Today's program was brought to you by Patina Events at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, an idyllic location for weddings, corporate events, and parties of any style. Visit us at patinaevents.com. This week on Meet and Three, we're getting semantic to understand the deeper meaning behind some of the foods we love. First, we'll look at the big debate happening around the word milk. Who the hell are you to tell me what is the name of my product and my landscape and everything we've cared about when you know you don't have anything invested in except to put out a little money to buy it?
Then we get the lowdown on the language of cider. So the first thing that's really confusing about dryness is that it has nothing to do with how something actually feels in your mouth. And finally, we get our fill of tiki talk. You don't walk into a tiki bar be like, oh yeah, this is what Polynesia is probably like. Like it's it's supposed to be like fantasy and stuff.
That's the hard part. It's so easy to do tiki bad, and that's where it gets a bad name. Tune into this week's episode of Meet and Three. That's M-E-A-T plus sign T H R E E. Available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Hello and welcome to Google. Early! We're still going. What's happening? Am I on that?
Uh Jesus. Yes! Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, you're also cooking issues coming to you live on Heritage Radio Network. And listen, people, I was here before the clock turned 1201.
Not on time. Before the clock turned before the clock turned 1201, I ran with a spinzall, all of my clothes, and gear to go to Houston from the subway, and I made it here before it turned 1201. I called in to our our illustrious radio station here, which has no cell service, and said, start the announcements now so that we don't have to wait for me to get in. But no, there is no there is no communication into the box. Nastassi just goes like this, I can't hear you, Dave.
I can't hear, I can't hear you, Dave. And then I get here. So I want all of you guys to know I'm here before 1201. Suck it and blow it out your backside haters. Suck it.
I take full responsibility for our incredibly late start. Glad we're off to such a good start today. So as usual, we have uh Anastasia Hammer Lopez. How you doing? Fine.
Yeah? We got Kat in the booth. I don't know why. She's just here with a camera. I don't really know.
She's not out of micro. Sit at the microphone. You know you can't be in here without being in a microphone. You make it behind? This is we're getting really good quality clips of cat walking.
Yeah, we got we got uh you got good clomp. You got clook good clump on the mics there. She's clomping. Street, sweet. Uh I got Matt in the booth.
How are you doing, Matt? I'm feeling great. We already have a caller, in fact, but we can, you know, we can wait a minute. You can wait like 35, 40 seconds, something on that uh in that range. And we have as our special guest today, uh author, podcaster, marketing, uh genius, entrepreneur, lover of food, uh Seth Godin.
How you doing? I am fantastic. So, how would you like us to call in all of like so uh, you know, uh in preparation, I was reading and listening to some of the podcasts. I'm gonna characterize kind of what I'm getting, which is you're trying to help people figure out how to do something if they don't necessarily know the best way to get from A to B. They know they want to move, they know they want to make something, but they're not sure that they have kind of the best strategy to get there.
Is that fair? That's part of it. I think culture is a system, and if you see how the system works, you can make culture work for you and not against you. And I think that people are afraid to make things better, and I am trying to encourage them to make things better. Like you, I am against the enemies of quality.
Exactly. Yeah. Seth brought brought us some uh small wooden kind of ice cream spoody things that say enemies of quality on enemy of quality, which I I very much appreciate. Laser those? Yeah.
I have an interesting laser story we can talk about if we have time later. I was saying we could talk about, if you're interested, later we can talk about new design machines, old design machines, and the systems, and then lack of repairability on some of the new designed machines, uh and how that works out. But in the meantime, uh, since uh we have a caller, why don't we uh I'm sweating like a I'm sweating like a just about to be executed pig. Uh why don't we take that caller? Caller, you're on the air.
Yeah, hi, how's it going? Uh my name is Steven from Washington, D.C. How you doing? Good. How are you?
All right. Um, so I I have a competition barbecue question for you. Shoot. Go. Cool.
Um, so you know, I have I have uh not a ton of experience. I'm about to enter my first like Kansas City Barbecue Society competition, and I've got some real questions about brisket. Okay. And so, you know, they do a lot of different injections uh that you can find kind of uh these these proprietary blends of things you can inject your brisket with. And so there's always cooked a beef stock, and then there's matter and other ingredients.
So they put a lot of sodium glutamate in it, they put uh sodium phosphate in it. Yep. Um they put sometimes there's like hydr hydrolyzed uh plant-based proteins. Yeah, so I was wondering like if you could point me in the right direction on how to start about one on my own if I have all those individual components. Okay, so I mean all those are there because i here's what they're worried about.
They're barbecue is delicious. Before anyone jumps on me, you like barbecue, Seth? Uh-huh. Vegetarian? I don't eat meat.
No eat meat. Fine. If I ate meat, I would love barbecue. Okay, okay. So the the issue with barbecue is is that the the everyone wants to do it in kind of a traditional way, and the and the enemy of barbecue is kind is is dry dried and moisture management.
Moisture management. It's the miracle of moisture management. So that's what all those ingredients are there for. They're allowing you to beat the snot out of the meat and still maintain some moisture in it. So the hydrolyzed vegetable protein is there uh as a uh water holding agent.
The phosphates are there as a uh a water holding that actually makes the meat itself hold on to its water better at higher temperatures. And uh I forget what the other one you said was there's oh the the the meat stock is there just to inject flavor into it and extra moisture that's gonna be pumped out of it as you deliciously but viciously overcook it in the barbecue process. Um so I mean all those things uh you know, all those things work. I mean, y they the I don't remember the percentages. Um you know, but you can look up uh like I I used to I did once uh I don't know if any of you remember remember Josh Azerski?
Yeah. The uh he d he once he was obsessed with juiciness. He was obsessed. He kept Dave, juicy steaks. Let's go talk about juicy steaks.
He took me most uncomfortable dinner I've ever had in my life. The most uncomfortable lunch I've ever had in my life is with Nastasia Lopez, where she was completely angered that we were listening to somebody's discussion of their bowel ailments and other things, and in return got to taste more citrus than we have ever seen in our entire lives. But she has still never forgiven me for forcing her to sit through that uncomfortable lunch. The most uncomfortable dinner I ever had was at a strip club when Adam Perry Lang was, I would believe it was the Penthouse Club or something out of the strip. Anyway, so like I had to eat and discuss juicy steaks while uh you know people around me were getting lap dances, which I don't know for those of you that don't know me, that's not my thing.
Like, like I like I just I didn't appreciate the whole that the atmosphere of it doesn't make sense. It doesn't mix it mixing that kind of stuff with food is not my anyway. Uh so I kind of proved to him that juiciness isn't so important because I took uh sodium polyphi, you know, sodium um uh shimp, you know, uh sodium hexametophosphate, and uh brined it into a steak and made the steak increase its uh weight by about 10-15% in water, and then cooked it, and lo and behold, I had a juicy but not so flavorful steak. So mostly, you know, back in the old days, people would make stuff uh and it would be fine with without any of that. I think all of that stuff's just giving you wiggle room.
And so I don't really I'm also not opposed to it, I'm not opposed to it. The MSG is gonna you know increase the flavor profile. I would just say, I would just start with some tests. Don't go too high on MSG. I think that's the mistake people make is that when you when you start add a little bit of MSG, it's great, and then all of a sudden you can tell that MSG was added, and as soon as you can tell MSG was added, it's a little bit off-putting.
Uh in the same way that like, ooh, salt, ooh, that's good, ooh, salt, salt, salt. And then at a certain point, that little bit of extra salt, you're like, ooh, my ooh my, that's salty. But like MSG, I think has a sharper inflection point. There's a wider range of properly salted things than there is a wide range of properly MSG'd things. The uh the shimp, the sodium hexametophosphate, or whatever sodium, you know, whatever phosphates you're using, you're not gonna really, I don't think.
