This episode is presented by The Green Grape. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network. We're a member supported podcast network broadcasting over 35 weekly shows live from Bushwick Brooklyn. This year we're celebrating 10 years of food radio. For the past decade, we've been taking you behind the scenes of farms, restaurants, breweries, school cafeterias, and more.
It's been 10 years and we're just getting started. Find us at heritageradio network.org. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you alive on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday. Oh, we're late again.
We're really freaking late again. Robert's Pizza Win, Bushwick Brokley. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez and Matt in the booth. How are you guys doing? Excellent.
So today, I don't even know if people care about my excuses anymore, but today Nastasi and I went on a wild kitesan goose chase. Because uh we're getting ready to gear up for another push of uh Spinzall Mania. Are our is our next shipment of spinzalls on the water or no? No, not yet. They should be here by let's say March.
That freaking long? Well, I'm just gonna say that because if I say end of February, we're gonna get all if they don't, then you know. It still has to get through Amazon. So they may make it to the US at the end of February, but the Amazon component is Can you believe, people that it takes? Okay, Jell, if we open a bar in Queens, what are we gonna do when Amazon opens?
This is your idea. I know that it's so good. Well, what was it? You wanted to choose it charged double? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So here's what we're gonna do. Here's what we're gonna do. So for those of you that, you know, for those of you that you know have listened to this show, you know that like Nastasia has a hate hate relationship with the Amazon Corporation. Now, every, every nickel that Nastasia and I make is derived from selling our products on Amazon. You know, we sell a couple things on Monitors Pantry, but pretty much our revenue is Amazon derived.
And their favorite thing to do is to not pay us. That's their favorite thing to do. Yeah, they receive that. So like we hand them a like, and I say we, I mean Hong Kong Chris, hands them a whole bunch of Sears alls in in China, which is this is our contract. They put them on their own boat and then ship them to the United States.
And then an Amazon boat. An Amazon, well, Amazon contracted boat. I mean, maybe they own the boat, I don't know. Maybe it's a Bezos boat. I have no idea.
Uh so they so what happens is invariably they want from Nastasia, who by the way lives here in New York, and you know, we are Booker and Dax, anyway, wants from Nastasia proof that they have arrived in the warehouse in the United States. And we're like, ho, ho, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Amazon, your boat. Your boat.
Your factory, your people, your receiver. You, you know what I mean? Like, we handed you crap in China, and that's the that's it. You know what I mean? That's all there is to it.
So Nesta what Nastasi wants to do is sell, so Amazon is moving a big, you know, one of their headquarters to uh Long Island City, Queens. Nastasia wants to open a bar there just so what she can do is sell gift cards to Amazon workers for gift. That's the only way they can get a drink. If they buy a gift card. They buy a gift card, and then when they show up, and Nastasia, by the way, is gonna quit every other job she has to do that just to be the host, which is a ransom job.
For those of you that are hosts out there, God bless you. God bless a good host. You know what I'm saying? Wretched job. So anyway, so uh so she all she's gonna do is be the host, and when they come in with their gift card, she's gonna be like, Well, I don't know.
Can you can you prove you can you prove you bought that gift card? Find the person. Yeah, find the person who sold you the gift. But I bought it over the internet. I don't know, man.
I don't know. I don't know. And she's just gonna do that so they never get their drinks. And just so you know, this is exactly the kind of vindictive person that Nastasia is. Like she was definitely they could go to other bars.
Yeah, you'd figure out you'd figure out something. Anyway, all right. So uh let's hit some questions here. Oh, by the way, I don't know if you know this people, the telephone number for this radio station is 718-497-2128. That's 7184972128.
Oh, before I get to questions, last night we did a Bobby Burns and Industry Grey Goose. So strangely, Doug at Gray Goose is like half Scots, and so he's like, We're gonna do Grey Goose is gonna pay for so a vodka company, a French vodka company paid for a Bobby Burns night with Haggis yesterday at uh existing conditions. Nastasia made a vegan face on Haggis. Haggis is freaking delicious. Have you had Haggis?
