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Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Sus? Got Matt in the booth. How are you doing? Excellent.
But like compared to last week, I feel like there's like nobody here. It's like we have empty chairs. There's nothing. It's kind of nice. There's no was it last week that Jackie Molecules made a surprise visit?
Anyway, call in all of your uh cooking-related questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And by the way, next week, uh, we will not be here. I will be in Chicago. Existing conditions is participating in the uh Chicago style.
I don't know whether it's called Bar Fight Chicago style or Chicago bar fight. I don't really know. But I'll be in Chicago and existing conditions will be I don't actually don't even know who's running the bar because such a huge chunk of existing conditions is gonna be uh hanging out in Chicago anyway. This is like this is like an anchor man situation where you exchange blows with other bartenders. I unfortunately no.
I mean, I would love to see like me get the crap beat out of myself. You would not. You would be the one. Yeah, you got it, man. You seem you've got crazy energy.
Well, yeah. I don't know. There's only so far that like, you know, crazy person can get you. There was a kid, I remember in college. That's true though.
He was crazy. Like when you when you when someone goes crazy, you just step away. You don't like really want to fight them. You know what I mean? Do not engage.
Do not engage. Like yeah, but it's like what Wee Pop told you that one time. So uh Weepop uh, or you know, Weepop Soupapipot, or Weepop Soupy Pot, depending on how you how he contracts his name, uh, from Bangkok, who is one of the uh original partners of Nomi Ku and our intern at the French culinary once told me, have I mentioned this on air before? But just say it quickly. All right, so uh most of you, if you look at your palm and you and you make like a little bit of a like a what do you call this?
If you bend it a little bit so you can see the lines in your palm, most of you going across your palm have a different line on the on the left and right that don't meet each other, right? I have a straight line all the way across my Well, so my mom always told me that either meant that I was suffering from some form of genetic uh retardation. Or I I was a monkey. It's called a simian crease. You can go look it up, it's called a simian crease.
So We Pop, our intern, uh, who I believe now has nightclubs in Bangkok, which is interesting. So we had a part of a song. What? What? No, One Night in Bangkok's a different song.
That's from Murray Head, and you hate that song. I do. That song is not about anything. That song's about playing chess. I don't know if you know that.
Uh now you have that song going through my head. But the uh Matt, you know this song, right? I actually don't. I don't think so. Uh excuse me, One Night in Bangkok makes the hard man humble.
Somewhere between despair and ecstasy. And that's about chess? Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Bangkok.
Anyway, I like I can't get I can't I'm not gonna get into it. Uh but now I can't think of anything. So anyway, so we pop just takes one look at it and goes, oh yeah. In uh he doesn't talk like this. Go, oh yeah, in Thailand, that means that uh uh someday you're gonna kill someone by accident.
I was like, how can like a line in your hand mean that someday you're gonna kill somebody by accident? We all know who that somebody's gonna be. What? Me. No.
Although, you know, I have a friend who it's always been said is going to kill me by accident. Maybe we pop got it backwards. There's a friend of mine from college who's gonna kill me by accident someday. Anyway. Uh, so call in all of your how do we even get it?
One question. So listen, Matt. After they ask their question, hang up on them because nobody has the balls to tell somebody to only ask one question. I mean, I gotta say it because I can't text you in this godforsaken hellhole. So I'm letting you know over the Here's my question.
Because we all know there's no internet in this in this box where we're working. What how is it that you're always searching your phone? Are you just looking at old crap? Is it is it so boring to you to have the radio program going? I write my diary.
She looks at whatever's cached on her phone. Oh my god. Is that what the kids are doing these days? They just cash a whole day's worth of reading onto their telephones. Okay.
Alright, caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave and Nastasia. I'll follow uh Nastasia's rule and be a uh full on Zeta male. But I have two comments and one question, which hopefully qualifies. Um for a masa grinder, I've been using the Estrella, which is similar to the Corona and the Victoria.
I actually found that if you grind down the burrs so they have true flats on them, almost like uh a higher end coffee grinder, you can get full on tortilla ready masa using one grind pass through. Huh, and and and do you do it yourself or do you force some other idiot to do it? No, I do it myself. My friend has a uh full on machine shop at his home. Um so one of the burrs we were actually able to fixture and grind true flat almost on a uh, you know, like you would on a surface grinder.
Right. But then the other one, there's no good way to hold it unless we were to make a special jig or a tool just to fixture it. So we did that one just on a uh a decently flat plate with some sandpaper. But it looks like both of them can be done just with a plate and sandpaper or even just a semi-flat table. Um because there is some play in how the the burrs align.
So it kind of levels out anyway once you force something in between them. Right on it. The most important thing is to to get a true flat on the edges, because from the factory, um every tooth, if you want to think about it that way, has a high point to it. It comes to a peak. So it actually cogs when you tighten down and slips in between each tooth instead of being able to run on each other flat.
