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Become a member today at Heritage Radio Network.org slash donate. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday, you know, like, you know, noonish, like, you know, to about one o'clock for Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Joined as usual with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez, and we got Matt in the booth. How are you doing?
Hello, hello. Well. So this is the like next Tuesday is Christmas, no? Don't know. Uh something like it.
Christmas similar? Yeah. It's definitely Christmas adjacent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Christmas adjacent.
By the way. It is Christmas on X to there. Well, eh. Alright, then. Well, I won't be here because I'll be Christmasing.
Nastasia may be sitting here grumbling, break like throw a brick through the window and show up. Tell them that we almost got we almost got taken out last week. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, so Nastasia and I on the same day, like almost independently got brain damaged by concrete. Nastasia, more literally than I.
So she's walking down the street. For those of you that don't know, Nastasi and I, when we're walking around the streets of New York, if we're in a bad mood, which is I would say often. 100% of the time. Yeah. At the very least, often.
Yeah. Right? So Nastasia and I have this like years-long ongoing thing where what we say is that you're in the you're in the touch me mode. And what the touch me mode is is you're waiting for someone to touch you so that so you can just go off on them. You know what I mean?
And it comes from I was walking down the street. Did we ever tell the story on the on the radio? I was walking down the street one day, and there was this giant guy, and it became apparent after listening to this screaming conversation. What had happened was this giant fellow, this giant fellow had um somehow he he you know had umbrage. That's this somewhat shrimpier fellow had done something to piss him off on the street.
Furthermore, this giant fellow uh was uh you know had just recently gotten out of prison and was on probation, and if he started any sort of fight, he would end up back in prison, right? But he really, really, really, really wanted to crumple up this tiny guy into a ball, into a bloody little ball, and like you know, bounce him around the street a little bit. So he was towering over this guy, going, touch me. Go ahead, just touch me, please, please, just touch me. So he could like, so he could like beat the ever loving snot out of this guy, and I've never seen a guy look so scared and so careful not to touch this dude.
You know what I mean? So from then on, that was years ago, like Nastasia and I won't touch me moment. So, like, the other thing we have is Nastasia and I have uh this thing where we have this, because you know, I don't know. We never, you know, we we've been in business for a long time, and yet somehow, by the way, we're almost climbing out of the hole for years long. Nastasia and I have given ourselves you know two years almost to like get uh by my 50th birthday to have us be in like kind of a stable good position business wise.
Uh and we pretend that being in a stable good business situation will make us happy in other respects, but you know, probably not. But anyway, so that anyway, the point is that uh the other thing we have is is that whenever we like slip on something or like something hits us and we're damaged, like we imagine that if someone were watching the videotape on the security cameras, that as we were about to get like like intensely and permanently mutilated on somebody else's property, yeah, that you'd see this giant smile go across our face, and we're like, We own this be hot, and just like slipping like as we're in the air about to get crumpled. Anyway, so Nastasia had a moment like that where a concrete masonry unit was you know how like here in New York, what they do is is they when they're building, they do dem demolition, they install a chute on the outside of a window, and then they put a dumpster down below, and then they cordon off the whole area so that they can just hurl crap out the window and it slides down into into the into the dumpster. Well, the guy upstairs was like, Who needs to wait for the dumpster? Who needs a shoot?
And just threw a CMU unit out of the out of the window, and it lands like you know, inches, like less than a foot from the side of Nastasia, and was like, Nastasia was like, instead of saying I could have been killed, it's like, why couldn't it just have grazed me? You know what I mean? Like, couldn't it have just hit me a little bit? It could have been big money. Big money, and like, you know, and with the anger, she could have had her righteous anger.
Like, Nastasia's main goal in life, again, if you come in New York and you go on the trains, yeah. If you go on the trains here, especially on the L train, which is the train that runs between Brooklyn and uh, you know, between Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and you know, uh 14th Street Manhattan, right? It's like Hipster Central, and also a lot of bartenders too when they work, that's where they go. So, anyway, you're in this tunnel for a long time when you're going under the river, and that's when the guys come out, it's showtime. And then they get and they do their little parkour moves on all the all the you know the banisters and stuff spinning around, like almost kicking people in the head.
And Nastasia, every time, is like, they're gonna kick Dave in the face. They're gonna kick Dave in the face. So Nastasia makes me go in the center where they always go, because her goal is A to get me kicked in the face, and B to see my reaction. When we live when we worked down in Eldritch Street, her goal in life was to get hit in the face with a loogie so that she could lose her mind. This is just a little insight into like you know how how we operate.
So the same day that Nastasia almost got killed by a concrete masonry unit, I for some unknown reason strapped on my bike helmet early. Without being on your bike, without being on my bike, you know, which is a goofy look, by the way. And then and I was doing a bunch of stuff, and I whipped around as hard and as fast as I can. For those of you that don't know me, I walk hard and fast. This is why I almost that's why I had to go to the hospital when I was in Spain walking into a glass wall, because when I'm walking, it's with purpose, right?
