This episode is brought to you by Tabberdin, New American Cuisine in one of Washington, DC's oldest hotels, located in DuPont Circle. For more information, visit Tabardin.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. But 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 alive on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from you know like 12 or something like this. To like, you know, around one from Robert P uh Robert's Pizzeria and Bush Week broklyn. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez.
How you doing? Good. Got Matt in the booth, what's up? I feel great. By the way, my voice, I sound like this because I inhaled a whole lot of fiberglass over the weekend, which we, if we have time, we can get into, but I've never heard you stumble on the start before.
So much fiberglass. You know, plus at a certain point you're too old to be inhaling fiberglass on the regular. Uh like when you're one. Oh, come on. One-year-old can take some fiberglass to the lung.
Uh, but we have uh in the uh in the studio our special guest, Nick Strangeway. How you doing? I'm very good. Very good. Very happy to be here.
I haven't seen you in a while. The first time I actually got to spend a lot of time. Well, maybe do you want to just he makes a gin. He makes a gin. And it's a funky gin, but I think to understand like kind of what's not funky necessary, but like in other words, production-wise funky.
And in order to get into it, maybe it helps to talk a little bit about kind of your history. Nick, well, oh, by the way, call in your questions, gin related or otherwise, to uh uh 718-497-2128. That's 718497-2128. So you were a bartender before the big renaissance. Yeah, I started bartending in 88.
Right. So a long time ago. And I've survived. Right. But but the interesting thing is is that I think one of the things that's interesting is that not only have you survived, but you've managed to stay kind of at the rolling front of what's going on.
So you haven't you haven't dinosaured out. You know what I mean? You you stayed kind of at the at the leading edge. Now Booker and Dax and Stasia, I have a company. We're the trailing edge technology, we're the stuff that can fall off the airplane and it still flies.
That's our motto. But uh you've managed to stay, you know, um kind of at the forefront of what's going on. I remember the first time I hung out with you to any extent you were doing like a really kind of uh you were working with, I think Purno Ricard at the time. I think you're allowed to talk about it. And uh it was before you came out with kind of your your limited run.
The craft the craft vodka stuff yeah yeah but you were working, um, you were just out working with uh I think it was Ferminich or one of the big flavor houses. I forget which one it was. Uh was it Ferminich or was it the other one? No, it's the other one. Yeah, yeah whichever they're called.
Yeah, yeah but um so you know you've kind of been um interested in techniques of distilling flavor creation through your consultancy company and then went later working making the vodka so you you come at this honestly and like from a from for a long time working on these kinds of problems and from the heart would that be accurate? Yeah I think so I mean I think it's very easy to get bored in the bar industry and luckily this Renaissance came along and I wasn't at the forefront of it I was always there and it kept me motivated it kept me interested otherwise I'd have stopped and gone done something else. If I get bored I go and do something else and it's boredom that drives me to do things. All right well well that's good for for me what what what is it that drives us Nastasia just I don't know I don't know I don't know we'll figure it out yeah if you lose interest then what why continue doing it I mean I'm lucky touch wood and make long continue I don't do things I don't like doing right I mean there's there's a thing about cooking in general right bar cooking where you have to be able occasionally to zen out and just produce you know what I mean otherwise this is the wrong industry for you. Yeah I mean I very very early on I enjoyed going for walks.
I don't know that's an odd thing to I mean I I live an unhealthy lifestyle I drink and I smoke and I do many things that are unhealthy. But going for a little walk through the city and picking things and tasting things that you find along that walk because you can forage in the city that was something that I was very early on something that really intrigued me and gave me the headspace which you don't get in the city. I think it's very easy to get caged in. Tell me about it. Yeah, Nastasia and I I think both have a love-hate relationship with our with our fine city.
Which I still love New York had to but yeah you know. Yeah. Just sucks sometimes. Yeah. Yeah.
I I'm lucky. I have a I now live in Denmark, so I commute into the city. I go into London maybe twice a month. I get my fix of the city and I then get the hell out of there. Uh speaking of forage, you know the uh existing conditions, I don't know if they have it today.
At our bar, we currently have a New York City foraged. I tried it, it's really good. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Linden Linden's in.
Oh, cool. And so uh, you know, l if you're walking down the street of a city and you're like, what's that smell? And it's pleasant. There's a good chance in temperate regions. I mean it's you know, we're not like a honeysuckle kind of an area or like wild rose bushes or whatnot.
Linden flowers, amazing smell, right? Linden flower, amazing. Uh yeah, so we nitromuddle the linden into uh a light because it's a light flavor into Plymouth's because it's light. Yeah. And uh simple, that's it.
Like Linden, simple lemon, and and uh simple is good. Yeah. Simple is always good. I know. All right, so you want to describe your uh describe your we actually do have a caller on the line.
You want to hit that first? All right, let's see what they let's see. Caller, is this a a gin or a cooking or just a random rant-related question? It is a cooking related question. All right, what do you got for me?
Uh on a podcast a while ago, you had mentioned getting into a tip with some renowned chefs about the use of tongs. Uh is it more than an aesthetic issue? Or I I wanted to understand the pros and cons of that. So it was my brother-in-law, Wiley Dufrain, Dave Chang, and a number of other people on the anti-Tongue side. And uh I think what it is is that generation, i.e., they're all my age or younger, you know, my age or around my age.
That generation, you know, I think that they just saw the tongs as a sign of disrespect that that someone would go grab, let's say the the example they always say is we're gonna get a big get a nice piece of fish and you're gonna grab it with the tongs and flip it, destroy the fish. I was like, no, that's not what tongs are for, doesn't mean tongs ha don't have a place in the kitchen. So I think you know, they saw a bunch of younger cooks that they deemed sloppy who were using the tongs in ways that uh damaged food, right? Um now they're not talking about like at home on your grill, you know, you know, moving stuff around with tongs, stuff like that. But you know, they're talking in their kitchens, when someone's like uh flipping uh a piece of fish, they wanted to see a fish spatula, maybe if you needed extra support, a spoon or something over it, gently flip it over.
Um and they didn't want to see kind of you know, you know, roughed up rough housing with the tongs, and that was their main gripe. My only issue with tongs is is that if you should ever make the mistake of going into a deep fryer with tongs once and then lifting your hand up and having the hot oil run down the inside channel of the tongs down your wrist, you'll never make that mistake again. So tongs can have their dangerous aspects too for sure. But I mean, I mean, come on, tongs, am I right? Nope.
I don't know. But I think so. I'm very I'm pro-tongs. I'm also pro, you know, telling people in your kitchen, flip fish the way you want. You know what I mean?
Don't rip things about with tongs. But whatever. Alright, so you have a spritz bottle. First of all, you have your gin. I have the gin.
Then you have three bottles of water of not water. Of water clear, I'm assuming distillate. Yep. And a spritz bottle. So what's going on here?
