This episode is brought to you by Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a stunning 52 acre garden in the heart of Brooklyn, featuring spectacular plant displays and inspiring public programs year round. Learn more at BBG.org. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network. We're a member supported podcast network broadcasting over 35 weekly shows live from Bushwick Brooklyn. This year, we're celebrating 10 years of food radio.
For the past decade, we've been taking you behind the scenes of farms, restaurants, breweries, school cafeterias, and more. It's been 10 years, and we're just getting started more. Find us at Heritage Radio Network. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from, you know, I don't know.
I really don't know anymore. I really don't. Till about one o'clock from Reverse Pizzeria in Bushwick Brooklyn. Nastasia the Hammer Lopez is not here yet because she has been detained by the L train. So, um Matthew, uh, how you doing?
The uh yeah, good. I just got trolled by the chat. It started auto-playing our own feed. We were gonna be looped for eternity. Well, so I'm sure Matthew will edit this out of like whatever happens in the internet in the future.
But but, yeah, someone or somehow we had looped our uh the what what what do we call that the commercial before the thing? Uh pre-roll. Yeah, the pre-roll got looped into some sort of like I kinda liked it. I think you should go full Frera Jaca on that. Uh you know, maybe I will.
I can stack them in the in the post. We get a little bit like three minutes of just 12 copies of that. Yeah, and like, you know, the what what what's the actual line? Do you remember something and more? Uh and then it looped in, and you had it like right at the correct.
No, it was it was the timing was good. It was sick, man. Yeah. Everybody likes short bursts of rounds, right? You know what I mean?
Like, like I can tolerate about 25 seconds of of Frera Jacques once it's all in, right? Oh man, wait, are we gonna make you a a round version of uh Classics in the Field theme? Oh my god. Well, no, because Classics in the Field is such a short thing. How can you can't you need at least I mean, we need a couple more lines.
You need to flesh out the lyrics here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, for those of you that know, like, whenever we come up with a song, it's always just like the one line and that's it. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh well, since speaking of songs, since we're waiting for Nastasi to show up before we begin with actual cooking issues. Oh, and if you have a uh cooking issue, you can call in your questions to 718418. Wait, wait.
Um, yes, that is right. 7184972128. And in fact, someone knows the number because I'm talking to her. All right. Well, let's take the call.
I mean, I was gonna talk about my lack of understanding of Neil Diamond's crackling crackling rosy song, which I've listened to my whole life and just was listening to on the way over, and I was like, the lyrics were kind of making me mad. Uh well, we can get back into that afternoon. All right, let's do this. Call her, you're on the air. Hey Dave, how's it going?
Going on. Josh from North Hair. Hey, how are you doing? Good, good. Um I'm recently getting big into uh charcoal grilling, and I feel like I remember you talking about the pros and cons of like hardwood charcoal versus lump a few weeks ago, and I was wondering if you could go into some more detail.
All right, I will. Um so we had uh I don't know how long ago that was, Matthew, I'm not sure. But we had uh Meathead uh Meathead Goldwyn on, right? And Meathead is uh believer in uh in kind of compressed kind of briquette style uh charcoal, right? And he's like, it was it's more uh what's the word he he uses?
He says it's more uh uniform, which I guess is true. Uh anyway, he like and he says he you know what's in it as opposed to the wood that's made in in hardware charcoal. So then uh after I we had that conversation on the on the air, I went and bought a sack of, you know, not the vile stuff that's impregnated with garbage, but like, you know, the uh standard briquettes. I believe I purchased Kingsford, and I tried using them, and I have to say I hate them. Uh I just don't like them.
Uh you know, and this is not a scientific me talking. It's just I hated using them. Uh I yeah, uh like the the kind of so I I use uh hardwood uh charcoal. The the brand that I use, I even I don't even remember the name. It's there's only a couple of brands that that you that are available on the East Coast.
I use the one in the big red paper sack. And uh I can see the chunks of wood, and uh I don't care that it's not always the same. I just I I don't care. I just prefer to use it. Like the stuff, the way it stacks out in my in my chimney, the way it lights up, the way that I understand it, I just like it better.
