This episode is made possible thanks to listeners like you. Wanna support independent food radio? Go to heritage radio network.org slash donate today. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Hartle, your host of Cooking Issues Coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from eh.
I don't know. For birth pizza in Bushwig Brooklyn! Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing? Good.
We got Matt back in the booth. I feel feel great. You're right. You are now a married man. Indeed.
Yeah, how'd that go? How'd the wedding go? It was amazing. Great. Yeah?
How's the food? Uh the food was good. Um lobster was very delicious. Many, many pictures of lobster on the internet from that wedding. Yeah.
Um highlight of the wedding, we pitted all of our tables of guests against each other in a cake decorating competition instead of having an actual cake. Okay. And it was the most fun. Was anyone good at it at all? First of all, this was Rhode Island, right?
Indeed. Now, uh this I forget, fancy Rhode Island? Are you like are you some sort of like Rockefeller like, you know, uh breakers Rhode Island, or is this like, you know, kind of more mellow people long ago? It was a lot like that, except it was at the town um owned rotunda on the beach. So it was um yeah, no, it wasn't like that at all.
Rotunda's kind of a funny word. So was anyone a good cake decorator, or were they all just like complete nightmares? I was very proud of the cakes. Yeah. Um they were they were things of beauty.
Uh somebody said, we have it on video, that it was like the the greatest episode of nailed it they'd ever seen. Cool. Nice. Well, let me ask you this. Was this your idea or is this a thing that all the kids are doing nowadays?
Uh I believe this was our idea. Okay, so here's what needs to happen. Wha like are are you uh a public or a private uh Instagram? Um, neither really. You don't have Instagrams right now.
I'm I tech I have it, I think. You no, so there's no record. So you like in other words, if you're trying to promulgate this new wedding idea, which are hashtag, what's your hashtag? We did not have a hashtag. Oh my god.
Hey, by the way, guys, yeah, dude runs like uh social media for a radio station. Nope. Boom! Don't I do not do that? Okay.
Not my job. All right, I'm messing with you. Nice. Well, uh, point being that like this is something that our listeners, in fact, we we know someone last week called in and is about to get married. Maybe this is something that other people might want to emulate.
Guests found it found fun. They found it fun. Who sprayed highly, highly colored icing all over their fancy party dress? Uh I don't I don't know that that happened, actually, but liar. I I I didn't see it if it did.
All right, well, if anyone knows how to find uh photos of uh Matthew's wedding, let us know. Oh, I have I have some photos of the case I can show you, but you know, photos aren't great for the radio. Yeah, you can put it up on our uh website, though. I'll put I'll put a picture or two on the website. Yeah, people can marvel.
All right. Uh so today on the radio program, we have uh special guests because I've been told that it's better to have special guests than not. Uh so it's uh now, you know, I think of him most as uh existing conditions bananagrams champion. And I believe we mentioned on the air last week, he was so good at bananograms on uh you know on our birthday. Six hours of banana grams.
He played six hours. Nastasio only played six hours of bananograms with him because she could not beat him. She would have played maybe 45 minutes of anything if she had beaten him, like even once, she would have been like, I'm better than this guy, and quit. Six hours later, had not beaten him. Uh his real job, I guess, is at the nomad.
Uh Robert Saxai, how are you doing? I'm very well, Dave. How are you? I'm I'm alright. So uh call in all of your nomad related questions or bananograms related questions.
Or uh I don't know if like well, I don't know how much you want to share about your personal self, but like you also have an interesting, like like atypical nomad uh backstory. I don't know how much you want to share that on the air, but uh welcome. Call in all questions relating to this to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So uh why don't you how much do you want to say about yourself?
I mean And what did you bring? So I was asked to either promote something or bring something. I really had nothing too interesting to promote, I think. So I decided to promote something I could bring, which is my favorite cocktail I feel like people like to hate on. Okay, which is cosmopolitan.
Right. And we're drinking them out of beer glasses. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. I've probably brought you my preferred glass where you're gonna be able to do that.
Now, uh for the cosmopolitan, uh, you know, for those of you that don't know, apparently there was some sort of fight, but the abs people, the the good folks at Absolute Vodka have given the uh kind of the imprimatur of inventor to Toby Chaquini, right, who's a bartender and professorial looking fellow here in uh New York. But uh the spec that the average person has that makes nowadays is like fundamentally unrelated to his uh original spec, in that his original spec is highly acidic. Very acidic. Highly acidic. A very big drink.
So are you so so the question being me, I'm sure you know like kind of like his spec and kind of what people make now you want to give people the spec so they can see the difference between the two specs so the spec I've seen that was his original spec was I believe it was was it one and a half or two of Bass Spirit and then one one one of citrus uh cranberry juice or cranberry cocktail and then uh triple side quantou or you know those orange liqueurs in that type bracket and the base spirit's supposed to be absolute citron in the original so and by the way like for those of you that don't know like bar bar bar people do bar people are like super at shorthand they're like come on two one one shut up what you know what I mean like what you know what I mean like jerk you know what I'm talking about uh yeah we we we get in this habit but like the story of the where it comes from is like huge like there's such a fight like some people say comes from the 30s like there's this uh mixing mixing co mixing cocktails or mixing drinks and elite bars but it was like more of a daisy variation that was raspberry lemon triple sec and gordon's then oh yeah that sounds exactly like a Cosmo this is why bartenders are so freaking dumb like swear to god everyone gets so bent about actually in 1893 someone once mixed a beverage with similar things. Only all the spirits were changed and the ratios were different. Like it's like, it's like jerk! No one was drinking these things in the freaking 70s, okay? All of a sudden, the 1980s rolled around and people started drinking them, and it came from a specific place, and that's it.
I mean, that's it. It's like, well, it's like, uh not your fault, Robert. But it's like, it's just like this is part of the joy of the cosmo, though. I mean people being like either they love Cosmos and they want to argue about which spec is correct, or they want to be like, oh, that's that terrible pink drink from Sex in the City. I don't want that drink.
That's that girl drink. But that's also the thing. One of the reasons I love Cosmos is because it's a perfectly decent, delicious vodka, sour whatever you want to call it a daisy or a kamikaze riff or whatever, like that's a good thing. Or just a drink. Or just a drink.
And uh people wanna Daisy Gendered drinks all the time. Daisy riff. Let me ask you a question's gendering drinks. Uh well, I I love a pink drink. Pink drinks are often delicious.
I I mean, pretty much sparkling champagne. If I see something pink across the bottom, I'll uh uh uh I want that. I I want that. Well, like I was actually at PDT last night and ordered a blue drink, even though I hate blue drinks. Just so I could have John DeBerry's famous drink, the shark.
Well, you know the rule with blue drinks. If it's blue order two. Uh if it's blue order two. Yeah. Do you know?
Uh we have a question uh later on. I'll I'll I'll get to it, but I uh I once asked someone, famous person actually, uh, hey, um, you know, the blue curacao is uh it's kind of a bad product. Why don't you just use a good orange liqueur and blue food coloring? And he he was not happy with me. Who was it?
