This episode is brought to you by Tabbered In, New American Cuisine in one of Washington, DC's oldest hotels, located in DuPont Circle. For more information, visit Tabardn.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. Like a drowned freaking rat. From Rubina Spirit Sorry!
Days in his undershirt. Well, thank God I always wear an undershirt. Thank God. This guy wears an undershirt 100% of the time. And I have the SPD blanket on me.
Uh well, you want to explain what that is? It's this old dirty blanket in the studio that's been here forever. That Nastasia has nicknamed the STD blanket. And she's so desperate that she's actually touching it. So what happened was is that when we left the house, the sun was shining.
Right? I it was for me anyway. I was like, oh, it's not gonna rain. Yeah. So I wore my shoes that have holes in the in the in the in the bottoms because I'm walking on dry land.
Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. What am I gonna throw away a shoe just because it's got a hole in the bottom like it? Buy new shoes.
Yeah, right. Not sunny day shoes. Right, Matt. Matt in the booth. You have sunny day shoes, they have holes in the bottom.
Absolutely have sunny day shoes. And now today I'm wearing my rain boots because I, you know, looked. I didn't look. I didn't look. Just goes to show people the internet is there for a reason.
Look up the weather. Uh okay. Get out of the subway. I'm carrying with me the classic in the field we're gonna talk about today. It's in my hand, because I was refreshing myself on some of its points.
Starts pouring. So I I don't have time to like cover myself. I just shove the book under my under my vestments and then walk here. And uh, Matt, how did I look when I showed up? You look like you walked out of a swimming pool into the studio.
That's true. I took my overshirt off and wrung it out, and copious fluids came out of it as though as though it had been in a pool. So anyway. Okay. We're gonna be at Whoa whoa.
Why don't you start with next week? We're not gonna be here doing curking. Nastasi, like it's like you think that they're part of our lives or something, like they know what's going on. Next week we won't be here. Where are we gonna be?
Detroit. We're gonna be in Detroit. We're gonna we have two things we're doing. One, we're judging a contest, which is oh, by the way, I hate contests. I hate contest.
But apparently this is a good natured contest, so it's so it's okay. I don't like contests. Okay. Wait, you were a judge on nailed it. I watched it with my own eyes.
Uh you were also on Time Machine Chef. Uh, never got aired, never happened. So, like the but the the issue is is in nailed it, the people very specifically said that they were gonna be good natured about it, and they flew me first class to LA. We're going first class to Detroit. Okay, but anyway, I they stood up to their promise.
It's a good natured show. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. Um But I don't know, something about contest. Maybe it's because like, you know, I'm not built to win contests.
Like I never like I never do what it takes to win a contest. It's never the thing that I want to do that wins a contest. You know what I mean? So I was like, you know, that's when I, you know, I I told the people at the bar, lose with style. You never won like a science fair when you were a child?
No. A science fair winner. No, I mean, I did some stuff that's totally should have won. Like my giant parabolic mirror array from like 1983 when I was like 12, that could light like anybody and anything on fire, like definitely kicked the crap out of anything else. It was all made with this is pre-internet.
I just called every glass and mirror company in the yellow pages, and uh, you know, because I was, you know, talking, I was like, well, you can build a little set of mirrors and you can like make a little bit of I was like, little, little, little, little. So I I built a four by four foot mirror array, like parabolic mirror array with um uh two by fours for the angles, and my dad helped me like figure out um, you know, the the angles to make sure it was a parabola. And I found a company that was like, you wanna buy you wanna buy like a couple hundred four by four inch mirrors. Do they need to look nice? And I was like, nah.
And they gave me an amazing rate. This is back when you had to look up like mirroring glass and the yellow pages, and so I called like every place that was, you know, within driving distance, and made a giant solar thing that concentrated the sun into a four by four inch window of death. And then you put anything in that, you light it on fire. You're like a tiny little bond villain. Yeah.
Yeah. But you know what that doesn't do? Win. That doesn't win. Because they're like, what?
Yeah, but you can light the judges on fire. That's gotta count for something. No, no, the problem with that kind of thing is they have to kind of stay in one place. You know what I mean? It's like it's like you're like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's cloudy.
Come back when the sun's out. And you're like, I'm gonna get you. I'm gonna get you. And then you like you aim it exactly at the angle of the sun, and then you're like, okay, okay, okay, okay. Put your hand right here.
No, not there, closer. No, no, no, further away. No, at the focus point. And they're like, F this. F this.
I'm not gonna get lit on fire by this little snot-nosed kid. Okay, wait, so we just threw that away. We just threw that away like a year ago. My stepfather was like, get this thing out of the house. He doesn't think he needs the space.
What's he gonna do with it? Dave. What? Detroit. I don't know.
You set it up. Cocktail competition on Okay, that's on the Tuesday. But it's not a Monday. No, the competition's on the Tuesday. Okay.
And it's not uh it's not done by cocktail people, it's chefs who are doing ingredient-driven cocktails. That's the that's the of it. You know what I mean? That's that what makes it different. Yeah.
And and apparently, I'm told good natured. Okay. And then we're making cocktails. We're making cocktails on the Monday. But here's a little known fact to people who aren't from Detroit.
Monday is this Monday, coming Monday, for those of you in the Detroit Greater uh metro area, is apparently like the day of the year for fireworks show in Detroit. Not the fourth, it's like next Monday. So we love fireworks. I love fireworks, but guess what we're not gonna see? Fireworks.