The way it feels, the whole thing about it I enjoy more. Now I've also never uh I've never purchased uh you know, fancy binshotons. So uh Nastasia's here by the hold on second, she's gonna pass right by my whole second. Oh, she's gonna go behind me. What's up?
Hey Nastasia. Uh so we were uh yeah, yeah, we'll talk about the nasty train. We're talking about charcoal right now. So uh Jeremiah Stone and Fabulous, when we were working in um in uh LA, Jeremiah was like, Well, we're gonna need to use the grill, so uh, we're gonna get some sort of uh bintoton. Remember that?
We're like, Jeremiah crash suck crap on you. I don't like that. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I think I was, we were just trolling and making fun of them. I think there is a place for like super like fancy kind of uh benton and bintroton like.
So for instance, uh Andy Ricker, uh a friend of the show, uh, you know, well known chef, has a line of ties of Thai-made binsoton style charcoal, which is much cheaper than binsoton. So the the advan Nastasia, people can hear when you do that, you know. Yeah, yeah, we'll we'll talk about the fact that they don't trust us to talk anymore. But that's fine. So, like uh, I think that stuff has a that's super expensive stuff, also has a place in that um if you're grilling inside and you need something that's relatively smoke free, the binchoton is good.
Maybe it burns at a higher temperature, but the way that I cook now with charcoal is uh in general just like lots of lots of heat. So Meadhead Goldwyn may have a point when with briquettes, because he's setting up these long snakes and he's doing these like long cooks at low temperatures, and he's trying to regulate heat over hours with briquettes, and it's just like that's just not the game I like to play. I just dumped out, I don't enjoy playing that game. So uh take everything I say with that grain of salt. Like I like uh I like what I like, not necessarily from a scientific standpoint.
Matthew, is this making sense? It is, in fact, making sense. Uh Devin on the chat wedding. He well, you didn't like the king's word. Um then real quick, uh, what has been your experience with carrying a spinzall on domestic flights?
Oh, it's fine. So uh get a if you if get a similar to uh 511 tactical rush 24 bag, similar. You don't have to buy that one. That bag is rather heavy, but a spinzall just fits. My only gripe with the 5'11 is that uh it doesn't fully clamshell, so it's kind of hard to shimmy to shimmy, shimmy, shimmy the spinzall into it.
Um but you can fit it into that, and then you can pad it with like clothes and all your other paraphernalia. And a 5'11 tactical with a spin's all in it exactly fits. You have to kind of like push it, but it exactly fits into every overhead bin that I've ever uh tried to work with. The problem is you don't want to ever put it into a roly. Because if you put it into a roly and you show up, unless you're group one, your roly is gonna be like has a good chance of getting checked, and a spin's all in checked luggage when it doesn't have a lot of padding is going to get cracked.
I just I happen to meet. Yeah, I was carrying one once and I put it in a roley, and the you know, the flight person was like, You're gonna have to check that. I was like, you don't understand, I can't check this. Like my whole business is this is when we were just in prototype. So it's like literally my business is here.
This is my whole business. You're asking me to check my entire business. And she was like, Yeah, I don't care about you. And so she uh she took the thing and checked, and sure enough, broken. Um so I would always backpack it, and it fits.
Um you know, if you can literally you can just put it into any sort of sack and have it as your carry-on and and it and it will fit, but it doesn't fit with a lot of extra packing, so it's it's about you placing it in the overhead uh on your own. But I've done it many times, even internationally. Alright, awesome. Thanks. Cool.
Uh what were you saying, Matthew? Um you caught me eating this Tate's cookie that I found in the green room. Uh, what am I doing? Devin, the dude says something, and I can't find it. He said that uh you didn't even like the Kingsfords, and he says he bought some Embers brand briquettes at eight at Home Depot recently since they were cheap.
Internet says they might be seconds quality Royal Oak briquettes. He does not recommend, they were way ashier than the Kingsford, and tons of smoke during lighting. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Look, a lot of things, look, people who are interested, I'm sure he's changed his uh, I'm gonna give you another example. So years and years ago, Alton Brown, great, you know, great influence in the food world, Alton Brown, uh Ariel Johnson is, you know, friend of the show, is his uh first science officer now on the program.
