This episode is brought to you by Tillet, the style leader in hospitality workwear and hotel and restaurant uniforms. Learn more at Tilletnyc.com. This is Dave Arnold, host of Cooking Issues on Heritage Radio Network. I've been a part of the HRN community for nine years. Nine years.
Each week I record my show in the HRN studio made from two recycled shipping containers because I'm excited to bring you, our listeners, the most important stories from the world of food. Well, not really food, more like, you know, whatever Nastas and I happen to be doing at that moment. You know, technical issues. All of us here at HRN make food radio because we love it. This year HRN is celebrating its tenth anniversary, but we need your support to keep food radio going strong for the next decade.
Join the HRN community today by becoming a member. Go to Heritage Radio Network.org/slash donate right now. You can even show some love for my show by selecting cooking issues in the designation drop-down menu. And if you hate me but love Nastasia, still do that. Select cooking issues in the designation drop-down menu.
Thanks for listening to HRN. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from you know, whenever. From the pizzeria in Bushwick Brrrrril. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, who is not yet at our mic.
Hold on. Oh, she's walking behind me today. That's so nice. Oh my god, she's she's the queen of politeness today. And uh what has happened?
Nothing. Nothing? Ah, we got Paul Adams from uh what's your official title over there at the uh nowadays? Official title is Science Research Editor. Of America's Test Kitchen and Cooks Illustrated.
And Cooks Illustrated and related empires. Yes. Okay. We got Kat from the network. What's up?
Hello. So you have anything to tell us about the network while you're here? Are you just here to social media evangelize? I'm doing social media and there's a special thing happening today. It's the beginning of our summer membership drive.
So anyone who's a fan of cooking issues should support cooking issues. Oh, geez. And Heritage Radio Network by becoming a member. Is this gonna be one of those things where somehow I only ever end up listening to NPR during their drive, and like people are gonna be bombarded constantly as they listen to our podcast about this? Well, if we reach our goal, then we'll stop bombarding them.
If we reach the goal in half the time, you hear half the plugs. Is that what members get? Um we have this is actually very exciting. We have some brand new member gifts. We've refreshed um the things you can get if you become a member.
So we have we're gonna have limited edition t-shirts that have this very like cool Illuminati pizza logo on them. We also have pins with the pizza Illuminati logo. Um we also have a fine and raw chocolate gift set that has like custom HRN branding on it, and then the last new gift is a spice kit from Burlap and Barrel that are single origin spices, which is owned, co-founded by one of our hosts of Why Food. I've heard good things about them. I've never had their products.
Uh I really like them. I really like their um Icelandic kelp that's like um ground and it has like a sea, you know, ocean imami taste. Nastasia, what are your thoughts on Iceland? I don't know, I've never been. Yeah, but I thought you were anti-Iceland because you saw Bjork and Dirty Sneakers and you were like, she's so rich, why is she wearing dirty sneakers?
Uh where do we see her? At uh one of Questlaw's food salons. And you're like, she's so rich, what's with the dirty sneakers? Yeah, takes a lot of money to look this poor. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Matt, how are you doing? We didn't call you out in the booth. Um I'm great. I'm spending time with our first caller. Uh already here, it's amazing.
All right, well, give me one second. Give me one okay, we'll take the we'll take the caller. But uh, okay, we'll take the caller first, and then uh I gotta announce we have like a thread that's gonna be running through the a testing thread. So America's test kitchen Paul is gonna be important. Testing.
Uh caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, this is Devin. Uh I had a question for you regarding uh automation in the bartending world. Okay. Um I'm see I'm seeing kind of more automation of parts of uh you know coffee shop operations.
Do you see the opportunity for stuff like that uh for bars? Uh so you're referring to like super like the super automatic machines, like for instance the custom ones that uh Starbucks uses or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah, what I've been noticing is kind of uh a move towards breaking down the components of the drink making process. So like automatic uh milk brothers at a very high level, and then you know volumetric dosing of both uh espresso and coffee grounds and things like that, instead of a one unit super automatic like uh you know Starbucks had back in the day. Right, right.
Uh I mean look, I kinda hope not. I mean, the fact of the matter is is that certain parts of bartending are extremely easy to automate. Extremely easy, right? Uh I mean, obviously that you know kind of stuff we like to do with a lot of pre-prep and not not so easy, but it it's easy to automate uh some of this stuff, but at a certain point I just assume drink at home. I mean the question is what are you trying to what are you trying to do, you know, with with your with your drink?
People at home can't make a decent espresso, they just can't do it, right? So, and there's a certain number of actions that a barista is doing every single time, right? To make it like it's it's you know, like they say, gol uh, it's like a game of golf. It's about repeatability, about being able to like repeat the same shot, or I guess bowling is more act because bowling really is the same time every time you toss the bowling ball, you're tossing it at the same 10 pins. And so, you know, I guess espresso is more like golf because things change, the humidity changes, the beans change, the roast change.
But anyway, you're trying to achieve a specific thing every time. Uh, and so you know, at least everyone has a reasonable goal. With a drink, it's not the same. People want their drinks different. Um, it just, you know, it's there's the banter.
So could you make a machine that was like and like shooting stuff into a glass, chilling it to an exact temperature, and handing it to you without human intervention? Sure. And could that take a drink at like a really wretched club, you know, where where the person like not only could care less about the drink, could care less about you and kind of wishes you'd fall off the face of the earth, just wants you tip and then wants you to die and have the next customer come up. But they have these on cruise ships already. Yeah, and how good are the drinks on cruise ships?
I don't grow on cruises, so I don't know. Well, at your bar, Dave, you have bottled cocktails in a machine. It would also be cool to walk up to the machine and the cocktail gets made by the machine to order banters with you. But we hello, person. I'll tell you what, I hate machines that try to pretend like they're people.
