This episode of Cooking Issues is brought to you by Bob's Redmill, an employee owned company that has been offering organic stone ground products for decades. Their flowers and whole grains are the highest quality and are minimally processed at their stone mill in Oregon. Visit Bob'sRedmill.com to shop their huge range of products. Use Cooking Issues 25 for 25% off your order. I'm one of HRN's interns, Nina Medvin Sky, with a preview of the next episode of Meet and Three, our weekly food news roundup.
This week's topic, the marriage of food and danger. Sometimes danger lurks in the food that we eat. So instead of saying what is poisonous, I'd rather say what's not, because it's literally just the flesh and the fins. Food poisoning doesn't just threaten our bodies, but it endangers our environment as well. The emissions of JBS combined with the other top five meat companies exceed the annual emissions of Axon, Shell, or BP.
For more, tune in to this week's Meet and Three on Heritage Radio Network. Available wherever you listen to podcasts. To about one o'clock from a burden's pizzeria in Bushwick. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer. How are you doing?
Good. Yeah? Got Matt in the booth. How are you doing? Hey.
And we're and we're joined from the Radio Mothership. We got Kat in the studio to talk about, I don't know. I don't know what are you here to talk about. Our end of your drive. Okay.
But first, should we talk about the gala? So, a couple of things about the gala. For those of you that have listened to this podcast before, there's a couple of things that Nastasia enjoys. The suffering of others. It is me know maybe the highest one, right?
Uh but just below that is this creation that she and Piper, who used to work with us uh made years ago called the the wine Santa. Now, for those of you that don't know what the wine Santa is, it is a Santa Claus mannequin in outfit, right? With a tube running through its body out of its mouth, and it continuously one might say spits if you're in a fountain mode, one might say vomits up wine into a bowl, and then it goes, it drains and it just keeps circulating. So you're supposed to stick your cup underneath and just you know, partake of Santa's, you know, spirits. Spirits.
So, you know, one year Nastasia had uh a friend of the show, Phil Bravo with uh with the deep voice, uh, you know, saying, Oh, I shouldn't have had so many cookies, blah and like the wine would come out. This year, Nastasia has decided that she's going to use uh one of these uh it's like a very large version of those little flower pots where when you play music the plastic flower dances. So imagine that, but on a Santa scale, on a human Santa scale. So Santa moves back and forth and she can play whatever music she wants, and it's vomiting up wine the whole time. See, I didn't know that wine Santa danced until uh the night of the gala.
Yeah. And it was a delightful surprise. Uh okay. So Nastasia also, like, I like perennially refused to help her until the last minute. So she tried to make one by herself.
Till it's too late. Until it's too late. Well, no, no, and then she forces me to waste my time anyway and do it, even though I'm horrified by the whole idea. So horrified is the determinant's gonna come up later. So she makes this wine, Santa, and instead of constructing when I I looked at it first, she's like, How should I do this?
I'm like, you need to build a large enough base so that the bowl, when the bowl is, and I would support the bowl because otherwise it's gonna be a tipping hazard. She's like, I don't care, whatever. So she gets two like super weak PVC. This could not look more, this could not look more like little rascals, like you know, she did that thing out of there and it was not secure. Yeah, yeah.
So it's got these two like red spray painted PVC ski poles down to its base, which by the way, note to everyone out there designing things for structural purposes, like putting a pole to the base does not increase the size of the base. You like you cannot prevent something by from tipping by not increasing the size of the base. So anyway, so here's Santa's. Not only is it there's this giant punch bowl, cantilevered way out, she of course also hasn't tested it prior to this. Uh I did.
You did not. Yes, I did. This was a different unit. You did not you had never plugged in the unit that we brought to the thing. Yeah, yeah.
You said you hadn't because none of the screws or anything fit. No. The bowl didn't fit, the bowl was twisting around and tipping in every direction. Well, once you took out that little piece and it was flowing faster than it was when it was. But the bowl is still tipping anyway.
So it has like so many untested things. So it's at the Heritage Radio thing. We're filling it with red wine. This is at the gala, which was a fun event, right? Yes.
Yes. So she fills it with red wine. Uh we get it going. Uh we have she makes me go out to a hardware store. Hours I have to think about this crap.
And like get a screw to screw the bowl into Santa's chest, into Santa's sternum so that the bowl won't flip around. Yeah. And uh one of the event organizers, I don't even remember who, uh, I don't know whether they were on the Brooklyn Botanical Garden side or on our side. Anyway, I I'm walking behind her because I have to get napkins to continuously wipe up the dripping red wine all over the floor. And the giant splash of red wine, which thank God did not get on the felt plant art that was all over the wall.
It almost did, and I spent Tuesday cleaning wine off the wall. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So, anyways. It was it was not bad.
So this lady is walking. I'm walking behind her, and she goes, That's horrifying. I want it 86. And then the guy from the botanical ground was like, I don't know if we can you know the guy I'm talking about. I don't know if we could 86 it.
