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Find us at heritage radio network.org. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, you're also cooking issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from you know, like, you know, whatever. I don't even know anymore. So roughly 1 p.m.
from a Bernard Pizzeria in Bushwick Brooklyn. Happy New Year, people. It's our first one of the New Year. And we didn't do one after the Christmas, did we, Matt? No, man.
It's been a while. Happy New Year, Matt. Happy New Year. How you been? Did you have any good food over the uh over the break?
Uh yes. I've been cooking a lot, actually. Oh yeah? Yes. Alright, well, but like what?
Oh boy. Um, like right now, I'm much uh Nastasi's got her here we go face. Well, what what what? Okay, fine. I'll keep it short.
I got this uh coconut curry chickpea sweet potato thing that I'm eating right now that I made myself at home. Yeah? Yeah. All right. And it's like uh uh how did you coconut milk?
Yes, and did you uh what coconut milk did you use? Oh boy. Um some organic hippie dippy shit from the Park Slope Food Co-op. Okay, I've never been to the Park Slope Food Co-op. I hear it's fantastic.
That's right, we don't let you in. I know, but I hear it's I hear it's fantastic if somewhat cultish. So you're a member of the cult? I have a high tolerance for bureaucracy, so yes, I'm a member of the the cult with all the paperwork. So for those of you that don't know about this Park Slope Food Co-op thing, it l you are not allowed to shop there unless you work, what is it, like four hours a month or five hours a month?
What is it? Uh two hours, 45 minutes every four weeks. Oh, so it's not that much. But if you don't work, you're not allowed to eat it. And you are not allowed.
Let's say you have a roommate. I swear to God, what I'm about to tell you is true. There's a documentary on this place. If you have a roommate, your roommate is not allowed to eat your food. What?
Yes. Really, the rule is supposed to be that the roommate is also supposed to join. Yeah. Yeah, but that seems like like it it's taking it from like not exploiting someone else to being coercive. Like just because you happen to be my roommate, what if I hate you?
Like it's like it's not like you like roommates a hundred percent of the time. Then you assume you don't share food with them, and then there's no problem. Eh, I don't know. People steal food all the time. So literally I have a roommate now.
What? I think the room the roommate is allowed to steal from you just as much if you are a co-op member or not. You're they're not really supposed to be stealing from you. You're also not supposed to regularly like cook for friends and parties and stuff like that, right? No one is that is not written down or said ever, no.
You're a member of a cult, a delicious, tasty cult. Now, the other thing is though, apparently the prices are very low and the quality is very high. Yeah, the margins, I think it's like 40% across the whatever it is, it's everything, everything same margin. Yeah, and uh what I've what I've been told, because uh my uh partner at the bar, Don, is a member, is that um is that if they they want to find uh like high quality and the lowest price they can, and if they can't, they'll give you a quality and a price conscious choice. True?
Uh that seems to be true, as best I can tell. All right, cult member. Nice. Uh anyway, uh Andy Ricker has always told me it's true after many tests that you should go through the trouble of making your own coconut milk once or twice. Problem is most of the coconuts we get here in New York are garbage anyway, but make go through making your own coconut milk once or twice just to see what the difference is, and then do what we all do, which is go buy the canned stuff because your life's only so long.
You know what I mean? Uh I mean, yeah. What was it? You should try. It's good.
Anastasi, what was the uh what was it someone said, why is life so long? Why is why is it taking so long? Was that they said that to us? Oh, it was amazing. So Nastasi will enjoy this before we get into the cooking related questions.
Uh can you talk about what our manual what our guy in China said to you the other day? Which one? Chris, when you were talking about all the stuff that we needed to get done, and then at the end of the conversation, what do you said? Oh, he said go. Nastasi and I are holding on for dear life.
Speaking of which, uh in the next week and a half, they're gonna be making the second batch of spinzalls. So it should be back in stock in about a month and a half or something like this on Amazon. And I'll say this by the way, if you know, in case you don't know, spinz all centerfuge, blah, blah, blah. The new round is basically the same as the old one, but the new lids, we got rid of most of the silicone parts that fall off, and the new lids have a plug in it so that if you jerks out there who own one, put it together wet with a little bit of sugar on the shaft. Ooh, sugar, ooh, Jesus.