Fireworks, because we're gonna be inside during the fireworks show. Apparently, the entire city is one big fireworks show, right? And nobody goes out on that night. And that's the So please come. So please come.
If you're in the Detroit metro area and for some reason, I don't know, you hate fireworks. I mean, there are some people out there who hate fireworks. Talk about our fireworks. Oh my god. So this weekend, uh, since, you know, uh Hey, can you cough closer to the mic next time?
Jeez. Like this. Face here. Yeah, then go. Anyway.
So uh I'm you know, I'm getting rid of my place in Connecticut. By the way, shout out. I went to uh Grano Arsen, Chocogano's restaurant. Uh we're packing the place up, and I realized I had somewhere in the high hundreds of dollars of illegal fireworks from Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, by the way, of all the states around uh New York, there's two the two closest illegal fireworks states, well, they're they're legal there are New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. But in New Hampshire, you can get nice big shells, right?
But no rockets. You can't buy rockets in New Hampshire. So if you really want the rockets, you gotta go to Pennsylvania. Who doesn't want the rockets? The rockets are fun.
So anyway, so on Father's Day on Sunday, Booker doesn't care, so he went home. My wife Jen definitely didn't want any part of this. So she went home with Booker. Dak stayed with me, Nastasia, Jack and Bobby from the bar came and we lit off like what was that, like a like a half hour of 40 minutes of like continuous boom boom boom boom. Yeah, yeah.
It was so great. Yeah. And the the the awesome thing about where my house is, you know, it is that uh there's really no way for the cops to find it. There's no way for them to know where it is. It just looks like it's coming from the middle of like this like ridgeline.
There's no way for them to see where it's coming from. Awesome. And you timed it to some music. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you got some Nastasia wanted uh dad rock.
So what was the song we did? No, you the your greatest was the Boston. Oh, Boston 4 play a long time. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good song.
It's a good tune. Uh and but then you wanted to play Cats in the Cradle which is uh you did you play that yeah I like how Nastasia always uh tries to foist stuff off on other people um and my son was right there I was doing something with my son so it's clearly not applicable Yeah anyways uh Tandoor's already gone out of that house uh my mom has it and she's already used it nice so you know kudos to my mom my stepfather uh Gerard he hates anything he doesn't understand so he's like this ta what is this tail what is this it's gonna burn through the deck it's gonna burn through the deck and I'm like Groard listen listen it only burns through like 20% of the decks and he's like what what what like you know and specifically the you know I forget where I got it was like 100 Tandoor in Jersey and like Summit New Jersey specifically the guy designed this Tandoor for decks it's on wheels story of when you called for a Tandoor No I will not I will not I will not it's not come to the bar if you want to hear the story yeah come to the bar if you want to hear the story of of buying a Tandoor and nah whatever I don't know how often does someone show up at the bar uh requesting one of these stories it has happened more than thrice cool yeah uh call in your questions to 7184972128 that's 71 uh uh 7184972128 by the way so uh to continue a theme of the past couple of weeks and on fire and fire in general uh don't read anything but do you have any idea don't don't read it Nastasia but do you have any idea what this is uh no okay moon rock. No, no. You know how much moon rocks cost? What are you?
Crack? Moon rocks are expensive. You don't care because you don't care about those things. No. I would like a moon rock.
Yeah, but you wouldn't be willing to pay what it costs it cost I mean, a lot. I mean, like they only have so much of it that they brought back. This is also a rock that there's only so much of. So uh because we've been talking about nuclear warfare. Are they more than diamonds?
I would guess. Moonrock? I mean, it should be. You have to go 250,000 miles to get it, and then 250,000 miles away. Yeah.
I mean, it doesn't really sparkle. Who cares? Uh, you know what? I I like the way you think, but most people uh they uh they like the sparkle. You know?
You know, most people aren't aren't you? Hey Matt, do you have some sort of a knife end or scissors? Yes. You have a key right there. I want to cut it cleanly.
I don't care what it looks like when it's done. Not mine. So uh this is also a rock that there's only a fixed amount of in in the world. It's called Trinitite. And what happened in New Mexico when they set off the very first nuclear weapon in the uh desert uh outside there, I get where was it, Alamogordo or wherever the hell they were.
Uh at the Trinity site, it turned the desert to glass, and that is a piece of glass from the very first atomic bomb that was ever detonated, called Trinitite. And people used to go out in the desert and collect it, and then in the 50s uh the government got pissed off with people going out there, so they just bulldozed it all over and saved a couple 55 gallon drums. So this is some of it. And this reminds me of a cooking thing. So Nastasi and I are gonna do some uh ridiculous cooking things over the summer.
Uh one of which is the chicken gun, which we've spoken about. Nastasi, just make up a date, we're gonna do it. You tell me. Why would I tell you next week? It takes longer than that.
Post a date in the future, such that we can set up what it needs to do, and then we have to stick to it because otherwise it's never gonna happen. Okay. We're gonna do resistive cooking. I want it to do it on well, we'll talk about it later. This is a uh these are all kind of post-war cooking things that never happen.
But I've been a long time, many, many years, thinking about kind of uh atomic level sear, right? Atomic level sear. So for any of you who have ever watched um nuclear test videos, which if you haven't, please you know go out and watch them, they're amazing. But you'll see when they put these test buildings out in the in the desert and they drop the uh the bombs. If you look at them, you'll see the initial flash, poof, and then you'll see like smoke just rising off the building and then stopping.