You know what I mean? Thank you. You're not a machine. What's thanking me mean? Nothing.
You're a machine. The corporation maybe thanks me, which is fine. But remember, a bartender is making the drinks that go into our machines. Could it be mass-produced? Sure.
I mean, like there's lots of mass-produced products that are delicious. For instance, Coca-Cola is the well, you know, I drink Diet Coke, but Diet Coke, delicious. You know what I mean? If you like diet sodas. Uh, pre-made, put in a bottle, great.
And the idea of a bar is that you're supposed to be able to order a wide variety of things. So most of the automation that's coming down the line is like here are these three mixers, here are these 10 spirits, let me spray them into a cup. And you know, they have those machines that make make coffee. Could you do it? Sure.
You know, is it gonna replace a bartender in a real bar application? I again, I hope not. Like you want the in other words, like at what point are we drinking? At what point are you like just hard drinking alone? You know what I mean?
Like if you're if you're walking up to a machine, like uh Anastasia, this is not my not my bag, you know what I mean? I think uh cocktail machine would be a fun novelty at a bar, but I don't see it replacing the human bartender. I mean, what it's for is if you wanted to have an environment where you trusted no one to make the drinks, right? So you had complete lack of skill, which is true in a lot of coffee shops, complete lack of skill, and then you also have uh, you know, a limited menu and a lack of skill on the production side. I'm sure that this machine would do better than the average Jocamo.
If somebody wanted to put an automated bartender in that corner over there, I wouldn't say no. Uh I mean, but the thing is is that it would need so much power. You'd need ice, constant supply of ice, constant supply of of uh liquids, rinse downs, all this other stuff. Automated bar back too. They also would take up the entire shipping container.
We can't even get Wi-Fi here. Strong point. Yeah. You know, Anastasia, always keeping it real. That's why I love you.
Uh all right. So, uh, while Nastasia and I were in Los Angeles last week, uh, we did an event at Harvard and Stone, Aaron Polski's joint, where, you know, he viciously, viciously underestimated how many drinks we needed, right, Nastasi? Oh, he did not viciously underestimate the amount of drinks that we needed. Definitely did not. Uh definitely, definitely did not.
Hey, Nastasi, do me a favor. Let wait till we're done to airdrop because it's going over the front of what I need to read. And I can't read the stuff. You know, no, that's great. I have a picture of Nastasi sent me a picture of Rebecca the Boondogler and an apple head.
But really, I just need my iPad to function as uh as something I can read the information off of, okay? Yeah. You know, although that pair of shoes from Zappos you're ordering is real nice. Um this is the more pleasant me. I'm trying to be supportive.
Uh so we're in Harvard and Stone, and uh someone I knew back uh from the French culinary days, uh Ivan Makawa, uh he has a place, so his family is of Japanese extraction via Peru, where they picked up Peruvian like rotisserie chicken technologies, right? Then came to Los Angeles and settled in Koreatown. So uh he and I guess he like took over from his dad. They have a restaurant, uh, Pollo a la Brasa, you know, which is the Peruvian chicken, uh, Western in LA, right? And so it is a Peruvian chicken joint in Koreatown run by a family of Japanese extraction.
That's where that's to kind of the like classic kind of I guess LA mashup of what's going on. We didn't get to have his chicken. Although next time I go out there, Nastasi, we should uh we should stop by and have his chicken. Here's why I like the guy. Two things.
One, he brought us a present, which is what why I'm talking about it now. Two, uh, the guy makes uh all of his own rotisserie parts. So he's like custom fitting out all of his rotisserie, and then I looked at them up on the internet, like they hands like chop all their own wood because they do wood fired on their on their chicken. So I want to go check it out. But the the reason we're talking about it today is that uh he brought us at Harvard and Stone uh and handed me a bunch of MREs.
Now you know what MREs, right? Meal ready to eat. These are the military rations made by the Warnick Corporation. Now, uh Warnick makes civilian rations, right? Uh, but you cannot buy legally anyway.
You cannot buy the military version. It says right on it, uh warfighter recommended, warfighter tested, warfighter approved, and then it says, uh, where does it say? Somewhere it says, you cannot buy or sell this. Oh, U.S. government property, commercial resale is unlawful.
What is the difference between military rations and civilian rations? Well, if you listen to the Warnik company, they say there's not a big difference, but yet everyone wants to buy the military version, I guess because it's illegal to sell them, right? So apparently they're difficult to source. I don't know where Ivan sourced this. I didn't ask him.
I wouldn't know where to get civilian rations either. But when he hands this to me, he said this to me he said, Listen, listen, don't open the package till you get home. He says these things because they contain a heater in them, right? Right. So you can these are allowed on an airplane as long as they haven't been opened.
But as soon as they've been opened, they're no longer allowed on uh on the airplane. So, you know, for those of you that don't know, the museum of food and drink uh has long been interested. We haven't done an exhibition on it yet, but you know, I've personally been interested in military food for a long time. Some of the great advances in food technology, think canning, right, are a result of needing to feed troops on uh, you know, when they're far away, when you don't necessarily have access to local produce. Also, you know, when you fight a war, that's why in the old days, when you fought a war, you took all of the crops and cows and pigs and whatever and just ate them.
You just ate the land as you went. You know what I mean? But these MREs are uh this is a lot lighter. Feel this, Paul. It's quite light.
It's quite light. Apparently, it's also completely self-contained, so we're gonna try to do this in a completely I have a knife. Very light stew. I have a knife. Is there liquid in there?
Uh no, that you need. So it's everything but the liquid. This is menu number nine, beef stew. Ragu de bœuf. It really says that on the menu.
It says ragud de boeuf. MRE, and we're gonna open it up. I have a knife with me because of course I'm a breathing human. But it says that I don't need a knife to open it, and indeed I don't. So it's in this tan pouch.