Well, when we started making the gin, I think there's a too much respect for tradition in the distilling business. And most technology that is being used is 19th century technology. And like you are as an earlier adopter of rotavats and distilling under pressure. And we decided we were going to always use a road vap at some point. We weren't going to throw away the baby with the bath water, so we've got a copper pot still.
We run distill it through that, which has a certain character. Then we run a rotav, and then one of my partners is a guy called Carebury Hill, who's actually the guy who introduced rotavaps to me and Tony and variously throughout the world. And he had always been banging on about this technology that I still don't totally understand, called supercritical gas extraction. Yeah, good stuff. Um so we combine all three bits of technology, and what we find is it creates a fuller flavor and we get flavors you can't get via traditional distillation.
Traditional distillation is limiting, but essential. So with the supercritical, you're doing like supercritical CO2, then putting that base into what? So we do juniper through our supercritical gas extract, which we then hold into ethanol and then mix in at the end. So we basically make a London dry gin on the pot still with 11 botanicals, and it's fairly classic in style. Then we run six botanicals separately through the vacuum still, blend those in, and then we blend the supercritical gas extract in as well.
So without giving away any trade secrets. Yes, no trade secrets. Well, like so, like uh of uh of uh I know you're probably a 700 CL guy, but for a 750 person like myself, what what percentage of that is pot still product? What percentage of that is it'll be approximately 70 odd percent pot still coming off it. And then the other bits go in.
There's probably no 15% is coming off the the um vacuum stills, and then the rest is CO2. The CO2 is very, very small. Because it's super strong, it's just insane. I mean it's ridiculous stuff. I mean, this is that what that is?
This is the CO2 extract. So if we put a kilo of juniper into our CO2 extract, we'll pull off and I'll have to talk in milliliters rather than ounces. Yeah, yeah. We'll probably get 25 milliliters of pure oil. I don't really know what it's exactly is coming off there, but it and that will go into about a liter, and then that'll go across six or so, six hundred bottles or so.
It's super poke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um so how diluted is this stuff? This is diluted down so that I could get it in to the US without having the rubber gloves on in immigration. It was that's diluted down about half and half with 68 ABV, and it's still super pokey.
I mean, the first again, I don't really understand the technology. I mean, I learned things, I'm autodidactic, so I will learn things in the stupid way. So when we first tested the machines, I was hesitant and you know, disbelieving of it. And we went into a laboratory in Newcastle and they turned on this machine, which is a very odd-impressive looking piece of technology. It didn't it look like an old Amstrad computer case.
Yeah, yeah. And some buttons made the thing, and there's a bit of shh noise. And when the lab technicians went out, a little drip started to come off this little needle, and I put it on my finger and then stuck it in my mouth. Idiot. But it's the way I learn things.
So I, you know, it's not how I encourage people to learn things by doing it like that, but I couldn't taste anything apart from juniper for about a week. It was so intense, the flavour. I have made the same error with straight flavor compounds, and it's it can be yeah, it's not the way to do it. Yeah, yeah. But you do understand the effect of it if you do it that way.
Yeah, I did that once with uh methylanthranolate, which is the um uh fake not fake, but the Concord Grape aroma. And I got it all in my mouth, a straight chemical in my mouth. Yeah. And it messed me up, yeah, for like a week. Yeah, it takes a long time to get I mean, you know, I think we we did some um gas chromatography on our different parts of the distillation.
So we ran juniper in our pot still, we ran it in the vacuum still, and we ran it through the CO2 extract. And if we ran our pot still efficiently, we could extract about sixty percent of the flavor compounds in there. And we were changing compounds because obviously we're cooking. When we went in the vacuum still, we could get to 70 odd percent, and with less change, because again the but when we own the CO2 we can get 90 odd percent efficiency. Do do the pot people use supercritical CO2?
They use it well, yeah yes. That's the when we're when I was looking to buy my technology, I get kept getting led to Californian websites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're using it to extract THC. Yeah.
I mean, that's what's interesting about it. So to me is that f you know, for years back when I was at the French culinary, which you know I haven't been actively in a long time, you know, uh, we were always looking for there was two things we were always looking to do. Extract flavors, separate flavors. That's basically nine out of ten, or you know, extract, you know, solids, liquid. That was always the game, you know, um with a lot of the or create textures.
That was the other game. You know what I mean? That we were playing with these kind of new techniques, and I'd always wanted to have uh supercritical CO2, but the price was just out of like out, like no one was doing it on a pilot level. Yeah. And even the pilot machines were built for labs that were gonna do it bigger, so they weren't inexpensive.
And I really not inexpensive, but reason even within shooting distance, you know, and of reasonable. And DIYing with the pressures involved didn't seem like such a smart idea. Uh because you know, pressures are high. Yeah. Uh very high.
Super high. And uh, and so you know, once again, I mean, thanks to the drug industry, potheads, because I think the more potheads want to do this on a smaller scale, the more uh chefs and bartenders are gonna be able to use this technology. I mean, like you can get uh a rig down now for like 10 grand, right? Or something like this. Yeah, I think ours ours is a fairly cheap one.
Ours was fifty. But don't they make an even smaller like pothead one for yeah, they will do. And I think I think with again with all that technology, the more that people use it. I mean, rotor vats were prohibitively expensive when I started using them. And they're still they could be cheaper, they could be cheaper.
I've always wanted to build one. Yeah, it's just the market's not that high. No. I already I have enough pe I have enough trouble. Nastasi, right or wrong.
We have enough trouble getting people to use a centrifuge with the trading. Imagine the training that goes with a roto vap to get the flavors you want out of it to really control a roto vap. The training is just there's a there's a cool place in London now called Crucible. I don't know whether you've been to Crucible in London, set up by a guy called Stu Bale, who used to work for me and Tony C in the in the past, and he's basically gone out and bought a rotor app, a centrifuge, and bartenders can rent them by the hour now. No, I like that.
And he'll give a training on it, so when you go in there, you join it as a club, and then you have to go through a training thing, and then you can go use it whenever you like. Yeah, I haven't seen him in years. I haven't seen him back since back when he was at 69 Colebrook Road. Well, no, he's doing good. He's still as crazy as ever, but he still has the he like he always has that like uh characteristic like a little gray bit going through his eyebrow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's still got that. Yeah, he's still got that. Well, wow, how could you lose that? Yeah, like let's say, let's say your eyebrow came in all of a sudden black one day, you're like, well, that's not me anymore.
You have to go just die out that one that one little that one little bit. Uh all right, cool. So so are we gonna taste this? Yeah, we should do. Well, well, what I brought in, I brought in the pot still, which is basically a London dry gin, to see where we start, and then you can see how it evolves.
And then what is this one watered to? This is at 43. I think it's gonna be at 43. And that's what you that's what your bottle proof is? That's what the bottle proof is.
We it took us two years to come up with the recipe. We it took us two years to get the funding. So while we were getting the funding, we were coming up with recipes. Um this is fairly standard. I think when we started, I would have probably made a slightly murkier, more foraged, feral gin.