So all love to Alton Brown. Years ago, Alton Brown tried to tell not just me, but the entire world that the best way to cook bacon is in the oven. And that's just not true. I mean, like that's just that's just not true. And this is exactly why that's not true.
He said, uh, when you cook bacon in the oven, it cooks evenly. Do you understand what I'm saying, people? He said it's better because when you put bacon in the oven, it cooks evenly. Now I ask you, I ask you, whenever you are at a restaurant, now on a burger, fine, but when you were eating bacon, when you were eating bacon, as bacon, not on a sandwich, whatever. Would you rather have that perfectly flat, board-stiff, one-done-ness piece of bacon that is just kind of there as a stick, and you pick it up and it's typically dry and whatever.
Or would you rather have a traditional pan fried piece of bacon that has some parts of it more done, some parts of it less done, a little bit of that soft yielding bubble where the fat came up off the pan and didn't cook very much, and another part that's a little crispy because it hit the pan more. Would you rather have that? And the answer is nostalgic. It's not nostalgic, it's a taste thing. I like, I like variation in my bacon.
So the very fact that a bacon piece of bacon cooks more evenly in an oven might be great if you're doing bacon for burgers. However, it is not make the best eating bacon, in my opinion. And so, like this idea of evenness as being the be all and end all of what we're shooting for, not really true, I think. I think what what you're searching for in the kitchen is knowledge and repeatability and consistency, time to time and batch to batch, not necessarily a hundred percent Pablum consistency of texture and look across the individual things that you're eating on the plate at one particular time. Is this making sense?
Yes, also nice use of the word Pablum. Oh, yeah. It's a good one. We gotta pull that out more. I don't know what that is.
It's gross, it's just like like no taste, like it's like what a baby first eats, like Pablum. You know what I mean? It's just like uh someone says, uh, how was the food? Uh all taste is mush, all tasting the same pablum. You know what I mean?
Can we market a product as Pablum? Uh, I don't know. I think there might be, I think there might already be a baby's biscuit, like a you need a style biscuit. By the way, you need a biscuit. Sick name for a biscuit.
And P.S. they taste good. I don't like to let them like disintegrate in my mouth like a teething baby does. But you need a biscuit is not a bad prop product and a fantastic name. Fantastic name.
Alright. So, uh on to what you were going to talk about, Nastasia. Matthew no longer trusts us not to spit into his microphone, and so we have these metal spit guards. Oh, that's what they are? It's not you two.
Won't say who it is. Won't say who it is. But we're narrow we've narrowed it down to 33 hosts. Um no, I would I would have Nastasia teach a class on mic technique. Oh, you would?
Yeah. I had a lean, lean back. As far as away from the microphone as you can be while still being in the same room. Yeah, we gotta get. I think uh I think Fat Joe lives in the neighborhood, maybe, or used to.
Now he's in the Bronx. Yeah, he's in the Bronx, I think. Get him to come sing lean back, so for Nastasia's microphone technique. Yo, where's my my uh okay? Here we go.
Uh so uh we don't have any questions, people. Sad. Sad. We're dumb, though. We're real dumb.
We're stupid. Uh, but the lack of questions, you know, we get sad. We have feelings, right, Nastasia? Yeah. Not really.
Oh, I know what we were gonna talk about real quick. Nastasia hates me talking about Neil Diamond, so maybe I won't. But I don't understand. I think because there's one song that everyone thinks, like you have your song, I have my song, that should be erased from the musical dictionary forever and everything. You want to say what it is?
For me. What is your song? Uh I don't I have uh I don't know. Like every time I I know my wife's song. What is it?
Uh Walking on Sunshine. She hits that song. Oh, yeah, I know she hates that song. She hates that song. I have another person I know that will leave the room if pulling muscles from a shell comes out.
Oh wow. What about you, Matt? I'm gonna double down on Sweet Caroline. I just can't deal. Especially when a crowd is chanting to it.
