
That's why you hear her hissing in the background. Fact matter as a Stasia, like your job here in Nastasia isn't to sit around and have fun. I know you think I know, I'm just I was concerned about everybody who listens and uh has also heard this. Well, excuse me, Matt has not heard it. Some of us are new here.
You might have new fans. Yeah, yeah. Now that you've pivoted to talking mostly about beta males, you've got a whole new audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
Uh okay. So, anyways, so um uh this started uh sort of drink started fading out of uh the picture as taverns with fireplace working fireplaces um started fading out, and that drink kind of faded out, but it turns out that super high heat creates these kind of cool flavors. So then I don't know, like 10 more than 10 years ago or you know, thereabouts, I started playing around with trying to figure out how to do this, and eventually, so the the main problem is uh, you know, originally we were literally heating slugs of metal up on you know our commercial stoves. Again, not very good for a bar. So I tried to make one that could heat itself, and uh a lot of hilarity ensued as I blow uh you know I made ones that exploded and all these other things.
You've seen them explode, right? It's nasty and nasty. You don't want to see one explode. Or they just burn themselves out. Um, so I finally found a, you know, years ago, I finally found an exact heater at an exact wattage that it is hot enough to heat the drink, in fact to ignite it, um, on a pretty regular basis, not so hot that it will explode, and they last for about a month during service.
So every year I build a set of these red hot pokers and we use them at the bar, and we're gonna try them at existing conditions. Uh although you know, with the number of seats we have, I think we're gonna have to raise the price just so that people don't order too many of them because if they order, you know, if you have like you know, eighty people in there and you know 15 of them order red hot pokers at the same time, it you'll shut the bar down. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
So we gotta price it at that level where it's not gonna like ruin service. Anyways. That makes sense to me. Thank you for explaining. You're welcome.
You're welcome, you know, Nastasia. Hey, so Nastasia, here's a question for you. Yes. So uh isn't the weirdest part, one of the weirdest parts about owning a business just looking out at your you and I have a business together. Yeah, but I mean, do we don't we certain we don't get to see in other words like a restaurant business?
Yeah. It's like looking out and seeing the people who are at your place and being like, who are these people? Where did they come from? I hope they're having a good job. You have a lot of dates there.
Um I guess you do not have a lot of pasta dates. I'm going out on a date, let's get safasta. Let's pack carbs into our date. No? No.
Well, so what's your average person? Like single person eating quickly. Yeah, beta male. No. I regret.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I regret saying anything. But like I don't know. Like I look out and like uh what percentage of the people, not at your establishment, say, you look out, I look at what percentage of the people are enjoying what they're doing at any given minute. Don't you think about that when they're at when they're at any sort of business or sort of restaurant?
I think are they having an okay time. Yeah, we want them to have a good time, right? That's why we went into this business is to have a good time. So you're looking out and you're like, is that person having a good time? Is that person having a good time?
This is what I spend most of my time thinking about when I'm at the bar looking out, and like I have that confused look on my face. That confused look is looking at you and wondering, are you having a good time? I was at Charlie Bird sitting on the sidewalk with Robert Bohr and Mark a couple weeks ago. And that's uh Mark Ladner and Robert Bohr. Yeah.
They have a lot of like sidewalk area, and there's these rats that want to like run up to the restaurant. Not people, like literal rats. Rats. Yeah. And Robert's favorite thing to do is to go chase after the rat on the sidewalk that's coming toward his restaurant and kick it.
And I saw him kick one to death. Wait, wait. So first of all, first of all, I don't really know Robert. I mean, I've spoken to him, but I don't I don't know him. He has angry.
We we'd all get along. No, my that's not my point. My point is he must be a quick dude. Yeah. I didn't picture him as being a fast kind of a guy.
Excuse me. First of all, first of all, first of all, first of all, what kind of shoes does he wear? He was in like these nice leather, like he was dressed for work. Like pointy Italian shoes? No, they weren't pointy Italian.
They were, they were, but they were nice. They were not. They were not like sneakers or boots. Yeah, because he seems like a fancier person than I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I wear I'm a sneak, I'm a sneaks kind of a dude. Well at the tree. First of all, props to the rat. And then it collapsed red. The rat's like, the rat's like, nah.
Nah. Crap on you. It comes back towards him. Yeah. But that's crazy.
I lost my mind. I was laughing so hard. Well, first of all, it m I'm sure most people would be horrified. Yeah, people were like, is he with you? And I was like, he owns this place.
Oh, geez. That's like so nostalgic. Do I know him? He owns this place. Not actually related.
But he's like, yes, I do know him, but more importantly, the place that you're about to, you know, patronize is his place, and yes, the owner of this place kicks rats to death. You should know for fun. Before you go in, I want you to know this dude, this is this guy here. He likes fancy wine. And he likes kicking rats to death.
It says so on his freaking profile. How New York is that? I saw it. What's his favorite kind of wine? He's by the way, he's a wine official.
I don't know. You don't know? No. But is he like I can guess, but I don't I don't know. But is he like an old school like wine like liker?
Or is he like all this new like uh natural stuff? Oh no, he hates I'm not gonna speak for him. But like I'm trying to imagine his personal profile. If he needed to have a personal profile, it was like I like first growth Bordeaux and kicking rats to death. Like what are they like, you know?
I'm trying to come up with like a e-harmony profile for him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that, but I'm just saying, like if he weren't. Oh, geez. That'd be amazing.