And then as time went by, I started noticing that everybody now, the USP on a gin is Jason the stick an extra botanical in, and that's your USP. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um for those of you that don't know, that's unique selling proposition. And as time went by, I started to realize actually the gins I really liked were the ones that stood the test of type the beef eaters, the tankarase, the plummets, etc. They've been around for a hundred years and were fairly classic, and they were about juniper.
Right, and also like the more the closer you hit one of those things, the more versatile it's gonna be for someone uh because the thing is if you're if your gin is way very different, right? It's gonna work in a couple cocktails, you get people to make a signature cocktail with it. But I mean I think what tends to happen again, when you look at those gins, is when you mix with them, one of the botanical skews and becomes forward, and it's never the juniper, or very rarely. In some of the older classic gins, it is, but in more of the modern gins, as soon as you add vermouth or tonic water, whatever simple mix you're adding to it, it'll be the cardman that pops out, or the whatever esoteric botanical they've decided to put in, spins out. And actually, juniper is the heart of gin.
Um we have our own juniper on our land. So the juniper was always an inspiration. So it became much more, it became focused back in on the juniper. Wait, bro, let's bring let's taste these other things and then come back to the juniper. You were saying something before we started about uh juniper problems.
Yes, this is this is opportunity to talk about this is green juniper from our plants. All right. Um juniper problems. The juniper problems are twofold in the UK. They're not so much in America, but a little bit like phlox are in the 19th century.
There are a couple of things that are wiping out juniper across the UK. There's a little insect bug, something that's eating it, and there's also a mold type thing that's killing it. We're really lucky we're in the middle of a national park. We have a military shooting range, one side of us, so nobody goes there. Um then the other side, it's basically big moorlands that are owned privately.
So there's no way that people can get this shit onto our land. Now, from an American perspective, because we've heard this all the time, what the hell is a moor exactly? A moor, I think, is probably unique to the UK. There are there are, I imagine in Scandinavia a few moors. It's mainly a if you imagine what Scotland looks like.
Yeah, yeah, that is more than generally. It's a lot of heather, a lot of bracken, wild blueberries, bill blaberries they're called in the UK. So like shrubby grassy. Yeah, the the shrubs tend to grow to about half a meter, a couple of feet high. Yeah, yeah.
And it tends to change colour constantly, it goes really bright green in the summer due to the the blueberry plants, or the blaberies are really vivid green, an almost acid green colour. And it's sitting down on peat. So peat is decayed plant matter that's been sat and compressed over the years. Acidic soil. It's an acidic soil in general.
The juniper oddly doesn't particularly like the acidic soil. So it will grow where we have it. It's growing in stands on water courses where the acidity isn't quite so high. And the junipers we have, I believe will be five or six hundred years old. Whoa.
Yeah, I mean that most people name their stills, myrtle or whatever they are. Our juniper plants are named. Wow. So we have Miriam, who I think is approximately 500 years old. At the base, she is about three or four feet across.
Now, well now what uh so I I'm used to like American ornamental juniper, which is not such an agust or magisterial thing. Yeah. Are these are they still because of where they grow? Are they low and spread out? Are they the weather where we are is particularly horrendous?
I mean, it's sometimes stunning andly beautiful, but it's pretty wild. Um, and it's not massively cold, but it's horrendously windy. So they tend to be growing inside little valleys, and they are hunkered down against the elements. They are twisted and old, and they follow the contours of the land. If you go to if you go to Italy, you'll see juniper growing and it's beautifully prounded and upright, like you know, a lot of it looks like the typical Italian crowd.
Ours are wizened old fiends and hags of the moor that sits low into the hill. That's by style, I like that. But they they they have a unique flavour. That the one you just tasted is the green, which nobody is again. I think one person started using green juniper.
We use the green because the green, the juniper takes two and a half years to ripen on the bush. It only ripens on the female bushes. There are males and females. We have a lot of males who are only active once a year. And for the rest of the year, they don't do very much.
And it's the females that you want. Do you even bother naming the male ones? The males have no names, it's only females who have names. Yeah. Um because of the age of this juniper or these juniper plants, they are unique.
And the green has a there's a certain when you smell the green, it has a sort of like sandalwoody aroma. I don't know what they call it in Roman Catholic Church where you swing those balls full of it has that, it reminds me of going into a Catholic church. And which technique was this? Well, that's that's vacuum distillation. Well, it's got the it's got that fresh, yeah, like all there note, you know what I mean?
Yeah, and it's there, and I think you know, when we've seen the GCMS, we're we're capturing about 70 odd percent of the flavor compounds. So for those of you that never used a vacuum still before, it's got two main advantages. One, you get, you know, as Nick said, a very high capture rate of the flavors involved. Also, you're under vacuum, so there's almost no oxidation of uh compounds, and there's little to no, depending on how you're running it, little to no heat. So it's the I mean I haven't tasted super critical, but of the stuff that you can normally accomplish, it's kind of always got the freshness, the high notes, all of that stuff, which is which is very nice.
Now, I'm interested, so tree to tree, how different is the flavor, even like with the same varieties? Because is it like a mulberry tree where two trees, one is garbage and one's delicious? Well, no, I mean they tend to ripen at different rates. So again, we're fairly lucky that because the distillery is in the heart of where we produce a lot of the botanicals, we can taste them during the course, and we had two years to run up to it. So we saw them over the seasons, and so we now harvest at specific times of year where we think the flavor is right.
From bush to bush, I don't think there's a huge amount of difference. Or not enough that it would become critical to us. And when you say green juniper, is it never gonna go pro red? It will go it'll go black the following year. So we don't harvest our black juniper berries to use in the gin.
We harvest them to propagate more juniper bushes. So we have a propagation program because of the disease that kidding things out, we're obviously paranoid about it. Right, right, right. So we now have several hundred plants in propagation from the blackberries. We let the animals take back and we propagate.
So then the other one, the more standard, where are you sourcing those from? Does it matter? Do you it does make a big difference? We we source so in the pot still we run Macedonian and Italian juniper. Uh we chose those two because we like the flavor profile of them.
And we also, to be honest, I didn't particularly like the flavor profile of our black juniper. I think it ha they'll have a place at some point, but they didn't taste as robust. The green was very, very distinct. The the regular juniper is great in cooking. It's wonderful.
Yeah, it's really really wonderful. I think it's underused in cooking. I mean, where I am, because I'm based in Denmark, so in the Scandinavian regions, you'll find it cropping up constantly. Yeah. It's one of the prevalent flavors.
I don't think the Nastasia, do you get it that much here in the US? No. No. No. Do you like it?
I like it. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, all right. So we're actually well, we'll talk about the juniper. So this is the CO2 extract as we use it.
So this has been watered, diluted down and way the hell watered way the hell down. In my um strangely, I don't know what to describe that as urine-coloured bottle. Uh that's a the uh for Americans, uh, country time lemonade. Yeah. That's a that's a more polite way of saying it.
