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 Bobsredmill.com to shop their huge range of products. Use Cooking Issues25 for 25% off your order. Hello, welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from, you know, I don't know. Sometime after 12 to like about one. Especially Nastasi has to leave on the button today because uh joined as usual with Mistasi de Hammer Lopez. How are you doing? Good.
She's uh flying off to uh her native land to LA today. For 24 hours. Sounds fun. Visiting pasta after pasta place in in LA. Yeah, nice.
We got uh we got Kat today. How are you doing? I'm good, how are you? You're gonna well we'll give you your pitch in a second. We gotta do this is our NPR version of a pitch for money.
We got Matt in the booth. Hello, hello. And in a minute, we're gonna have, I hope. We had he called before, but I guess he doesn't know how late we normally run. Uh Dave David Zilber, who uh is the co-author of the NOMA guide to fermentation, and we're gonna talk fermentation in a minute.
Uh but while we're waiting, Kat, why don't you give your pitch? So this Monday, December 3rd at 6 PM is our annual fundraising gallery gallery. I've been in Alabama for a week, don't judge me. Uh Fundraising Gallop. Winter in the Garden.
It is at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Palm House, the really pretty glass house. Um we're gonna have a great lineup of chefs. Dave's gonna be making cocktails as well as Southern Sky. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm gonna be making I'm kidding, I know I'm gonna be making cocktails. Wait, what do you mean?
Um Damon Bolte, Southern Teague are also gonna be slinging cocktails. We're super excited. Tickets are still available. Go to Heritage Radio Network.org. Tickets are one thirty five general admission, two twenty-five VIP.
VIP gets you in an hour early. You get an hour more cocktails. You get VIP bites that only VIP people are gonna get. It's because you're jaded. Remember that?
Were you there for the Justin Timberlake VIP thing that we did when he launched his tequila brand, or was that before you started working with me? No, I was there. Remember? But he wasn't there. He was.
Really? But he wasn't in the VIP section because he didn't want to hang out because the VIPs at like an event like that aren't the real VIPs. The re the real VIPs are on their own platform in the club, looking down at the rest of the of the of the plebes. You know what I mean? They don't want to be in a separate back room with like the with like the tier C and D V IPs.
They want to be untouched by the the throngs and yet see the throngs. Right? Speaking of tier A VIPs, Dave. Yeah. I've got a friend on the phone.
Oh nice. Got uh David, you there? Hello. Hey, how you doing? Wait, where are you now?
Are you in Copenhagen right now? I am in Copenhagen. I'm in the greenhouse, which is my little my little uh my vegetable getaway. Oh nice. I thank them.
Nice. Do you know I've I have not been in Copenhagen for more than an hour and a half in my life. That's unfortunate because there's more than an hour and a half worth of stuff to see here. I'm sure I saw mainly the train station. Like I went from the airplane to the train station.
Now, this comes to another part of my life where I only go on trips uh basically for business, and absolute vodka was like, you know what you need to do? You don't need to go to Copenhagen, no one needs that. You need to go to Skona. So, you know, uh Yeah, you you need to come to the south of Sweden and see nothing. Hey except an absolute vodka factory.
Wheat. No, my girl, my girlfriend's from Skona. Yeah. So I've I've been I've been to that town. Yeah, well, I mean it's quaint.
I mean Skona's the kind of place people are from, right? Yeah, exactly. It's not the kind of place people have moved to. It's the kind of place. It's not like California where people go to California.
It's like where people are from. Now, you're actually from you're you're from Toronto, right? I am Torontonian, yeah. Toronto is a place people go to, not necessarily a place people are from. So is it j in your in the in the your intro or somewhere I read, oh no, it was in uh some in uh interview with you.
You literally to go to NOMA, you sent out a bunch of resumes to like the three places you wanted to go, and your first bite was in Noma, and that's how you ended up in Copenhagen, huh? Yeah, that is. That is. Uh Grand Akits wasn't so interested in me at the time. I think you'll find that no one's interested in.
That's the thing. No one's interested in you until you know something. It's one of the kind of like crappy parts about life. You know what I mean? It's kind of depressing.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure enough. So you know I'm glad Noma scooped me up.
So you just came out, by the way, because people are gonna want to call in, I'm sure. You just uh recently came out uh with uh the Noma Guide to Fermentation. Now, I know you know Ari Ariel's good friend of the show, Ariel Johnson. She they did a s uh, you know, another guy guy to fermentation years ago, but this one is it's very different. It's much more kind of I mean this in in a good way, mass market kind of, you know, bigger, shot differently on kind of a a different scale.