They brought it, it's from the people. Anyway, so she's like, uh So they pull wine Santa, we drain the wine out, and they say you can't bring wine Santa back out until 9 p.m. Okay. So at 8:30, Nastasia's like, it's nine somewhere. And she goes, and first of all, there are pictures of this wine Santa, which looks all beat up, like all like silicone glue and spray paint, nightmare.
And it's turned against the wall like it's being punished in elementary school. She goes, there's pictures. So she goes, she pulls it out. This time, Jack Shram from you know uh uh existing conditions. He's like, Like, let's fill it with vodka instead.
Thank God for Jack Shram. Well, I mean, horrifying in a different way, a warm vodka spout is hard gross. Yes, but it was like a water. With the remains of the Malbec that you had had it in earlier. This is hard nasty all the way around.
So they turn it on. It's, I don't know, some form of cool in the gang or something they're playing. Santa's dancing. All of a sudden, you see Santa's like, oh, whoa. So Santa starts, Santa all of a sudden's like, I can't do this anymore.
Blah! And Santa just starts tipping forward. So Steven Hoppy from uh uh La Penultima, who came to the event, he's standing next to Santa. He's like, I'm gonna save this. Only Santa had already crossed like the 30 to 40 degree tilt.
So he iron palms Santa in the chest. As he iron palms Santa in the chest, Santa's head flies right off. Santa's head just goes tumbling through the air, flying across the hallway, and then and then like just goes around Steve's hand and just hits the ground and then keeps on dancing in a pile of his own vomit and and vodka. Like at least it was vodka. And like you can't see on the radio because it's not a visual medium, but just imagine your hands just slowly pumping back and forth while your face well, not even face down, doesn't have a face anymore, head fell off.
Like chest down, dying in your own pool of vodka blood and vomit. And that was the wine said. So then the next day Nastasi's like, So you gonna help me build that again? I'm like, what? What?
Version 2.0. Or 9.2. Oh well. Anyway, so like whatever. So I'm like, you know what?
So no, she's this is how Nastasia gets you. This is how terrible Nastasia is. Nastasia says, I have all of the things. She doesn't talk like that. She's right here.
You know what she talks like. She's like, I have all of the things we need to build. Yeah, pasta flyer. I'm like, you have nothing, that pasta flyer with which to build this. She plans on building it out as spaghetti.
She's like, I have a hand auger and like uh and like a screwdriver. I'm like, listen. And so like, I'm like, and then she's gonna take Jack Shram, the head bartender from existing conditions, and waste his free time. What? He did not want to do force people in, and then you say they want to do it.
Don't anyone say I wanted to do this. I never want to hear that I wanted to do this. So I'm like looking at her and at Jack, and I'm like, you're both idiots. Neither of you, A, have the skills to do this, neither do you have the tools. So we went to New Lab with a shop that Booker and Dax, you know, has a is a member of, and we had to build it, but then we ran out of materials.
Oh god. So we stole some well, he didn't steal. Oh god. Unlabeled wood. Uh-huh.
Is community property. But this guy had just brought it in there. He was still there, but he was working on something else. So I was like, eh, literally, how long did it take me to turn that thing into pedestals? Five minutes.
I took a four by eight sheet and I was like, crap on it. Staple gun. And like with like it's all there, you know what I mean? And like the guy was like, he literally turns around and goes, Hey, nice pedestals. Where's my wood?
Oh no. So we had to buy him wood. And now Nastasia wants me to make more because someone rented. Here's what she says. Dave, this is gonna be big money.
I'm like, first of all. For one month a year. First of all, I was like, oh, really? You've made three this year. It's cost like it's cost eight years off my life in terms of the anger scale, plus like my actual time, money, her time that she could have been spending, I don't know, selling freaking Sears all's and centrifuges, stuff like this, getting more of them made.
Instead, we're doing this. I was like, oh, how much grand total did you make this year? Well, nothing this year. This is like the fourth year of just you know, building up interest. Next year is when the real money comes.
This year's been the year of the Instagram for wine Santa. Okay, but wait. Oh, yeah. It's true. Yeah.
Okay, but before like a burning savannah. Before you talked about wine Santa, you said that the Sasia's favorite thing was making people suffer. Oh, yeah, great. Yeah, tell this story. This is awesome.
So about two weeks before the gala, I go to existing conditions to chat with Dave and be like, what cocktail are you gonna make? I brought the the mezcal for the cocktail. Just making sure everything's going well. You had texted me and said, I'm gonna be late for the gala. I have an event at the bar.
And I was like, no, please no. I told you the date in March for this reason. So you made me very you made me nervous. The most anyone has ever spent on a buyout at the bar. Like, and they were like, We're doing this because we really like the cocktails and the attitude you have towards drinks.
I was like, uh, go ahead. Sure, sure. And I respect that. But I really, I really needed you at the gala. So you made you were making me nervous.