Huh. Well, the um what I meant by getting someone else to do it, I mean getting someone else to grind it, because it's still a bear, unless you got your friend at the machine shop to hook a motor up to it, which I've seen in in out. I've seen people hook up coronas to motors. Did you do that as well? Because it's still a pain.
Once even once you get it broken in, or do what you did, which is make it actually work, it's still it still is not the most fun to sit there grinding that thing. I agree with you on that. I did your recipe, I think it was 500 grams of dried corn, and then it produced uh somewhere around the range of eight hundred once it was uh nystomalized. Right. And that took under, I want to say under eight minutes.
It was it was worth, but it wasn't uh a dreadful time or anything like that. So for for home use, you know, I'm happy with it. Uh cool. Now uh so for those of you that don't know what the heck we're talking about, uh when you make uh tortillas, you nixtomalize uh the corn, and you know, you're soaking it, uh you're you know, par cooking and soaking in calcium hydroxide. So you put you like you take a calcium hydroxide solution, aka cal, you cook it, uh partial you know, par cook it and then let it soak for whatever your amount of time you're gonna let it soak is, then you rinse, rub rinse, and then you you grind it, and that whole process is the difference between cornmeal and you know, uh like a cornmeal style thing versus a tortilla.
So it's completely different animal. It's like one of the world's most miraculous cooking processes. And I believe my post on it on uh cooking issues is still available. Is it is uh is cooking issues a Russian porn site now, or is it still good. It's still good?
All right. Uh and so the problem is is grinding it. So the what we're talking about is this category of grinders, which for better lack of a better word, we'll call them Corona. What's the brand that you had? It's uh Stray O, but it seems to be the same as the Corona and the Victoria.
Right. So these suckers are built, I believe, in Columbia, which is interesting because anyway, well, it's a too long a story to get into. But uh they're sandcasted, right? And you can see the sand casting, and I think over time, like the wooden blanks that they that they make the sand castings from, or however they do it, they really suck. I mean, they suck real bad.
And so uh, you know, the only and in the plates, when you put the so the way this grinder works is got uh, you know, the plate that's bolted onto the grinder itself, and then there's uh the rotating plate that fits over it, and that's what you adjust forward and backwards with the with the auger, just like kind of like a meat grinder, to adjust the the thing, but they don't get anywhere close to matching each other. Uh and it's just they're just phenomenally bad, such that I think it's intended that you sit there for like two years just sitting there and doing turning it and just grinding it down to nothing on itself, because that's the only way that's gonna get uh to work. So this is a good, it seems like a good uh how much time you think you someone would invest. Could they could they do it, could they do it just by flat rubbing on a on a table with uh with wet dry, or you think it wouldn't be uh good enough? Yeah, so the one bro that I did that way, um it was with wet dry, I think it was 100 or 120 grit, and it took under half an hour for for one side.
So, you know, up to the user if they're willing to invest that hour. But um, in terms of breaking it in through actually grinding corn or even dried rice or something, I noticed absolutely now wear after about 10 batches before grinding. And then the burrs themselves, I thought they would be soft, but we put a file to them, they're pretty hard. It's just uh must have been a quick cooling process for the casting. Right, right.
Uh you know the whole rice thing. They're hard. The whole rice thing, yeah, it doesn't do squat. Like, so I mean, I think it's just to have something running through while the burrs are rubbing against each other. And the other thing I think is is that it's probably a good idea to grind rice because you know, through something, uh just to clean it out, because these things come as pretty rough, rough castings.
Uh so you know, I think that's kind of part of it, but I agree that you know, I mean, you can see the cast green in this thing, and there are little dots and specks coming up off of the thing. I mean, they've just done a just a terrible job at finishing these things, which I guess you'd expect for the price they are. You know what I mean? It's the same, by the way, with cast iron pants, which we should get, you know, get back to. Cast iron pans, uh they all used to be, not they all, but like, you know, the higher end ones used to be sanded uh down uh to get rid of that casting grain uh on them, and they just make much better pans when they used to do that.
I have a set I have you know some old like hundred year old or maybe not a hundred, maybe they're 70 year old cast irons that I used to get them at thrift shops, and man, they're so much better than the current ones. I know a bunch of people have taken uh disc sanders to their cast iron uh and just you know, new cast iron and sanded it down a little bit and just gotten to that kind of flat surface, and it really makes a big difference. So I'll skip my next uh comment and just go right to the question. Um, in the food or cooking or even bartending world, are there any remaining great mysteries on kind of a larger scale? I know you mentioned the the elusive uh dirty and caramel, but uh it seems like more of a just a personal thing that that happened.
But are there any remaining huge mysteries in terms of why things happen or or how certain products are produced and things along that way? Huh, that's an interesting question. Well, there, you know, the the thing is that a lot of what is going on in cooking is I mean, it depends on what you mean by mystery. So, like from a from a scientific perspective, right? There's lots of stuff that we don't really know uh what's going on, right?
