Today's program was brought to you by Emmy Cheese, specialty cheese from Switzerland made with heart and passion. For more information, visit M E USA.com. This week on Meet and Three, we're exploring the culinary wonders of urban New Jersey with a tour through Newark. We speak to Frank Mentisana at Phillips Academy Public Charter School. This idea of family style and made from scratch lunches continues to be a bit of an anomaly in the city.
We also hear from Gil Speyer from All Points West Distillery. Newark used to have an incredibly rich beverage alcohol history. And we'll tour Arrow Farms, the world's largest indoor vertical farm. We're going using 390 times more productivity than field farming and 95% less water. Tune in to this week's Meet and Three on Heritage Radio Network to be amazed at the wonders of Newark.
That's Meet Plus Sign T H R E E. Available wherever you listen to podcasts. I don't know, I don't really know. This time, Nastasia. We were waiting for the computer, not the other way around.
At like 1210, yeah. At like 1208, you freak. Uh from Robert's PC in Bushwick, Mr Brooklyn, joined as usual with Nastasia De Hammer Lopez. How are you doing? Good.
Got Matt in the booth. Hey, hey, hey. And special guest today, Nick Morganstern. How are you doing? I'm doing great.
How are you? So uh you are the founder, proprietor of Morgan Stern's Ice Creams, and uh and what else? Why don't you tell tell people about yourself here? That's it. I got two stores in New York.
I got rid of all my other uh ventures last year. So I got uh Morgan Stern's finest ice cream originally at uh two Rivington, and then I got the new store at 88 West Houston. So, what's the difference between the two crowds on those uh in those two areas? I mean, because they're somewhat close to each other, but really they're completely different neighborhoods. I think they're definitely close and uh concerned about cannibalization on the old store with the new store, but um we haven't seen any of that.
So there's die hard fans of the old store and they like it for different reasons. The new store is much larger and offers a lot of other things that the little one doesn't, but the little one is maybe easier to access, and it is a different neighborhood. Yeah. So now why don't you describe your uh you know, so we've talked about ice cream on air here a bunch. Uh you know, people always write in and we're like the Italian stuff is like super heavy stabilized.
Don't let them lie to you and say it's not like a lot of the Italian stuff, not saying all the Italian stuff. A lot of the stuff super heavy, super heavy stabilized, super heavy saturated colors, like a lot of flavoring to overcome the maximum amount of stabilization. And by the way, I find that stuff to taste good. I enjoy it. Uh then you have other people on the other end of the spectrum.
Uh we've talked about uh, you know, a you use of eggs and temperature of pasteurization and whether you cook it long enough to get the texturizing effect of cooked eggs or just do minimal pasteurization so you don't get that egg, blah, blah, blah. We've done all this stuff. So just to give you like that kind of background of stuff we've already discussed, where do you fit? And then if you want to talk about, for instance, like old school Aglis, like Philly style, go ahead. If you want to talk about, we've talked about lack of stabilization and the way Briars used to be and how it doesn't last in a freezer case, yada yada.
So just give us some give us some uh some uh philosophy of ice cream. Some details. So for us, um we don't use eggs in any of our ice cream unless it is an egg-flavored ice cream. So we have 88 flavors on our menu at our flagship location now. And of those 88, two of them have eggs.
One is an American custard, which is custard style ice cream, and then we have a French vanilla, which is a vanilla ice cream that's made in a creme anglaise style. So everything else is made no eggs. It's um cream, milk, sugar, uh, salt, every recipe has salt, and then there's gonna be a little bit of uh milk powder and a little bit of glucose, and that's it. And then whatever the flavoring is. No stabilizers.
No stabilizers. Okay. So but does this mean that you but do you do you do you do wholesale at all to people or no? Very little. Only to my friends.
Is that why? Because of the lack of stabilizing, you don't trust people to keep it properly? Wholesale's not really a part of my model. This is not like for what we do as a business and and how we want to bring the product to the consumer. Um I sell to people who really get what we do, who really want to have it, and they handle it the same way that we do, but they also are an extension of our brand because of the way that they talk about our product in the store and the way that they get it to the customer the same way.
So nothing against like there's certainly business in New York to be done with wholesale ice cream, but that's just not the direction that I'm going, and it's just not really it's not what I want to do. So by the way, call in your ice cream-related questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128, or shoot them over to the chat room, and Matt'll read them out. Uh now, so would you consider then yourself like like where do you where do you come to this style of ice cream? Do you come from a Philly style background, or is it just this is where you arrived?
Like I describe how you got to this place. Um worked as a pastry chef for a long time, made a lot of ice cream, mostly creme anglais style, like that would have been done in in fine dining restaurants where you're making pretty small recipes, pretty small batches. So you have a lot of control over the process, and that's the way that I was trained to do it. Um started to explore non-eg product in maybe like 2006, 2007, when we were getting unpasteurized raw milk by the gallon um from Four Story Hill Farms. They were bringing it to us just on the side.
I probably shouldn't blow them up, but it was a long time ago. Right, right. And so you know you could theoretically buy it now if you went up to them and bought it. Or Connecticut, you can go ahead and get it up there. This stuff that they were bringing us was still warm, and so it was like very, very fresh.
And they were producing uh they weren't producing it, they were putting it into a jug just to bring to us. So the so we were just getting one gallon from one cow, and they would say this is really delicious, and check it out. And so um we started to try and figure out can we just make an ice cream that just tastes like this milk? And so that was the beginning for me of going down the path of not doing any of the ice creams um with egg. I never when I was working for other chefs, there would be recipes that maybe had a stabilizer or maybe didn't.
I was, you know, following their recipes. As soon as I was making my own stuff, we weren't using stabilizers. I find that stabilizers just really inhibit the flavor release. Uh bottom line. Well, I mean, they I mean, for those of you that don't do a lot of work with thickeners and stabilizers, it is just for sure true fact that anything, anything that thickens or stabilizes does inhibit flavor release.
Especially if it's cold. Yeah, it's just a question of how much does it inhibit flavor release and what is the flavor release. That's why industrially, and I'm not saying that as a negative about that stuff, because I use that stuff all the time. I'm for it, but it's just known that in fact they they rate different thickeners on how much they release and/or mask uh uh the flavors of the of the of the product. So our challenge every single day, we make really small recipes, we make a lot of them every day.
Um, is to make sure that we're you know following the process, which isn't that complicated, but it does have steps that need to be followed in order for us to make sure that we get the consistency of the product that we want, that it's smooth and creamy without using stabilizers, and then we've sort of built um systems and equipment around the desired result to get us there. So oh wait, so so uh so talk well. We should eat you have ice cream here while you're opening it up. By the way, uh note uh listeners detest mouth noises. Which listeners?
Like, I don't know. Some of them are like violent about it. They're I hate it. They threaten, you know, they threatened us, threatened us. I've been on audio things before where they really want you to get mouth noises.
Yeah, our listeners we have a separate show for that. Can we do that? Mouth mouth noise issues where we have actually already pitched that. What do they call that? The people that are into the weird, like putting your face in the bread or um the weird, like repetitive um, so is that internet thing, right?