Because the thermal energy that was delivered to it was enough to char the outside instantly, but because it wasn't long enough, uh it didn't actually catch on fire. Now, I did some research and the numbers for that classic picture that you can see of that wooden-sided house going poof and smoking but not catching on fire, was uh 700 watts per square inch for about a second. So that is a high number. That is a high number of thermal energy to deliver to something, but it's achievable. We could literally test searing at nuclear level stuff.
Wouldn't you like to do that sometime, Nastasi? Like do and see how many how many nuclear nuclear pulses it takes to get a nice sear on the outside? Maybe it tastes terrible. We all know that shooting a laser at something makes it taste terrible, at least according to Harold McGee. But anyway, here's a little piece of history to remind you of uh nuclear searing.
There's the very first nuclear-seared search. Are you gonna open it? I mean, uh why? It's all sealed. It's nice.
It says caution radioactive material tape all around it. I mean, I'm not radioactive in the way that like I'm radioactive, not radioactive. I mean, like, it was a long time ago, not a lot of induced radioactivity in the glass. Why are you worried about it? A little bit.
It's gonna hurt my mock then. Uh explain what a mock is. No. No. She's like, she busted out and then she's like, no.
This goes back to Nastasia's uh mom, who's this is a term that people actually would not understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But she uses other Russian terms that you might understand, such as Titsky. What's that one? Uh all right.
She's like, what? She can't understand what I'm saying about her. It's in Russian. What? Uh yeah.
Okay. So uh Anthony Din writes in. Uh hey, hey crew. Uh Anthony from Seattle writing in. I purchased a control freak, which is the very fancy uh induction hob that uh was uh made by Breville in uh conjunction with uh uh Polyscience, our friend uh our friends at PolyScience.
Uh I purchased a control freak and have been running into some issues where the unit will frequently trip the circuit in my kitchen, even if I have nothing else plugged in. Talking to the building manager, it's a standard 20 amp circuit, set the trip at 80% load. Although, why would you set something to trip at 80% load? 20 amps is 20 freaking amps. Am I wrong about this, Nastasia?
No. If it says 20 amps, how many amps should I get? 20. Should I get 80% of 20? No.
No. No. How about you set it to trip at 101% load? Jerks, jerks. But anyway, you need far less than that.
You need a 15 amp circuit, works fine. I plug it into 15 amp circuits all the time. Uh given that the control freak runs at uh 1800 watts, it doesn't seem like it should be a high enough load to trip the circuit. You are correct. Um I've also run into this tripping issue running circulators with much lower power requirements, 900 and 1100 watts, respectively.
The building manager seems to think this is due to the AFCI breakers that the apartment is wired with. Apparently, they're prone to tripping when appliances cycle their heating element. If this is the case, do you have suggestions about what kind of outlets breakers? I should be looking for in a new apartment. Um then the chef steps says you should use GFCI.
Okay, here's the thing. Um I've never used an AFCI, which is an arc fault interrupter, um, which is designed to trip if if it senses what's called uh arcing. But even like crappy GFIs, GCFIs can cause problems if there's uh internal problem with the GCFI. Also, certain older pieces of equipment uh were like for instance, say we used to have one of the large model uh Hobart mixers, you know, like you know what I mean, the large model ones at the school that was equipped with electronics that would blow in any GFI, right? So even a good modern GFI, because they were brand new, it would trip in.
So we had to go find non GFI circuits to plug this into. And the issue is is that depending on the electronics that are involved, this the it puts some noise back on the power line. And especially if you think about the way that an induction works with the it's like it's like hunting and hunting for frequencies and doing all this stuff, it's doing a lot of switching, it's putting some power back onto again right into the microphone, Nastasia. Listen, it's like you know when you're talking to someone and you turn your head to cough, imagine that the microphone is somebody. What do you think, Matt?
Uh, I you know, I'm just happy when Nastasia's on mic. Thanks. Wow. Thanks. That's like such a backhand of comment.
Why are you thanking them for that? Oh, did you see my sharman bear? No, no, no. Let's finish this story first. Oh my god.
She's trying to get me off with the shaman bear. I'm getting you off with the sharmin bear. No, I mean off topic. Jeez. So uh poll quote.
So uh please people, please people. It's hard enough for me to stay on message, please. So, uh where the heck was I? So, so it puts some noise back on the power line, and older equipment, a lot of older electronic equipment can chip trip even regular GFIs because it puts noise back it doesn't like AFCIs. It's probably since they're not as common, it's probably not designed for that, it's probably tripping it.
Even in your current apartment, go buy one. They're like, you can get a good GFI and GCFI for like $15 at a big box home improvement store. Uh wire it, and it should work fine. Mine plug into them all day, all night, and they work fine. Ah, see?
See? See, although although, people, I'm not singling Nastasia out. I know people say I'm mean, but Nastasia, it's in the food business, you don't cough into your hand. Where do you cough? Into your elbow crease.
Onto the food? Yeah, yeah, elbow crease. I've been still coughing by the way, because of the fiberglass I know. It's not, Dave. We're sick.
I'm not sick. What am I sick from? I don't get sick. We're sick. I'm not sick.
