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Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. Hey Nostas. Good. Good Matt in the booth. How are you doing?
I'm doing great. Yeah, calling all your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So what was this Bushwick show you were pushing uh before our show, Matt? Uh it's like a like a hyperlocal podcast about the neighborhood.
Alright, I'm gonna ask you a question. So, like the music was some sort of like Hill Street Blues, like like sad, like definitely, definitely someone's getting over some sort of terrible traumatic loss, and they're listening to some sort of like not I can't quite be up e upbeat yet kind of music. Is that what the vibe you're getting off the music? That was the vibe I was getting off the music. Is that the vibe of this neighborhood?
Uh that that that tuning noise is Nastasia Lopez messing with her mic. I'm not gonna touch the mic. Not gonna take it, not gonna take it. Um Zing. And we're there.
Um he tries to elicit the feels on the podcast. I guess that's what he's doing with the music too. Yeah, yeah. So you're saying that the feel of Bushwick is somehow like sad, but hoping it will be better in the future. Ding ding ding.
Um maybe you should consult on the music with him. He might he might have he might have I don't know. Yeah. Anyway. It could be a misfire.
No, I mean, it's fine. It's it's it's well made. It's just like, you know, usually if you're trying to get someone to tune in, either it's like dun dun dun dun dun dun, or it's like, you know, you know, I don't know, something more, you know, kind of hey, you know? You know what I'm saying? Anyway.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I mean, I I I edited out the ripping guitar solo that comes later. That was your mistake. You gotta leave in the ripping guitar solo. My bad.
What's your favorite uh 1980s theme song? My favorite 1980s themes? You can do 70s, 80s, or 90s. Uh Night Rider came to mind, but that seems wrong. I would have to revisit.
There's a there's a rap song that samples Night Rider, but I forget what it is. It's a hip hop song that samples Night Rider. That I want to hear. Yeah, yeah. Uh I don't know.
Like my classics, I think we've discussed this. I think Sanford and Sun, excellent. Excellent. Uh Rockford Files, excellent. Excellent.
And you would like those Nastasia. No words in them for me to talk about the stories. Yeah. I mean, my actual favorite is the X-Files theme song, which is still like gives me chills to this day, I think. Yeah.
That's because of the content of the show, not the song. Here's a here's Nastasio. I don't watch TV. I don't know what a theme song is. No, that's not true.
What's your favorite theme song? A theme song is like a piece of music that plays early on in a television program. It sort of like marks the the program that you want has started. Yeah, what do you what do you what do you like? I don't know.
I don't know. I gotta think on it. Yeah? Yeah. Alright.
Um are you calling? Well, what? I don't know. We have a caller and I'm checking to see that they're gonna be able to do it. Listen, they're going to answer they're gonna ask one question.
Oh, you hear that caller. Nastasia is going to actually try to be the hammer today. Here's how it works, by the way. Like I tell her to be the hammer, and then whenever she is the hammer, I feel bad about it. Yeah.
I'm like, be nice. Yeah. And so Nastasia's like, you can't have it both ways, you jerk. Oh, you should tell them about your new emoji. Uh we should not.
And uh caller on the air. Uh no, their connection was real bad. I had them call back. Hold on. Alright.
Yeah, so Nastasia can talk about the new. So every once in a while. We are in a the quarterly boondoggle right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A serious one.
Like, so uh I don't know if you can still buy tickets to this. I won't mention names, but we have to do this event next week where I said in advance, Nastasia. What did I say in advance? It's gonna be a Cordal U. Yeah, Cordal U is is uh is uh you know book or speak for Cluster F.
And uh, and lo and behold, it is going to be an am it's gonna be They were like what what was your text? Oh no, it was Rebecca's text. Um they didn't order us anything. Yeah, they so months ago they're like, it's absolutely critical. This is by the way, people who do events.
I gotta be on the phone with them, and they're the reason I had to crawl through the trunk of my car, because by her car she means the zip car. But listen, like uh she accidentally she left the trunk open, but it already locked the keys in the car. Is that what happened to me? But because of the conference call. You climbed into the trunk, ripped the back seat off, went back into the car.
Yeah, anyway. So here's what happens. Uh, for those of you that actually like, you know, work for a living, like make food or drink, and someone asks you to be in an event at an event, if they say to you, they're gonna here's what's gonna happen. You're trying to work, right? Because that's what you do for a living, work, and then uh they're like, we have an event.
We know it's like four months from now. But we need we need the menu right now. We need to know everything that you're gonna buy. We need it right now. So you find figure out like you stop what you're doing, you stop the fact, everything's on fire, service is a nightmare.