Okay, some questions. We have some questions. Uh you know what we have to do first, I told you. Austin. Well, answer Austin's question, yes.
Okay. Nastasia is so uh, you know. You know what's funny is like for some things, she's on me like uh a freaking like a hawk, right? Why do they call it on you like a hawk? Is it on you like a hawk?
So in that I'm the mouse. So like Robert Bohr is gonna fly out of the sky and kick me with his shiny leather boot into a tree. And should I have the temerity to come back at him? He will kick me to death. Amazing.
He's gonna get all these like negative like PETA style things now. Where did this where did I just come from? Why is this happening to me? People also I just want you to know, having known Nastasia for too many years, many, many years, this is probably not his favorite thing to do. Nastasi probably made his year.
Again, Nastasia has a way of getting quotes out of people that are, let's say, let's say not what they would ordinarily say if they weren't with Nastasia. Peter Kim, uh director of the Museum of Food and Drink, and this show's favorite punching bag father, right? Um, has said to me on many occasions that he does not like to have meetings with the two of us together because we make each other much, much worse. He says he cannot have a constructive meeting if the two of us are there. You believe that?
He says that you feed off of me, and then he can't get stuff done. Hmm. I believe that. All right. Thank God that like not only do you guys have that power, but you also have a platform to broadcast that unedited.
Whatever the whatever you got out of somebody, you can tell the world. Thousands of people at once. Yeah, which is why you should never tell Nastasia anything. I keep secrets better than you do. What?
I have some. Name a secret told you. Name a secret that I've ever let out. I've never seen I've never revealed a secret. Don't say that, and then I've never revealed a secret.
Okay. I've never revealed I've revealed things that people haven't told me are secrets, but I've never revealed a secret because it just doesn't interest me to do so. What's a secret I revealed? Tell me later. Yeah, I'll tell you later.
I'll tell you later. A secret that you said not to say. Yeah. No. I'll tell you later.
No. No. No. Drop the secrets. Anyway, go.
Alright. Austin writes in. Austin, our friend Austin, formerly of Booker and Dax, now of Major Domo. Great place. In Los Angeles.
I had that was a really fun dinner. And that's saying a lot, because Nastasia, A, there's two things that she doesn't really enjoy. She goes out a lot, used to, doesn't enjoy doing it, hates even more admitting that she likes a place, especially if she's done business with one of the owners. If Nastasia has ever done business with one of the owners and she likes it, it's it's a grudging like. True or false.
True. But it's a really great place. Yeah. Uh although it's in a weird neighborhood, right? It's like in the like it's in the middle of an industrial neighborhood.
Makes Bushwick look like a residential neighborhood. Yeah. You know? This part of Bushwick. There is residential Bushwick.
But this is not residential Bushwick. By the way, for any of you who listen to this who aren't New Yorkers, I still don't understand. Matt, what neighborhood do you live in? Yeah. Do you understand why anyone lives in this neighborhood?
This neighborhood? Yeah. Is this even a neighborhood? Like who lives here? Yeah, no, I mean, yes, people do, I think, I gather, but no, I have no idea.
I mean, it's like an industrial park. For those of you that don't know, like, let's say you're driving down the highway in anywhere USA, and you just saw a bunch of industrial buildings with roll-ups and like garbage trucks parked outside of them, and like the occasional trash on the side of the street. You've been to this neighborhood. Yeah, except it's like I don't know, many, many dozens of city blocks of that. It's crazy.
But the thing is, is there is real Bushwick that is a real neighborhood where real people live, right? It's just not this neighborhood that we call Bushwick on the air. I don't think I've been to that. Where is real Bushwick? I don't know.
I I know it's real. I know it's real. I don't know. Um Austin, who is in the Roberta-style Bushwick of LA at Major Domo, a fine restaurant. Um I want to add texture to a carbonated uh highball style drink, and thought that a fat wash with coconut oil would do the trick without adding much extra flavor.
I know that Tona Palomino uh did a carbo uh peanut butter fat wash at WD50 uh back in the day, so I know it's possible. Can you walk me through the best practices for this technique? Actually, also I know someone was having trouble with a peanut butter fat wash who came into the bar the other day. Um the way Tona used for those of you that you know aren't like up on it, fat washing is where you transfer uh a fat soluble flavor in a fat to alcohol because uh uh the flavors that are fat soluble are also in general weakly alcohol soluble. So you can add a fat which won't dissolve in the um in the alcohol, but some of those flavors will be pulled all out of the fat into the alcohol.
You can then freeze or or separate, otherwise separate through filtration, uh not through uh through like a separatory funnel or something like this, you can separate the fat out and you get a fat-free but fat like flavored from fat uh alcohol. Uh in the case of peanut butter, you have to be careful because in peanut butter there are a lot of soluble things in it, right? So uh if you just mix peanut butter and and um uh what's the word, uh like alcohol, right? You then have to use some pretty serious like centrifuging uh or other forms of stuff to get it to settle out and become clear again because you're suspending stuff in the peanut other than just the fat, right? But you are doing fat uh washing, and because there's very little moisture in peanut butter, if you're lucky, there's very little moisture, um, you're not like extracting a lot of liquids from the peanut.