Yeah. Uh we'll get to it later. But like you know what I mean? But it's like I don't know. I don't know.
Like, I'm not against fake coloring. It's just do you think the average person knows just straight up fake? Like, does the average person know that it is only F and D C blue? Number F I think two, by the way. I think everyone in this program who's listened to us knows that my favorite Nastasia moment of all time.
All time, my favorite Nastasia moment ever. Ever. Top five. Okay. Top five.
We'd ordered a can of uh F and D C Blue 2 powder, which P.S. if you don't do this, but if you somehow manage to slip your buddy a gel cap of F and D C Blue 2, we were using it for we were testing penetr uh color penetration tests for Bryant's is what we had it for. It's intensely concentrated. So if you if you give someone this capsule, which you will not do, uh they'll like poop poop green, like straight green, and they won't know why. They'll be like, oh my god, oh jeeps!
I only know people who've naturally done it by eating like more than two boxes of blueberry, a blueberry cereal, blueberry, not blueberry, blueberry cereal, in one sitting. So anyways, I'm pretty sure I've told this before, but I love it so much. So I go to lunch, I leave the bottle the can on the on the thing. I'd realized how concentrated it was, like literally like like milligrams color things. It's like very intense.
And uh, and so I was like, yo, Nastasia, don't touch this bottle. I'm going to lunch now. And I came back. Why would you do that though? Why wouldn't you just set the bottle somewhere with someone?
I set it on a shelf, but she knew it came. So this I come back from lunch. I'm like, hey, Nastasia, did you touch the bottle? She's like, nah. Nah.
I'm like, then why is your entire face blue? She wiped it all over her face because she had somehow touched her face and wiped blue all over her face. She looked like Violet Freaking Beauregard. It's my favorite because she was first, she was pulling the shaggy. I didn't do it.
And then like, well, she had blue all over her face. But I feel like if you get anything in the powdered form, it's always like the most volatile form when you like, because you get like anything powdered. I feel like people get powdered forms of stuff from like they're the people who go to like chemists, not like Walgreens. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's so intense.
But like, whenever I opened something like that, I like, you know, we remember like after that, you were like, I'm getting gloves. Like you get gloves, we open it. We'd be careful not to sneeze or breathe too hard when we opened it, and we like triple bagged it when we were done. I wonder what happened to that stuff. I think you threw it out.
Uh I think I threw it out. Nastasi was always like, can we put it in a joke app and give it to Clifford? With one of our interns. Can we, can we, can we put it in a gel cap and give it to Clifford? No!
No! I'm the big blue. I don't believe in in messing with people's insides without letting them know. I believe you should let people know if you're messing with their insides. Yeah.
Okay, make the drink. I have a pairing. No, no, no, mouth noises. Crinkles don't gonna get in trouble again. Why should I use this golden shaker?
Yeah. Yeah. So, which of so that's Toby's uh spec, which by the way, people, is a high acid beverage. And low sugar. So uh how much how much uh of the uh of the orange liqueur and which orange liqueur did he originally spec?
Was he quantch? Uh or is he a straight triple six? I think it was triple sex. Okay, so triple sex gonna be higher, most triple sex are gonna be higher in sugar than Quantro, right? So if you try to make Toby's recipe with Quantro, it will be toothjarringly acidic, right?
Maybe burn your throat out with a higher sugar level triple sec maybe, but still you're talking about like an acidic drink. So uh so what spec are you using? Are you using a chicken spec? Uh no. I'm using more of like modern adaptations I've seen, which is uh lighter on citrus and then kind of citrus almost as a modifier and then a split of the orange liqueur and the cranberry.
So lighter on the citrus meaning less acid. Less acid, so t if Toby knew that we were doing this now, you know, if he cared, he would f he would jump in here and throttle all of us. I mean he gets virulently angry. Does he? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh no, I've never talked to him about it. Just you should talk to him about it. Go ahead, Megan. Alright. Alright.
Robert's using a golden. He's got a golden shaker. It's ours, Robert. And Nastasia has which we will not eat uh on near the microphone. Cracker Jack birthday cake popcorn.
I'm gonna say this about Cracker Jack. I love Cracker Jack. It needs more. Of course it comes with a prize. It's freaking Cracker Jack.
But uh, it better come with the prize. If it doesn't come with the prize, I'm gonna jump through this blast. The problem with Cracker Jack is it's not as good as you want it to be. It just doesn't have enough of a coating on it. Isn't aren't you the person to stash you do not like kettle corn?
I should probably get to a question on the who do I know that doesn't like kettle? Is it freaking Dax doesn't Dax doesn't like kettle corn? I'm not a big kettle corn guy. Why not? What the hell's wrong with you?
Have I told you guys a story about how uh my family now gets angry at my impatience? Last week when it was super hot. They only do that now. Well, I've just kind of realized last week uh when it was super hot, my uh Dax, we were ordering Chinese food because that's what uh that's what they want. Oh, doing the do it never possible to do a good pour that way.
Robert's trying to do the uh just barely crack the tin. Good wash line there, Robert. Professional. Professional. So like Dax orders soup when it's a hundred degrees outside.
And I started, I was like, soup! Why do you order soup? And then like all of a sudden now Dax is like, Dad, you're so aggro. And now all he says to me is aggro, Dave. Now all he says to me is the word soup.
He makes fun of me. He's like, soup. I'm like, yeah. And by the way, he hated the soup. It's too hot.
Egg drop? Egg drop? No. Some sort of like I don't know some sort of noodle soup. It's like that's not the right weather for noodle soup.
Alright. Cheers. Cheers. All right. If you uh if you eat the popcorn into the mic, uh, Robert, you will be murdered by anyone that finds you.
I'll tell them where to find you and they'll go for it. People don't like them where to find me. Oh, that's true. You told them where they can harass me at my job. Yeah, what days?
Which is where I'm what days are you there? Oh, it varies. We don't have set schedule. So they I can't tell them exactly they have to come again and again in order to murder you for the cracker jacket. I guess so.
Alright, now, before I get into serious cooking questions, this is delicious. Yeah, it's really good. Uh uh, where do you where do your bananogram skills come from? Um I grew up in a very competitive family that really use games as a way of just passive aggressively berating each other and making each other feel like they're intellectually inferior. Uh and word games are very good at that because you can really like up your intellectual prowess by being like, look at my vast knowledge of the English language.
But when I learned it, it wasn't called bananograms. I feel like this is a very like make it accessible, like make people look like, oh, there's a banana bag. They'll buy that. When I played it as a kid, it was a game called scissory. Syzzogy, which is a word.
It is a word. And a bad movie. Interesting. That I didn't know. But it came in this big physics is the movie.
Syzygy is the real word, yeah. This giant kind of ornate velvet bag with these gold ropes. Then there are these soft red plastic tiles. They have these very ornate kind of like tarot card looking images on all the wildcard tiles that are not played at the book or index. No, no wild cards.
Nastasia hates wild cards. As we know from last week. No QI, no wild cards. Yeah, no two-letter words that you don't use in normal daily speech. No spellings of letters.