And I was like, no, it's gonna be fine. Day, you you reassured me, you were like, I know how to show up and make drinks somewhere, and I was like, that's all I need. Which is true fact. It's true, true fact. And oh, and and that day we figured out we were gonna do a frozen cocktail, and we got a frozen drink machine.
It was all looking great. Which worked really well, by the way. Loved it. Those were delicious. I had too many.
So good. I think a lot of people had too many. You make frozen corsairs for those that are interested, which is preserved lemon, preserved lemon drink. So the spec at home is you make partially clarified, in other words, don't make it fully clear. Take preserved lemons, blend it completely.
The juice, the lemons with the pith and everything. Blend it, spin it out, but don't make it fully clear. It's uh, and it's one and a half tequila. We usually use tequila, one and a half tequila, half of that preserved lemon, half of lime, half of simple syrup, uh, some spice, shake it up. That's a corsair.
We made a frozen version. Go ahead. So I you know, I was a little nervous, but I trusted you. I knew you're gonna be there. And I knew Nastasia was gonna be there with wine Santa.
I've been talking to her and Rebecca about that. And it's like four, you said you would be there at like three. It's maybe four, and I get a text from Nastasia. I'm at the bar with Dave. He wants to know what time to load in at the garden tomorrow.
I'm at the garden. I am waiting for you to all of you to arrive. And new Jack was coming with you, so I texted her back and I was like, sorry, I was a little bit snippy, Nastasia, but I was like, this doesn't make sense. I had like all the like text messages, all the emails, I double checked everything to make sure I never put the wrong date in. I'm just like having flashbacks to like managing Momafuku's chefs of like what's gone wrong, right?
And and you don't, she doesn't respond. She's like, oh shit. She go, oh shit, that's it. And then I'm not sure. No, no, but you gotta say it right.
Oh shit. See, I didn't have that context. I was like, what's her inflection? What does she mean? Dave's.
So, um, so then I I call, I'm trying to call Dave. I'm trying to call Nastasia. Nastasia's like, don't answer it. And then I call Rebecca, Rebecca Palkovich, who works with you guys, and I'm like, I talked to her that morning. So I was like, what has happened?
And I'm like, Rebecca, like, they know they're supposed to be here today, right? And she's she's like, yeah, uh, I'm meeting Nastasia there at 4 30. And I was like, okay, cool. So I was like, can you give me Jack Shram's number? I call Jack Shram's, no answer.
Sassy's like, do not pick up. And then I then I'm someone else calls me that's trying to load in. So I'm like, have to table this crisis for a moment. As I'm on the phone with someone else, here they all come, strolling in. And I just I looked at you guys, I just pointed at the table.
I was like, I can't look at you right now. Yeah, yeah. Just so you know, Dave dared me to do that. But then you did it and they wouldn't allow me to back down. You loved it.
And so I said, I feel like I've been initiated into y'all's sorority now. Hey, whatever happened, uh so we like also Nastasi and I, of course, by the way, set up in like Jack and Nastasia and I set up in what? Like we were set up and we're like, well, okay, we're done now, what? So we go out to get some sort of food, and we find a five kilo bag of super fancy soba flour on the sidewalk in the middle of Brooklyn, and we're like, this has to be for the event. I get a text.
I get a text from Nastasi that says, We found buckwheat flour. No context, and I'm like, huh? And then she's like, Is it does it belong to someone? And I was like, Of course it does. We have a soba table, which was awesome.
So thanks for picking up. So then we just walk back in and we're like, we no one was at the table because I'm sure they were out looking for their flour. He didn't, he didn't know we he didn't know we lost it. Oh, really? Oh, Jesus.
Yeah. You know what's really hard to make without buckwheat flour? Soba noodles. Soba noodle, very hard, very hard. All right.
Wait, so we're gonna talk more about the space? So very quickly, our we're doing our galas over, but we still have a little bit of time left in our end of year fundraising drive. We're trying to do it bigger and better this year. Um trying to get many, many members because next year's our 10-year anniversary. Did you guys know that?
I did not know that. 2019, HRN's turning 10. How long have we been doing this show? I think you're at like eight years. Didn't you start it around 2011?
I don't know. I all I know is that very early on I came on Patrick's show. That's back when he would anyone that would come on his show, he would ask them to do a show. Totally. You should do a show.
Remember that? Like, I'm like, what? You know, they like yeah. Um so yeah, so that we're gonna be celebrating like all year long, doing lots of fun events. Um so you can become a member and be a part of all this by going to Heritage Radio Network.org/slash donate.
Do you guys have any thoughts on why people should become a member? Why they should support cooking issues? Now's your time. No, I can't think of any. Can't think of any.
What do you think, Sas? Like, I'm that guy, I like I'm just a bad person. I don't know. I support it, support it if you like it. Eventually we're gonna be like, okay, no more pizza, goodbye.
And we don't want that, so you should become a member. You know. What do you I don't know. What do you think? You give the pitch.