Nastasia? So I sma smash my head into this concrete wall. And I was like, and but I have a helmet on. If I didn't There would be no Booker and Dax that day. There'd be no Booker and Dax that day.
Anyways. Sounds like you should always wear the helmet. I know. I'm that kind of guy. Yeah.
Yeah. Anyway. Do you think Nastasia could have picked the unit, like in anger, picked the unit back up and thrown to him. Sure. If it grazed me.
So for those of you who have we talked about the legend of Baba Deep Singh? No. On the radio. So Baba Deep Singh, the Sikh hero, is like a character that I freaking love, right? So you know the Sikhs are well-known ferocious warriors, and they have these like giant, huge, very heavy swords that are, you know.
And uh one of the one of these heroes, his name was Baba Deep, right? And he was so angry. He was like, he was old. I think he was like in his 70s in the legend, right? And this group of people comes to, you know, uh take over some territory or invade or whatever.
I can't remember the specifics. So Baba Deep's like, I'm really? And then he like he's like, he's leading the army, he goes in with his giant super heavy sword, and one of the enemy dudes hits him in the neck and cuts his head almost, some people say almost all the way off, and some people just say like all the way through, but holding on by a string. So instead of Baba Deep, this is where the nostasia part comes in. Baba Deep is so angry that someone has chopped his head off, yet he hasn't killed them all yet, that he uses the one hand, I'm assuming his left hand, I'm assuming he's right handed.
He uses which, you know, assumption, I don't know. He he takes his left hand and holds his head onto his onto the neck stump, takes the sword in the other hand, and kills everyone, and then after he kills the last one of the of the enemies, then he drops his head and dies. Wow. And that's the kind of anger Nastasia would have. So if you ever kind of drop if you ever drop something on Nastasia in an attempt to kill her, just make sure you're far enough away that she can't hold her head on with her with her bad hand while she's running after you with some sort of weapon in her right.
You know what I mean? Yes. Yeah. Alright. So uh call all of your Christmas, holiday, cooking related questions.
Two 718 497 2128. That's 7184972128. And while we're waiting, last week we had someone call in uh about a uh eggless pecan pie. And I did a little I didn't bake one because I don't have any time. You know what I mean?
I just don't have any. I I wish I had the time, you know, maybe in a couple years when we're happy again, I'll have the time to cook as much as I used to on the regular. It'd be great, right? Instead now I'm like caught in a rut of like quick cycle cooking. It's very hard for me to do research and long cycle cooking at this point in my life.
But you know, when I'm writing the book, maybe I will. Nastasi's giving me the air quotes, the laughing, and then the the universal um You're never ready, man. What do you call this sign in a nice way? Oh god. I don't know.
That's a nice looking thing. There's gotta be a nice way to say it. The you're wasting your life self-pleasuring sign that Nastasia likes to use. I don't use that. All the time.
You look at me, you look at me with dead eyes, and then you're like, yeah, whatever. And then you give the sign. This is total Nastasia. Don't lie, don't front. Nastasia, classic fronter.
Uh so, anyways, uh I looked him up, and uh, I was in conversations with some people over the Twitter. Some people gave in some ideas, some dairy based ideas, and I couldn't remember whether the caller, whether it was just an egg allergy or whether they wanted You are our trans listener. Yes. But I I can't remember whether they wanted uh whether like the couple wanted vegan or just egg-free. I couldn't remember whether it was an egg allergy or whether it was a vegan thing.
I think it was egg allergy. Anyway, the discussion was that you know using an egg replacer that's meant for baking isn't gonna help because what you're using here is you're using the egg proteins actually not just to hold kind of bubbles to hold air at a leaven, you actually need to set something in it in a gel format. And I looked at a bunch of um, because it's not common to have kind of egg-free non-vegan stuff. I looked up a bunch of vegan pecan pies, and lo and behold, yes, typically what they do is they use in some combination cornstarch. Uh, most of them, you know, some of the more complicated ones are more you know, savvy ones are using kind of higher end starches like arrowroot or things, but they're using cornstarch, and they're cooking it with a fat, so you could use butter uh and a liquid.
These guys are using coconut milk, you could just use milk if you're not gonna go vegan, and using enough corn starch so that when you heat it and then bring it back, it cools and sets back into a custard once it sets. Now, the thing about this is uh, and it should be stable, so you can heat it a little bit again and and and stay stable. The thing about it when you're doing these custard based things with straight starch and without egg is you need you can't just set it in the oven. You need to boil off your starch beforehand before you bake. You need to boil your starch off to get it going because you're not gonna get guaranteed to get a good custard otherwise.