No. Yeah. No. She won't even allow E L, which is really elevated rail, which is. What about AA, the volcanic rock?
No. Do you use that? And when do you talk about that? Normal people, Nastasia, you scrap. Explain the people that it's a word.
It's a valid word. And it's a good way to store extra vowels. You know what I'm saying? For when you get when you get consonant shafted. But I feel like the real So playing Lord games like a lot of Scrabble growing up, the game upwards.
Did you guys ever play that? Is that some sort of 3D Scrabble? It was Scrabble where you could build on top of tiles to change words. So it got a little frustrating. Um with bananograms, I feel like the real skill set is don't be married to anything you've made.
Like you have to constantly be shifting, moving your board around, like sacrifice half your board, and just like trust that you can make it. Kind of like recipe development. Also being like very strategic with when you dump, which is where you put one tile back that you don't want to use and you draw three more. I never I don't really even care. I never dump early.
I'm always just like, I'm gonna never dump. Robert is now lounging. This is your banana gram's lounge. No, he's eating the popcorn. Oh, he's eating the popcorn away from the mic.
So after you eat it, come back and let us know how it is. I have some questions, I will get to it. Uh birthday cake. Okay. This one's from uh Ana, right?
Because pronounced like A is an ABC from Dublin, Ireland. By the way, I have uh Father Bill staying with me now, the cocktail priest. He's a priest. Priests, when they go around, they stay with people. That's how it works.
Was he coming back from Tales? Yeah, he's coming back from Tails. He's going back. No, Dax is a camp. He's sleeping in Dax's bed.
This is not important on the air. Anyway, he's the cocktail priest and he's going back to Dublin. Can you still stay with people? What? Like they get freeze days at people's houses?
What? What kind of lesson is this? Do you charge your friends to say it your house? Nastancia doesn't. Like, if you've met Nastasia for 25 minutes, you can stay at her house for two years.
Make sure that you drink all of her wine and ask her to go get groceries for you. Right? Yeah. And or make sure that you play loud music when she's on the conference call. If you ever have to do business with Nastasia or myself, just realize that you're gonna have to hear some sort of stupid crap in the background because neither of us can be bothered to go to a quiet place to have our conference call.
And whichever one of us is making the noise, the other one will yell at them like incessantly for being such a jackwad. But we're changing that. We're changing that. How are we gonna change that? I don't know.
Are you gonna turn into a different person? Am I gonna turn into a different person? Oh, okay. So I I would say we were yelling at each other, to be fair. And I said what I said to Nastasia is it?
No one thinks we're grown adults! Everyone thinks we're freaking jokers! We're not comedians. I was like, yeah, well, she's like, people like us. I was like, people like jokers, but we're not comedians.
We're supposed to be in business. And she was like, yeah, you know, anyway, so like this is the kind of telephone conversation I have while I'm waiting for my bags. Anyway, okay. So You know, and when you called me, I was on the beach, and nobody could get through. No text could be sent.
No, I couldn't like call anybody. For some reason, your call came through and it was like pristine. 3G, like one bar. Like the yelling was just like. Loud and clear.
Loud and clear. Yeah. CRISP. CRISP. I have to say this, people.
The argument started over, and listeners will know. Over. I'm just gonna say this straight up. I'm just gonna put this out there. So God, it's not about cooking.
Jesus. Okay, listen. All right. It's about Hawkins. Nastasia wants to make this product called the Wine Santa.
Now, the wine Santa, for those of you, I don't know, that have never heard this show before. Yeah, that's as Robert says that nightmare machine is a is a large, poorly made animatronic Santa. That can also be a zombie for Halloween. Okay, well, what you have to buy a different animatronic figure. It's not like Fudgy the Freaking Whale, where it's like either Santa or Fudgy the Whale or a zombie, you know, or whatever.
It is what it is. Anyway, you have to go buy wine zombie and wine Santa. Although wine zombie makes a lot more sense. Yeah. Anyways, uh because why wouldn't they puke out wine?
They don't need it. They they need brains. Right? I mean, Santa just had too much, but he's typically eating milk. You would think that Santa would be puking up milk punch.
Anyway, milk punch Santa. Uh but point being what wine Santa is is a poorly made animatronic Santa who is holding a a punch bowl, also poorly fabricated, with a pump coming out of his mouth such that don't give away the IP. Everyone has seen it! You've already released it. There's no IP, you've released it legally, it's done.
Anyway, so then you have the trademark. So like uh then a tube is coming out of the mouth, and uh he's vomiting liquids into this bowl. Could be non-alcoholic. She once did a lemonade for kids, puking lemonade Santa. Uh, and uh for for good measure, typically when people uh try to dispense it, they drip it all up in his beard, and so his beard is covered with uh whatever sort of disgusting product has been going through.
And also typically he is uh has a uh uh an unfortunate, shall we say, center of gravity, such that he will tip forward, like spill all of his drink, and then continue puking onto the ground, thankfully face down, so we know he won't choke on his own vomit while continuing to dance his animatronic dance on the ground. Uh if uh Stephen Hoppe from uh La Penultima is there, maybe Santa'll get punched in the chest, his head may fly off. I don't know, may happen, has happened. Anyway, so this is Nastasia's business idea, and Nastasia believes that everyone on earth wants one of these things, and it's gonna be the next Billy Bass. For those of you that don't remember, Billy Bass is the fish, the dead fish on the wall, who flaps his head and tail back and forth and sings.
I forget what Billy Bass sings. Does anyone remember what Billy Bass sings? Take me to the river. Yeah, throw me in the yeah. Take me to the river.
Yeah. Everyone bought one of those because they're they were 12 bucks. So what do we what's our target price for this, Nastasia? $50. That's not fuck.
Excuse me. I didn't do it, I didn't finish it. I didn't finish it. I didn't finish it. That's how angry.
Family show. Family show. Record setting. Family show. So that is not to pretend that I was gonna say something nice all along.
That is not feasible. Not feasible. Not feasible. Like you're looking at at least a hundred and twenty dollar problem. Okay.
Right? To sell to people. So the question is is that she thinks this is the big money idea. And I was like, well, in all the years that you've done it, which is like to be fair, four years. So what if you get it branded?
She already has brand. Oh, brand sponsor. This is an idea. But like, we've made a grand total of zero dollars. I put all my money into it.
Oh my god, that's not the case. That's true. I put a lot of money into it. How much money? $3,000.
That's a lie. What $3,000 have you put into it? All the Santa's, the trademark, the flepping it around. Slepping it around? You're just gonna hit that number up.
No, I I have to do that. So we've lost, we've lost $3,000. No, it's my money. $3,000 has been lost. Invest.
Of my money. It's it has nothing to do with your money. I'm not saying my money, I'm saying in general, $3,000 has gone down the poop shoot, and no money has come in, and yet Nastasia believes that the big money is in wine santa. So here's what I agreed to do. First of all, she's like, I'm gonna call the guys in China.