Like, five people just quit, but you drop all of that, right? As I like to say, you you you have the baby in your hands and you drop it into that burning trash can to take care of their stupid problem that's four months in the video. Oh my god, they need it so and and oh my god, it's gonna be so hard getting Okay, one, you know they're gonna order the wrong stuff. You know they're gonna order the wrong stuff, but they won't let you order your own stuff and then just reimburse you for it. As soon as they won't let you do that, people walk away.
Walk away. Because here's what happens when they ask you four months in advance, I guarantee you that little football is being handed off to at least 12 different people, and one of them, one of them, is gonna drop it. So we went through all this nightmare trying to figure out our freaking list of stuff we were gonna make for this event. Three-day event. We're figuring out all this stuff, right?
Three days. Three-day event. Don't even get me started. Don't even get me started. So we're we're making this stuff, and I'm like, oh my god, I waste all of this time that I could have been doing anything else, beating my head against the wall, shoving like slivers of bamboo underneath my fingernails.
Anything would have been more pleasurable than dealing with them at that moment. And then on a conference. Kim Cobb's call yesterday. It's coming up Monday. What do they say, Nastasia?
They say we don't know what you're doing. Yeah. What? You didn't order the product. What event?
What event? You didn't order it? So they they ordered nothing. They ordered nothing. Nothing.
Nothing. And I was like, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're just like your machines, your machines. So like, I'm like, I need to clean.
I need this is also happens. You're asking me to show up and demonstrate a piece of equipment that makes food. Do you have access to running water? Yeah, the bathroom. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And like, I'm not walking into a bathroom and rinsing out spinzall rotors while people are washing the poop off their hands. That's a no-fly. That is not gonna happen, right? And and four months ago, they were so adamant that we could not buy anything, that they had to order everything, right? So it's turned into such a nightmare that I was like, listen, listen.
This is gonna be great content for your Instagram. I was like, listen, listen. Is anyone going to search my am I gonna have some sort of full body cavity search when I'm entering and leaving the venue? They're like, huh? I'm like, well, what if, what if, right?
Stuff just magically appears that I've made at my real honest to God bar where we know how to work for a living, right? And then I just take the raw product that you haven't yet ordered and is not gonna be right, and bring it back to the bar in my backpack. They're like, ah, yeah. They were like, what'd you say? We were at listening.
Yeah, anyway. Nightmares. Nightmares. Anytime someone asks you that far in advance, pay attention because they aren't. Yeah.
Caller? Caller. You're on the air. One question. Yeah, hey.
How you doing? I'm good. I was wondering if you have any suggestions or ways to look into any different for roasting cocoa nib versus the whole beans. Because most of the stuff online is about roasting the whole beans. Yeah, geez, I don't know.
I mean, the main thing with roasting beans is uh obviously getting an even, you know, well, I guess if you don't want it even, you don't want it even, but getting an even profile throughout. I don't know anyone that roasts the nibs, and 99.9% uh aren't they already are you buying raw? I thought they already roasted and then cracked them into nibs. No, you can get raw nibs. I mean, I don't want to offend anyone, but 99.9, I would just order the uh I would go to like I forget the name of the place, it's like chocolate alchemy or something like this.
Um you could find it that way. They will sell whole raw cacao beans. I would do that. 99.9% of nibs are, and no offense, chocolate people, straight garbage. The like garbage, like the stuff that they're not willing to put into their chocolate is like what they're selling as nibs.
99%. And it's true, maybe I've only tasted like, you know, 15 different brands of nibs, but with the exception of Valrona, which sells a high-quality nib, I'm not gonna say it's as uh as good as the stuff that they put into their fantastic chocolate. I like it. I think for a larger chocolate manufacturer, I think Valverona does an excellent job. If you disagree, come fight me.
But like the uh, but uh their nibs are good enough for me to use, at least in with uh infusions, where most of them are just kind of like wretched, like burnt bitter tasting things. Now, uh I would go, uh it's been years, like on the order of five or six years since uh I've dealt with it, but um, I believe it's called chocolate alchemy, and there's a couple other websites now where they'll supply whole uh beans. Uh and the good thing about that is that they I think they have a tighter control over the quality than if you're just buying unspecified nibs from bulk nib supplier.net okay. Um but no, I don't know anything about roasting the nibs if they if they come raw. Um Neil wrote in from uh Los Angeles, where by the way, Nastasi and I are going to Los Angeles when we're doing what you tell them what we're doing.
Why don't you face into the mic instead of doing your zappos? She has been very on mic today so far. Well, yeah, except for she's literally sitting there while I'm talking, asking her questions, looking up, she's the rudest, rudest, rudest co-host in the world. Like 45 minutes, you need to focus on what we're doing. She can't do it.