Also, you need to have enough fat in it that the texture of it, because that the fat is going to provide kind of the texture as it as it cools back down. And third, you might want to grind up some nuts uh or uh other things to put into it, like fine, almost people put like a nut butter, and that all should also modify the texture to make it a little more like a classic kind of pecan pie uh filling. So for rate and so for ratio as you look at any one of these things on the web, just realize that that cook pre-cook step, the boil off steps uh step for the starch is important to get it to uh to function properly. Now, I saw a couple of other interesting ideas. Some people mix tofu in, you know, you could do it or you could not do it.
Silken tofu to add a little more body. I wouldn't because I don't think it's gonna add what I want. Uh a lot of people are uh added uh flax meal, and what fla flax meal is snot. You know what I mean? So, like like hydrated flax meal is fundamentally snot.
So I saw one recipe that didn't use cornstarch that just used snotted out flax meal and then mixed it with cracker crumbs, like not graham cracker crumbs, but like bread bready kind of ready bready bready bread cracker, ready bready bready but you you used to watch uh Buck Rogers when you were Kevin, you've heard of it. There's a character named Tweaky, who's this little robot, and he always walks around bitty bitty bitty biddy, hey Buck, like this, and he would just walk around, this guy Tweaky. So it was Buck Rogers, who is the guy, the the you know, the hot lady pilot whose name I forget, and then and then oh, and the other thing about Tweaky was he carried a doctor in the form of like you know how Flavor Flav had that giant clock around him? So Tweaky, this tiny silver robot had Flavor Flav style, this giant round, almost clock-faced robot who is the smart one. So I don't know why if he's so freaking smart, he couldn't build his own body, he had to be carried around on this moron tweaky.
So whenever I say something like bread or bready, I do it in tweaky. I see. Long explanation. Anyways, so uh point being crushed up the cracker crust, mixed it with uh, you know, first hydrated the uh flax, I forget what she used, coconut milk or something like this. You could use whatever you want.
That turns the flax meal into snot. You mix the snot with the crackers, that makes kind of a gooey snot, and then you mix that gooe snot base into the uh into the bottom of the pie, and that's how she got the custard. So here's those are the various kinds of techniques. Some people dope with little tofu, I wouldn't really go that way. Other people are making a straight um basically cornst eggless cornstarch custard, and so they're using fat, uh, like uh a milk a milk or milk substitute and uh butter or butter substitute is the fat uh with cornstarch, and then making sure that you let it cool until it is cold before you cut it, because you need that starch to set up properly uh and pre-boil, uh, or this flaxy snot or some combination.
But I like the idea of mixing something in like crackers or smashed up crackers, bread, you know, bread crumbs, or bready bread, or um uh like nut nut paste or nut you know, crushed nuts into that goop to get it to work. Because I remember sh, you know, the the request was for goop, a layer of goop, not nuts all the way through. Although, as I said before, I'm a fan of both kinds of pecan pie. Nuts all the way through or goop. Uh and Nastasia is one of those people who doesn't like pecan pie.
Right. Which is absurd. Matt, you also were also on the no pecan pie thing? No, no, no, no. I just I was at uh a fancy dinner the other day at the Jams Beer House, had the best pecan pie in my life.
Okay, and what kind of was it goop or nuts and goop? It was a mix. Oh, yeah, there was a healthy dose of goop in there. But like a layer of goop only with the nuts floating on top? Correct.
Yeah. And so what made it the best pecan pie? I mean, first of all, I don't eat a lot of pecan pie, so the standards are low. Um second of all, it was I don't know. I don't know what made it the best because I've never made one myself.
Uh it was just I mean, it was just delicious. I haven't I got nothing. I got nothing, man. Yeah? Uh I love pecan pie.
Uh did you put whipped cream on your pecan pie? Nope. Ah! Well, first of all, there wasn't an option. Who the hell serves pecan pie without whipped cream?
There was some fancy uh ice cream. Um ice cream, okay. Ice cream's a semi-valid substitute for whipped cream on a pecan pie. Nostasi, you like pumpkin pie? Yeah.
So when someone has like Thanksgiving, what are the pies they bring out at the end of your Thanksgiving? Pumpkin. Just pumpkin? Mm-hmm. Just pumpkin.
Or if somebody made something else, yeah. We usually have a fruity pie, a fruit pie, apple or apple similar, pecan pie, and pumpkin pie. And then everyone's like, I want a slice of apple, I want a slice of pumpkin. The correct answer is, of course, all three. I want a slice of all three.
And then just like generous gobs of whipped cream across all of them. That's what I like. But I love pecan. I love pecans. Uh and for those of you that uh, you know, remember the years that we were working with hickory nut and then we never got a good supplier?
Yeah. If you've never had, I would love to make a hickory nut pie. If you've never had hickory nuts, uh, you are missing out. Like, if you love pecans, which to me pecans are one of the great nuts. I love pecans.