Yeah, what's the ASMR? There we go. ASMR. Can we have noise ASMR? I have actually pitched that show to heritage already.
And did they say yes or no? They said yes, and then I was like, I don't actually really want to do that. Let's start it right now. Okay. So what so we'll take a whiff.
So what what flavor is this? Take a whiff. So what do you think? It's like passion. What is this?
Durian durian. It's got that funky sulfur smell. That's durian with banana. Don't start with that though. That's gonna blow you out.
All right, don't I won't start with it? Jesus. I usually you know, durian, though, like, has such a high solids content that I'm sure that adds its own creaminess. We have to adjust for that all the time. That's a that's a good segue.
The this product that I have here, uh Stone Beyond Belief, Action Bronson's second cookbook. We made an ice cream sandwich with him. This is the first time that we've done mass production of a sandwich, and we do it all by hand in the store. And the flavor that he wanted the ice cream to be was banana pudding. So we make banana pudding.
So this has egg in it. It also has stabilizer of cornstarch and all the things that would otherwise go into a banana pudding, and then tons of banana. Banana is a terrific stabilizer for ice cream naturally. What's the what's the banana pudding of record? Mighty fine.
Well, I mean, it probably would be jello. Jell-O? But we didn't even really go there. Um I don't I mean, I have banana pudding recipes, but I actually went to the New York Times Melissa Clark. Oh, really?
We tested a few recipes. She's strong. She's strong. 100%. 100%.
She's got a lot of, she's got she got more time in on testing that stuff than we do. She does it in her house too. My mom's 1970s doctored cake. Did I talk about this in there already? So, like, my mom has we have one doctored cake recipe.
Like Sandy. Well, it's like, so a thing now, there's whole shows built around it, is taking boxed cake mixes and doing crap to them. And there we're like, look, I made it! I made this. So like I mean, listen, the cake box mix is just a blend of things that you could put together yourself in theory.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, more or less. But like, I mean, look, they're technological marvels. But anyway, so like in my family, to this day, reaching back to the 70s, I believe from Sunset Magazine, which was a powerhouse back in the 70s. Yeah, we still in the family have a doctored box cake that we still make. I still make to this day.
She made back then? She made back then. Oh wow. It was my favorite cake growing up. What is it?
I have taught it. I have taught Dax how to make it. Dax now makes it on his own. How old is Dax? He now is 14.
Oh wow. When did you teach him how to do that? Like when he was like 10 or 11. Oh, cool. Yeah.
And you picked it up back then. Well, I picked it up when I was like. He picked it up at 10. Oh, yeah, yeah. My mom made it again, because I was like, it was my birthday.
And I was like, Yo, mom, make that a sherry cake, make a sherry cake. And so, like, my mom made it. Well, so it's like, first of all, how 70s this is, Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry. Love it. Which is PS delicious.
Delicious. Like Harvey's Bristol Cream, don't hate. Delicious. Come on. And especially in cooking and baking, it's like so good.
Industrial food is delicious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's people that are very skilled at making sure that it's delicious again and again. So here's how this recipe works, right? I won't give you the full secrets because I told my mom I wouldn't give out the full recipe, but you get your standard yellow cake mix, right?
Then you put in a box uh, you know, a bag or a box, however you call it, of lemon pudding. Lemon pudding. Lemon pudding mix. Lemon pudding mix. Okay.
Right? Put it directly into the boxing. Then you put the eggs and stuff, but then not milk, not milk. Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry as the liquid. Swap it out.
Yeah. As the liquid. Yep. Yep. Right?
And then you make that. It's gonna make it soft, tender. Come on, forget it. It's pretty delicious. Typically, in typically traditionally in 70s style, in a bunt form, but we do also flat cakes and what else.
I love a bunt. Then it comes out, you do the forkity fork on the top, and then orange glaze over that sucker. Orange powder sugar glazed. With a little more Harveys in there, or no, that that means it would be good. It might be Gilding Lily.
I've never tested, I've only followed the strictly the 1970s. Yeah, kind of program. I got it. I like it. And yeah, I'll tell you what, first of all, me personally, not an icing guy, I'm a glaze guy.
Just so you know. Okay, got it. I'm a glaze guy, not an icing guy. And I love a glaze. Morning pastries, all of the I mean, like, you know, in donuts, like glaze and icing kind of they kind of merge into that thick glaze.
I guess I'm thinking fillings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like fillings. So here's the thing. And uh if you had gay handed me a cake with icing or a pie, I would take pie.
If you handed me a glazed cake or pie, I'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is tough. This is a hard problem. You've now made the problem difficult. Understood.
Okay, I got it. All right, I got you. Also, I put whipped cream on absolutely everything. Everything. Including, and you might hate on this because my sister-in-law Miley, who runs the Food Network magazine, Miley Carpenter, she's the founder of the Food Network magazine.
Before that was founded Rachel Ray's magazine, before that, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, credibility. Has some creds. And whatever you think of Rachel Ray, by the way, that magazine launched huge. Right.
That was back in the day. Whatever. So uh she does not, first of all, I hate to blow her stuff up here. Not a giant fan of whipped cream in general, which is bizarre to me because is there anything really like whipped cream is like second only to ice cream. Well, that's the thing.
So I put whipped cream on ice cream. Not just in Sunday format, which we're gonna talk about in a little bit, but I put whipped cream on ice cream just as a matter of course. I listen as a purveyor of ice cream in New York City, I can say you are you are not in the minority on that one. There you go. We sell a lot of ice cream with whipped cream on top.
She thinks it's she thinks it's gilding the lily. Here's how I feel. Ice cream is the denser format. Then it becomes more airy as you go into whipped cream into air, up to God. We gotta talk about the different types of whipped cream and how close to God they are.
Well, okay. So are you Swedish and do your non-sweetened whipped cream? I'm an American, so I put sugar and vanilla in my whipped cream. Oh, you think that's American? Well, I think that's how I that's uh because it's the most like cool whip.
It's the most like cooling. Ah, okay. So we're going cool whip direction with it then. Do you like woo-whip? Cool is delicious.
Listen, first of all, I feel we just stop and clear it for a second. You're tiptoeing around whether or not I might like or not like a lot of these industrialized things that you're dropping in the hat here. And I love it all. And I'll tell you, just to clear it right now, number one favorite ice cream experience in the world for me, Bertillon on the Ille Saint-Louis in Paris, number one. Um, number two, I really love going to Jaliti in Rome, which is like this massive ice cream shop, Giolato Girlotteria that's in downtown Rome that's like a total Italian shit show.
Product is delicious. Always get it conpana with whipped cream on top and a big cone. Um, but it's a tourist disaster. And if you go there as an American, be prepared to be pushed out of the way by multiple Italians while you're in line. They will cut in front of you and order in Italian in front of you.
That's the experience. Um Dairy Queen. Oh. In order. Well, what era of Dairy Queen?
Um, I still it's tricky now because I go to I when I'm on a road trip, I'll go, and there's still a few franchises that are outside of the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate that have they predated, so they're still allowed to operate on their own. And finding them, you can Google it. They're not Dairy Queen doesn't really want you to know that those things are out there, but there's a few up in the Midwest that are still doing it the way that they were doing it. They don't have to necessarily use all the proprietary stuff from Dairy Queen, but I still I still love a peanut butter parfait. I really do.