She would do it if you could be interesting for 45 minutes today. Oh we're going to LA. Oh, I told them that. What are we doing in LA? Uh the 27th through the 31st.
And what are we doing while we are there? Nastasia. Oh my god. That house has a lot of reference. Okay, this is how this works.
You listen to what we're doing and you tell them what we're doing. We're going to Harvard and Stone. We're making apple heads. And we are making cocktails, one of which will include Personally Handmade by Nastasia, Applehead Doll Garnishes, as featured on her Instagram stories a couple weeks ago. In yours.
Was it also featured on my stories? Okay. And uh if you're very nice, Nastasia, if you say something nice about the apple head, she might take her dead to me look off of her face for five seconds. And then what are we doing? Jack Shram is also going.
We were gonna throw a party at the I'm not allowed to say where it was gonna be, but we're not gonna throw that party. And then I don't know what we're doing. We're going to do a cooking issues from Los Angeles. Maybe in case you have a list of use. Is that true?
Yeah. You you deal with all this stuff. Anyway, stay tuned. Uh stay tuned for that. Also, uh at the end of the show, we're also doing a dinner party at the house.
No, we're not. Who said we were doing a dinner party at the house? You did this is the first time hearing of it. The last time the last time I did a party at a house in the Hollywood Hills that Nastasia rented with You know you're staying there again, right? Oh yeah.
So she rented this house in the in the Hollywood Hills, like literally the last house before the Hollywood sign. It has a tent where I could throw a baseball and maybe well, no, I'm not that strong, but I could throw a baseball and hit the Hollywood sign from it. And uh this is the one where she set an immersion circulator on 55 Fahrenheit, threw a bunch of steak in it for like six hours, and used it as a freaking doorstop, and never bothered to stick her finger into the water. Like any normal human, listen, it doesn't take Sherlock freaking homes. You know what I mean?
Or, you know, Angela Lansbury to look over. But I covered it with saran wrap. No, you didn't. Yeah, I did. No, you didn't.
Which had any heat been generated, that would have insulated it really well. Yeah, dingy ding ding ding. Yeah, right? But obviously, no vapor coming off of it at all. Never bothers to touch it, see what's going on.
And the one question She sends someone who shall remain nameless. Her nickname's the Boondogler. Sends someone over to increase the to decrease the temperature of the bath a 55 Fahrenheit below room temperature bath, by the way, by two degrees. Has to somehow touch the equipment and not realize that this thing has been sitting in room temp water. I mean for outside.
This is well outside the danger zone. No, no. Oh no. Oh no, no. Room temperature.
No. Oh, I suppose that's true. Yeah, yeah. No. No, she was like, she was like, listen, I know this, I know this meat started out cold, and the bacteria was having a tough time growing.
So let me just as fast as possible, let me run a bunch of room temperature water over it. By the way, room temperature in LA. So not like, you know, room temperature in like the Arctic tundra. Like room temperature in LA, right? Let me just get it up to that temperature to see whether I can really just ferment this mother for a while.
I show up. I said I ask one thing of you. Do not yell at me in front of my parents. You didn't care whether I yelled at you in front of your dad. That's true.
Uh and then, and then, but she's like, listen, listen, listen. Don't you just need to be nice in front of my parents. And then I see that I'm supposed to be putting our name, Booker and Dax. I'm supposed to be an expert in this stuff, right? Putting our name on this.
Nastasia Lopez, who sits in this freaking chair next to me and has for I don't know how what do we have to do, 8,000 episodes now? And has heard me talk about low temperature cooking, I don't know, eight billion times, right? Writing a book on the freaking subject, can't even set up the simplest circulator in the world, and she expects me to sit there and be like, hi Nastasia. Great job setting up the party when her parents happen to walk in behind me when I'm trying to figure out what the hell has happened in this kitchen. This is an unreasonable expectation.
That's like saying, that's like saying, Dave, I know you're on fire. The one thing you can't do is stop drop and roll. No! I'm sorry. I have to stop dropping roll.
My mom was horrified. Well, she should have been. I think I spoke to your dad about it. I think she was horrified at what a terrible job you did with that immersion circulator, is what she was horrified at. I know I would be.
Oh my god. It's like I tell Dax every day, do well or don't come home. I don't actually say we do say that to each other as a joke, but obviously I don't mean it. Okay. Uh Neil wrote in from Los Angeles.
Uh, hey Dave, Nastasia. And oh, you're now Booth Boy Matt. How do you like that? Ooh, no. Uh Booth Boy?
Booth boy. Booth boy. Alright. Am I like bringing you drinks? No, it's like boy, like boy, I don't know.