I mean, we you can look up the literature on it. Uh, but that stuff's fairly widely available uh online. If you just type in phosphates, water holding capacity, uh meat, just like type those things like phosphates, water holding capacity, meat. Like that stuff is pretty well defined even on the on the you can go find it literature in the non-technical literature because uh industrial and commercial people use it. Uh, you know, I'm not against that either, but just realize that you know you're injecting hopefully with meat stock or something with flavor because there's a whole group of people I happen to disagree with them, but people like Kenji who are anti-any sort of what adding water to meat because you're not adding uh it's not flavorful to water that you're adding up.
You know, I I don't agree with that. Also, like, you know, there's uh Harold McGee, who you know I love and respect, also at one point said not to brine turkeys because then it made the gravy inedible. Uh you know, I have workarounds for that. Look, for every work for everything that you for every application of a technology or ingredient, there's secondary things you need to change. So, you know, I think all of it's valid when done, when done properly.
Um have I answered this question? Well, if you want to win, there are only two ways to win. You win by fitting in all the way or standing out all the way. So to fit in all the way, you have to do it the way the current people are doing it, but even more. And if you want to win by standing out, you have to do it differently than the people who are winning or doing it, and that's the first choice you gotta make.
Seth should be here every time. Well, I thought I've gotta I've got a plan or uh a part B for that question related to that. Nastasi's gonna kill you, but hurry up. What do you got? So uh convention they say that you know, internal temperature for brisket should be somewhere between 195 and and like 205 dish.
Why is it so high? Why don't they smoke to 150 uh lower than that? Oh, it well, it's be look, first of all, when you're dealing with a traditional product, I'm gonna go back to what I'm gonna just gonna every every for every question is gonna go back to what Seth says. What you're shooting for is traditional brisket product, and traditional brisket, if you cook it normally, i.e. don't overcook it, right?
It's incredibly tough because the connective tissue makes it uh almost inedible at that point. So the traditional way of of cooking it is to cook it to a very high temperature such that the gel such that the collagen and connective tissues render into gelatin. It's that gelatin that gives you the uh the appearance that you haven't viciously overcooked it, makes it quote unquote fork tender. But those what you're fork tendering it into are kind of shreds of viciously overcooked meat, right? Now, that's the texture people are shooting for, and so that that's kind of what they're looking for.
They're looking for a juicy equivalent of that meat that can be pulled apart with a fork. And at 150, it's never gonna it it will it won't do that. What will happen instead? Let's say you were to cook it for 72 hours at a low temperature, those fibers won't get as hard, right? They won't get like flaky apart like that, they'll get more mushy, you'll get softer.
That's also not what they're looking for. And so I think you know, Seth is completely accurate here, and he's saying, do what they want just more. That's why they're adding MSG. It's what they want, but more. You know, like a little bit more liquid, a little bit more beef flavor.
It's what everyone's looking for, but more. If you go outside of their textural parameters, you're gonna lose. I I'm gonna have to say that in competition food competitions, especially, I've never seen anyone win by going completely outside of the box. I call this losing with style, and I think this is a a a valid thing to do, and I have lost many contests with, I've believe, immense style. And there's honor in this.
Uh, but in general, uh you know, it's you know, you never, you never win in those kind of things other than by choice one, which is to do what they're doing, but more so. Well said. Okay. Okay. Awesome.
Well, on that note, I'm gonna play around with some koji, so I'll let you know how it goes with the brisket. Cool, thanks. Thanks, bud. All right, so Seth, what'd you bring us today? Well, I I I brought you a rye bread.
There was a lot of debate. Should I bring you dal? Should I Dosa? I couldn't bring you. Because it wouldn't last.
It wouldn't last. Um but instead I went with the rye bread. I have a little grinder in my basement, and I buy the rye berries at Union Square Market. And the only ingredients I add are two kinds of barley malt, the powdered one and the liquid one, and walnuts. That's it.
I have to add walnuts, even though my friend Ishita is deathly allergic to them. I just put a little sign up. No walnuts. Do not eat these, yeah, yeah. You know, I hope someday they can kick these allergies.
Uh yeah, I they're making progress. So here's the secret of the rye bread. The secret of the rye bread is it's 12-hour bake. So you have the super low and so this is like like full-on, like I would call it German style fork full corn broat, like long, long bake, turns dark on its own, no caramel color, et cetera, et cetera. No caramel color, but I I cook it at 475 for an hour and a half, then I turn the oven off and go to bed.
So, how much do you dislike people who associate the flavor of rye with the flavor of caraway seeds? Oh, there's no uh like yeah, epochs on them. Yeah, right. I think that's accurate. Most rye bread isn't has no rye in it, or just uh like they wave a rye berry over the thing.
Right, and it's in the ones that use it are like uh like the what's this what's the standard? Uh the standard American deli rye, uh New York deli rye is well, what's it called? Levi's, levees? What's it called? You don't have to be Jewish to like levee's rye bread.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh it's fine. It's a fine sandwich bread, by the way. It's a fine sandwich bread, but uh it's the rye is totally refined. I get almost no rye flavor.
So that's so so for those of you that don't eat uh you know the Danes also have a uh a full con full corn broat uh oh yeah there's some really good Danish stuff. It's that whole middle and northern uh of Europe they know listen. We're talking, smells great. We're talking like this is like uh for those of you that live in lands where this is only in a supermarket, the brand of full corn broat you can get is relatively moist. Uh uh messer, what's it messer, Messermacher, Messermeyer?
The one that comes like in a square and it's all sliced up and it sits there for a week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good. Yes, if you taste it. It's it's it's very tart and kind of moist, but it's like you are you for that thinness level?
Yeah, I like it. When I cut this, I cut it as thin as I can. Oh, here why don't you go? I'll try not to cut anybody when I get it. You know cut into the mic.
Now, I don't know if you know this, but listeners of the show don't mind cutting noises, but hate mouth noises. They hate it. Yeah. Let me see here. I'm gonna put my glasses on.
There are mouth noises about to occur, though. I I I don't know how to apologize for that. Nastasia, there you go. It's gonna become an ASMR show. I'll just I'll just bleep the next 10 minutes of the show.
Do you know that like my son Dax has started saying whatever the initials are, whatever the acronym is, and he doesn't have any idea what it means. I don't think he watches that stuff. You ready for a mouth noise? I think people don't mind this particular noise. It's the it's the formp womp womp they don't like.
It has to be a low moisture noise. Okay, uh crushes. That's okay. But now it's that, yeah. Sorry, I forgot to bring radio friendly food.
That was my fault. I can handle it. The feedback is welcome. Oh, the maltiness really comes through. You think the this, well, the sweetness is conversion from are you using diastatic malt?
Are you using completely sorry? It's got like a it's I'm gonna eat during the commercial break. I'm gonna eat more. But it's definitely got a sweetness. I like it.
I like it. I quite like it. I would like some cheese. Yeah, it's great. I'm gonna take some to Matt.
I've gotta go. What? It was so great to be here. Thanks for watching. Well, we haven't even got a chance to uh mess with you.
It was very thoughtful. I am so sad. I will say the mezcal tasting that I talked about last week is in the times today. Yeah. It's gonna be you, Dave.
Uh, how is it thank well? Because we talked about it last week. Yeah. So when is the mezcal taste? It is April 26th, which is a Friday at 6 30 p.m.
just down the street at El Cortez. Do people have to reserve in advance? There are tickets available online. Where do they go? HeritageRadio Network.org/slash sacred.
Okay. S-A-C-R-E-D. That's right. Perfect. Thanks, Seth.
Seth Godin for the win. Seth's so nice to meet. Wow. I was saying we need to have him here. We need to have him here all the time.
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Executive Chef Morgan Jarrett's unique menu offers warm, distinctive cuisine with a focus on local vegetables, grains, and sustainably sourced meats and fish. Hey, are you enjoying this podcast? Heritage Radio Network has plenty more. My name is Kathy Irwin, and I'm the host of Eat Your Words here on HRN. Every week I sit down with food writers to talk about their newest work.