Let's open up, take a look here. Okay. Oh, it comes with it, it comes with a spork. No, a spoon, sorry. Come on, Warnick.
Step up your game. Give me a spork. You know what I mean? Although a spork, if you don't need it, is inherently uh unsatisfied. Okay, honey, mustard, and onion pretzel nuggets.
So apparently these are ready to eat right now while we're waiting. Nastasi, you want to crack open these honey mustard and onion pretzel nuggets? See what else we got in this little magic pack. Oh, Jesus. Nuggets all over the floor.
So it turns out Nastasia shares something with uh my son Dax, which is opens packages by like just like mega rip. They're pretzel nuggets all over the floor. Uh I hope you don't have too many mice problems in here, Matt. This one fell. I'll bring Daisy in here later to clean it up.
Yeah, yeah. Hand me a nuclear, how many nugget? How are these guys? This one fell on here. But it you wait, one of you try one because it it's gonna make mouth noises.
Garaball. You know, you know everyone hates mouths. Oh, God, Paul. Chocolate hazelnut cocoa beverage powder, naturally and artificially flavored. Here's how you do it.
Try that one more time. I'll open my mouth. Why did it go? Just throw it right in. Directions for use.
Allow water just chemically purified to stand 30 minutes before adding to powder. Tear pouch. Oh, mouth noise. That was Paul. Mouth noises are so rough.
People hate the mouth noises. Tear pouch at notch, open zipper, add six ounces of hot or cold water to fill line, close zipper, shake to mix, consume promptly within one hour, or I guess all hell breaks loose. Alright, Kat, you make this. Or have Nastasia make it because you're on the you're on the uh on the social media machine. Ooh, what's this?
Do not overfill. Oh, this is the heater. This is the ready-to-eat magnesium heater, which we're gonna learn to use in a second here. Okay. Oh, this is the beef stew envelope.
What's in an MRE? Oh, it's got the all these- Oh, nice, beautiful. All right, Paul, you wanna set up this? It looks like one of the it looks like a larger version of a McDonald's apple pie thing, right? And this is the actual beef stew.
That's the the envelope to hold it because I guess it gets hot, right? Hold this. Alright, Nastasia, how's that? How's that smelling over there? How are the pretzel nuggets?
We got blackberry jam. Why? I don't know. Does any of this stuff go together? Peanut butter, why?
I don't know. Nut raisin mix. That's clearly ready to eat. And here's our packet with salt, chewing gum to freshen your breath, and Tabasco sauce. Alright.
Alright. I'm grooving on it. And then, oh, multi-grain snack bread. That's what the PB and J is for. So you got multi-grain snack bread.
Let's take a look at this. Uh, that's not bread. That's not bread. That's like that's like a cracker on roids. Let's see.
Ooh. It's snack bread. Okay. That's what they had in Lord of the Rings. Imagine if Fig Newton, imagine if fig Newton material without the fig part was just inflated to a thicker thing.
It has the exact texture of like a fig new Newton cookie. Nastasia is a fan. Alright, so let's get this going here. Warning. Vapors released contain hydrogen, a flammable gas.
Do not light a fire while you're doing it. Alright, I'm ripping this guy open. Using no equipment other than just the water that I've recently chemically purified by passing it through my body. Alright, I'm kidding. Hand me the beef pouch.
Now you put the beef pouch into the packet. Are you getting all this on uh on radio? Can you see this? It's just like a it's just like a small little envelope. That's a heating element?
Yeah, that's a heating element. Now watch, give me the give me the water, please. Alright. Ready? Looks like it's holy stino!
Wow. What was that? She you why don't you keep holding it in your hand rather than taking something that doesn't have a base and resting it upright? Nastasia. This is wine Santa all over again.
So what happened, people was Nastasia took something which is the equivalent of balancing a single piece of paper and rested it upright by a bunch of cables. That's what's happened. Alright, now I'm filling up this thing. This is water activated, so I gotta fill it up to the fill line. Let me see here.
Alright, God. It's probably enough. Alice, Paul. Gotta get the heater all wet. Neat, neat, neat, neat, neat, neat, neat, neat, neat, neat, neat, neat.
Alright, now supposedly this is gonna work now. Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah, it's getting hot and it's filling up with gas. We have the sleeve, the Oh Jesus, on a stick.
And it's I'm not supposed to say that. Bursting. I'm told that that's offensive thing to say. Okay. Alright, now it's gotta be propped up.
Kat, can you prop this up against a rock? Oh my god. You can smell it, right? No, that's it. No, that's the chocolate?
No, no, no. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Smell that. It smells like you ever have one of those exploding cannons. Oh, vapors are coming out of it.
You ever have one of those exploding cannons that uses uh that uses like um an acetylene reaction where it's got the you know what I'm talking about? They're called bang site. They use um, oh my god, it's going out of my head. The name of the chemical that when you add water produces uh carbide. Yeah, and then uh oh, you smell that?
Yeah. It smells like uh like kids probably No, no, no, no, like this. Like this, propped up against a rock, like that. The water has to completely cover the heater. All right.
Now Paul's gonna hold that mitter for 12 minutes while it heats up while Nastasia cleans the chocolate beverage off the ground, and I answer some further questions. Oh, is there a chocolate beverage? Can I have some? Uh well, you have to suck most of it off the floor. Let's uh here when you pour it in the cup.
Let's try it. Okay. Was it cup provided? The cup was not provided. You're supposed to be able to drink it out of the pouch.
Oh, Jesus! That one was not Anastasia. There is there is uh, okay, let's try this. Alright, Paul. This is the first taste of the That pouch looks difficult to drink out of.
Well, you're you're first of all, you're out in the field. Yeah. You just mix it in there and slug it down. This isn't meant, this is not like But it's got like a wide mouth. Why don't they make does it need to be pre-mixed?