No, I really do think that that combination of things, it's such a simple interpretation of a hot tin roof, which is just vanilla ice cream, peanuts, chocolate sauce. That's all you need. And if you can get those things in an unadulterated format and taste them all together, they truly are almost like the holy trinity of an ice cream sundae experience. What are your thoughts on the blizzard as a technological marvel? I like the blizzard as an idea as a concept.
I think in execution and what they're doing now, it's got so much other stuff in it that it can the dis the time frame between when you're eating, enjoying and having the experience, and then when you're feeling really bad has gotten shorter and shorter the more stuff they put in it. Right. I mean Blizz Blizzards and whatever you call them now have gone artisanal. Now, Kith at the new Hudson Yard has those blizzard machines that look like a have you seen these machines that look like like earth-digging augers? That's exactly what it is, yeah.
They're cool. The machines are cool. Those machines are dope. I would love to feed myself. Those are created for a very specific purpose, which is that they make these conical cups that you can put the little frozen packet into, and you just throw it in the canister, and that that digger thing goes down in there and then pulls it back out, and you get something that's sort of like soft surf.
Yeah. So they've really taken any variable out of it. And managing and running a soft surf machine has its own complexity and issues. So this is like pretty, I don't want to say dumbed down, but it is. They're smart.
Those machines are smart. They are smart. They're like they have to self-wash because they're such a free freaking crap show of mess with all those blade. But they have like the sanitizing solution in a chamber. It's nuts.
And the like the little uh evacuation valve at the bottom of them. Well, you know what texture they get? If they don't get soft served to me, they get um uh fro the remember the frosty from like that kind of texture. But those all are still sort of falling into that category between like liquid and frozen right in the middle. Very desirable.
We're getting to liquid here with one of these. Listen, take a little bit. What are we what are we eating? Okay, so we'll start off with a flavor that we created a long time ago when I was running a restaurant in Brooklyn and I had my first ice cream cart. This is salted chocolate ice cream, and so um really simple.
Give me what you what you just tasted. It but is there I mean, is it just my mind is also going to like Heath and Caramel? Or is there so crazy you said that? There's a lady who's a regular regular at my store, and on Saturday, she she grabs me and wants to talk to me all the time. She loves the product, and she was like, I've always been you know eating this other one, and then I eat this one, and she was kind of like really getting into it with some of my counter staff, and she was like, There's gotta be caramel in there.
And the staff's like, I got the recipe list right in front of me. Like, there's no caramel in this flavor, and then I came up there, he's like, I want to talk to her, and then she's like, and I said, No, there's no caramel in that. It's interesting that you say that though, because there is some of that, I think it's almost more like a butterscotchy kind of flavor that's going on there. So that's a relatively high cocoa content milk chocolate, uh, 38% single origin. We buy all of our chocolate from uh Falkland, which is a Swiss company that's been family owned for 120 some years.
Um and I just think that what they do as far as how they process and and stick with the script on what they want to do with their product is this is so consistent. I've been eating this in pistol form as my midnight snack in the store when I'm there late for 20 years. I've been buying from these guys, and it I know when it tastes different. They'll send me other stuff in this. They sent me a 36% last week.
No, no, it's not it. I've been eating the 36% for like a week, and I'm like, this is not gonna work. You're not getting addicted to it. Not in this, but this has a specific flavor profile to it. So, anyway, so do you think it's the you think it's the milk powder in the milk chocolate that's giving it the caramel note?
A combination of things. It's also that that profile. So I'm not gonna give you all of the details of our recipes, but very close ratio of cream to milk. So Nastasia hates families, by the way. When you said family own, she's like, you lost it.
What are you talking about? Well, please explain, Nastassi. Why is he saying that? There's an anecdote. I don't understand.
Matthew, back me up on this. Dave, I hate families. What are you talking about? Only families you know. That's insane.
Anyway. Could be. Uh wait. So speaking of close milk to cream ratio, then first of all, let's go back to what kind of machines you use, and how do you because like everyone when they go high on cream, by the way, I love high cream like butter fat, yeah. Yeah, like uh recipes.
Everyone's like, you're gonna overturn it, it's gonna turn to butter. Can do, can do. Because the texture on this is fantastic, by the way. And but what is the lifetime of something like this? I get 90 days, but that's um our walk-in freezer functions like a blast freezer, which is pretty crazy.
So there's not a lot of movement up or down. If you had this in a normal freezer, what would you say the life was? A home, a home jerk freezer, a right-aid freezer. Three weeks max. What's this guy?
What am I eating on here? We call this dusty janduya because it has a lot of cocoa powder in it. If I find Jan Duya hazelnut chocolate made with hazelnut oil, I love Jan Duya, but it's very sweet, typically very sweet. And um, we strive for as low sugar content in our product as we can have with still maintaining the texture and consistency. I find sugar, try to use sugar the way that a savory cook uses salt.
So it like it tends to add, it can add to the flavor profile of something. People want sugar when they're eating ice cream, obviously, they want something to be sweet. Um so we add quite a bit of cocoa powder to this. I don't use cocoa powder very much. Um we use it to make fudge.
We use it in our chocolate chocolate ice cream, which I didn't bring you. I should have. I was in a little bit of a hurry when I was packing the cooler for this. Um, and so I think that the cocoa powder in this kind of balances texture wise, this is not quite as warm as the salted chocolate. I brought this in a cooler, that big cooler behind you with a little piece of dry ice in it, so I think the pints were kind of shuffling around in there, but I still think you're getting something here.
Sorry for all those um eating noises on um. Today's program was brought to you by Emmy Cheese, specialty cheese from Switzerland made with heart and passion. Since the early 1900s, Emmy has been a passionate supporter of farmers, cheesemakers, and family tradition. They believe in sustainable agriculture and respect for the people, land, and animals that make their business possible. Remaining dedicated to tradition, they strive to lead the industry in innovation, ensuring they bring you only the highest quality, best tasting cheese from Switzerland.
Emmy is best known for importing more than 80% of Swiss Grier into the United States, but that's not to overshadow their other specialty cheeses, including cottbalt cave age cheeses, appenzeller, tete monitional Emman Toller. For more information, visit M E USA.com. Are you enjoying this podcast? Heritage Radio Network has plenty more. My name is Andrew Friedman, and I'm the host of Andrew Talks to Chefs here on HRM.
Every week I interview a diverse cross section of the best and biggest names in professional cooking. Give a listen and get to know all about the inner lives of chefs. You can find Andrew Talks to Chefs wherever you listen to podcasts and on HeritageRadio Network.org. I was going to ask you about something off the subject real quick. An employee of mine has bananaphobia.
Right. What do you mean? Afraid of bananas? Just like can't deal with it. Right, right.
All aspects of the banana. Like the way it looks, can't deal with the smell. But most importantly. I'm not gonna say, actually, I'm not gonna get into the gender. Um, cannot deal absolute no fly is the sound of someone eating a banana.
Really? Can't handle it. Well, does it matter what okay? What is this person's? We don't know the gender.