Yeah, I mean, you're the one who literally like your whole livelihood depends on. So why don't you give the pitch? Yeah, I mean, that's true. Well, because we have 35 shows, I know a lot of people maybe don't listen to other shows on the network. They should, they should explore heritage radio network.org.
Um, but members directly support all 35 of our shows, including cooking issues, and they keep everything on the air. Like, we couldn't do it without members. Oh, speaking of Heritage Radio, uh, in the lead-in to this, they talked about meeting three poisonous foods. Yeah. And I could tell, obviously, because anytime someone says poisonous food, what's the first thing out of people goo?
My name's Fugu. I'm served in a cup. You cook me wrong, I'll if you up. You know, yeah, I'll get it. But clever.
Yeah, my wife has had Fugu, by the way. I would love to have Fugu, but uh it reminded me, it just struck something in my head. There was a video years ago I got from Japan, and maybe this is where Miracle of Moisture Management came from because the title of the video was The Miracle of Poison Removal. Because if you take Fugu Rose, poisonous, you ferment them for a long period of time, and bacteria consume the tetrodotoxin and make the the egg the egg sacks uh edible. Hmm.
Yeah. Wait, what does that have to do with membership? Oh, just thinking about other heritage radio programs that you might listen to. Yeah, you should listen to meat and three for sure. Um Dave's been on it several times talking about water and other things.
Museums. Museums. Here's something here's something you should think about with poison. So a lot of foods, like plants specifically, and there's been a lot of published stuff on this recently. Uh but a lot of the the compounds that give herbs, for instance, their like special pungent flavor, like mint, for instance, the mintiness of it, right?
Is there to prevent bugs from eating it, right? It's like poison against bugs, and so we eat it in a smaller relative amount to our body weight, so it seems okay. So uh when we were doing our first exhibit for the Museum of Food and Drink, uh, like the crew, we were sitting around and we were trying to simulate this for flavor. We were talking about flavors. So we're like, well, what is it like to be a bug on a mint plant?
And so we all took pure mint oil, and we took hits of pure, pure mint oil, and we're all like, ah. And that's what it's like to be a bug. So you could do that test yourself. If you really want to know what it's like to be a bug chewing on a uh, you know, a piece of spearmint. Where else could you learn things like this, other than Heritage Radio Network?
And that's why you should support our programming. All right, that's my pitch. All right, there you go. Thanks, Dave. Alright, no problem.
Dave, you already have a caller on the air. Caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, it's uh Josh from Norfolk Virginia. How you doing? I'm well.
Uh so I don't know if Nastasia is still doing the poll, but for what it's worth, I'm 28, married, and my wife likes food and drinks too, so she lets me buy like whatever the family show I want. There you go. Good for you. There you go. Hey, did you guys get the snow there too, or did it stop before it got up to Norfolk?
Uh we're coming back from Raleigh right now, and there's a ton of snow, but we just got some like terrible rain. But it's all right. Uh so my question is about uh proofing who sinos. So like I know it doesn't change in like a closed centrifuge, but uh in a spinz all when making like banana houstinos or whatever, is there a reliable way to calculate proof on that with it being an open container? No.
Because I tried to use a hydrometer and it gave me some like terrible wacky stuff. Okay, so no, no, you can't because you're adding sugar. Like what I have done is I've measured just straight evaporation amounts, and so with when you're using first of all, open bucket centrifuges, also we would also get evaporation, especially people who had non-refrigerated centrifuges. If you have a like the way to really reduce evaporation in a in a commercial centrifuge is to put lids on your on your buckets and refrigerate your centrifuge, right? And that tamps down on it, you know, all almost entirely.
In the uh spinzole, uh you want to make sure that you have uh all of like the gasket really firmly on the bottom, the the intake top lid down on, and I even put uh uh what's it called? Um saran wrap over the over the output pipe, and I make sure that the tube feeder is on. And when you do that, you also gotta make sure that your uh your product is below either at or just below ambient. It could be colder, but it doesn't really help. You know what I mean?
So you want to have it be uh at ambient or below. Because the the by far and away, uh what the what the spinzall wants to do is bring your product up to room temperature as quickly as possible. It doesn't heat it in the same way that uh let's say uh a spinning bucket rotor does because there's not nearly as much friction, but it brings it up to temperature very, very quickly. So if your product is warm at all, it'll evaporate a bunch. So I've only done like evaporation tests, and having it without the tube feeder lid in it and all of that, you could get very high evaporation rates, like 10%.
And then if you do it right and keep your spins as slowly as possible, you're uh with alcohol, that is, you can get your evaporation rates down to like you know under five. So it's that's really the only way to test it. The other way you could do it is by using uh like an alcohol refractometer and and just spinning plain spirits, right? Uh but once you add sugar to it, right? So you're talking about there's two losses of proof, right?