But did you overlap with Ariel at all or no? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. She taught me lots of what I know. Yeah, Ariel is a smart lady. I love Ariel.
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So do I. Um I d it it's funny 'cause I think of her as like big fist, even though I am older than her. But um no, she she taught me so much when I first got into the lab and really really kind of helped me get my feet on the ground in there.
Um her and Lars. And so we worked together for may maybe about a year before she moved on. Um and same with Lars Williams. No, but uh it w it it was amazing to work with them and to see what they did and then and then to be handed the Rams and kind of build a new lab and get to write the book. And so Yeah it was it was a big torch to be fast.
Nice. So I uh by the way, call in your uh fermentation or your NOMA, whatever. You got your Nordic related questions, maybe I guess your Toronto related questions, your fermentation related questions, your writing a book related questions. Two seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight that's seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. Uh but uh Matt I'm assuming we don't have anyone on the phone yet, right?
No. Okay. So I'm gonna say some things first uh 'cause I did as I say read the book in its entirety. Um what I like about the book, and I this has to be a conscious choice uh that you know that you made is the kind of you know you can do it to channel Rob Schneider, but the you can do it kind of attitude you have in the in the in the book, it's you know very uh you know it's very much with this tone that you know, you can get her done. You know what I mean?
Yeah. But that that was exactly the point. I mean, it wasn't uh you know, when we're when we first set out to write this book, and and Renee was like, okay, this is this is what we're striving for. Uh it you you can't just write an esoteric, you know, tome of clues. We couldn't include recipes with centrifuges and rotovaps and and ultrasonic homogenizers.
We just wouldn't I mean it's pretty to look at and it's but it's not about impressing people, it's it's about empowering people. So uh I really uh a lot of the work was just dumbing down what we did at Nelma. And and not in a negative sense, but being like, okay, if you had nothing and you will you still wanted to make this butter emulsion, what would you have to do? And then you just McGiver it until you you know, it it it makes sense. Um and and the best part about this is that Martha Holmberg, who's uh a really amazing cookbook author herself, was a recipe tester for all this.
So I actually flew out to Portland uh quite early on in the book's process to actually like once as soon as the recipes were graphics, just do this with her and then basically go through the entire process of what Noma did, you know, very early on as we were figuring this stuff out and going to the local hardware store in the local cookshop to actually like build build all these incubators and stuff in her apartment. So just to prove it could be done. And that's one of my favorite things. You're like, here's a speed rack, here's the plastic thing, and you like you know, build all the stuff, which is I think, you know, I think that's the kind of thing people, even though look, you can get all that stuff on the here's what you can't get off the internet, people. Like what you can't get, I mean you can, I guess, but the nice thing about a book is a book when you're writing for the internet, yes, it's a good place to put up a a DIY, how to build uh, you know, a fermenting chamber, et cetera, et cetera.
But um there's something about writing a book and trying to turn something into a coherent large format document that just forces the writer into a mental space and a kind of if they do a good job, but a level of rigor that you don't get writing on the internet. You know what I mean? So I think it's a useful thing. And I think books, it's one of the reasons I think books still have a place. What do you think?
Yeah, absolutely. It it really forces you to, you know, to like go through the fine-tooth comb. Yeah. And uh blog posts, like you said, they're one thing. You know, it's and that's the thing is they're self-published.
There's no I I don't mean to say it, but there's like there's no stakes. You can put something up. If it doesn't work, oh well, it gets buried in the history of your archives or whatever. But with a book, you know, there's there is a pressure, especially, you know, coming from us, it had to be it it had to do what it needed to do extremely well. Um and and uh yeah, you just put yourself into that mindset and that's from the ground up, kind of uh you know, empathize with someone who's like got a team of three cooks in a bistro and you're I really want to do this, but how?
And and you just have to put yourself into their shoes and and make it make sense to them. Yeah. You know, that you take it for granted that we have this like huge space and these amazing uh incubators and and you know thousand dollar humidity systems and all this stuff, but at the end of the day, it's about doing it for for the little guy, I guess. And so for people who haven't seen the book, it's kind of organized by style of ferment. So it goes like you know, lacto ferments, kombucha, uh vinegar, koji, miso, you know, koji in general, miso, shoyu, garum, which uh uh and black fruits and vegetables, and uh which is you know like black garlic, etc.
etc. So uh until people call I have some questions actually on the uh Dave, I believe we have a caller on who has a black garlic question. Uh well, all right. Well, so I'm gonna call her you're on the air, but while we're doing this, I'm gonna see in case this question overlaps, uh, we'll we'll put them to you all all at once. One, you in the book you do mainly kind of I know it's weird to say traditional because none of it's traditional, it's all a relatively new process, but kind of lower temperature, much longer um uh processes for you know your your blackened uh you know alliums and your blackened fruit.