Uh but if you put it together that way and it freezes itself shut, in the old, in the old days, you would have to like rattle the hell out of your lid uh and you know, possibly break the bearing. Now you can just pull the plug and irrigate the bearing with uh water until it breaks itself free. So if you break your old lid, new lids that ship that way, which we'll have in a month and a half, we'll ship with that, just an FYI. Okay, tell the story. Oh, so like, you know, Nastasi and I are holding on for dear life in terms of our business, and uh, you know, we think every every year we're like, this year we'll make it.
You know what I mean? Like, we're like, and like we're close, actually. Yeah. If this next project goes through, we're close. But you know, when you're building something, uh, especially when you're building it overseas because you're not there beating on people every day, and you have to rely on people, things take uh uh exponentially geometrically longer than you'd think they would.
You know what I mean? And so it's taking forever. And so at the end of this conversation, where I'm realizing that I thought the spinzalls were gonna be showing up this month. In fact, they're shipping at the end of this month, right? So that's another month down the toilet.
Uh, you know, and like things are taking forever. You my you know, my guy Chris in China goes, uh, so uh you want to talk about uh making uh wine Santa's Yes, yes, and I was like, damn it, no I was like, that's the last thing on earth I want to talk about right now. He's just been getting so many calls from potential customers, maybe you know what? No, for as much guff as Nastasia gives everyone that we work with, I'm pretty sure she called him beforehand and was like, yo, yo, yo, troll Dave. Troll Dave.
I'm pretty sure people, for those of you that have seen Bo Jack Horseman, except for the except for the being a TV star and a horse and a guy and living in Los Angeles, I'm pretty sure Nastasia is Bojack Horseman. You've already said this. Not to the people out there on the No, I said it to Don. No, you there was an episode called called Bo Jack. That's true.
We did have an episode called Bojack Lopez and the Oh my God. And they they uh that's a good show. Anyway, so back to the thing. So we for those of you that know Nastasi and I, we talked about this before. We have this kind of touch me moment thing where we're walking through the city.
Well, something happened today, so if you could shut your yeah. Um, so like we're uh we're we're I'm going in the subway, and the subway, for those of you who know, like there's a lot of us here in especially in Manhattan, we're cramped into these tiny things. Delancey Street, near where I live, and I have to come to this radio program from, is like a it's like you you can't it's built for people by people that hate people. Like you can't just leave the platform and go out like into the world. You have to go down and up and down and up, and the trains show up and everyone funnels into this tiny staircase and like goes down.
And I'm trying to fight my way up. Now it's a long staircase, so you can't see whether there's still a train there or not. You just know a bunch of people are getting off, so there's a chance that you're gonna make that train, right? And plus, PS, this is where we see whether people were raised properly, right? You gotta leave a slot for people going in the other direction.
Same way, when the doors of the subway open up, let me the freak off the train before you muscle your way in. So anyway, this guy is taking up, and and by the way, this is America, where we drive on the right hand side of the road. So when you're walking up a staircase, you walk up on the right, right? If you have a choice, right? Strange.
For those of you that come to New York for the first time, it you walk up on the right so that it's like being driving on a road. But paradoxically, if you were going to stand on an escalator, move to the right to stand. Now, this may be unclear to you, but that's the equivalent of a slow lane on a multi-lane highway. That's why. When you're on an escalator, there's no such thing as a single file escalator in New York.
You do not own your whole step of the escalator people. You do not sit there and have a conversation with your cowlike companions, looking at each other, chewing your cud on the freaking escalator up. You move to the right if you are standing, and you allow humans who have better things to do to walk past you on the left. This is how life works. Anyway, so I'm on the stairway, and I'm going up the right side, and I'm by the way, and it's you know me.
You know me. I'm all about as much as I hate, I'm all about the like, you know, the modicum of etiquette that it requires to get by in this city, right? So I'm skimming the right hand side, like, you know, filthying myself against the spit and puke that's on the side of the of the stairway. And I make it, I'm squeezing up, and then I see Gigantor coming down in my slot. This guy has a good like, you know, six inches on me, and it's built like an upside down pyramid, right?
And is in his mid-20s. And so he's not moving. And I'm like, you know, buddy, I get it. You didn't know whether someone was gonna come up the stairs. And I'm going up, by the way, so I have infinite freaking right of way.