Especially on the nutrition side, we don't know squat, we don't know diddly squat, right? So there's like, you know, there's there's a whole range of stuff on the on the science side that hasn't been explored just because there's no real reason or economics behind uh exploring it. In terms of like finding new things to cook, I mean everybody at all times in history who've had uh you know enough energy, time and and enough of a surplus of food, and even if they don't, frankly, uh, have had, I think, a full range of culinary experience, right? So um and people different cultures are cooking wildly, wildly different in terms of what they're eating. Uh so I you know I can't see there being any logical stopping point.
I mean obviously nowadays, you know, because of the internet, because of globalization, uh, and because of the kind of interest in uh consuming all different kinds of things that um you know, especially in in you know higher higher end uh higher end like more wealthy uh circles have had over the past you know several decades uh and even longer you know the there's been what seems to be kind of an explosion of um different cooking ideas different um you know different dishes and in the past 20 years you have the explosion of kind of new technologies in cooking with uh low temperature and sous vide which you know I think is super interesting and and and important and so it's can seem like well is there anything else to to know and the and the fact of the matter is that you know that's what people thought in you know during the age of uh well whatever you want to call it I mean I know politically charged term but age of enlightenment I'm sure everyone's like well you know Newton's come up with the laws of physics and with calculus so I guess we're all set you know what I mean so it's like I think you never can know what the future brings and I think there's always going to be there's always going to be new mysteries to uncover. But you just don't know what they are until someone presents them to you. Right? Yep awesome. Thanks so much.
Alright, thank you. Uh all right. So you you uh cooking. You got you got another one on the air, actually. All right, caller, you're on the air.
What's up? Hey, uh hey Dave, this is uh Anthony Collin from Seattle. What's up? Hey, so I have a question. I was reading through the uh Warrenus cuisine on the your whole section on cooking C V and uh he recommends uh holding, if you can, um holding uh cut of protein for 120 for a couple of hours for some like tenderizing effects before actually throwing it in.
Um would that still be beneficial if I'm doing something like uh chuck roast at say 55, 56 for uh 48 hours, or should I just skip that uh 120? What's 120 in Celsius? I don't know. Let's see, look it up. Uh wait, so you're saying uh, oh, you know what this is all about?
So there's a lot of uh research. And so let me tell you how this all worked. Back in the day, everyone who had a science-oriented mind, while you're looking up what 120 is like everyone. What? 48.9.
Yeah, yeah. So in the in in the squarely in the danger zone, the real danger zone, by the way, not like the theoretical danger zone. Um so back in the day when uh everyone, and this includes Miravold, this includes you know, me, includes Wiley, includes Heston, includes, you know, you know, Grand Akees, includes everyone who was interested in this stuff. We were reading all the science papers, uh, presumably the Rokas, um, you know, you know, who wrote the first book on um C V cooking that I'm aware of, the first real one. Uh Bruno Gusseau.
We're all reading like the all of the literature on uh how meat works. And so uh you know, and we all read these uh books and studies that there were uh the this enzyme categories that what they say autalized meat that broke it down that caused protein denaturation and therefore tenderization, right? And uh they're like cal calpanes and calpa somethings, right? Is what they what they are is the is the actual uh enzymes that are there. And then you know, the online literature would say these enzymes are most active at blah X temperature.
And so then, you know, the assumption was well, if you hold something in that zone long enough, then you'll get a lot of extra tenderization out of um out of that. Now, uh does that actually make a difference in the end in your meat? I gotta say, I don't know. I I can't remember whether I ever ran those tests. I might have.
Um, you know, I I you know I was at the time when I was doing most of my preliminary research. I mean, I'll look at it again in the process of writing the book, but uh when I was doing most of my preliminary research, I was doing work for chefs and teaching chefs how to use these techniques, and there's no way on God's green earth I was gonna tell a chef to hold a piece of meat for uh you know a couple of hours in something that is so clearly the danger zone, and then ramp it up to a safe zone so that they could get the so the idea is that if you're in the kill if you're in the kill zone within your four hour limit, I guess is you know the the argument that you know you're gonna you're gonna be okay, but just so much can go wrong in a restaurant that there's there would be no way I would ever recommend doing that uh you know to someone who was doing this professionally. You know what I mean? There's no way I would ever recommend it. You know, I've seen Nastasia, for instance, people get the temperatures wrong and have things circulating at exactly the wrong temperature for many, many, many, many, many hours, right, Nastasia?
Yes. Yeah. So, and because the temperature. Oh my god, that Nastasia put something in at Fahrenheit for Celsius. So, in other words, 55 Celsius, and the circulator is set at 55 Fahrenheit, and then you and then used as a freaking doorstop.