But hickory nuts are even better. It's just hard to get Shag Bark Hickory nuts because they're so hard to shell. Remember, we broke all of those shellers. We were trying to shell it. And then there was that guy in the nursing home who used to shell them, and then his there's a guy in a nursing home who I forget the guy's name, but he lives somewhere like Ohio or something like this, where they have like a lot of the shag bark hickory trees.
And the guy, his only hobby was shelling hickory nuts. Can you imagine? Like watching Wheel of Fortune and shelling hickory nuts all day. You're like, I'll shell another one and another one. He could get like the nice big pieces.
Because we used to just hit him with hammers and try to sweep away the uh the shells, right? And uh yeah, this guy, he would do it, and then his like daughter or whatever would pick up these nuts and then sell the nuts, and then she would bring him nuts to shell, and he'd be like, Dad, how many of you shell today? Remember? Yeah. He must be gone now.
But that was an amazing deal. Like, you know, I'm giving some old guy a hobby, and I get in the hickory nuts, you know, and making some extra money for them. Anyway, uh, if anyone has a good supply of hickory nuts, I would love that. But the solution that Piper and and I came to was the old Native Americans uh solution, which is they didn't like they didn't like shelling these hickory nuts either. Yeah, but what else do they have going on?
What the hell? I mean, they were like, you know. We'll talk about this in one second, Nastasia. But uh, what they would do is they would pound the nuts with the shells together and make hickory uh nut milk, which is very nutritious, strain it out and get rid of the shells that way because the shells don't add too much tannin to the hickory nut milk, so you can extract a nice rich, thick hickory nut milk without having the shells without having to shell them. It's just you don't get to eat the nuts on uh as is.
You're using nut milks. See what I'm saying? So speaking of what was going on back then, what do they have? I've just just finished listening to this book I've been meaning to read for years and years and years called 1491. You ever hear this book?
No. Why are you banging your head against the microphone? The in-depth look at pre-Columbian America, right? Well, all of the Americas, yeah. Yeah.
So, um, so anyway, you know, and for a number of years, it's as well I can sense myself I'm gonna go down this research hole. I'm gonna dive into this well of windows. Well, because you're gonna be a in reenactment person someday. I mean, you think I'm gonna be a civil war reenactor. You always think anything I do, you're like, he's gonna become a reenactor.
Yes. Nastasia half assumes I read a book about Civil War reenactors, by the way, they call it Confederate in the Attic, which is an interesting read. Well, think about this, people. For those of you that are Americans, like, why are there so many more people who want to reenact Confederate side than Northern side? It's weird.
And Confederate in the Attic is like the book on that. And like, you know, whatever. Anyway, so the Also I have an announcement after this. All right. So the the thing is is, and you've known for you know, we've known for a long time, or you know, I've I've been researching for a long time, the kind of false idea that the forests, when uh when Europeans arrived, you know, the forests were relatively open and great for hunting and all this other stuff.
And so the theory is is that not the theory, but like the the fact is is that the the Native Americans who were here at the time used controlled burning and did a lot of um work to create a very particular kind of forest that wouldn't exist in nature, right? And so one of the theses of this book, 1491, is that in fact, the entire Americas, there was no such thing as wilderness. So uh, like a lot of the things that we associate with wilderness, like giant, giant, giant, giant buffalo herds, or like giant uh passenger pigeon migrations, where and you know, up until 1914 when they became extinct, Americans, European Americans would eat tons and tons and tons of passenger pigeons every year because they're delicious. Uh or um mast-fed things like like uh like the way pigs used to feed on mast and mast is things like hickory nuts, beechnuts, and all this, that all of this was somehow bountiful nature. The fact that there was all these chestnut trees, like this is nature, uh, even in the Amazon.
That the reason that the all the so many fruit trees, such a high density of fruit trees in the Amazon is seen as a natural thing, and that we need to preserve this wilderness. And one of the tenets of this book, which is quite interesting, is that no, in fact, these are all human-mediated environments, and they only looked like they were natural because when Europeans came, the diseases were so bad that they caused a population cr uh crash that is like unprecedented in uh in you know, kind of new world populations, and so it appeared wild because all of a sudden now no more people were tending them, and still to this day, certain places like in the Amazon still have the imprints of the human manipulation that was done over thousands of years. Interesting concept, and especially related to how can we get good food out of these quote unquote wild areas in the same way that in Spain, you know, the argument why is Spanish ham so good. Well, it isn't just it it's because they have the access to the Dehesa, which is this protected but yet human-maintained environment of uh oak trees and um grazing land. Uh so anyway, so I'm probably gonna next year go into uh some sort of deep well of research and not come up for a while and Nastasi's gonna berate me for it because there's nothing Nastasia hates more than me learning about things.
Yeah, because you have so many things that you haven't finished. Like what? Your book? That's true. This is all going in the book.
