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Join our hosts as they lead you through the world of craft brewing, behind the scenes of the restaurant industry, inside the battle over school food, and beyond. Find us at heritage radio network.org. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on Heritage Radio Network, extremely late today because we had a we had our weekly China call, which we can't do on Tuesdays anymore, Nastasia. Our weekly call.
I know to okay, to be more precise, to our team in China. We are not calling the entire country China. Yeah. For a Burst Pizza Rien, Bushwick Brooklyn! Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez.
How are you doing, Stas? Good. Yeah. We got Matt in the booth. How are you doing?
I'm doing great. Yep. Call in your questions, but make them brief because we only have like whatever today. It's gonna be a quick one. 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. So uh after the radio program today, Nastasio, we need to do some Bob's red mill talking. Specifically, they want me to talk about amaranth flour and sorghum flour. But you know what I'm super sick of in general? I'm sure Nastasi, I'm sure you hate this as well.
Doing ads. Oh, no, I mean like whatever. Gotta pay the bill. I don't know why we gotta pay the bills, honestly, but we have to pay the bills. But uh no, but like when someone gives you a recipe for like a gluten-free flour, what do they always freaking say?
What's the thing they always say? It tastes just like regular flour. No, and they never say that because it's untrue. What do they say? Matter, do you pay attention to the world?
Nastasia clearly doesn't. No, no, I'm on her level. It's like she's not even in the food business. It's crazy. Although I have to say, Nastasia, okay, so we were on this call.
Uh well, that's not what I heard this morning on the telephone. That's an employee. Because yeah, so he's not people. So Nastasia, first of all, Nastasia calls into this call with China, which is by the way, hard enough to hear because they're connecting on Skype, and like I don't know whether the you know Chinese mainland government isn't slick enough to not like when they're listening in on whatever our engineer is saying, like his connection is the worst connection in the in the universe constantly. We can never hear what he's saying ever.
Nastasia, meanwhile, is on speakerphone in the middle of a New York City street because she's walking to Pasta Flyer. Whatever. Because you didn't want them to hear, they might stay right there. Oh Jesus. Yeah, I know.
So then she shows up and she starts yelling at her employee like worse than I yell at my kids when it's like the same F up they've done everything. She's like Well, the thing is is that he's mopping in the dark. Mopping the restaurant in front of house in the dark. He does it by feel. No, and then I'm like, hey, person's name, person's name.
He has his headphones on so loud he cannot hear me, so that just raises my anger level. Yeah, yeah. Of course, as far as he knows, he's there alone. So why wouldn't he? Mopping in the dark.
The dark issue. No, no, no. I walked in and I was like, hey, and then I sat down to do the call, and then I was like, it's dark. Yeah, but the the tone of voice Nastasia used. Like, honestly, if I was that dude, I would have been like, This lady wants me to quit.
I'm gonna quit right now. Oh my god, Nastasia. Nastasia should have been arrested for what she said to UPS. Yeah. Like, honestly, you're not allowed to physically threaten people.
Although, good news, uh, Amazon is gonna have three headquarters, not just two. So there's so like they're gonna have their Seattle headquarters or wherever in the hell they are. And then remember they were gonna have their countrywide search for where they were gonna put their second headquarters? Well, they decided to do two one outside of Virginia and one Nastasia in Long Island City. So now you can physically go over there and and choke out somebody at Amazon.
People, here's like a good health tip. Like, do not do business with Nastasia and then move within choking range. She will find you. I honestly I can't believe that you weren't that you weren't like that. No police showed up at your door after the threats you made to the UPS.
That's the first time I felt bad about things I said. Uh I believe you have a caller. Oh, caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, it's uh J from Alden again. How you doing?
I'm good. So um I picked up uh a cooking around the world series that you and I don't know. The time life one, the one from uh like the early 70s. Yeah, great, great, right? Yeah, I've read like 10 uh 10 of the volumes, but uh right now I'm making the FEMA beverage, like some lemon flavored mead from Scandinavia.
Oh, okay. Yeah, you never made it, right? No, no. Basically, it's just lemon, sugar, and active dry yeast. Okay, but so it's sugar, so it's not a mead, it's like it's got Yeah, I know.