It should be called meal ready to clean. I need to shake it. You didn't shake it. That's the one it's said to do. Roll the hey, Kat.
Pour this back in, roll the top over, and then shake it such that you actually distribute the powder on the inside. They actually spent several weeks of basic training just teaching you how to do a meal ready to eat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Alright.
How's that? Is that warming up there, Paul? Yeah, it's becoming uncomfortable to hold. Sweet. All right.
Uh eight more minutes. You're supposed to prop it up against a rock. Is there a rock in the kitchen? Uh you know what? We're offending all the way.
God. You wanna just put it down? God, no, I'll hold it. Alright. Alright, okay.
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Learn more at Tillitny C dot com. That's T I L I T N Y C dot com. Alright, Joe writes in, Joe Ankowitz writes in about uh his soda stream. I'm looking to stop paying for soda stream refills. I'm hesitant to go full on and install a carbonation system in my plumbing, uh, to my plumbing because I rent in New York City.
The smell of the MRE is so intense now. You smell that? I love it. It smells like exploding stuff. Smells like my childhood where I would light everything on fire.
Who else had that childhood? Is it just me? My brother. Yeah, what's up, Matt's brother? Uh I also have zero plumbing knowledge, and it seems like that job might be above my pay grade.
I was thinking of attaching a CO2 tank to my soda stream with an adapter, but I keep my soda stream under the sink for space reasons, and I feel like it would be a pain to reach under the sink to turn the valve open and closed on a tank every time I want soda, which is usually multiple times a day. There are adapters online that allow you to refill soda stream canisters directly with a tank, which seems like a good option, although I don't know if there are any dangers. There are. Or if it will really work. It will.
Uh wanted to get your opinion on which of these options you think is best, and also ask where to get food grade CO2. All look, food grade CO2 in the New York City area. Uh, thanks as usual, Joe. Okay, so here's the thing. First of all, there's no such thing as uh food people are gonna yell at me really badly, especially the sellers of food grade CO2.
There's no real difference between food grade CO2 and any other grade of CO2. The difference is the tank. So uh tanks that have impurities in them can put off flavors like if there's oil or any sort of other impurities. So it's really all about the cleanliness of the tank. That's the important uh thing, right?
And uh I have used tanks uh from welding shops for 20 years, roughly. And you know what? They make carbonated water. They work. Um, so what are the dangers?
If you want to fill a soda, first of all, if you want to fill a CO2 tank, the couple of problems. I've done it many, many times. You don't want to overfill a tank, right? So you have to be able to uh, first of all, like you should really get a filling, like a filling rig if you're gonna fill it again and again. Because what you want to do is add some CO2 to the tank, purge it, and then fill it again, uh, and then be able to vent off because you want to make sure that you don't have any air in, because the air is gonna ruin you.
You have to keep the tanks uh frozen before you fill them, such the CO2 wants to stay in them, otherwise it's hard to get the CO2 in. Also, the tank you're filling from, either you have to be comfortable turning it upside down to get the CO2 to flow into it. Otherwise, what's gonna happen? Put it this way: if you take CO2, you know, uh depending on the temperature, let's say it's at 800 psi in your CO2 cylinder, your big one, it's a liquid. Above it is gas.
If you just then uh put a tank on it and say go, what's gonna happen is is that it's gonna fill with 800 psi of CO2 gas, and then nothing else will happen. And because nothing else is happening, uh, you're not filling it. You're having a very small amount of CO2, it will never fill. So if you chill it, chill it, chill it down, as the CO2 gas hits it, it will condense, turn to a liquid, and you will constantly fill it up until it is either the same temperature as the cylinder or it stops filling. You also to really do this right, you want what's called a siphon CO2 machine that has a siphon CO2 tank that has a spigot running all the way to the bottom, such that the first thing it draws off is liquid, not gas.
Otherwise, you need to turn the tank upside down to have the liquid flow out of it, which you know, whatever. Uh I mean, I'm not gonna say I I haven't done it because I have done it many times, but I'm not sure if it's safe. It probably is not. Uh, secondly, if you overfill a tank, what happens is uh the tanks are meant to have a certain amount of expansion room based on what percentage of uh what the pressure is uh of that at a particular temperature. So if you don't have enough expansion room in that tank, as soon as the temperature goes up, I mean, even a little bit, even up to like, you know, 90 100 degrees Fahrenheit, you're gonna blow the overpressure valve.
When you blow the overpressure valve, it's spent and you have to redo it. It's also impressive, right? So you don't want to have that happen because it doesn't just leak down to a safe pressure a pressure. It's like, I'm gonna dump all this CO2 into your kitchen right now. And it's not, it's not what you would want to have happen.
So I would not have it happen. Now, also, if you're filling tanks and you don't get them hydro tested regularly. So, like let's say you were gonna go buy a paintball tank, which is what a lot of people do. Paintball tanks, small ones, are so cheap that they don't hydro test them. If a tank becomes extremely old, it's no longer in spec, will it explode?
Probably not, but there have been cases where old non-hydro tanked uh hydro tested tanks have exploded. And again, this is not a pretty situation. You don't want to have it happen. Uh so what I would do just to make your life easy is I would get the adapters to fill uh the adapters to go from a soda stream to a paintball tank. And then I would get the you know, biggest paintball tank that can fit into your soda stream in lieu of its uh internal tank.
And then you can get those things refilled at uh sporting goods uh shops. And if you really want to, there are people online who will sell you a tank that's already been cleaned out to make sure it doesn't have any oil, and then that's a decent way to go, of course. The real way to do it is to get a 10 to 20-pound CO2 tank, 20 pounds, the most economical, and stick it under your sink and do carbo caps instead of using the soda stream technology. But if you're wed to soda stream, and people who are wed to soda stream, they just can't get enough of the farting noise as that thing tells you that it's carbonating, and for some reason they love it. And people who aren't used to the carbonator caps, that the ones that I use, they're like, it's too hot to do it, it's hot.