Also. I can't write about that though. Yeah. But the thing is that all I enjoy doing, the only thing I enjoy doing is learning about things. Yeah, that's it.
It's like that's my hobby. That's it. That's all I enjoy doing. Like, or foraging for food. For the past 10 years, Heritage Radio Network has brought listeners around the world the most important voices in food and drink.
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Now is the best time to show your support for HRN. Go to Heritage Radio Network.org slash donate. On today's Bob's Red Mill moment, we're gonna talk about sorghum, sorghum flour. So sorghum is one of the kind of what you'd say millets, which aren't really a real group of uh things because they're not all related to each other. Uh but sorghum is uh a millet that is native to uh Africa.
And in fact, it's one of the most important uh staples in the world. We just tend not to use it that much for uh human feed here in the US. You can also make uh from sorghum stalks, you can make uh sugar. Uh so it's an interesting source of sugar and an interesting source of flour. Uh, it's high in protein, sorghum flour is, but it has no gluten, so it can be used in gluten-free recipes if that's interesting to you.
Sorghum also has a very kind of cool taste. I really like it. So if you're substituting a portion of it into regular quick breads andor pancakes, it works very well. But uh I think a more interesting application is to do a traditional sorghum only recipe. I've attempted to make uh sorghum only biscuits, and I'm not quite there yet, but I did do an interesting egg recipe, which I can talk to you about later, maybe in future, uh sorghum biscuit kind of egg cocott that I thought was interesting.
But something that you can go look up online uh how to make right now are Jawar roties. And Ja'war roties are a traditional uh Indian um roti made only with uh sorghum flour. And what you do is is you have to use hot, hot water. So that hot water is gonna get it to have the texture that you need in order to make a roti. If you don't use the hot water, uh, where if it doesn't kind of swell and pre-gelatinize a little bit the starch uh inside of the sorghum, you're not gonna be able to get a good dough that you can form into a proper roti.
But then after you make the rotees, it's just salt, sorghum, and water. And these are the kind of applications that I really enjoy for kind of a different flour like this because it really gives you the opportunity to use something to its best advantage and not just as a substitute for wheat. So look up a recipe online for Jawar Roti and remember that Bob's Red Mill carries sweet right sorghum flour for all of your baking needs. 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.
Speaking of learning about things and doing things. Um, one, we posted on Heritage Stories. All right, we'll talk. Let's talk about that. It's a day in a Tuesday in the life of Dave and I.
It was last Tuesday's life. She only tells me this after she's already recorded a bunch of compromising things. Yes. She's like, oh yeah, by the way, uh there's a lot, there's a lot of hidden messages in the. First of all, and and I want everyone to know if they look at it.
Right? I want everyone to know this. I haven't looked at it and won't. You want me, Dave. First of all, I lived it.
Why do I need to go back again? It's like people are like, you don't watch food TV? I'm like, no. No. That's true.
Like, why would I watch food TV? You know what I mean? It's like, no. You know what I mean? And then, like, and then the other thing is that she's like, uh, just insulted a bunch of people there.
You know what I mean? But but then Lastasia's like, Nastasia, for those of you who have said this a million times, she'll sit there and push my buttons and then get me to flip out, and then she'll only hit record. When they're a lot of while flipping out. Yeah, there's a lot of that in there, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I want you to know that this is a false. No, it's not, Dave. It is. Matt, you're not. Okay, second thing, everybody loves wine Santa.
And if you want a large format drink at Dave's bar coming out of the mouth of a wine Santa, email me. Okay, here's what I don't understand. How do we charge for it? They get a certain amount of this large format drink. And how do I monitor that?
Because you the wine Santa stays at their table. How do I monitor consumption? Uh, well, there's like marks on the on the um what? How ambro. Yeah, no, but if there's eight people at a table.
They have to pre-reserve. If there's eight people at a table, I can't. Well, but if there's eight people at a table Jack's taking doing it, so it's still, you know, it's the bar's responsibility. No, but he's gonna come to you with the playoffs. Eight people get it, and then everyone else is like, I'd rather have something else.
You have to do it. And then one guy drinks the whole thing. The whole table has to drink from the wine. That's the deal. Yeah, okay, well, you know, so email me if you want to only drink from the wine.
I can't let you know someone, you know, do the full job uh and just put their face underneath the thing. Well, it's gonna be a little job of all over the wall. And I now you just lost all your sales right there. It's gonna be great. Plus, everyone's Santa is yours anyway.
We have wine Santa's. Please don't think that. So Dave If I was gonna do it, I would have engineered it so differently. Nastasia's like this is terrible. Did you see that this morning?
See what? Our guy, Chris, was like, I love wine sands. Oh my god, a guy in Hong Kong. So listen, listen. Anyway, look at our stories.