For two weeks sick? Yeah. No. Okay, Charmin Bear. I don't have no idea you're talking about.
I couldn't look at my clothes because it was raining. There was we do have a caller, by the way. Alright, caller, you're on the air, and then we'll get to the sharmin bear. Hey Dave. How are you doing?
Uh I've got a running issue for you. Alright. Uh running like running like like jogging? Yeah, yeah, jogging, sure. Yeah.
So ever every now and then in the summer, my friends and I will hold a beer mile event. Have you heard of a beer mile? I have not. Is it like the Sentry Club where you have to drink a hundred shots of beer in an hour? Uh yeah, it's similar in spirit, I guess.
Uh so the basic rules of a beer mile are you set up around a quarter mile track, and before each quarter mile of which you run for, you chug a beer. Chug or shotgun? So uh so you can't shotgun, that's part of the rules. No wide mouth cans, no vortex bottles, none of that nonsense. Just uh, you know, typical twelve ounce minimum beer, uh five percent alcohol by volume or greater.
Or greater. Um greater. Uh you have a little control. Right. I bet you know, I would have to say for a performance standpoint you'd want to go with minimum.
Although you could probably jog a mile before you'd feel the alcohol, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, so the trick, the the reason I'm calling is because after you drink that first beer, you run that first quarter mile, things start sloshing around in your stomach, foam starts precipitating, uh pressure starts building, and it gets really painful. It's not easy. And it's not easy to burp up that foam, you know, the gases are trapped in the foam.
So I wanna I'm wondering if there's a uh solution. You know, I have control over the type of beer, uh the temperature of the beer, I can, you know, do any sort of tapping beforehand on a can. Um, but I need to eliminate as much trapped gases uh both from in the beer and in my stomach as I can. And but I guess it's to be freshly opened. It has to be freshly opened.
Yeah, you yeah, you can't you can't doctor it beforehand, so you have to open it uh right before you run the lab. Well, what's the lowest carbonation beer that exists? Uh so the carbonation? Yeah, what's the lowest carbonated beer in the world? Uh well that that's a good question.
That's I mean it'd be some kind of material stout. Yeah, we said, well, yeah, but we don't it'd be some kind of British thing, right? You want to go and you want to make sure it doesn't have one of those little like enfaminators at the bottom. Uh and you're not allowed to like pour sand into it, right? No, but I do have control over the contents of my stomach.
Uh I'm not above uh PEDs, you know, if there's anything I can take before or during the race to disrupt the foam. I mean, once the thing's there, it's there is the problem. I mean, what what has the lowest carbonation but also doesn't produce a nice head? Like you want basically you want like an incredibly thin, like low-bodied beer. You want the lowest body beer that exists.
You just want it to be lower carbonation than than you'd expect. There's gotta be some terribly produced beer of low carbonation with almost no body. Like you want like the most garbage, thin bodied, like like almost no barley in it. You know what I mean? Like you want like Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Uh but I'm going the other way. I think you guys should make this race more challenging. And what you have to do is you have to eat a soft surf ice cream cone and then pound the beer. Oh that would have hurt so much.
Oh my god. I've been pushing for an eggnog 5k, but nobody's taking me up on that. Oh my god. Oh my god. Are you allowed to throw up?
Uh so you uh you have a penalty lap if you can't keep the beer down. So I'm not recommending this, but I wonder if there's any way you could like bypass like open yourself up so that you're like one long constant burp. Like but no, you can't, because then you choke to death. You would choke to death. You don't want to choke to death.
Presumably. Uh yeah, that'd slow you down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a penalty lab for that. Penalty lab for choking to death.
Yeah. I mean like obviously if you modify it, there was a I'm not proud of it, but I was a member of the drinking team uh uh at So again, into the mic. Again. Uh with um at Yale with Squee and uh Uh no, Squee didn't go there. Uh please don't get me started with these people.
Uh anyway. So uh what we used to you cheat by using stale beer, like stale old beer. You know what I mean? Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I mean are you above cheating?
Because we could put a we could put a micro you could put a micro you could put a micro hole in the can that no one will see. And then just let it just let it gas off. Just let it gas off for like a week and a half. And then like, you know. That's cheating.
I can't endorse cheating on the show. Wait, how would you do that? Well, there's there's only so much honor in the beer mile. That's right. Although if you look the at the records, they're pretty they're pretty out of this world.
I think four minutes thirty seconds, something like that for like the real serious folks. Yeah. That's including drinking the beer. Right, right. So do you do you drink then run or run drink?
In other words, do you end with a beer or end with a lap? You start with a beer, end with the lap. And you have to dr you can't drink it while you're running, you drink it before the lap. So it's like the pistol goes off and then you hear all the clicks? Yep.
Okay. How many competitors are there? This is a sport I didn't know existed. Well, you know, we it's kind of impromptu for us when we do it, maybe like between five and ten. Have you can and one of these five or ten people that you can run a four and a half minute and drink four beers.
Oh no no no that's that's national. Yeah I'm I'm I'm nowhere near that. Alright well you know what uh you should also start practicing your javelin catching which is the sport that I want to see. Javelin catching. No I think you can get this done.