It takes about 10 minutes, people. 10 minutes, and you're fine with the carbonator system. But whatever. Whatever. 10 minutes to get used to it, not 10 minutes to create a bottle of soda.
Yeah, yeah, zero minutes to create a bottle of soda, 10 minutes to get used to that technique as opposed to the soda stream, and it is super cheap, and people, then you can carbonate cocktails, then you can carbonate fruit juice, you can carbonate anything. You can recarbonate your wine, you can post-carb your your champagne if it goes too flat. I mean, that's my recommendation. Oh, by the way, uh I while I was looking up CO2 safety, um, and again, like I look it up, there have been uh there have been things where you know they've blown up and killed people, but it's extremely rare. Can you hydrotest your own tank?
Uh you can hydrotest your own tank, but it won't be certified, it won't get a stamp because you are not certified to hydro test things. But if you fill your tank with water, use a hydraulic press with a uh use a hydraulic uh, you know, cylinder with a very, you know, with a good gauge, stick your tank under water and then pressurize it to a particular PSI, you know, you can hydro easily hydro test. The point of hydrotesting is is that um pressurized water stores very, very little energy. So when a tank fails when it's got water in it, it just goes and water sprays out, it comes out, right? And then immediately the pressure drops.
When you pressurize something with gas, this is why, this is why the chicken gun that Nastasi and I are gonna fire is so tremendously dangerous, because when you store vast quantities of compressed gas, right, it it's very compressible, so there's a lot of extra energy to release. This is why compressed gas, PVC, for instance, is rated for water and not for gas, specifically because the rupture uh mechanism of PO PVC is brittle, and if there's gas in it as opposed to liquids, when it does rupture, it goes all to hell and gone. Like through your eyes, through your neck, through your face, you know what I mean? So it's like through your chest, through the chicken. Through the chicken.
Ooh. I don't have time to talk about uh nuclear war and calculators, but I got some good nuclear war calculator information coming up later for people who are interested in nuclear war calculation. Uh which by the way, for people my age, nuclear war was the thing you thought about growing up. Like when I was growing up, nuclear every like every day I would plan with compasses like where I where in the fireball range I was compared to New York City. What's our plan?
Well, if you're in New York City, so the the real question is is what kind of weapon is the person gonna use against us, right? So if they're using a suitcase-style bomb with a ground burst in New York City, and they try to like make a point by doing it in a very like uh like high building canyon place. Turns out no one has ever run those tests. So there might be some people doing computer modeling now of a ground burst of um, you know, a ground burst of a small suitcase style weapon in a very densely built area, but most of the almost all of the tests are even built on the there that are done were done on kind of 50 style, like Levit Town American, like widely spaced wood-building villages with occasional concrete structures that were fabricated out in the desert, or uh, you know, uh wartime experience from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or airburst tests. So there's there's almost no real data on what would happen if someone's suitcase bombed us.
When I was a kid, I wasn't worried about terrorism. I was worried about the Soviet Union throwing, like you know what MERVs are? So it used to be that but way back in the day, missiles had one warhead on them, right? And then they went to this technology called MERV where they would throw one missile up and then it would split into a bunch of warheads, and so they didn't need just one warhead landing on New York. You were gonna be you know circled in in multiple megaton rain, not kiloton, megaton range hydrogen bombs, in which case, Nastasia, the long story, we live inside of the crater.
So not a lot you can do. The survival plan is you know, use your last 15 minutes wise. I thought you were gonna take a boat. If it's going to be something that you can get away from, right? Look, again, I we wasn't gonna go into it.
Yeah. How did this come up? No, exploding CO2 to just in Dave's brain. Yeah, no, don't you? I mean I was just excited.
Okay. Yeah. I went through a speaking of the military. Yeah. How much longer on the MRE?
How much longer on the MRE? I don't know. That's I don't know. I don't know. Oh, is it still liquid?
Is it still hot? It's still liquid and hot. Okay. Because it's supposed to consume the It's not gonna consume the liquid, as far as I know. It will consume some.
It's making hydrogen gas. It's getting that from somewhere. Presumably it's ripping the oxygens off, oxidizing something in there, probably the magnesium, and then producing hydrogen gas, which you know, that's why you're not supposed to put an open lighter. How's your beverage, Paul? The chocolate beverage is terrible.
Let me taste this chocolate beverage. It's supposed to be nutritious. This is like insure. Oh, that explains it. It's just like um, this would be good with milk.
It's like quick in water. It's like not enough quick in water. Well, I'm sure there used to be more quick back before the initial spill happened. Nastasia, what do you think? Oh, did you spill the flavorful part?
The flavor went on the floor. Oh, the ground smelled amazing. I'm gonna say that tastes fine. That tastes like quick. Yeah.
Do you like strawberry quick or chocolate quick? I love strawberry quick, but I had a terrible allergic reaction to it when I was a toddler, and now I'm afraid of it. By the way, very soon, people, maybe as soon as Thursday, and we'll uh we'll uh live live douche it out, I'm gonna go through my cherry test where I see whether or not this eight months of of weekly shots in the back of my arm have caused me to be no longer allergic to cherries. And then and then what is the test consist of eating cherries at a doctor's office. This way, like if I die, they can bring me back to life.
You know, epinephrine is the narcan of allergic cherries. So they just like you sit there, like you you collapse on the floor, boom, they hit you with the epinephrine, and then ship you off to a hospital. That sounds great. It's gonna be amazing. Are you providing the cherries or does the doctor have a few?
Come on, the first cherry I've had, Paul, in like in like 16 years, and you think I'm gonna let a doctor buy it? They might have special pharmaceutical grade cherries. Paul, have you met me? You know I'm gonna buy the best cherries that is possible to buy. I'm gonna feel each one.
