This episode is brought to you by Foster Sundry, a specialty grocery located in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Have you ever wanted to open a restaurant, launch your own food brand, or dive into the ever-changing world of food media? Well, buckle up. Join us for Aspiration to Action, a special live podcast on Monday, June 3rd at Haven's Kitchen in Manhattan. Zara Tangora and Bretton Scott, hosts of Life's a Banquet, will lead us through tales of the good, the bad, and the transformative.
Featuring food world innovators and HRN hosts Dana Cowan, host of Speaking Broadly, Eli Sussman, host of The Line, along with his brother Max, and Alison Kane, host of In the Sauce, in conversation with Jenny Britton Bauer. Light refreshments will be provided by Paris Gourmet, Wolfer Estate Vineyard, and to Honey. Get your tickets before they sell out by going to Heritage Radio Network.org/slash action. Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. That's a weird intro, Nastasia.
It's going from like it's going from like from Cherish. We'll do it. We'll do it. Okay, we'll do the intro. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live! Where am I? I'm in Hollywood Hills. We're not on the Heritage Radio Network yet, because we're recording pre-recorded, and we're in the Hollywood Hills. We're coming to you with a special I Love LA Los Angeles tour of cooking issues.
We're as close to the Hollywood sign as you can possibly be. That's right. And we were uh introduced, by the way, uh people we have with us today. We have, of course, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stas?
Yeah, good. All right. We have uh we have Rebecca, the Boondogler, our intrepid marketing guru, the Boondogler. You're not even gonna say hello? I'm shaking my head right now.
And that's all you're gonna get. I can see you, you. You're not shaking your head. You're lying to the listening audience. I was giving you death eyes.
Oh, death Eyes, Death Eyes. I appreciate that. We got uh Jack Shram, head bartender, Jack Shram. What are you going to do? Hello.
Yeah, how you doing? So this is basically along with Austin Henley, who's at uh uh Major Domo out here in LA. This was the team that we've been running around doing things like Harvard and Stone, blah, blah, blah. We'll talk about it later. We do not have Matt in the booth because Matt lives in New York.
Instead, and then we'll get into the story, Nastasia. We have Jeff in the booth. How are you doing? I'm well, right? Yeah, and we are at his house in the Hollywood Hills.
This might be the closest house to the Hollywood sign that exists on planet Earth. True or false. That's true. Yeah. And this is all and here's why, even though it's a hard to go into like, you know, uh, you know, a jet engine wine intro out of Cherish.
The reason, the reason Nastasia like chooses to stay at this house when we come out here is not just the Hollywood sign, but because the association actually like hung out here when they were doing the album that had songs such as Cherishon, right? That's true. Yeah. And one other bit of information is that David Crosby was introduced to Graham Nash at a party at this house by Mama Cass, who lived next door. So some gnarly she didn't she didn't where where did she choke on the sand on the baloney sandwich?
Not here. Okay. So I had to bring it back to cooking. I always have to bring it back to cooking. So my my point is is that some gnarly, gnarly, gnarly stuff has taken place in this in this building, true?
I mean, it has to have been like that era of folk. I mean, right? I mean, this the party stories. When did you get involved in this house? Uh botted in 87.
So, like where it's we're like, who was living there before? Was it still like rock and roll types, or was it? Uh, they used to have uh orgies here, actually, I think, on Saturday nights. That's what I heard. That that makes sense.
That makes sense. A lot of windows in the background. Unfortunately, we're checking out the bigger. A lot of it on Friday. What?
All right. Dave is so upset right now. So uh so Nastasi, you want to tell them why we're out in LA, what we were doing? Sure, yeah. We're taking over two bars.
Um, and then we're doing a bunch of spin-sall demos, and that's it, right? So we were uh first we were at Harvard and Stone. How'd the apple heads turn out? Great, I think. So for those of you that don't know, I don't know if if you how how you'd be hearing this and not knowing this, like Nastasi and I have been for many years obsessed with the apple head doll phenomenon.
So Nastasi's like, we're gonna do appleheads, we're gonna do it, we're gonna do apple heads for these drinks. And I was like, I don't really have time, so she's like, crap on you. I'm gonna carve every I carved two out of all of the apple heads I carve two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And uh I dehydrate them for you those does.
Yeah. And then we we're all then why I didn't want to do it all. Well, Nastasia believes that there is some sort of stereotype of like a half Mexican, half like Russian woman who moves from the Los Angeles area to New York to the west side and just sits at home all day making apple heads. To her, this is like a valid stereotype that she didn't want to be, so she wanted me to make cats, yeah. How is it related to collecting cats?
You have a boyfriend. This this is getting deep into a non cooking area that I don't know if you want to get into. So the question everyone had on the apple heads. So what you do is you take an apple, Stasi, why don't you take given the procedure? You take an apple, right?
Carve peel it. You peel it, yeah. Then you carve it. A bunch of cuts. Right.
So it look like a face. Ish, right? Then you dip it in lemon juice. Didn't you roll it in salt? Salt after.
Oh, lemon juice, then salt, right? And then you semi-core it. And you we put it in the you can. So back in the day, they used to have a Vincent Price shrunken head maker that was you just like ripped apart your your parents' lamp and put over a hundred watt light bulb, the Vincent Price shrunken head maker with the apple, and you did one at a time. I have an excaliber dehydrator, so I took a bunch of copper line and made hangers, and we could do like I think we could do like 16 at once or more.