What is this person's feelings on plantains? I didn't get that far. So, like, first you have to like there's a lot of cultural things. There's like the sweetness, there's like the obvious sexual uh references. None of that.
There's the maybe afraid of slipping on a banana peel. Like, then there's like how ripe is the banana? You know what I mean? Like the whole thing is a no fly zone for this person. Is this person?
Did they eat an underripe banana and that taste of cement? Do they not like nail polish? There was, I think that what I got out of it was there was an issue where they were forced to eat bananas for breakfast as a child. So just a mental issue. I mean the mental, it's deep.
Yeah, yeah. I'm saying, like, you know, this is like a clockwork orange kind of a thing. This person can no longer listen to Beethoven while eating. What's this guy? That's a tricky one.
That has olive oil and orange in it. Chocolate with olive oil and orange. That's quite delicious. But getting that texture of speaking of overrunning, the olive oil really does not want to c cooperate when it gets cold. As you can it's so weird.
The uh, well, you know, fate that was famous. Uh the olive oil, the olive oil gelato at uh Babo was like the most like everyone was like, how you do it? And they're like, why don't you crap off? You know what I mean? That was always the answer, but like um what's interesting is that the the mixture with the oil, the orange almost takes on green notes.
I agree. Well, the I will tell you the olive oil is very young and it's from chili. It's very spicy. It's from Grove and Vine, um, Nick Coleman, who was formerly uh oleologist for the BMB group. That's a gross word, right?
Oleologist? Yeah. I kind of like it now, but because I know him and I really like him. If you haven't talked to him, you should get him on here. He's a weirdo.
No, he's not. I don't think he's a weirdo at all. He likes family, so he's written out for the things. He's a brilliant guy, super kind, and really knows his stuff, and he loves it. I mean, he loves his olive oil game, is heavy.
Um so so back to Coco for one second. Sure. Do you what's your theory on um cookout on stuff? Do you cook the do you like do a uh cook on the milk with the cocoa powder to get it in? Or how do you just soak it forever and then blend it?
Like, what's your theory on this stuff? So for the chocolate ice creams, everything gets tempered in um milk powder, sugar, and cocoa powder in this case, and salt, and then it goes back in pasteurized to 180, and then it's pulled off and it's done. That's it. Full batch. So you're heating the cream too?
Oh, yeah. Now, are you uh we don't heat the milk? Don't you heat the cream, not the milk? Yep. So, oh, because you want the flavor of that of that.
Exactly. Got it. You got it. And it does change it. I have heard many things, including from uh was it a stolting rep, or was it one of the Italian people?
But uh so that for those of you that don't care, I apologize. But why are they listening if they don't care? Right. Well, there are various theories about how long you have to wait if you are going to pasteurize and or heat something, then how long you should wait before you spin the product after you chill it back down, because the theory goes that uh the fat crystals will agglomerate in different ways and you will get a different final texture. I find so little evidence to support this, dude.
Right, but this is a lot of talking. And we're like, is that it's not we can't find enough evidence to suggest. I'm just telling you, in our experience. There's an Italian guy who I met at a trade show whose name I forget, and I can't remember whether he was working for a German, but he was Italian. And what he said was that if you spin it right, if you basically he was pushing a machine, I he was one of these machines where it went direct from pasteurized to chill.
Yep. And he was like, if you chill it right away, right the hell away after you do your pasteurization, then it's just as good as aging it. He was against any sort of in-between stuff. That's probably just because he was selling a machine that did it right away. You're saying that it doesn't matter one way or the other.
Well, the I think that for us, uh part of the challenge for us when we're running a business is you know, is the juice worth the squeeze in general? So like the steps that we take, are they going to yield a result for our consumer that they're gonna want it? Like that they get it and they understand it. And there's times where we pull things because we're like, we're doing all this work for this thing. I'll give you an example.
We have a peanut, like a peanut praline ice cream that we use these crazy peanuts from uh San Antonio, Texas, they're called Picosos. And uh what are they like compared to like a Virginia peanut? Are they big like a Virginia peanut? Are they trying to? Spanish redskin, salted, hand roasted.
I it's my favorite, and I do think for me that's we're gonna get in a peanut fight now, but go ahead. That's all right. I mean, you can have your opinion over there, and I can have mine, and we can live in the same space. It's gonna work out. Not true.
And if you want to bring your own peanuts to the store, I'll put them on the Sunday for you. I'm not mad at that, especially if it's like that's your peanut. For me, the picoso is the ideal peanut for a hot tin roof Sunday. You like a small peanut. I do.
I do like a small peanut. I'm not afraid to say that. Um the so we were making a praline with that and then grinding it and doing all this crazy work to make the ice cream, and at the end of the day, number one, the ice cream wasn't selling very well. And number two, you know, you taste it and eat it, and you say, uh, is this is this translating? It wasn't really translating.
Well, so we're doing all this work downstairs to do this thing, and it's not really getting delivered to the consumer. And I think you gotta have experience with that with what you do behind. Oh, I hate it so much. I hate it so much. I there's whole categories of things I won't do, such as uh high high proof, super chill carbonated work, or like there's a like uh you work real hard on flavors and people don't get it, and it's uh for me, it's not even just that it's not worth the it hurts me that people don't appreciate something that I think is good and that takes a lot of work, and so it's less heartache just to not do it.
Agreed, or especially if something's a lot of work and you're worried that it can slip because you're yeah, you're not on top of it all the time. It's gonna slip. It's just it's a complete heartache. What do you what do you what do you what what is this? What are we waiting?
You say clean it off with my spit, lick the goddamn. We got more spoons. Um we'll go to the banana flavor. So that one is banana that has just a little bit of calamancy in it. Which is a fun word.
Calamancy. Yeah. People have a hard time with that word, actually, on our menu. What is that? Calamancy?
Calamancy. So this is a much different texture. Yeah, totally. This has got like a it's all that banana. Banana ripeness.
So she won't make it. If you're making it. You're pushing this into a gender thing again. That was a mistake. It was not a mistake.
You don't make mistakes. Well, I don't even remember that. Okay, try the durian banana now right off the back of the bottom. I should say, you don't make that kind of mistake. You assume it's a woman.
Yeah. No, I would just pick one to see if he was funny. Why would you assume that? She's just trying to rally you. Don't let her value.
By the way, I saw Matt moving back there. Do we have a question or something? Yeah, Matt, what were you trying to tell us? He's trying to tell me not to do something. I think I was trying to tell him not to uh beat up.
Don't touch the microphone. Get so handsy with the mic. Oh, oh, well. Yeah, it was around the small peanut comment. Um, we small peanuts make you handsy with the mic, huh?
You do have a question that might be a little adjacent to the topic, but we could we could go for it. Um Tyler tweeted this in a while back. He was wondering do you know anywhere to buy less than one pound of tycoloid 210? Ticaloid. Ticaloid 210.
Uh that is adjacent. We were talking about stabilizers. Uh no. Uh Dave, do you have any ticloid on hand? Uh in my pocket.