There's a loss of proof theoretically because you're adding liquid to it in the form of I don't know let's say bananas or dried fruits and then there's the loss of proof because of evaporation but you know the evaporation one is the only one you could really accurately test because you could do it when you don't have sugar in it. Anything else it's very hard to properly measure. But I'll have you know that I'm trying to work uh I gotta talk to the guys in China I'm trying to work on a uh on a lid for Houstinos that seals it entirely just around the shaft so if you're doing batch mode Houstinos you'll get almost no evaporation and it should be uh easily uh what's the word I'm saying uh uh retrofitable to old and new because we're not changing the the dimensions of the stuff on our second printing printing second run. Does that make sense? Cool.
Yeah yeah definitely uh is there any like appreciable loss of proof you think into like the uh the puck I mean I mean there is alcohol in the puck for sure but like you know there's also like it depends on what you're spinning. Give me an example. So like uh strawberry and that's calpuccino. Yeah so like the fact of the matter is is that what I tend to do is I tend to assume uh I tend to be conservative because there's some evaporation, right? So what I'll do is I'll say okay uh I'll take the strawberries even though the strawberries are really only like 85% water or something like this, 90% water, I'll just take the entire base of the strawberry as water weight and I'll assume my proof dilution is basically you know strawberry uh, you know, plus liquor, that's the new weight of product, and the original amount of alcohol is there and distributed equally between puck and liquid, is usually how I just do my estimations.
And then, you know, that's conservative because obviously there's solids that are left behind, and those solids don't have alcohol in them. It's trapped in the water and and liquids between them, but there's also evaporation. So I'm uh yeah, I try to think that, well, you know, maybe you know, if you add those two things together, they kind of wash themselves out of it. We now bring you our Bob's Red Mill, food fact of the week. Potato starch is a starch extracted from potatoes.
Well, that's a tautological freaking statement, people. But I'll tell you something about potato starch. I like potato starch for a lot of reasons. Potato starch swells enormously versus other uh starches. Uh, and so it's got kind of unique properties.
If you look at potato starch under a microscope, it looks very different from other starches. And I really like dusting things in potato starch that are gonna get fried. It has a very particular fryable texture that I enjoy in a lot of applications. Also, potato starch is what they call hygroscopic. So if you include potato starch in recipes, you can get effects similar to what you get in like Martin's potato rolls or something like this.
So you can make kind of um that kind of like chewier, denser, water-loving feeling that you get in like uh a potato roll or something like this. So you can use it in baking, you can use it in frying as part of your uh coating mix, or all typically I use it as part of the coating mix, but I really like using uh potato starch in um frying applications. Thanks to Bob's Red Mill for supporting cooking issues. Visit Bob's Redmill.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. Alright, caller, you're on the air. Hey, uh, Michaela, 26 out in Seattle, Washington. And stars for your poll.
I am trans female. So I don't know if you've had one of them yet, but hello. I had a question about I really want to replicate a um pie that my grandmother always made growing up, but I'm now with a partner who can't eat eggs, and I've tried like three different goes at it, and getting something that isn't just like a mucky sludge out of it. Um your phone click for a second. What kind of pie was it?
Pecan pie. Oh, yeah. Okay. Now, here's my question. Yeah.
A bunch of questions. Are you a nuts on top with goop below, or are you a nuts all the way through pie? I'm a nuts all the way through. Alright. Uh, yeah, so what can you do to get rid of the egg?
I'm gonna have to, first of all, anyone in the chat room help us out on this. I mean, it's probably gonna be, see, the thing is egg replacers. I don't know a lot about custard-based egg replacers, but you'll have to look at like uh, because you're fundamentally you want to make something that's relatively custard like. I mean, I know that pecan pie is more a little harder of a gel than than most custards, but most of those egg-free custard things are some starch base. You know what I mean?
Some form of uh huh. Yeah, I've tried Bob's Red Mill Egg Replacer. It's potato starch based. Um, it was uh not a good goopy mess. Uh I've tried a different egg replacer that was pea protein based, um, also not good.
I tried making it more like just like a cake, like a really wet cake with flour in it instead. Not not a good choice. Yeah, no, yeah, you're not like so those egg replacers are mostly trying to replace the functionality of egg protein in a leavening and binding sense. Not in not in a in a custard-based sense. What you want is like like probably like a tapioca custard kind of a thing, or something that is mimicking the more custody texture, which requires the yolks is more of a soft set kind of a uh a situation.
And I have done these before, I just don't have them at the at the tip of my tongue. Uh I mean there are specific starch bases that are made specific, you know, they're made specifically to do this. But a standard egg replacer isn't going to this is what like I like to tell people all the time. There is no egg replacer that will replace everything that an egg can do, right? And specifically the ones that you're mentioning are for a a different, a completely different uh uh application.
Uh I'm just trying to think if I know off the top of my head something that will do it. I I don't I mean there's plenty of there's plenty of like custard powders that don't have eggs in them. And I would try uh I would just try one of those. Like even if something just just as a test, don't waste a whole pie on it. Like, is are there eggs are there eggs in Mighty Fine?