That last batch you did the whole batch in the dehydrator. She says, Let it go. You rip it out. Nastasia, I told Nastasia, I thought we should use clove eyes for it because you know that's the legit thing, clove eyes, and uh, you know, that's old school. And she's like, No, I'm going to the cake decorating shop and buying uh, you know, they're she's not googly.
Okay, they're not googly, but that's just because the pupils don't move. Edible cake eyes. The best thing I saw this week was Nastasia googling the phrase cake hair. So we ended up, and then she was gonna put these fake hats on. We ended up actually not needing hats.
Once the googly eyes are on them, they don't need hats really. Some got hats and they look great. Rebecca was the stylist. I found a new calling, which is just putting a variety of small hats on apple heads, depending on the personality and what speaks to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And we had several that looked like Freddie Krueger, one that looked like Donald Trump. Oh, yeah. One that looked like Jay-Z. It did not look like Jay-Z. You were just inspired by Jay-Z when you were carving, I would say would be more accurate.
It didn't look anything like Jay-Z. Jack. There was a minor semblance. The guy, that photo. Anyway.
Anyway. So uh, so then we just make a cut in the bottom, and then we put that on the glass. We made a special cocktail for it because we were sick of making banana justino. So we did fashion fruit. We did old fashioned, which is you take uh passion fruit, you mix it in with uh what did we mix it into?
What do we use? We use plantation here. Yeah, we use plantation original dark. Yeah, mix it in, add the enzymes, spin it out, dope it with a little brown sugar, pour it over a rock, garnish with an apple head, and you know it's a good drink. It was a good drink.
Good drink. Everyone, can I eat the apple? You could try. It's not not funny. I don't think anyone ate one.
It's not poisonous. No, but anyway, you'll never get that at the bar. Why? Because Jack, we do not make apple heads. Or garnish.
Or non-functional garnish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Twist. That seems like a pretty functional garnish to me. It was so fantastic.
It gives you nightmares when you go home at night. That yeah, yeah. I don't know. So we sold all of those. We ripped through all of our drinks, like super quick.
We sold, yeah, we sold all the m more drinks than we had planned. It was great. So busy. We were the busiest session that they've done there. Nice.
Harvard and Stone. Old friends, great regulars came through, like Eric Tsai, who has been a Booker and Axe regular for years, and now he lives out here. It was so nice to see him. Yeah. It's great.
And uh, you know who came uh from last week? Steve from Los Angeles, and I will read his poem. Oh, yes, yes. This is now the Cooking Issues poem. I had sushi from a chef who developed a technique for aging fish.
I got to try some of this. An Amberjack. Kompache. Steve from Los Angeles. Yeah, yeah.
Wow. That's really powerful. It's like, he came to the bar and he was like, alright, alright. I'm like, we're just gonna keep reading that dang poem. Uh all right.
So uh we didn't do any other new drinks, right? Although we ran out scroll. We ran wait, we ran out of all of our drinks. So Nastasa and I at midnight, you have a grocery store out here on the West Coast people called Ralph's. I don't know if you know this, but back where I come from, that means vomit.
So, like for the entire rest of the trip, we're like, Oh yeah, yeah, Ralph's. We're gonna go to Ralph's. Is that also West Coast? Does Ralph mean throw up in West Coast? Yeah.
Okay, okay. Uh we thought we were gonna do blender versions of Thai basil daiquaries, which I know, I know. They're only like 88% as good as a real Thai basil dairy with liquid nitrogen, but they didn't have any Thai basil. And we were in Thai town. Yeah, yeah.
Well, closed. You're at but the point is is that, you know, like you go to like like a crap, a crappy grocery store. Uh, I'm not boosting New York, but you go to a crappy grocery store in New York. It happens to be in like a Latin neighborhood. They have the goods.
I can get the Latin ingredients there. You go to uh in Thai town, and they don't have Thai basil. I was disappointed. It was what did we make instead? So we just grabbed whatever Mezcal Aaron Polski had on the back bar.
I think it was a decoration. How long had that stuff pin there? Is he pouring that stuff? Yeah, it was illegal. Yeah, and then we just uh uh we did uh what was it uh cilantro and parsley, which was the only green thing they had in quantities large enough.
We made an orange syrup. We talked about orange syrup here before, right? So instead of just bricks it up to 50. Right. So instead of instead of um instead of acid adjusting new orange juice up to become the same thing as uh lime juice, I wanted to do split citrus.
So we had lime juice already. We got some uh fresh OJ, and I think it's 780 something like that grams of sugar per kilo of orange juice equals 50 bricks because remember, orange juice has like 10.5, 10.6% sugar in it. And we used that syrup and we did it was good. Yeah. It's a great trick.
Blender model. Yeah. Yeah. What do we call that thing? Green.
What do you guys uh can I have a tea? We only have green. You only have green left. You can have green. And then you started making daiquaries.
Well, no, we left at that point. But the point is, where'd we go? We were gonna we were gonna do uh we were gonna do uh what are we gonna do? Milkwash what? We're gonna do just like a milkwash daiquiri, right?