So, uh, anyway, so yeah, I've done this many times. I'm going down the stairs, I try to go into the passing lane. Why didn't you just say excuse me? Please. So I go into the passing lane.
Everyone's got their earphones in anyway. I could sit there and chant at them and they wouldn't hear a damn thing I'm saying. So I go, I'm going up, and the guy doesn't move. When you do that, what you do is you scoot back into your side temporarily, and then you do it. Because whatever, that's what life.
I'm like, nah. I just keep going. And then he doesn't move because he's like, I'm huge. People have to get out of my way. I'm a big man.
You know what I mean? And so, and then I just keep going through it for people who don't know me. I walk hard. You know what I mean? So, like, I go through this guy, and then he goes back in.
About 30 seconds, I'm up on the platform. I'm already like, you know, rereading the questions for today. He comes back up the platform. To find you? To find me.
Oh my shit. To find me. And he he goes up and he looks at me and he's like, hey, what's up? Oh, Jesus. And so but here's where I use what Nastasia believes is my superpower.
I just I gave him a smile. This is why Nastasia believes that I have not been killed. Yeah. Is that I can say almost anything to you with a smile on my face. I could talk about your mom.
I could do anything I want. Because I have a smile on my face, Nastasia believes that I can get away with it. Whereas she says she's nice to people, but because she has such a sour puss on, people think she's being mean even when she's not intending to be, which is always she's always intending to be mean. So anyway, so the guy's like, What's up? I'm like, hey, I don't know, what's up?
My god, dude. And the guy's like, and the guy's like, because he wanted to fight. So he's like, you brushed by me pretty hard. I was like, really? I don't know.
I was just going up my side. And he's like, he's like, what? But I was like, I'll just go, hey, sorry, didn't mean to uh, you know, cause any uh problems. I was just going up my side of the stairs. He's like, the train wasn't even coming.
I was like, I don't know, man. I was just going on my side. And he's like, You gotta be careful, you gotta be careful. I'm like, okay. Thanks for the advice.
Yeah, thanks. I'll go on up my side. Bye now. And he left. You know what I mean?
And I went back to my thing. Like, but that is the superpower, right? Zero aggression. You're like, absolutely walk hard, plaster through him, know that he was in the wrong, and then zero aggression when he comes to try to start a fight. The confused look on this man's face as he walked back down the stairs because he was not able to hit me was something that I will cherish forever.
I wish you had gotten in a fight. No! In the 14th Street station, there was a homeless person running a blender base next to his ear. Homeless people don't typically have blenders. I know.
There was no craft. Nastasia is like, Nastasia once took a picture of a homeless man in a wheelchair who had fallen off of his wheelchair on the subway, and it looked like it looked like some sort of candid camera setup. You just see the man had been run over by his own wheelchair, and his feet were sticking out from underneath behind his wheelchair. So I'm like, oh my god. What happened?
And Nastasi's like, Nastasi's like, well, first I thought maybe Nastasi had run the man over. And then I was like, what happened? And she's like, I don't know. I didn't ask. I was like, what?
New York, you don't ask. No, no, that's the thing, New York. A man on the subway last night wearing no pants. That you don't ask. That you don't ask.
But if a if someone is face down and have been run over by their own wheelchair, you just do this one. Hey, buddy, you okay? Hey, hey, buddy. Buddy, you alright? And if he goes, then you're like, okay, bye.
You know what I mean? But I can't tell you, I've had people like having uh like severe, like uh, I don't know, whether too much uh drug interactions or whatever, but I've gotten cops for people or lifted people so that they wouldn't fall in the street. I don't love doing it. It's a human being. And I do love that.
You love carrying strollers. You love it. I do love that. You love it. I do love that.
Uh so I don't think we've talked since uh Christmas or New Year's, right? Have we talked since Christmas or New Year's? No. Confirmed. So I uh Nastasi, you like this.
Um when I'm cooking with a wood fire, I cheat. I've said this many times. I cheat. I make a large charcoal fire uh with a chimney starter, and then I build my wood on top of that because who the hell has the time to build the get the tinder, get the thing, build the pyramid, meh meh meh. Plus I'm using wet wood because my wood's outside and it's real moist up in Connecticut, right?