I look at heritage stories. Wait, we had something on wine Santa. What was it? Uh Nastasia, first of all, is like, I don't really care. Nastasia doesn't care about the things I care about.
I do. I wish you would just do it. And then I don't care about the things Nastasia cares about. What don't you care about that I care about? Wine Santa.
There you go. There you go. So much. If if anybody at the bar came up with it, you'd be like, oh, this is genius. Like w wine Santa, first of all, Santa's beard is made out of like polyester.
And so like wine gets in Santa's beard. No. I've tucked it into his coat. She trimmed he cut who the hell wants a Santa with his beard tucked into his coat. Crazy person.
Alright. I think you guys should be mass producing wine Santa. It could be your next really big thing. So anyway, so Nastasia. Yes, I know, thank you.
I bet it would make more money than the Sears all. Nastasia knows that. We do. Okay, Nastasia's like, this is our big money, Dave. I'm like, first of all.
First of all, no. And then how much are we making off the wine Santa this year? He's in his quiet phase. I'm gonna stab everyone. Everyone know Nastasia knows more than anyone else that you're not supposed to use the word quiet phase.
I know, I know, no, I'm joking. This is his um, this is his we're getting people excited. So Cassie doesn't work very well, so I won't actually do the design work on it. Please the problem with wine Santa for those of you that care about equipment is this. Nastasia has purchased a pump that is not the best pump for this.
And so the amount of the distance that wine that Santa pukes out the wine. It's up to six feet that pump. Is related the six feet is the head. You don't know pump terminology. That's that's the head it can push.
Anyway, like the the amount of uh force that the Santa is right now related to how much liquid is in the unit. Yeah, so I wish you would have. And so you need to separate the liquid level from the pump velocity because you need to keep the amount of uh total don't give away the secrets. There are no secrets, you haven't solved this problem. You know how to solve it.
I know how to solve the problem. Please, listeners, write in to me if you want to see wine Santa work well and have Dave make it. I think you love Christmas. You love Christmas. Any Belgian out there?
Any Belgians. Any Belgians, yep. Phone has been dead all day, and you just started talking about wine Santa, and we have a caller. Do you think that's coincidence? I don't know.
I'd rather have a mannequin piss. You know you know mannequin piss? Please let it be so much. Do you know mannequin piss? Yeah.
The statue that you're in it's on the dynamite? Yeah. Anyway. We have a caller. Caller you're on the air.
I would love to see a wine Santa at every table at the bar. Boom. Sadly, I'm an idiot and I live in California. That's okay. But I think it still should be a reality.
What what what part of California? I'm in Costa Mesa. This is Jeff Given. Oh, hey. Where's Costa Mesa again?
Where is that? Uh that's like south of Los Angeles. Yeah. Okay. Do you watch Bo Jack Horseman and like it a lot?
I I have. I haven't seen recent seasons, but first. I'm not really in LA. My my theory is that Nastasia Lopez is Bojack Horseman minus the TV show. I'm not gonna comment on that.
She's the female version of Bojack Horseman, I think. Pretty much. That makes me todd, I guess. Anyway, so go ahead. Do you had a question about wine santa or any other thing?
Yeah, well, speaking of learning, uh, there's something I I recently learned in in my botany classes that I thought you might be interested in. Um so with in uh in the ground tissue of plants, there are three types of cells generally, and colinchyma cells. Um the best example of those would be the stringy parts of celery that would hate. Yeah. Umery stock go ahead.
I do hate them, I said, yes, you were correct. Yes. So as the celery stock grows, um those colinchoma cells uh get stronger and more rigid if the stem is exposed to a lot of strong winds or being shaken. So they they continue to grow stringier, basically. And so my hypothesis is that if you could grow celery in a more contained environment without any strong wind, no shaking, no abuse that you could you could possibly grow celery with uh smaller, less rigid, less bothersome strings.
So something maybe to try out. What about the like uh what about the uh the entire approach and like actually mounding it as you go? It would also probably blanch it. What do you think? You think that would work?
I think it's possible, yeah. I think it it would have a similar effect, just the more that you can protect it from needing that extra structure or even even giving it support as it grows, um the cell direction would probably then have less reason to strengthen those colynchy cells. See you do need air movement because of transpiration and and photosynthesis, but yeah I feel like if you could the mounting might work. This is the reason people to have an international space station. Why aren't they growing celery on that son of a gun?
There you go celery on the space station. How long does celery take to grow um two weeks maybe like six weeks. See this is something this like I like I if my tax dollars are going towards the International Space Station. Whose are yours? No.
Remember the roads we were on last week? What? Those crappy roads in New York anyway but my point is that they should grow some celery on that son of a gun. Are are you gonna test this hypothesis somehow? Are you gonna I'm I'm gonna try yeah I'll try a few things.