Like what was the the the backup what I don't know? I think we're gonna use that orange syrup as a milkwash. Anyway, so then yesterday, which was the next day, we did a spinzall training with the folks at score. We're not allowed to talk about the new place, right? No?
No? Yes, no. I think we can just talk about more so what you guys are playing around with. I don't think, you know. So we did a strawberry milk, seeing whether or not we could spin the solids from strawberries out of milk to make some sort of a milk I don't know what they wanted to do.
Strawberry milk analog. But it broke and we got strawberry cheese. Strawberry cheese and strawberry whey. That was really delicious. It shakes and foams up.
Yeah. And then we showed them uh good old-fashioned milk syrup, because they wanted a a heat stable, acid stable milk syrup. So we made milk syrup, which I've told you a million times, but it's equal parts sugar milk, blended in a blender, not too hard, you don't want to over foam it. Then once it's dissolved, you add for every liter of syrup, you add one ounce of 15% citric acid solution or about two ounces of lime juice, you blend it, you'll see it thicken up, and then once it thickens up, you've I call it like you know like par baking, I call it par breaking. You're par breaking the milk so that when you're using it in your application, it won't really curdle out and break.
And so they want to do a hot we actually it worked. We did juice plus milk syrup, steamed it. It steamed and held, and then added it to hot coffee, but Jack's like, nah, I'm gonna do cold. No, this is gonna be much more delicious. Cold.
It was cold boo. Oh, Dave, get into we also went to the farmer's market. Yes, that's true. Because we cooked some dinner last night. Jack was like, I want to buy rabbits.
We bought two rabbits. Guess how much two rabbits cost people? Guess how much two rabbits costs? $100. They were like $80.
Yeah, it's like $40 a rabbit. They're big. They were very big and they were delicious. So they fed what, 10 people? We didn't have a lot of time because we were doing a lot of work outside.
So we uh the way we cooked them was we spatchcocked them, you know, like cut them, we opened them up, cut them down the on the inside out, made them flat. They kind of like they still look a lot like rabbits when they're flattened out though. Yeah. I guess they look like a cross between a rabbit and a chicken when they're flattened out like that, because I'm so used to thinking of chicken spatchcocks. But then we did salt, pepper, mustard, garlic, oregano, lime, uh, lemon juice, oil, right?
Yeah. Anything else? You said garlic, yeah. Say garlic. Rub that in, let it sit for sugar, a little sugar.
Just a challenges. Yeah. So we put a little sugar in, spash cock, let that sit while we uh cooked our delicious, hyper expensive 20 freaking dollars worth of mushrooms that could fit inside of a small lunch bag. They were very good. You know what's really good out here is strawberry land.
Like all those people, I'm sorry, Union Square, uh, you know, green market with your tri stars and all that. You come over here, and the strawberries and the farmer's market here. Shout out to the over loving crap. They kick the ever loving crap out of what we can get. Am I right, Jack?
Oh, yeah. What do you think, Stas? You like those things? Oh my god. And we had uh the Mandarin quads.
Oh my god, the Mandarin quats. Now Nastasi and I have been to Mandarin Quat Heaven, Gene Lester's ranch in Watsonville, California. Worst trip ever. What? It was because Nastasia had, oh my God.
For the two-hour lunch or the hour and a half lunch, we had 250 kinds of citrus, and she's never going to let me forget that she had to, that we didn't bring our lunch, and they brought a lunch. So we ate like a like a piece of rye bread. And we've heard this terrible stories. And we're yeah, we were told that salt's not allowed in restaurants in New York anymore. We're like, I'm pretty sure that's not true.
I I work in this business. Anyway, so uh she's never let me forget that, but you know, I'll never forget it as a fantastic experience because I got to taste 200 varieties of citrus, including a lot of those kind of Mandarinquat things, but they weren't necessarily in high season, and uh, we only had a couple of them. And I don't have I mentioned this on air. If you eat only citrus for an entire day. Have I mentioned this on air before, Nastasia?
Probably. Okay, this is gonna get a little gross. I apologize. But you know how people say that guy thinks his his what does he say? What doesn't stink?
He just doesn't stick. He thinks his poop doesn't stick with okay. I eat nothing but citrus, hard citrus. And when I go to eat something, I don't mess around. Jack's the same way.
It's true. You don't mess around. No, you eat. I I it came out of me almost like it went in. Pure citrus juice.
And I was like, this is amazing. This is the best day of my life. Anyways, uh, still working on the human clarified cocktail. We can't get in. It's too much, too much, too much.
So uh we bought those delicious. What do you remember her name? The the farmer? No, I don't, and it's killing it. Who did the Mandarin quads?
They are delicious because they're they're more sour than a Kumquat, slightly thicker skin, and I would say twice as big in every dimension, so four times the volume of a kumquat. Real good. Real good. What else do we buy? Oh, I bought some delicious dates.
I forget the name of the date farmer, but uh California hybrid date. Everyone buys the medule dates, right? Because they're delicious. And then occasionally people will go buy, you know, deadlets or zahitis or some uh other kind of date. But, and these are all the like you know, the the well-known kind of dates that were brought in from uh places like Morocco, places like Iraq, all these places, uh Saudi Arabia, uh, but there are some amazingly delicious California hybrid dates that are kind of micro because they've never been turned into big kind of date production.