Uh and I was wondering whether you've tested and rejected or just haven't played with uh like a lot of the shorter term ones that like Johnny Hunter's doing in Madison, where he's doing was first doing higher temperature and then uh beyond that pressure cooking uh black uh stuff. And I know that all the flavors are are are different, but I'm wondering whether you're testing it. And while you're thinking about that, caller, you had a question about black blackened products. What was it? Oh yeah, hey, this is this is uh Quinn Francis BC.
Hey, how you doing? Another four uh a uh fellow fellow Canadian, nice from Vancouver Island. Yeah, yeah. Cool. So my setup right now is a um old rice cooker.
So again, it is actually running a little hotter than you guys recommend. But I had a different sort of question. Um how concerned would you be if the eating got interrupted? Because that hasn't happened to me before. And I just requested it just in case.
But I was wondering like if it if it goes completely off for like a day if it's cold. Would you be reset? Could you hear that question, David, or no? Yeah, I I it was a bit choppy, but I think I think how how concerned should I be if the rice cooker shuts off for a day. You got it.
And then you restart it. Yeah. Um I that's not a good thing. Uh and it was actually Ariel who impresses upon me, but you know, what you're you're sitting in the prime range for for pathogenic bacteria growth. So if something cools down to like you know, forty-five degrees and it's sitting at that temperature for like eight hours, it that's that's not there's there's no way to to ensure it's safe.
Um you know, that's why you ferment or or you you you age garlic at sixty degrees because that's it's hot enough to keep the bacteria from propagating. Um again, garlic is something that grows underground anyway. If there are botulism spores they could they could very easily start to to kick off. So I I I elaborate on that in the book and I say, you know, it's your task with making sure that it doesn't drop. So I I would just start fresh for the it's not it's never worth your answer.
Stable at like seven selfies and I've already thrown up the old band. Making sure that you know, if it happens again, I know what to do. You know, back when I used to work at the French Culinary Institute, constantly, like people who were cleaning would come. This was in early, early days, back when people weren't used to things cooking for 24, 48, 72, you know, a week, whatever. Constantly people would unplug my crap.
Like I would come in the next morning and be like, I can't live in the damn kitchen, people. You know what I mean? Like, don't unplug my stuff. And like, so it got to the point where I would duct tape over all of the sockets. You know what I mean?
Because, and still occasionally, some moron would be like, I wonder what this tape is here for. Let me take the tape off and unplug this thing. I hated it. I hated it so much. Like interrupted processes.
This is why early no, no one does it anymore. It's not even a problem anymore. But early in the day, I used to tell Philip Preston, I'd be like, Philip, man, can't you put because the worst would be like I I didn't trust anything I did anymore because I no one had the data logger yet. There wasn't a data logging function in your kind of your standard thing. And so, like, I was always nervous if that some a-hole unplugged my stuff for like six hours to plug in a vacuum machine or some crap, you know, or a vacuum cleaner, and then just plugged it back in and didn't say anything.
I didn't say nothing, I didn't do nothing. You know what I mean? So, like, I used to be worried about this constantly, but I don't think it's a problem anymore because I think everyone knows now not to unplug the cooking equipment overnight. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Hate, yeah. One more quick question about fermentation. Sure, Queen, go do it. Go for it. Sure.
Um, so I've run some mixed responses about harvesting my own codes for. I was wondering if David has any other for making sure that that is sterile or there's no contamination from other flangers. Or you know, we'll so good. So not just harvesting your own spores like from the wild. No, no, no.
But just propagating around. Yeah. Um if if it tastes right, like if you if you grow the spores and you grow your next batch of koji and it tastes like koji, you're probably on track. Uh one of the really cool things that Japanese koji growers used to do or or manage to do is that they would they would select for for color variants. And this you know, the the idea that koji is white is something that people had to to do.
Um so it was domesticated and they're like, okay, we'll breed it white, so if anything else pops up, we'll be able to see it. We'll have a very strong visual cue and we'll know that something got infected and we can either toss out the batch or start again. So if you ever see uh different colors pop up, black, green, especially red or orange molds, you know it's been infected. But if you're if your spores stay pure and white and keep growing really, really fluffy and it doesn't look like any other sort of rectaline growing, you're good. When it's spores, correct?