So it is a fat wash, but it's easy to get it, you know, kind of like murky. So the way tona used to do it, which is I don't know not the most efficient way, but it it you know works, is he used to spread the peanut butter very, very, very, very thin uh on sheet trays and then pour a like a thin layer of alcohol over the peanut butter to get maximum surface and uh area, and then he'd like you know, move it back and forth and he'd do it that way, just maximizing the surface area uh of the solid peanut butter rather than mixing it, mixing it together, and that's how he was able to carbonate his peanut butter fat wash and get it you know nice nice and clear. Um now if you're gonna do coconut oil, I mean I think the issue is is you're gonna want a you know you can't have uh the fat the coconut oil in the in the liquor because uh coconut oil specifically coconut oil uh gets very hard and clumpy when it gets cold, which is why if you buy coconut cream, which contains a lot of you know uh the fat from a coconut, uh it's super highly stabilized. If you read the back of a of a can of Nastasia Coca Lopez, it says, like, you know, it has like a million things in it, it's got like guar and LBG, carragea. I mean, I don't know exactly, but it's just a a huge crap spray of stabilizers in it because if you speak to any hydrocolloids expert, they'll tell you coconut fat is a difficult fat to uh to stabilize in a beverage system because the temperature drops uh and you're diluting, so it kind of clumps out.
So you're gonna want mainly the flavor, but I don't know if coconut, I mean, have you ever had a coconut oil nostalgia that was like, oh my god, this tastes so much like coconuts that I want to die? No. Me neither. I mean, like, I think like if you were to take there's some very high quality flaked coconut now, or you could just grate coconut and remove some of the excess moisture so you're not like sucking a lot of that cloudy, like you know, stuff into it, and then do a soak, and then what my favorite thing to do, my favorite thing to do nowadays is throw everything in the hydraulic press. That's why I'm gonna rewrite a lot of my orjah recipes for the uh bar where I'm going to, and how often do you get to say this on a family show?
I'm gonna throw my nutsack into a press and crush my nutsack under 20 tons of pressure to squeeze every last little bit of juice out of my nut sacks and get very high yield on my orjaz. How often do you get to say that on a family show Nastasia? You like that? Yeah. And I'm gonna squash my nutsack in a press.
Did I tell you, did I talk on the air about the new about the modifications I made to our 20-ton press? Yes. Or did I say? So you went to Granger and you got this thing. Granger?
Where'd you get it from? I haven't been to Granger in years. Well, it's an English. I don't know. I didn't buy anything from the McMaster Car.
I made it all from parts I scrounged. Okay. Jerk. Nastasia Lopez, well-known jerk. I made a the like a new lab where I have the you know, this um, what's it called?
I'm a member. Some idiot threw away like a thousand dollars worth of food grade Delrin. And so I just milled all the Delrin into I used it like wood, but like a non-absorbent wood, and I built an old school cider press out of solid Delrin. And then so now, like we have this Delrin cider press that we we can use for all of our waffle popcorn and soon nut sack crushing needs. What do you what do you what do you want to put in my nut sack and crush, Nastasia?
Not going there. Many things. Many, many things. Now, if you were to just soak coconut flakes, let's say, and not squeeze them out. I mean, the issue, I guess, if you had a very highly flavored coconut oil, you might be able to get some transfer, but it would need to be highly flavored.
And the advantage of that is you'd have extremely low loss because once you froze the coconut oil, it would go up to the top. So you'd melt, you'd have to find a very highly flavored coconut oil. Let's just go through with it. You'd find very highly flavored coconut oil, then you would melt said coconut oil, mix it into the alcohol, keep it liquid, uh, and I would say stir it occasionally to get maximum surface area contact, right? So I would stir it, keep the convection going, whatnot.
Keep it for like, you know, eight hours, ten hours overnight, then throw the whole sucker in the freezer, coconut oil will turn solid like a rock, and nothing will change it. Uh through the steel. Anyway, so then you poke a hole in the in the solid coconut oil on the top, and you pour out the coconut booze, and it should work, right? You have to find a highly flavored coconut, or the effect will be, shall we say, subtle, right? Yeah.
Because once you use coconut flakes, even desiccated coconut flakes, if you're gonna get the yield up, you're gonna need to squish them, and if you squish them, you're gonna get the cloudy stuff out. You know what I mean? And then you're gonna have to separate it. I happen to know Austin has his spinzall, so we could probably do some good separation on it, but I haven't done a lot of separation work with uh squeezed out coconut sack, so I don't know whether it would work, so I can't say. Second question.
I'm working on a gardenia syrup for a Pearl Diver. So gardenia syrup, by the way, a syrup, a tiki drink syrup that does not, in fact, contain gardenias. Can you eat gardenias? I don't, I thought they were poisonous. Are they?
So why are they naming a syrup after them if they're poisonous? You're gonna look this up, whether it's poisonous. By the way, Nastasi and I yesterday, after the radio program, we went to the Star Chef's and we met this guy. I'm not gonna blow up his spot, but he had all of these edible flowers. Remember this, Nastasia?
Yeah. It wasn't yesterday. It was last week. That's what I'm saying. Was it yesterday?
Oh, sorry, last radio show, last Tuesday, right? So Nastasi and I are going, and Nastasia put on her, like Nastasia put on her you could live, you could die, I don't care face, which is kind of her standard face. It's her standard, you know, like if a meteor was coming down and she knew it was gonna hit you on the head, maybe she'd move you. You know what I mean? Like that gardenias are non-toxic to humans, but they're toxic to dogs, cats, and horses.