Someone look up Mighty Fine and see if they're eggs in Mighty Fine. Uh and then, of course, you're gonna want to go more brown sugar on it than their kind of uh normal vanilla hit. Sorry, my uh I'm a little stuffed up. I got so I'm gonna sound a little bit uh might be hard to understand what I'm saying. But um I don't know.
I'll look it up. And if is anyone on the in the chat room? Is anyone there? Is anyone alive, Matt? One moment.
Yeah. But anyway, we'll think about it, and then uh hopefully uh I'll I'll try to come up with some good stuff and maybe uh if you follow me on Twitter, I'll try to Twitter it out to you or or s shoot me something on Twitter and I'll see if I can find any good uh uh any good recipes and shoot it back at you. Sounds good. I'll hit you on Twitter. Cool, thanks a lot.
All right, bye-bye. Nothing from the chat on that one. And that chat room. Where are you when we need you? Alright, so we have a question in from Jane in Toronto.
I like Toronto, Toronto's a good place. Nastassi, you've never been there, right? It's so close. Why have you never been? I don't know.
Wasn't that the one time when you had dinner with a radio show fan? At uh at the Momafuku joint there, that five floor momo. Well, remember I had to remember they were doing a uh a film festival, a food film festival, and they're like, what movie do you want to talk about? I think I worked with you on that. Yeah.
And I was like, Willy Welka. And they were like, Christina Tosey already took that. She's like 20,000 times bigger than you are, so crap on you. You get soylent green. I'm like, but she's like, you can choose any movie you want as long as it's soylent green.
I was like, soilent green, I'll choose soil and green. So I went to that uh Toronto Film Cube. Tiff, yeah. Yeah. And uh, you know, watched the movie and then talked about it.
People get soil and green entirely wrong, by the way. I've never seen it. You should watch it. I mean, uh people get it completely wrong. They're not murdering people to make the that people are like, oh, they murdered people to make it the food.
No, look, they they encourage you to kill yourself, that's for sure. But they don't murder people for the soil and green. Instead, it's oh my god, we destroyed the planet, we're about to die, so we have to chum up human beings and make them into food, or we'll run out of food. That's the story, people. It's not about the murdering people.
Don't they get to see what the planet was like as they're dying? Like what it was before. No, they go into some sort of sensory deprivation tank, and it's like, ah love love happiness. Yeah, and they die. Anyway, like to me, like that's just good recycling use, but it's like a perpetual motion machine.
Like, you can't feed people from people. It doesn't, it's not energetically favorable. You know how many pounds of people it takes to grow a person? Like a lot. Like, it's called feed conversion ratio people.
So right now, chickens for animals. It it takes listen to how crazy this is. Chickens are grown in about six weeks. It takes less than ready for this, less than two pounds of feed to make a pound of chicken. Think about that for a second.
Think think of how big we'd all be if it took less than two pounds of stuff to make a pound of us. You know what I mean? So people incredibly inefficient food source. Not to mention ethical problems, of course. Those pesky ethical problems.
Yes. But Toronto is super close to New York. So close. They have a good Chinatown. They have a lot of good stuff.
I really liked it. That's where I learned the Canadian bacon that we've been, you know, maligning Canadian bacon for all of these years. It's actually quite good. Uh anyway, so this is where this has nothing to do with Jane's question. It just happens to be Jane's from there.
Alright. So far we've gotten to Jane is from. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what Anastasia likes to do? Nastasia is a sound person's worst nightmare because she loves to sit next to a microphone and rub squidgy things.
She's in a booth and she's wearing a freaking parka and going, squidgy quickie, quick, good, quick, quidchy, good. I have to be on conference calls with this lady in China, and she doesn't put it on mute and she rattles pots and pa pans around during and we're trying to have these engineering conversations. And by the way, their internet connection in China is so bad. How bad is it, Nastasia? That we can't ever understand, like half the thing, we're like, I can't understand what you're saying.
You know what I mean? And then like, and then she's like rattling her pots around, and now on the radio, she's like, let me just goey in my park. Let me do the, let me do the wine Santa dance in my parking. Shoop, shoop, shoop. Nastasia should get into ASMR.
What's that? It's uh the thing on YouTube where people like when people like wrestle brushes. Oh, I don't like that. Is it as bad as spores and mold? Yeah.
Oh, by the way, so in the wake of the uh David Zilber fermentation thing, I I went home and I had accidentally bought like five times as many tomatoes as I needed. And so I was like, blah, crap on it. I'll ferment it. Remember that like years ago I made the uh fermented salsa? Yeah.
So now I've started fermenting again. And my wife's like, really? I'm like, yeah, it's really, really. Anyway, back to Jane. Uh hi to the cooking issues gang.