I just do not want it. No, no, no, no. Are you guys both the I hate things that people like people? No, that just reminds me of St. Patrick's Day.
Weddings that are boring. Red Sox games. Okay, okay, okay. It's not a bad song. Please don't jump on me.
But if it was punishable with a short jail sentence, I would say that you should punish the playing of Brown Eyed Girl at Weddings. Really? Oh my god. This brown eye girl. You can't dance to that song.
Yeah, but you remember when I like to dance at weddings? Oh, also tell them how we were banned from dancing. Oh my god. Let me get it. So, like, first of all, someone please explain to me a non-horrible meaning behind Cracklin Rose.
Listen, Cracklin Rose is a store-bought woman, but you got me. Wait, wait, you like a guitar? Like a guitar humming. Hang on to me. Hang on to me.
Our song keeps going on. So what he's saying is, because it it at a different point in the song is like having a time. Listen to this lyric. Having a time with a poor man's lady. What the is that?
And then saying, hey, you're a store-bought woman, i.e., I'm putting you down. Hang on to me, because I'm going somewhere. I st I like having a good time. You keep me humming, but really I'm the one in charge. Hang on to me.
Our song's going on. Unpleasant. And I love Neil Diamond. Whatever song I like. Traveling Salesman.
Um Brother Loves Traveling Salvation Show. Love it. Love it. Traveling Salvation Show. Grab the old ladies.
What? That shit's. Oh, sorry. That stuff's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Grab the old ladies. Grab the old ladies. What are you gonna do with them? Pack up the babies. Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies.
Everyone knows. Wait, don't you? What? Oh, so we went to a place. I'm not gonna name it.
I'm not gonna name it because I don't name places. Or any of that stuff. Okay. I won't even give like the normal hints that normally. We threw a party for a band.
It was fun. We had a fun time, as Wesley Willis would say. And we're there, and so Nastasia and I, first of all, here's something people don't don't like. Don't get me started. Seriously.
Like, seriously. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like 48, sure, right? And you know, you said you're in a previous episode, you said your funk motor is not broken. It's not broken.
It takes longer to start. Right? It's like an old crank, it's like an old crank car from the 20s. We were at a concert before, and Dave was the only one headbanging. Okay, so check this out.
We're at this place, uh, we're at this place called Elsewhere in Brooklyn, and we're now on the roof. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're on the roof. And so Nastasia, in typical Nastasia form, is like, crap on this. We're we're going up front.
Now, me, as a woman, you know, as a woman, no one's gonna like punch her. They give her bad looks, but no one's gonna punch her. But she gets mad at me for not like zooming in behind her while she is like throwing elbow checks to all the people who have been there waiting, right? Prepping them to be really mad with you. Oh yeah.
Ding ding ding. So anyway, so finally I I'm like, mmm, sorry. I literally had to say, see that crazy person that just plowed through you? I have to follow her. Oh, that's what you're doing.
And yeah, yeah, yeah. And the guy was like, okay. And so like, wait a minute, so we end up on there's these benches surrounding the main, you know, area, and they have these this wire like wire fence, right? But not like like an ape like a cable fence that has a lot of bounce to it. So we realize that we can stand on this like narrow bench, but if we loop our hands over the fence, we can s seriously headbang.
And we did. And we did, and no one else did. No one else. It's also, yeah, whatever. It was a headbanging song.
It was a headbanging song. I stopped headbanging in the night. It's one of those songs that's like, you know, ba la da la la la la la juga junk junk junk. You know, and during the jugger junks, right? We went for it.
We went for it. Because I know, I know from experience that when you go full jugger junk junk, you want someone in the audience to go for it. You were doing a service. Yes! You're in the hospitality industry.
Oh yes! Oh yeah. It's part of the there it people. This is where Peter Kim from the Museum of Food and Drink is wrong. Yeah.
There is, and even though Wyatt Senack, we met Wyatt Snack, or I've met him a couple times, but uh we he was at the Mofad Gala. Did we talk about this on the air? Yeah. Yeah, and so Wyatt Snack, famous comedian, does not believe that there is a social contract between the viewer and the comedian. That is all on the comedian to do a good job and make the make the guests laugh, right?