So the one we had yesterday was called Empress. So the next time you're in the Southern California area, I know it it's it's gonna be date season when it's the end of summer is actual date season, right? For fresh dates for new crop dates. I think it's the end of summer, anyways. Uh I encourage you when you're in the area to search out real date farmers, find and ask the medules are great, whatever, but find some of their cool hybrid dates because although medules are super silky and super sweet and big and they're delicious, like there's a variety of textures from bready to silky.
Uh the skin can be it can be firm, it can pop, it can have more of a candied texture. So there's a lot, uh there's a lot to do. Did you like that thing that the guy made a seat with the cacao nib? Yeah, it was good. So this guy, he's like, he's like, Don't eat the date.
Don't eat the date. Rip out the pit, stick this cacao nib in, and then eat it. It was good. It was good. But I think I would rather just have chocolate and dates.
Yes. Yeah. Okay. It'll be the best piece of chocolate in the city. So I don't know if you know this.
Like, I'm a cheap man, and Nastasia Lopez is a cheap woman. This is perhaps how we got into business together because we're cheap people, and but the messed up thing is that we're cheap about different things. And we're also, we're also both of us, if you don't know us, uh right or wrong, Sas, so far. Like, we're both willing to do unreasonable things for minor reasons. True.
So like Nastasia didn't want to deal with regular car people. So she's like, I'm gonna what is this fake Airbnb for cars called? And it's you rent people's cars. Yeah. So here's the thing about people's cars.
Random humans. Yeah, random humans cars. Yeah, but they have ratings, stars, yeah. Here's the thing about a random person's car. They may or may not be maintained.
May or may not be maintained. So Nastasia has in her head, which by the way, I appreciate she's like, I'm gonna rent a peace bus, and then we're gonna like be able to drive the entire like like you know, Booker and Dax, cooking issues, existing conditions, armada around Los Angeles, like you know, like Chi Chinchong used to do back in the day, but without the marijuana, and or I don't know, and then like you know, we'll get out, we'll do whatever we're gonna do. So she's super psyched about this peace bus, and she shows up. First of all, you could hear the brakes. How many miles away could you hear the brakes on that day?
I knew it was gonna be a nightmare. Rebecca, the boondoggler, totally jinxed. Well, they gotta know who I'm talking about, Rebecca. There's a lot of Rebecca's. Have you referred to me as a boondoggler previously by name?
With Rebecca. Nastasia also Nastasia makes me sing various boondoggle songs, like though right? Yes. I won't do it now. Anyway, uh, point is is that Rebecca gets in and it has a full kitchen ish.
Okay, full kitchen is if you are on your knees and you only want to do very limited things. It's in a van. Yeah, it's not like it's it's a full kitchen. It's a full kitchen for a van. The f the fridge door kept opening.
I had to slam it shut from the front seat a lot. Yeah, no cup holders though. No. So I got I got in first. Yeah.
I got into LA first. Nastasia was already here with a van. And I get on the phone with her when I'm off the plane when I'm waiting for him. Like, you're picking me up, right? And she's like, yeah.
Uh you're she didn't tell me what the car looked like. She just said, it's the loud one. You'll hear it. You'll hear it before you see it. So anyway, so Rebecca is, I I would say everyone would agree the most reasonable of us.
Yes. Yes. It's been a it's a big growing and learning experience for me this trip, I would say. So she gets first of all, this van seats four, sleeps six. You figure it out.
I don't know how the hell that's worse. Except it's sleep six, but you can actually have a hundred people here on a Saturday night. And the thing, the other the other things that is similar about this house and that van is that they both move the same amount. Because here's what happened. All right, so here's what happens.
We're going down the highway. We're playing music. Nastashi's like, I gotta get gas because this thing gets like, you know, five, six miles to the gallon. So it's like draining. You can visibly see the gas meter going down as you're going down the highway.
Pull into the gas station, she turns it back on again, and meanwhile, there the whole time we're driving. Well, well, you know, I don't know this yet. I don't know this yet. Nastassi and I were both aware that she goes, huh? The battery lights on.
Yeah. Doesn't tell me what's going on. We pull into the gas station. She turns it off, turns it back on. Yeah, but Jack, what did you say?
You were like, It's fine. It's probably fine. Yeah. People, let me tell you something. In an older car, you know, that doesn't tell you everything that's going wrong, when the battery light goes on, it means the battery's not charging.
Without a battery, if you don't have a battery and the alternator's not working properly, as soon as the battery runs down, no more spark, no more engine, no go, right? So I'm like, oh my oh my god. We're in a gas station. Yeah. Yeah, right.
We're at a gas station. But like, you like at least like if there's a little bit of power in the battery left, when you when you turn it in an old car, you'll get click, click, click, click, click, click, nothing. This sucker was dead dead. And of course, none of us know that like in a VW, the engine is in the rear of the car. I was like, I did we throw the alternator belt?
What's going on? We've never actually found out what's going on with the car. So we're dead on this thing. And the the battery, also in one of these things, is right in the middle of the vehicle. So we're right next to a gas pump.