It's like dealing with Booker, like with like a two year old. So anyway, so she calls up the company in China that we deal with, and I was like, don't call them because we're new with them, and we want them to think that we're serious people because they work on a contingency basis. In other words, they only make money when we get product shipped from China, right? So I was like, I don't want them to think that they're investing their time poorly, so don't go with some sort of crazy idea that Nintendo. Yes, and this precipitated the argument.
But this is because Nastasia somehow thought that that was okay because what I said to her is I was like, look, you I know because she hates uh crowdfunding. So I was like, look, I don't think there's an actual market of people who will pay $129, let's say, for a an animatronic uh vomiting Santa, right? That can also be a zombie and a football player. It can't also be that because that's a separate item. No, no, no, no, Dave.
You it comes with three outfits. What? It's an animatronic fit. Now it's a hundred, now it's $160. Okay.
Would you buy one, Robert? Yeah. No, he would not. Come on. Would you buy one, Matt?
Well, I thought Robert was going for his wallet right now. Anyway, point being that I was like, this is the kind of thing people like to say they're gonna buy, but will not buy. So what I said was, we need to make about five thousand for an item like that, in order to make it, you need to make about five thousand of them, right? Because think about it this way I said do the numbers for the guys in in China, our company in China to work with us, if they're gonna make, I'm just giving you odd numbers in case you guys want to build something. If you have an agent, a good agent, they're gonna take roughly 15% of what's called FOB, freight on board.
So whatever you're paying the factory in China to port, let's say in Shenzhen, which is where animatronics are made, if you uh you're gonna pay them uh 15% of whatever that number is, not the retail number. So let's say you're gonna make 5,000 of them. That's all they get. 5,000 times uh whatever your price in China is times 0.15. That's what they're making.
So they have to do a calculation in their head. Is this worth it? You know what I mean? So they're checking and see if it's worth it. They can't know because no one knows what the market is.
So I said, what I said is that if you you hate Kickstarters, but if if the if the boondoggler, who for some reason is also on board with the wine Santa, Boondogger's Rebecca Apokovic's RPR person for our our mighty mighty spins all and sears all PR person. Call someone the boondogger and not think they're on board for the wine Santa. It's true. Robert, this is why you win a bananogram so much. This is why you're a winner.
I'm a winner. I can feel it. We were talking about Beck before, right? Yes. Uh, because I'm the loser.
Anyway, so anyway, the point is, is I was like, if you can kick start this sucker and get 5,000 orders, such that I know that 5,000 people want this. If you can somehow create the media poop storm and have this be the next electric cooler. Remember the electric cooler that sold all that, all that five million dollars in electric coolers? Like if you can pre-sell 5,000 wine Santa's, I will gladly go into the wine Santa business. So she immediately called up uh our folks in China and was like, yo.
We need to know how much it costs. You can't know how much it costs until you make a prototype. You're gonna make the prototype. I need a wine zombie by October. Wait, what do you mean by October?
Why buy October? I'm gonna have a Halloween party. Oh, personally, why don't you um we have an active chat discussion going on. I'm sure. Can we get you to weigh in here?
Sure. Uh the original question from Michael was can you pressurize an ISI whipper with a tank of uh nitrogen instead of using all those tiny cartridges? Nitrogen or nitrous? Well, N2, sorry. Is what he said.
Go ahead. Like the chemical formula, N2 is all he said. That's nitrogen. Thank you. Yes, you can.
And I think Dave's talked about it before. Using a CO2 adapter would be an adapter. Uh and then Elvin said, I've definitely heard of adapters for soda streams and drink maids before, but a cursory search doesn't reveal anything similar for ISI. Did you say a crispy search? Cursory.
Oh. Uh I know for a fact someone used to make it. It was unconscionably expensive. Uh if you know anyone with uh machine shop skills, it's fair. Oh my God.
Banana crap. I hope you don't crunch it in the mic. I hope you don't have any sort of vermin problems in your studio. Oh, the popcorn. Great.
It was the popcorn. There are no vermin in the city. And you know what the good news is? Mice don't like popcorn. Oh wait.
Oh. Oh, wait, they love popcorn. Don't like word games, love popcorn. You spilled the wrong thing. Nastasi is like Nastasi's like, hey, uh I want to be nice to the vermin.
Uh don't worry, I got you, Nastasia. Yeah, so uh anyone with basic machine shop skills can do it. You have I like how whatever. I'm not gonna even get into it. Uh uh the problem you have to worry about is you really want to make sure that um that part is well built.
The part that connects onto the pressure adapters. Now the good news is is that you're using a regulator, so it's never going to be as high of a pressure as it would be with a cartridge. But literally that's the part that killed that lady, that blogger. That's the part that blew up, I believe, shot off and hit her in the I forget whether it was chest or face and and killed her. So you just want to be careful.
But anyone with basic machine shop skills can do it. There used to be a company that built it. When they they charged a lot. I don't remember the name of it. They might've been out of business, but you can you can find it.
Uh I actually made my own tops for the whippers out of a very high grade food food grade urethane from a company called Hapco. So the way to do that is to just make the best way to do that is to make a mold uh with silicone out of the original, then disassemble it, you know, make a plastic positive, then machine the plastic positive, then recast it with all of the adapters that you need. That's what I did, but it is kind of a pain in the butt. So maybe it's not worth it for you to do that. I don't know.
What's the FOB on that? The FOB, the Freight on Board Zero, because I had to pay for all of it. Uh by the way, speaking of um Booker and Dax uh making things and existing conditions, in the next two weeks, we will be announcing our the Booker and Daxes. It's not the next project that Nastasia working on in China, but it's gonna be our next thingamajig. Our next potentially patent pending thingamajig, right, Nastasia?
Next two weeks. And I accidentally texted someone who didn't know about it, and Nastasia threatened to murder them. Not even wait for them to go to sleep. Threatened to murder them if if they talked. The person is currently in Thailand and he said, Who am I gonna tell?
The monkey that's sitting at my window? I was like, Don't you tell that monkey? You called it a thieving thieving effing monkey. Everyone knows those window monkeys are thieves. Everybody knows this.
I've never even been there and I know that they're thieves. Anyway, did we ever get to this question? No. All right. Aina called in.
Uh thanks for the episodes. I'm listening in reverse order, and I'm currently back to 127 from 2000 uh and thirteen. Jeez. What are we on now, Matt? Uh 376.
Jesus. Uh second, my question. I've been looking into bottling low alcohol drinks and have found uh and ha and having them be shelf stable. For this, I plan on using a corny keg and a counterpressure bottle filler to minimize foaming and carbonation loss. For my research, the alcohol would need to be in the 18% range or so to be guaranteed uh a preservative.
I don't think it needs to be quite that high if it's gonna be carbonated, but yeah. Um which is too high for the alcoholic soda vibe. I'm uh looking for 5 to 8% ABV. Uh what would be the best way of guaranteeing that the bottles won't spoil or start fermenting? I was considering sodium benzoate, but it is ineffective against some yeast and unfortunately reacts with ascorbic acid, which is vitamin C people, creating carcinogenic benzene.