From colorful cookbooks to food memoirs to expose on the food industry. It's all meaty topic for discussion. You can find Eat Your Words wherever you listen to podcasts and on HeritageRadio Network.org. Hey David Alex is Alex from Long Beach. How y'all doing?
Alright, how you doing? Doing fine. I have two questions. One relating to carbonation and one relating to uh a little combine I have. Related to carbonation, I have a little taggerator that I use, the carbonate water.
I live in an apartment. I do it at 34 Fahrenheit and 45 PSI, and it just comes out amazingly fat. I give myself a little aesthetic bath each time I do it. I'm wondering if there's any quality of life improvement I can have that doesn't come out blasting at me. Yeah, okay, so you keep the keg in a refrigerator and you carbonate it out out of the refrigerator.
And you're doing it at 45 PSI. What kind of tap is 45? What kind of tap are you using? Whatever came with it. Now that's your mistake.
All those taps are garbage. Yeah, they uh people need to be people need to be. People who sell things don't necessarily understand or use them. This is the secret, one of the secrets I've learned in like my life is that the people just because someone sells it does not actually make them an expert in the usage of said thing. What kind of tubes do you have?
Are they clear vinyl tubes? Correct, yeah. Yeah. The press look, this person might not be a bad human being, but uh like those tubes eventually, I mean, maybe not in your house, but like if you were gonna beat them up or have them in a professional environment, those tubes will fail. Uh I only use braided uh braided tubes so that they don't fail.
Uh also I hate, I hate PVC. If I need to use PVC, if I buy from the beverage suppliers, they sell the cheap braided PVC. It invariably smells bad, makes me very angry. You can get, it's a lot pricier, but you can if you must have a flexible, flexible tube, you can get uh braided uh Tigon. If you buy Tigon on Amazon, people will rip you off and give you regular PVC instead of Tigon.
Tigon's a high purity PVC, and it's still, if you hate PVC, it's still PVC, but it uh it tends not to smell, but it's you know, on the order of like, you know, between like a like two dollars, two dollars fifty, three dollars a foot, somewhere like this. Spring for that. It's a lot more. Yeah, well, it depends on how many feet you're running, and you know, uh, but it you know, gas you can run in a regular braided P VC line. Please don't run gas in an unbraided line.
Eventually someone will puncture it. And then, and if you really need something tough, get the um get the uh polyethylene EVA jacketed stuff. It never imparts any flavor whatsoever. And I've never seen it fail, and I've tried to make it fail. Repeated abuse will not make it fail.
Second thing, when you're filling up a kegerator, uh remember to fill it completely with water and then purge it out with CO2, then pressurize your stuff into it if you want to make sure that there's no air into it, if you're using a carbonator. If you're already getting a good enough, the reason you're foaming is one, your tap stinks. Go get a uh a Becker. Uh don't get the Cornelius one, actually, it's been failing me. Get the Becker uh squeeze valve, get that.
That's the first thing you need to do to put into your line. Those picnic taps are the worst thing that's ever happened. The second reason you're foam, you're putting it, you're not putting it through a cold plate. Second thing you're need, because you're in a kegerator. Second thing I would do is run it through about 15 foot of hose on the inside of your 15, 20 foot of hose on the inside of your refrigerator to give it time to kind of like laminar and slow out before it uh leaves your tap.
Try it. If you if it doesn't help, then take it out. There's no reason to have that extra tube there, but give it a shot. And the third problem is is that you it sounds to me like you have some air in your system. And when you have air, when you haven't purged it, like the thing I told you to get rid of all the air in by either you can you can pressurize and and and uh vent a couple of times at the top the thing to get it to go.
But if any air is remaining in your system uh under pressure, when you release the pressure, the things like nitrogen, which are and oxygen, which are almost completely insoluble, will form micronucleation sites the minute they come out of the tap and foam out on you. So get rid of your air, uh maybe add some tubing uh before the outlet, and please throw away that picnic tap and get a decent tap. And for those of you who aren't yet on the seltzer lifestyle, you have persuaded my son who has built one in my office as well. You've got the nitrogen seltzer, which you don't talk about enough on the air. There's a lot to be said for the seltzer lifestyle.
It's worth a try. You know, like you take water that comes in, which by the way, I hate flat water. I I won't drink it. Like my sons are like, you know, I I will if I have to, but I'm forced to, if I'm dehydrated. But I threaten my family with because I don't want them to put me in seltzerless situations.
Uh like they, you know, I threaten them that I just won't, I will just, I will let myself dehydrate into a raisin rather than eat, you know, drink non-carbonated water. And so they kind of make fun of it of me for it. But uh honestly, you know, it's not it's a little bit of a hurdle to like make your life carbonated, and it's totally worth it, you know. And it's it's actually, you know, it's it if if getting a soda stream is what it takes to get you there, then get it get a soda stream, but there are cheaper ways to have infinite seltzer. Um anyways.
Hopefully I answered that question. Nastasi's like, I don't care. I don't care. All right. So uh what do we want to talk about?
What do I by the way? If you're gonna listen, which one of the podcast you Akimbo is the one that you want people to listen to now or no? That's my podcast. If they want to listen to it, that'd be great. Here is a uh, and uh here is here is an uh a word to the wise.
I am um I'm stubborn, and so like I started listening to it in reverse. I'm like, I'm gonna listen to the most recent stuff first and then go backwards. And I realized, not after the most recent one, because you didn't take questions on the most recent one, but on the one after that, that you were gonna answer questions from the podcast before on this week's podcast, and for some reason, this didn't encourage me to then start working from the back and going up. For some reason, I'm like, I'm just gonna listen to questions without knowing what the heck he's talking about. And I kept on doing that.
And then like later on, I'd be like, oh, now I get what that question was about. Anyway, so you know, a lot, a lot of uh a lot of uh uh, you know, again, it's like you seem to have like a very kind of open view of what a creator is, right? Yeah, and most of the stuff that I've heard you talk about or you know, read the the the work is aimed at people who want to do something, you know, creative writ large. You make new things, make things better, right? Yep.
Focus on make things better. Now, here's a question for someone who runs uh, you know, or helps to run uh a bar uh or a restaurant, or you know, Nastasia ran uh, you know, the the Outlet Apostifly, or Nastasia and I run Booker Index. Right. You're not always, and maybe you shouldn't even always be working with creative people, right? So, like it seems to me that there's kind of a, and the other thing I'm gonna say about your work, and then I'm gonna I'm gonna let you go because this is gonna get kind of like hard for people to understand if they don't already already familiar with your work, is that um a lot of like it, and this is kind of what I like, is that you you're focused a lot on kind of your personal response, personal responsibility, in other words, in inwardly focused, like what you can do about yourself.
And the you know, the more I was reading, the more I'm like, okay, look it. I tell my kids this all the time. Don't be concerned about externalities. In other words, what's fair? Don't be concerned that that person has more money than I do, or that person has some sort of benefit that that I don't have.
Focus only on stuff that you can control about yourself. But the flip side of that is if you can design a if you're designing a system, you do have to worry about kind of fairness, and not everyone can, you know, then I also have to worry about people that can't be creative, and then what does it mean to be good to someone like that? It's not to try to necessarily force them to be better at being creative, right? I mean, like I was with you until the last sentence. Well, I'm in other words, I have people who I think makes them feel completely uncomfortable to there's people who really desire the safety of just knowing what to do.
Right. Yeah, right, right. I'm not in other words, so your point is only I'm gonna let you answer it large, but in other words, your point is that someone who wants that safety net, give them that safety net if that's like give them the chance to be that creative person, but then do you really think we should try to force someone to be that person even if they're not? So the reason that I love the two of you, and I do, and I've been listening since before you were famous and been to the bar, um, is because you have a growth mindset. And the growth mindset says things could be better.