Oh yeah. It's got a kick to it. Yeah. Wow. It's like it's also got more of kind of a like a back pepper note in it than the other uh not black, you know, but like a peppery note in the back.
Is that just it's the same proof, so it's not the alcohol, it's not alcohol, it's just coming the thing is through distillation you're not getting sugars and oils. Through CO2 extraction, we take the sugars and the oils. So it gives a mouthfeel, which is different, I think, um due to the oils and the sugars. And the flavor profile is drastically different to any of our distillation techniques. Now let me ask you another speaking of distillation, right?
So there is in okay, let's just put it this way. In the industry, in every industry, there are things that get a bad name for a good reason, and then people can't get around why those things got a bad name, and so they can't wrap their head around someone using something for a good reason. So I've always said this is that if you're doing something to make a product better, then you're doing a good thing. If you're doing it to make it simply to make it cheaper, then you're doing a bad thing. Now, there are a lot of people who are against extract-based chins, right?
Because it's seen as the kind of fake adulterated b a bathtub variety where you're just buying chemicals and and making a gin. Now, someone who doesn't kind of understand what you're doing could see the use of of supercritical extracts as extract-based gin making. I would argue that you're just trying to control the flavor even more, and clearly it's not making it any cheaper. You don't it doesn't make it cheaper, it makes it more expensive. Right.
Um but do you have that problem? Do you have to explain that to people? Adding extracts as opposed to only being a dissolute. Do you have these purists, or have we are we thankfully moved beyond that? I think we're start.
I mean, I think we're starting to move beyond that. I think the gin category or the way they categorize gin as you know, London dry being seen as the epitome and the height of good quality gin, is a fairly archaic idea. Yeah, I was just having this argument yesterday. Like, why do you even have to call something London dry? If it's not London dry, then tell me something.
I mean, it's like because it's the standard It's the standard way of doing everything, and it's using you know 19th century technology. Yeah. In many cases, very crudely. I think the more we talk about using technology, and the more it's a little bit like the food business. You know, a lot of cutting edge technology in the food business was first used in the cheaper end of the food business for properties of cost.
Yeah, yeah. Whereas when you put it in the hands of the guys at Noma or Booley or whoever it might Heston, it's seen as being creative and genius. You put it in the hands of one of the big fast food chains and it seems being the evil. It's who's using it. Well, all during the early 2000s, that was the fight.
That was the fight to show that using technology in the kitchen or in bar, as long as you're using it for the right reason, you're doing an honorable thing. And it was a huge fight. Like a lot of the old guard back then were just they would beat on you. You know what I mean? Like uh, they would beat on you, call you industrial, call you, you know what I mean?
Like everything is industrial. I mean, again, industrial has negative, but if it's industrious, it's not a negative. Right, right. So, I mean I mean, I think we have to talk about technology. Technology is important.
Um it adds flavors that I cannot get through tradition. Right, and I'm interested in flavors. So if you're interested in flavors, whether you like them or not, is a different thing. But the creation of flavors and the exposure of flavors through technology, it's got to be a good thing. Right, especially if if your goal, which is what I'm getting off you, your goal is not to produce something with a bunch of different flavors from what gin would normally have, right?
Because that's been done by a million people. And you're not out to just try to make, you know, I'm gonna remake beef, or I'm gonna re- That's beef eater, or remake tank. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like you're not gonna do by the way, Gordons. Do people drink Gordons anymore?
I have no idea. Anyway, I think so. I mean there's nothing wrong with it if it's the right ABV. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If it's a cheap and 37 and a half, then it's not so good.
That's yeah, yeah. So what you're trying to do is make something that is gin flavored, but a different, like with it, and like like you say, with unique selling proposition, and I, you know, I I feel very sympathetical with that because I I'm not trying to necessarily make things that are wacky, I just want to do it the way I'm doing it to get the flavor I want. Yeah, I'm after flavor. I'm interested in flavor. I mean, the reason I like the bar world is because it deals with flavor.
I like the food world as well, but I'm not as good as as a chef. Yeah. Alright, we're gonna take this call and then we're gonna taste the uh the gin altogether. This episode is brought to you by Tabert Inn. Tabard Inn, Washington, DC's quintessential hotel, is located on a quiet tree-lined street, just five blocks from the White House.
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Caller, you on the air. I hear it's urgent. Hi, uh, it is a bit urgent. Thanks for taking my call. Um, sorry, not Jen question, but it's a cooking issue and a wedding issue.
Oh. Um, so I'm getting married at the end of the month, and uh, we're definitely gonna get a bunch of different charcuterie, including I I'm leaning towards a Soriano ham. I know you have issues with that particular ham is great. I don't like the name. Right.
Um, we just wanted something American, but with yeah, that European style that we can flice really, really, really thin. Uh the issue is that because of the venue, we have storage and transportation issues, so we're gonna have to do it ahead of time uh for all the charcuterie. But I'm particularly worried about the ham because you know it's thin and it can dry out. And I just want to make sure what would you say is like the maximum time and the best storage opportunities that we can try and do for that. Um yeah, like in we can't put in, you know, we don't have like a vacuum you like saver or anything like that.
Right. So uh by the way, uh I had some delicious do you know? Did you get it through uh like okay, fine uh full disclosure? Patrick Martin's Heritage Foods is the founder of this radio network. But did you buy it through did you buy it through Heritage or did you get it directly from Sam Edwards?
Um I haven't bought it yet, so if you have a suggestive one, I was about to pull the trigger on that like this week as soon as possible. Not to push the you know, the house brand here, but um Patrick, Patrick Martins and Heritage Foods, they get a lot of uh Heritage Breed meat. That's their deal, right? And a lot of the pigs that they get are like very nice, very highly marbled. And over the past five, six years, they've been selling raw hams to some of the better producers.
So your your uh Newsom's, which is Nancy Mahathy, who was at the bar the other day, uh, which is a fantastic ham, and uh also Sam Edwards' Seriano, uh, and I and he has a couple others, but then typically those ones, a lot of them are sold back to and distributed by Heritage uh food. So if you want an American ham, kind of an American taste, but you really want like a highly marbled, like really kind of uncuous ham. I have tried a bunch of them and they are delicious. So like just see what they see what they have. And also Patrick will guarantee the age on a ham.
Uh so you know, he he likes to take ones that are a year better. So that you know, once you get over about a year, uh they start slicing better, and they're not gonna be as wet, and this is gonna be an issue for you. If you take a nine-month-old ham and slice it, uh, it will slice fine right now. But uh on storage, it will gum up a lot more than like a ham that's aged for a year. Likewise, a ham that has more fat, as long as you don't get it hot, but has more fat but is more aged, will tend to hold better once it's sliced than one uh that is uh, you know, got more moisture and and less fat.