Maybe it's like as like you're like a hype man. Okay, okay. I'll bring my I'll get my giant watch from or clock from home for around my neck. Do you have a flavor flav necklace? Uh I will once I get on Amazon.
Sweet. Do they still sell those? Of course they do. I mean, troubled individual, right? Had a lot of issues.
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I'm working on a draft. Do we already deal with this? Draft spritz at the bar and some home some carbonation questions. Sounds yeah, you've done the carbonation. I know you've talked a lot about this in the past.
Did we already talk about this? I have some new information. Everyone I talk to, this is Neil said, everyone Neil spoke to says they need a carbstone, and I played around carbonating water with a carbstone, uh, and it works just fine. Uh as long as I don't mind shaking a five-gallon keg like a jerk, is the carbstone necessary? Uh P.S.
I had a good time at existing conditions. Okay. I have just recently used a carbstone. I attempted to do a and people might find this interesting, a kegged uh cocktail. Everyone knows that I'm anti-kegged uh carbonated cocktails because they come out rather undercarbonated because of the immense amount of foaming you get uh at the tap, no matter kind of how good a job you you did.
Now, uh I was using a carbonating stone and I was testing carbonation levels, and I was able using uh what I did was I circulated uh the carbonation stone that you use with uh one of the uh these things. You have a pump, the pump circulates the liquid through the keg through the carbonating stone uh and and carbonates it that way. Uh I had a good good result carbonating it. What I did was is I circulated the product with the pump through a cold plate uh so that the product was continuously kept cold uh while I was doing it, and it was done very quickly. The temperature dropped down to pretty close to to zero in I would say five to ten minutes.
Um I also, before I hooked up the carbonator stone, I put the batch into the keg, applied uh CO2 to it to the tube side to the so that I was pushing from the bottom and vented all the air out. But I also tried to keep it circulating because my theory, one of my theories was one of the reasons you get a lot of foaming, especially at the beginning when you're using water, is that uh static stuff in the line has air uh you know bubbles in it, and when you depress it, those bubbles foam up. So I was trying to keep it circulating and cold and uh dispense it that way, uh constantly circulating from a really nice tap. Still didn't work. I still had undercarbonated cocktails, so I still do not recommend it.
But you know, your results may vary, and by that your standards may vary. Oh Nastasi's like, don't care. Um mood therapist from Vietnam asks, uh do I need to suggest that you buy another vegetti? No, someone handed me a vegetti when I was in Chicago. Oh, by the way, I was in Chicago last week.
Um, by the way, Clara's speech went well. Oh, so for those of you that were listening to the episode where I was giving uh advice to someone uh doing a wedding official speech, it went well, but I heard that Nastasia had to take care of a lot of dotting the I's and crossing the T's to make sure that the wedding happened. For instance, uh your favorite officiant showed up 45 minutes late to the rehearsal. Because she wanted to go buy wine for herself. Well, for herself?
Yeah. Who the hell buys wine for themselves? Because she didn't want to pay for the wine at the ranch. Wait, what? So she's like buying Capri Sons of wine so that she can like does she have like a beer hat with two wines in it?
And she's like sucking it down. Yeah. Dearly. Dearly sucking on like wine as he's like. What?
Who buys wine for themselves? I don't want to buy wine at this ranch. We're going to the store so I can get it for cheap. What did she buy? Some kind of Chardonnay.
What's that stuff? Kendall Jackson? Yeah. Oh, geez, Louise. Oh, geez.
Uh anyways. So I was in Chicago. Uh the Vegetti comment reminded me. So wait, Moot Therapist was calling about condensers and roto vaps. Nastasia Lopez tells me that it's too deep to get into this conversation because only three of you will really care about the uh cooling power of condensers at of uh chillers for condensers at various um distillation rates.
So Nastasia assures me that nobody cares, so just reach out to me individually and I'll answer it. What? Tweet it. It's beyond Twitter. Whatever.
You can DM me. We'll deal with it. He's supposed to. I thought we were gonna go to Vietnam and hang out. It's not like I answer my phone anyway.
So um wait, what were we talking about before that? Chicago. Chicago. So uh if anyone out there is listening from Chicagoland, once again, uh Frontera Grill did us way, way right. And uh we had um uh you know Rick Bayless and Yotunda Allison got us a whole bunch of one of my favorite herbs to work with, Oja Santa, which is a very, it's big, it's it's related to um black pepper, actually.
It's in the same uh genus, different species, and also related to you know, pond leaves, which are used, or beetle leaves, which are used for chewing quids of of uh of beetle nut uh, you know, over vast, you know, areas of Southeast Asia. Um, but it's a really, I think, good spice. I don't know, uh herb rather. I don't know why. Why do you think people don't use it in the US fresh?