And it's like why? Why does I say mead? But next time I might use honey. Yeah. Although we should get that mead guy back on from Enlightenment Wines.
I mean, the thing is that obviously if it's Scandinavian back in the you ever read Beowulf? There's mead all up and down in Beowulf. It's all everywhere. The mead bench is. Oh, but like I've read other things.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you you would have no idea how much AVV will turn out to be. Oh, that's an easy calculation to do.
Uh if you're using white sugar, I don't happen to know it off the top of my head. Yeah. But you can just look up uh, you know, bricks to uh potential alcohol, and then you can just convert the uh the sugar to potential alcohol because this is the thing the brewers worry about constantly. So, or anyone that is doping in sugar. I just again I just don't happen to have it off the top of my head.
I know that the when I ferment orange juice, I ferment pretty much uh I have to add sugar to it, and it starts out at around eleven bricks, so eleven percent sugar by weight, and I have to add sugar to it. So it's not one to one. So if you want, let's say eight percent alcohol, you're gonna need more than eight percent sugar. I think, but again, it's been a long time since I run the calculations, but they that's an easily knowable thing on any one of the brewer's uh sites, bricks to uh potential alcohol scales, what they call it, because they don't know if you're gonna ferment dry or not. So obviously any residual sugar that you leave is is potential alcohol that you didn't convert.
Okay, yeah. So what I'm doing right now is lemon. I was thinking about other varieties once I get started. And well, probably using citrus would be like pretty much. Orange is good.
I mean, the good thing about orange is the residual acidity that's in orange juice is nice. And the residual it's clear, I use clarified, of course. I've never tried unclarified. And the residual bitterness that's in clarified orange juice is nice once it's fermented dry. It doesn't tend to last, so you can't, you know, the flavor of it I didn't like as much when it been aged for you know three, four months as when it was, you know, fresh or on the order of like a couple of weeks old after the initial primary is done.
Um I mean the the one problem if you haven't done a lot of fermenting before is you'll probably have a tendency to make it too acidic on the beginning. Uh and then once it ferments dead dry, it's going to be extraordinarily tart because the sugar will be gone. Unless you don't ferment it dead dry. You could do a partial fermentation, in which case residual acidity is more your friend. Um if that makes sense.
By fermenting it dead dry, like I you know, this is the first time I'm making any sort of alcoholic beverage. What do you mean? Well, so like the sugar that's in there, right? It as you convert it to alcohol, then it there won't be any more that that sugar will be gone away. So, you know, uh like when I do ciders and and and other things, I tend to try to ferment almost all of the sugar away.
Other people, uh for instance, there's techniques in cider making called keeving, and there's all sorts of techniques to try to stop the fermentation uh at you know at some point mid cycle so that so that some there's residual sugar. But um, you know, and sometimes things will just get stuck, so there'll be a lot of residual sugar, like if the fermentation will just end for you know a number of reasons. The yeast is inhibited by something or in fact, honey, a lot of like a lot of mead, uh, you know, first-time mead makers will have problems with their distillation. It's called getting stuck. Uh, and so you'll end up with a higher, you know, proportion of sugar and less therefore alcohol.
But if you are gonna ferment something until it is completely dry, so it's all the sugar is gone, then just have to take into account the fact that you know uh the acidity will taste uh you know double more you know much more present than than you might expect. Okay. Yeah. Okay, uh another quick question. What's your best recommendation as to an inexpensive meat grinder?
Ooh, I don't have a I don't have a good one. I have the KitchenAid one and I don't really like it. I hate it. Right? Some people buy that yeah, I want made uh moranella with it.
Uh yeah, it's no good. Never doing that again. Yeah. Some people uh use that uh, I believe it would it's check, I think, that like one that was built, the old one, the the hand grinder that's you know, uh like a casting. Uh but you know, I don't have any good luck with it.
I should research uh inexpensive grinders. I don't have meat a lot. I mean, I just deal with garbage. I mean, like I don't have in other words, the stuff that I do when I grind it, I just don't like it. I just think it's low, low quality.
The only thing you're using is the kitchen aid attachment. Yeah, it's garbage. It's just wretched. Okay, all right. So you have to cut them, you know, like the thing with the kitchen aid attachment is it smears so easily, so you have to like uh cut things into into long strips.