And once you acknowledge that things can be better, the next step is, and I could make them better. That I don't have to make macaroni and cheese the same way every time. I could make my macaroni and cheese better. I believe everyone at one point in their life has made something better. And once you can make something better once, you're a creator.
And if you're a creator, you can do it again. And if we live in a culture where everyone is trying to make things better, then we can have interesting conversations about what does better even mean. Does better mean more open, more diverse? Does better mean just one person wins? Those are interesting conversations.
But we have to begin with, guess what? You can make things better. And my career coincides with the birth of the internet. And what that means is you don't need CBS radio to give you a show. You can make your own show.
You don't need Julia Child to tell you you're allowed to cook something for a recipe. You can make your own recipe. And that's where Kenji came from, right? Like, who was Kenji? Kenji didn't have a permit, but Kenji showed up, shared something he had to say, and some people wanted to hear it.
So, in the face of all that infinity, my argument is see the system, make it better. And that's what I just keep saying over and over and over again. Be responsible for your work, and nothing is fair, but at least you can make it better. Kind of related to that, I'm also a firm believer that uh just because you know there is so many more people doing things now doesn't mean that everyone's that much better. In other words, it doesn't make it that much harder for you to do something if you have something to say.
Right. Because you can be interesting, you don't have to be correct. Right. And also, just because everyone can make well, it's just gonna show my age. Back when people actually wanted to make magazines.
Remember when color when color printers first came out? Yeah. You're like, oh my god, anyone can make a magazine now. You don't need to, you don't need to work to make a magazine wrong. Yeah.
Like you still need to be good to make something good. Just because it's easier to make something glossy doesn't mean it's easy to make something good. Exactly. So, you know, typography ran screaming after they came out with desktop publishing, but true topographers figured out that just because people have fonts doesn't mean they know how to make things that look good. Right, right.
Uh, what do you think about our uh our uh belief in self self in friendly self loathing? Are you alright with that? No, I think it's not all right with that. The reason I'm not alright with it is there are already enough people in the world who want to who get pleasure out of bringing us down, who get pleasure out of criticism. You don't have to do it to yourself.
Yeah, but I don't know. Like I feel, don't you know people who have I guess the drive for self-loathing stops you from becoming complacent, right? If you use it properly, but what it really does is it gives you a place to hide. Yes. Because you're experiencing failure in advance over and over again.
Oh, yeah, but I'm all about the failure. But you're not all about the failure. I'm super pro-failer. Look, here's the thing. If you don't fail, if you if you don't, if you can't handle failure, you'll never gonna you're never gonna succeed.
If you can't handle different kind of failure. Yeah, you're working really hard. I did something to see. But if you fail in advance, you never did it. You're just giving yourself an excuse.
Yeah, yeah. I see what you mean. So you're saying it can be misconstrued. I'm all for doing things. Right.
Totally down with that. It's just what paralyzes people, you know, I'll give a talk and people won't raise their hand. And then at the end they all run up to ask you their secret question. Like, what was wrong with asking me your question in public when I was there to answer your question? Well, it might have been stupid.
So you're willing to ask the quest the stupid question in private, but you're not willing to ask the stupid question in public. That creates a cycle of constant experience of failure in private, which doesn't benefit anyone, versus your generous act of being willing to fail in public because you put something into the world and at least we learned one new thing that doesn't work. Both Nastasia and my partner Don dislike most public questions because they don't think the person actually has a question. They just think that the person, well, what's how the way you put it, they just want to say something. I have a question for Dave.
They want to let Dave know that they've been working on something. Then those are the people that speak up. The people with actual real stuff don't. I don't know. I have no opinion on this.
I know you don't. No publicly shareable opinions on this. Okay, I'm just messing, I'm just messing with you. Here's another one. You have an interesting idea on kind of, and this goes to, I think, to chefs and cooks a lot.
So let's uh you you talk a lot about writer's block. No such thing. No such thing. And it applies to, I would assume any sort of I need to create something. Painting, cooking, right?
Now you want to talk a little bit about your view on writer's block first, and then I can I can't do it. It's controversial. I have been I have been poked and queried on this topic. I think writer's block is invented. No one gets plumber's block.
No one gets walking block. Where did writer's block come from? Well, if you look at the literature, there was it wasn't even used as a term before 1925. It was invented by Ernest Hemingway and the Great American novel. That before that, writing was a thing you did in your spare time, and it wasn't a referendum on your quality as a human, it was just an act that you performed.
And so if we say I don't have any good ideas, what we're really saying is I am not willing to work my way through an unlimited number of bad ideas on my way to finding a good idea. So I was friends with Isaac Asimov years ago. I did a project with him. He wrote 400 books, published 400 books. I said, Isaac, how do you do that?
He said, every morning I sit at this typewriter, 6 30 in the morning, and I type for five and a half hours till noon, and then I'm done. And it doesn't matter if I type something good. I just have to type. And once your brain sees you're gonna type one way or the other, your brain will come up with something decent. And the same thing is true if you're trying to develop a new recipe, if you're trying to open a restaurant, if you're trying to do anything.
If you you're you persuade the resistance, as Pressfield calls it, that you're gonna do it and you keep doing it, sooner or later, one of your bad ideas will turn out to be a good one. So I've blogged every day for 7,000 blog posts in a row, and I don't blog tomorrow because it's perfect. I blog tomorrow because it's tomorrow. So I think you know, part of what might be, I think that's true. Like people think that artists, let's just use artists or writers, they think that there's something uh super impressive going on there from a day-to-day thing, day-to-day standpoint, the same with cooks, anyone else, and I always say to them, having been trained as a visual artist, uh, you know, I am uh a trained artist, as we say.
Um I'm a FA though, it's no lie I do. And uh the truth of the matter is is that the veneration with which we hold uh people in creative positions um means that we don't really understand what those people are doing on a day to day basis. Exactly right. And I try to demystify that because I don't think Bob Dylan is a particular genius. I think he just ships often.
Well, I mean, I mean the ship the shipping is is is the thing. So when we look at people, we we tend to think about the stuff that they put out in public, right? Which, you know, for for a musician, hopefully, writer, you know, hopefully, is there better stuff, right? Or what they think is better. Well, or can be.
Well, we got the guy with the brisket competition, he's finally bringing his brisket into the public. Right, precisely. And that's a cause of anxiety. Right, right. Private brisket is different than public brisket.
Right, right. But my point is is that people ask me this a lot. So I've come up with some bar techniques, some food techniques, things like this. People say, so what's the next? So what's the next uh, you know, what's the next thing?
I'm like, well, how should I know? How should I know what the next thing is? Because, but that's I think where this whole idea comes from that there are these kind of, and there are actually, in fact, massive leaps of understanding that happen through practice. It does happen, you know. Um, but the fact that a matter is that you can't sit in a corner and wait for the good stuff to happen.
You have to be working on a problem. Right. So right now, uh, I'm working on problems with nostalgia on the next pro you know, product that we're gonna make, which we can, I guess, you know, tangentially talk about. Tell us. Uh, but then I, you know, on stuff for the bar, I'm working on certain um kind of technical flow problems, but I'm not working on any problems right now that are gonna come up with a fantastic new style of drink.
I'm not wrong. That's not on the agenda today. Right. I I want to interrupt for one second because you talked about this last week. Uh my wife owns four bakeries, and her chief baking officer invented Fudgy the Whale.
Oh my god. And did they know Tom Carvel? Yes, she worked, she was Tom, she was 18 years old, Tom Carvel was her boss. How was Tom Carvel? Tom Carvel was a fine, fine man.
Oh, that's so nice to know. When when Kathy went to get a mortgage for her house, he was angry at her that he did she didn't just say, Can you back this? And he called the bank officer without telling her to make sure that the mortgage would go through the whole thing. So, Tom, you as you know, you can't leave the stuff in the tailor machine overnight. And so he he was frugal.