First of all, you gotta sell it. If you want it, you say delicious benzene. You don't say carcinogenic benzene, you say delicious benzene, and then people aren't worried about it. Uh FYI, it is true that uh ascorbic acid, sodium benzoate has a couple of problems. One, it tastes bad.
Two, uh, like when and so like if you get um if you get sauerkraut that's preserved with sodium benzoate, like uh I don't like it. You know what I mean? It tastes bad. Um the other problem is is that with us uh in in conjunction with ascorbic acid, vitamin C, which is used in a lot of it's present in a lot of citruses, and I use it as an antioxidant all the time. It's my favorite antioxidant.
Uh I prefer it infinitely over all sulfites because not everyone tastes sulfites. Not only are many people allergic to sulfites, or uh you know, either they are or they believe they are, that they're allergic to it, gives them headaches. But uh people's taste thresholds for sulfites are widely different. And so uh even if you can't taste the level of sulfites that are in your drink, other people can, and sometimes free sulfurous volatiles can be created and cause a stink. I'm not gonna call you out ciders who I've had this happen to, but it's happy.
Anyway, so the other problem is uh is that with ascorbic acid, which is my antioxidant of choice, as I just said, uh you can create uh benzene, but it's in the presence of heat. So typically at you know, refrigeration and low shelf temperatures, you're not gonna be causing that reaction to happen, but it's something to think about. But the fact that a lot of people don't like it and that it doesn't taste good, you know, the benzene is just an added kind of reason not to do it. The other thing that's uh effective against many yeast things is potassium sorbate. Potassium sorbate, I don't think is as problematic as uh benzoate, it's usually not, I think, 100% effective uh on its own.
Um, but that that's something to look into. Uh the other thing you could and you mentioned this, um pasteurization is sometimes used by hard cider makers to halt fermentation early in bottled cider. Would that be a panacea in this situation? And the answer the sh the answer is both yes and no. So when Estasi and I were looking to make sodas, God remember that?
What a nightmare. Remember how terrible that was? Remember like how like we didn't want to get up in the morning and we're like, I gotta duck dog, I've got oh my god, soda. Like making it's like it's just like it's just get to our question. Okay, so like uh the problem with it is this you can bottle your product and then heat pasteurize it, right?
And you only need temperatures of about uh 60 degrees Celsius, I'll give you Celsius since you're in Dublin, uh, or like 140 degrees uh Fahrenheit for us here in the US of A. And uh the problem though is that the pressure in a carbonated drink goes up drastically when it's heated to those temperatures. And so there's a limit on how carbonated something can be. So just as an FYI, like a very when you talk to a professional bottler, they're gonna ask you this. Hey, I mean, with whatever accent they happen to have in Dublin, hey, how many volumes of CO2 you want in that?
And a volume of CO2 is two grams of uh carbon dioxide per liter of beverage, right? And the correct answer for Nastasi and I was like, we want like four, four and a half. And they're like, nah. Like the most you're gonna be able to get with heat pasteurization in a bottle because they're worried about the bottles rupturing. So, first of all, you're gonna have to buy a more fancy, expensive, thicker bottle.
But the most I think that they can do is about two and a half, three volumes of carbonation. So that's like maybe up to like six grams per liter of uh CO2 in your beverage before they're gonna be worried about stuff exploding in the tunnel pasteurizer. Now, you could just wing it and pray and then throw away the ones that have uh shattered and sprayed glass into your eye. But uh, you know, I don't necessarily, I don't necessarily recommend it. But it is a good solution if you like what I like to call West Coast carbonation, i.e.
light carbonation, i.e. poor carbonation. Uh but no, I love you, West Coast, come on. But the um, so you can do it. Uh another thing is that it everything depends on whether you're doing a couple or you're doing this professionally.
If you're gonna do just a couple of them instead of professionally, you could try, because if you're gonna do it on your own, you don't need it to be validated by a third party. None of this stuff's gonna kill you, it's just gonna taste bad, right? If it starts fermenting, it's just gonna get drier, more highly carbonated, and perhaps explode. It will not most likely, with the flavors that are in these kinds of things, actually spoil in a way that will cause danger. It will just be a lower quality product.
Just like just like myself. And uh so you can run some experiments. Now, what I've always wanted to do is build a and it it's hard, it's expensive to do commercially because to do commercially, things need to be done quickly and with high throughput. But a UV pasteurizer, if you buy a bunch of high-intensity UV lights and put them in a box, and you're willing to have these things sit there under UV light, you can just test how long it takes to zap all the bad stuff in it uh without it spoiling and without it changing the flavor. And I've had UV pasteurized uh cider before, and it is a lot better than heat pasteurized cider.
So, anyway, good luck with that. Good luck with that, right? All right. What do you have to say about the birthday uh cracker jacks? It's good.
It's there you go. What's your usual way of well? Let's let's know where you're from. Uh I am from uh the exact bullseye of the continental United States, St. Louis, Missouri.
Well, the exact middle is Steelville, Missouri. Steelville, Missouri? Is this including Alaska and Hawaii? No, the continental United States. Alright, so you've just said that everyone in Alaska and Hawaii can go hang.
Alaska might be counted. Because it's on the continent. We don't count that though. You mean I'm pretty sure you probably mean the lower 48. Probably.
Yeah. All right. I don't know. This is something like people say there. It's not like hard facts.
Did you go back there for the eclipse? I wanted to fly to St. Louis to see the eclipse. Which I did not. The last one we had, the last really uh big one, like St.
Louis was right at the good zone. Right on the epicenter. Yeah. Did you go back? I did not.
Is it because you hate fun things? No, it's because I am a workaholic. I was at Tales of the Cocktail. And by the way, uh congratulations to our sister Bar Katana Kitten for beating us at uh best new bar i in in America. Congratulations to Massa and the whole team over there at Katana Kitten.
But uh when you go to Tales of the Cocktail, if you ever go, it's the big, you know, festival, I don't know, trade show, uh convention, cocktail convention in New Orleans when it's you know, horribly hot. I went there and like this this person was like, I wanted to go talk to someone and she's like, Oh yes, we have a three-room experience. And the end of the experience was the one person I just want to say, Hey, how are ya? And then leave, right? Because that's all I like to do.
Hey, how are you? I'm still alive, how are ya? And leave, right? So she's like, There's a three-room experience. So I look her straight in the face, I was like, I hate experience.
And she was like, What? I was like, I h I hate it. She's like, just go to the third room. I was like, I just want to say it's still alive and well in and Roberta's breastfeeding at the table. Nastasia Nastasia It's been a while.
You but you're people are allowed to do that. What? People are allowed to do that. Baby gotta eat. I don't mind when people breastfeed.
Then why'd you bring it up? If you don't mind it, why'd you bring it up? I I don't want to talk about it. Wait, wait, you don't want to talk about it? No.
You brought it up. It's just when you're eating as an e as an eater. A child is eating. Yeah, but I would think you'd want to like cover the breastfeeding with like a blanket. How um how is it that I'm the one that thinks you're crazy.
Our heads. Yeah, yeah. Just all of us put a cowl over your head and your plate. As though we're eating ordelon? Yeah.