So, like went literally used as a doorstop. So, like when I when I tell you that like when you're giving people instructions on stuff like this, I've very I almost always shy away from uh giving um from giving instructions that aren't as bulletproof as possible from a safety standpoint. Taste standpoint, you can kind of be a little more wiggle-waggle. You can give something somebody something that's not bulletproof as long as you warn them it's not bulletproof. But from a safety standpoint, you have to kind of go bulletproof on them because once anything can go wrong, it will.
Uh we just got fish bowled. I know, that was weird. This is the first time we've ever gotten fishbowled. What did they do? They looked in here with their hands.
With their hand over their uh so the second thing I'll say is that I don't know what kind of uh function those things have on collagen, right? So just because something breaks down the muscle fibers doesn't mean it breaks down the collagen. And 99.9% of what you perceive as toughness in meat is not the muscle fibers, it's the connective tissue. And and I need people to understand this, and this is what I'm gonna be trying to figure out when I'm writing the book, how to get people to understand this. When you're doing low temperature cooking, or when you're doing high temperature cooking, there is a fundamental difference in what it means to tenderize, i.e., break down the muscle fibers themselves.
Broken down muscle fibers almost always present themselves as being mushy or fibrous. So if you've had something that's been um, you know, cooked too long using low temperature and you chew on it, it's like it breaks up into fiber and forms like a fibrous like cud pill in the in your mouth, right? And so it almost you know what I'm talking about. You've had that where it forms that kind of fibrous ball, and then as you if you keep chewing it, right? Which, you know, you are I'm not one of these mastication freaks who chews like a hundred times, obviously not.
How fast do I eat Nastasia? So fast. So fast. It's disgusting. Nastasia has been like, you know, disgusted, and she still doesn't forgive me for how fast I ate at Jiro uh dreams of sushi, even though that was not my fault because I get to eat at whatever speed I want to, people.
It's my mouth, my right. Anyway. I can't believe you're willingly wading back into this. I'm not going to. I'm gonna leave it there.
But the point is that if you sit there and chew something that's been uh where the muscle fibers have been broken down by um by however they're done, uh, it gets this kind of fibrous kind of mushy nature, which I don't appreciate. But if you then cook uh, you know, if you then cook uh the collagen, that provides a different kind of tenderization. And I don't know how well those enzymes work on breaking down collagen. I have to research it. So a long way of saying your results may vary, but I don't know how much of a difference it would make.
If it made a giant difference, I would guess that everybody would do it. Paris gourmet delivers the finest specialty imported and local foods directly to chefs. For over 35 years, Paris Gourmet has sourced specialty foods from around the world. Their Meadowlands headquarters services, the New York Tri-State area. Paris Gourmet delivers Bermont butters, cacao Noel chocolates, ravi fruit pureees, cuisine tech ingredients, and bon pâtissier viennoiserie to your kitchen.
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My name is Thari Kamen. And I'm Leah Kurtz. And together we host Food Without Borders here on HRN. Immigrants make our food system vibrant, diverse, and delicious. Each week, we invite a guest to talk about how food connects them to their past as we explore what it's like to be an immigrant in the US today.
You can find Food Without Borders wherever you listen to podcasts and on Heritage Radio Network.org. We have a parade of callers, so there's an there's yet another on the air if you're ready. Alright, Cavalcade. What's up, caller? Hi, this is Monty from Jacksonville, Oregon.
Ooh. I've never been to Jacksonville, Oregon. How close is that to Corvallis? Uh, it's it's on the border of California, actually, basically. Oh, so you're you're you're close to the Redwoods?
You're close to Jedi Smith? Well, yeah, more or less. Yeah. God's country. On the I5 Parrot corridor.
Jedi Smith Park in California is one of my favorite places anywhere. I love that place. Oh, yeah. Absolutely beautiful. So uh majestic.
Yeah. Um, speaking of trees, I've got uh Douglas fir on my property. Nice. I was calling about how to use Douglas fir tips. I know people make a tea out of 'em.
I was wondering if there's other things people do. I you know, so interesting. So uh Bobby Murphy, our uh beverage director in existing conditions, we didn't get uh fur tips and Doug Fur Tips. We have we bought six hundred dollars worth of spruce tips. And six hundred dollars worth of spruce tips can fit in my backpack, which is disconcerting.
You would think six hundred dollars worth of spruce tips could not fit in my backpack, but you'd be wrong. Um you know, I've never worked with I've never worked with Doug Fur. So you know, with this one, the question was, you know, Nastasia and I have uh what what what what what variety of tree did we distill for that party? It could have been a Doug fur because Doug furs are used as Christmas trees, but I don't think we did a Doug fur. Nastasia and I once years and years and years ago bought a Christmas tree and then distilled it.
The whole tree. Is that MTV? Yeah, that was MTV. Uh yeah, we were like, uh how many put was it like 1200 people at that party, 1500 people at that party? And we and stupid.