Yeah, you made me eat it once where at the FCI. You brought some back. It was delicious. You don't like it? You have you have serious brain damage.
People who don't like Haggis, either you're a vegetarian or you just have some sort of mental thing about it. If I just told you like oats plus like good stuff, you'd eat it. Anyway, they made me read. First of all, we had a bagpiper come. They hired this amazing uh bagpiper, Al Gonzalez, who used to play in the in the NYPD uh pipe band.
So we brought pipes. We had a haggis, and but it was an American-made haggis, so no lungs, unfortunately. Apparently, next year we're gonna try to smuggle in a haggis with lungs in it. Because the real haggis has lungs, but as you know, lungs are illegal to sell in the United States. So we get this piper, and like the whole front of the bar is like, what the what?
Because the piper starts playing in the front of the bar, like, ring. And so I talked to him, I'm gonna get back on the bagpipes again. Back on the bagpipe again. Come on, it's gonna you're gonna love it when I go bagpipe crazy again. What about your sous vide book?
Uh I have to write the sous vide book. Well, people, I have like two, I have I have a couple of hobbies in my life that I pick up and drop, pick up and drop, pick up and drop. One of them sous vide book. Well, that's not a hobby. I'm sp I'm I'm like theoretically being paid to do that.
So I need to do that. But the other one, it I can't believe it's called a freaking Sous vide book. It's not really Sous vide book. First of all, I lost that battle about calling it sous vide Solongo, but it still pisses me off, no end, that everyone calls it Sous vide, even though very few techniques in the in the book are gonna require a vacuum machine too long to get in here. Anyway, bagpipes, math.
Nastasia thinks, still thinks there's a uh an outside chance that I become a civil war reenactor. But I haven't I haven't gone on a civil war, like go into these holes, people. So it happened that Nastasi will call me, she's like, What do you what are you doing? Did you did you uh do the drawings for the for the next, you know, blah blah. I can't talk about it, but blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, I just read 600 pages of Shelby Foot Civil War. And she's and she's like, You were idiot, you idiot. And of course, like, you know, but she, when she wants her bachelor time, she wants her bachelor time. I don't even watch that anymore. That was back in the day when I had time.
Oh, you watch that crap. No, I don't. I have no idea what's going on. People, Mustace. Oh, oh, in The Bachelor, but you watch other I watch nothing.
That's it. Did you see the uh the uh Upper East Side rap? Yeah, it was good. It was good. My favorite line is they say that I'm I forget where I come from.
Uh no, I actually remember where I came from. That's where I live. That's why I live on the Upper East Side. Leslie uh Leslie Jones is a fan of pasta flyer by the way. Uh she didn't trust you at first.
She didn't trust anyone that would draw a picture of her and like shrimp, yeah. Yeah, and she was like, I don't trust it. And then she was like, meh, okay. Yeah. Uh a friend recommended your podcast, and I enjoy it.
Oh, that's nice. I was wondering if you might be able to shed some light on a couple of questions I have regarding custard-based ice cream. I'm trying to find a way to streamline the process of making the base and cooking the eggs without having to temper and then heat them again to 160 to 170 and then allowing them to cool. My thoughts are to sous-vie the entire thing, steeping the ingredients and all, and then just strain, cool, and freeze with LN. That's liquid nitrogen, people.
The problem I'm having is I want to make 12 quart batches of the base at a time. And having uh to cook the eggs, steep the flavoring uh and and having it cook the eggs and steep the flavored ingredients, with this larger batch even be possible in this manner. Would you have any suggestions there? I mean, 12 quarts of base is like, I don't know, about six times the amount that we used to make, but you we'd make you could make all that in a circulator. I'd put like probably you know, the way that we used to do it, if you were gonna do sous vide uh on a on a base like that, is to put them all in a vacuum bag, uh, about you know, two quarts per bag, suck the vacuum, make sure they don't leak, and then throw them in for at 82 to 83 degrees uh Celsius for you know between 15 and 20 minutes, pull them out and then throw them on the counter, slap dab, slap it, slap, slap, slap, slap.