That's just life. That's how life works. Um but now and I'll also have to say that obviously that like in the world of sliced things, you'd rather have someone slice your salmon for you right now and eat it. Uh you'd much rather have that than buy pre-packaged sliced uh, you know, uh lox or nova in my in my book. You know, if you've never had someone slice Nova or Locks for you and then eaten it right away, you have not had the proper uh uh smoked salmon.
But uh ham is similar, not quite as bad, but don't despair. Your main problem is gonna be separating them out. And uh if you can get like that waxy butcher paper, you've got to get the one uh cut right brand wax paper that you buy in the supermarket is not durable enough, and the moisture in the ham will wrinkle it and then it'll get nasty. Get the get nice stuff like a butcher would use, and uh or like like uh DiPalos here in New York or Delhi has. And if you layer the slices consistently, you can overlap them a little bit and they should peel apart.
Uh, but you overlap them and then always have the one layer on paper and not on the other. You will be able to separate them and present them nicely on on a thing. But that's really the only way to do it. So you get them on the paper, you can then fold the paper like triptych style, as long as you're never folding ham on ham ever. Uh, and then wrapping that, excluding the oxygen from it so that the um uh the fat doesn't oxidize, uh, and you should be able to keep it in relatively fine feather for uh for the big day.
Got it. Awesome. Anything else for the wedding? You're not catering yourself, are you? Please tell me you're not.
I am not catering, uh, but I uh set it up like productions that I do in Los Angeles, so I'm kind of used to the vendor thing. Um I will say that uh like you, I also never called my in-laws by name, and my mom was super mad uh when she they found out a couple years back. So I totally understand that. Well, yeah, I mean it's just like once you don't do something, you kind of dig in, you know? Yeah.
Like a you know, certain things I'm too old to change, you know. Like anyway, uh like uh have a good time. I hope it all works well. Let us know how the ham was. Well dude, thank you very much.
All righty. Um, so let's taste this chin. Yeah, so this is the this is the finished product. Yep. So this is the pop, this six different vacuum this summer repeats.
So again, some of the thing is, and I think I like it when I make cocktails as well, is I like layering the same flavor in different iterations over the top of one to increase the amplitude of that particular flavor, whether it be black currants or whatever. So if I make a black currant drink, I'll generally use black currant two or three times in a drink to expose more of that flavor. Right, lot less. If you add a bunch of different things, it's just yeah, you're just muddling things up. I mean, you know, it becomes murky and cloudy.
Yeah. Shotgun mixing, I call it. And then the main thing is it it's very classic gin. Can I water it some? I want to see what it tastes like when it waters.
Yeah, yeah. Try to take it. So by the way, hopefully we're not making any mouth noises. Uh, we had a comment, uh, question in from last week's show. Do you read that one, Nastasia?
Oh my goodness. Uh you should you should take a gander. While you're pouring this, uh I'm going to uh read this. Nick O from Cincinnati writes in. Excuse me, Nick, for one second.
This is not you, Nick. This is Nico from Cincinnati. I've never been to Cincinnati. You ever been to Cincinnati? No, but my friend is.
Oh, your friend's the violinist in Cincinnati. You know, all I can think about now that you uh you can put music in Cincinnati in my head. Now I got WKRP going through my head. Uh now the song is going through my head. Sorry.
I won't sing it for you because my voice is not up to singing WKRP in Cincinnati. I had some blues to it. Yeah, yeah. So uh hey Nastasia. I'm looking uh to buy a Sears All, which is a piece of equipment that Nastasi and I manufacture.
But the replacement screens seem absurdly expensive. $25 to $30 for some little metal screens. At the moment, this is the only thing keeping me from buying. Question: What makes Sears all screens so expensive? And two, are there any plans to do something to bring down the price?
Well, Nick, uh the short answer is it is this is going to be unbelievable to you, but literally half the manufacturing price of the entire unit is that one little metal screen. Uh they tend not to break in home use, by the way. Like uh very rarely do they burn out, and that's one of the reasons they're so expensive. First of all, the rear metal screen is not any normal alloy. It's uh Ekoloi or Inc and L, I forget, 693 is the, I forget whether it's Inkaloy or Incon L.
It's a it was a metal that was developed for uh aerospace technology to be in the back end of um three you know turbojets for the uh exhaust nozzles uh prior to the development of ceramics for the same thing. So no one uses high technology, high temperature metals in that application anymore. So there's almost literally no market for this metal in the world anywhere. It's made by a corporation called Specialty Metal. Specialty metal would not make uh wire for us.
So, and it's the only metal that we were able to find that could withstand the heat. So we had to find someone in China who would do a knockoff alloy of this super metal that's no longer used by anyone and was never used in screen formation, then have them make it into a screen. But we're not done yet. That still was not uh that's not even all of the cost. That's like half of that cost.
The other part is that we found that they were still burning out, even with the uh 693 in it. So we have them electrocoted, electroplated with palladium. And uh palladium ain't cheap, and uh electroplating with palladium ain't cheap. Now, it is possible in the future we'll be able to bring the price down a little bit because currently we were not able to sort source an industrial palladium producer, so it's literally someone who coats jewelry with palladium, is what we use. So half the cost of the entire thing for us is that little screen in the back.
But the good news is we've done a lot of work on that little screen, and odds are unless you're really burning in a lot, it's not gonna break. Uh would you say it's accurate, Nastasia? Yeah, that is true. Uh secondly, uh uh Matt, they don't Nick does not want us to do pledge drives on this program anymore unless you buy airtime, which is a strong idea. I like that.
And then the last thing is the next thing, the cooks illustrated guy, Paul, friend of the show, Paul. The next thing Paul could eats on mic can be my butt. He used the A version of butt. But he says, the next thing he eats on the air can on mic can be my butt. Dave fed him pretzels from an MRE for some reason, and the sociopath just leaned right into the mic and chewed.
Disgusting. Um, please ban Paul. I had to turn the podcast off. That guy ruined my commute. Wow.
In defense of Paul, I also went in for a good hard chew on that. Why are you admitting that? Now Nick's gonna come and get you. I mean, he can try and kick me off the show, but that's not. I mean, yeah.
Okay. Anyway, so real real world world repercussions. Nick says, I have access to military MREs and was ready to offer to send some, but never mind now. Tell Dave to look for omelet MREs. They're by far the worst.
I believe that. Oh my god, omelets on uh omelets that have been held for a long time are just oh I had an airplane omelet again recently because uh uh Blaze came on. Remember Blaze came on, and I forget what it was, but he was like, Oh, United's omelet. And I was like, I'm pretty sure that's gonna be garbage, dude. And he was like, Well, I'm in first class.
I was like, you chump. That's what it's like. Oh, a chump. He was fun on the show, but that's a chumpy thing to say. I had an omelet on United the other day.
Sucked. Rubbish. Yeah, so bad. Uh all right, so let's take your own food on there, Line. So this is the gin watered.