I mean, everyone that owns a real grinder loves it. Uh people like so I've used, for instance, the inexpensive sausage stuffers from places like Grizzly, right? Which is on you know, a catalog. And it works fine. It's not as well put together as the more professional ones.
Like the welds are really crappy and the grinds on the welds are really crappy, so presumably it's more difficult to sanitize. Uh they also have relatively inexpensive grinders that may be good. I just don't have any personal experience with it. What's the brand name? Well, like a catalog that sells that stuff is kind of is Grizzly.
The r G R I Z Z L Y like they're mainly a tool company, but they also cater to hunters, right? And uh and so hunters have to process a lot of sausage, so they have sausage or don't have to, but they do. So they have things like sausage stuffers and meat grinders, and they tend to be cheaper than Bass Pro, which also sells these things, or Cabela's, which also sells these things. So, you know, um, like uh once it's being sold into a professional kitchen, the prices go way up, but when it's sold to a hobbyist or a hunter or something like this who still has the need for professional grinding abilities, the price can come way down. Now the quality probably also comes down, but if you're not using it every day in service, then it's probably not, you know, not that big of a deal.
But you know, I doubt you're gonna have anything that's gonna, you know, rival like the you know, the butt-kicking Hobarts that uh you know we had back at the school. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, thanks a lot.
All right, well, if you have if you have any good experience, tweet it over to me. Let me know, uh let me know what you get. Yeah, tell me how your stuff is. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, look if you're doing a small amounts, you can get away with almost anything, you know?
Anyway, good luck with it. This program is brought to you by Jewel Sous vide. My name is Katie Moseman Waddler. I'm the executive director of HRN and a real life Jewel user. I use Jewel to help me host the most delicious dinner parties.
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That's Chef Steps.com slash J-O-U-L-E. Code H R N. Uh Dave, we got another question from the internet. Oh, what is it? It says, Hello, Nastasia and Dave.
This is from Sam in Chicago. Uh love the show. Looking for an alternative to the Sous vide turkey this year. You mentioned a method where you spatchcock the bird, lay it over a pile of stuffing, and blast it in a hot oven. I've listened to every episode, and I can't remember if it was a new one or an old one.
I can't find this spec. Would you mind going over this again? Sure. So you can do, depending on how much you take out, you're gonna speed up the cooking uh more or less. But if you're willing, see, the thing about it is is you can make something that looks relatively bird-shaped.
The thing that I don't like about a lot of like the classic kind of roulade things is they don't end up looking like birds, which is okay if you're a French person, but not okay if you're doing an American kind of uh a Thanksgiving. So what you can do is just cut along the backbone, and you can cut along the backbone kind of on either side and rip it out, and then you can even rip out some of the uh you can rip out you know the the internal carcass of the of the bird there. It's a lot easier than doing, for instance, when I use was doing the turkey where I'd have to put the exoskeleton in, I would have to do what's called inside out boning, where you'd roll the bird apart and remove the skeleton without making a cut in the meat at all. And that takes a long time on a turkey, a lot longer than it does on a smaller bird like a quail. Especially if you have Nastasia Lopez sitting next to you pestering you about how long it's taken.
Remember how mean you were to me, Nastasia? She's like, it's taking you a long time, Dave. Taking you a long time on like a freaking frozen freaking turkey trying to inside out bone it so it looks good on TV. And Nastasia is doing nothing but sitting there. Nastasia is very good at sitting there and pushing your buttons while you have a sharp knife in your hand.
She's the worst. Worst. Uh anyways, so this is much easier. You just cut out the backbone and then like kind of pry it open, snap the joints at the at the lay, uh, you know, at the legs and at the wings, rip out those bones. You can take out, you know, uh you can leave the rest of the bones in, really.
But then so you have those bones now, you can roast them off and make a uh a gravy with them, which is what I would do. So then you make a stuffing shaped uh kind of mound. I mean, sorry, uh a bird cavity shaped mound on uh you know, on a tray or whatever, and then you roast that or cook it. Or uh what I typically do is I'll make a like a bag and I'll make like a plug, like sous vide almost of that, and I'll cook the stuffing as its own kind of thing, like a football. And then I'll have it hot, really hot, like you know, hot, uh like you know, steaming temperature.