Wait, what? Say it again? You're kind of uh Doesn't color shift from white to green when it just uh doesn't it shift from white to green during the growth? There are some species that do that. So there are some species that when they go to spore they go green.
Um but if you are concerned about that, find find a strain that grows white and you'll have that added layer of protection or that added cue. Okay. And you know, for those of you that don't I mean f for the for the few people I guess who are listening to this who don't know about uh thanks, Quinn, but for those of you who don't know the you know the basics of Koji, you're inoculating uh a substrate with uh uh an aspargillus species, uh, you know, fungus, and that is growing, producing a l a lot of uh enzymes that then do many other awesome things. Care to elaborate, David. Yeah, so it's uh it's how uh everyone in East Asia came across basically the process of ulting.
So liberating the starches and grains and being uh so you you one once you do that you liberate sugars that can then be fermented by yeast into alcohol. So in in the pursuit of getting drunk, we have koji in the world. Um and it has a flavor of its own, it's delicious, it's fruity, and its enzymes work not just on grains and starches, but also on proteins. So you can break down meats and misos and all sorts of tasty things. Is a broadband breaker down of things, which by the way, funguses are in general, which is why they're so awesome, but also such a pain in the in the behind if you, for instance, own a house or want anything to not get chewed up and eaten alive.
I mean, fungus they've developed a fungus that can break down anything. That's why a lot of your enzymes that you buy, commercial enzymes, are grown from some form of fungus that has been found in a laboratory to produce a very high uh, you know, quantity of a particular enzyme. All the enzymes I use are fungally produced um let's see, is that true? No, uh Activa meat glue is bacterially produced, I think. Anyway, um anyway, fungus good at breaking things down that's what they do you know they're one of the very you know you anyway whatever uh so on aspergillus I'm very curious because something I've never tried using before and I didn't really know that much about is this uh this other aspergilla species that you use uh loot wait how do you pronounce it luchu luchuensis that makes a citric acid luchuensis how awesome is it is it which is named after the island in the south of Japan where it comes from do you love it I love it it's my favorite thing on our it's my favorite thing to grow it's my favorite if you if you ever if you ever get your hands on it and you taste it it's like fruit loops on speed I like I've never tried methamphetamins I'm told that if I had methamphetamines it would be really really bad I'm I'm told that me on speed would be horrible idea don't do that yeah it would be a terrible terrible thing but uh I do you know I do like fruit loops so you know win also I like anything that produces citric acid you know what I mean like anything that can produce citric acid like how much have you have you ever figured out kind of uh uh like equivalent percentages that you can get if you're doing um if you're doing like how acidic can you get well then then you have to deal with actually extracting it.
I mean the the the grains once they're fermented are packed with citray acid you pop it in your mouth it tastes like a sour patch kit if you want to let's say transfer that into a stock you're all you're you're obviously going to be buffered a little bit that you're only gonna be able to get out so much of that. But when once you do, it is still super delicious. Uh totally want to I read that's the that's the thing I read when I read that. I was like, I want that. I want to try that.
I want to try so I want to try a koji that makes citric acid. That sounds like something I want. You know what I mean? So uh on that other thing, uh I you know the uh garum, I love garum, so I have a couple questions when people try your recipe so that you know we can give them kind of a mental note. Your squid garum, how I'm sure you've had the the s the squid, uh the ishiri from uh Ishikawa, right?
Or no, have you have you ever tried that one, the commercially produced? I have not. It is freaking awesome. I love it. It's my it's one of my two favorite commercially produced uh favorite uh commercially produced fish sauces.
So I can't ask you how dead a ringer yours is for that because you have you haven't had it. Um fair. Uh so that was one of my questions. The other one was the grasshopper garum. Now, I understand theoretically that people want to eat uh bugs, protein, yada yada yada.
I ain't never had a grasshopper where I was like, you know what? That was better made with a grasshopper than with anything else. I have to say, like, if that had been made with anything other than the grasshopper, it would have been not as good. And what you're telling me in the book, now here's the thing, and you know, I liked you know the the ant distillates and all that, they're they're good. But what I'm asking you, God's truth.
Is the grasshopper garum just surprisingly good considering it's made with relatively flavorless grasshoppers? Or is it an incredibly delicious product on its own right that deserves to exist aside from the fact that you happen to be making it from grasshoppers? In other words, would you ever choose it over a different substrate? Yes. Yes.