Anyway, but inside, Jen likes to start a fire the old-fashioned way with like, you know, one little scrap of paper and like like little things and kindling. So she's like, make me some kindling, Dave. Now, for those of you that have never made your own kindling, the problem with making kindling is you need to temporarily hold the little stick. Because I'm making sticks that are like, you know, I don't know, like half quarter, like half inch on a side, right? Little sticks.
So you gotta hold the stick. By the way, the wood I have is real squirrely. You know what I mean? It's not like straight. I don't have like these like tall, straight.
Anyway, so you have to take your your little axe, your little hatchet, and go bop and plant it into the already in small end stick, right? That can't stand on its own. Right? Really, what you need is some sort of tongue. And of course, I'm an idiot.
I'm inside, I'm not wearing my my gloves. So I go, bop, and I slip, and the axe goes right into my hand. I don't see it. I know. Well, so like what happened is I'm like, uh, I get up and I immediately just put my hand against my shirt.
And later I look back in the laundry room, which is where I was doing it, like, look like a crime scene. Blah blah blahere. And so Jen, uh, I'll make the story short. So Jen is like, we're gonna go to the emergency room. It's it's not that wide, but it's real deep.
I'm like, no emergency room. So she, so we have stere strips. So she stere strips my uh my hand together, and uh it's finally just it's so it's she did such a good job. My mom looked at it later and she's like, Jen, you did a good, it's called approximating the wound. Do you know that?
It's called approximating the wound. So she's perfect. My hand looks like uh looks like nothing ever happened. It's amazing. Switch careers.
So I know. Well, she's gonna learn how to do suturing, I think, so that in the future because the problem with the sterestrips is you have to be a little more careful of your body while it's healing because the sutures will hold it together even while you're still working. Whereas when you're when if you like with the sterestrips, if you if you bop, if you hit it, like it'll pop open again. Anyways, so uh I bought a new piece of equipment that I'm super psyched to use called the Kindling Cracker. So for those of you that need to make a lot of kindling, take a look at the kindling cracker.
It is a very well-designed piece of equipment, and now I will be able to make kindling all day long safely without having to wear my normal gloves. I could have just worn gloves, but you know what? Kindling cracker. Uh what else? Ooh, I made some good Christmas cookies.
Did you make any good Christmas cookies? No. Every year, uh, my family joins up with the uh Hartre Verona family, and we make Christmas cookies together. And I make Christmas cookies from my family background. So we have a recipe that we've been making for I don't know how many generations, like five.
It the recipe is so old that it calls for clabbered milk because it's like pre-refrigeration recipe uh for these like kind of chocolate bonbons, but then the Verona Hartray family makes these like amazing Southern Italian cookies that are based on hatred. I love them. It's like you ever heard of Mustacholi? Yeah. Yeah, so the must real mostacholi is like hard like a rock.
It's the it's you hate the first three that you have, but then afterwards you crave them. Kind of like kind of like working with us. You know what I mean? And so it's it's basically just flour with barely enough honey to make the sucker stick together. So we're making mustacholi and bonbons.
Anyways, nobody cares about Christmas anymore. Nobody kids, nobody minds, nobody cares. Pathetic. Uh all right. We had a question in from Rodney.
No, what is the first one? We're good. All right. Well, I already said Rodney. We're gonna do both.
We have a question in from Rodney uh in Amsterdam, and uh love the show, been listening. I have a question on the preparation, and um he used these words which I don't even know are real, but uh for Nastasia's sake, pulpoce and liqueform products. Yes, Nastasia does have the face on. I want to drink my vegetables instead of eating them, but I have two requirements. I don't want to get rid of the pulp, so juicing is not really an option.
Well, there goes selling a spinzel. Actually, spinzall is good uh for this in one set in one sense, which I'll get to in a minute, but I'm not not trying to sell you on it because frankly, I don't own any of them right now. Yes. I'm pounding our incompetence, dude. When we were trying to make the spinzalls, we're like, okay, we need more.
And they're like, yeah, no. And we're like, what? What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why?
I I I It's because they couldn't see your smile when you asked. Yeah. If they could have seen your smile, you would have had them. I would have had them by now. Oh my god.
I get so. First of all, for those of you that don't know me, when I'm in a meeting, I'm zero zero zero zero one hundred. You know what I mean? You see me do this, Nastasia, right? It's like, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm not fine.