No, actually, you know, we okay, so this is a mixture of gum arabic and xanthan that uh I use because um when you're making syrups like like specifically oil-based syrups or butter syrups that need to withstand immediate agitation. Yeah, agitation, dilution, and simultaneous like chilling with the with the fats. It's a huge pain in the butt, and ticaloid can do almost everything except coconut fat. It nothing that I have. This is why you just buy Coco Lopez.
Yep. Which nostassias kind of like you're the Coco Lopez of people. So like it it won't break no matter how hard you push Coco Lopez, but Ticoloid is like a good second best. Um I don't know of a place you can buy small amounts of it, but uh I have it I have published somewhere, someone remind me before the show, I'll look up of the uh a good starting ratio of gum arabic to Xanthan to use to make your own thing. I will say that So you're making your own, in other words.
Yeah, nowadays. I don't remember what the ratio is because it's been a long time. We don't have any butter syrup on the menu right now. Okay. Um because actually I had a bartender who was afraid of butter syrup back at Booker and Dak's days, afraid of it.
Why? Wait, tell the story. I'm not gonna tell the story. He was having he's actually over at my house uh on Sunday. No, I I'm not gonna tell the story because it's a family show and it's not a good thing.
We're running out of time, and the amount of time you spend arguing about whether to tell the story or not is the amount of time we would tell you. That's like 30% of any given episode. Yeah. Also, uh speaking of stories, we're not gonna have time because we have a lot to talk about this week. But can I just make a suggestion?
Yeah. Can't you just break off like four ounces of ticaloid for this guy and send it to him? No, no, we uh now make our own. So make some for him and send it to us. I'll find out that I'll find out the rest of the ratio.
I gotta remember the ratio. But his other his secondary question was are there other good uses for large quantities of the stuff? I mean, he's just gonna come up with the. I mean, like it was like i any sort of any sort of syrup with oil in it, though. Like, like if that comes up for you a lot.
I mean, we ran through all of ours and then we had to, you know, make more after, you know, because you can buy it from from T I C, but the point is, I now even forget what I was gonna say. I was gonna give a suggestion. Have I ever told the puke punch story on the air? It's not really my story to tell. No.
All right. Next time. We don't have a lot of time because we're talking about other stuff. What do I have in my on my spoon right now? My fresh spoon.
Strawberry with pistachio pesto added into it. It's good. Nice. I like that combo. That's very popular.
People really like that flavor. Now, on durian. Two well, two things. On durian, I've noticed that most of the durian you get in the US of A has been, even if it's still a whole durian, has been pre-frozen. Not frozen.
Or it's not as stinky after you freeze it. It's like 50%. Yeah, yeah. And therefore, not as stinky. Not as therefore, for for us western folk, it more apparently.
Palatable. It's a diluted version of something that's extreme. I agree. Did you say diluted or diluted? Or both.
I had ice cream in my mouth. Yeah. Diluted. Um the I tell you, I've told people on this on air a million times. I once made a durian caramel by accident.
I was never able to recreate it. It was a mistake and a pressure cooker. I was pressure cooking to try to see whether I could dull durian even more by pressure cooking. Wow. And I hadn't controlled uh because I was using at the time a non uh a venting pressure cooker, so it was shooting off moisture and the temperature was going up, and I stopped it at just this perfect point where it came out like a caramel and it was rich and durian but not stinky.
Then I tried for the next like two, three weeks to try to do it again. I could never close. No. Not even close. Never even got close.
Oh, it's just one of those flukes. Yeah, yeah. And then like that's why that's why I tell people, you know, you could do the best thing of your life, and if you didn't write down everything you did. Yep. We deal with this all the time, man.
Take a keeping the notes. Our binders are crazy in the store. And then keep update. We update on the minute. I'm like, put it in the computer's in the kitchen and put it in in print and shred the old one and put it back in.
Because you can't, it's like things get too all over the place all the time. It's really difficult. It's really challenging. And we're adjusting all the time. Things change, and we don't have those same.
We're not if we're not using any stabilizers, then just dealing with the equipment. The store is brand new, and we're just like learning how to make sure that everything's coming out consistently. So there are changes that need to be made on the fly, and then the cook does it, and then we're like, Did you write it? And they're like, I wrote it in my book, and my book's in my car. You know, this kind of thing.
So we try to keep that stuff recorded. It's really important. Oh, yeah. If you didn't record it, then you should get punched. Yeah, and the value of the time that you spend the first time and then the second time trying to remember it and trying to like recreate it and all that stuff.
It's like evaporated, it's gone. Yeah, and we're Nastasia and I are actually terrible at it. This is one thing we tell other people to do, we're terrible at it. The other one we say is if you if you have time to to lean, you're gonna die. You should be writing the notes on what we've been doing this whole time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You guys have a strong human resources department. Uh okay, wait.
Now, uh okay. Before I forget, you you said beforehand that you're involved in it in a charity thing you want to talk about. Talk about it. Oh, we I just I brought you I purchased from my store two articles of clothing for you guys, which is a t shirt that we created this year with St. John's bread and life.
That's your shirt right there, Dave. I got you a large. I think that's the right size for you. Um so I was explaining to Nastasia that we get approached by a lot of different uh I like those guys, by the way. Who?
St. John's? Yeah. They're it's amazing. I know that I know they're architects.
Oh, really? My wife used to work with uh what used to be Rogers Marvel architects now. Yeah, and so like they uh they were did a long bunch of architecture work for for them, and yeah, I like them. They're good people. So the woman who's running their culinary program over there, um, Millicent Soros, she spent a long time in the diner organization and has done a lot of different things in food um in the same industry that you and I find ourselves in and now has dedicated uh her time to helping the soup kitchen at St.
John's Bread and Life. Um get more organized. And you know, if you go into a soup kitchen that's producing tons and tons of food, more than most uh restaurants are producing, and they don't have the same uh experience or skill set that someone like you and I do um to understand how to do it better and understand how to be more efficient, more effective with it, and use the same ingredients that they get donated to them to make the food tastier, make the food healthier. So she's really doing something that's um it's extraordinary. And what they do every day, provide 3,000 hot meals in Brooklyn, is a crazy feat, if you can imagine, and they serve them out of their soup kitchen, they serve them out of trucks, and they do all kinds of things.
So for us this year, our entire initiative for any dollar that we're gonna raise goes to them. And so we made a shirt to help celebrate that, which is something that we've learned um over time. Um our in-house illustrator, Jessica Che, who does a lot of different stuff for us, incredibly talented, did uh brilliant illustration um of a bird eating a piece of pie. Millicent is very famous baker, wrote a book, How to Bake a Better Pie. Um, incredible, incredible baker, incredible chef, but really incredible baker.
She's got the hands. She just knows how to she just knows how to make it um grandma style. And so um pie a la mode being eaten by a pigeon. Uh it's not a pigeon, it's a raven. Raven.
Oh, it is? I love Corvid's. She's from Baltimore. Corvid's smartest of all birds, by the way. Like any of the Corvids are as smartest bird bird of it.
The thing is, like it's got a it's got a look in its eye, like it's got that pigeon look in its eye, which is why I thought it was a pigeon, but I like it better now. It's a raven because now I'm like, oh, it's smart. It's not pigeons are dumb. Millicent's no dummy. Yeah, so they believe me.