We can grow things in California. You're gonna do but you have like one one small benefit. Yeah yeah so you're gonna have like an do it indoor you're gonna do some like hydroponic uh celery there's using grow lights and all that sort of thing. Yeah yeah instead of just growing marijuana you can also grow celery without strings there is apparently a British celery variant that is they call stringless but I'm kind of highly doubting it. I doubt that yeah I've used cellulase to try to break down those cells and the Any luck it no it it must be it must be s like slightly lignified or something.
The strings must be more than just cellulose. It must have is are they? Is there any lignin in that crap or no? That's that's possible. It's just those specific colynchy cells that's.
You don't find them in a lot of other areas. It's mostly parynchyma cells, which are the fleshy part, and scleranchyma are like peach pet type woody cells. Um so they're just a very specific type of kind of uh s strong cellular wall cell. But yeah, possibly lignin too. How come they're not on the interior section of the U.
Oh, because those are interior parts of the is it's it is that a lever uh stem or a modified leaf, those things? They're stem. They're stem. This is what do you think of those words? Awful.
Especially scleranchyma. Can you give the uh speaking of celery? Can you give the OG celery spec? Yeah, if I can remember. Let me see.
So the first trick is generally uh you're gonna want to make uh an orange syrup. So uh, you know, look up I can't remember off the top of my head, but look up the bricks or measure the bricks, you know, if you if you have um if you're doing fruit work, you'll have a refractometer there. Uh so measure the bricks of your orange juice, make sure that you get a non-bittering orange juice, obviously. Um take the orange juice up to 50 bricks. Uh yeah, whatever you like.
We actually uh we use a navel cultivar and non-bittering, which is just luckily the cultivars that get shipped to us of navels are non-bittering. I know there are bittering c um uh navels, but ours are not. Yeah, most of ours are. Yeah. Um and so at least I don't think so.
To what bricks? Uh 50. So like up to syrup, and so then it is um uh what was the what did we use? We used uh I use gin for that. I think I used gin.
Sounds like yeah. So then it was uh the celery leaves, uh and then uh a little bit of uh par uh parsley uh to kind of balance it out, right? Uh because the the the parsley adds some a different kind of green hit to it and just if it's only celery, it's a little rough. And uh Americ you want to use the American style or what I call the American style celery, the Chinese celery will work, but it is ha it it is it is a more bitter and has these kind of um kind of uh volatile notes that are like a little more kind of aggressive. So I'll do American celery and a little bit of parsley.
Uh and if you do have to use the Chinese celery, then I would use more parsley. Uh and then two ounces of the gin. That was tankery, I think I used, and then um equal parts of uh lime juice and uh the um uh and the orange syrup and some salt. So I did you know you nitro muddle. And are you nitro muddling though?
Yeah, I nitro muddle it. You could blender muddle it. I've tested, it's fine, it's not as good. Um so it the ratio is depending on how you do it, somewhere between a half and a half and uh three quarter and three quarter for the two ounces, depending on how much kind of stuff. I think it shades closer to three quarter than to half, but I can't remember whether we spec'd it as three quarter, three quarter, keep them short, or whether we spec it as half half ha keep them full.
But it's it's really in the middle. Great, and no spinning, just just um blended and and strained or muddled and strained. Uh yeah, so if you nitro muddle it, you nitromuddle it per drink, shake it, and then um put it through a fine strainer on service. If you blender muddle it, you and it's just leaves, remember, not stock. And if you bl and if you blender muddle it, you um you blend you blend the st you know the full drink together and then strain it before you shake it.
Perfect. Alrighty? Let us know how it works out. All right, thanks, thank good. All right.
Alright, cool. Uh all right. Did you hear that? What? He said he wanted a wine sand at every two minutes.
Yeah, but how are we gonna fig like the thing is is they having it at your house where you don't have like legal alcohol serving responsibility or too much of a legal alcohol serving responsibility. And you have to have poor people. They all have to be drinking from it, and that's the rule. Uh uh No and the thing is you don't care about like the law or whether like someone gets overserving. It's not a bottle of wine.
You can't run wine Santa off one bottle of wine. No, we we turn them off after they've drank a bottle of wine. And how are you gonna monitor that? There's marks on the camber. So you need a a staff person to sit there and stare at this freaking thing, be like, You drank too much.
I will be there. I will monitor it. And then plus it can't be wine because it's gonna get like too highly oxygenated. What are you gonna actually put in? When Nastasi actually takes it out of places, she freaking loads it with vodka.
People like it. Uh it's not even chilled, people. People. It's not even chilled. Nastasi has not done the basic research on how to get it right.
This isn't my real job. So it's not gonna make a lot of money. No, when you start helping me, it's gonna be awesome. Crazy. So Kat wanted us to review some product.
Yeah, we but we have to buy it. How much does it cost? Um it's not oh wait, what do you mean? The Lee Press on nail cheese graters. Yeah.