And nothing makes me like when you when you go to factory meetings, especially overseas, everyone knows that you're only there for a fixed amount of time. So one of the things that people like to do, because they know that you can't come day after day after day after day, is just put you in a room and stall you out for the entire time that you're there. And this is a tactic that causes me to freaking explode. So if you really want to see, you think that the rants I go on here, like get me into a windowless room in a factory. We're going together for the first time.
No, yeah. Nastasia's gonna have the pleasure of sitting in said windowless room. Yeah, I might lose it. Bring a recorder, bring a recorder. Oh my god.
We should do it from there. When you're sitting in a factory and someone tells you that they haven't ordered the product that you asked them to order a year ago, or that they're not gonna make this tiny change that they don't even understand that actually makes the product a whole lot better for your end user, or that you haven't approved something that you have 13 emails all in a row that say you've approved it. This is when you realize what the limits of your uh capability to retain your cool are. And I don't know if for those of you that are younger, you're supposed to get more patient as you get older, right? It's not really true, at least in my case.
In my case, what has happened is when I was younger, I worked on my own, like in the in the arts when I was in art school. So all of my successes, all my failures, they were my fault. You know what I mean? Or wait, you went to Tesla? Yeah, I'll talk about it later.
So or we can talk about it on air. Dax really wants a Tesla. So we're sitting there, Nastasia loves Tesla. I have one. She's she she has one.
She has one like I have uh, you know, I have a casket picked out, I'm not in it yet. But like uh I don't I don't really, they're gonna burn me up. Anyway, I didn't even forget what you may forget what I was talking about. Sorry? Well uh there you know a guy was in a Tesla recently and an airplane crashed into it.
That just stopped. That's true story. An airplane, an a DEA airplane, single engine Cessna on a training mission, attempted an emergency landing on a road in Georgia and smashed directly into someone's Model X. And did the guy live? The guy was fine.
And the plane got effed up. Yeah, I think the Tesla was fine. And me Elon Musk tweets the guy back, is like, all right. Love, love, love him. Yeah, anyways, so like I I'm less patient now because uh I'm always at a fine simmer.
It's like when I was younger, my pot got cool. Now my pot's never cool, right? I'm always just at a simmer. So when you turn up, you're ready to go. And and I, you know, I use very high grade induction to heat myself.
So it's like the heat is instantaneous. You know what I mean? I gotta mellow out, I gotta mellow out. I can get you there in like a split second. And so you know what, Nastasia has taken I don't know how many years off my life because really the only thing she enjoys in life besides The Bachelor, is seeing me get angry for no reason.
Yeah. It's true. Back to Rodney. I want to drink my vegetables instead of eating them. I don't want to get rid of the pulp.
And I don't want to add liquid. Most vegetables already contain a greater than 85%. Eh, that's a misnomer, 85%, whatever. Contain uh greater than 85% water, which should be plenty. Can I use pectanase with vegetables in a blender to get something easily drinkable?
Could you provide some general guidelines on what enzymes to use with different kinds of vegetables? Starch content, age, etc. I will try those and report back. Happy holidays, stuff your faces with delicious food and drink. Rodney from Amsterdam.
I did in fact do that. Um I did stuff my face. Um so look, uh, there's there's uh several things in in veggies that you're gonna need to break down. There's starches to a lesser extent, there's things like inulin and Jerusalem artificial, but you know, anyway, we'll get we won't get even getting into Jerusalem chokes, right? So to break down uh amylose, so let's say you were uh uh you you know a brewer or a uh well, more more accurately, a distiller, right?
It used to be that they would do old school starch uh conversion, but now they just do it all with enzymes. But typically you go through a multi step process. So you you chum the stuff up, uh you cook it with an enzyme that's specifically meant to liquefy it, right? So you want like a liquefaction enzyme. They then add a what's called a you know, uh a sacrification enzyme, which is slightly different enzymes that then breaks those uh gelatinized starches down into sugars so that they can ferment them.
That's not what you want to do. You just want to do some light liquefaction uh on the starch so it doesn't have the textural problems. But those enzymes, I've tried using them cold, they don't really work. They can't really attach uh attack the starch granules until there's some temperature on them. So they're gonna require some temperature if that's a problem or not.
The second thing you're gonna want to break down is kind of the the pectin uh and hemicellulose structure, right? And for that, pectinx ultra SPL or uh Pectinex um XXL, which is their non-GMO, sorry, their GMO version of it, uh, which I think I'm gonna switch to because it's cheaper and I think it works better. And I don't really care whether it's GMO or not. You know what I mean? What do you think?