It can cause bombing diarrhea and hives in animals, but not people. What the hell is that all about? I don't know. You know what else apparently is that uh like alliums, apparently toxic to dogs. But do you know, do you like?
Do you believe all these stories where people say things are toxic for like I mean, how different am I from a dog or a cat? I know chocolate. I know chocolate, I've heard alliums, but I mean, it could be true. I don't know. You know what's another thing that's not really poisonous, at least not that poisonous?
Poinsetis. Oh, really? Didn't you grow up with in mortal fear of poinsetis? Your parents would be like, you're gonna you look at the poinsetter wrong, you will die. And then you're like, and you're like, oh my god, now I want to eat it.
Now I want to eat it. I'm gonna eat this damn poinsetta. What about you, Matt? Did you like did you grow up with this problem? I did not grow up with this problem.
Really? Are you a Christmas guy? Am I a Christmas guy? Are you Christian? Are you of Christian extraction?
Oh, yeah. We did Christmas. But you don't have you didn't have poinsettas? I I remember poinsetas in church. I don't know.
But not like at your house? You didn't have poinsetas at your house? At my house? Yeah. Oh no.
I like this. It's like who has poinsetas in their house? We have who brings that poison into their house. Well, no, I just I had a Christmas tree. That's what I got.
Yeah? Are you a are you a real Christmas tree guy or are you one of fake Christmas tree guy? We were real. Well about you stuff as real. Yeah, yeah, real.
I don't like the fake creature, the first grade fake Christmas tree. You have one though. No, I I have a completely silver one next to my real one because as nice as a real tree is, it's not very reflective. You know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm.
Anyway, that's for later. Although, pretty soon it's gonna be time to bust out Christmas hat. Christmas hat, Christmas music, Rudolph, all the stuff that Nastasi and I love. Yeah. It's the only thing Nastasi and I both actually like.
There's other things we like. What? Um like champagne. Also good to have at the holiday time. By the way, uh, so we had this argument with Jack, my head bartender, and so Jack is like Jack's one of these classic kind of wine snob kind of a guys who he's like only wants to drink stuff that you've never heard of.
If you've heard of it, he does not want to drink that. But here's the problem. So he got a very good, reasonably priced, and the names went out of my head, champagne, actual champagne, to have at our bar, right? And the problem is is that if you want people to come into a bar and buy a champagne, you have to give them a champagne that they've heard of. If the idea of having a champagne on the menu is to extract money from people who wish to spend a load of a lot of money, you have to appeal to the person who has a lot of money, and in general, that person is going to go for the one they've heard of, not for the one they haven't heard of.
Yeah. Right? Yeah. That is true. Do you serve champagne at your uh restaurant?
You have wine, you don't want to have a couple of fancy bottles around for fancy folk? I can't. I can't I can't even talk about it. All right. For that heavy poor.
Nastasia's like, Nastasia's like, I don't care what you charge me, just make the poor heavy. No, no, no. I'm talking about Nastasia. We're at I'm at the bar with Nastasia talking about a very exciting business development that I can't tell you. Uh and so by the way, speaking of the other thing, like someone came up to the bar and asked me what it is your mom thinks happens to all the soda cans, and I told them.
That's good. Yeah, yeah. Can't tell you people. Did you tell the when they come to the bar when I said the UPS person? Oh, Jesus.
If you come to the bar, you can add by the way, these are all things that are fair game at the bar, but are not fair game on the radio program. Nastasia went to UPS on Saturday, right? Well, we worked super hard, you and I. Yeah, yeah. We worked hard Friday night.
I worked as hard Saturday morning, same thing that we were sending. Yeah, and by the way, it was well, I'll say what we were sending. We were sending uh spinzall, so it's big, you know what I mean? And cocktails and cocktails as a demonstration of what the spins all can do. So now Nastasia, who, by the way, like if you had to list her top ten things that she does not like to do, right?
Getting hit in the face with a hammer or shipping things, they're kind of equal. You know what I mean? I mean, I feel like it's you feel the same way. I feel as someone say said to you, I'm gonna hit you once in the forehead with a hammer, or you'll never have to ship and you'll never have to ship anything again. You'd be like, ooh, yeah, let me see the hammer.
You know what I mean? Like a rubber hammer. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, so she goes, goes, physically goes to the UPS with this giant box and drops it off, and they just didn't ship it. She paid an ungodly amount of money for overnight weekend shipping.
Ungodly. Ungodly. It was still sitting in the place yesterday. Can you imagine? So Nastasia had, let's always say, uh, shall we say, choice words?
Choice words for them. That you know, Dave? That could not be repeated even on basic cable. And then after I said it, I had to get out of the store with the two boxes. Wait, wait, you took them to a different mail?
Yeah, because I was just like, I'm not dealing with you people. So, what did the faces of the regular guests customers? But the embarrassing part is then I had the two boxes and the door opened in. Oh, geez. I know, and I couldn't have to do it.
Did any of them help you? No. So I use all my strength and I like use one finger to pry the door open. It was like you didn't use your Drew Barry more fire starter anger. I was surprised I could do it.
Oh my god. That's so funny. I mean, let's just say, let's just say the C suck word came out quite a bit. Right? I mean, uh I would have loved to see, like, when so Nastasia spends most of her time just kind of internalizing anger and getting other people to be angry in her stead or to have miserable time so that she can kind of keep herself under control.