It is it is one of the most popular ferments at Noma, and it has been for a very, very long time. But is how much of that is because it's grasshoppers, and how much of that is because you would in a blind taste test be like, that's the one I want. I'm just asking. I'm just being a devil's advocate here. The satisfaction of eating like shellfish without the fishy flavor, that's what grasshopper garment is.
Except it's roasty and it's more meaty and it tastes it tastes almost like molite. Honestly, it really does. Oh, by the way, people, uh you guys use garum rather than the more kind of current fish sauce. Is that kind of just an homage to tipping your hat to bringing it back to Europe to doing something uh on the European side? Or like a like a a desire to not try to appropriate like like wholesale like uh a South, you know, uh uh, you know, an uh Southeast Asian kind of uh condiment or what?
Yeah, it it's it's tough to say. And a lot of the a lot of the reading that I had found about gerum and fish sauce, it it like the dates kind of don't match up. And there there are there are people, there are historians, food historians that postulate that um it only showed up in Southeast Asia in the way it's made today after communication between the Roman Empire and uh and China was established on the Silk Road. Yeah, I kind of doubt that though, don't you? I mean there are links to I mean, don't you kind of doubt that a little bit?
I like almost all of these kind of they're very uh tenuous food histories. You know what I mean? And it's like super, it's you know, especially for someone who wants to I've in other words, for instance, like you look at rice culture, right? And so it's you know, it it's now obvious, decades, you know, hundreds of years later, that rice was domesticated in parallel in two separate, at least, at least two separate, very different kind of places, two separate domestication events, at least, right? In Africa, in Asia.
And so, you know, there are some things that you know have one place where they come from, like chickens, you know what I mean? Uh but don't you think it's much more likely that since everyone has salt and everyone's got extra weird fish lying around, that it kind of just kind of happened, you know? Like if you really think someone in the possible. Yeah, I mean, do you really think someone in Asia needed some like, you know, like uh uh a Roman to instruct them on how to do this, but think about it, think about it this way. Not only well, I mean, not only do you need a Roman, right?
But if I handed you an amphora of garum, right, and say, yo, here's this sauce. We put it on everything. You know what I mean? And you'd be like, because they did, they put it on everything. It was like, you know, everything.
It was like more they put that on more things than we put on ketchup in the US, right? But it's like every damn recipe had garn in it. You know why? Delicious people. But the point is, is that if I handed you a bottle of that, you would have no idea how to make it, right?
Doesn't taste like its constituent parts. I mean, it's like vaguely kind of fishy, but you wouldn't be like, you know what? I bet you the way to do this is to just take a bunch of fish and salt and throw it in a pit. You know what I mean? You know, like you wouldn't think about it.
So, like the idea that somehow mastery of fish sauce comes via raw, it just doesn't make any sense to me, that's all. You know. And now for our Bob's Red Mill moment, we're gonna talk about amaranth, an amaranth flour. So amaranth is a pseudo grain that is uh native to uh I guess South America. Uh it's a tiny little thing, and in fact, uh you can pop it really well.
Uh if you have the whole grain, you can uh and it's dried, you can pop it and then mix it, and in fact, they make a whole series of candies. You remember where the name of that candy is? The one they make in Mexico with the honey and the amaranth? No. You know what I'm talking about though?
Yes. Yeah, anyway, I forget the name of it. Um the Bob's Red Mill sells an amaranth flour. The cool thing about amaranth is it has it has a really nice uh taste. I haven't figured out exactly what to use with a hundred percent amaranth flour yet, but I have substituted as much as I hate telling people to substitute it into things like muffins and pancakes, small amounts up to about 25% of amaranth flour in those recipes are nice and good and add a kind of a bit of a nuttiness to it.
Uh amaranth, you know, it's if you believe in health, it's people believe it's a healthy thing. I of course don't believe in health. I care only about taste, but I still enjoy using amaranth flour. Uh Bob's Redmill carries whole grain, stone ground amaranth flour. Go to Bob'sRedmill.com and use the code cooking issues25.
That's one word. All caps, cooking issues 25 for 25% off your order. Wake up. Hey, we want to do another uh another caller question. Yeah, sure.
Caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. Dave and Dave. I have been uh trying to track down the recipe or some kind of clue about how to make Portuguese fermented hot sauce. I know it's made with these with the small period chili.
I know it's got some garlic in there, and I know it has uh some kind of spirit. Other than that, uh no clue. Wondering if either of you have seen anything or in putting me in the right direction. Portuguese fermented hot sauce. No, uh nothing nothing on my radar.