Here's the thing. Uh if uh a bird consumes caffeine, will that mess it up? Because it's got a piping hot thing of coffee here. As long as it's smoking a cigarette at the same time. It's doing great.
Well, like crush the cigarette out. It was like it tried it. It's like, I don't like this. Uh it's finished. I'm gonna eat the pie.
Yep. Cigarette and pies don't go. Uh it depends on where you're from. If you're in Baltimore, it might be something that's happening down there. Have you have you ever like uh tried like uh like what how does cigarettes and ice cream work?
Doesn't seem like that would work either. Although smoky ice cream works. I've had good smoking. Yeah, we've done some smoky ice cream. I'm not a smoker, so that activity is not something that I would be able to speak to.
Smoking a cigar and eating ice cream. But we do see customers at the new store. We have a big patio, they'll go out there and have that ritual of having their cigarette and having some ice cream outside. It's an indulgence. I I was never a smoker, but my grandparents and you know, my my aunt always were, so for me, the smell isn't the smell of the cigarette itself, it's the smell of old cigarettes.
Yes. And the space and the being in the house and all that stuff. They smoke, did they smoke in the house? Oh, yeah, in the car. Yeah, all that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Serious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that would be. So um, like to me, that's like the childhood memory of what smoke is.
I got one more thing for you. Let's do it. Ice cream sandwich. While you're opening this ice cream sandwich, let me ask you this. So, how do you avoid overturning on high butter fat recipes?
Or do you just like do you have to alter your machines, for instance? They're not high butter fat. I thought you said you did use uh like a a large ratio of a using lighter cream. Yeah, we use low butter fat cream, and we also keep our ratio adjusted based on sugar content. So we don't we have a very rarely do we have an overrun issue.
Very rarely does that happen where we're overturning. Yeah. Only on something like that olive oil chocolate where we've added that other fat to it and we're still kind of like playing with make sure. I feel like this one we tasted it and you're getting that flavor of the olive oil, but it's not um it's not predominant, and we couldn't really back down the olive oil any further than that than where it is right there. Wouldn't the olive oil?
I mean, I'm I don't know, I've never done it, but wouldn't the olive oil actually kind of protect protect against overturning because it would stop the butter from break. Olive oil will break out of it. Yeah, it'll break out of it. You you can't I mean you could you know take it apart with a microscope and be like, what broke? But it's broken.
The olive oil is separating out. So I broke this in half for you guys, it's soft enough. But just get a little bite. Um so this is uh the Axon Bronson ice cream sandwich. This has been very popular.
It's inspired by my favorite ice cream sandwich of all time, um, the It's It from San Francisco, where I'm from. Um, and so you have a little Nilla wafer there that we made in house. You have some banana caramel in there, the banana pudding ice cream, and then there's a chocolate shell on the outside of that thing. Um that's been pretty popular, this thing. It's really good.
This has been a uh this has been a hit. It's serious. That's a five ounce ice cream sandwich. It's a nightmare for your worker because the banana is very present and it creates noises when you eat it. So it's not a good scene.
Nowhere near it. Nowhere near it. Does he have to make them? Now now it's a disease. Now it's a heath.
Um, they do not have to make them. I'm getting better at that. So you know what? I think it's always better to use the uh the under uh ungendered third person anyway. It's very complicated though, it's tricky to do.
We're trying to remember that. It's it's not easy to do nowadays. Uh so we should talk a little bit about something that I think you can speak to, which is menu matrix. Um Morganstern's transacts so many people. That family showed.
Really? Yeah. Um I needed the expletive right there. That we over the weekend we probably transacted I don't know, it's something it's not even warm out yet, but it was over a thousand people. So there's a thousand experiences happening that have to happen really fast and that with the way that they interact with the menu is ultimately what defines whether they're gonna come back again or not.
I mean the product has to be good and all those other things, but with eighty-eight flavors on the menu, hopefully you have like enough choices that someone sees something that they have to have and something else that maybe they want to have the next time they come. That's a big part of how we, you know, get people hooked in and they want to keep coming back and try what we do. So when I went to the bar, I went to existing conditions two weeks ago and I saw that like you have a pretty substantial selection going on there. So it's no death and co, but yeah, we have a good idea. I'm not comparing I'm not I don't th I mean whether it's relative or not, just like objectively coming in and looking at it.
There was all I think it was the right amount. It wasn't overwhelming for me. Sometimes I go to places and I'm like, There's too much information, I can't make a choice. Which is what people say about Morgan Sterns quite a bit, but they do keep coming back. Well, do you bullet it out?
I mean, I think bulleting out is the main thing. If people can hone in on a chunk. Like this is like the problem. So when you say bullet, we categorize. Right.
Yeah. So it's like I think that I think overwhelm the like if you look at a Greek diner menu. You know what I mean? You're like, ah even and those are the same things. Well, if you look at the Shopsons menu.
I know I've never been. You should go. That's an important experience to have as a New Yorker man, really. I'm serious. I mean, I and I live right there.
You've been to Katz's. Oh, yeah. And like Katz's can have like you can you can be up or down or whatever it is, but I still love going to Second Avenue Delhi myself. I'm not from here, but those experiences, even when they're not good, they're great because they are so true to what they are and where they are. And so Shopson's is something.
I literally live two blocks from the Essex Street market. Got it. So it's like uh I'm right down there too. I live in the same neighborhood. Yeah.
I'm on Elizabeth Street now in Chinatown, but close. Yeah, for those of you that don't know New York, it's a very small we're talking about a very small radius. We're neighbors. We should be throwing rocks at each other. Well, there's not that many rocks around.
You have to break apart the sidewalk. I mean construction site. Yeah, we can throw pigeons. Um the Oh my construction site. Wait, so to me, I think um if you just list everything, then you're ruined.
You know what I mean? But if you bullet stuff out and people can be like, okay, like at our menu, it's you know, it's it's fundamentally like is it is it served on a r up on a rock, is it shaken, is it carbonated, is it non-alcoholic? And each one of those is only like somewhere between four and and eight drinks. And so it's easy to kind of consume sections. But you find that the consumer would rather um search by category on the that style versus the spirit.
Um, I mean for us, well I would say for us, because we're, you know, a group of people, so I won't speak for them. For me, um I don't I start more from what style of drink am I gonna have. I very rarely start with spirit. Okay. Uh me personally, which is weird because when you're when I'm talking to a guest, like what you you kind of have to because it's been beaten into you.
You ask them about spirit first. Whereas for me, I'm always like, Well, what are you looking for? Are you looking for something more refreshing? Are you looking for something more spirit forward? Because then I can say, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna push you to carbonated and stirred drinks, am I gonna push uh carbonated and shaking drinks, or am I gonna push you into stirred and and built drinks?
So I like that's where I and then and then I'm like, okay, are you looking for bitter? And then if I and if if they are not interested in having that kind of conversation, if I'm getting that vibe off them that I'm not interested, they're not interested in having that conversation with me. Then I'm like, okay, well, what spirits do you normally drink? Because like I clearly start also what ice cream do you usually like? Right, right, right.