That's jump gin watered down. Yeah, the structure's still there, still tastes like gin. Still tastes like gin. Still tastes like juniper. Although you know that pepper hit in the back from that super critical stuff's really still there.
Yeah, yeah. A little bit goes a long way. A little bit goes a long way. So Nastasia's gonna spray that uh that straight stuff in her mouth? I wouldn't suggest spraying it in your mouth.
You could wear it as perfume. I've got it spritzed on me. There's a whole bunch of okay. Now here's another thing. You hear this a lot, I'm sure.
People are like, maybe me, pine tree. Junipers don't taste like pine trees, really. I mean, if you've ever eaten a pine tree, which Nastasia and I have, you know what I mean? It is a different flavor. It is a different flavor.
There are resin notes in juniper. There are piney notes in juniper, but pine trees. There are similar terpenes in both. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and juniper is of the coniferous family.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's a little bit like saying a lemon tastes like a lime. Yes, they do taste similar, but they are not the same. Or like a lemon tastes like a lemon leaf. Yeah.
You know, because then when people think of pine, they're thinking of the needles, which I and I love it, but it has a very pine needles, spruce needles, pine needles have a very kind of polarizing hard resin hit. The juniper does juniper doesn't have as much of that hard resin hit, would you say? It definitely is softer than the pine. I think again, I we use Douglas fir in our gin, and we also make a Douglas fur vodka to the um and it depends how you treat your botanical, what flavors you extract from your botanical. So if you start to dry pine, you'll get more estery sort of notes come off, and you get these very ripe tropical sort of notes come off once the drying process starts.
And then you have to arrest the drying process to capture those flavors. If you take it straight off the tree, it's become it's as people imagine pine. Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna go ahead and say that I hope Nastasi and I never have to distill another pine tree. Bye, that is fun.
I love distilling pine trees. We had to buy the pine tree. Take it, you know, take it up to our our lab in major air quotes was a garbage room, and rip rip all the needles off by hand while all of these prospective students were coming by and they were like, I don't know, second Christmas. Like, if you want, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Blah blah blah, blah, blah. And then like, you know, we're sitting there, how many hours did it take us to distill that whole tree? But you know what you are to me, Dave. What? You know how when you're in a taxi cab and the taxi cab driver is on the phone with somebody, and you're like, and they sometimes like it'll just be like a conversation, then it'll drop and it'll be silent, and then they get back on the and then they start talking again.
Yeah. That like if I were a taxi driver, you would be the person on the other end of the phone. What do you mean? I don't even understand what that means. I'm saying that even if we're like taking down a tree, we're still talking about stuff and laughing.
Yeah, about other random stuff. Yeah, r very random stuff. So you're saying taking a tree down is equivalent to driving a taxi? Yes. Yes.
You are yeah, you are my person on the other end of the phone. Speaking of random things, Nastasi and I were at an event last night. City. I was not there for very long. But anyway, City Meals on Wheels.
It's a good event. And uh by the way, Nick is here for Bar Convent Brooklyn. You can come uh chat with him about come chat with him about Heppel. Great product. Uh he'll be there at what when to I'm there after the show and then I'm there tomorrow again.
All right. Go say hello. It's it's worth a talk. God knows a lot. Anyway, uh so I'm at this event yesterday, right?
And uh we're serving Kendra Hada, you know, her drink, the Sunday brunch, which is a gin-based drink. We were using uh we're using Jared's uh sip Smith, he was the sponsor of Megan. And by the way, if you had his slow, I like his slow gin quite a lot. We did it, we took his sis slow gin is relatively low in sugar. Uh so I did uh two ounces uh which is 60 mils for you uh of uh the slow and then just uh three ounces 90 mils of water, carbonated it just like that at the event just for just for giggles, and put a l uh lemon twist over the top of that on point.
Slow's great. Everybody thinks slow is a winter drink. Yeah, no. We've just made a slow. I bake it with we mix it with sherry on top of the tonic water, and it's my favorite summer drink.
Yeah, it's good. Well, I think it's like it's for those Americans that remember it, it tastes like poison because we've only had bad. Sweet. Overly sweet. Overly sweet and like, you know, I don't know, like, probably made with slows that have been boiled to oblivion into some sort of paste or jelly.
I'd probably not put on gin either. They're probably put on neutral as well. A lot of what were called slow gins were not gin at all. They had. Yeah, but I know for those of you that have never had a proper slow gin.
Uh when are you coming out with yours soon? It's available in Europe. We'll be doing another harvest this year. So it might come over here. Right.
So if you if you don't, if you don't can't find Nick's, uh search out Sismith, it's a good product. Anyway, so we're at this event yesterday and getting to the heart of the story. And dude drops a glass. Were you here for that? No.
Dude drops a glass right in front of my station. Now, when you're working at an event, right, usually it's not always easy to get around your station to the front. You know what I mean? It's kind of like you're barricaded and there's a bunch of people here at your station. Dude shatters a glass and he makes the classic mistake of trying to pick up the glass for you.
I'm like, I'm like, stop. Stop. Like, don't. You know what I mean? Like, and and and I want you to, and I do the same thing because you want to help.
As a guest or as a customer, however you call yourself, please don't do that. Like, here's what you don't understand. I don't want you to do that, not really because I care about you. I theoretically care about you in general, right? But like in reality, what it is is is that if you cut yourself, my day just got so much worse.
You know what I mean? Like, what do you say about this, Nick? Yeah, I mean, it's one of the times when I shout at customers if they're about to do something that will hurt them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and again, not because I know you.
I probably don't. I don't want anyone to get hurt, but I really don't want you to be bleeding everywhere during my service, because then we're really going down. You know what I mean? So step away and let's leave it to the professionals. Yeah, leave it to the professionals.
So then I'm moving the trash. I'm literally I'm like, I'm like fending off this guy. It was a bad break, too. Like lots of big curved pieces sticking straight up and people walking around with because it's summery here with their open toes and all of this stuff. I'm like, I gotta get out and fight.
So like I'm pulling the trash can out so that I can get out behind my station. And a lady is so interested in throwing away her plate of garbage from Morimoto next door, who was the chef next door, that as I'm doing it, she still throws it and just throws this plate of like old sauce all over my pants. And I'm like, really? Really, really, really? 48 years on this planet, and this is what this is this is it.
48 years. You know what I mean? Like, you know what I mean? People have some respect for the person that's trying to serve you. That's all I'm saying.
And saving you. Yeah, yeah. Clutching yourself. Yeah, yeah. Uh how do we even get on that?
Why are we even talking about that? I don't know. I don't know. Okay, we gotta go. No, no, we're not gonna go.
We're staying later. Okay. That's what Matt said. Okay. Right, Matt?
I I allow it. All right. So uh I have a couple questions, but first, uh, so I'm getting rid unfortunately of my house in Connecticut, so I'm no longer gonna have any outside of the city space to think about. And it was a real strong outside of the city. It was like forests and like, you know, deer, snakes, toads, the whole whole nine yards.