If you had told me that this conversation was going to take place, but you had like stripped the names away and you were like, guess who said which thing? You wouldn't. I would have gotten that wrong. Yeah. Well, that's the thing.
Like, this is why I've said many times, and I've had people t like tweet me, tweet storms on how I'm mean and crazy. Tweet storms on how I'm too mean and too crazy. Nastasia is the only frat boy I hang out with. For real. You know what I mean?
Like for real people. Unbelievable. She's like, Nastasi's like, these women, what are they doing with the breastfeeding at the table? Am I right? Kip hand me a beer.
What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you? Baby's gotta eat. It's incredibly painful to hold it in when the time is gonna be. Do you want her to have to go to the freaking bathroom here?
What? She just wants a small pup tin over here. Yeah. You just want you just want the mother to be encased in an envelope of shame. That's definitely not true.
God. I think uh Frat Boy and Nastasia might be interested in joining this conversation of the chat. They're they're discussing what your favorite shot in a beer combo is. Oh, no. I do sho I don't drink beers.
I have pictures of you drinking beers. Yes, yeah. You don't want to get in on this? My public statement is I didn't know. Nastasia prefers light, flavorless beers as all frat boys do.
She will have a uh corona, and she probably won't shoot it, but she'll probably have it like a shot of whiskey. That's something she doesn't want gin. She just doesn't want gin. Um she sent me a picture saying what don't talk about Frank. Empty no, empty bottle of Medley Brothers.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so I would say, even though it's a terrible pairing, uh a shot of uh high proof whiskey and a corona. But uh why is that a terrible pairing? Because it just is. I mean Nastasia's not like an agave shot person.
She's not gonna sit there and do the do the tequila or the master. I would do tequila. But I would choose a gin shot over a tequila shot. I don't like it. Nastasia doesn't like gin.
I don't like gin. Okay, questions. All right. So this person, it's not a food question. We'll come to it later then.
Let's do a food question, right? Oh, here's one. Not not a question. Uh this is uh Jesse McMillan enjoys classics in the field. Oh, yeah, which we'll make sure we get to today.
Uh it's already one, Dave. Okay, hold a sec. Dan Price wrote in about chestnuts, and you know, we can't say chestnut. Yeah, Nastasia looks at me and goes, these nuts. Like, she can't help it either.
She's like, Dave, you're a jerk. She looks at me and goes, D's nuts, right? Which is a I mean, talk about classics in the field. That whole album. D's nuts.
No, man. And with with the uh prank phone call that uh Snoop has at the beginning. Yes. Did you get that to the other day? What?
D smells nuts. And then she hangs up on him. Classic. Uh just thought, if Dave didn't see it, that this article might be of interest. It's about the efforts to make genetically modified uh GMO American chestnut trees designed to resist the chestnut blight.
And the article is by Rowan Jacobson, who wrote The Geography of the Oyster, which is uh a book I think that um I read and uh has done a did a lot to kind of help the resurgence of everyone knowing and caring every little nuance about every little oyster. Robert, what's your favorite oyster? My favorite oyster? Um what's your least favorite oyster? What oysters do you not like?
I mean I'm more of a northeastern coast, like as salty and briny and blue as I can get them. Oh yeah. I don't want a small sweet oyster. I feel like so I'm not I'm not a I'm not a Kumi guy, I'm not a Kumamoto guy. I don't need my stuff to taste like melons or cucumbers.
Sometimes I like them as like a palette cleanser between my East Coast oysters. Like if someone else wants them, like I'll have like one or two. Yeah, I'll eat one. Yeah, right. But if I want those flavors on my oyster, I will just make a fine, I will make a fine Brunoise of that crap and put it onto my oyster, as I have done.
Yeah. You know what would be good? You know what'd be good? Lightly brined, like very fine, very fine cubes of cucumber tossed in like it like in it in a minionette on top of an East Coast oyster. That'd be good.
Sounds great. You have never had a plate, I've never had a a real ballon, like a like a plate oyster. Yeah. I hear I would not like them. I have not been presented with one myself.
Okay, so anyway, so he wrote that, but then he wrote this article, which you can look at, P.S. Mag, which I don't know what that is. Uh most controversial tree in the world. Now, uh here's the thing. So uh for those of you that I don't know, don't know anything about trees, uh American chestnut was one of our kind of ubiquitous forest trees.
It provided delicious chestnuts, it provided uh good wood. Um, so we used it for carpentry, we used it for um nuts. It was nice tree, lovely. Uh it was completely wiped out in the early 20th century by a fungus that invades the tree bark, causes it to split, uh, creates uh oxalic acid, and then it keeps getting worse. Finally, the tree gets girdled, it dies.
Funny thing is, chestnuts are theoretically very resilient. So, what happens is is they shoot up shoots of the old tree around the dead tree. Those live for like 10, 15 years, they never become big, then they die. And it happens over and over again. So even now you can find remnants of these old chestnut trees with these young shoots that will shoot up and then die, shoot up and then die.
They're slowly dying out because the roots can't produce enough reserves to stay alive. So within 20 or 30 years, all of those original chestnuts will be dead, and the chestnut will be wiped out. Of all of the bazillion chestnut trees that existed back in the day, none of them, none, not one. And they've searched. So people have been searching the forests forever to try to find some lone, I'm here, chestnut tree that is resistant to American chestnut tree that is resistant to the blight.
The evolutionary miracle. Right, the miracle, like you know, the uh the you know, whatever Will Smith was in that movie where he was the last guy, right? Like like wherever that is, like that chestnut tree, never been found. They've tried breeding the American chestnut with the Asian chestnut uh trees to try to get one that is more like an American but uh still resistant. Never found.
Never been uh possible. So what they did is these folks were like, well, I will just I will just insert a gene from wheat into this tree, and maybe the tree will be resistant. And guess what? It is. And so now they have this uh genetically modified tree that is uh resistant to the blight, right?
Now the problem is uh they want to put this into the forest, and no one has ever released in a non-plantation way, right? In a completely uncontrolled back into the forest wild thing for no money, by the way. This is not a money thing, right? No one's gonna make money. Not patented.
Not uh no, I mean they're just gonna release it into the wild. It's like, you know, free of free of uh IP restraints, let's put it that way. Uh but no one's done it before, and so there has been an outcry, an outcry. Uh and there is a um, I forget the name of it. I had it last week because I was gonna talk about it last week, but it's like some website with a very easy to search for name like StopGMO trees.org.
Now, there are geomotrees that are are problematic, right? So like they they're trying to introduce eucalyptus trees to places that are colder than where eucalyptus wants to grow in in plantations, and why the hell would you want to introduce eucalyptus trees anywhere where they don't automatically grow? Talk to anyone in California about introducing a eucalyptus tree and they'll punch you in the face. Harold McGee, who how nice is Harold McGee? Nice.
How often does Harold McGee go off? Not often. Does he ever like like start cursing people or things out? No. I was like, yo, yo, eucalyptus trees are pretty harold.