You don't care. Yeah, I don't care. As long as I don't have to do uh agar clarification no more. I don't care what the hell you do. Um so the pectin enzymes work at a lower pectinase enzymes, I should say.
Uh work at uh don't need cooking. So that's kind of an advantage. So you can do a combination of them. If something has a high starch content, then you know you might want to heat it with some sacrification, uh, sorry, with some liquefaction enzymes, which you can get from Novazymes. We don't use Gusmer anymore.
I forget the name of the new company we use. Um but I'll try to post some. You could probably use some brewing enzymes, although I haven't tested them. Then hit it with uh hit it with some pectinx and and go. Uh fruits or veg that don't have a lot of starch in them, you can just liquefy quite well with, and this is like peppers, tomatoes, whatever.
You can just hit them with the with the pectinx, and that will that will smooth them out quite nicely. Now, the the thing you can't really break down with any of this is uh lignin and cellulose. So you can't get rid of like the strings in uh celery. So those you have to chop finely before you put them into your into your blender so that they they blend properly or whatever kind of technique you're using to get the juice out of it. But if you do add a little more water, and you do have a centrifuge, which I know you don't want to do this, you what you can do is on like a sweet potato uh or anything like that, you can blend it real hard, uh, do a slight cook, like sacrifice, blend it real hard with a little extra water.
The water, if you're blending stuff that's thick, it's hard to get very fine particle size because you don't get a lot of churning and you kind of kind of get lumps in it. Um if you add a little more water and then spin that water out, the resulting texture is friggin' crazy. And then you can resuspend it in water if you want and just drink the water. I don't know, whatever. But I made the world's best baby, not the world's best, the world's best that I have tasted, baby food, uh using uh pectinx ultra SPL, some starch enzymes, uh, some starch um uh some amylases and uh the spinz all, and then I drank the the extra water separately, but whatever.
I don't know. Nastasia hates drinking vegetables, true or false. Yeah. Well true, true. 100 Bogart has made much progress over the past year since their grand opening.
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100 Bogart hosts events like art exhibitions, pop-up stores, product launches, and fashion shows. Heritage Radio Network is a proud member of the 100 Bogart community and often holds events in the building. Visit 100Bogart.com to schedule a tour and learn more. Now we have a question in. This is a two-year-old question, people.
It's fine, fine network we're on. So uh Matt found this on the old uh way back in the voicemail. She's like Matt's like, you know what? It's a new year. Maybe I'll listen to my voicemail.
Hey man. So the voicemail, for almost the entire time that I've been here, the voicemail machine was full. So technically, no new messages came in while I was here. Strong. Yeah.
Strong. Alright, so let's hear it. Hey, a question for Dave on cooking issues. Seth Godin calling from Hastings on Hudson. Uh you mentioned doses, which got me really excited.
Uh, because I've been experimenting with doses without as much success as I'd like. Here's my problem. I can't get them to be crispy like they are at the restaurant. I've tried store-bought batter, plus I make my own batter from scratch. And I have a cast iron tava and the other kind of tava, and I've tried different temperatures.
What's the secret? I'll wait for the cookbook if I have to. But Dave, if you've got any dose of insights, I'd love to hear them. I love Seth Godin. I think he's a genius.
So I'm so happy he listens to our show. If he still listens to our show. On behalf of my predecessors, sorry, Seth. So I've got some good news and some bad news, Seth. The good news is I well, I got some bad news, basically.
If this question had come to me two years ago when I was doing kind of heavy research on idly batter, right, I'd have a lot more knowledge. Um, there's it's a big difference between just have having made a bunch of stuff and having made a bunch of stuff a long time ago, right? So I apologize that I'm a little bit uh rusty on this. And also uh there's been actually some research on this subject since I was investigating it. And the other thing I'll have to preface with is saying um I I was focused, even though Idley, even though Dosa Batter and Idley batter uh are often similar and people use the same batters for for both, I was doing tests almost exclusively with uh idlis and very little work with uh doses.