And I just had uh a Portuguese intern with me for three months. And uh no but he I mean I I haven't I haven't heard much about that. Maybe you could call them up. Put it out, tweet. You're not really on Twitter, are you?
I am not on Twitter. Yeah, I'm on Instagram. Yeah. But not not. Well, email it to us or whatever.
If you get if you get an answer, if you ever speak, did you like the Portuguese intern? I loved him. He was fantastic. So you will you will speak to him again someday? May maybe you can get back to us and t let us know something and then I can I can forward it.
Yeah, well, I will do that. Yeah. Uh speaking of questions we had off of the internet, uh Wes Hendrickson wrote in, um, would you talk about this is for you, David. Would you talk about Koji aging meat? They omit it in the book, but the DIY Koji crowd is nuts about it.
Discuss. We don't really omit it. You talk more about marinades, not about aging it for long periods of time, right? Yeah, that's because putting meat in an incubator freaks me out. Yeah.
I'm sorry, but just putting a a hunk of meat at thirty two degrees for forty eight hours just makes uh yeah, not it makes me a bit uncomfortable, so I didn't want to tell people to do that. What about some sort of middle of the road thing doing kind of refrigeration uh dry aging with already made kind of in other words, doing the marinade just for a long, long, long y long, long time. How about that? Yes. Yes, that that works.
And that's that's what we say to do in the book. I mean, it's like make a make a cure, make shiokee, blend koji with water and salt, turn it into a paste, and then rub your meat down in that and leave it on for as long as you want. Well, how long have you gone? No, I well, as at the restaurant we marinate our ducks for maybe about five four to six hours. And it really actually does help to tenderize uh the f the skin and the flesh.
Right, but you're not doing like uh like a week or a month. No. But you have you could. You would make the meat extremely tender. But uh I I think after a point you're you're not you know, it's like a law of diminishing returns.
I don't particularly like over this why like I you know, I know that in your buttermilk fried chicken recipe with I forget what you added to it with the enzymatic thing, like I like buttermilk batter, but I actually don't l I mean I like it, but it's not my choice to marinate for super long periods in acid just 'cause I think the flesh of the chicken breaks down too much. Is it if is it accelerated even more or using a harder chicken? 'Cause American chickens are so so freaking tender anyway, that if you really if you do too much more kind of breakdown on an American piece of chicken, I mean, suckers pulp. You know what I mean now if you were gonna do it like on like uh you know you know an older chicken like a hen or maybe like you know the kind of chickens that I you know I had when I was in Columbia or that you get in Asia sometime you know older tougher chicken like maybe but I mean I don't know what you get in Copenhagen there are you getting like American style like hyper tender things or are you getting tougher pieces of chicken I mean you can you you can absolutely get like factory farms rock ends and and and all of that um but we haven't really sort of tried chicken and Noma. That was that was a recipe that Renee came up with you know just as like a oh this this could be a good use and we tested it.
It was good. Um now um back to black fruit again well sorry go ahead. Yes. No so just getting back to the the Koji on meat a lot of this uh is centered around like rubbing your meat down in rice flour and then I'm gonna do it. Nastasi just made a face when you said that.
When you just said rubbing your meat down, Nastasia gave me such a look that phrase got uttered once before and I was looking through the window nobody was looking at me. Alright go ahead go ahead. So the coji's growing on the rice flour it's not actually growing on the meat. Some of those enzymes do kind of go through the other side of the layer of rice cake and and leach in but it's not going to be anywhere near the same level of enzymatic production or at least that you'd experience if it was growing on a completely starky substrate. So I we've tested this in the lab.
You know, it's when we see when we see people doing interesting things, we want to be able to understand it ourselves and see if it's worthwhile. And it's not it it's it's to me just making a paste and rubbing your koji or rubbing the koji over the meat is a more effective, safer, and more controllable way of actually you know, getting some usefulness out of its enzymes. So here's some some more random questions. Back to the b uh blackened uh alliums and fruits. Do have you ever tried the higher temperature or or the pressure cook methods, you just don't like them or it's just you're sticking with traditional or just curious.
Yeah so I I follow Simon Davies on Instagram and he was recently posting about pyrolysis which is the the the thermal breakdown of of whatever plant matter at high heat in a short amount of time in the absence of oxygen. Um garlic at those temperatures I find you'll end up getting those burnt flavors out of them. Those those kind of charred acrid notes. And for me that's why that's 60 degrees for a really long amount of time is it's quite special. I mean it's what it is I I've never tested it so I I don't know.