Is it because it's so big? I don't like it. Why do you not like it? I don't like the flavor. What do you not like about it?
Describe the flavor that you don't like. All of that flavors that you just talked about, I don't like. Which flavors? The beetle nut. Beetelnut is is it doesn't taste anything like beetle nut.
The it doesn't taste zero in fact, beetle nut is a beetle nut and the leaf that you chew with it is at least reminds me of um Sachuan peppers. It has no relation to Sichuan peppers. It doesn't have it does not have any tingling at all. It is not a tingling herb. It has no tingle at all.
There's no, there's absolutely zero Sichuan button flavor. I think you don't have an accurate memory of Oja Santa. I think so. Are you thinking of tarragon? No.
I know what you're talking about, Dave. What does it look like? It's a gigantic leaf. The one that is the one that is from India has it tastes like burning transformers. That one people the Mexican one does not.
They are different species. I am not wrong. I have studied this quite thoroughly, and I am not wrong. Uh anyway, it's a great fresh herb. If you can find it, uh I recommend it.
Uh Rick Bayless was uh, as usual, super kind, able to get us because it's a little early in the season. He grows his own. I didn't see him. Uh, you know, they were closed uh the night we did the event, so I didn't get to didn't get to see them. But anyway, thanks.
Shout out to them. Um see, we have a question from Matt regarding dragon's beard. So, how many years ago did I do that dragon's beard video? Nine. So Dragon's Beard is like uh you've heard of hand pulled noodles.
Well, Dragon's Beard is like hand pulled cotton candy. And so what you you you you take sugar um and you you cook it, sugar and you know, I think uh I did it officially, so I used maltos, but sugar and I think they added the maltos to it, I don't remember. Who's best at the dragon's beard? What do you mean? Me?
Nick Wong. He never made it. Yeah, he did. When did he make it? He came in and I handed it to him.
He had the best, he had the best racist picture of himself with it. And he made a picture of himself and said, here is the best racist picture you will ever have. You remember now? Now do you remember how it works? Anyways, uh do you have any recommendations for how to make Dragon's Beard candy at home?
Uh what cook temp, pull temp, etc. I tried yesterday to recreate it as best as I understood, and just ended up with long, fat, snotty shaped strands. Ooh, long, fat, snotty shaped strands. I definitely started stretching while the candy was too warm, but any recommendations, suggestions, and our tutorials, references would be appreciated. Oh, this is not from Matt.
This is from Serena. P.S. uh, Nastasia, I missed a chance to go to Pasta Flyer. I'm kicking myself for it. Awaiting your next adventure.
Uh so Serena, I have a video on this. Uh I don't I I I didn't get a chance to go look at it again, but I have all of the information on the on the video, like all of the like the cook temperatures and all of that other stuff. Uh the main thing is if you pull too early, you're definitely gonna get that kind of ropey, ropey thing. You should wait for it to be dead cold. And then if it's too hard, you can just nuke it for a second in the microwave.
But the whole trick about it is getting the cook time very similar to the cook time that I used in the in the recipe. That's why you really shouldn't change the mount, the amount of the quantity of the recipe that I have and the amount of vinegar I have. The problem with when you're cooking sugar is you're trying to get a you're as you cook sugar, a lot of complex things happen to it. So cooking to a temperature is not doesn't really mean the same thing as cooking to a particular temperature at a particular uh in a particular amount of time with a particular amount of acid. So you're adding some acid to the sugar vinegar in the case of the recipe I used, um, you're adding some acid to it, and what that's gonna do is invert, invert some of the sugar, split some of the sucrose into uh into uh glucose and fructose, and that is going to uh drastically affect the texture of the finished product.
So uh the amount of time that you're boiling something in the presence of acid is going to affect the amount of uh temperature, the amount of sugar inversion that you get. So for a given temperature, and Harold McGee has proven this by putting sugar in at very for very, very, very long times at very constant temperatures, and you can see them kind of break down and change color. So, in general, for a recipe where you're cooking sugar, you want to get the the use the same batch size they do so that stuff's evaporating at roughly the same rate, and you want to hit roughly the same amount of time. So if you go back and you look at that recipe that I did, um just try to hit those numbers exactly once it cools down. You should get the texture pretty much exactly like I did.
If it's too hard, you can heat it, but just know that we're talking like five seconds in the microwave. You don't even want like sensible, what I would call sensible heat in it. You want it to kind of um uh you want it to just be good enough to make that donut by pushing your finger through the puck. You basically you make a puck of sugar and then you put your finger through it, form it into a donut, make the donut relatively wide around. This you want to do very accurately.