He's like, What should we do? We need to make cakes with the leftover ice cream overnight and sell them tomorrow. And he said, So Kathy, and they say necessity mother invention. If Tom had waited for the perfect ice cream cake, there would never have been Fudgy the Whale, because Fudgy the Whale is an imperfect ice cream cake. Whoa.
Did it did it start as fudgy and then get turned into Santa? Or did it's like how did it start? So there were a lot of production problems because the tail was converted. And so one of Kathy's innovations was making Fudgy fudgy, because if you make Fudgy vanilla, he doesn't have the structural integrity. And apparently chocolate or the crumbles or something gives to the tail that thing.
And then there was Cookie Puss and the whole idea of turning him upside down. Cookie Puss. Right. So Kathy talks if you prompt her a little bit about Fudgy the Whale, but I haven't heard all of the originals. Is on point.
And that like to know that I even know someone who came up with the ice cream cake with the crumble in the middle and all that. And I don't think it's just taste memory. I think they're good. I think that they're a good thing. I like them.
Do you like them? I certainly have a Prussian relationship with them. I don't think I would go out of my way to have one today. I mean, but they're better than I mean they're better than most anything. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I mean, no offense, Baskin Robbins, but I mean offense, Baskin Robbins. We can say offense to Basic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know what I mean?
Like, come on, Carvel. And the memory for anyone who grew up on the East Coast, Wednesdays and Sundays at Carvel. I mean, the guy was Tom Carvel, unbelievable. I'm glad to know he was a good guy. You know, uh, does it bother you when you find out that people that you used to look up to were just vile?
Yeah, it does. And one of the things I've tried really hard to do is separate the work from the worker, because otherwise we're just gonna have to throw out so many things that mattered to us. Well, and I think going forward that's gonna become more and more of a kind of a problem. I think there's you know, once people have been dead for a while, they kind of no one goes and dredges up their stuff, or you just don't care anymore. I mean, people people aren't like, well, I'm not gonna listen to Wagner.
Right. You're like, well, you you are kinda. You know what I mean? It's like uh, you know, but uh it's tough to say. I mean, you know, I remember when I used to really idolize Chuck Yeager, who's uh you know, a famous uh test pilot.
Right. And then, you know, when I was a kid, when I still idolized him, I found out that, you know, he was one of the people who uh was and this may be wrong, but this is what I was told, and it affected the way I viewed it, was one of the guys who prevented uh African American astronauts from having a lot of people. I was just gonna mention that new book coming out in four weeks. It's so good about the uh the m Apollo mission on the 50th anniversary, and Chuck Yeager's got three pages in it. And does it verify it?
It totally verifies and so like But mostly he was doing it because he got told to do it and he didn't like being told what to do. Oh no. I mean, I met him when I was a kid. I used to go to the experimental aircraft association meeting at Oshkosh to fly in. Cool.
And uh, you know, I had a copy of his, you know, his book with him on the front with the Bell X One, which was the first plane to break the sound barrier, had him sign it, I was like, ah, Chuck Yeager. And then like later that yeah, he's a vicious racist. I was like, Yeah, I think he was just a vicious uh anti-disciplinarian. Uh the uh the hero of the book is Arthur C. Clarke, which I didn't know.
The uh the science fiction guy. Oh, yeah, yeah. I worked with him a long time ago. But he. So this guy, he's a troll, not Arthur She Clark, this other guy whose name I can't remember.
His proposal, right around the time of Sputnik, was that the US should launch nuclear whip weapons at the moon and make a giant crater that could be seen from the Earth as their example of just being able to piss on whatever they wanted and then be done. And it was Arthur C. Clark who persuaded the United States not to do that. Hey, can we still do that? Can we can we go back and revisit this idea?
Like it's so funny. That's so, yeah, that's so like like late 50s, early 60s thinking, right? Yeah, hardcore. That's like back when the Soviets were trying to reverse the paths of rivers with nuclear weapons. Only they actually tried it.
I mean, were they ever successful doing that? I have no idea. Uh all right, all right. So back to back to uh see if we have any issues initiated to cover food issues. Yeah, right.
Let's do some. Nate Simon writes in, you might have something to say about this, because this is part safety, part perception. Nate Simon from from uh Sacktown from Sacramento. What are your thoughts on Sacramento, Nastasia? You ever go there?
No. You've never been to the capital of the state you grew up in? No. I've at least been to Albany. I know.
You're very patriotic. What's wrong with being patriotic? Nothing, that's your thing. It's not my thing. Are you saying on air that you hate your country?
No, I'm just not patriotic. What does that even mean? I'm not outward. I'm just not as patriotic as you. But uh like to claim this, I don't understand what it is.
He's wearing red, white, and blue. So you should cut her a little slack. But like, I just don't understand. It's like it's like going out of your way. It's like when you say no offense, you're like, yo, I'm just not patriotic.
That means you there's some chip there. There's something I don't understand. Yeah, I just don't. I don't know. I don't know.
Are you patriotic? I think that there are trappings of patriotism that are often used in ways that aren't associated with what you're talking about. Why can't we have him here every day? Because he actually makes a lot of money for what he does. Alright.
Hey guys, as I'm sure you'll agree, morbid fear of undercooking poultry often results in horrendously overcooked poultry. Truly said, Nate. According to everything I've read, intact whole muscle cuts are assumed to be internally sterile. Contamination with evil bugs like salmonella and camphylobacter result from surface contamination. And unless the meat is punctured, the inside is still sterile.
Well, I'm gonna stop right there before we even go even further. Talk to any food safety expert, and they're like, how do you know it wasn't punctured? You know what I mean? And plus there's lots of like nooks and crannies on a piece of chicken meat that there aren't necessarily in a whole, you know, in a in a steak. There are a lot of like, you know, muscle separations, even on a chicken breast, lots of little places things can hide.
Uh and plus, unlike a steak, so when you're fabricating a steak, let's say you take a uh a rib apart and then you slice the rib, there's a lot less knife poking towards that piece of meat than there would be in, let's say, ripping the breast off of a chicken. Okay? And also, uh the every part of a chicken that you can touch is closer to the guts and to the processing uh area of the slaughter than almost any part of the beef that you're gonna eat. So let's just start makes sense from there. Um this is why it is considered acceptable to serve a rare steak, for example.
If this is the case, why are we so hysterically obsessed with cooking poultry until the internal temperature is in the pasteurization range? The problem, Nate, isn't that we're obsessed with cooking it to the pasteurization range, it's that we're obsessed with cooking it well above the pasteurization range. We're we're obsessed with cooking it to a temperature where everything dies within like 10 to 15 seconds. And at those temperatures, at the 10 to 15 second death range temperature, you're looking at horrendously overcooked. It's 100% true that even in uh you can cook something until it's pasteurized and still have it look to most people's eyes viciously undercooked.
So there's there is a there is a wide gulf between perception of safety and actual safety, which is I think the real problem that we need to also, you know, uh there's a risk to eating uh, you know, anything undercooked, and I, as a semi-relatively healthy, you know, not yet hopefully immunocompromised individual, I'm willing to take this risk uh on the regular. So there's also uh that. Okay. This is the case. Why are we so obsessed with cooking poultry until the internal temperatures in the pasteurization range?
Even more maddeningly, maddeningly, why do we freak out about undercooked chicken, but rare duck or squab is considered not only acceptable but desirable? Because we're hypocrites mentally, not hypocrites. We okay, look. That's a good part. I would I didn't expect that part coming up.
That was a good ending to that question. Yeah, well, the the thing is this is that people have an internal revulsion to, because of the way they're brought up, to looking at undercooked chicken or poultry, and for some people also pork. So it's just and they're not gonna overcome that. So, like, it's just not logic. Like uh But why duck different?
I mean, what with Passover around the corner? Why is this poultry different than any other poultry? Well, I think because we're raised to even in like duck cultures, are there duck cultures? I mean France and China. So are they a version?