I I think it's not real yet. That's not real? So it's fingernails that are cheese graters? That sounds real gross. You know why?
Because if you look like you're grating stuff with your fingernail, you you're thinking then thinking of the cheese as like the crap that you scrape out from under your fingernails, and no one wants to even think about fingernails when they're eating. Yeah. When you're eating, do you want to think about the crap that's underneath someone's fingernail? Like even slightly? No.
No, right? I haven't seen any of this, and every word you've said has been horrifying to me. Right. And I told you the story about when I was a kid, and the chefs just joked that he made the hamburger patties using his armpit and I wouldn't eat. What if we did a warm Glog and we can put the circulator in the like we did the first time we made Wine Zombie?
Sure. Okay. That works. Have you watched uh have you watched the Christmas uh rankin' bass things this uh this year yet? No can do, Santa!
Anyway, alright. Uh we have one question I'm gonna get to real quick. Longtime listener, first time questioner cooking issues. 29, married and male for the Hammer Census. Thank you.
Uh I have ordered a seven uh 7.5 pound piece of bone-in T-bone that is heavy on the porterhouse side, uh, will be dry aged for 35 days when I pick it up. Uh 30 uh when I pick it up 36 hours before I plan to plate it for Christmas Day dinner. I'm wondering if you could tell me the best way to cook it and or prep it. My instincts say to Sears all the outside, good Sears all plug, uh, and put it in a bag with a little oil and circulate it till it's medium rare throughout. Drop it down uh the temperature a bit at the end, take it out of the bag, dry it off, season it, and finish it with the Sears all again.
But is there something I'm missing? Uh my family likes their steaks done all sorts of ways, but I figure with this method I can cut steaks post uh post-cook uh that suit everyone's needs, and if someone isn't happy because it's underdone in quotes, I can simply fry it up in the pan to crisp it to bits. Uh thanks. Also buy your cerezals because Amazon says that they have enough for the year, but I don't know. Yeah, so they're like, we're not gonna order any more till March.
Mm-hmm. Anyways. I'm not even gonna make my Sears all announcements, but I will say this. We're out now of spinzalls, right? Mm-hmm.
But you can come to book uh look at it. You can come to existing conditions and buy it. We have a couple in stock. We made a case. We made a case.
We have a we have a small retail shop inside of existing conditions. This would uh that question was from Tyler Klanow. Also, he works with Peter Schweiger. You ever meet Peter? I feel like uh at Marvel Bar in Minneapolis, and he says hi.
Uh hope you're well. Can't wait to visit. Uh I love uh my man Peter. Hope to see him soon. Anyway, so uh on this here.
So let's look at here. So hold on, I gotta answer the question. Uh so 7.5 piece of uh beef. I'm trying to figure out how thick that is. If that's like is that you think that's more than five?
That's big, that's a big piece. It's like probably what like four inches, something like that, five inches, something like that. Okay. Anyway, so what I would do is you can't just drop it a bit. If you sear it beforehand, that's good, right?
Uh, but you can't just drop the temperature a little bit and then hope that you're not gonna overcook it on the on the finish because uh depending on whether you do it, if you do it sears all, the problem with just doing it sears all in this case, if your family likes all kinds of doneness, and if they want it in kind of kind of that roasty high heat way, you're gonna want to get some time. There's no way to trade. You can make the outside brown, but if you if you searz all it before and after, um you're not gonna get very much of an overdone ring around the outside, and the fat part of it's not gonna render almost into that roast style, like prime rib roast style crackling fat, which a lot of people uh like. You could just cook the thing for hours and hours and hours. I would say cook it a long time, like eight hours or something like this.
I would cook it f at like I would do 55-ish, like 55 for like I would I would maybe do it at 55. You have to hit it with a thermometer and see when you get up into like 54 in the middle, and then immediately drop it and let it ride so that it's cooking for like you know eight hours at like at like stays above 50 but below 55 for like five hours there, uh and then pull it, I'd almost cool it almost all the way down, like to room temperature, do it the day before, and then just throw it in an oven and roast the bejesus out of it so you get some crispy crisping on the outside. And a lot of people kind of like it. I think a lot of people like it that way. You could also pre-warm it back in the bag up to kind of a middle temperature so that you know it's not gonna be cold on the inside, and then roast the hell out of it uh on the outside.
But as I've said many times, if you if all you do is drop the temperature a little bit on something that thick, you could also, by the way, cut it into steaks and just cook it like a normal steak, unless you want to present it whole. If you just cut cook it and cut it into normal steaks, then you can do it as normal. But if you have a giant piece of meat that you slice through that's just super fast sears all at the beginning and the outside, you'll get the outside to look nice, but the inside's gonna be too uniform throughout. So just be aware of that. Did I answer this question right?
Yeah, gotta go. All right. Happy holidays, man. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network, food radio supported by you.
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