You gotta slap them, otherwise the texture's weird. And then they're they're good, they're pasteurized, and you know, they they stay good for a long time. It's also very fast to cool them down that way because you can just throw them right in the ice bucket. But it is kind of uh uh a lot to do. Let me read the rest of your that's how I would do it if you were going to do it in uh the bag.
You get very good flavor. Now, while I normally tell everyone that you can do almost everything in a Ziploc bag that you can do in a uh vacuum bag, and that that's mostly true. Um, putting things in a vacuum bag with uh with ice cream base is you can blend the eggs with the base, literally with a blender, blend the eggs with the base. Um I do it with uh not with the cream, with the milk. So usually I'll blend the eggs with the milk, then add the cream, stir in so that I'm not over whipping the cream.
Duh. But uh it blends up the halaza, so you don't really need to strain that much. It's kind of nice that way. Uh the disadvantage of bagging is you have to be very vigilant when you're using a vacuum machine with with uh with a bait with a base with eggs in it. Think about it, eggs and milk.
Two of the biggest foam capturing things that you can get. And so, you know, what happens is is the base makes a real run for the border. So you need like relatively big bags, you need a lot of airspace so that you have time to hit the stop button as the base flies towards the seal bar and wants to shoot out. Okay, uh, let me read the rest of your question. My other thought is to steep the milk/slash cream uh and sous-vide only the weight weighed out liquid yolk, and then blending the two warm ingredients together, which would eliminate the extra step of tempering the eggs and then cooking the whole base together again.
Yeah, uh so a couple of things. One, uh, when you're in a I think I said this on the air before, but when you're making a custard base uh for an ice cream, you know, well-known, you know, delicious ice cream makers like Sam Mason, for instance, don't like the taste so much of cooked eggs. So he actually does super low temperature pasteurization of the eggs, but doesn't cook out the custard base, right? So the two things you're doing, you're you're you're doing well, three things. One, you're you're heating the milk to steep your flavors in, right?
So that's one, uh milk and or cream. One. Uh two, you um are you know, you need to at some point pasteurize your egg yolks. Uh and three, and by the way, one easy way to do this uh the whole this whole tempering nonsense is to mix the um is to only steep in a part of your base, right? Steep heat steep part of your base, mix the rest of the base back in with cold stuff into your eggs, and then put that mix directly into the hot and it won't curdle.
But whatever, I digress. Uh, especially if um there's sugar in the especially if the sugar goes in with the egg yolks and some of the liquid mix, the sugar will also protect against curdling. So if you have lit if you have some of the liquid plus the sugar with the with the egg yolk mix, um you shouldn't need to do that much tempering to get it back into your steeping liquid. But again, I digress. Um but he doesn't like the taste of the cooked eggs, so he would pasteurize his egg yolks and then put them into uh into his milk, milk cream, and whatever, whatever flavor base.
The other, but the the thing that you get from the standard cooking of bringing it, bringing it up and making like uh, you know, uh standard creme anglaise or a custard base, is that the whole mix gets thicker, and when it gets thicker, it it affects the texture of the ice cream, one as it melts, but two, what its melting properties are. So you know, my experience is is that thicker bases have a uh you know a different kind of meltdown. Now, if you get a super hyper stabilized like a gelato, you know, some of those gelatos, and this is why they dope them so hard with flavor, because when you add hey, I was not faced towards anything. I did the real sneeze. Don't you know, don't give me people people need to sneeze, Nastasia.