This is like when I was like uh dumber, dumb, dumb, dumber, which if you can believe I was at once dumber than I am now. I was like, we're gonna distill. We're gonna distill the Nobody cared. Nobody gave a rat behind. We distill we distilled, we sat there, I don't know how many, like it was like a look over a day, Nastasi and I sat there distilling a Christmas tree.
First of all, we had to walk into uh the French Culinary Institute like an idiot with Christmas trees on our back. Then break it down. And everybody's sitting there cracking wise. Because everyone, when they pass you, whenever you're doing something non-conventional anywhere. Everyone walks past you if you're in a public-ish area, and they think no one else has made a wise crack about you.
And so then everyone takes their chance at doing a new wise crack. So Nastasia, of course, is less able to withstand this stuff without putting this the scowl on her face. So Nastasi is sitting there, probably with her Christmas hat. I don't know, which by the way, she located people. Here's another fishbowl twice.
What is it? Anyway, uh, so then um we're sitting there it with like angry faces, shredding a Christmas tree. Oh yeah, I remember this. Yeah, shredding a Christmas tree, and then stuffing the needles into the rotov app and just running the rotovap constantly, like for a day and a half. And then get this live carbonating.
I had built carbonation rigs for uh adapters for EC units. Wait, do you remember what the one joke that everybody kept saying over and over was? No, what I'm guessed the grinch is blown, you know. Oh my god. Oh my god.
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Oh jeez, oh my god. It's just like making fun of somebody's name. They've had their name their whole life. You can't make fun of their name in a way they haven't heard before.
The 30th person who like makes a wisecrack about you doing X, Y, or Z, like one of the other people's already made that wisecrack. You know what I mean? That's why if you're gonna wisecrack someone, only do it if you have the an actual something new that they couldn't possibly have thought of before. That's why a lot of the time, Nastasia, I I just say something that's completely off the wall because at least like well, they've never heard it before. You know what I mean?
I mean, at least they've never heard that before, but I was told by somebody, this is a little off topic, that Nastasi and I sometimes shock people with what we say. I was told by our PR representative for Booker and Dax that we sometimes say things that not by the way, in it, not in a me too or sexual way, just completely inappropriate and kind of like, right? Yeah, I don't know what it is. Anyway, back to Doug Fur. So uh at the bar we have these spruce tips, and we're doing just like you said, we're making a tea.
So I've only ever either made a water-based tea or an alcoholic uh distillant from them. Now, I don't know how well, I mean, I could imagine many things like uh Doug Fur ice cream would be obviously delicious. Do I know whether or not there's gonna be a problem with the milk? No. I mean, but this is worth a test.
If you have Doug Doug fur on your property. Female Morgan's dream. Also, well, he did Doug for ice. I don't know, but it sounds like something. The other thing I don't know about Doug Fur is I don't know how long the needles last on Doug Fur.
Are you talking shoots, like fresh, uh fresh shoots? Yeah, I take the green, you know, when it's just bright green, just budding out. Yeah, so for those of you that deal with conifers, like when you're walking through the forest on and it's around the time that they're flushing fresh, like just go ahead and do yourself the favor of tasting. The old ones are relatively flavorless, and the flavor they do have is very, very harsh. And you could tell by the color green unless unless you're a complete nin cow poop.
You can tell by the color of green whether you're dealing with a fresh uh shoot. And the fresh shoots are usually like much more fun, much more interesting, much brighter. Um, so like I would see whether or not they mess up milk. I mean, I think there's probably a good chance they would mess up milk, like a decent chance that they'll mess milk up. But I I could see like a delicious uh sorbet, or I could really see a delicious ice cream out of it.
Um, you know, I don't know how much uh I mean, there's no point in burning that stuff because it's just gonna burn. I don't know it's gonna give anything good, but I would try that. We we've been doing uh steeps. We've we've tried um uh regular steeps, we've tried uh rapid infused steeps. The rapid infused, I don't know how much of a difference it made in the in the needles, and we've also tried uh pressure cooking to get like a like to get it out quick but at a higher temperature, and they all yield different but uh interesting results.
The one thing I'll say is that when you're dealing with um extracts from like uh different conifers, the one of the issues that you get is uh once you've been tasting it for a while, you become a little kind of inured to the flavor of it, and so you tend to overdose. So, whatever you think is a good dose, I would then wait a minute and try like literally half of that dose and see whether or not you like it better, right? Because some people are repelled by overly uh resinous things. Like nostasi, you don't really like super resin y things, right? Yeah, some people are repelled by over-resinous things, and I find that sometimes uh less can be enough for people who are pine lovers or you know, conifer lovers, but uh at the same time, you know, can bring people who would otherwise be repelled uh into the fold of liking it.
But I think an ice cream now that I'm thinking about it, I think ice cream would be delicious. One other thing is that do you have sugar pines that far north? Uh not close by anyway. Yeah. I wish I had a source of sugar pine cones.