But on the rare occasions when Nastasia loses her mind, it is a rare treat for the rest of us. Alright, back to this. I am working on a gardenia syrup for a pearl diver riff. Ideally, I would like to be able to store the syrup in a squeeze bottle and keep it in the low boy at all times rather than having to keep it at room temp during service, back in overnight and back out again. Uh do you have any advice for proportions of sugar to butter and possibly alcohol that would keep it squeezable at fridge temp, or possibly some additive that would keep it from going solid on me.
And uh so, uh PS, I'll give you the Pearl Diver recipe that is on uh the internet. I forget whose this is. I probably looked up somebody I like, but probably maybe not, I don't know. It's probably in bib. I don't know, I don't know.
I don't know who the hell's recipe this is, but I'm gonna give it to you anyway. Three quarter ounce of lime juice, one ounce of laur uh orange juice, three-quarters ounce of the gardenia mix, which is that you know, mix we're about to talk about, three-quarters ounce of uh Demerara uh rum, preferably Hamilton 86 proof or El Dorado 8 here, one and a half uh ounces of uh gold Puerto Rican rum, half ounce of gold Jamaican rum. This is like a shotgun of stuff, one teaspoon of phalarum, one teaspoon, one teaspoon, Nastasia, of phalarinum. One teaspoon. These recipes.
Preferably latitude twenty-nine formula and six ounces of crushed ice, combine all the ingredients in a blender, starting with the gardenia mix and finishing with the ice blend at high speed 15 seconds, strain through a medium uh mesh wire sieve into a pearl diver glass, pressing gently on the solids to express all the liquid. Uh add crushed ice to fill the glass, garnish with a geranium leaf. What? Nothing. You hate this recipe?
No. Anyway, so then that's the recipe. But anyway, gardenia mix is one cup of unsalted butter, one cup orange blossom honey. You know, that's gonna be real subtle. The orange blossom honey is gonna be real, whatever.
I went to a honey store in Saratoga with Chef Haley from the Italian program. She's one of the uh the owners there. And they have this honey that we're gonna use. Did I tell you about this? From the it the is there a black forest in Italy?
I think it's a black Italian Black Forest. Do they have a Black Forest in Italy? I don't know. Anyway, the the honey is not extracted from pollen, but from honeydew, which is the uh sap of plants processed through aphid bodies. It's pretty good.
We're gonna use it in a drink. Anyway, orange blossom honey, one ounce cinnamon syrup, uh half ounce of allspice liqueur, and a half ounce vanilla syrup. Uh, and you combine all ingredients in a saucepan and whisk until melted and smooth. Uh, and so you have a butter syrup. The only answer to the first of all, butter syrup's always gonna go solid on you.
Um what you need to do is you need to stabilize this sucker with uh ticloid. Uh so ticoloid is a mixture of gum air ticloid 210 or two or three ten uh are mixtures of gum arabic and xanthan. If you can't find that, you can just substitute a um a very finely powdered gum Arabic and a kind of uh, you know, wrap it either agglomerated or you know, high quality, strong xanthan gum. I forget the exact ratio uh that I use, but it's in liquid intelligence. Uh and I think it's like four to one Arabic to Xanthan or something like this.
I have the, I keep saying I have this, I'll look it up. But you want to stabilize it with Xanthan and Arabic. And the the ratio is not really super important. You can add them separately. The Arabic is there and it's there in higher quantities on the order of like you know, two percent or something like this.
The Arabic is there as an actual uh emulsifier to emulsify the fat into the into the liquid. And you're better off actually um adding the sugar later, uh adding the Arabic to the straight water before you add the sugar uh in your cinnamon slash uh you know ginger thing or whatever you're doing there, all spice, whatever it is, I can't remember. Uh you're better off uh adding the Arabic and Xanthan into that and then adding the butter to emulsify it in and then adding the sugar. But you know, you can do it either way. Um so the Arabic is there on the order of a couple of percent uh to actually emulsify the butter in so that it makes a stable emulsion when you're making the drink.
The um the other part, the the the xanthan gum is there at a much smaller percent. You're talking like below a half a percent, probably closer to a quarter of a percent, and that is there to just make a light gel when it's sitting still, just so that it doesn't want to separate because it's fundamentally a solid when it's standing still. So that's what the two things are doing there. Now, uh I would not use a squeezy for this syrup. First of all, um having made butter syrups for many many years, they do go rather solid in the fridge.
They can still be squeezed, squeezed. Uh, but if you if you're gonna want to do that, you're probably gonna have to add more liquid, reduce it down more to get it to squeeze more because it does kind of solidify or get kind of real thick at at lower temperatures. But a squeeze bottle is not the answer, and I'll tell you why. Unless you're gonna free pour, which you're probably not with a squeeze bottle, because it, you know, the viscosity is going to change a lot. You're you're gonna go into a jigger.
And this syrup is gonna be real hard to get out of a jigger. So what we do at existing conditions with our cream syrup, which is also not very pumpable, is we um put it into a dosed pump. So we have pumps that put out exactly an ounce. And so the drink that we use this pump for has exactly an ounce of this syrup in it, and every time you push down, you get exactly an ounce. And we've tested it, it's accurate, much more accurate than trying to jigger something that thick.