Uh sassafras everywhere. You could you could make filet for months. Lindera benzoin, which is an interesting little berry that no one uses because it's you know not grass, but it's which stands for gender regarded as safe, but has been used for centuries. Um anyway, so because I have to condense all of my books into one place, which is an apartment in New York, for the first time in my life, I have to get rid of books. Which is hard.
I don't ever get rid of books. Books are sacred. And I I had to get rid of I had to get rid of like almost half of my books. So I had to go through and be like, okay, uh certain things that I've never read that I've always meant to read, I'm not gonna, you know, need anymore, gone. Uh the Concordance of the Bible, okay.
I have the internet, I don't need that anymore. You know what I mean? Stuff like that. Uh but then a bunch of things, uh, you know, my you know, my wife Jeff was like, do you really need that? And my response was, oh hell, that's a classic in the field.
Right? But just like a random field. So I'm gonna do like a like occasionally I think we should just do a mini segment here called Classic in the Field. Classic in the Field, yeah. Right?
And so like I brought one. Uh I brought I brought two actually. Uh so last week you weren't here, Nick, but I was talking about this is my beater copy, which The Effects of Nuclear Weapons is an amazing book put out by uh United States government back when they were actually worried about winning a nuclear confrontation. And this is the actual book. It's intense.
I'm not gonna discuss that. It was brought up, I just want to prove that this was a book. Now, this is the book we're gonna talk about. Uh it's called Sawyer's Paper Bag Cookery. Now be careful when you flip through this because it's from 1911.
This is the first American edition. Oh wow. Came out a little bit earlier in England. It was either 11 or maybe a year earlier, uh 1910 in England. It's an English book.
But because of the era, the papers are very fragile. They're very brittle because it's uh acid paper. So, a little bit about this book, which is a classic in the field. So, when I was a child, uh smells good. When I was a child, every couple of years, uh there a new new recipe would become popular for paper bag this and paper bag that.
You remember this, Nick? Yeah. 70s and 80s, uh paper bag cooking definitely was a thing, and it kind of fades out and comes back. I first learned about it because uh President Eisenhower's daughter, whose name escapes me, wrote a book, and it had paper bag chicken in it. And every week, when I was a child, I would make paper bag chicken.
So the paperback chicken I would make, I used my own personal, it's not five spice, my five spice mix at the time was salt, pepper, paprika, curry powder, garlic powder, because when I was a kid, I think I've spoken about this before, I put garlic powder on absolutely everything. So you I would rub, hand rub cold butter into the chicken, and then add those things, predominantly, of course, salt, throw it in a paper bag and throw it in the oven and let it cook. And the results for uh a nine-year-old, I thought were fantastic. I mean, as far as nine-year-old cooked chickens go, it was fantastic. Uh, I haven't done it in many years.
But anyway, uh later, I became aware of a very famous chef named Alexis Sawyer. So, spelled Sawyer not like sawing things, Sawyer as in soy sauce. Alexis Sawyer was some people say the first celebrity chef was a French guy who was cooking for uh some princes, royal, you know, princes in uh you know obviously they had been deprinced because it was after the French Revolution, but uh, you know, the kind of wealthy aristocrats in France, and then ended up moving to England. So kind of the Jacques Papin of his day, who you know used to cook for like Francois Mineran and De Gaulle, I think, and then came to the United States. He was kind of like that.
Came to England, uh, became the chef at a place called the Reform Club. You ever been to the Reform Club? Yeah, yeah, the Reform Club is phenomenal. Is there is a restaurant still good? They still do, because it's one of his famous dishes is um the Lamb Cutless Reform stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They still have that on the menu. Is it any good? I've never had it's good. It's good.
Can any Jamoke go get go there? Or you need an invite? You need to be a member of the aristocracy or have a friend. Can you get do you have a friend? Can you get us?
I have a friend. Maybe we have a mutual friend who can probably take you there. Really? I've been there with a mutual friend of ours. Yeah, yeah?
I'll tell you about all fair. All right. Okay. So anyway, so he becomes the chef of this place called the Reform Club, which at the time was progressive, like rich aristocracy, but like progressive, i.e. reform, and became a wildly popular, wildly famous chef.
Wrote a book called The Gastronomic Regenerator in 1946, uh, that talked about professional kind of high-end cooking. 1846. Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry, 1846. Professional high-end cooking. He had one of the first kitchens in the UK with gas.
Fully gas, yeah. Yeah, fully gas kitchen. Amazing. The book is amazing. I first learned about this from MFK Fisher.
By the way, the way that you used to learn about things is that you would read a book, okay? And then in that book, right, that author would then talk about books that she had read. Right. Now, I actually got uh guff. Someone gave me guff in liquid intelligence.
I would talk about where I learned things or where sources had come from or ideas. That's how I used to learn is that like authors would say things like this, or in bibliographies or annotations. So I learned about the gastronomic regenerator, which was the book of its time in English. Obviously, you know, in French there were different books. He then also, uh, when the uh potato famine, when the great when the great starving started happening, he wrote uh a book somewhat some of his stuff somewhat didn't it didn't have working misguided, but soup kitchens for for the Irish, and he was interested in cooking for poor people after he'd written his rich person's book.
He wrote several uh you know uh people, you know, poor poorer people's books. Uh also invented a cook stove during the Crimean War that was in use by the UK for field cooking called the Sawyer stove was in use into the 1980s. So very kind of but he died very young. Uh he had his own brand called Sawyer's Nectar, I think it, which was uh sort of like peach flavored bottled cocktail. And let's remake that crap.
Um yeah, he did loads of interesting stuff with that guy. So his grandson was also a cook. His grandson, Nicholas Sawyer. So when I saw this book, 1911, I'm like, that's not right. The years, Nicholas Sawyer, his grandson and his grandson invented paper bag cooking.
Now, now, uh that might not be a big deal to you, but for anyone that grew up in the 70s or 80s, paperbag cooking is the real thing. In the very first paragraph of this book, so this is 1911. And just so you think that, oh, we're lying, this is garbage. Paper bags were first invented, mass-produced paper bags were invented in 1852. The first flat bottom paper bag was invented in 1871, and the first pleated paper bag that we have was in 1883.
So it's about the right time to come up with the paperback cooking. Also, notice that if you grew up in the 70s or 80s, you weren't worried about chemicals in your bag. No, it just wasn't what you were worried about. And we didn't have plastic bags. Everything came in a paper bag.
Every house had a bunch of paper grocery bags in them. Because that was the only method to get your groceries home. Because one, none of us were carrying around little nylon satchels, and there were no plastic bags. So um, so he invented this, but right away he says it's the same thing we've been doing forever on papillot, but now we have these convenient bags. And at the time, actually, he was saying that the paper bags they were manufacturing were quite uh polluted with whatever they were making it with because I think he was just trying to hawk his own bags.