Or smile or whatever. I disagree. I think there's always a sort of contract. If you want the best performance from a band, let 'em know that you like it. Right?
Yeah, we were the only ones though. We were the only ones. Uh well speaking of people letting you know they like it, you have a caller on the air. Oh, sweet. We hope they like it.
Caller on the air. Hi, how's it going? Going well. Awesome. Um calling in from uh southern Germany, actually.
Uh and I uh it's just about uh Vasen or Oktoberfest season. Ein Hofbeih house, Einstein. In Merci and what? No, I like I'm not I'm actually not so I'm not uh in Munich, I'm in southwest of Germany near Stuttgart. Right on.
Yeah. So actually for us it's the it's the Vasen. It'll be the sort of festival that they do here. Yeah. I don't know if you're modern.
I've never been to Stasia's bin and has a derndle. It's great. Nastasia owns a derndal, and if you guys are very nice to her, maybe she'll post a picture of herself in the derndal. I only wear um what's it called? Under it.
She wears long johns with reindeer on it under the derndal. Anyway, go ahead. Well, actually I was uh I was told to buy mine today, my later hose, and then there's there's no way I'm gonna do that. But oh laterhosen is cool. Well, maybe, but I don't really uh I don't really feel like wearing leather on anyway, no uh but that's also an Oktoberfest thing and anyway.
No, uh so my problem that I was having was I wanted to try and cook something that's like a little snack or something that we could kind of eat. And so I bought some pork belly and it has the bones in, the ribs. And try as I might, I couldn't find anything for everything. You know, as you search, you kind of go through and it says like, oh yeah, do pork belly, do this, or oh, you're gonna do ribs, do that. And I couldn't find anything that really gave me a clear answer on a fun way to cook pork belly with the ribs.
And I was wondering if you kind of like lean me towards one direction or another. It's got the the ribs or the cartilage pieces, or both. Both. So it's extending into the so you have the whole that whole plate section. It's almost like it's almost like the whole side flitch up to how how long up into the into the ribs is it.
Uh well, probably not that very far. I wouldn't be able to tell right now. I have it at home instead of on me. Um but I wouldn't go super super far. I don't think it's crazy big.
Right. I mean crazy long into it. So I I mean, I would just mean I my favorite pork bellies are like you know, Wiley's old pork belly at WD50, but you know, it takes that takes a long time. So he used to he would first cure it with uh he would he would use a little bit of uh nitrites on it, and then he would uh he would like salt, salt, I think salt and sugar in in vac, press that down, let that go for a couple of days and cure, then he would low temp it for 72 hours, then he would crisp the skin up. And you could do the same even with the still got the skin on, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You could do that, that's delicious, that's firmer, and then you could slice it. If you if there's a little area of the bone you could french out, you then it could have little handles on it that people could pick up, right? Which might be fun.
Because that way of cooking the pork belly leaves it uh moist and uh tender, but but still liftable, i.e. like not completely gelatinous, right? Like another thing is like you know, bones be damned, ain't nothing better than like uh, you know, tungpo style, like braised, like Chinese style braised pork, uh, you know, if you want to do it in kind of in kind of that in that in that fashion, right? Uh another thing, like if you're gonna be in in Germany, you could almost do like uh like a Schweinhox version where you do like a like you do a relatively long, you salt it and stuff, do like a long braise on it and then deep, you know, cut it into pieces that again with the little handle, deep fry those suckers and serve them Schweinhox style because everybody likes that. Are you familiar with the American uh invention of the Midwest called pig wings?
No, no, I'm not. Pig wings are like mini Schweinhox, where they they at the at the butcher, uh sorry, at the packing plant, they they take some like uh one of the bones uh in the legs, a smaller one, and make like mini Schweinhox with it so that they're they're like remember we had those in Milwaukee? Those things are sick. I for those of you that have never had Schweinhox, it's the best, it's one of my favorite pork. It's just like it's just a pork extravaganza.