Oh my god, huh? Like the difference between a crab cherry and a gray cherry is like the difference between, I don't know, crab coffee and gray coffee. Even worse, like a bad cherry, it just has no flavor. It's just like a bag of water. You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah. But whereas like that cherry where the skin is still taut, there's still texture to the flesh, and it's got a nice acidity and sweetness. You know what I'm talking about? And the feeling, I'm not gonna do this at the doctor's office because she'll get pissed, but the feeling of just boom, spitting those seeds out, boom. If I can be that guy going down the highway again like I was when I was young at like, you know, 70 mile an hour, boom, shooting seeds out of the side of my window.
Oh my god. Is there any better feeling? Really? Is there? No.
Oh my god. Dave shot seeds across this whole country when he was younger. You know what? I'm Davy, I'm Davy Cherry Seed, spitting them out the window. In fact, I told this I think before, like, I used to live on the 20th floor of a garment district building, uh, you know, when my wife and I had our first illegal loft, and uh the entire next like section of the block instead of had a building, had a single-story loading dock.
So we had a great view. Uh Nastasi would have loved it because it's on the west side and she only likes living on the west side. But we used to spit our cherry seeds straight out the window because what's it gonna hit? Nothing. There's no one down there.
That's a great feeling. Spitting cherry seeds out of a window in Manhattan without without actually damaging anyone. No cherry seeds grew, no cherry trees grew on the top of the loading dock to my uh to my chagrin. Anyway. That's too bad.
Uh oh, back one more thing on the CO2. So some people try to say that the expensive CO2 adapters are worth the money because they are quote unquote lead-free. Uh the vapor pressure of lead at the temperatures that we're talking about, uh, and the small amount of lead that you is required in free machining brass is like on a rough order, zero. So I would just say no liquid is ever touching it, only CO2 is touching it. So someone tell me I'm wrong, but a little bit of lead in a fitting that's never gonna touch anything but gas and never gonna get hot.
I'm gonna go ahead and say don't worry about it. What do you think, Paul? Adapter from what to what? Adapter from the the brass adapter from the paintball tank to the uh soda stream. Like, some people are saying that their adapter is worth the $50 instead of the $15 because it has lead-free brass.
Most brass, almost all brass back in the day, had a small amount of lead put into it to make it much easier to machine, which by the way, that stuff, like marine brass, super easy to machine. A dream on a lathe. But, you know, I just don't think that there's gonna be any cross-contamination because all that's touching it is a gas at low temperature and the vapor pressure of lead, which it's not even 100% lead, it's a little bit of lead in the brass to help it machine. Zero. So you're not gonna really get any cross-contamination.
The reason you're paying $50 to the other one is that that person is probably a human. They're making a small number of them, they're not a large corporation. So if you want to support them for having the idea, I would do it for that reason and not for the lead. Uh we ready to eat this sucker. We can try.
All right, while you're doing that, Matt writes in about the vermicular, which sounds kind of gross, vermicular. It sounds like vermiculite or vermicelli, like worms, right? Sounds deliciously like worms. What's gross about worms? Oh, okay.
Are you one of those worm eaters? Paul, I bet you're one of those worm eaters. How hot is how hot is that? Uncomfortably hot? Uncomfortably hot, yeah.
Nice. That's my favorite kind of. Let me see. Let me see. I'm I'm trying to judge now, Paul's uh temperature.
That's that's warm enough. By the way, the meal is, as they say, ready to eat, meaning you don't have to heat it. It's safe to eat without it. Were we gonna pour this into a cup or you want to eat it out of the pouch? We've had extremely bad luck eating things out of the pouch.
Do you want to try it? Yes. All right. I'm not gonna tear it, I'm gonna cut it with a knife. Even though, like, is that am I really am I no, tear it?
Tear it? Okay, Nastasia. If I tear this and it it pours beef ragu all of my lap, Nastasia, it'll be the best day of Nastasia's life. Even better than the day Peter walked in on me in the toilet. Right?
Alright, I got a small opening in the top of this meal ready to burn my crotch. Nastasia. I'm not I'm not gonna use the I'm gonna use the screen. Do we have some scissors, Matt? No, I don't need scissors.
I got a knife, but Nastasi just wanted me to use no tools. Uh oh! Alright, ready? Give me a spoon here. It's right there.
Let's use the included all right, we'll use we won't use the included spoon because we have to unwrap it. Hem me a spoon? It does not smell like smells like delicious like dinty more. It smells like dinty mower. You familiar with dinty more?
Hold on. Hold on, people. Talk while I eat this. Describe Nastasia. It does not smell great.
Hey, what do you think? I'm gonna give it a thumbs up, Nastasia. I don't want any. Nastasia's gonna try this too next. Why don't you try it?
It tastes like freaking canned beef stew. I'm gonna say this is a good thing. It's gonna be great on social media video. I'm gonna say this is good. I I wanna say that I've put the unboxing video of the MRE on our IG TV so people can go watch it there.
They want the full effect. So Nastasia now is realizing that and I'll tell you something, Warnick Corporation. God bless you, you're not afraid of salt. That is a that is a salted. It's good.
It is a salted beef stew. I'm gonna give this one cooking issues approval. That is like, you know, that tastes like a decent canned beef stew. Yeah. Not grizzly.
It's it's very well thickened. It's it's very thick. It's salty. Matt, Matt's trying it. He came out of the booth into the shipping container to try it.
I don't know. What do you think I've got my salt ration for the day? Right. I'm for it. The only person who hasn't tried it is Kat because she's a secret vegetarian.
Okay. They make uh they make vegetarian versions of this, by the way, for those who are interested in. I didn't bring chicken with feta, I brought beef stew. I thought feta would be more polarizing. What else is in our meal?