So no one can pull in and we our jumper cables for this that can't it should tell you something. The first thing the guy said when he gave it to Nastasi was like, oh, the jumper cables are back here. That should have told you something, Nastasius. Yeah, you didn't think about it. I did think it did hit me, and I was he was like, the battery's here and the jumper cables are here.
In case you should need to know. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? So then we also kept referencing that you were going to sleep in the van, and he did not think that you were going to be driving it around. True.
True. So we jump right. By the way, it takes very little electricity from the battery to keep the car running. Because as long as you're not running the radio or doing this other stuff, you're really just making the sparks, right? But that being said, we're driving through Los Angeles in an old bus with the windows down.
You think we're not gonna put the radio on? Yeah. Right. No, but after we figured out it was a problem, we didn't put the radio on it. Oh, the good news is doesn't have any air conditioning.
That's the other good thing. So uh we are it had an air conditioning at one point. I can see because I saw the compressor for it with no belt that the guy cut off because he didn't want to maintain it. Whatever. So we get this guy to jump or us, we sit there for a while, we go, and I'm not sure in my heart, I'm like, was it was it a problem with the with the charging?
In other words, is the alternator are are we gonna be okay running as long as we don't turn it off? Oh yeah, Nastasia also wants me to talk about the fact that well you're just making me look like a meanie. You're sitting there, we don't know what the heck's going on, and you're sitting there pounding Skittles, like you know, like you're I don't know what you're sitting there pounding Skittles. We hadn't eaten anything. Who hadn't eaten anything?
Well, Jack and I had squirrel for breakfast, but then I get really hungry for lunch. Yeah, we had a big beautiful breakfast that's gonna be a little bit more. So we're sitting with a dead bus at a gas station. She's just sitting there. We're all trying to rip the back thing off to look at the engine.
She's like, no Skittles. So I lost it a little bit. You lost it. Yeah, I lost a little bit. You're just like, you're eating Skittles right now?
Stop eating Skittles! Stop eating Skittles! So we get we get going. And about the person who approached you. Oh yeah.
So we're sitting there trying to sweating, sweating, trying to figure out what's going on with it. You both got off a six-hour flight. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Guys like, can you spare any money?
Uh we were like, I don't even have a working car. I got nothing here. I'm trapped. You know? Pick on someone with a working car.
So, like, we get the sucker going, and we can make it all the way. So we're like this house, I told you, it's the closest house to the to the Hollywood sign. You have to go on some snakey, snaky, windy roads. And the road bifurcates like 89 times before you get to the final one where this house is. And PS, the cell service, Jeff, right or wrong, sell service up here, not so much.
Not so much. No. And uh, so I was navigating. Yeah. Getting us getting us up there and uh doing a fine job.
But what I said to Nastasia as we approached a turn was left, left, left, left, left, left. She goes right. She goes right. Now, also remember, we're in a peace bus on a road that's about as wide as like a baby stroller. Like a baby stroller can go up this road, maybe.
So we end up at this place, I don't even know where it is, Dorcas Place, if anyone knows where that is. Dorcas place. Put it into reverse to make a no, she pulls into an extremely rich person's driveway. How do I know they're extremely rich? Because they had one of those automatic gates with a punch pad and a little camera so you can say who you are, and a bunch of vehicles in their little McGillicuddy over there, right?
In their little cul-de-sac, their private cul-de-sac. So we pull into it, but half the peace bus is still on Dorcas Place. And then right there, the spark plugs are like, you know what? I'm done. I'm done.
Poosh. Dead. Nothing. Right at this bird. Yeah, she throws it in reverse, and it was just silence.
And Jack has no bars, Nastasia has no bars, I have no bars. Rebecca, the boondoggler, you come to the rescue, you have a half a bar of service or selling one bar. And things that the stories you're telling. Who's exactly the boondogger? Another thing, like I had not experienced any good old-fashioned LA road rage when I was out here until this happened.
So what we what we what what are we gonna do? We we we have like a like a 19 like early 80s like peace bus halfway into Dorcas Place. Dorcas Place, you know, I could barely walk on it, much less drive a car. And like this guy comes around the corner at like 85 miles an hour in his little beamer, whips around, whips around, slams on the brakes, like, my groceries are all over my car. I'm like and what?
He wasn't mad at us though. He was mad at the truck that was coming down. I'm like, but and what? Yeah. Like, we are here.
We live here now. The good news is. Yeah, so Rebecca had one bar of service. We got Austin Henley, uh, you know, formerly of Booker and Dax, now at Major Domo, who we're doing all these projects with, to drive over, jump us. I'm like, give us enough, just jump us, give us enough power to get, you know, get the spark plugs running back to where the house was.
We made it. We called it in. We're like, you pull a flatbed up here, you free show, and get this thing the hell out of here. Anyway. Did you get a refund yet?
Yeah, I this episode is brought to you by Foster Sundry, a specialty grocery located in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Since opening in August 2015, Foster Sundry has evolved into a neighborhood hub for weekend brunch, weeknight groceries, coffee on your morning commute, a draft beer after work, and so much more. Their cheese counter, whole animal butcher, and produce section make grocery shopping a pleasure. Foster Sundry also offers catering and wholesale. Learn more at foster sundry.com.