You like that stuff? People in Germany love that stuff, right? You like that stuff, don't you? Yeah, no, it but that's yeah, that's what I was kind of going for. I was like, well, how can I make something that would kind of be like that, you know?
Yeah, I know that they love it here. So yeah, I mean, the only I think that would work. I mean, the the issue is is that uh the the advantage of the way that Wiley was doing it is the disadvantage of like tongue po pork style is that the that the the skin stays kind of gelatinous and gooey, which is delicious, right? But it's not gonna give you that crackling, going back to the word crackling, that crackling like hit that you get off of like a Schweinhoxa. But you know, we used to do pork belly doing that kind of long and low, whether you do a traditional braise or not, then cool it down, cool it down, and then crackle render out the the skin down almost like a duck breast, and that is good.
That tastes good. Uh or you could do the the prickle and like a little bit of basicity to make sure it browns and then broil crackle it, and then you'll get more of those kind of blisters that you get um on the skin in a more blistered pig sitch. The problem with deep frying the pork belly entire is that um you will most likely by the time the skin gets crispy crackly good, you most likely will overcook relatively large portions of the meat. Yeah, it was something I'd like to avoid. If I could.
Right. I just think doing it whole would be kind of hard as well. Uh what do you mean, frying it whole? Um, I don't think I could fry it whole. Yeah, so like the way to fry things uh I mean I can't rec I sorry, I can't recommend it.
It's not safe at all. What the hell am I talking about? Yeah, yeah. So I was gonna say, like, like don't don't ever do this, but like okay, never mind, never mind, never mind. Okay, okay.
Yeah, okay. But there are ways to do, for instance, relatively large shallow fries with based over so that you can fry just the bottom of it in kind of a shallow fry situation, and then do like a hot oil based over to rewarm the top, and that'll allow you to cook the skin more in a deep frying. But most of those involve extreme risks of oil fire and he's not gonna do them, so self-immolation. Thank you. Speaking as someone who has immolated themselves on more than one occasion.
Okay. Yeah. And by the way, I'll say one of my life goals is to never catch on fire again. I'm like at least halfway through my life now, and I'm gonna say Dave, you don't even know when your life is gonna end. I know that I know that I'm not gonna make it past 96.
Anyway, point being that, I mean, maybe I will, but I mean, odds are not. My point being that, like, I just hope that my catching on fire days are behind me. I think it's like it's it's I can ask for that at this point in my life. Okay. Yeah.
Alright, thank you. I hope for it for you too. Hey, just before um what was the temperature that you were going up for 72? Oh, geez, uh, I don't remember somewhere in the low 60s, I think we did. Low 60s.
So low 60s. I have to look it up. It's been many years since I've done a 72-hour pork billy. I can it's it's in Wiley Duf, it's in Wiley's uh cookbook. So if you have the WD50 cookbook, yeah, check it out.
The recipe's in there. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. Alrighty. Are you enjoying this show?
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But anyway, so to go back just briefly to what Nastasia was saying before. We go into this place. We go into this place. Well, your punk motor is already like at what speed? Oh, well, we had been at a concert already, right?
So I'm already primed. The pump already has liquid in it. Yeah, yeah. I'm in a constant. So we show up, and I'm like, you know what, Nastasia?
It's 3 a.m. also. Yeah. I'm like, you know what, Nastasia? I hate this place.
And Nastasi's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. And they start playing really good music, including, as we all know that I enjoy Travis Scott. Yep. They start playing some Travis Scott. They start playing, like, you know, some older hip-hop that I know, some like Biggie, this kind of stuff.
I'm like, eh. Bomb, bum-bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so like, we're going. And then they make us move to a different spot.
So we keep dancing. So we keep dancing in the different spot. And then they're about to start their their floor show, right? And so this guy comes in. This guy comes in, an American dude, in his best Russian oligarch outfit.
You know what I'm saying? Like and and you know, if you're a Russian oligarch, you could pull it off. If you're just some like 25-year-old American guy, don't try it. You know what I'm saying? He comes and he's like, I need I need these spots for my people, and like shoes us out.