But I do think I'd be really curious to see how it was for you guys there. You have a large menu and you have a big enough space where there's like enough volume running through there to say, what if you were categorizing by flavor profile, not by spirit, but like you have a lot of fruit representation on your menu, which is really cool for someone like me. A fruity guy. Great. And that's it's like it makes the experience um more it's kind of more fun to see that those flavors are coming through, and because of your knowledge and what you do and how um exacting you are for like pulling that stuff out, literally pulling out those flavors, then you know when you go there when you drink that drink, it's really gonna taste like that thing.
And I wonder if your consumer would respond to that if you were putting it out there in the category as far as the flavor profile. I don't know. It's interesting. If you put a banana category, if you put a citrus category and so on, would that, and then the spirit comes next, and the style is listed that way. There's any number of ways, obviously, to like organize the information.
I remember we had the fight when we were starting. But again, there's just so many stakeholders. Why does it gotta be a fight, dude? Uh it's always a fight. Oh, Jesus.
I'm solo, by the way. Really? So it's like I look, I I have to say that I think collaboration makes me better personally. It's challenging, yes. Yeah, I don't think that's true for everyone, but it is true for me.
It is true for everyone. Yeah. I mean some resistance is gonna get you gonna do things that you wouldn't otherwise do, yeah. People that you know, um everyone, listeners here, too. I'm not talking about just us, right?
Look at the people you know that don't have checks on them. They are small children. They become small children. You know what I mean? And uh but the checks can come in different ways, like different forms as far as like how you're buffered.
I'm buffered by the fact that we have to balance our budget and we don't have endless amounts of money behind us, and we have to be able to operate something that's operating, so then we have to operate it. And consumers are a big check. Uh yeah, that is the budget, is the consumer. You know, but like, yeah, it's like, oh, I was wrong. People don't like this.
Right. Oh. You know what I mean? Like, yes, we have that experience all the time. Yeah.
I think something's gonna work, it's gonna be amazing, a flavor that we thought was gonna be great, and it doesn't move, and we move it off the menu. So the most depressing thing that's happened to me with menu. Uh it's so Don Lee, my partner at the at the bar, um, one of my partners uh at the bar, he is like, Look, just name this thing. We have this drink that's got this super salty water that we get from Saratoga. It's called the Saratoga Paloma, right?
I didn't want it to be called a Paloma because it didn't, it has some of the same Paloma's got freaking squirt in it, right? It's got grapefruit soda. We don't use grapefruit soda. Does a paloma have to have squirt in it? That's the same thing.
Well, I mean, that's what it is. You know what I mean? And then, like, it and you know, so it's got this kind of thing. So, like, this is like this crazy water from Saratoga that nobody else has that's not in any Paloma. We're using clarified grapefruit, right?
We're re-adding everything and carbonating it like together, right? And it didn't come from the idea of a paloma, it came more from if frankly, from just wanting to use this water and like pushing it in, pushing it in the direction of grapefruit because salt and grapefruit and you know tequila. With a lot of things, though. Right, no, but I I use a lot of grapefruit juice anyway. One of my big drinks at Booker and Dax was was uh gin and juice.
Like I have like a long personal history with clarified grapefruit juice. Like I just I love it. So, like it's one of my kind of go-to things. That still doesn't mean that you had to use it for that drink. No, but I know I created the drink because that's the drink I wanted to make.
Okay, and then it was post-labeled as a paloma, right? Even though, like, you can count on zero hands the number of palomas that have been made with super salty water. Okay. Or or with clarified grapefruit juice for that matter. You know what I mean?
So, because uh ding ding, grapefruit soda, I like it by the way, fresca, delicious, does not taste like grapefruits. True, yes. In a way that apple jacks does not taste like apples, true. Yeah, I agree. I agree.
An old school fake banana doesn't taste like banana. But you can't, but you can't divor you cannot divorce those two things. Like that whole process that you're saying that you're struggling with, and someone else was saying you should think about calling it a paloma because that's gonna be the way that people are gonna look at it. Right. And so he won that battle.
We called it the Saratoga Paloma. You lost. And we sold are still selling a boat ton of them. A crap ton of them. And he's like, it's because it's called Paloma.
And I was like, Don, there's no A B. There's no freaking A B. We don't. And what I wanted to do, and I'm not, I don't think we're gonna do this. I want to have You want to change the name?
No, no, no. I want to have the exact same drink on the menu in two places with two different names. The exact same drink, and then see which one's because we have another one. So Garrett. What?
What would you call it? Don't tell anyone now. Like so Garrett has his drink on the on the menu. Garrett, our uh our tiki fiend. Uh he he had a drink that uh is called Don.
It was it's it's called Beachcomber Negroni. I saw it. Yeah. So uh and we sell a lot of it. And Don's like, it's cause it's got the word Negroni in it.
And then so then, like, we took off one of our Houstinos off the menu. Which one? Uh we took off um Professor Plum, which was a prune Houstino, into Elijah Craig Bourbon. Delicious. And we swapped it out for a um compass box and uh date Houstino, which is good.
Uh I think wait, date or fig. I can't remember which one we put on because I like both. Uh anyway, so like um he put that on and we appended the word f old fashioned. It's fig. Fig old fashioned, and we sell a lot of it, and Don's like, it's cause it's got the word old fashioned in it.
Don sounds like a marketing genius. As far as I can tell. But I've never met the guy, but yeah, but like I just hate it so much. Why? Because I just hate that it's that easy to push people around.
You know what I mean? It's like that they're not like that. We are all part of the herd, Dave. Even you. Yeah, I know.
I know. That's what I'm saying. But it's like You are at times being herded. In spite of my rage. And you need the hurting.
I am still just a rat in a cage. Exactly. You know what I mean? Yes, I do. We all need to be herded sometimes, though.
We do. Have you not ever sat down at looked at the menu and just been like, ugh, yeah, just I just need to get that. I don't know. What am I doing? I can't think about this.
Okay, so most people don't think about this as much as you think about it. So like I am perfectly fine with this. Because this is the way I am. I hate choice. First of all, I hate choice.
And as Estasi knows, if you go out to eat with me, I I insist on ordering last. Yeah. I don't know why. Because you want to see what everyone else is doing. Yes.
Yep. Yes. Anyway, so like the thing is, uh it's not that it changes, but like I'm kind of always on the fence in my mind between a couple of things anyway, so I it has to go around. I don't know. I don't know.
I'm uh I've got problems. Listen. So, like, but I my favorite thing to do, and I hate it when people can't handle it, because a lot of servers can't handle it. I'm like, listen, I haven't been here before. I might never come in here again.
I like almost everything. Just bring me something that's representative of what you do. You know what I mean? And like You do that? Yeah.
Wow. And I'm like. How often does that wind up well? Uh so sometimes it ends up really well if they take it right. You know what I mean?
If they don't take it right. But are you making the estimation that you're gonna do that once you have gauged your server's ability to understand your particular psychosis? Well, it's like you try to get a read off someone. Like you could tell if you ask them questions and they're clearly pointing you towards just what's easy for them to sell or hide inside and whatever it is. But it's, you know, especially like I'll go to a town and I I don't know anything about the town or like what they do there.