Meanie. Um when you have when you add as much uh um stabilizers and thickeners as they do in Italian gelato, you need to really add a lot of my goodness! Jeez! You need to add a lot of uh flavoring, and that's I think also why they got in the habit of adding so much freaking color. This is why gelato is so freaky the texture's great, right?
But uh anyway, very heavily stabilized. So when you um when you're thickening, you can get that thickness from um doing an anglaise base. Uh and and the egg cust the egg, like cooked egg thickening does obscure flavors somewhat. This is why some people like the egless flavor of, let's say, a Philadelphia style ice cream, which is just kind of a cream milk base without a lot of it. And by the way, that stuff is good, but only good the instant you make it.
Like for any of those, and we've said this before, who lived in the New York metropolitan area, uh, you know, in the 80s, 90s, Briar's ice cream used to be a straight Philly's i Philly ice cream. In other words, it had didn't have eggs, didn't have any stabilizers, and it sucked, right? If you lived at the factory and you got it right when it came out of the machine and you ate it, then it was great, which is like all that Philly style stuff. But then, you know, if you put it in your freezer, it kind of blows. Anyway, and especially Briars used to sell it in the half gallon.
You never got that out west, right, Nastasia? No. You even know what I'm talking about. No. They used to have commercials where like, it's only got ingredients I can pronounce.
Why would I give a crap whether a little kid can pronounce ingredients on whether or not I'm gonna buy a product? You know what I mean? Like, uh uh it doesn't make any sense. Does that make any sense to you, Nastasia? What if it's an ingredient that is very common, but it's in another language and the kid can't pronounce it?
Like, what if I'm eating fuck uh freak? What if I'm eating gooseneck barnacles and the kid's like, Barnac, barna barna, can't pronounce it. Don't eat it. Fine, more for me. You know what I mean?
Like, I hated that advertisement. But the even worse thing about it is now Briars was like, hey, you know what? This stuff sucks. And they added a whole bunch of stabilizers to it, so now they can't even say that. No offense, Philadelphia people who grew up near the factory and it was good when you were grown up.
Whatever. Anyway. Uh, so point is is that um cooking the egg uh also gives uh texture for meltdown. You can add that texture back with thickeners, but be aware that, like when you're doing Italian gelato, if you add stabilizers, you're gonna be masking flavor, and if you mask flavor, you need to add a lot extra. Even the fat in um in like cream uh masks flavors, which is why some people, and I actually am one of these people really enjoy chocolate sorbet.
Do you like chocolate sorbet, Nastassi? I love it. Because it's like as chocolatey, it's as chocolatey as you can get, right? It's not as smooth and creamy, but it's as chocolate as you can get in a frozen confection, in my opinion. Um anyway, what do you think?
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That was uh that was from Michael Penn. This episode is presented by the Green Grape, a family of three businesses on Fulton Street, committed to supporting small scale farms, celebrating seasonality, and delighting our customers. Order local pasture-raised meats and cheeses to pair with our selection of fine wines and spirits, and we'll deliver it to your door at no extra charge. From great local gifts to providing you all you need for a delicious meal, the Green Grape offers truly special and hard to find products created by New York's community of local makers.
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Elliot uh Papanow wrote in. I haven't heard from him in a while. And I I don't know. There's two questions on this, so I'm gonna find the other one and we'll do them at the same time. Uh any tips on making infusion with dry herbs in grain alcohol.
What do you think of people who call herbs herbs? Nastasi's like, don't care, I'm gonna kill you. Um see. And then here, we're back into also uh we have another question in on the similar thing on infusions from Todd. So I will read them together, Elliot, and we will take it all at the same time.
I'm running from Park Slope with a question on making a morrow using uh an ISI whipper. I forget, did they ever land on EC or is it ISI here? I can't remember because it was one in the US and one in Europe, and they decided on one, and I can't remember. No, no. You like don't know, don't care.
Why do you still have your coat on? It's cold. And also you have five minutes. Get to the questions. I have seven minutes and whatever.