Yeah, they're huge, they're but not close. They're delicious. For the ice cream, would you actually steep it in the milk? If it won't break, if it wouldn't break. So like if you have a vacuum machine, what I would do is I would I would throw the I would like like rough chop the uh shoots and then I would throw them in the in a in a bag and suck as much of a vacuum as you can.
Get the milk really cold, put us uh small or cream or whatever, put a small amount of it in the bag. You might actually be better off adding some sugar first because the sugars will sugar will help stabilize the milk against breaking. So you know, like large amounts of sugar do a lot to stabilize milk against breaking, uh, which I discovered by accident. That's I've I've talked about milk syrup on the air before, but you know, we can make a uh a stable milk syrup that won't break even in a shaken acid drink by stabilizing with a lot of sugar before you add the acid. Um so you might need some sugar if it's gonna break, but I would put it in a vacuum bag.
You need to leave a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of space because nothing foams quite as well as milk does, even when it's real cold. So, you know, but you suck a little bit of a vacuum on it, or even you know, uh you know, put a non-foaming thing with the shoots, suck a hard vacuum on it to inject liquid in, and then add the milk and uh milk and or cream and sugar and/or eggs if you want to do it all at once into the bag with it to cold infuse. Uh and I think cold infusion or even warm infusion might be the way to go. I pretty sure I've I think you have a good chance that it will curl and break if you go like let's say if you were gonna just make an on glaze base with it and then strain it out later, you know, which you know you're cooking at 82 or 83 degrees Celsius for like 10-15 minutes. I mean, that'll infuse it fast as a mother, might break it.
Again, we're the test because the egg egg yolks are also stabilizing it and and sugar is stabilizing it. So you might get a stable thing there, but don't you think that would taste delicious? Doesn't everyone think that would taste delicious, Doug for ice cream? Sounds good to me. Yeah.
Absolutely. Uh cool. Um let us know how it works. Yeah, yeah. We have one more on the on the phone.
All right, Claire, you're on the air. Hi, Dave, it's Claire. Hey Claire, how are you doing? We got fishbowl again. What the hell is this?
My Claire. Am I wearing clothes? Are you wearing clothes? Why are people looking into this studio? You're not wearing clothes, you're calling in.
You're one of those people who like writes Yelp reviews without putting their clothes on. If you're gonna write a Yelp review, have the decency to put on pants before you sit down at the keyboard. I don't think you have the right to criticize someone else if you if you can't even bother to get dressed before you write the criticism. Okay. You don't think so?
Sure. You don't see what I'm saying? You just I don't know, is it? What's your question? I don't know.
I'm confused. Oh, you're talking to Stoff. Well, anyone who'll listen. I'm just saying, like I love writing Yelp reviews, but I always am dressed when I write them. Good.
Good. Because someone, someone has worked real hard and they have to get dressed to go to the restaurant to make your food. The least you can do when you're talking about their hard work on your computer is to have the decency to at least pretend like you're taking it seriously. You know what I mean? I agree.
Yeah, go ahead. What do you got for us? Okay, so I heard that you are a bit of a wedding speech aficionado. What? And it just so happens that I'm officiating my first wedding this weekend in Santa Barbara.
And I'm really struggling with my speech. So I wanted to know if you had any advice. Well, when you get to me, my age, Claire. Uh well, I mean, I like I've seen, I seen many a shall we say, interesting wedding speech, but since almost every wedding I've been to has been friends or family, I'm not really at liberty to talk over the radio of of uh what they are. I've never seen like what was the speech that Steve Yusemi gave in that movie?
I don't know. Anyway, but you're actually officiating, so yeah Yeah. I mean, I think that like don't guild the lily. I mean, I don't really have any cooking related advice to this, but I'm saying, like, you know, pretty much people are there to get married, right? And what are you some sort of like fake reverend church of the poison mine in the state of uh California?
Um I wouldn't say that it's fake. I'm a reverend licensed by the universal life church. What the heck is universal life? They're the people who license the fake reverence. You don't know that?
Yeah, but what does it mean? Like, is there any belief associated with it? They're non-denominational. Uh what okay, first of all, non-denominational, does that mean any denomination or non-denominational? Or is it Christian?
No. So it's not just non-denomination. Who cares? What give advice for the speech? Well, what I'm saying is is I don't even know what this means.
Like, why like why do they even do this? Why don't they just why doesn't the city government or the just say, pay me 50 bucks and you can do the wedding? Like, why do they need to have this fake church stuff? Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, just you know, Claire, are you are you religious in any sense of the word?
Or do you have any sort of religion to you? She does. Yeah. Anyway. I mean, whatever.
Not like not like I'm like a lot of different things. Let me tell you something about real reverence. So I was. What the hell? I am not religious, but I was married by, you know, my wife's uncle, who was a real, honest to God, not Southern, but Baptist minister, right?