But what I know is a hundred percent true is that you that no reaction is the same carried out in a way if you change almost any of the parameters of temperature, time, pressure, water, i like all everything changes. You know what I mean? And so you can't, even though the same style of reactions is taking place, you don't get the same flavors. And it's just a question of maybe they're not better or worse, maybe they're different, but you're thinking on something like garlic that you think it's worse to do the higher temperatures for shorter times. Yeah.
In in the rare instances where our our fermentation chamber has spiked up and jumped, I've always found that you do get these kind of like this like burnt garlic flavor. And it may not be like overt, it may not be like, oh, this is like garlic that was stuck to the pan and it's gross. But you do get that a little like in the back of your mouth, that twang of it. Yeah, but I wonder whether that's because you're running it so long. He's only running for like uh like in one s one one he's running with a high temp on the crock pot.
He's running, I think a couple of days, and then I think in the pressure cooker he's doing like 16 hours. I've never cooked garlic more than an hour and a half in a pressure cooker. So I don't know. You know what I mean? Um I mean I know that shifting into pressure cooking range like drastically accelerates my yard reactions drastically.
Yeah. Um drastically. But um, all right. But if in other words, no, I haven't yeah, I haven't tried that yet. I would love to do it, love to do someday someone I would love someone to do a side-by-side test and then bring the results to me so I don't have to do the work.
I'm too old to actually do the work anymore. I want someone else to do the work and bring it to me. Um other questions they have. Oh, when you were making your uh your shrimp now, shrimp, I'm assuming you chose shrimp for one of I think right garm, you did a shrimp, shrimp garm. I think one of the reasons you're doing that is because it already comes with its guts in it, right?
So you appreciate you just buy the whole thing easy peasy, right? And it's got lots of guts with lots of enzymes in it. Now, and in fact, isn't that the reason you started Koji doping uh a lot of your stuff? Because you were using things that didn't have a lot of endogenous enzymes in it, yeah? Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. I mean, yeah, the grasshoppers do, um, but it it it really came about with uh with the meat scraps, um with the beef carrot. And you know, you're like, oh well, what what sort of digestive juices can we get from cow? You know any butcher shop will be like, we're not selling you those. Um full of E.
coli. Um so we switched to coachy for that means and then we're like, oh wow, this flavor's developing really fast. And discovered that. The shrimp caramel is uh is very it's classic, you know, it's just shrimp, lots of salt, just let it go at room temperature for for months and months. So you say no farm shrimp.
Why? Why no farm shrimp? Is that just because you you're hating on farm shrimp, or is there some actual technical reason the recipe won't work with farm shrimp? No, it won't it won't not work. I just find the flavor to be lesser than the amazing wild shrimp that you can get.
Uh I mean, I I know we're a bit spoiled here here in Copenhagen, but um I just I just think wild shrimp tastes better. I mean strictly from a taste perspective. Yeah, okay. So it's just a tasting. You know, one of the things about you know, if it's if a weekend warrior is going into a grocery store and they're getting like frozen tiger shrimp from Thailand, fed chicken shit or whatever.
I don't think it's gonna be the best six percent on it. Well, it's because uh farm shrimp are raised in in uh low low salt situations. You know what I mean? Don't you think that's why? I mean, I think like in like from the research that I've done years and years ago, you know, one of the main issues with uh farm rain sh far farm raised shrimp is that they're raised in kind of um kind of concrete pits at lower salinity levels, and the free amino acids and kind of like nice tastiness of a shrimp is kind of directly one of the direct relationships it has is you know how much salt there was in in the environment in which it was living.
Same with like bass, right? So you get like your your hybrid stripers, one of the reasons they don't taste very good is because they're raised in freshwater. You know what I mean? And no offense to freshwater fishing people, but I mean most of the stuff that what comes out of the ocean tastes better. Am I wrong about this?
No, I I would completely agree. Yeah. Now a couple of things here. One, you uh you you make a plea, you say, you know, that you've moved away at NOMA almost entirely from long cooked stocks, and you call it a greasy smear, like the old school gelatin ray stocks. That's pretty harsh language there.
You guys don't like you you know no longer even find a place for it. I mean, like it's on it actually know now with this game with this game season menu, we do have we have a dish of uh cold pheasant jelly with caviar, and that is a very, very classic stock. So it it it did make a comeback, and there's no koji in it. Yeah, yeah, I'll I will read the quote. Koji helps us to uh find the finesse in our raw ingredients and highlight their natural beauty without smothering it, like adding a spray of just right lubricant to a creaky door rather than a thick layer of grease.