Uh Paul, yeah, like uh look and eat away and make comments. I gotta uh I gotta do these uh these questions. I recently came across vermicular cast iron induction system. It looks interesting but a bit spendy. Have you had any experiences with this equipment that might warrant its place in a home kitchen?
I already have a low temperature cooking capability, so I'm wondering if there's an advantage to having a vermicular uh induction unit. Question two, if Nastasia allows it, which she will not, but she will like this question, so I'll do it anyway, and we will answer them in reverse order. Yeah, do it in reverse. Please explain the context behind the boondoggle song that was posted on Instagram during your LA tour. I was uh simultaneously amused and confused.
So, a boondoggle. Uh Nastasia, uh define boondoggle. I think it's a trip that's not worth our time. It's anything that is, you know, not worth a time or expense, usually complicated uh and just not not worth it. It's it's derived from the little keychain that the scouts used to make.
That now you've seen them remember when you're a kid you used to weave those plastic things into those kind of barrel shaped key fob. Yeah, yeah. Technically, those are boondoggles, right? And the original the scout newspaper was called the boondoggle. The boondoggle then got applied to the little thing that you make, and then somehow during the 30s, that got transmogrified into meaning something that's a waste of time or useless, especially something that requires energy to do and is not worth the investment.
Why is Rebecca the boondog? We are getting a big thing. Which one? Wendy. Oh, yeah.
We could sing boondoggle to anything. So the first time we went to LA, uh, intrepid bartender friend, former BDX, now uh major domo bartender Austin Henley, uh referred to the party that we threw as a sub party. Which, by the way, is the greatest insult you can give to a party. It's a sub party. I was like, Austin, good punning, my friend.
Good punning. Uh so, and in fact it was, and that, and that was the the infamous, like the the infamous uh circulator set to Fahrenheit instead of Celsius uh event uh among many, many, many others. Uh so because that uh we look any time Booker and Dax does an event outside, we have to pay for it. I don't know whether you understand this, but when you do stuff, you have to pay for it, right? So we have to pay for us to go out, the crew, whatever we're doing.
And right now, like we're pushing spinzalls uh because we need more people to buy them, but the fact of the matter is, we know we're we're never gonna sell that many. We know that it's you know, just like us, trailing edge technology niche, right? Like, you know, we we know what we are, but like honestly, like you need to get the existing customers to buy more and more spinzalls. Well, you know what? That's an interesting point.
So, like, like uh I I think that the truth of the matter is is that when bigger restaurants take it on, they need to kind of lay the potato chip them a little bit. Like to run a program like the one we have at existing conditions, you need like four, right? At least. Three to run and one to have as a spare while I fix the other one because I'd say twelve. Or you can do a double fisting campaign where everyone should have two.
But my point of the matter, my point is is that if we sold every single spinzall that we've made, we still have to like we're not getting rich. We're not being Bernie Madoff here with our spinzalls like they accused us of in uh with our Sears alls. Uh ain't nobody getting rich off the centerfuge. Let's put it that way, right, Nastasia? It's the next product, people.
It's the next one that's gonna push Nastasia, Nastasia and I over the top. It's gonna make us happy. What are you gonna do with your money once we make the next product? Helicopter. Oh my god.
We're not gonna get helicopter rich no matter what we do. Nastasia has been hanging out with billionaires too long and wants to become helicopter rich. Ain't nothing we're doing is gonna make us helicopter rich. Although that would be nice. Maybe rich enough to rent a helicopter every once in a while.
You know what I mean? I need to get out of the city. We could turn the top of the shipping container into a helipad for you. That was one of my get out of New York. So by the people who live in New York, right?
You want to be have a get out plan. So like Nastasia's weaker friends, Phil, right? Just basically said they were gonna give up, like if they knew they only had 15, 20 minutes. Nastasi and I have a plan. So the various plans we have, and you guys rate it.
Right. The blast range is a big thing. Well, there's blast, but it could it could just be something's gonna happen, like a dirty bomb, something like this. You just need to get off the city, right? And for those of you that don't know, getting out of this city when there's traffic can be problems.
I like the parachute backpack with the propeller because then you just go up to whatever top you're building, brrrrr. You seen these things? Parachutes with a propeller on the back. Have you seen these things? Sounds scary.
Have you seen it? I mean have you? No, they're amazing. Anyway, the other one is you can buy small with pressurized canisters, inflatable boats without without boards, where you just store it in your closet, wheel it to the river. Nastasia lives near a river, I need to live live near a river.
Out. That I think is the best. If you are very rich and you live in this city, look, it's not for that. Let's say you are rich and you come from not in New York City and you moved to New York City and your parents are worried about you, and you were very, very rich. There is a dude whose business is.
You know what a zodiac boat is? No. Zodiac boats, there's various varieties of zodiac boats, inflatable, but then also aluminum pontoon zodiac boats. The Coast Guard uses them. They're indestructible and require very little maintenance.
This dude will keep one gassed up, ready to go with stuff at a dock, such that when you hit the you know GTFO button, right? It's always there ready, and you just right out of the city on your own zodiac. How sweet is that? Nice. Nice.
I have a personal submarine docked in the East River. Oh yeah? Have you chopped up a journalist and thrown her body parts overboard? Are you Danish? You remember that story?
Yes. Yeah. Are you like a do you have you murdered a journalist? Are you Danish? He never answered, by the way.
He never answered. Okay, so the vermicular, so the boondoggle is uh, oh, yeah. Because even if we sold all of the spinzalls that we make, we still wouldn't be making enough money to pay for promotional tours for them. You know what I mean? So inherently, anything we do that's spins all related is a boondoggle.
Like inherently. And you call Rebecca RPR person. With love, we I you also do. We all call her the boondoggler. And now it's a thing of love.