I think it's just a research problem uh of of like just research on like one of those rate beer rating sites for like oh my god no carbonation oh my god this has no body you know either of those things will win it'll if the beer has no body you'll be able to burp up you know it's like all right you're halfway to this if the beer is like like a corona you can burp up a corona right because it has no body right sure because it's yeah right so that's one way to go but imagine if someone made something with as little body as a corona that also had very low carbonation. Then you're winning or something yeah and clearly don't eat any dairy beforehand. Just don't don't even dairy temperature do I want this room temp? Uh look I don't really I wouldn't go room temp just because again not proud of this have shotgunned many beers but if you uh with on certain occasions uh you can get like these like rapid rapid nucleation things happening in your throat when you're drinking really quickly and that itself can be quite painful. You know what I mean?
Like when you're drinking very very quickly. Yeah. And so um you know that can be that can be problematic. And so you don't. I mean, you want to get we used to drink, although we drink warm flat beer.
I would say that warm, just open beer is probably more prone to that than beer that's a little bit colder, which is gonna make it down before it does that. Are you allowed to squeeze the contents of the can into your mouth? That's another way to go. Uh they recommend against it, but uh you know, we're a little more informal, so I should probably yeah. Although it might make the last couple of dribbles.
I mean, I don't know how they test the weight of the can afterwards to make sure that you don't cheat. It's a classic shotgunning trick that when you are finished, you crush the can and throw it, and you lose like you know, half an ounce or so from the toss. It's undetectable. Yeah. Yeah.
Classic. The the classic trick is the you put the can over your head upside down and how the heck do you do that? You got you got running to do. What is this? What do you got?
Time to sit around with a can over your head? You have to hire some sort of like you have like in a duel, some sort of second to put the can over their head. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. All right, let us know.
Let us know how it works. All right, thanks. All right. Oh, by the way, are you uh are you better winning on the be drinking side or the running side? It seems to me are you you're probably a specialist in one.
You know what I'm saying? Like a Yeah, well, it it definitely is advantageous to to be really good at one rather than you know a jack of all trades. But uh running for me. I have trouble burping. Yeah, are you married?
Uh no. Uh that's nostalgia for you. All right, all right, man. Good luck with this. Let us know.
Uh Elvin wrote in about peanut butter steak. Hello, uh Nastasia, Dave, Dave, Matt, Jackie, etc. Anyone else in the room. Uh, long time uh first time uh uh writing in. Uh love the bar, accidentally became a not quite regular, even though I don't even live in the same state, city, or coast.
I'm curious if anyone has asked it, uh what? Why are you pointing scissors, please? What do you why? What do you need to cut? Don't cut anything on my book.
And I'm in the middle of reading the person's question. She's like, they can't hear that I'm asking you for the scissors. Anyway. Um, I'm curious if anyone has asked about this meme that seems to be exploding on the Sous vide subreddit. Basically, people spread peanut butter on a steak, low temp it, and wipe it off before searing.
Apparently, the resulting product tastes really good and not peanut butter at all, but I feel like I should try to reach a theoretical explanation before trying it myself. That's a mistake. Just try it. And then theory all theories are garbage, by the way, including the one that I'm gonna give you. By the way, Nastasi, you couldn't have just reached over and gotten the scissors.
No. Okay. Uh thus far I haven't been able to test it, but I'm really curious. Uh P.S. I annoyed Jack and Bobby at the bar last week with this very question to try to avoid sending it in uh to no avail.
Pass on my thanks for tolerating my low-quality individuality as well. Thanks, Elvin. So uh I watched a video by someone who claims to have thought of this idea uh on his own. I forget the guy's name. Um, but the theory was that he likes peanut on beef in Vietnamese cuisine, so he was gonna wipe peanut butter on the steak and souve it, and everyone on the video went like, you know, crazy for how good it was.
Now, uh I have not tried it, but again, theory, all theories are garbage. However, what is peanut butter made of? If you ask me to think about it and not having tried it, uh you wipe peanut butter on, uh, you cook it, you wipe the peanut butter off and sear it. Now, there are a couple of things I would like to know. Everyone in the video said that it was one more tender, two more beefy, and you know, three just delicious.
As for more tender, I don't really understand why there's not a lot of tenderizing agents in peanut butter that I'm aware of. It's salt, sugar, oil, and peanut solids, right? That's what you got in peanut butter. You got your salt, your sugar, your oil, and your peanut solids. So the this could be one of those cases of, you know, uh like I like to put mayonnaise on things before I'm gonna sear them.
It could be a cake because mayonnaise is fundamentally is solid oil, uh it's solidified oil plus egg yolk. So you know the egg yolk is good for browning and oil is obviously good for you know for searing. So this could be a case of like similar to mayonnaise but even thicker with the addition of the sugar which in low concentrations is not gonna be perceived as burn but is going to be perceived more as a searing thing like a small amount of sugar um you know which could uh depending on the sugar involved probably also uh help for my yard so there's that uh and the oil is gonna help with uh you know getting good contact between uh the pan you're searing on or if you're gonna sear on and the meat itself so uh that's one explanation uh two I'd like to know whether or not I mean I don't know if there's not that much salt in peanut butter so I doubt you're gonna get any uh you know salt pre-salting something is obviously a long long discussion that I can't get into right now but uh I would like to know whether there's more drip loss or more drip in a bag uh with a peanut buttered steak versus a not peanut buttered steak. So when you wipe that peanut butter on the steak, you're in essence wiping another sealant over the meat exactly across on the ends of the fibers where you're gonna get a lot of uh liquid coming out. So it's conceivable that you are inconceivable.