And then I'm looking at this menu and I'm like, I'm told I should go here. Like I go to a, let's say I go to a barbecue joint. The first time I was in Kansas City, I went to like, you know, that barbecue joint at the gas station. And I'm like, listen, I know a lot about North Carolina barbecue. I know something about Texas barbecue.
I've never been to Kansas City before. What is it I need to have here? You know what I mean? But you're describing a scenario that's not the one that I'm describing, which is when you're just like, I you go to you're going somewhere very specific. You know that you're gonna have an experience and you need them to guide you because that you need to be guided.
I I subscribe to the same philosophy. If I go someplace and I'm just like, tell me what it is that you guys do here and let me experience what it is. And if I want to add on to it and augment it based on my own taste, then I'll do that. But there's certainly times in my life where I'm just like exhausted or can't be bothered, and I need to eat, and I'm like at a place and I'm like, all right, I don't, you know, I understand that sometimes people don't really want to have to choose. Choosing is work.
So it is, it's yeah, hate choice. Okay, so it's energy. You have to like deal with it. And so, but you're writing menus and you're fighting against the fact that putting on the tag name Negroni or old fashioned or whatever else is actually making it easier for people to make the selection. Yeah, well, Don is often right.
Marketing genius. Don, Don, Don Lee. Uh, he's not listening, thank God. So I can say on air that he is often right. But but it it doesn't mean someone's gonna point him to this.
It doesn't mean that it has to make me happy. Okay, so you are disturbed by the fact that he's right, or you're disturbed by the fact that he otherwise is just winning this fight. The whole thing disturbs me. Okay, not to get off the side. So, okay, so so wait, so I want to hear more.
Check back in in September on what happened with your two cocktails, same cocktail, different names. I want to know what happened. If we ever did so, so Nastasi wanted me to say this uh quickly. We were at the bar. So Nastasi and I, the way this works is that Booker and Dax, and by the way, we talk like right before the rip is off, we'll talk about uh spin spins all updates.
Uh because we got the new spins all in. Oh, jeez. Can you give me one of those to borrow and use for a week and I'll bring it up? So listen, so listen, so Nastasi and I don't have an office anymore. It's just the two of us plus Matthew and Hong Kong Chris.
That's the whole company. And uh so what the way we operate is we get on the phone and yell at each other constantly. Understood. So like we're meeting at the bar because we're gonna go do this French fry shoot with Harold McGee that we did last week for 0.0 that Nastasia posted our tests for, and apparently it's the the greatest, it's the greatest video that Nastasi and I have ever done. Like people were like, you know, to talk about see how the sausage is made.
It's just us yelling at each other the whole time. So we show up at the bar, and don't like we say they're having a photo shoot, a huge photo shoot at the bar. The whole bar is filled with. It's like two o'clock in the afternoon. Two o'clock in the afternoon.
Who's having a huge photo shoot? The the bar. They were shooting a bunch of drinks for something that I didn't have to work on. We're talking about your bar. My bar.
So you say we were having a big photo shoot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Existing conditions having to go. So like so Nastasi and I show up and we show up separately, and then within two sentences of talking to each other, we were full out screaming at each other. Everyone was just like, what the hell?
You know what I mean? I don't know how that happened. Oh, it's nasty. But Nastasia like gets mad at me, and then she knows how to, she's like, I am mad. I want Dave to be mad.
But the problem with me is is that I go from being totally fine to not fine. Quickly. Well, with Nastasia, especially, because it's the same button. It's like it's like if someone new comes up and starts punching me in the shoulder, it'll take me like three months before I get really agitated. You know what I mean?
Yes, I do. But after 10 years, she knows she's punching the exact same place on my shoulder. Yes. I'm like, I told you about the shoulder, damn it! You know what I mean?
It's like, and so she knows how to And you're the same. You know what I mean? You know this comes through on the show. I don't know. All right, we gotta go, Dave.
Whoa! Hold up. So uh I didn't get to any of the questions except for I will say this. Uh Matt Hall called in with a liquid intelligence life hack. Liquid Intelligence is my book.
And as you know, Nastasia uses it. Uh, for instance, if she was taking a pint of your ice cream out of your establishment. But they also made me make lasagna, and I'm taking both of a potlack. Right. So then she would use my book as the thing that separates the ice cream from the lasagna, and it's the right size to stop the heat transfer during the transfer in the bag, but it's not too heavy.
So she uses it as as an insulator. Yeah, I could make her a styrofoam insulator, which would be a lot lighter, but she likes to use my book. Yep. Uh so here's another uh liquid intelligence life hack from Matt Hall. Uh I'm new to Instagram and may have screwed things up, but I tried to send Dave a picture of my wife using liquid intelligence as a mouse pad.
She does this basically every night. I thought you might like to know that the book can be used for more than separating hot and cold foods. Dave, can I have a copy of your book? Brilliant. Yeah, sure.
Uh uh then, okay, we had an update which we're not gonna have time apparently to get to from uh Alex on he cooked his Canadian geese that were shot out of the sky in Toronto. So next week we'll read uh about that. We have some soda problems we have to deal with for Daniel next week in Cleveland. Uh we have someone uh I'll just do this real quick. Uh Paris wrote in and is trying to make pretzels, but trying to deep fry the pretzels and is doing the lie dip uh at the here's the thing.
You need to do the lie dip. Paris is par baking this before before uh frying it, but doing the lie dip after the par bake. You do the live dip before the par bake because you're starting the Mayard and stuff, and I think if you do the let it sit for a while. So if you do your dip in the hot lie, it should be hot lye or hot, you know, sodium carbonate, uh, pull it out, then do your par bake, let it sit for a while. Yes, basic things ruin ruin oil.
They saponify the oil. Whether it's a huge factor, I don't know if it's gonna be a huge factor, but I know that if you go hot out of the oven into the lie, wet into the oil, gonna be problems. So uh do that. That's a hazard. Yeah.
Uh Remy is doing a fundraising dinner with liquid nitrogen. I have tips, but I'll have to get to them next week because there's too much to say. And we, Mr. Morgan Stern, did not get to talk about the history of the Sunday, which Nastasia made me research. No, Rebecca did.
Rebecca or Rebecca? Yeah. So uh I'm happy to come back. Alright, we'll talk about the we'll talk about the summer with new flavors. What do you think about the banana split?
What do you mean? What do you like? Do you like it? Yeah. It's like the second most important thing.
Is this like probably works with you? Second. What's the first? Regular one? Regular like.
Listen, the banana splits, the banana split. I went on the Wikipedia, and these garbage faces had a banana split. It wasn't in any form of boat. Dude, I was gonna bring the banana boat over here. I have we have uh we have eight of the vintage, like they're from the 40s, and they're they're shaped like a banana and they're big, they look like a banana, they're cast, they're yellow, they're beautiful, and they fit a banana.
It's gotta be in a boat. Yeah, it's gotta be in a boat. Banana split eating experience is really critical. I love, I don't like a lot of the things that are like I don't really like some of the stuff that's in, but a banana split's great. Let's talk about what's in a banana split real quick.
Okay, okay. So that's gonna ask you are you how hyper traditional spee as a dairy queen man? So hyper traditional. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network, food radio supported by you. For our freshest content and to learn more about our tenure anniversary celebration happening all year long.
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