And the pumps that we get are like syrup pumps, like for Tarani syrup, and they fit on Gatorade bottles, the ones we have fit on Gatorade bottles. So we have Gatorade bottles with these syrup pumps on it, and we push down on them, we get a very accurate dose again and again and again. If you wanted a smaller dose, they make smaller pumps, or you can just put a ring around the pump so that you can't push it all the way down, and you get your dose that way by saying, and they make very expensive volumetric pumps, but this is the super cheap way to do it. And we've been using them for uh a long time without any trouble. Now, long time meaning four months.
But you can pump it from the fridge. Uh, you know, it's just a lot thicker in the fridge. The one thing I say is that the only reason I can see wanting to keep this in uh not you know, not have it out, is because you're worried about Department of Health, because ain't nothing gonna go wrong with that syrup sitting out. Uh I know this because I've done it. Like it doesn't go bad sitting out, going in and out out of the fridge.
And as long I think the main problem with using these kinds of syrups on the regular and a higher volume bar is really the um is really just the jiggering, is a is a complete and utter nightmare. Also, cleaning creamy tins out is a little bit of a nightmare, which is why eventually we're going to do a uh, you know, a special menu called Creamy Tins that is only creamy drinks. What about what do you think about creamy tins, Nastasia? Your favorite superhero is coming back. Which one?
That Rebecca. What? Oh, you want to describe that? So uh so here's what here's what happens, people. Like uh now, it was not that bad.
So I like to call people get mad at me because anything that I'm involved with or people around me are involved with, I make fun of, right? Mm-hmm. Right. And uh, you know, I like to belittle anything that I do or anything that anyone I know does, right? In a kind of friendly loving way.
So I had to do uh this event, and I started describing this event as a complete boondoggle. And so Rebecca, who does PR for Booker and Dax, I was like, Nastasia, what the hell? Rebecca's taking us on a freaking boondoggle. And so Nastasia, because she loves nothing more than people feeling bad, tells Rebecca that I have described this this series of events as a boondoggle. And then Rebecca gets real depressed about it, and so Nastasia starts laughing about it to me, so then we start calling her the boondoggler, and that's her, that's her like bat villain name.
Her Avenger's name. Her Avengers name is the Boondoggler. So like when she she's a good guy, what she does is is it she takes the villains and she sends them off on this wild goose chase doing all this stuff instead of killing people. And they're like, I could have been killing people, and you had me at this damn event. The boondoggler.
And so, like, now Nastasia's been, you know. Oh, by the way. So she's coming on. Oh, yeah. Soon, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So uh, so we do not know. We know Bob's Redmill is our sponsor today, but we don't know what ad that we're going to theoretically play once this thing goes uh on uh you know on the whatever in the hell it's on on the internet. Actually, it's a very well-timed Xanthem gum ad. Really?
Fact. You're just like, you're so intuitive that you just nailed it. Alright. Well, so then uh we will take a break. You can listen to some Bob's Red Mill stuff.
I will have you know that I'm experimenting now. If you guys have any ideas in the chat room, uh Bob's Redmill sent me to mess with some amaranth flour and some uh sweet sorghum flour. So sorghum, very interesting, uh very interesting grain. Uh, you know, in the greater class, I guess people, it's not actually millet, but people call it kind of great millet. Millet is one of those like poly, you know, it has no real meaning, it's just a whole bunch of small grains that aren't really related.
They're all in the grass family, right? But they're not, you know, I guess they're real grains though. They're in the grass family. So sorghums are uh super interesting because they can be used to make sugar. They were uh they're native and were um domesticated in uh in Africa.
Uh they're all there, so there's regular sorghums like baking sorghums, there's sweet sorghum. So Bob's Redmill has sent me some sweet sorghum flour and some amaranth. And I gotta play around with it to try and find an interesting application to talk to you about in the next couple of weeks. So if any of you in the chat room have some recommendations for sorghum flour that aren't just substitute this in your newest gluten free recipe. Because you know, how interesting is that?
I want a recipe that just is screaming for sorghum, not you know, a recipe where you could use sorghum or you could use this other thing instead. So give me some suggestions because I'm playing around with it over the next week. And with that, let's go to break. We now bring you our Bob's Red Mill food fact of the week. Xanthan gum is a thickener and a stabilizer.
So Xanthan, it's it's produced by fermentation. And it has incredible thickening ability, but it doesn't just thicken, it actually forms a weak gel that, but then can move around. And that's why it's so great in um in gluten-free and also in egg replacing, because it can hold uh batters and doughs. But Xanthan is great to have around. You're gonna want to use it typically in lower percentages if you're using it in sauces below about one quarter of one percent.
Uh, and also after you add xanthan gum, give it a couple minutes to hydrate before you add more because it's gonna keep getting thicker over the next five, 10 minutes. So don't add some, be like that didn't get thick, and then add more. Thanks to Bob's Redmill for supporting cooking issues. Visit Bob'sredmill.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're back. So uh this weekend it was kind of uh it was like classic me, right? So, like I'm going up, I'm driving up, I go to Connecticut, and I'm like, okay, I do what I always do. I buy chicken thighs because I'm like, I know how to is like you know, it's the kind of thing where you know it's 2 a.m.
or it's 4 or 5 a.m. You you punch me in the side, I wake up and you're like, make these chicken thighs. You're like, okay. You know what I mean? And like, you know, you just make chicken thighs.
You know what I'm saying? It's one of those things that, like, you know, you can do in your sleep. If you were to take, if you were to remove my entire cerebral cortex and leave my brain stem, my body could still cook chicken thighs. You know what I mean? Uh, in this particular way that uh, you know, I always make them.