It's it's conceivable that you are sealing some of the moisture in as well, and that could be the extra juiciness. I don't know. I'd have to run some taste tests. Uh also things like uh peanuts just taste good, and so maybe seared peanut uh on the outside also uh increases beefy uh taste. Now, for those of you that say, well, there's no penetration of the peanut butter, so it can't really affect the taste of the meat, you're definitely wrong about uh one half of what you said.
It's probably true that there's little to zero, little to no penetration of the actual product onto the inside of the meat. But just saying that things like spices, marinades, etc. are only on the outside of the meat, therefore they don't add a lot of flavor, is incorrect because a lot of the flavor of cooked meat is from the outside, where those kind of interactions can take place. And so they're quite important, even if you don't have a lot of penetration, uh, which is why if you cook a large, large hunk of meat and then just uh like large, and then cut it directly in half and then cut a small cube out of the center, relatively flavorless, no matter what you do to it. Uh so I I'd say give it a try.
I'm gonna try it. I hadn't thought about it, but now that you know I'm theoretically writing my book on the subject, I will uh I will have to test it out and then give uh give props to the uh inventor if I can determine exactly who it is. Charmin Bear. All right, uh, what is this about Charmin Bear? He was in Union Square riding a toilet, animatronic giant bear.
It's not an animatronic, it's a human. No. Animatronic. It's not an animatronic, it's a human being. No, it's animatronic.
It was moving like an animatronic. It's there's no such thing as a freewheeling animatronic bear. It's a human being on a pried jazzy. It's not remote control. It's a person.
Nastasia, but like, how would you think that, like, why like it would be so much easier to just hire one of those filthy idiots outside of Times Square? Yeah, but look, watch, watch. I am moving like an animatronic, but am still relatively a human being. You guys built an animatronic, Dave. See?
See? Where's my red book that you took? Are we gonna go to the thrift store after this? People don't know what you're talking about. We're building the speciality.
This is why this is why people say I'm mean, but like, after all these years, Matt, what episode number is this? Like a thousand. I I forget. Right. All these years, right?
You have to preface anything you say to the listeners. We're making special for our PR person. Alright, what? We can't say it because she might be. Then why are you saying it on air?
But it's but look out for it. But then why are you saying so you're saying tune in next time? Yeah. And we will discuss the special. Well, we are we're making boondoggles for her.
Yeah. But we're we're doing something even more special. And we already talked about boondoggles on the air, right? The little little plasticky thing. What's our current boondoggle song?
I think it's the Sade one. Boondoglitter. That one? The Grand Canyon in winter. Feeling better.
And fell down the rocket cliffs. The pointed clips. This episode is brought to you by Tabard 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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So if there are no more callers on the air, uh well, you have a question from the chat actually. What do you got for me? Robert asks if Dave has any thoughts on the new ISI nitro siphon and any uses for it beyond coffee and beer. He says, sort of rude, in my opinion, for ISI to make the nitro system incompatible with our current ISI siphons. So on the fence about it.
Yeah, okay. Uh my phone is stasia, please. I need to look up a picture. Uh the for those of you that don't know, uh the new nitro, which they shouldn't have, I wish they hadn't. Okay.
It this is one of those confusing things. The new ISI nitro thing is not nitrous oxide. So the nitro the nitrous that you buy for whipped cream or for rapid infusion, or the CO2 that you buy for seltzer water or whatever else from EC, they are both compatible, seven gram chargers. All you know, they they all of that stuff's compatible back and forth. This new nitro is not nitrus, it is nitro, straight nitrogen.
And what it's doing is under pressure, it's putting nitrogen. Nitrogen's not soluble. And so what happens is is you get that it like immediately bubbles and creates that kind of foamy texture that you get from like a widget in a in a in a Guinness, right? So it's not the same gas mixture. Uh and I guess that's why they made it not compatible.
I don't know. Like maybe the pressures are higher. I don't know. I I had a conversation with them briefly at the bar because they came to demonstrate it to us. Uh but I mean, honestly, could they have made it compatible?
They probably could have made it compatible. But they didn't want you to use one for the other, I guess, so that they they didn't do it. Although that's not a problem for them with CO2 versus nitrous. Look, I don't remember their story about why it wasn't compatible. I'm not gonna say that I I my feeling is is that if I believed that it was a good story, I probably would have uh I probably would have remembered it.
So I probably also agree with you that I didn't think it was such a good story as to why they made it incompatible. All right. Now, for this week's episode of Classics in the Field, we have Making Pigeons Pay, which is a classic that first came out in 1949, and is still considered to this day a classic in the field of raising pigeons. Now, uh the for those of you that don't know, Nastasi, you knew that squab was pigeon, right? Yes.
All right. But I didn't know that until I was like 30. Yeah, yeah, it's not well, for those, you know, for people who uh, you know, speak other languages, right? Like French, right? Where it's it's more kind of uh apparent.
Uh, you know, it's kind of clear. Like we're used to eating squab. In fact, I was at a uh three Michelin star restaurant in France, you know, well over a decade ago. And I don't know what me. Uh yeah, we spent our last time on it.
Anyway, we went in there and we were lost. So for those of you that have been to Paris, there's this restaurant. I don't even know if what it's still doing, but Lepre Le Pre Catalan, I think is what it's called. It's it's in the Bois de Bologne, which is this kind of area kind of on the outskirts of Paris, and it's where all the hookers hang out, right? And we we were spending all of our money on the meal, and we had reservation, we don't speak French.