We called her that on the on the air when we did our LA show. So now it's out in the ocean. Yeah, she's in the show notes as the boondoggler. The boondoggler. I love the boondogger.
Boondogger, good business. Good business. Uh so now, the other question you had on the vermicular cast iron induction system. Okay, Jeebus. So the vermicular cast iron system is a uh Paul, eat some of this other stuff.
Let me know how it is. I never had a pretzel. Was it good? Was it a flavored pretzel mugger? Pretzel is a totally fine pretzel.
It's probably the best part. It tastes like a pretzel you buy at the grocery store. Like you know why? Why? It's probably a pretzel that you buy at the grocery store.
There's a sugar-free raspberry beverage base. Oh, make it right now. In the two minutes you have remaining, make it some Tabasco and chiclets. Don't mix those together. The chiclets are to clean our breath of the dinty more stew and we're done.
But there's only two. So you can really only eat one with a friend. Uh unless you're one of those people that bites chiclets in half. Dave, question. Okay.
You're not one of those people, right? No. So the vermicular is a cast iron, it's okay. Imagine an induction cooker, but an induction rice cooker or an induction crock pot, which by the way, my Zoji Rushi induction rice cooker is sick. I love it.
But with a cast iron pot instead of a regular rice cooker pot and a and some more controls on it. Um I think it looks like a very well-built piece of equipment. It's again, it is for rich people. Like, if you wanted to have a rice cooker that like also had a really cool cast iron pot that you could put into the uh that you could put into the stove uh as well, then I'd say it looks like a nice piece of equipment. If you're looking for it to do something that your rice cooker can't do, then I would say no, it's not worth $675.
I would rather spend the $200 and something doll on the largest Zoji Rushi rice cooker, use that for what that's for. And since you probably already have a, you know, uh Le Crusade somewhere using that for your stovetop wear. But it looks like it, and by the way, you can use that on a regular induction unit as well. So, you know, there's that. So what is vermicular about it though?
Uh nothing, as far as I can tell. It's just a name. It looks like a very nicely designed, very well put together, like uh Instapot sort of a thing with a cast iron, very well-machined cast iron thing. So I'm gonna say if you have the money, do it. I mean, it looks nice.
I would be proud to have one on my counter. Marcel from the Hudson Valley writes in about oat milk. Uh hey, any chance you can get Dave to answer this question. Uh this may have been discussed before, but please tell me everything you know about how to make good oat milk like oatly in a commercial restaurant setting. I'm that is a highly flavored raspberry beverage.
I can smell it across the room. But it makes Kool-Aid powder. It's concentrated. You're supposed to mix it instead of just eating the powder. There's another cup with some water.
Maybe you're you have one minute. Cheese, oatly in a commercial restaurant setting. I'm especially interested in semi-long-term stability. Uh thanks, Marcel from the Hudson Valley. Okay, so here's the thing.
Uh Oatly, which is the oat milk that the baristas use, is not made like a regular human being. There's a patent on it, right? So uh they use whole oats and then they grind them up and then they enzymatically treat them with two things. One, a protease, which includes How did you find this information? Because it's patented.
Anytime there's a patent, oh anytime there's a patent, you can go on. So you can't, by the way, if you actually try to do what they're doing, you're infringing on their patent because the patent is very recent. They applied for the patent in 2014 and they got the patent in 2017. So anybody can find this information? Stop.
So listen, so they de-amidate the protein, and what that means, you have to wait through a bunch of stuff. When you deamodate the protein, you're um so cereals have a lot of proteins that are liable to this process called deamodation. When that happens, they uh the proteins partially unfold and they become better emulsifiers. So they don't have to, they're the ingredient label list on uh on Oatly is very, very clean, right? See if I think I have it here so I can read it maybe but I have to sift through it.
Oh, yeah, oat base, water and 10% oats. So oatly uses whole oats that they grind, soap, blend, right, and they treat with enzymes in that state. So they're using a 10% oat base, but one protease and what's the other enzyme? Uh they add uh something to uh break down the starch. They add some sort of amylase to it.
So they have an amylase to break down the starch, increase increase the sweetness, uh, probably also reduce some of the gumminess in it, and then they have a protease which adds an emulsifier to it without having to use an emulsifier. So it also theoretically increases the protein content that's soluble, so it's increasing the protein content. However, if uh they also then add rapeseed oil. The reason they're adding rapeseed oil is because um there's not very much oil in it. So if you want it to act like milk, you have to add milk.
Now they don't add an emulsifier to it. Well, they add calcium phosphates, that's probably adding some emulsification to it, salt and vitamins. But they're trying to get some emulsification out of the proteins that they've deamidated, right? Now, that one of the tricks of their patents is that if you just add like bromelin or some other protease to it, it won't it won't do it in the same way. It'll just hack the protein up into little pieces.
Those little pieces may or may not have any emulsifying capability, but they're also likely to be bitter. So, you know, unlike you know, breaking sugars down where pretty much you're just busting it down, proteins when they're broken down the wrong way can produce what we call bitter polypeptides. But I'd say uh if you don't care about any of that, just make uh oat milk with standard uh oat stuff, hit it with a mixture of gum arabic and xanthan to stabilize the heck out of it because you don't have emulsifiers in it, and gum arabic will emulsify fine, uh, and then add some oil to it. Just like follow one of my recipes for like uh any milk, you know, for for butter syrup or something like that to emulsify a small amount of oil into the oat milk, and it should also stabilize the oat milk from separating because you're not gonna find uh all of the all of the enzymes that the oatly people do, and even if you did, you'd be infringing on their patents. So uh thanks, Ivan for the uh MRE.
Nastasia, although she didn't want to try it, gives it the thumbs up. I tried it. I know, you give it the thumbs up. I know, she's stew queen. Who's who's not?
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