Hating on the gelatin-based stocks, just hating on them. They're heavy. They they for me, honestly, they take me back in time. And I'm not saying that deft hand can't use them well. But these these are the things that I learned how to cook, you know, 15 years ago.
And they do, they they do taste of a time and they taste uh of a certain way. And they do weigh you down. And you know, Renee is the the final gatekeeper of what actually makes it off of the menu. And you know, one thing he is he is adamant about is that like the flavors don't weigh weigh you down in your mouth. Nothing that's like so incredibly heavy that you're like bogged down in the middle of your meal.
Things should be light and slow and and and and like almost flutter on the palate. Um and that's something Koji helps us do more than traditionally cook stocks. So that's that's why that's part of the mantra in the book and how we apply it. All right. Well, so we're coming up on the end here, and I was gonna get in a long protracted argument with you about chaos theory and hand taste and uh consistency in the kitchen.
So for those of you that want you know that want to get into it in the section on hand so the the cover of the book is kind of hey Nastas we we didn't get to say it. Nastasia hates the word spores, spores. Yeah, she hates the word sport. But there's kind of like uh there's kind of like a fungal high fee thing with a hand on the front cover, right? That's what's going on there.
Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's a discussion of kind of this idea that m you know, micro changes uh the in the cook's hand, hand taste, taste of taste of cook, taste of place, right? Hand taste, Korean idea, hand taste. But then you go into chaos theory, and this is where I have a bone to pick with you, but I don't have the time to pick it because Well you should just go to the hang.
The question well, we'll do it again sometime. The bone to pick is is that with a hand like having an actual hand taste, look, there is a true statement that batch to batch you're gonna get changes because you're not controlling it a hundred percent because things are wild, but part of having a taste from the hand is that the hand does lend some consistency through practice, right? I mean, that's the thing. Like, like y it is a trained hand, not like the random hand. You know what I mean?
Not like the anyway. Well, we'll we I wish we had more time to talk about it because instead I have to ask you this last question on the way out. And I know I didn't get in any of the pre-written questions. Well, we'll think about it. Maybe you come back on sometime.
You know, when you're back in uh, you know, in New York sometime to see it. Oh, and I didn't get to ask you, by the way, real quick. Coffee, coffee and kombucha, coffee shoyu and kombucha. You make them with spent grounds. I get it, as a way to reuse waste.
But revelatory or just something to do to prove you can do it and and not waste the coffee grounds. Uh it can be extremely good. Now, that being said, we have tested so many different types of coffee, and they are all different. You will get fresh ground where you'll have a batch of shit, and fresh grounds where you'll have a batch that will you'll be like, holy crap, this is amazing. Um we were fortunate enough to have spent grounds actually turn out really, really good.
But you can use fresh grounds. Um trial and error will tell you what roasts are best, what beans are best. Um but it's it's it's surprisingly good with this gold speed method. So yes, it is a great way to give something a second life. So uh you have been listening to David Zilber, uh, one of the co-authors of the Noma Guide to Fermentation out now.
It's a great read, but before you leave, I have the my last question, and I don't mean to blow up your spot, but if you look at your Instagram, which is David underscore zilber, right? Is that correct? Yeah. And you look at your profile picture, and you're also wearing this in your Grub Street interview picture, you have this amazing technicolor dream coat, and I don't want to like, you know, you to give any secrets away, but where do I get this coat? This is a miraculous coat.
It's like an amazing freaking coat. Is uh do you have the only one? No, there's more than one. I think they're sold out, to be honest, but it was made by a designer out of New York, uh, a label called Cease Marjon. Wait, make some fun stuff.
Cease Marjon, like stop margining. No, no, it's it's uh it's a Dutch name. But uh S-I-E-S M-A-R-J-A-N. Would you be offended if I found one of these coats and also had one? No, of course not.
I didn't make the coat. Anyone could buy the coat. Yeah, but it's like I feel like it's like, you know, it's your coat, so like if I wore it, I'd be like, you know, kind of horning in on your coatness. Whatever. If you can find the coat, Dave.
Two Dave in the same jacket. That's not that's not a bad thing. All right, cool. Well, anyway, thanks for coming on. Uh Kat, you want to say one more thing?
It's been a pleasure. Yeah, and next time you're in New York, stop by uh the bar, stop by existing edition, say howdy. I have one thing one thing to say before we go. I forgot to mention it. If you if cooking issues listeners want to come to the gala, they can use the code cooking issues for 10% off their ticket.
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