If you have lots of really thin spots in the donut that you're pulling on, that's when you know they're gonna only get worse and worse. Then you put it into your cornstarch and/or cornstarch and flavor mixture, and then you start pulling. Make sure that you're always uh, you know, you know, figurating, putting together and pulling, make sure that you're always dredging it in between cornstarch, and hopefully you'll have a better result. If it's like I say, too hot, uh, it just doesn't work. And if the texture is too stiff when it's cold, it will snap.
So it's kind of hard to get it just right. But once you get the texture right, you will it will work a hundred percent of the time, and you will know based on touching it whether it is right or wrong. Um anyway. Uh Matthew Sanders wrote in about uh no Nastasia Lopez is sitting here reading emails and hitting the table with her foot such that my microphone keeps jangling up and down like I'm on a horse and buggy. Why she's doing this, I don't know.
And I'm I look at her, give her the snap. If you hear this, that's me trying to get her to stop bouncing the table with her feet. Now I bounce my feet, so I'm not saying you can't bounce your feet. I mean, both Nastasi and I are are inveterate fidgeters, right? Mm-hmm.
Yeah. But do you need to bounce the table, Nastasi? Remember when Nick Wong came on the show and didn't say anything? Yeah, it pissed me off. So, what are you looking at on the internet right now?
Nothing. There's no internet, but what emails are you reading? I saw a picture coming up. Was it interesting? I think it's a good idea.
Was it a picture of someone's baby? I know you hate seeing people's babies, so I doubt it's that. Is that true? Why do you tell me that every day? You're like, I d I hate babies.
Every day? I don't hate babies. She hates babies. I don't hate babies. I find them annoying.
Did you guys get this question about existing conditions name? No. Explain it, Dave. Can I can I give you this one? Let me guess.
What's the name about? Uh yeah, that's the that's the quick way. I'll redo the whole message. Just wondering how you guys came up with the existing conditions name uh for your bar. I work in architecture and interior design and we use the term quite a bit.
Did your wife being an architect have something to do with the name? Yeah, Don and I, well, like like uh Jen, my wife was talking to us about the existing conditions at various places that we were looking to uh take over. And uh we Don uh and I, you know, were told, you need a name, you need a concept. And we're like, what the hell? I thought the concept was we were gonna make drinks.
You know what I mean? And uh, but apparently these days that's not enough. If it if you don't have some sort of like, you know, high concept, it just doesn't work. And so she just kept talking about the existing conditions, and Don and I at at the same time were like, hey, that's a great, that's a great name, and also to kind of abuse the architectural concept a little bit, we were like, well, we're gonna focus on using the existing conditions at the space, doing as little kind of intervention as possible, uh, and have that be the the goal. Because the goal is to is to focus on the staff and the drinks and the hospitality and not so much on um you know, trying to impose our will on a bunch of already existing conditions in a space because that gets really pricey.
People people spend, you know, people you could you could drop a million dollars on a space and you would hardly even know that you did it. You know, it's isn't it crazy where the money goes, Nastasi, especially if you do things legally. I mean, I'm not saying that they do things illegally here at Roberta's, Matt. But I mean also look they have greens on the pizzas now. They they will not have greens on our pizza.
So Nastasia, like so like anything you do by the book costs 30 times as much as anything that you don't do by the book. But Nastasia Lopez and I for how many years have we been doing this? So many. Have been asking for greens on our and we're like we'll pay. I wouldn't even make the radio pay.
We would pay out of and if you know how cheap Nastasi and I are we would pay out of our own pockets. Yeah. To have greens on our pizza. That looks delicious. And there I'm looking out at this dude and he has greens on his pizza now in his defense, I'm sure he asked for what is that arugal I can't see they gave him like three leaves.
No actually I think it's I think it's cilantro. That's not cilantro. Yeah Dave look that's some sort anyway they gave the poor guy like three greens turn the tables on them. Tap on the window see if you can get their attention. Hey yo yo yo cave the rest of your pizza yo anyway so Nastasi and I are gonna go there and we're gonna ask them for greens on their pizza and what are they gonna say?
Nah no it's a garden this is this is a garden. It's crazy. No, this is a container yeah or we're under a garden. We're under a garden. Yeah not our garden.
Um they had a second question completely unrelated. All right. Uh they say I'm looking for a chocolate melter not a tempering machine per se, as I would like to temper couverture chocolate by hand and keep it at the proper temperature in the melter. Do you have any recommendation on a particular brand or any features I should consider. I'm bas it's basically for hobby work, something in the 3k range.