Do they have the aversion? I think the French overcooked their duck. Okay. Well, now we've come up with something then. Duck works because it's a foreign feeling poultry.
Right. It's allowed to have its own. It's allowed to have its own temperature. Yeah. Right.
Good insight. Whereas chicken and and turkey, they can't, but you're not gonna overcome somebody's. Also, duck has a different fundamental texture. Duck is more steak like duck breast. Let's just see what talk about what we're talking about.
Uh because like uh rare duck leg is like, oh my god, what I have to, I have to, you know, I'm not gonna spend all night at dinner. How am I gonna how much am I gonna chew? You know what I mean? But like a like a like a medium rare duck breast has a stakier texture, I would say, than uh not flavor, stakier texture than a chicken breast. I think this is gr fascinating stuff, and you could do an entire show about fear of turkey because of Thanksgiving.
Because it comes with so much overhead of uh your worthiness as a member of the family, and I think that spreads into food safety. Well, because you're worried about poisoning your family, but no, because you're worried about seeming incompetent, seeming lesser because you don't love to cook, and so we add all these side dishes that we would don't eat the rest of the year, not because they're good, but because they're part of the the trope of this is what it means to love your family. Right. Is that you have this thing and then what it means to be a TV watcher because it has to look like a butter ball because they advertise that for 40 years, and and all of that is the the elements of culture that have nothing to do with the facts of will this food make you sick? Right.
And uh uh to piggyback on that, I think that equating love with the act of cooking is can be extremely toxic. I think for those of us that like to cook, right? For those of us that like to cook, it is a good way to express our desire to do things for others by cooking. Right. For those of us that don't like to cook, it should not be made to seem like you must cook in order to show your your love for others.
I mean this is brilliant. And I think this is a huge problem. And I think I know people that are are guilty. Ah, we ordered out again. Are we it's like, look, you're incredibly talented at other things.
Right. You know, uh, you know, so my wife is like actually good at cooking, she doesn't enjoy it, but she sometimes she feels very guilty, and I'm like, you're like an incredibly successful architect. Why should you have to want to cook? Like, why is this have anything to do with your you know, ability to, you know, be you know, uh to be a loving parent. You know, it's it's uh, you know, people don't necessarily have other people do their laundry for them, but if you could, you would, and you wouldn't say, Oh, I don't love my family because somebody else is washing their clothes.
You know what I mean? Like so, family dinner is important, and my son works on family dinner, it's just what his nonprofit does. Not because of the cooking, but because of the sitting at the table together. It's breaking bread. And we associate the two with each other when they don't have to be associated with each other.
You know, we uh we had family dinner every Sunday for two decades. Like the past, like as like a lot of members of the family who live in New York have had their own kids, it's become less thing. But I think it's important to have a you know at least a a standing invite like once a week to get the I love a family dinner. Yeah, yeah. I mean, my my youngest when we when the kids were growing up, we would cook dinner together every night for the four, but Mo and I would spend hours doing it because the actual act of cooking, not the part of I'm going to feed you, but the part of we're standing next to each other, that's just priceless.
And so it's really interesting that when we're talking about can I take the temperature of chicken down one degree, that's sort of turning it into a sport. But it's coming not from this basis of sport and competition. It's coming from this basis of this is how we define ourselves as humans. We're not all drinking soylent all day long, automatons waiting to be replaced by AI. I hope none of us.
Yeah, exactly. Although what do you think? You think we're gonna get replaced by AI? I think that the number of people who lost their jobs to steam engines, steam shovels, who were ditch diggers was very large. And most of them in the long run were relieved.
And I think that computers are gonna keep replacing the part of our job we don't want to do, if we can find the guts to be willing to do the other parts of the job that put us on the spot. Right. So uh when I first started working at the French culinary years ago, uh it was run by a, you know, a French chef named uh Alain Sayac, who's still around, he's a he's a cool dude. And because I was a tech guy, he s he always said that he always said to me that uh you know, in his mind, my goal was to go Jetsons and to have you know all the food be in forms of you know pills or yeah, you know, and then he would point to people like Hervé Tees, who uh, you know, had his kind of mechanistic, we're just gonna like uh we're gonna do, you know, the same way that they come up with antibiotics, we're just gonna make a billion sauces and then you know, and he was like, This is what you think cooking is gonna become. It's like, well, I mean, I hope not.
I mean, unless it tastes better than what unless it tastes better than what a you know, a thinking, caring person can do, then I hope not. But you know, if it can do a better job, then okay. You know what I mean? It's like and a lot of those guys freaked out at Sous-Vide at the beginning because it was so precise you couldn't do anything while it was underway. Right.
It was a different sense of a lot of that was just macho garbage. Right. You know, like I can't like yell at it or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, yeah.
Uh well, it's like, you know, look, I'm not talking to too much out of turn here, but uh, you know, uh famous three Michelin star David Kinch, uh, you know, uh now Michelin. So remember, like you said, anyway, so he uh, you know, he once I was talking to me, and he was an early adopter of kind of low temperature in Sous vide, as was Keller. And there was a period of time, oh, I don't know, seven, eight years ago, when um those kind of chefs really started pulling back from Sous vide and low temperature. Interestingly, I don't really know Thomas Keller. I've you know met him a couple times, and he wouldn't remember me if I kicked him in the face, but uh, you know, when you even I think his book came about uh on low on Sous vide low temperature, came out right around the time he was pulling back on using this stuff uh personally in the kitchens.
And so um I said to Kinch, I was like, What do you wh why are you he had just gotten a new Bonet, he was shooting for three stars, you know, he was chasing the star at the time. And I was like, why you know why why are you pulling back on Sous vide? It's a great, it's a great technique. And he's like, well, uh, you know, I find I can get a better result by and then he starts telling me like kind of super old school technique. He's so he's got this giant bonet, which is maintaining its, I think it was Bonet, I don't think he was um uh I think he was Bonnet.
Anyway, so in out, in and out, in and out, in and out, not multi-nee. I think he was Bonet. He's pulling it in and out, in and out, in and out to get it the texture right. So he's he's basically trying to do low low temp cooking, like high high input to make the skin or the outside the right texture, low input to not overcook the inside manually. And I was like, why?
And you know, like, why when I can solve for those two problems separately? Like, so my whole life, the part of my life that's teaching people about low temperature, and Kenji doesn't agree with this, uh, and he's wrong. It's like it's like you can separate the problems of you can separate, there are two problems getting the texture of the outside right and getting the temperature of the inside right. And yes, by being some sort of like ninja Jedi, you can get them to come together using old techniques, uh, you know, and you can get them to come together at the same time and perform this minor miracle. But unless you do it all the time, the odds of failure are much higher, and your odds of getting it right right out of the bat are much higher than just controlling these two problems separately.
You know what I mean? But for Kinch, like, unless he was riding that line of I am I'm doing it this way, I'm putting all the input in all the time, right? It wasn't good for him anymore. You know what I mean? At least that's the impression I got from him.
And I was like, man, I was like, because I have a theory, you will hate this, I'm sure, Seth, where, and the you know, the more I see it in myself and other people, we have a there we have a limit. Like we all have different amounts that we give a crap in general, right? But even the ones of us that give the most crap, eventually we bend and break, eventually we compromise, eventually we give up on something, right? Yeah, and I think we don't have an infinite amount of that inside of us. And so if you waste conservation of crap giving.
Right. Yeah. So if I can, if I can separate these two problems of the texture on the inside and the texture on the outside, and not worry about that being that's so much more energy to focus on some other problem that's messed up. The problem is when we just routinize it and stop thinking. And so many people have been driven by our convenience economy to just swipe, swipe, swipe.
It doesn't matter, nothing matters. Here you're saying, you still need to give a crap, but let's uh uh conserve it appropriately. Right. Yeah, I agree with that. And then I said to him, So you don't use uh you don't use low temp souvite at all anymore?