And then you'll have your bird, and because you've taken all the bones out, it's gonna most of the bones out, it's gonna cook relatively quickly. Also, the stuffing is already at cooking temperature, so you don't need to get it hot, it's already hot and it's already been made safe. Then you can drape the bird over the stuffing in the shape of a bird. By the way, you can also have brined it already, injected brine into the breast and whatnot, and you can drape it and dried it if you want. You should dry the skin, drape it over the stuffing, and it cooks relatively uh quickly, not as quickly as like the actual flat pressed spatchcock against a sheet tray, which is the absolute fastest way to cook it, but it's again, then it's gonna look like a flat turkey and not like uh turkey turkey for Thanksgiving.
Does that make any sense? All right. Uh oh, the internets, the internets. All right, uh, let's get to the questions that were written in. Uh this is from uh Gaz Herbert.
Uh I am writing after having done some research on peppercorn infusions, for which there seems to be little material online, especially in the gastronomic applications I'm interested in. It occurred to me uh that you may know about this stuff after reading through uh liquid intelligence. I mean, I have a pepper infusion in the in the book, Nastasia. Not that Nastassi. I remember it.
You remember me making it, you've never opened the book once. I mean, I don't know. Did you ever the paper itself is not useful as toilet paper or as a cleanup? You re oh, you you looked to see whether I had thanked you or not, and that was it. So she's opened the first three pages.
Miracle. Um I love your use of interesting spices uh and relate to your perfectionism here at Ikoyi, a West African fine dining restaurant in London. Uh my question is when it comes to infusing peppercorns and spices in non-alcoholic solutions, such as milk or water, what is the ideal temperature and time for infusion, and what scientifically speaking are the consequences of going above or below this temperature slash time? Take as an example peppercorns, cloves, and star anus, which by the way, our friend Lian Wong has said was her porn star name, which is amazing, right? Star Anis?
No, she said it would be Star Anus. Well, you just m just mispronouncing Anis, well, aren't you? We had another woman at the French culinary who used to mispronounce something in a horrifying way. I can't say it online. I mean, uh, but like literally whenever she opened her mouth and said these words, Nastasia and I were like, that's just if she would travel to a certain country.
Yeah, yeah. But mispronounce it in the most horrible way, and like, and like it was like it was like, you know, when you see the shock waves and you see the skin like in slow-mo, and like the cheeks are like getting flapped over, like when they do those explosion slow-mo. Yeah, yeah. It was like that. Nastassian was like, ah.
Anyway. Uh yeah, yeah. Starrinus. Uh, where are we? Where are we?
Where are we? Uh infusing into milk. Would 90 degrees a centigrade for two hours be too high, too long? Uh, all the best. So look, a lot depends.
Let me tell you what the variables are. First of all, milk, whole milk, by the way, or as my grandpa liked to say like to say, milk, because he did not admit that skim milk was in fact milk. Um he lived to be 98. So there you have it. Uh although that's such a dumb argument.
I hate people who make arguments with like an N of one. So there I are. Self-hate, right? Anyway, whatever. Um so the point being that milk is a good choice because it has some fat, and a lot of these spices, especially um uh specifically black pepper, the the actual nice flavors in it, like uh peperine and all the other uh all the other good kind of uh aromatic volatile stuff, not extremely soluble in water, which is why and also it's volatile stuff.
So Jeffrey Steingarden, you know, our friend Jeffrey Steingarden, who by the way, all the younger people out there, if you haven't read The Man Who Ate Everything, you should go ahead and read that. Seminal, seminal book in its subject and you know, very early person of that kind of kind. And uh, you know, kind of a curmudgeon and uh, you know, more than kind of a curmudgeon. Yeah, yeah, and the and the worst, best and worst. Love myself some Jeffrey Steingarten.
Anyways, um point being uh he was like, Dave, why do you add pepper early on in he used to he would call me, he would literally he would just call Nastasia and me and just yell at us for our practices, even though he had like we we would not have seen him in like a year, and he would just call us and start yelling at us, right? Nastasia? Yeah, we'd see the number come up on our phone and be like, it's your turn. Yeah, yeah, because we knew that it was gonna be like eight hours of him yelling at us about X, Y, or Z. He's like, Dave, why do you add pepper early on in cooking?