That's F-O-S-T-E-R S-U-N-D-R-Y dot com. Oh, I also mentioned, I forgot to mention. So uh real real cooking tip, cooking tip, not uh driving tip. We were gonna have so many cool driving-related cooking tips in that piece bus, too. I know.
We were gonna cook all kinds of stuff in the Peace Bus. Yeah. Sears all shoot in the Peace Bus. We're gonna take it down to the Los Angeles River and do Sears all cooking in the Peace Bus. Didn't work out for us.
Next time we are not renting that Peace Bus again. What do you mean next time? Never again. No, no more pieces. We're going to rent from reputable people.
By the way, there was a sign on the side of this peace bus. It said, rent me for your next adventure. And I had to stare at it while we're like trapped on Dorcas Place with this guy's Beamer's groceries splattered all over his front car because they didn't have seatbelts. Honestly, it was an adventure though. They just didn't mention that they were creating the adventure.
Like the van is the adventure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so uh remember back, uh, we had purchased uh two very large expensive rabbits. I was like, what kind of rabbit is it? He's like, I don't know, California.
California rabbits. He's like, that's the variety. I'm like, no, it's not, you're just making it up. You jerk. He was a nice guy, actually.
So uh we remember we spatchcocked it, marinated it, and then we used the uh I used what I've learned from Tandoor. Remember, everything I now know about cooking, I've erased all of my old memories, and I do everything based on the Tandoor technique, which is use preposterously high heat and then just go off and on as many times as it takes to get the stuff done. Now, uh, and then you can let it cool down and then fire it one last time to rewarm it as long as you keep it like relatively warm. So you always have a nice crust and you don't overcook it. So remember, it usually works on stuff that's been lightly tenderized because you're gonna overcook some of the outside.
That's why we had acid in the marinade, sugar, all that crap. Spatch cocked, made it flat. We should have pounded it, Jack, right? Uh I thought it was pretty good. Yeah, I don't think we needed to.
Well, if we pound it, we would have wrecked all those miniature bones. Rabbits got a lot of bones, people. Yeah. Anyways. Uh so my wife wouldn't have liked it.
She hates, she does not uh we don't cook rabbit at home because she doesn't enjoy eating bones out of her bones. She doesn't enjoy the bone thing. I will leave that. So then uh so what we did is we we made uh we made like you know the surface of the sun, Jeff. We turned your grill into the surface of the sun by like putting like eight loads of coal and like super hot, and then just we did uh both sides off on oil in between.
I think we had to off on it four times, right? Like was it three and then we did one last one. Yeah, so what you do is is you you put it on super high for like two minutes, flip it, right? It hasn't formed a good crust at this point. Then for the first cook, pull it off, let it rest, right, until it's not you know gets down to kind of a lukey warm kind of a thingamajig.
Then who back on, do that for two minutes, and then pull it, and then usually but some of the ones where you're actually trying to pulse the heat into it, so you're trying to get the heat up relatively quickly. You won't let it cool all the way down before you hit it again. So let's say you're cooking something like uh shrimp. Shrimp is gonna be viciously overcooked, right? I mean, pretty much it's gonna be viciously overcooked no matter what.
But uh with that one, you almost let it cool all the way back down between firings and you keep it well oiled because all you're trying to get is a nice exterior because the inside, as soon as it starts cooking is overcooked. In a rabbit, not the case because you need to get the thighs especially and part of the you know the haunchy stuff cooked, and it's a little bit thicker. So you're gonna need to go uh off on while it's still relatively warm. So the whole trick of this kind of high multiple heat cooking is how long you let it rest off the heat before you hit it again with your with your you know, quick on, quick off. Uh but you know, I think we hit it pretty well.
What do you think? It was perfect. Yeah. Rabbit. Delicious.
Off on, off on. So that's gonna be, you know, the subject of uh of half of the uh book that Nastasia doesn't believe I'll ever write. Right. Right? You believe I'm never gonna write it.
I don't think you're gonna write it. Which one? The miracle of moisture management? Yeah, and in my mind, it's not supposed to be called that. It's supposed to be called something else, but in my mind, I just keep calling it the miracle of moisture management.
Maybe that's what it should be called. Yo, bring moisture back, people. Today we're gonna be at night market. Right? Going at night market, but which one?
West Hollywood. Doesn't matter because no one's gonna hear it. But am I just reiterating that because you guys have asked me that like six times over the past 24 hours? Do they really call West Hollywood Weeho? We know they do.
Okay. Uh shall we do some questions? Uh yes, we have 10 minutes. Okay. Uh Ryan Miller wrote in from uh he's from he's Kansas City, right?
Kansas City. Our restaurant group recently acquired a family-oriented burger restaurant here in the Kansas City area that uh has three units uh around the metro area. In addition to tightening up some of the beverage operations, now I have that song Tighten Up going through my head. Tight enough. Uh tightening up some of the beverage operations and procedures in their bars.
I've been tasked to upgrade the milkshake and adult milkshake program. Now I have Khalis going through my head. Not, oh man. I wish we could play that. You know, she's a cook.