I received an infrared thermometer for my birthday a couple of months back, and want to get more use out of it cooking wise than just checking that my water is the correct temperature when I'm making matcha. I understand that it reads surface temperature. But what are some practical applications for it in the kitchen? Uh love the show, and thanks as always, Jane from Toronto. Alright, well, I mean, I use my infrared uh, I use it, what do I use it for?
I use it to shoot a lot of times, like the inside of my ovens. I use it to shoot uh when I make stone moles, but this is not normal applications. Like I'm trying to think of a normal person application for this. And because I'm not thinking of a normal person application for this, instead, I will go through my usual diatribe of mistakes people make with infrared thermometers. There are uh two main mistakes people make with infrared thermometers.
One is not understanding what's called the emissivity of your infrared thermometer. So infrared thermometer is measuring uh it's measuring the the light coming off of uh an item. It's looking for a specific wavelength and it's correlating that with the temperature of the thing, right? And here's the problem. Water, they're they're all calibrated, so like different objects, right, have what's called different emissivity.
And you if you think about it, it's it's uh, you know, how how to explain it normally. Basically, a high emissivity means that it's gonna register a higher temperature. It's gonna get more of that uh light coming off at uh at a particular temperature, and a very low emissivity, which usually corresponds to very reflective metal surfaces, is gonna mean that relatively little of the light that you're measuring is coming off of it. And so low emissivity, things like aluminum, metal, very hard to measure with infrared thermometer. So people try to read a dry pan, a dry aluminum, uh dry stainless steel, dry aluminum pan with an infrared thermometer, getting wild, wildly inaccurate readings, right?
So the emissivity of something that's called a perfect black body, so flat black spray paint is one. Something that is completely you know the other direction like the shiniest shiniest metal is emissivity zero something like uh stainless steel aluminum pan is like 0.05 most of the food that we measure is 0.95 to 0.97 so most in uh most infrared thermometers are calibrated to that emissivity and you can't change it what that means is is that different foods are gonna give relatively different um readings not on only on their temperature but based on their emissivity luckily for you water which you're measuring for matcha has a fairly uh because it's it's not clear at infrared temperatures has a very uh fairly uh you know uh close emissivity to what it's measuring things like glass don't necessarily so you can't measure the side of a piece of glass and get a good uh reading uh pans do not uh if you have a a bare pan and you want to measure the temperature let's say you're gonna fry an egg or I mean like I when I fry an egg or fry whatever who else does this the old school where you just take a drop of water and throw it in the pan is that what everyone does or is that just me? No everybody does that. Yeah that's what I do I don't bother measuring it but if I really care I'll measure it with an infrared thermometer or I'll sometimes measure the temperature of my uh large griddles with an infrared thermometer so cast iron black cast iron good add some oil uh if you're gonna measure a pan even a little bit of oil uh like like five thousandths of an inch of oil brings your emissivity from 0.05 all the way up to like 80%, eight a 0.8 right? So any more than that, you're bringing it up to where oil is, which is like 0.95.
So that's the first thing. It's like figuring out what you're measuring. Also, uh, you you can't measure through anything, right? So you're literally, if you were to have if I was to sit here and try to measure the forehead of this knucklehead wiping his eyes, sitting at this table here waiting for his freaking pizza to come, I can't because the glas all it's gonna measure is the glass, right? Uh the second thing people get wrong or don't think about on infrared thermometer is what's called the aspect ratio or the field of view.
So someone will stand like 10 feet away from an object, point the laser, for instance, a cat's head, and try to measure her. But what's happening is is it's measuring a large cone. And usually on the side, and so it's an average of cat, the the wall, everything else. What you want to do is get as close as you can with the infrared thermometer. And what I usually do when I'm buying an infrared thermometer is make sure that I have a very narrow field of vi uh view so that it's getting a very narrow spot.
Does that make sense, Tess? Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's good good look, non-contact thermometers are great, but they can't replace, they can't replace everything you need. You know what I'm saying?
It's also hard to get a non-cocked contact thermometer that can measure very, very, very high temperatures. So if you're trying to measure, which by the way, it's another gripe I have. People are like, my boiler is like 5,000 degrees. No, it's what does that even mean? It doesn't have any meaning.
Trying to directly measure the temperature of like of like a combustion element and trying to relate that to how hot your food is is almost almost meaningless. So uh anyway, whatever. This I c I could talk for, you know, hours and hours because I have to worry about this with things like Searsols and crap like this. Can I ask you a question about like a digital thermometer, like thermometer? Sure.
Do you ever have to worry about that becoming inaccurate? Uh yeah. So like if you're working with it, typically there's two ways to calibrate your thermometer. You can do the the boiling water, uh, where you're you're putting it in boiling water. Uh the only advantage of that is that uh it also uh you know sterilizes the thermometer while you're working.
But uh you ever held your hand directly over a pot of boiling water for a long time? Yes, indeed. It sucks. Sucks real bad. Uh and and like the other thing is is that the is that the temperature of boiling water isn't actually uniform.