So then he, as he does this to to us, Nastasia goes, I hate this. I hate this! Like out loud in the club, like super loud, and just keeps repeating that. And I was like, you know what, Nastasia? I've never been more proud of you in my whole life.
And we and we walked out. Yeah, we're like, you know what? No, we watched the show and then we've got to be. I watched like five minutes of the show. Yeah.
Yep. And I was like, I'm not shocked, I don't care. You know, a little bit shocked. You were a little bit shocked. Man, it whatever.
I don't want to get into it. Anyway, point being that. Point being that, like, I found the hospitality wanting. Although, Dave, you don't realize that the bar before we were there, I had to do that to people. I had to be like out of these.
No, no, no. If you have a reserve table, that's a reserved table. We were told by staff to go to a place and then were ejected from said place twice. It's like I there's another bar I'm not gonna name that I will never go to again. Well-regarded bar, nice place.
I will never go there again because I was placed at a seat and then I was made to leave because they made a mistake. Once someone is seated, once you have given someone a place, it is their place. It is now your fault, hospitality person. That person is now your guest, and any other thing you need to do, you need to do. You're like this you can you can't, once you give someone a space, it's your fault.
What about when there is somebody sitting at a bar and there's two seats on either side and you have a two-top coming in? Do you ask them to move down? You can like it depends. If you have a good rapport with the guest, right? You can ask them.
They're not obligated to do anything. You can ask them if they mind moving over one. If they do move over one, it is then also nice to either give them something, or you know, VIP them somehow because they have done you a favor because how much obligation do they have to move? Zero! Also, we should give a shout-out to Pablo.
Well we're gonna touch one of the things we're gonna talk about. Well, we don't have a lot of time because we have a lot of clubs. Also, very important question from the chat. Is an oligarch outfit a gaudy suit or some sort of two-piece velour Adidas track suit track suit? Oh, I could be either.
This was the former. Good to know. Yeah. Oh, now I'm I'm kind of wishing this dude had like the kind of shiny track suit on. Yeah.
It's definitely the better option. Okay, let's get to the other side. Alright, so uh a couple of things. One, uh last night we went to uh the old lightning pop-up at uh Pepe's underneath Grand Tivoli, and tonight, I don't know if there's still reservations available, but look it up online. They're they're doing a pop-up at Hunky Dory in Claire Sprouse's uh place in Brooklyn.
So here's the deal. So uh Pablo, how do you pronounce his last name? Wa? Wah. Well Pablo Moi and uh Steve Lavigny.
V Lavigny? Is that right? I don't know. You're you're Italian adjacent. Lavigny, yeah.
Yeah. So his wife, who's great. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so here's what they did. They have a bar in LA in Venice, I guess.
Is it considered LA? Is that LA? Same? Yeah. Okay.
They have a bar, and their shtick, Steve and Pablo, is that they travel around and they find liquor stores in Southern California. And and no, everywhere. Oh really? Everywhere. They some of it's from Southern California.
They happen to live in that area, so a lot of it's there. Everywhere that have old bottles of liquor, and then they buy it all. So like they'll look, they'll look on a shelf, they'll see an old bottle, and they'll be like, yo, yo. We had a conversation with them last night about yo yo, you've got more of that. Crappy liquor stores.
Yeah, crappy. Uh I'm not gonna tell you their secrets, but they have a tried and true, like they look for a trifecta. I'll give you one of them. Don't say it, don't say it. I'll give one.
Don't say it, Dave. No, no, no, don't say it. Don't say it. It's mean to give away this. The secrets, okay.
I won't tell you what they are. There are three things. It's very funny. If those three things, if they call in or some point, give us permission to say what those three things are. There are three, they troll neighborhoods.
And if they see these three things in conjunction, and they are easy to see people. There's a pot at the end of the rainbow. Yeah, yeah. It's like it's like the rainbow leprechaun sitch, and they know they're gonna get good bottles. So they travel the country and they find these old bottles that uh you know the people are happy to get rid of because they're just sitting there collecting dust and have been for decades.