And um, so I'm like, okay. Well, you know, Jen's like, I don't want you to have to think, she doesn't talk like that. She's like, I don't want you to have to think, make chicken thighs. So I get the chicken thighs and I'm making them. And then I realize that, and this is the first time this has ever happened, it was raining like cats and dogs.
So I'm like, I'm not gonna use my cowboy grill. I'm gonna use the tandoor because my tandoor is partially covered, right? But I'm like, okay, so I go to get the coal, no coal. I had no more charcoal left. So I was like, what the hell am I gonna do?
And then I realized that I have been remiss in that I have not set up any of my fireplaces for cooking. So if you have a and here's something that is true fact. If you have a small, relatively small fireplace, and you have a fire in it, damn, the radiant heat coming off that thing burns the hell out of your hands when you're trying to hold, when you're trying to hold skewers of meat, if you don't have a meat skewer holder and you are holding in there the whole time, A, turns out your forearms and shoulders get pretty tired holding chicken thighs in front of a fire for a long time. And B the reflected heat is pretty no joke. Well, Anastasia, you also have a fireplace.
It's just fake. It's just made of fiberglass. Yeah, no, I made you get rid of that son of a gun because you didn't remove it so many times. So if anyone out there has a cool, like regular residential fireplace cooking conversion kit, I'd like to see it. Because like uh it's fun cooking in your fireplace.
It's just a real pain in the butt if you're not set up to do it. You know what I mean? No, I don't. I also, no, I don't, I don't have a fan place. Manny nanny poo-poo.
Says the person who like, you know, oh, they we don't have a fireplace at my timeshare in the Hamptons that I go to all summer. I know for a month, and I got to go once a week. But I did do it a week. I did do a demented thing. I tried to do uh, so you know how I put mayonnaise on everything that I grew?
Not on chicken, actually, but I put mayonnaise on all that stuff. So I did the I did the par steamed uh whole whole heads of broccoli on a skewer, and it's ended up poorly for me, right? So I was like, I want to put this broccoli on a skewer. I don't want to like not gonna skewer a bunch of pieces of broccoli because they're gonna fall off. So I'm gonna par steam the whole head and stick it on the skewer.
I thought I was being real smart, so I was like, I'm putting the skewer backwards so the hook is in the broccoli, so the hook is locking the broccoli so that I can rotate it, right? So I'm manipulating the sharp side of the stick, right? And I put mayonnaise, I parsteined it, salt, pepper, a little bit of sugar, and mayonnaise. Short answer, it was delicious, grilled broccoli with the mayonnaise coating on the outside because the mayonnaise was like dripping off into the into the fire, but enough stayed on that it was like delicious. Anyway, it ended up being good call.
Except for this, I s I ran my hand to go get it, and I shoved it into the skewer and I tandoor skewered my hand, and I started bleeding all over the floor at the house, and I was like, of course I didn't. Of course, this is of course. You know what I mean? And what did Booker do? Uh call you his idiot father.
Sorry, he started laughing uncontrollably because I was bleeding all over the floor. Let me tell you something. Having your son laugh at you while you're bleeding over the floor and burning your other hand trying to keep chicken aloft in a fireplace makes for fun times. Fun times. Okay, question.
Uh I've been in this is from Anand. I've been enjoying your podcast, uh thoughtful, thoughtful information antics and uh wonderfully meandering conversations for several years now. I now have a question I could use your insight on. I recently had a gas stove installed in my house, and uh it is a considerable upgrade from my previous electric contraption. I'm assuming if it's a huge upgrade that what you had before was either a ceramic top, which are garbage, or a resistance heater style top, also garbage.
I hate all of them. Uh man, do I hate them? Uh even the quartz ones I hate. Um, however, my current like induction. Induction's good.
Uh however, my current ventilation situation leaves much to be desired. Honestly, I'm not sure the current hood does anything at all, and it certainly doesn't look like it vents outside. I've heard Dave uh heard Dave mention in passing that proper ventilation is often overlooked and undervalued. So I wanted to solicit your thoughts here. How important is proper ventilation and why?
I have two young children, a five-year-old and a two-year-old, and so I have no desire to be careless with what they inhale while I cook. That said, I am unsure where the line is between cautious and alarmist. Your insight would be greatly appreciated. Uh on a separate note, Nastasia. Uh the beta male conversation has been amusing.
If an alpha male is the leader of the pack, then let's consider how many of our previous presidents, the most visible and arguably most powerful leaders in our country have exhibited stereotypic stereotypically alpha male tendencies, e.g., chest beating and assertions of dominance. Interestingly, the current president exhibits those characteristics in spades. So what do you think about it? What do you think about that? Is that what you want?
You want that? No, I just want confidence and swagger. Like, I don't want a doormat. And then Anand says, it can be difficult to give respect to someone who acts like a doormat, yet the fact that such people don't demand respect doesn't indicate that they don't deserve respect. Okay.
Look, this is just about like what I want. I I have like I'm run businesses. I don't want to come home to a doormat. I want someone to be assertive, confident, have swagger, be really nice. That's it.
Like what Nastasia wants, what she needs, whatever hat makes you happy, sets you free. Yes. What a cool. Anyway, um. Alright.
I don't know. I think that like, look, we beat you down pretty hard last week with the beta male thing. And honestly, this is I think beta males are for lots of beta. This is never happening. You get many of my friends are beta males.