Three kilogram? Yes. Yeah, no, I don't. It's been it's been a long time since I've worked at the French culinary. I used to know all the name brands of the melters they used at the French culinary, but you know, I don't, especially if you don't want one that uh tempers.
I mean, uh, I would see whatever JG J uh JB Prince's has now, because they usually carry stuff that works pretty well. Um, but uh yeah, I don't have any, I don't off the top of my head, I could take a look, but I don't off the top of my head have any good recommendations for it. Um Matthew Sanders writes in about nopolis. Now, is this another one of those things that you don't like, Nastasia? As a cactus?
Yeah. I don't know it that well. Really? Mm-hmm. But you grew up in Southern California.
We didn't eat that. What? We didn't eat that. Is it your dad Mexican? Mm-hmm.
What? You didn't eat it at all? What about prickly pears? No. No.
None of it? No. Okay. Uh I'm a sucker for the flavor of Nopalis paddles, which are the Nopalis. Okay, we'll get into it in a minute.
Uh, and a friend who has a large uh I and I have a friend who has a large squad of cacti in his alleyway. I effectively have an unlimited supply to experiment with. The only published cocktails I've seen with No Paulis are in two families. Uh the first track I've seen infuses the flavor into a simple syrup. Uh fresh napalis have a nice green uh pepper citrus vibe going on.
And after you simmer them, they just move into green bean asparagus peas territory. Not terrible, but and then dot dot dot, not not what you're looking for. The next track is blending it into a god-awful Slurpee from hell. It's so thick and viscous and snotty that it's not even worth it, even though that tastes pretty good. Straining the stuff is incredibly difficult, and the sludge does not want to separate.
What should I be doing to these uh little friends for maximum clean flavor extraction while combating the pulpy slime? Uh and for the ongoing cooking issue census, I'm 36, male, married, and my wife is down for whatever kitchen stuff I want. As long as we have room for it, she's a fantastic home baker and has plenty of her own kitchen gadgets. Desperately trying to carve out space for a spinzall, it might get relegated to the garage. Well, why not?
Uh all of our stuff ends up getting relegated to the garage, right? Nastasia, trailing edge technology. Uh so uh nopolis are like uh there's a bunch of different and you get a bunch of stuff from from no nopolis. Napolis are the paddles, right? And they come from a larger, large, relatively large group of cactus or cacti called uh opuntia, right?
So the fruits, the same cactus that gives you the paddles, uh, different different species of them. You can get the paddles, you also get uh prickly pear cactus. Now, prickly pear fruits. In America, in most places in America, if you buy prickly pear in the supermarket, they suck real hard. They're they're almost flavorless.
Um you can get various varieties of them. So, like the one that uh, you know, that Rick Bayliss again got us, uh, Shucko Nosle, which don't even bother, it starts starts XO, but it's pronounced Shucka Nosle. Uh or Shockan, I don't know how you pronounce it, but that's the way he pronounces it. Or that's the way he had me pronounce it. Uh, has a lot more acidity.
So if you don't like pick prickly pear fruit uh or a punty of fruits now, please do not judge them until you've tried a wide variety because the flavor is extremely different from species to species and plant to plant. And whenever I'm within uh whether I'm in an area and I see them like on roadsides, I try them, and they are incredibly different from different places, different plants, different species, etc. Uh and when you dry them, uh you get the the dried prickly pear, which is more of a texture thing, less of a uh flavor thing, but that is called tuna, I guess. Anyway, uh the leaves, the paddles, have a like a hardcore mucus in them that in in uh I forget the Spanish word for it, it's like babusa or something like this. But it's very, very snotty.
So even when you're just cooking with it, people have a lot of uh ways they try to ameliorate the slime. And the slime is uh is a hydrocolloid, I think. I I looked it up, it has uh I think both proteins and hydrocolloids in it uh that cause it to kind of snot up on you. But uh the various ways that that people do it is they will uh cut it, salt it. By the way, be careful of the prickers.
So I I uh take a knife and shave the the prickers off before I use it. Some people then also flame it to get rid of some of the prickers. But if you if you slice it, uh salt it, right, the the salt will cause water to come out. As the water comes out, the mucus will come out with it. You rinse off the mucus and the salt and the stuff that's left over is less mucusy.
That's one thing people do. Another thing, as you say, people do is they will slice it, uh, boil it and skim the scum off of the top. That gets rid of some of the mucus too, but it causes it to be cooked. The only way that I have ever seen um cactus used in a cocktail that wasn't snotty uh was if you blend directly into liquor, the if the liquor content is high enough, and we had a a cactus uh cocktail that uh Felipe uh you know used at our at our bar at Booker Index. If you blend the cactus leaves directly into liquor, um the the hydrocaloid can't stay in solution in the liquor, and it will drop out.