Now I'll just knock out the secrets that other people have. How about don't give him the secrets and he has to come have lunch with us instead and I'm not gonna make that well well, okay. So like uh in you know, one of the better doses that you can I've never been, I've never been to India, any part of India, definitely never been to the South. But you know, one of the better doses I've had in uh New York City is at Ganesh Temple out in Queens, and I was chatting with their uh what do you call what do you call it? Dosa maker, I wonder.
A dosant. A docent. Uh anyway, so like they're I was talking to their dosa maker, and he was telling me that you know their secret, which is a lot of people's secret to crispiness, is adding um some chickpea, uh chana uh doll to it. So for those of you that don't know Dosa, it's like uh it's like a Indian crepe. Typically, like the standard kind of style is you take uh uh black gram urad doll, right?
You get its skin, so it doesn't have the black on it. I've made batter with the skin still on it without and with the skins gives it kind of a gray unappealing color, and I don't really think it helps it. So buy the ones that have the the um don't buy split or broken ones, but whole ones that have the black uh the skin taken off of them. So it's kind of confusing. You're like, I thought I was buying black gram and it's white looking, it's creamy.
It's because they took the outside off. Um the second uh component is rice. More on that in a minute. And the third component typically is fenugreek. So classically, you soak, you could soak the fenigre, the fenugreek seeds, by the way, aside from providing uh flavor, fenugreek also has um like hydrocaloid-like properties and can affect uh the fermentation, right?
So uh, you know, you don't need it, but it's kind of helpful. It's there for a reason. Nastasia hates this conversation so much, she's walking out the door. Swear to Christ. Uh so uh I don't know, maybe she has to use the restroom or something.
I don't know. So uh you soak the dal and the rice separately, and then you grind uh the rice uh separately. You grind the fenigreek with the with the doll, you mix them together, you ferment them, and there you go. So now, what are the things? What are the different things?
The ratio of rice to to dal to uh urad dal is a big thing. Um I typically am, you know, of the four to one to between four to one and three to one on rice to to doll, right? Secondly, is the technique that you're gonna make them, whether you use a blender or uh a mixy or a wet grinder. I'm fortunate enough to have a a wet grinder. And everyone, and I agree with this, grinds the rice and the doll separately because they really want to have different textures and they want to grind for different lengths of time to reach the right texture, right?
Third, you uh mix them together and there's the fermentation time. Fermentation time is a lot of work on the fermentation time. In the f in the ferment, a lot of things are happening. One, you're creating it's mainly a lacto uh lactobacillus uh thing, but there's other bacteria and yeast in there as well. Um but aside from leavening, you're breaking down starches, um, therefore creating more free sugars.
That's gonna increase crispiness. Um lots going on. So the texture and flavor, your pH is going down. The texture and flavor of the dosa uh requires a nice fermentation time. Now, typically a lot of people who ferment in colder weather, like you live near me, uh, so will kind of try to put their their product into a kind of south of India kind of temperature to get the fermentation time uh short.
Um anyway, oh, also a little salt, which inhibits uh kind of bad bad bacteria. But back to the important question we haven't chosen is the rice. So if you add a little bit of chickpea, grind it with the doll, that's gonna increase what other some people call crispiness, but one person's crispy is another person's hard. I've noticed recently if you do a bunch of frying testing, which I've done a lot, people have different concepts of what crispy means. Like we all think that if I say crispy and you say crispy, they crispy means the same thing.
And it really doesn't. So, like some people think cornmeal batter is crispy. I think cornmeal batter is hard. You know what I'm saying, Nastasia? Okay.
Do you like cornmeal batter? No. Why? It's hard. Okay.
Uh but some people think it's kind of crispy. Same thing if you have too much chickpea. I like chickpea flour for battering, but too much chickpea flour takes it from being crisp to being kind of hard. You know what I mean? Anyway, so add that if you want the person who wrote the DOSA article in Sirius Eats didn't seem to think that the chickpea helped, but again I wasn't there during testing so I don't know if I agree with the way they tested.
The rice is a big component in it. If you really want to do it, it's expensive and it's hard to source but I would use and you don't have to because even in India they use many different kinds of rice. I would try idly rice. So idley rice is a parboiled like medium grain rice that's specifically made for idli flowers but it also works very well for doses. The par boiling is going to affect the texture as is the variety of rice and the exact amylosa millipectin breakdown it has.
So give that a shot. Dave remember when you were what were you breaking down at the FCI and they were giving a tour and it was like a it was like what was it? What? Was it a possum or something? And then raccoon.