Yes, you've talked about this. All right. Uh I remember I was almost gonna be on that pilot. They were almost gonna get her to be the other judge. Time machine chef.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're almost gonna get Khalise to do the uh thing. And then I wonder whether she would have used that song as the as the um adult milkshakes. As we get started, all milksh as we get started, all milkshakes will be using the same vanilla ice cream base, which purposely has a high butter fat content per the owner's request, and I'm sure to the delight of most Americans. Uh my question is, how do I maintain the texture and most importantly the thickness that is necessary in a fine milkshake when you're adding spirits, liquors, et cetera?
My initial attempts, well tasty and delicious, have come up thin and lacking that milkshakiness that we all want when we think burgers, fries, and shakes. Uh I'd like to use a mixture of spirits and liqueurs. In each, for example, a malted version featuring 50 uh 50%, 50.5% bourbon, and 31 uh percent uh these are alcohol levels, spirit-based tomorrow. Is this even possible or do you need to rethink entirely? Keep in mind that while having many competent bartenders on staff, special bar uh ingredients such as liquid nitrogen, etc.
are simply not an option in these heavy volume establishments. We have just installed a high velocity Hamilton Beach three spindle mixers at each establishment specifically for the milkshake program, Ryan Miller. Uh okay. So the answer is if you're not willing to do anything out of the ordinary, they're gonna be thin, right? So you can either reduce the quantity of liquor in, use liquor that has a relatively high viscosity.
I mean, we've all had Bailey shakes in the past, right, Jack? Yeah. Yeah. Uh but they thin out quickly because the alcohol content is just gonna cause everything to melt down faster. What I suggest you do, go on cooking issues.
Nastasia, is is cooking issues still a porn site, or is it back to being uh cooking issues? It's back. Okay. Look up my recipe for gel-an-based ice cream. What I think you're gonna want to do is specifically for the um the alcoholic ones, if you can have a separate ice cream base spun for it, you turn the ice cream base into a fluid gel.
So I use gel an, low acyl gel-an, um, and it used to just be CP Celco, but it went out of patent, so you can get it. So, what you do is you set the milk. So if you let's say you're let's just say you have milk, cream, eggs. You set the milk portion. Let's say you're gonna have a thousand uh mils, right?
So 500 mils milk, 500 milk uh mils cream, and then uh I don't know, like it's like three, four egg yolks, whatever it's gonna be in the recipe, right? You you take just the milk and you put uh you put uh like a full one percent of gel in, uh, so that's five, and then a thickener. So you could use LBG, uh, you know, you could use any of those. You and you bring up the milk and you you boil the milk with the gel in, and then you add in as it starts to come down in temperature, you add a little bit of calcium, the recipe is there, you add a little bit of calcium, the eggs whisk the eggs in, add a little bit of calcium, and then the cream at the uh and then do I add the cream before it sets? I don't remember.
You want to keep it so above the temperature where the gel an sets, but without having to boil the cream up. Then you set it, it sets hard like a gel. You blend that gel, and that gel now has the consistency roughly of a milkshake. And it's completely stable. Then you add you freeze it like ice cream, you make a milkshake, and then even as it warms up, it won't melt in quotes.
It'll just get um it'll it'll just get warm. Which is kind of gross. I got an email in question. Oh, yeah, what do you got for me? Mike in Brooklyn asks, why is everything so disorganized?
In life or with us? With us. Uh huh. But they can't be listening live, so what's that like when when do they email this? Now.
But like regarding what? Like there's different reasons why different things are feed and everything. People have been following what's been going on here. Why is everything on our life so disorganized? Well, because we try to do more than we are able to do.
Yes, that's true. You know, you try to do more than you're able to do, and it's uh it's you know, it's a crap show. You know what I mean? It's like, but at least you can do something interesting, right? I mean, the odds that we could do anything at all if we tried to only do what we knew we could accomplish would be zero.
We would get nothing done. Well, like when we got in, we did the bar thing. We had the car trouble, then we did the bar thing. We got went to bed at four, we woke up at eight, went to the farmer's market, and then all of yesterday we we did stuff. Yeah, but it was it is disorganized because we try to add too much stuff into No, I'm impressed with us, but it is disorganized.
We accomplished a lot. Oh, yeah. We we so yesterday we also uh we we also went to someone's house. Some guy's house. Right?
A listener. Yeah. Great listener. Yeah, and we made uh Saratoga Palomas and Kyle. And we made Saratoga Palomas, and we also I'm not gonna say it on the air, because A, we're not political, and B, we don't curse on this radio, but like Empirical Spirits Habanero distillate we did with uh grapefruit uh juice, carbonate that was delicious.
Yeah, those guys were cool. They had they had some fun stuff there. Yeah, great house. Really nice house. Yeah, you people, you people with your Hollywood Hills and your pretty views and your nice weather, garbage, garbage.
Um Dave, we have five minutes. Okay, geez Louis. Um let me see what I got. So you're saying I didn't answer the ice cream question last week. No, all right.
So you sure I can say two weeks ago? No. It's Sean Riper, you know him. Yeah, we talked about John Riper, but we didn't get into the question. All right, I'm pretty sure I did this.
Okay. I'm pretty sure I can remember answering this question. Don't do it, then don't do it. John, did I answer the question about Acme ice cream? Did I talk about the Stolting Ross custard machine?