And you can have a mucus-free uh uncooked cactail uh uh cactus uh infusion, but you have to do it into the straight spirit. I was not able, even with uh Pectanex uh Ultra SPL to knock out the mucus once the mucus is allowed to stay solubilized in a syrup. So anyway, there you have it. Um for that question? No.
Oh, so I didn't get to Bob's stuff on wine finding and bentonite. Uh a couple other things I need to get to, but I guess we'll get to oh, I know one thing before we go. Uh, because I just looked at the clock and we have two minutes. But Nastasi's like, you're gonna stop me from reading my emails some more. So she literally, people, I wish you could see this, Matt.
Can you take a picture? She pushes the mic away from her face, puts her feet up on the table, bounces the table, and sifts through emails during this show. But it's like all the time. Like it's she's all the time done with you. Like, how am I supposed to work in this?
She gives me crap for being late while I'm literally busting my butt trying to find the answers to your questions, people. And then during the show, she isn't actually here. So she is late the entire time because she's never in the show. She's always doing something else. My horoscope says today, you may realize that you'll have better chances for a razor promotion if you inventory your accompl accomplishments and demonstrate your value.
Oh, yeah. Demonstrating your hardcore value right now. You're reading your horoscope during the show. This is important, Dave. I'll tell you, it's horror scope with what I had to deal with on a regular basis.
It's like a constant horror. What were you gonna say? So Nastasia and I, did we mention this? The uh video series we're gonna do. Yeah.
We mentioned it? I haven't heard no one's tweeted me or anything. Oh, well, the chicken cannon. Dimensions? You said tweet ideas.
Nobody's tweeted anymore. You should mention it again, but yes. I don't look my Twitter, by the way, if you want to tweet me, is the same as the show title at cooking issues on the Twitter. And uh I have a I forget whether it's four or five inch across chicken cannon that I built uh a while ago, and I'm gonna tweet out soon. Uh what do you want to do it?
I I don't know. I gotta tweet out uh uh a clip of how powerful this chicken cannon is. Let's just say that I pointed it at like uh a three-eighths inch piece of Lexan and uh it evaporated the Lexan. Now originally the chicken gun was used uh to test windshields uh for bird impact strikes, and that's how my and you know I'm gonna talk about this later, but my my grandpa, when he he used to build radars for Westinghouse, uh he built the Pearl Harbor radar. Did I say that on the air?
Anyway, so he used to watch them shoot the birds at the windshields, and to me what stuck in my head was that he said the janitor used to take the birds home and cook them. So I've always wondered what that does. So I built this chicken gun, and every time I fired it, I was not able to properly recover the chicken. So we're gonna take the chicken gun, and I know Nastasia says that I'm the fancy one. Nastasia's the one with a beach house now.
I'm gonna take the chicken gun to her beach house. We're gonna fire some chickens into the Long Island Sound. An old wall. And we're gonna fire a chicken into a brick wall with a tarp. A stone wall.
What happened to the ones that you could not quote unquote properly recover? Well, the one that evaporated the Lexan, it just went through the Lexan. It ended up all coated with dirt. So I don't know. I couldn't like get all the dirt off.
And then I fired another one into the woods and I hit a tree, but by the time I got to it, my dog had been chewing on it, had leaves and stuff. So what we need to do is Are we recovering the ones from the ocean? That's just kind of a distant shot. What we need to do is fire the chickens. You can try to recover it.
What? We should try to recover the. Yeah, it's already brined. Yeah. Yeah, but it won't have the.
I want to see the tenderization effect of it hitting the wall and then recover it. We just need a big enough tarp so that it's not hitting dirt, right? No. And then and then so we're gonna take, we're gonna shoot the chicken into a into a stone wall, and that's gonna stand in for the windshield. Then we're gonna pick up the parts and grill them and have like, you know.
Baby barbecue. Uh yeah, a chicken, uh a grilled chicken uh fest with uh chicken gun chicken. And we're gonna video this as part of a we're also gonna be cooking things with uh resistance cooking. You can look up resistance cooking, where literally it's like the electric chair of cooking techniques where you just you know put two electrodes into something and cook it by running electricity through it using the food itself as a resistor. We're gonna do that.
So we're looking for uh ideas like this that you want us to test. And some people did send us some of those, but if you have anything that you want to shoot out of a chicken gun that weighs that can fit into a tube about uh, what is that, like five five inches across, five or six inches across, and weighs whatever chicken weighs, which is like what, four pounds in that range, then we can fire it out of a gun and cook it up. But only stuff that you want cooked, because this is a cooking show. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network, food radio supported by you.
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