Oh raccoon and then the tour guide the person on tour was like what is he what is he making and then the tour guide said what he was like a baby yeah that happened you know for people who don't like uh don't cook a lot of meat like when you're cooking small mammals they look kind of like yeah that was maybe the worst right yeah the raccoon tasted freaking terrible am I right? We bought a bunch of exotic animals, right? Yeah, from that guy that we won't buy from anymore because we found out he went to jail and he was like, you know, he was doing like really, really terrible stuff. Uh man. Anyway.
Well, hopefully those uh hopefully those dosed tricks out. I had some other cooking stuff I really want to talk about, but I can't remember what it oh, by the way, here's a question for I want you guys to ponder because they're gonna kick us off the air pretty soon. So do you think that knowing how to fix things is a blessing or a curse? I think for me it's a curse. Yeah.
It's a curse. You know what? If I had just spent more time making money and less time fixing things or building things, where would I be? I who knows where I'd be. I would definitely be cruising around in my in my P100 X Tesla.
Yeah. I'm not gonna Dax is like, Dad, we're buying a Tesla, we're buying a Tesla 7C Tesla. I'm like, I don't know, man. I don't know. Maybe just get the three.
They're gonna re no the and the I have two kids, two dogs. They're gonna release the cheap SUV next year. But anyway, when we bought the when we moved into our new apartment, we did the plunge and we got the Bosch, the fancy Bosch dishwasher that's real quiet. And for those of you that don't, for those of you that only have 20-year-old dishwashers, which is the way I've lived the majority of my life, you know, oh you have a dishwasher must be nice. Uh the Nastassi and I do that all the time.
Oh, dude, getting off at 11 p.m. half day must be nice. So stupid. Like this culture that we have of working so much that you die and belittling people who don't work as much is so toxic. Anyway, um, so my fancy Bosch dishwasher springs a leak and there's like water all over everywhere.
And I was like, you know, I know that if I paid someone to fix that, that's like a $400 problem off of an $800 dishwasher, $900 dishwasher. And I was like, man, if I was just rich, I would just pay someone to come do it. I would stay in a freaking hotel until it's fixed. Who cares? But I was like, two years.
Two years. Oh fix it. You know what I mean? Then I gotta get on my back, pull the dishwasher out. So what do you guys think?
Blessing, curse, blessing, curse. And I tell you what, I feel personally like if I didn't know how to fix things, I would feel not like a whole human being. Remember when the core container fell behind your refridge drawer or your freezer drawer and you couldn't get the core container and you couldn't close the drawer? And I was like, what are you gonna do? And you were like, you gotta buy a new fridge.
I mean, for those who who hasn't had some terrible thing happen, and you're like, I'm gonna burn it down and start fresh. You know what I mean? We were at the bar the other day. I never say this. We're at the bar the other day, and uh, and someone, they had just shown up.
They hadn't even started like really drinking at our bar yet, right? But they ordered a bunch of food, pounded it, got up. We have two bathrooms, the doors were closed because people were in them, and we made we have the air. There's no place for us to put a trash can outside of our bathroom, right? So this guy just starts unholy puking in our in our bathroom vestibule, but not like okay, I'm better now.
Like, blah, blah! Like, like, like, like, like, like exorcist, and like, and and Jack was like, Jack was like, did the guy eat a pot of clam chowder? It's so white. What is this? Oh, that's so disgusting.
He's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, I was so traumatized, I had no idea. I had no idea even what to do. I was like, and so, like, it's and so Jerry, who's our runner buzzer for the night, looks at me, he's like, hey, don't sweat it. I work at Equinox.
I see this every day. And then, like, he starts cleaning it up. Oh, and I just stand there. I'm giving you the uh the Superman pose. I just stand there, the bouncer pose, like standing in front of it.
People come to the bathroom and like, no. It cleans that whole thing out. And and I didn't realize till later, that guy went in, like the kitchen heard it happening, ran out with a fish tub, gave the guy a fish tub, and the guy was the guy had somehow had more stuff inside this. This guy puked his body weight at my bar. Wow.
Anyways. Um, anyway, so having Jerry with you, see, that was a situation where I was at a very rarely am I like, I don't know what to do. I might just burn this whole place down and walk away. And that's when you need someone with you who can just take care of business. Cooking issues.
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