Many of my friends are married to beta males. And the beta male says, yeah, I'm a beta male. And what's the point? Some of my friends. Yeah.
I had a beta male as a drummer once. Did you? No. Um did. No.
Who the hell has ever heard of a whatever, anyway. I had a drummer once that used to troll around the studio picking butts up off the ground and seeing whether you could get high off of them. That sounds like wrong. Yeah, right? No.
Okay. So on to uh Anon's question. Uh I had a bunch of drummers who thought they drummed well when they were drinking. That's the beginning of his question. No, no.
Yeah, so we're so we're on uh we're on this. So how important is ventilation? Well, I think a lot depends on your on your cooking style, right? So Harold McGee at the Harvard uh talked about um some new research that is coming out showing that uh oil particles uh like you know when you're frying like m microscopic oil particles stay in the air for a long time. So when you're volatilizing oil, which happens in a lot of high temperature heat things, this stuff is staying in the air for a long, long time.
Uh you know, as to and I think new new studies are coming out all the time, kind of relating uh relating um this to problems that are happening in the kitchen. That said, we've been cooking this way for a long, long, long time. So is it harmful? Probably. Should you have good good ventilation?
Yes. Uh I think the jury is out as to kind of what the long term problems will be. Um, but that's not to say that there aren't kind of long term problems. Um in other words, it's probably the oil the oil fumes are probably as bad as everyone freaks out when there's smoke in the kitchen, right? Which is still I just do not understand.
You know what I mean? People who smoke, people who smoke cigarettes get like freaky when like your kitchen fills with smoke. And I in my, you know, in my mind, I'm always like, why don't you shut up? Because the smoke's gonna be gone in a minute, and then you can eat this delicious food that I can't really make without generating this smoke. And everyone freaks out.
Everyone freaks out about the smoke. And it's because they perceive smoke as harmful. It's probably the oil vapors are probably more harmful, like the the microscopic oil vapors are probably more harmful to you than the little bit of smoke you're getting from you know cooking your steak. Um they're not as accurate and they probably don't hurt your eyes as much, but they're probably just as dangerous. But you know, I'll speak to McGee the next time I speak to him.
Uh I mean, look, I'm not gonna stop cooking kind of traditional high temperature cooking, because that's the way that I like to do it, um, until somebody tells me that it's as bad as you know being uh a regular cigarette smoker. But uh on the other hand, I would always go err on the side of trying to get good ventilation because it A, it's gonna be better for your lungs. Uh I mean, there were some studies back in the day, especially on people who cook over high heat all the time. The classic studies about 10 years ago or so or more were on women in China cooking over walks, uh having um certain forms of of uh cancer at a higher rate than other people do. Um but I mean good ventilation, I think, is going to become more and more important as these things become more and more.
Well, it's gonna be realized how important they are more and more as people kind of realize how damaging a lot of these kind of suspended vapors are and how prevalent they are. You ever wonder why like all of your pots and pans get a coating of grease on them in in your in your in your house or your apartment or why the ceiling gets a coating of grease on it uh even at a relative distance from your oven. That polymerized grease, right, is in the particles that are being generated while you're cooking. So all that stuff that's settling on your ceiling over the course of uh you know hours and hours, it's not just while you're cooking, it's hours and hours. That stuff is kind of settling in your lungs and you know settling in your system.
What effect it's gonna have over time, I think it's just now being researched, you know who knows? I would say go for good ventilation if you can. I think that it's one of the main things that uh hasn't been caught caught up with, you know, like we need to get good ventilation in in in our kitchens. And as more and more people who care about their health become uh you know cooks, maybe people will worry about it more. Maybe buildings will be built with good ventilation.
But uh if you have a a uh a hood that does not vent, you that is just a recirculating hood, you must, if you want the qual air quality to be good, uh first of all get a serious one. They make serious ones. They make ones that you can fry indoors with but you need real hardcore filters and real hardcore fans to make those things work. And you need to change the activated charcoal consistently and often which people don't do either. People are usually change it rarely uh you know and almost never in some cases.
And then they become functionally useless. Uh you know you might as well have nothing. Uh better to just take the extra time and energy and punch a hole through the side of your building or through your roof, put a big old honking fan on the outside. It's gonna be a lot quieter. Is there anything more irritating than a uh than one of those home fans uh over and think wearing your neighbors shower?
Well, especially your neighbors showering the way that what they do in the shower is unconscionable, but uh you know what I'm talking about. Uh Nastasia has unpleasant show, whatever, I don't want to get into it. But like that noise, that high-pitch noise of uh of the company that everyone used to get is Brone. Brone. Uh uh they're cheap, but that listen to this.
So the the pitch, the pitch that a motor makes is directly related to its speed, right? So most AC motors are a certain um a certain multiple of 60 cycles, right? And the smaller a fan is to move a large amount of air, the faster it needs to spin. And so it has this high-pitch noise because it has to spin so fast to push the air, right? This is why you're always better off, and they have to make the fan small because they're fitting it into something that's sticking over your oven or over your range.
So the real answer is you want to put that fan outside so that the fan can be much bigger. And if the fan's much bigger, it can rotate much slower. If it rotates much slower, it has a much lower pitch and softer pitch. And any day of the week, I will change I will trade woo-woo woo-woo woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo for wee. Cooking issues.
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