Uh I learned about the rapid infusion technique from liquid intelligence and have used it to make some nice infusions in Amari. Uh thanks for sharing your methods. Uh I have a half-liter whipper and have had good success making uh Amari with 80-proof vodka and rapid infusion to get good extractions and nice bright flavors and aroma. That said, the common wisdom on the internet seems to be that you need 151 or everclear to get good extractions. I think the EC technique uh probably offsets some of the need for high-proof spirits.
My thought is that high proof in the whipper and diluting after extraction might give the best quality. Uh is this a good idea? Will I end up with great extractions or will they be too aggressive and dry up bad flavors, they get left behind with a lower proof. Is there any way to know what ingredients will likely give a good or bad result at higher proof so I can avoid a lot of trial and error? Uh my typical recipes are bittered with gensin at around 1%.
Um, and uh blend of dry spices, blah, blah, blah, vanilla bean. Um, and would you shift the ratios for higher proof extraction? Okay. And then a follow-up is they want to know about lab grade ethanol. Uh, is it better than everclear?
Is it 100% safe? Okay. Oh, and they also want to know about the second book, Nastasia. So, you know, she gave a she gave a uh a fat chance, good luck, jerkweed look. That was that was that that was a look on Nastasi's face.
So, regarding your questions, um one. One, if you change the proof, you will get uh faster extraction. Um, I have done EC stuff with extremely high proof, you know, nine almost a hundred lab grade uh ethanol and done very, very pure, very extreme um tinctures. Uh I don't it's gonna taste different. So if you like the flavor you're getting now, right?
If you increase the extraction rate uh with this, you know, I don't know how to be honest, I don't know how it's gonna shift. My guess is that it's probably gonna be a little bit harsher or a lot harsher for the same amount of time. Generally, the high pressure, high, high force, rapid techniques um tend to extract high notes uh earlier than than base notes. So you're using kind of, for instance, let's take a particular ingredient like you know, genshin or whatever. You're gonna use probably even though you the thing about genshin, it's weird, is like you want bitterness.
Let's move something else like saffron. We use this at the bar, right? So saffron's got a range of flavors in it. So you have the kind of more vegetal base notes, and you know, kind of more bitter, like uh kind of cooked flour notes, and then you have the more the kind of flowery top notes. And rapid does a good job of shifting towards those high notes, right?
Now, it might mean you need to use more of the saffron than you would use. You're using it for a shorter period of time and you're extracting you know j just these high notes. If you increase that alcohol level, you're increasing the rate of extraction for most of the uh most of the things. Now, some things are very soluble in water, and so you can't really tell. You're gonna shift one direction or another.
You're gonna get a higher extraction into higher ethanol for sure. Whether it's better or worse, I don't know. Um, high-proof ethanol is pretty bad. It's easier to get kind of lower proof, decent quality, neutral uh alcohols. Um you have obviously more wiggle room if you're using a higher proof spirit, if you're gonna add sugars and stuff like that to end up, I don't know what you want your end result to be.
Lab grade ethanol can be good, right? The problem is is you have to make sure that it doesn't have benzene in it, because most lab grade ethanol uh has residual benzene in it, and you don't want that. You want to make sure it says USP uh, you know, or food grade, and you know, even those aren't really necessarily meant to consume as a beverage. They're kind of meant for kind of drug things, so I don't even know whether or not they're cool as a as a drinking liquid. That said, I have used it for that.
There are relatively expensive high grade pure ethanols available like tech reserve here in New York, but the standard 151 is everclear is is pretty gnarly business. Now, what you can do, and I have done I have done this, is get get yourself a Brita filter, and before you do your stuff with your 151, you gotta seal it because it's gonna you're gonna evaporate very quickly, and the vapors are obviously explosive. Is put it through a brittle like five, six, seven times, and you can take that nasty ever clear and the charcoal will get rid of some of the some of the nast, nass, nasties. Um, and so that's what I would do. And those are kind of similar uh to um you know the tips I would give you for uh dry herbs in in grain alcohol.