He's like, no, I'm like, squab. He's like, okay, okay, squab. I was like, I knew it. Let me talk about espresso machines for a second. So uh I have a vintage, like late 80s, early 90s, Las and Marco 85M uh one group machine in my house, right?
I got the Olympia Cremini old school. Oh I'm giving a few giving a fist pump. It's very strong move. Uh best cup of coffee I've ever had, which is gonna sound crazy, espresso shot I've ever had. I've said this before, was from a lever pull, an old Vitor uh Vittorio Arduini uh Arduini le lever pull at a trade show.
There you go. And the guy comes up to me and he's like, Would you like a shot? And I was a lever machine. I was like, Yeah, sure. And he pulls the shot, and I was like, oh my god.
You know what I mean? Is ever happening? Like, what are you doing in a trade show? You know what I mean? Like, you should be so can we do a pitch here for roasting your own beans?
Because anyone who cares about coffee needs to roast their own. All right, let me let me do this. I want you to talk about this, and then let's go back to beans. So um, and this is getting worse and worse. So I also had a problem with my brev Brevel, the Brevel Corporation gave me one of their Oracle super auto things, and I put it in a place where I wasn't gonna be all the time so that we you know someone else could just walk in, push a button, get the coffee, right?
Grind it. So on my Los An Marco, one of the solenoids went bad in a spectacular way last week. And the filling solenoid, so the the thing filled up to the brim, then tried to pressurize itself, over pressured, and started spraying boiling water everywhere, all over everything. And I was like, oh my god, oh my god. You know what I mean?
So I opened the sucker up and I diagnose it, but then I look at the solenoid part of it. Now bear in mind, an old espresso machine is a lot like an old car. You can open it up, look at the pipes, and see what's going on. And so I was able to figure out what was wrong like fairly quickly. It was a solenoid, but then there's no replacements.
So even in something old, right? That solenoid, if I would have had to buy the whole solenoid from Italy, right, which would have been like a lot, or buy an American replacement and figure out how to clutch the plumbing together. And then that solenoid's like a hundred bucks. I ripped the solenoid apart because thankfully it's all screwed together, it's not you know molded in. And the entire failure of the machine was due to a non-replaceable rubber disc that was uh sealing up the pilot, uh the pilot orifice on the on the on the thing.
It was not really pilot, but you know what I mean. Yeah, and uh I was like, and it was gone, it was eroded. And so I was like, this my entire life is predicated on being able to have two or three cups of espresso in the morning. And my entire espresso game is predicated on this like you know, machine that's plumbed into my wall working. It in turn is predicated on this solenoid.
Four cent piece of rubber. Yeah, and a four center piece of rubber, non-replaceable, by the way, has failed. Luckily, you know, uh my partner Don has a laser cutter at work, so I went in, ripped the thing out, laser cut a you know a piece of rubber, put it in, the machine was up and running the next day. And I was like, whoo. But I had a similar problem on my on my Oracle where the three-way, so for those of you that make uh espresso, there's a three-way valve on the group that that either applies pressure from the pump to the group head to make espresso and then depressurizes it to atmosphere to unpro so that when you open up your group head, you don't poof, you know.
I have that problem. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, this one failed in the open, so that it never pressurized the group head, it was always going into drain mode. You cannot get into that oracle to save your life because modern design is not designed to be replaceable, it's designed to be as compact as humanly possible, and and nothing, almost nothing is easily gettable, replaceable, or standard, which means that a you know, two thousand dollar machine can turn into a piece of garbage because literally inside of there, I know there is a two cent piece of rubber that has failed. Yep.
And it's pathetic, and I understand the advantages of it, but then also like are we ever gonna get back to creating things that are repairable? Well, companies want to make something that's repairable, people don't want to buy it. And that's the problem. Because it costs more, it is more difficult to acquire in the sense that it costs more and is bigger and clunkier, and because most of the people who are buying this stuff don't use it the way they used a 1948 Chevy pickup truck. They're using it for three years and then moving on, where they're putting it in their fancy kitchen and never even turning it on.
So they're the consumer is voting over and over again in favor of convenience, not in favor of longevity and control. And even when people buy, if you go to Maker Fair, right? The Maker Fair store, which should be filled with tools like we're talking about, is filled with kits. Because kids are taught by their parents to follow the instructions, make the kit. And that's what saved Lego.
Lego was going bankrupt selling normal Lego. And only when they invented kits with instructions did they save the company. So you're saying I hate this. You hate the kidification of Yeah. Because who's going to invent the next thing?
We need more engineers. Yeah. I love it. Well, you know I like engineers. All right, so let's talk about roasting beans before they kick us off the air.
Okay, so real quick, uh, Marco Armit, the guy who invented Tumblr, comes over to my house because my slayer is just not making good coffee, and he lives down the street and he loves coffee. He says, I can't help you. I said, Why can't you help me? He says, Because you don't roast your own beans. Once you roast your own beans, we can talk about this.
So I went to Sweet Maria's, which is a website, and you can buy a Korean coffee roaster. It looks like a tennis ball can. It's 350 bucks, pays for itself after 20 pounds of beans. Which one, which one uh which one of the roasters is that? I have so I stopped ordering from them even though I thought their green coffee was better than the other suppliers because they had a hack problem once.
And a boy? Yeah, like a bunch of credit card numbers got stolen. They probably fixed it. They probably fixed it. They're good people.
They are good people. All right, so so yeah, so and then instead of like venting, he the way Marco does it, he's only roasts on nice days, he brings it outside to roast. I pumped a hole in the laundry room window. There you go. Right?
And and ran a um a dryer vent vent out. I haven't burned my house down yet. And it it just it's better. Does this roaster have a uh catalyzer on the outside? I don't know what a catalyzer is.
So check it. So uh so I used to do are you so is this is one you're doing mimicking drum or is it mimicking air? Is it only rose to like a pound every two weeks so it's not like I'm right but you're a drum guy. Apparently. Right.
So I mean like the the big thing you have to decide in your life is are you an air person or a drum person, right? So Michael Sivitz, which who was uh the early one of the he wrote one of the more important like technical coffee books of the was it in the 70s I guess. Maybe we'll even say the most important. Yeah yeah yeah given that it was 50 years 40 years. Yeah AVI press right uh probably the most single most important book after Euchar's all about coffee in you know the early 1900s.
Anyway so uh he came up with this idea I think he wrote the book. Anyway civets roasting so it is he was using fluidized bed roasting right and then a bunch of home people were like well an air popcorn popper is pretty much like a fluidized bed roaster. And so there was all those early air popcorn people but those produce a very different roast profile than the drum. So I started roasting and there's a what's the name of the guy's his name is David last name I think is David or first name is David wrote the early book on home roasting from the late 80s early 90s if you know who I'm talking about. Don't know and his point is don't worry about it just start roasting.
Right. He's like don't worry you're not gonna he's like you're not gonna be as good as the best roaster don't worry about it. Just start roasting you know what I mean and so I thankfully read his book relatively early on and so I I consequently know how to worry, but uh, you know, I don't necessarily worry because I'm not trying to necessarily I'm not trying to always beat the best person on earth. You know what I mean? Uh so anyway, so I started as an air guy, but I would perpetually burn them out.
Uh even I I bought a couple of the purpose-made uh early um coffee roaster that were based on popcorn roaster technology, and I fry them like I would roast all the time. I've had really good luck, two and a half years. Really? And I but is this air or it's drunk. Well, the the the tennis ball can rotate it like asymmetrically.
Oh, yeah, I don't have this one. So it's got a little computer chip, you tell it how long and what temperature, and it just does its thing in 34 minutes later, it's done. So I built a drum, I built a mini drum roaster that is similar to the burn sample roaster, uh-huh, which I love and it lets me look at it. But the problem is obviously, and it's a long way to get to it. The problem, people is the smoke.