He's like, God damn it, eucalyptus trees. You know what I mean? So it's like every time I walk through Brooklyn, there's some new building put up and they try to make it beautiful by putting bamboo out front. You're like, please don't do that. Yeah, people hate the bamboo.
I was talking to someone who had someone plant bamboo. Oh, my my father-in-law, and he was like, filth! Filth! Baboo! Filth!
I was like, yo, yo. It's not filth, it's just like unkillable. He's like, it goes under my fence. It shoots things under my fence and shoots bamboo up. It's the army ant of grass.
Wow. Yeah. Wow. I thought grass was the army ant of grass. It turns out bamboo is there are many bamboos.
I'm sure they're not all filth creatures. Just the ones that can grow up here. Anyway, so I will say this. Uh I'm happy to have people call and tell me that I'm an idiot, but 99% of the arguments against this GMO tree, one of them is you can't possibly know what's gonna happen, so you can never do anything. That's one argument.
I think that's dumb. Uh another one is that this is a Trojan horse, so that you like GMO pro if you'll do this because there's not any money attached to it, people are gonna feel warm and fuzzy about GMOs, and then Monsanto's gonna go shaft the farmers. Also from St. Louis, Monsanto. Really?
Yeah. Anyway, but my point is is that like, I mean, that's not a valid, that's not a valid thing. Like, you have to discuss the tree on its own merits. You can't say, oh, oh my god, server just poured water all over this lady. It was amazing.
Uh the um, you can't discuss the like you have to discuss the merits of the tree. You can't say, well, if people like this GMO, they're gonna like the other bad GMO, and therefore you can't do the good stuff. Listen, I use a knife to do surgery on you, and you can't do that because sometimes knives they stab people, and the people that make the knives, they're gonna think everyone's gonna think it's okay because they're making scalpels. Nah. You know what I mean?
Like, and then they're like, oh, well, things are bad, and then they point things that are bad. Like, you can live this plantations where they shouldn't be. I mean, it's just the the whole thing I think all the time. Anyway, so that's my feelings on it, but please uh oh, Melissa. Melissa wrote in earlier uh last week about and her question was specifically this.
Now, Nastasia, I'm gonna ask you to do this. You have to do some legwork. Mary Drake, I believe her name is, is one of the foremost cheese scientists. I believe that's her name, Mary Drake, uh, cheese scientist in the United States. See if you can get a hold of her, see if she'll call in.
Because the question I'm not qualified really to answer. Uh Melissa hates goat cheese, and she we've spoken about this before, right? Uh, she also turns out she hates cotija cheese. Now, I uh cotija cheese is like a Mexican kind of like hard salted, very crumbly, aged cheese that you can use in grating. I love cotiha, uh Melissa hates it.
Now, I don't know why. Melissa, I'm gonna try we're gonna try to contact this if you're listening. Melissa, if you can hear me, we're gonna try to contact this scientist and talk to it, but I'd like a little more information. And the information is this. Um, I'm trying to figure out how much of your distaste for cotiha is the flavor versus the texture.
So, uh cotiha as a crumbly, drier cheese. What are your thoughts on Cheshire, right? Cheshire is a dry, crumbly cheese. Do you like Cheshire, which is a cow's milk cheese, but has a uh crumbly, interesting, kind of relatively unique paste texture. Uh going a little deep in the weeds here, but if you like, do you like Castle Magno, right?
Another very crumbly textured cheese, depending on how it's aged. Uh, if you haven't had that, don't worry about it. Uh, do you like uh feta, another highly salted but wetter uh cheese, not goat, sheep, most or cow, depending on who's making it, right? So let me, I need an I need that these I need to know to try to figure out what it is that you don't like. I'm guessing they add a lot of enzymes now to Kotiha so they can speed age it so they don't have to age it for as long as it traditionally be aged.
And you're getting off flavors from the enzymatic breakdown products, perhaps lipid breakdown products, but I don't know. That's why we're gonna try to get in touch with uh Mary uh Mary Drake. I have her phone number. Great. And then the uh the I had one last uh question I need to know the answer to about what you liked or what you didn't like.
Ooh, what was it? Ooh, ooh, what was it? Hold on, okay, okay. So we we gotta do classics in the field and get out? Yes.
All right, hold on. And there was one more one more question I gotta answer. Come on. I was late today, and it was my fault. Okay.
Well, you all say stuff nobody cares about. Why can't I? Nobody cares about any of it. Go. Oh, Bill uh Bill Guppy wrote in saying that you can get a copy of the market assistant, which is one of the classics in the field uh online.
Almost all of the classics in the field that we're gonna tell you, they have online copies. One of the ones that we're gonna do, Nastasi and I are gonna post an online copy, even though she doesn't want to because she doesn't want you to know how to make apple heads. But we're gonna do it anyway. We're gonna post one online. Yes, we are.
She's shaking no. Why? No one's gonna make apple heads, Nastasia. But we'll eat them. No one's gonna scoop you on your apple heads.
Uh okay. Stasi's like, it's too big a money making operation the apple heads. The FOB very little on apple heads. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, Nastasia, we gotta make 10 billion apple heads before the company in China makes even two pennies.
They do grow a lot of apples in China. Okay, anyway. So uh we will let you know when uh something that we do is not available online, right? Uh because almost all of them are. I should have mentioned I should have mentioned that.
Um most of the things that we do are available uh online. So, Robert, if you're ready, and you can weigh in on this, we'll take a look at it, we'll talk about it. Ready for uh this week's Classic Seed in the Field, yeah. Alright, so uh this week we're gonna do something a little bit different uh in that this is not necessarily a classic, but I don't know why it's not a classic, right? It's uh something that I think should be a classic uh but is not.
And I found it uh in a thrift shop and and I and I bought it. And it's by uh a person, she is dead. Uh but her name is Ruth Mary Griswold, right? And you can find a copy. The the book is called read the title so I get the exact thing right uh The experimental study of foods.
The experimental study of foods. And I like foods whenever I see foods that way, I think of the Welly Wesley Willis song, Don't Ask Me for Sugar Honey Iced Tea, only he says the the thing. And he's like, Don't ask me to pay for your foods. You know what I mean? Don't ask me for a Sony disc man.
Like he says all this like anyway. So uh she wrote this book. Uh she was born in um 1908. Uh she died in uh 1992. Uh, and um she was a food scientist, uh, but but also a home economics uh kind of professor.
And uh it's kind of this all the early work in at least in American um kind of food science writing, kind of fell under the rubric of home economics, and it was a good place for smart women in science to go uh into things. Reminds me, uh I probably don't have time, but reminds me of a story. Um there's a doctor who was a generation or so older than my mom, who's a pediatric cardiologist, who went to medical school in the late 40s or early 50s, and I uh my wife and I met her again. I hung out with her when I was a kid a couple years ago. She was in her 90s, and she had become a pediatric cardiologist, which for those of you that don't know, you go to medical school, then you go to uh you do your internship, your residency, then you can do after that, you can do you know, your your your residency is your specialty, so you would do pediatrics.