All that's left at the end is the bitterness and none of the great aromatics. Why don't you add it at the end? And I was like, Jeffrey, I like those bitter notes. Why can't I add it two times? He had no response, right?
So the problem with pepper is one, a lot of, especially in things like soups, is a lot of those like awesome aromatic compounds are one volatile and two uh not super soluble in water. They should be more soluble in the fat in the butter fat that's in milk, I think, right? So then there's there's two things that are going on. There's loss of volatiles because the stuff's boil like literally evaporating, right? Uh there's uh loss of volatiles because it's also just not infusing into whatever liquid you're using.
And then there's the actual destruction of the uh of those uh flavors and aromas due to the heat. So you you know you have to separate some of these things. So in a sealed system where there's no air, right? It might be possible to have a higher temperature, and because you're not volatilizing anything, because it's sealed, maybe it's possible to keep those uh things uh in solution if they actually want to dissolve into it, right? So you might run into a situation there where it's good.
So 90 degrees C in milk in the on a stove top, you probably will have evaporated a lot of those volatiles and they won't be there, right? So I read a study that even just your grinding temperature that you use, right? With your if you you know refriger you grind refrigerated or frozen pepper with dry ice, black pepper, versus grinding it at a higher temperature because of the friction of grinding, like let's say 40, 50, 50 degrees Celsius, results in a huge loss in the volatile components, presumably to the atmosphere, because you can smell them, right? Not presumably due to autolysis where the stuff is breaking itself apart. So I think, in other words, it might be possible in a sealed container to get a decent uh higher temperature extraction of pepper, but I don't know for sure.
You'd have to run some tests. The other thing you could do is try to do infusions under high pressure at lower temperatures, even in the milk, in something like an easy under you know, high pressure, like you know, 10 bar or so, 10, 11 bar, something uh there, right? Um and then you could do a side by side with it with heat. But that's the whole thing. It's like doing the side by sides and kind of seeing what uh what you get.
Not yet, we don't see it. Yeah, we do. We we still have nine minutes. They have a show at one, and you have to record a couple of things. Cat's not even here yet, it's right there.
It's right here, and you do need to record those ads. All right, one thing I'll say before we go on. Uh Nick wrote in and asked for the spec on the vodka cranustino. Uh it is, I believe, five to one cranberry, fresh cranberry to uh vodka. It might be four to one, but I believe it's five to one.
Uh, and then just blend it with uh SPL, uh spin it out. Uh the buttered popcorn rum is literally just you know, pour like pop air pop some popcorn, pour the rum over it. Um, you know, I think it's uh uh you know it's a you know it's a lot. If we just do it, let it sit there for like two, three hours, strain it off, press the hell out of it, melt butter, keep the butter, uh, you know, stir it in. It doesn't take that much butter, frankly.
I don't have the numbers off the top of my head. Uh stir it, let it stay liquid with like uh what's it called? Uh immersion circulator uh for overnight covered so you're not losing anything, and then uh freeze it and strain it off. Uh and then uh someone was gonna try to make activated charcoal with uh rye bread, uh, but I don't think it's gonna work. And I'll talk more about it next week, Kevin.
But um, activated charcoal is very difficult to make, and I would look at the books there are uh online uh on activated charcoal, how different and complicated it is from just plain charcoal. And once you turn into charcoal, it won't taste like rye bread anymore unless it's just something you really want to do. Now, on to Bob's red mill, because what we started to talk about at the beginning of the show we never finished. And can we just bleed this into the uh ads, Matt? Or no?
No. But anyway, what I was gonna try to get Nastasia to say that I hate is when people are like, you could just add it to pancakes or muffins. Anytime someone has a gluten-free flour, they're like, just make we pancakes, muffins, cookies. You know what I'm saying? Yes.
It's irritating. Because, like, obviously, you know, I do that all the time. I add oats to my pancakes and all that, but it's not interesting. So I've been trying to work with these products to try to see if I can make something that is interesting. But anyway, I have not 100% successful yet, but I have run a lot of tests.
I was working on a scrapple, a sorghum-based uh scrapple, sorghum-based biscuits, and Joar roti uh stuff. But anyway, so we'll talk about it later. More next week. I gotta record some ads, make some money, Bob's Red Mill, cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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