And so we got lost. There was no Uber, there was no nothing, like nothing like cell phones, nothing. We got lost, and we were walking around the water w water balloon trying to ask hookers how to get to this restaurant, and we were an hour late to our reservation, and they still sat us and they were you know they were quite nice to us. Uh anyway, the waiter came up, but they weren't really nice to us because they were French. No offense, France, but you know, like your service is not about being friendly to me, it's about you know being kind of more austere.
It's a more austere service style. You prefer Italian service style, right, Nastasia, where they're kind of more friendly? Yeah, I do. I do. Yeah, you know the austere French service.
I do like austere French service though, too. Yeah, anyway, so very austere, not American French, French French. And so the guy comes up and he's giving us, you know, and I have my high school French with me, uh, you know, which is m basically crap. And he's like serving us the pigeon, which, you know, was squab. And I tried to joke to the guy, I was like, hey hey, try serving something called pigeon in New York City, right?
Am I right? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Dead eyes, dead eyes.
855,000 for a moon rock. Oh, you Nastasia's still on the moon rock. I like how like how many different people's Wi-Fi did you have to parasitize to get that information? Because those of you that don't know, there's no internet service in this little box that we have. She had to like she had to go buy a satellite phone and download it one bit per year to get the information.
How much? 855. I can't see how how much. 30 14 inch. Nope.
I'll find it. Like how many carrots is this rock? I don't know. Let me figure it out. This is what you want for your engagement ring?
Yes. For those of you, if you plan on trying to get engaged to Nastasia Lopez. Alright. So anyway, so uh squab is uh young pigeon. Now, the thing about Squab that is cool.
I want the reason I have this book, Making Pigeons Pay, first published in 1946, and I believe still in print, so right after the war, uh, is I wanted to raise pigeons in Connecticut. I wanted a dove coat because here's another thing. So squabs are the yet flightless pigeons. So the way pigeons grow is that they uh have the, you know, they they lay eggs that pigeons hatch, this little squab hatches. Uh it grows to two-thirds of its adult size before it ever flies.
So it is extremely tender. It is never flown, so you don't have to worry about trying to catch it, right? And here's the other great thing adult pigeons are just gonna make another pigeon as soon as that one leaves, so they don't really get attached to it once it's gone. So as long as you take the the squab out of the out of the nest right before it would have flown, you get a super tender bird, never never flown, and the parents don't care, they just make another bird. So it's kind of this genius thing.
So what they what what the old time uh folks used to do, they would make something called a dove coat. This is where this is how I come to this because I wanted to build a dove coat, is you would create, and you can still see them in Europe and and some places even in the US, these large kind of almost like large beehive things often, sometimes they're square, with holes in them. And what would happen is the in the inside you could get into it, so the pigeons would poop inside, and the people could go inside, because you could use the poop from a noor. People will go inside to go steal the squab out of the nest before they fly, but there were holes to the outside so that the pigeons could fly out. And this is kind of what I learned from one of the things I learned from this book we're going to talk about.
The pigeons would fly out and eat whatever. So the nobility never used to feed their pigeons. In fact, you were not allowed as a common person, you were not allowed. It was illegal to raise pigeons because what the pigeons did was fly out and eat everybody's crops. So it was kind of like another tax that the nobles had on the peasantry because they weren't allowed to kill or raise these pigeons, but they weren't allowed to mess with them when the noble person's pigeons came to eat their crops, go back and raise little birds that the that the nobility got to eat.
In addition, this uh the pigeons are good at scrounging even in wintertime for whatever's lying around and creating more meat for you to have uh in the wintertime. So, anyway, so it's a win-win for everybody, but two things the reason I didn't make the dove coat in my house was one, everyone in my family said if you murder those baby pigeons, we won't eat them. So I'm not gonna sit there and eat the baby pigeons all by myself, right? Yep. And two, it's kind of rude to send animals out specifically to eat everybody else's stuff and then fly back and you get to eat.
It's it's rude. And in modern kind of pigeon raising, which is how I got to this book, modern pigeon raising, it's considered kind of in poor taste to allow your pigeons to freely roam so that they may ravage the countryside so that you may have a nice meal. So uh, if you look even to this day, like I want to learn about uh pigeons. There are three books, exactly three books that are highly recommended, and they are all by the same guy. Wendell Mitchell Levy.
He died in 1976. I'm not gonna talk about the most classic book. The most classic book he wrote is called The Pigeon. And it is like the pigeon Bible in the way that for you, those of you who are book aficionados, Ashley's Book of Knots is like the not Bible. The pigeon to this day is still is still the Bible for all manner of pigeons.
So we're talking, we're talking homing pigeons, we're talking eating pigeons, we're talking pigeon uh feathers, we're talking pigeon pigeons, pigeons, pigeons. If you want to know about pigeons, right, The Pigeon by Levy is the book to get. It's quite expensive, but for very little money, you can go online. I have the, I think seventh or eighth printing from the 70s that uh is actually ex ex uh ex Libris from a middle school library where they're trying to get middle school people to read it. If you're actually interested in just raising pigeons and you want the bare rudiment of knowledge to get into pigeon gring, making pigeons pay is not only a great title of a book, but is the book you want to get.