At his church. And let me tell you something about Reverends, ministers, priests, rabbis, whomever. Here's what they have done that you haven't done. A crap ton of weddings. Like a crap ton.
Anyone that controls any sort of house of worship has done a boatload of weddings. They are practiced. I'll never forget what uh what uh my uncle Ken said to me right before he got married. Dave cried. It was so powerful.
I cried after, I cried after the way. Let me tell you, for those of you that have not been married before, like it is more powerful than you'd think it's gonna be once you get to the back. I mean, like, that's the whole thing, right? Everyone's like, I'm not religious, man to man to marry. Like bee-be-be-be-boo.
What does it mean? And then when you actually get married in front of all your friends and family, you're like, oh wow, that's you know, not what I expected. But what he said to me beforehand was he's like, he's like, guys, this is going to take 17 minutes. He's like, I don't care like how many vows you have, I don't care like what you're doing. He's like, it's gonna be 17 minutes.
And it was 17 minutes. You know why he knows this? Because he's done it eight bajillion times, right? He knows he knows like where to stand, he knows, and during rehearsal, by the way, rehearsal for you is gonna be especially important, right? You know, like you know, like where to direct people.
Everyone, everyone who's not been married before has all these like weird knucklehead ideas of what they want to have happen at their wedding. It's just like Nastasia. This actually relates to cooking. When you throw a party, right? When you throw a party and you have chefs and you have all these different players, each who have their own minds, right?
And like all of the freaking bridesmaids and all of the freaking groomsmen or whatever they call them nowadays, like the flower people, the ring bearers, the guests, Claire, tell them about the ring thing. Oh, well, they all have their own ideas, right? And so you think in your mind, I'm gonna organize it exactly like I wanna be. And you can't. And it's the same thing with a party.
You have to be the as the officiant, you are the iron fist of this wedding. And you during the during the rehearsal, you better keep everyone in freaking line and make them do what they're supposed to do at the freaking event so that the bride doesn't look back later and be like, that was a crap show. What the hell was I thinking having Claire be the officiate at my wedding? No one could hear what I was saying. The lines were flubbed.
There was feedback on the microphone. There was so much wind in my back because we were outside. No one could see what's going on, and my hair was in my face. That's what's gonna freaking happen. Because you know why you haven't done a wedding before.
So do the research. Do the rehearsal and take the rehearsal seriously. I'm doing two rehearsals. I'm doing one on Thursday and one on Friday. That's good.
What about the rings? What do you got for the rings? Okay, so this is cool. You're gonna like this. So the couple, you might know them.
They when the people, it's a standing reception, so we're weaving a rope to make like lines where people will stand, and then right before the rings, I'm gonna say, You'll notice there's a rope at your feet. Please pick it up, and then we're gonna string the wedding band through the rope up to the front, starting at the back. This is gonna be a nightmare. A logistical nightmare. I know.
We're gonna have to rehearse it, and I'm staging people throughout the crowd who know what we're doing. I'm not giving it, I'm not spoiling anything, but I think it's kind of funny that you're are you literally in Santa Barbara? Yeah, right now. No, no, that's where the wedding's gonna be. Oh, yeah.
Okay. Santa Barbara, where they have the pier and the beach. No. No, it's at a ranch. Remember?
No, but that's where Santa Santa Barbara is on the water, right? Has a pier on the beach. So there's a movie out now by uh Peel. You might be familiar with it called, and I'm not giving anything away about the movie, called Us. And interestingly, hands across, it's in Santa Barbara, is where it takes place.
And Hands Across America, where everyone's holding hands and and like creating lines, forms very large in this. So I hope that everyone enjoys everyone thinking about the movie Us while they are uh at the wedding. Oh god. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I hope that doppelgangers dressed in red with scissors show up, because that will be sick.
Sick! You're really raining on my parade. I'm gonna send you my speech and you can give me your feedback. Listen, keep it short and simple. Do they love each other or is this some sort of joke?
As I've said a million times. For real? I think people get trapped into getting married. Did you know this? I I don't think this is the case.
This is not food related, but I think the same thing happens like with partners, with restaurants, with dishes. It's all the same thing. You go down a road, and once you've gone down a road more than about 50 or 100, hard to turn around. Like the ship of life is big and it's hard to turn it. You know what I mean?
And so like maybe she should start with that. So listen, I know you guys have been at weddings where all you people in the audience are like, you know, this is not gonna last more than a year. This is not one of those weddings, or maybe it is. I don't know. Oh my god.
No, it's not. I've never been in a wedding where I've thought that. Let me tell you something else. Let me tell you something else. Certain people who do weddings are known for uh, as we say, doing weddings that stick.
Oh. Ooh. I think I'm gonna be that type of efficient. Well, we'll see. You know, maybe the church of the poison mind will revoke your uh will revoke your license to marry if you don't have a certain batting average.