And back in the day, it probably still is, but when my mom was going to medical school, it was uh, you know, women, women doctors primarily went into pediatrics, they were kind of ghettoized into pediatrics for various reasons. Uh, but then after that, you go to what's called your fellowship, which is a subspecialty. So it's like very highly educated. So my mom's a pediatric cardiologist, you know, Dr. Griffiths was is a pediatric or was a pediatric cardiologist.
And so I said, hey, in the was it hard in like the in the 50s to become a pediatric cardiologist? Did I tell you this story, Nastasia? And what she said to me was uh actually no, because at Johns Hopkins, where I was, there was a woman who had become a pediatric cardiologist during the war, and no men would study with her, and she needed students. So it was actually easier for uh at that at that time in that location for women to get into that specialty because no men would study with this woman. So it's like it's these like study fields that for terrible reasons have become populated with these very talented women, anyway.
Uh so uh the reason this is a classic in the oh interesting. So she writes this book, and she doesn't keep the money from it. All the profits that she made from this book, she put into a scholarship. So you can still to this day, you can't find hardly any information on this woman on the internet. To this day, you can go get the Ruth Mary Grig Griswold Scholarship, which is awarded to uh undergraduates at the Indiana University in Bloomington.
Uh, is awarded to undergraduate or graduate students majoring in nutrition, dietetics, or human development and family studies, uh, with a GPA of uh 3.25 or 4.0 and above. And this scholarship was entirely paid for with the profits of this book that she wrote in 1962. Alright, so why is this why is this book, which is not known? I called Harold McGee and I was like, Harold, do you know about this book? He's like, No, I don't.
Like, it's not like one of the more famous early books, like early, early, like Catherine Beecher's book or like the uh Fannie Farmer uh, you know, in the the cooking school stuff, which was some of the early works on it. Um, I think that someone needs to redo this book. Like, everyone who writes, I still want people to buy Harold McGee's book on food and cooking as textbooks for like you know, non-major food science books. But if you're studying food science, there's very little between like uh what you know what Harold is writing, which is a very specific kind of book, amazing book. Everyone needs to own at least two copies, both editions, uh, right, and like Fenema, which is like, you know, kind of a hardcore like food chem, food science, or like Lowry's Meat Science or something like this.
There's very little in between. People have tried to make specific textbooks for food science that are aimed at people who don't necessarily want to be true scientists but are interested in food and interested in science. And I think this is the template for the book. And you can get it online uh at a place called Babel B-A-B-E-L. Uh Hathi Trust H-A-T-H-I-T-R-U-S-T.org.
And in the I found this at a thrift shop. I found it for like two bucks. I had no idea what it was. And on the inside it says, at the request of Mr. Philip Kempf, we are pleased to send you a complimentary copy of this book for your consideration as a basal text for your classes.
The list price is 949. So, like this book was actually sent out to someone to try to get them to use as a textbook. But why is it great? Let's take a look at the table of contents, which is going to give you kind of an idea of why it's so good. So she breaks it down into an introduction to food experimentation and an introduction into food science, which is great.
Like, why do this? Why not? She then goes into her part one, which is the current state. This is what needs to be totally kind of uh redone, right? The current status of food science.
But the current status of food science in 1962 is not the current food status science as it is now. But she goes through, much as Harold McGee does, eggs, dairy products, meats, veg, preservation, fats, starch, leavening agents, yeast, cakes, pastries, etc., candies. But then the real genius of it, so and she goes into it in somewhat in detail, right? So she's putting down you know, chemistry reactions, like very integrated in the way that a lot of college courses can't be because college courses are typically taught under one department. Physics, one department, chemistry, one department, biology, not under kind of like uh multiple disciplinary uh things.
But then where she really turns into a genius here is her food experimentation. And and that starts, it's only from page 491 to 567, the food experimentation section. Uh, but I highly, highly, highly recommend it because it tells you how to run basic experiments. And by the way, every every chapter in this book ends with experiments that you can do in a standard kitchen without a laboratory, right? So, like, she uses fundamentally basic stuff.
I mean, maybe you need a couple of things like you know, beakers and whatnot, scales, but she all of her experiments are are awesome and can be done in a regular kitchen. Uh, and that that alone is uh worth the price. Let me get a couple of um, and I like her attitude, which uh oh, another thing. She puts references at the end of everything. So the bibliography is horribly out of date, but everyone who most people who write about food science for gen general population don't ever put any references, and at the end of every chapter, she gives you references for further things to look at and further places to go and where she got the information, which is something I think everyone should go to.
I think she is firing on all cylinders back in the 60s, and people still haven't managed to do this, even in, you know, kind of, you know, we're a fifth of the way through our century already. So uh let me see if I can find uh something that I think you guys will like. Uh that I have time, because I know I have to leave. It's 20 minutes after. Oh my god.
Uh okay. Approaching the experiment. I'm gonna go teach uh with Harold McGee at the Harvard again this year. Everyone in Harvard needs to read this. Uh the student who is having difficulty finding a first problem may find comfort in learning that there's usually no trouble in selecting future problems because they seem to arrive constant arise constantly as research is being done, as research is being done.
If you continue to work, you will have new questions to work on. If you just sit around thinking about questions, you will not have new questions to work on. So smart, so smart. Uh reading also suggests topics by revealing areas in which unsolved problems await investigation. Await investigation, i.e., do investigation.
Ideas may come from practical food problems that have been encountered, from suggestions about simplifying a method of food preparation, from studying what function and ingredient serves, or from doubt concerning the validity of a theory. This lady, everyone should just read what this person says. And then, I mean, I mean, I kind of need you guys to keep asking questions, but like this, that she has the exact right approach to how to do everything. Uh, and then she goes, the first step in conducting most experiments is to read the work already done in the area. Imagine!
And yet this is something that no one thinks of. This aids in planning and ensures against unknowing repetition of work already done. The her, and yet nobody knows this. In 2019, nobody can figure this out. And then she goes on to explain, which is amazing, well, how to use a card catalog.
None of you guys need to know how to do it. She has an amazing section on how to plan your experiment, right? Like how to efficiently plan the experiment, how to document your experiment, how to not f up your experiment, how to control your experiment. She talks about how to train and find tasters. Look at look at her training these tasters.
It's sick. She's like how to select judges, how to train them. She talks about triangle tests, how to figure out whether your results are real or just garbage. Um, right? And then she talks about simple ways to measure things like how do I measure the volume of a cake.
Stuff that like Greg Blonder does in his genuine ideas, which is an interesting blog you should read now. And I will, uh, if you guys look at this book, which if you don't, you're a bad person, uh, go to page 523 and check out how she recommends recording bread textures. Ink print of the bread. Slice the bread, make an ink print. Everyone should someone, someone, if you can hear me, someone needs to take this book and update it and maybe add to the uh Ruth M.
Griswold uh uh scholarship in Indiana. Just doing our part to try to maybe bring her back so that everyone recognizes her as Classic in the feeder. Thank you, Robert. Thanks, uh, congratulations, uh Matthew, and uh thanks for coming back. This has been Cooking Issues.
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