The smoke is intense. So if you have it doesn't smell like good coffee, it just smells like coffee coffee. Yeah, and also it's by the way, did I talk about this last week? Air quality? I wasn't gonna see.
Oh, anyway, so like we talked about a lot last week. It was a good show. Oh, thanks. Except we missed nostasi. Except, yeah, well, you know.
Uh so uh this is not like a friendly smoke. This is a full of crap, sticky smoke. Carcinogenic, no? I mean, unclear. I don't think anyone's done this study because there's not enough coffee workers.
Uh but here's an interesting fact. The next time you roast uh in a place where you where so my roaster has a hole three inches across, yeah, and that's where all the smoke comes out of. If you hold an open torch right at the opening, it burns all the smoke. And professional roasters have like almost like an afterburner, a catalyzer that will come fully combust the smoke and it it goes clear and then it doesn't ruin everything. So you can really mitigate, and I think there might be a like one of the higher end home roasters that can do this, they can mitigate the smoke that's being uh made.
Makes sense. Yeah. The other thing, how does this thing cool? Does it have a cooling tray? Yeah, then no, no, then it just keeps going after the cycle is done until it's at room temperature.
So it just keeps spinning until it's cooled. Right. And I sit there and I toss it up and like toss it back and forth, and this chaff gets a lot of cool. Yeah. No, at this point it's worth you just going to a roaster and buying some coffee.
Well, no, I mean, ah here's a nice thing. Let's say, let's say, people that you're in a place and you know you're not gonna be there. Uh you only gonna be there, let's say you have like a place you're only gonna be a couple times a month. Right? It's hard to necessarily keep good coffee there.
Good point. You can keep good green beans, they last a lot longer. You show up. The best part is just being able to say to people, want some coffee? I roasted the beans.
That's what it's all about for me. Here's another thing. People say you have to wait after you roast the beans. You know what? You don't.
Really? It's just different. Okay, because I've been waiting I've been waiting. It you can. Look, the problem is is that uh, you know, it it's evolving more CO2.
It's it's evol it's evolving CO2 more rapidly right after you roast. I mean, that's the main problem. I mean, you have to wait for it to be cool, cold. You know what I mean? Yeah.
But um like I try to have a five day cycle. Yeah, but in other words, like it it's not the same. This is what I'm saying. It's not the same, but it's not like you're gonna die of poisoning by having the coffee right after you roast it. It's just different.
Right. No, and we keep changing the definition of what good coffee is supposed to be. I mean, like before Howard Schultz showed up, people said good coffee was something different, and then after people got over the Howard Schultz thing, people said good coffee was something after that. What do you do? I know someone who was it that was talking to me that was that he felt really someone who was he's he was a cool person, I forget who it was.
He was like, am I a bad person because I don't like like these kind of like high acid fruity coffees? And I was like, no, you're not a bad person. Just I was like, just tell people what you want. It's like people who produce those coffees can produce. I mean if you like milk chocolate, you're a bad person.
But what about these new, what about the new good milk chocolates? You had these? What were they used nuts instead of milk? No, no, no, where it's just like they're like it's like low sugar, high cocoa solids. There's like it's a whole fancy, the fancy milk chocolate.
That might be possible. But I'm I'm just saying I'm giving people less of a less slack when it comes to chocolate because there is an access there. But with coffee, you can go into different quadrants and be very happy. Yeah, I like uh I like a less whiny. I said I said if you want to sound like it's like one second, it's not too whiny.
Yeah, you know, you know, I don't not a lot of like uh not a lot of berry and red fruit in it. And then they'll be like, oh. Yeah, you can even ask for it to be chocolatey. Yeah, yeah, they'll give you, and then they'll give you what you want. Exactly.
Right? Chad has a question that I think is on this topic. I want to hear about the slayer. Worth it? Go for it.
Yeah, I don't think the slayer is worth it. I loved looking at it, and I loved how much technology was in it. I felt like it uh totally disconnected me from the act of actually that's why I went straight to the manual lever after that. And I was able to sell the slayer for a fine price, so I didn't feel guilty about it. And it's beautiful and brilliantly engineered, but I felt like I had no idea what was going on.
And your your lever is your lever is commercial style engaged spring, not levered direct on piston, right? I uh pull it down and the coffee comes down out when while I'm pulling it down. So it's as direct as can be. So it's like a lapavoni. It but without all the eagles and stuff.
Right, right. But in other words, that so like like uh I used to have um I still have if anyone wants it, I'm gonna sell it soon because I have no space for it. But I have a microchimbole, which is the smallest machine that uh works on the spring lever principle. So like most of like the V Vittorio Arduino, you pull down the coffee appears as you release because you're engaging a spring. Right.
And what I love about those machines is that uh, you know, pressure profiling is all the rage over the past five years, but the pressure profiling, anyone that really cares about pressure profiling is building that pressure profile on the fact that lever pull machines make, I'm sorry to say this, not as much crema, but a better tasting cup of coffee, like espresso, to my taste for what I want. I don't really care about the crema that much. I know some people get rid of the crema, like like uh anyway, not gonna get into it. But anyway, the point is is that the pressure slowly getting less over the course of the shot actually has an effect on the extraction that I happen to like, right? So in the in the early in the late 90s, early 2000s, everyone was all about oh, static pressure.
Pressure has to be right 100% static, right? And so they're like if you don't have a procon pump in your machine, which is uh you know a vein pump that can provide a relatively static pressure, assuming your inlet pressure is good and that and its pressure override is good, it will provide a relatively static pressure. You can look at your needle and it's pretty rock solid. Uh especially if it and they all this good systems have damping in them, so the system is really rock solid. And they used to say, well, you're never gonna get a as good a cup of coffee with what they call a euchre pump, which is a reciprocating brrrrrrrrrrr.
So if you have a machine that goes brrrr like that, is never gonna provide, they don't have the the system doesn't have the damping to provide an even enough pressure with those. I don't think that's necessarily true, but anyway, everyone's focused on that. And then the pressure profilers realize wait, these lever pull machines make this awesome shot, and it's you know, it's because it's reduction in pressure, and then hence. And the slayer lets you do anything. You can set the curve any way you want.
And if you're the kind of person that wants to make 30 cups and and not lose your sense of taste along the way, you can tweak it. For me, it was too much data. And I just like feeling the coffee pushing back against me as I'm pulling the thing, and feeling like I'm gaining skill. That's why I do it. But also, that is valid.
Like, in other words, even if the coffee is not like, even if like in a blind taste, that you would prefer the coffee out of the other machine, the enjoyment of making it the way you want to make it, right is a valid enjoyment. Because we're not double blind, right? Exactly. You're not, right? You should do what increases your overall enjoyment.
Bingo. Anyway, it's been a pleasure having you on, Seth. Uh please come on again. So we're Nastasi, but on the way out, what is this? I have to open it.
This is a because I've written so many blog posts, uh, twice we've made these collectible editions. So it's an 800-page 17-pound book of the last few years of my blog. Almost no one has one, but I wanted Nastasia to have one. So it's not on topics in relativistic physics? No, we put it in a mailing box to confuse people.
Yeah, it was like and part of it's written in Polish, and part of it's Einstein on the spine. And I got this note from this guy, and here, here's a knife. I got this note from a guy, and he says, uh, I received a package from you and I did not order it. And I write back saying, That's the $195 book you bought. He said, No, it's not.
The book you sent me is in Polish. And I was like, did you open it? This is all by email, so it's one a day. Oh my god. And finally he's he gets back to say, Oh, thanks.
Here, you need more knives. You're like, oh, you can't read Polish? I don't want to ruin that. Here's cut the tape. Anyway, pleasure.
Please uh, you know, when you have time, please come on again. I'm sure that's super fun. I'm sure people will enjoy actually having things they can do. You have contributed so much to my family and our and our delight in uh in listening to you guys. And Nastashi just shredded the box.
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