It's like the very bottom of it, the top of it's usually cooler at the bottom, so you have to stir it for a while unless it's rapidly boiling, and then it's really hard to hold your hand over it. Sometimes the steam can mess with the thermometers. It's like it's a nightmare. Uh much easier is the ice technique. So you get some, everyone's like, you have to use distilled water.
Garbage, garbage. It's use as long as you don't live, as long as your water is not like, you know, salt water, don't use ocean water. You know, water and like crush up some ice, and you want like a lot of ice and water, you stir it, keep stirring it for like five, ten minutes, it should drop, and you can see how close you get to zero. It should be at zero. Uh, you know, tenth or two above.
You know, we keep stirring. If you as soon as you stop stirring, the temperature will start to rise. So you just keep stirring with it. And you can hold your hand above ice water forever. So I always do ice and not uh the other way around.
Can you get in one more call or question? Yeah, sure. Caller, you're on the air. Oh, hey, this is West Colin from Washington State. How are you doing?
All right, how you doing? Hey, um, one quick back request. Would you be willing to post the Professor Plum's back if I have a spinzole and can make it happen? Yeah, so that's uh five to one. Uh I think it's five to one.
Could be four to one. I think it's five to one. I'll double post uh of uh pitted prunes. Get the best pitted prunes you can get. Good old Daniel, like French or whatever.
Get like a good high sugar, tasty prune, you know what I mean? Uh blend it with uh Pectanex Ultra S PO. Right now we're using Elijah Craig bourbon. We've used other things where we're using Elijah Craig. Uh and then uh spin it out.
That's it. And you know, that goes over a uh rock with uh a little bit of salt, a lemon and an orange twist, both uh both in the glass. Cool, thank you. Um I'm I emailed you a little while back about um glycerin and Darby Darcy O'Neill says that it can help to solubilize some ingredients, but he was using it for a bitter cherry phosphate, I believe. Um but using it as a dissolving base so as not to extract too much cyanide.
And it seemed really weird to me, and I didn't know if he'd talk for that. Yeah, I don't I I I remember that somehow uh seeing that, and uh no, I don't know. I mean, look, he's a chemist, so he probably probably knows what he's talking about. But yeah, I don't have any uh first of all, it was still extracting it and then just adding glycerin into the mix, right? So the the idea here is Is that yeah, people that you know is it isn't glycerin.
What is it like in straight glycerin? No, like uh whatever, one to four glycer in the water or something. Right, so still got the water in it. So I don't really know. I don't really know what the efficacy of that is or whether whether he studied it or whether that's just something people used to do back in the day.
Right. Uh in your mind it's just a bodybuilder, right? That's what I use it for. I mean, so there are there are some uh old uh I forget who told me this, but someone once told me a story, maybe apocryphal, about uh who is it? Was it uh Trader Vic or someone like this?
Uh this had a bet with uh this cocktail, he was making a high-proof cocktail, and the cocktail, you know, he only allowed you to have two, and this guy said he bet he could have three, and Trader Vic doped one of his with a huge amount of glycerin. And the theory being that the glycerin was gonna make the alcohol affect you more or something like that, or it's gonna wipe you out. But I, you know, I don't I don't even think that's necessarily true, but that is a story that goes around. So there are stories floating around of glycerin having more of an effect uh than I use it for, but we're using glycerin in very small amounts, uh strictly for bodying, and it is fantastic for that. It's like 0.1% by weight, is that right?
Uh we don't ever use more than probably half a percent. So it's like anywhere between you start with that, but you know, we go sometimes up to a half a percent. But that's a lot. Okay. Yeah.
Otherwise, and also you can blind taste it. We blind taste it. They do taste different in the different suppliers, and they're all vaguely sweet, but you want to try one that's relatively neutral, some of them aren't so good. Y'all ready? That's one.
All right, cool. All right, cool. Thanks a lot. Time to go. All right, well, listen, before on the way out, I'll answer this one thing.
Caesar wrote in and said, sorry for the barrage of carbonation questions. I need to know what gas line I use. He he's looked at uh Acuflex K31505, Yarn Reinforced PVC. No. People, I don't care what everyone else does on the internet.
Don't use PVC hose to put like liquids through. If you're using it for gas, fine. Just gas, fine. Uh, but if you are going to put liquids into it, right? So if you're going to have a liquid system for a carbonator, only use Bev Flex, polyester reinforced, uh polyester reinforced polyethylene beverage hose with an EVA jacket.
If you're putting liquids through it, that's the only way you're not gonna have terrible aroma and taste. Uh unless you like really to wash it out for a long time. Some people may not notice it. For me, peep putting liquids through that PVC is a nightmare. Now, I've heard that if the tube's been around in the factory for a long time, it's gotten rid of all of its terrible aroma, and it's fine, but crap on that.
So, but if you're using just gas, the Acuflex PVC is fine. But I only put gas through PVC, and I I always put liquids through polyethylene, uh uh braid reinforced polyethylene. Alrighty, see you next week. We're good. Yep.
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