Now, a little bit about uh a little bit about our boy uh Wendell Levy. He was uh he was born in the late 1800s and started raising his own pigeons when he was 11. Uh by the time the first world war broke out, he became the first lieutenant in charge of pigeon in the charge of the pigeon section of the USA Signal Corps because not just food pigeons, an expert in homing pigeons. Uh he uh did that from uh 1917 to 1918 during the time the United States was in World War One. Uh he then became the president, founder, and chairman of the Palmetto Pigeon Plant from 1923 until his retirement in 1956, uh, and then became chairman of the board.
I mean, how many people on the board of the freaking palmetto pigeon Plant? He was the president. He waited, he was the editor of the question and answer department of the American Pigeon Journal from 1927 until apparently this book was published. I didn't even know that was a journal. And the president of the National Pigeon Association from 1931 to 1933.
So anyway, so if you want to know about pigeons, uh he's your guy. It is my hope that through this book, many persons desirous of earning a live a livelihood and undecided as to their future may find in squab raising an answer to their dreams of an independent outdoor existence. Commercial squab raising is a sound business for one with the necessary qualifications. It can also be made a well-paying sideline. So what what's interesting, and my uncle, my crazy well, I have several crazy uncles, but my uncle Rick, uh, there was a lot of schemes for raising animals in the depression and just post-war in the United States, where they were like, hey, you got nothing else to do.
You like got a house, you got something. You could raise animals for money and make a lot of money. So I have another book on how to raise rabbits. If you're interested, the interesting thing about that one on Chinchilla Rabbits is the chinchilla rabbit poem. So if you want to hear the chinchilla rabbit poem, we gotta do classics in the field, chinchilla rabbits at some point.
Let me know. Let me know. Um, then let me see what else do I have here? Uh Making Pigeons Pay. Do you know what children's character loved pigeons?
What? Do you remember? No. Bert. Oh, Bert.
Hmm, pigeons. He remembered the pigeons song. He did the pigeon dance. He did the pigeon dance. You know my favorite quote from Bert?
Right. I heard that he was created as everyone's idea of a blind date. What? Yeah. Like that.
He is what the producer called everyone's idea of a blind date. So when you show up at a blind date, you're like, Bert? And then do you say, no, brother. Oh, brother. The young of pigeons has been recognized as a delicious and nourishing food for many centuries.
As far back as we can trace recorded history, we find the young pigeon a preferred article of diet. Among the many peoples of antiquity, an Egyptian bill of fare about 5,000 years old records their use at that time. Among the ancient Hebrews, and this actually is true, their desirability as a choice article of food was well recognized. They called them young pigeons and not squabs. For the word squab has only been used in English speaking countries for the past couple of centuries.
Abraham, about 1913 BC, was ordered to use a young pigeon as a sacrifice to God. The subsequent Mosaic laws were very strict in approving various foods, and especially so because of the existing hot weather and consequent quick spoilage. Doves, actually small pigeons, and young pigeons, are the only fowls suitable under the law of Moses to be used as sacrifices. Chickens, ducks, and geese, though raised at that time, were not acceptable. Then in a couple, you know, uh quotes from Leviticus.
And it is true that you could sacrifice a lamb if you were rich, but remember when we did the Anthony Bourdain, What Would Jesus Eat for Christmas? Yep. Yeah. Uh turns out that when Jesus was born, uh, Joseph and Mary didn't have a lot of money, so for a sacrifice, they did squab, and we cooked squab in a Palestinian what amounted to a tandoor for Anthony Bourdain when he was doing his Christmas special all those years ago. Remember when we made that fake uh fake tandoor?
All right. The ancient Greeks and Romans were also fully cognizant of its superior food value. Uh with their early writings, many references to raising pigeons as food. Socrates discusses their breeding. Aristotle discusses discourses on their characteristics and habits and actually describes five distinct breeds of domestic pigeons.
Uh in Rome, about two thousand years ago, pigeons were in a high state of cultivation, and the Roman writers describe pigeon raising for food purposes in great detail. Uh then he goes into a very long, if you're curious, which you should be, uh, if he goes, he goes into very long uh discussion of the intricacies of pigeon raising in um United States, including how to raise them on railroad right-of-ways. Uh, but I want to find what he says about the meat of pigeons. Alright. Um, compared with chicken, probably the most popular of all fowl meats, it is tenderer, has a richer flavor, and does not have the dryness which is often found in chickens unless they are very competently cooked.
The meat of very young lamb is quite tender, but not as tender as that of squabs. And young lamb has a flavor that does not appeal to everyone. About the only meat on our national market today that seriously competes with squab is filet mignon. A good filet mignon is always tender and has a flavor that quite justify uh quite justifiably appeals to many. But the size of the squab fits exactly in with a formal serving.
No carving at the table is necessary, and individual portions are of the exact same size, which is a real asset. Again, squab meat lends itself to a great variety of cooking, roasted, with or without stuffing, broiled, fried, smothered, in fact, any way that the most enterprising cook may desire. See recipes on page 253. Yes, he teaches you how to raise them, how to buy them, how to breathe them, how to kill them, how to skin them, how to sell them, and how to cook them. Making pigeons pay by levy.
Cooking issues. Oh, yeah, cooking shoes. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you. For our freshest content and to hear about exclusive events, subscribe to our newsletter.
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