Yeah. But um, he basically says if you use the regular you know paper bags from 1910 or 1911, it's gonna give an off flavor to your food. So you should buy Sawyer's bags. Sawyer's paper bags, of course. But uh all of the all of the advantages of cooking on papayote, and I might do this in my book, The Miracle of Moisture Management coming up, because it is I am I am gonna write it, Nastasia.
Uh paper bag on papiote and paperbag cooking is a form of moisture management. It's a so it's a combination steam, and then once the initial steam goes away, roasting technique that is kind of kind of cool. So this you're holding the very first paper bag cookbook, Nicholas Sawyer's paper bag cookery 1911. Classic in the field. I've taken a photo of it so I can.
Yeah, classic in the field. The effect of nuclear weapons, also a classic in the field. That I'll be buying. Yeah, yeah. Uh when you buy it, look in the back.
I took it. The reason I have this is my beater copy. I have my collectible copy at home. I bought this because I was missing the nuclear detonation bomb calculator in the back. Make sure that when you buy your copy, it has it's a slide rule in circular form of uh how to calculate uh how far away you are and how many seconds it's gonna take for the blast to get to you versus how many kilotons or megatons the uh bomb is.
Uh, here's the news by the time that you have read it off of the slide rule, it is too late. It is too late. Uh anyway, uh alright. We we have one more, one more, one more, one more. Uh Bob right, by the way, if you want to hear more classic in the field uh editions, such as uh pigeons, how to make them pay, or anything like this, which is the classic on raising pigeons for food, uh, you know, just let me know on at cooking issues, my Twitter, let me know that you want to hear more of them, and I will bring more classics in the field in.
Uh Bob writes in, and you'll be interested in this, I think, Nick, about bentonite. Hope this is the right email. It is. I'm a winemaker. Obviously, if I'm reading it, it's the right email, Bob.
Uh, I'm a winemaker and vineyard manager in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Uh, currently running through your back catalog uh during pruning season. Wisconsin is an unlikely region for grapes, no? But considerable process has been made in grape breeding by Cornell and the University of Minnesota. I have Cornell's old book called The Grapes of Uh New York, which is put out by the uh Cornell Extension, and it has it's the state of the art of uh American grape breeding up till about 1910.
Uh, and it's I think the most expensive of all of the fruits of New York series. You can get it on the Google. And I believe you can also get paperbag cookery on the Google books if you want to look at it. Um these new cultivars come unique challenges such as high protein content, which brings me to my question. We have to use a lot more bentonite for these new cultivars than the old vinifera to make a wine that's heat stable.
I'm not afraid of uh aroma stripping, but the amounts we need result in a lot of loss of product. A quick aside on bentonite, I think its aroma stripping ability is greatly exaggerated. The only concrete science I've seen on it is a study that shows up that bentonite strips, chocolate and cherry aromas, but given that we only use it on white wine, this is not an issue. Um in the past, you've commented on fast freezing and slow thawing, or maybe slow uh freezing and fast thawing, or some mixture, and how uh it imparts the proteins in an egg yolk and how to avoid rubbery frozen egg. I suspect freezing and thawing the grapes in the right manner might denature the proteins and result in lower bentonite usage.
Why? Because every time I make ice wine, the wine is always protein stable without new treatment. That said, ice wine has a lot of things going on, it could be something else. I would still like to try it on a small scale to test the theory. How do you think I can most effectively denature the proteins and grapes by freezing and thawing?
Fast, slow, thanks. In general, it's very interesting. So with egg yolks, what's happening is as you freeze something, the water, you get less and less water, the proteins become more and more concentrated. So as their concentration goes up, sometimes they can uh partially denature. Uh and that's what's happening in egg yolks, uh, so that when you freeze an egg yolk and then thaw it out, uh, it never turns liquid again because the proteins have kind of coagulate, I guess is the wrong word, but they've kind of denatured a little bit, come together.
Uh if you fast thaw a fast freeze an egg yolk, then it does not do that because uh it freezes so quickly that uh it just freezes in its conformation and then goes back. So if you drop an egg yolk into liquid nitrogen, freeze it solid, thaw it back, it thaws liquid again. So the answer here is you're looking to damage things, and if you want to damage something, there's no better way to damage it than to freeze it slowly. So I would say uh freeze it slowly on bentonite stripping. The amounts you're using in wine are far less, I think, than the stripping that happens in cocktail realm.
I've had people who have used bentonite. Have you ever had people use bentonite? I've never used it myself. Uh people stir like a load of bentonite into things uh to to get out flock and other things in cocktails, and in large quantities it does strip. By the way, I'll say this: any clarification technique strips flavor.
Because it wasn't clear and now it is, meaning you've taken something out, odds are that thing has flavor. Certain clarification techniques are more damaging of flavor, even of soluble things. I will say egg white strips flavor a lot. It used in high quantities. Let me smell gelatin strips relatively a lot.
Agar a little bit less. Wine, the reason we use wine finding agents, uh Kiesel Sol, which is suspended silica, and chitasan, which is um, you know, uh from shrimp shells or fungal, you can get it. The reason I use those is I find that they're the most gentle ones that you can use uh from a flavor standpoint to get the results I want. I will say I use the minimum amount to try to get the results I need just because I don't really want to strip any more flavor than I than I need to. Sometimes I strip on purpose.
In fact, there's a section of my book on purposely stripping flavors out. But um casein's another thing that strips flavors out like a demon. Um that said, I will just give you a tip. For those of you that have spinzalls, which is our centrifuge out there, at the bar, uh unbeknownst to me. Typically, I use two milliliters per liter of Kesel Sol, which is suspended silica, and then two of kitasan, and then two of the Kesel Sol again.
Uh the bar has unbeknownst to me switch to using four all the time, which is the amount of the enzyme that I use. And I can't tell, I haven't done a side-by-side, but I can't tell any extra flavor stripping, and it does tend to make the product uh more bulletproof on clarity. So if you want to move up to four, move up to four. Uh Nick, thanks so much for coming on. Uh go out, try Heple Gin available in New York.
What are your markets here in here? We're in New York states. I think we're in four states on the eastern seaboard. What about over in the west? Nothing in the west at the moment.
No calories. I think in California you can buy it via or as in New York or something like that. There is a way of getting it to California. Alright, we'll give it a try. Uh, it's the only gin that you're gonna have that has uh supercritical CO2, vacuum, and classic, uh classic uh pot distillation in it.
And uh wait, but no uh you're not doing any no wait, you said pot? No column, huh? No, it's not column. No, no column. Pot distillation.
You hear that? So then uh it's all three mixed together because he's trying to get the results that he wants to get, and it's a long line of Nick trying to of working real hard to try to get the flavor results he wants to get. Two years to get the recipe right. There you go. And I think it's right now, touch wood.
You know what? That's another thing. If you came up with a gin yesterday, you're not done. Keep working. Keep working at it, yeah.
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