The other thing I'll say is that, like, I mean, these are friends of yours, so you know, but like a good bit of like talking to them like beforehand is also of are you sure? Are you really, really sure? I've had friends who've called it off at the last minute. Really? Oh yeah.
I've had friends who called it off at the last minute. Oh yeah. Oh my god. This is not cooking really. You know how my you know how my theory, my theory is is that there is no, there is no more other than being pregnant, right?
Where you know that like it's not permanent, it's a s it's a temporary status. Fiancé is the only other such thing. Oh my god. And it either ends in marriage or it ends in not marriage to the same person, right? So it's like everyone is in a time of life reevaluation when they're when they're engaged.
Oh my gosh. Yeah, true story. We can all agree that the day was the right person to call. We gotta close. We've got to do that.
Okay, thanks. Good luck with that. Uh well, we had a lot of questions written in that we didn't get a chance to answer. Do we have any time to do any? Four minutes of choose.
Uh choose. I you know I hate cheesing. All right, here's some questions. Joe, uh Joe Ankowicz wrote in on uh Polish cooking. Hey, I remember a while back you were talking about exploring Polish food and taking a deep dive into Polish cuisine.
I live in Greenpoint, and besides cooking and eating the blood sausage at Poland Market, uh, I'm still not that well versed in Polish food beyond the very basics. Uh, do you have any uh dish interesting dishes or cookbooks? I don't, I mean, I I like I like uh Zurek, the uh, you know, fermented rye soup. I and I like all the weird mushrooms that they have. Although uh my you know, one of my uh the museum's friend and my friend Lukasz, who's Polish from Poland, like he's like, all of these mushrooms are no good.
Like Poland, Poland is apparently the land of mushrooms, but it's not the same unless you go there. Maybe sometime we can have Lukasz or some other Polish food expert on, because I'm interested in learning more about it. Answer Joe, I don't know enough to give you information, but I would like to. Um Richard McDonough wrote in on rotovaps, who uh you know you might know him as a mood therapist in Vietnam. We might go to we might go to Vietnam someday.
Nastasia wants to, by the way, uh Nastasi probably doesn't want me to get into. I was I was thinking I was gonna sit down here and do a rant on building stuff in China. Which one? About your business partner. Which Don Lee.
No, I'm not gonna say that on that. I'm not gonna say that. I'm not gonna say that on the air. Well, my partner here at the bar is Don Lee, and we're thinking about going into business with this new guy called called uh his name, his name is Dong Li, and uh he's from Shenzhen. And so, like Nastasia thinks it's funny that we could have these two different businesses where you know you're partnering with someone with very similar names.
Uh but the the thing is not even the well, I'm not gonna say what you said. So, like then uh the other thing is though that like literally like Nastasi and I just had this heartbreaking like couple of days where uh this factory in China wanted us to hand them, I swear to God, 92,000 US dollars with no guarantee of making us a product. Literally, Nastasi and I were like, we'll fly out there and make an agreement with you. They're like, nope, we won't talk to you until you hand us $92,000. That's that's what our.
I don't know what you're talking about. With Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks was in a pirate movie? Yeah, the Somali Empire movie. The real life pirate one.
Oh, yeah. And by the way, that's why I hate pirates. Like, that's what real pirates are like. Everyone's like, oh, pirates, pirates. I hate pirates.
Um can you recommend uh can you expand more in condenser efficiency than the required amount of cooling capacity advisable, say minus 10, minus 20. Uh, rotoVap salespeople don't get me, me meaning uh Richard, uh, wanting to go below zero or even plus ten. This is a long answer. We gotta go. Say we'll get to it next week.
We really gotta go. Alright, we'll get into it. Uh we'll get into it next week. Uh we got uh from a uh how do you think you pronounce uh how do you think we pronounce their name? Frieza?
Freeze uh Undini wrote in about soap. We had a discussion where I don't know where we got into it last week on soap. People wanted to know the way you bathe. I I don't I'm not gonna get back into it, but uh sent us uh Tom Friedman in 1995 uh did a sculpture of short and uh curlies uh on a soap bar arranged in a spiral pattern. And so they this was brought to our attention, which is horrifying.
Uh Aaron Morgan, who called about who wrote in about the milk, said we're gonna get a lot a lot of milk for sale in Oklahoma. Fresh coward goat. Let us know if you did anything fun. Uh, next week, or not two weeks from now, I'm gonna get to uh the Dragon's Beard question we had. I had an interesting one.
Oh, Nepalis. Matt Matthew Sanders wrote about Napalis. I have a lot to say about um Nopalis and Slime, but I guess we'll have to get to it in two weeks on Cooking Issues. Cooking Issues is powered by Simplecast. Simplecast is a popular hosting and analytics platform that allows podcasters to easily host and publish to apps like Apple Podcasts.
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