Did I talk about the fact that the only continuous freeze ice cream machine that a normal person can buy? And by that I mean under 20 grand because they're like 12 grand. I looked it up. Is the is the is the stolting Ross frozen custard machine that only puts about 20% overrun into your into your base and has really I did talk about this because I said that if you have no overrun, which is what the people at Acme claim that they have, overruns the amount of air in an ice cream base, that if you have no overrun, then it's just a frozen block of cream. That's what we call a greasy popsicle, not ice cream, right?
So you want to get you need some overrun, and they're just manipulating the overrun to be lower. Didn't I talk about the ways to manipulate overrun? I don't think so, dude. That's what I call a greasy popsicle. Yes, a greasy popsicle.
Uh but uh I'm pretty sure I did. I'm pretty sure I talked about this. John, if I didn't talk about it, get back to me. Um this we did not do. We did not talk about pickle brine.
I'm glad Jack is here today for this. Greetings to uh Nastasia, Dave, Matt, who's not here at all, so I guess that's Rebecca and you, Jeff. Uh in this house, we have become f become fond of Bloody Marys with pickle brine in them. We are now going through brine faster than the pickles. I would like to make my own brine, but have a question or two.
I like Clausen brand pickles, uh, so thought to start with a this knockoff recipe, which is uh from a blog called Amanda's Cooking with No G. Amanda's cooking, like cooking. With an apostrophe or no? Well, not on the URL. It's just cooking.
Like you remember, like um, you ever seen those Finsler film G.I. Joe things? We're not cooking. You're not cooking. Anyway, it's like that.
Uh if you haven't seen Finsler films, it was one of the early viral videos. And pork shop sandwiches. It's from that one. Yeah, anyway. Uh, go watch it.
Uh, this involves the recipe. Involves fermenting in in quotes the pickles on the counter for a few days prior to putting them in the fridge. How would you approach this if you didn't care to actually produce any pickled cucumbers? Is this step important to the brine flavor? I.e., is the pickles are the pickles important to the pickle brine?
Yes. Or do you have your own recipe for this? I checked liquid intelligence. Lastly, any comments on the comments in that recipe. There are two micro debates about what's going on.
One is whether the fuzz that some folks grow on top of a pickle is mold or an acceptable byproduct for the fermentation. The other is whether you should boil and cool the brine or just mix it cold. Thanks, Glenn Holden from Aurora, Colorado. Okay. So the long and short answer is that in the way that you need some base in there to ferment in order to have the brine ferment, right?
So you need to have something for the lactic acid bacteria to grow on to actually get that pickle brine flavor. The fuzz is almost almost certainly not mold. It's probably bacteria, and you're seeing like the like the dead burnt out bodies of the bacteria or the living like bacteria kind of stuff that's growing on the outside or on top of the pickle stuff, that's all fine and good, right? But you're gonna need some sort of substrate. Uh what I recommend you do is make classic pickles, right?
So or buy them, right? Uh and in general, like if you're going to can them for a long time, that's when I use a jar. Most of the time when I'm making my own pickles, I keep them live. So it's just salt and you know, whatever flavors you want, garlic, coriander, yada yada yada. You can get the nice flowering dill.
Flouring dill, not regular dill, flowering dill. Flouring dill. Did I say it? Flouring dill with the little umbles. Uh you put that in and you you make it, get the right amount of salt, you let it ferment.
You can pull it at whatever point. I noticed in Amanda's cooking that that she appears to like a half sour. Jack, how are you feeling about half sour? I love a half sour. You like a you know why?
You know what? You like the crunch. I told you what my trick is. Half and half. You go to the pickle store, because I buy pickles from a guy in a big pickle jar, big bucket, like big 55-gallon drums of pickles.
I was like, yo, yo, yo, yo. Give me some half sours, but give me full sour juice. So strong. That's the pro move. Ugh.
It's the pro move. Beautiful. And if you leave your half sours out long enough, guess what they become? Sours. Full sours.
Right. So anyway, so uh what you do is you can pull them at the last minute. The half sours will be brighter green and they will have a better texture, but you actually don't want that. Since you want to maximize the pickle brine flavor, what I suggest you do is ferment a whole bunch of pickles, blend all of those suckers, add some SPL to them, spin them out in a sp in a uh in a spinzall brand centrifuge, which you can buy on Amazon from the Booker and Dax Corporation. Uh and then that pickle brine, you'll get a very high yield of that pickle brine.
You can then, if you need to, uh jar and heat that to stabilize it, and it will keep for the approximately till the next ice age or nuclear war, whatever happens first. Uh that's it. What do you got? You got anything to say on the way out, Nastasia? You should sing the song on the way out.
Sing the song on the way out. Well, this has been Cooking Issues uh semi-live. It's actually pre-recorded from the Hollywood Hills. Thanks, Jeff, for recording us. And you are we all gonna sing this?
Cooking issues is the word. Are we doing it? No. We're already doing it. We're doing it.
You wanted to say you're laying back. Ready? Ready? One, two, two. This is gonna be a nightmare.
One, two, three. Cooking issues is a good thing. What key do we do this in? Dave, I don't just know. I don't know how many times that I have said who's stino.
I actually literally I sing that to Dax all the time. So when we're walking the dogs, I don't know how many times that I have said who's do. And he's like, a lot, Dad! A lot! Cooking issues.
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