Um Megan wrote in Megan Lauren, any tips on best coffee making practices for camping? Entering a coffee competition where I will only have fire, a pot of water, and a hand grinder, and my choice of non-electric coffee making device. So, uh, Megan, question. I don't know how unreasonable of a person you are, right? Or what style of coffee you're gonna make.
So let's say you were an extremely, extremely uh unreasonable person. You could go get a um a gas-fired, you could even wood fire it and convert it, like old La Mart Soco um lever press machine and a Ferro's two hand grinder, and you could be pumping out, you know, um extremely high quality espresso shots using no electricity, like none. And by the way, if you did that, I think I I mean, I hope that you're very, very strong, because even a backpack, I would have a tough, tough time carrying that sucker around because I think that they only make them in like two and three groups. Like a one-group espresso machine is heavy enough, and I've never seen a gas-fired uh one grouper, but let me just say the quality out of those machines is impeccable, and although it's not in the spirit of camping, it would be pretty damn sick. Uh, most people I know that do good coffee in uh in a camp and or travel scenario are all aeropress people.
I've never done a lot of testing on the optimum grind for uh aeropress, and unless you're a poor over person, obviously you can do that fantastically. The problem is most of my grinding um is kind of skewed towards the espresso side of the grind, and you should go look, I don't know what grinder you're using, but there are very few grinders that are good at kind of very fine grinding and very coarse grinding. Um there's a lot of reasons for it, and Nastasia's giving me the I don't have time to get into it right now, but get back to me with kind of more what the uh like rules, what style of coffee you want to make, and uh and we can get into it. Um, although on a follow-up, Sam wrote in and said, We'll so Ferros, there's these guys in uh in uh Idaho who make this uh Orphan Espresso, it's this uh I think their husband and wife team that make these uh grinders uh and they make uh the Lido and the Pharos uh and their thing is they put professional quality burrs like big ones like like I think the one that I have in the Pharos is from the Mazer Roberts uh big big burrs into their and you know high quality uh into their um grinders so that you can have this hand grinder that's you know it's not electric, but also instead of five, you know, $3,000, you're gonna pay like $300, $200. So I had one of the original ones.
I made a lot of modifications to it because there's a lot of things I hated about it. Like you couldn't just pour beans into it. You had to like do this like ridiculous kind of like shuffle to like get the beans into the hopper. Uh it also had this horrible, horrible way of capturing grounds in the bottom of it so that the grounds would get caught, so I had to build like a fake doser almost. It was kind of a nightmare.
It was great quality coffee, but kind of a nightmare to use. Pharos updated their grinder to, I mean, sorry, Orphan Espresso updated their grinder to Pharos 2, and they solved most all of the problems, right? Most all of them. Uh the exception is that they don't have uh a hopper to throw the beans in. And the question, I put one on uh on in my Dropbox and made it available to the universe for Pharos 1.
The question is, will that one work directly on the Pharos 2? Answer, no. It is modifiable with a knife. In other words, I didn't reprint it when I did the conversion. They also they sell a conversion kit, Ferro's one owners.
So I went and I bought a conversion kit, I converted it, and I was able to modify it with a knife and a grinder to make my old hopper work on the new one. But I if you want or if anyone's interested, I will go back, find my files, and do the uh do a little 3D CAD food to them to make them um directly printable because it really is a good modification for the Ferris. Nastasi's like, why don't you shut up, Dave? We gotta go do stuff. Anyway, uh more what's next week.
I might not be here next week. Is that Cuomo? Which Cuomo? Andrew or Andrew or or Chris Cuomo? Andrew, I think.
I do not think the governor of New York is. Who knows? Who knows? Nastasi's gonna go pest for him about the MTA. Cooking issues.
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