These are decades old bottles, but they're worth like hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to people who know what they are. So they aggregate these and they have this amazing collection of liquor, and they brought it out east for their pop-up. Now, you know what when we travel to other places, we should try doing that. And then But I don't know anything about it. I know.
I don't know anything. I wouldn't know. Let's see if we can find the trifecta and then well then we'll call them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like FaceTime them.
Anyway, because the the the fun thing about the bar, right? Is like, okay, I I gotta be honest here. I mentally have a problem with spending eight Jillion dollars on something that I'm gonna convert from liquid to urine very quickly, right? It's just in mentally I don't have it in me to enjoy an ex absurdly expensive sip of liquid. And nostasi are the same way.
Right. Uh so you know, we didn't order any of the craze daisy crazy crazy stuff. Some people like I I mean, I understand why people really enjoy doing that. But uh, but what makes it really fun, really, really fun about, and that was by the way, I'm such a jerk. I'm such a butt munch.
We show up at the thing. Oh my god, yeah. I'm we're there with Jack Shram, uh, you know, uh Jack Shram friend of the show, uh head bartender existing conditions, Nastasia Lopez and myself. And by the way, we went there a week early. Because we got the date right.
We walk and we're like, Is this Pepe's? Where's Pablo? What's going on? And there's no one there, and we're like, you're a week early, jerk. Uh so, oh, and by the way, the and we should have known that because we saw them in LA at our party, and here's what they did.
Oh, yeah. Pablo and his wife packed a uh uh what was it an S Escalade or something like that? An escalade, not suspicious. A rented escalade with you ready for it, people? Five hundred thousand dollars worth of liquor, and then drove it across the country on an on an unannounced route that they wouldn't tell anyone so that they wouldn't get knocked over like lime trucks in the cartel days.
Oh my god. They went all the way from LA. Or it doesn't work. Well they started in LA. Okay.
They only made like two stops. It was crazy. So they arrived safely with with all all their all their liquor and all of their very, very fancy champagne, which is what Nastasia was going for, the fancy champagne. But the fun thing about uh uh the this crew is they both know so much about the liquors that what here's my butt munch move. I walk up to him and you know, Jack's like, I want rum, I want beep ba-boo and the bee and the boo-boo-bib bop, and so like Jack got a very good rum tasting.
I just look at him, I go, This I hate choice. Give me something fun. And he did. And he did. Yeah.
He gave me something super fun. Uh he gave me a uh a flight of mezcals that were all the exact same distillate, made at the exact same time, aged three different ways. And I was like, isn't it interesting? Like aged in clay underground for different lengths of time, then held in like a larger glass thing for a while. I was like, you know what?
That was fun. Thank you. You know what I mean? And then he gave me something from West Covina. Yeah, because that's where Nastasia's from.
Land of Goodburger. May I take your order, please? So, like the point is is that his knowledge of the products and like the deep, the weird kind of deep dive knowledge he has about all these rare and obscure bottles that he's bought, their provenance, right? The provenance story is always interesting, as well as the story of the individual uh makers and the stories behind the bottles and the different labelings and how things changed over time, makes for a really good experience. So we were like, we woke up this morning and we were like, we should have had him on the show.
Yeah, but you know what? I was thinking about this. Nastasia's like, we're dumb butts, why didn't we ask to have him on show? But they're they're real busy right now. They're moving.
But you should go tonight because it's the last night and it's fun. Yeah. Now, Nastasia, you did not bring with you Applehead dolls, right? No. We were gonna do classics in the field with Drina Dotson.
Applehead dolls, we missed it last week. Yeah, well, it needs a good chunk of time and we have some. So I'll say this. One of the people we met at uh the Houdini party was uh David Carp, Carp with a K. And you should look up this guy.
He writes for the LA Times periodically, and he has had many different lives over the course of his life, right? Which uh, you know, I can uh uh sympathize with. And he uh, you know, he's like a stockbroker, a music producer, but he's now one of the world's preeminent uh fruit experts. He's like a fruit explorer. What's unusual about carp is that most of the time uh pomological experts are either temperate fruit pomologists or uh tropical fruit pomologists or perhaps specialists like a citrus pomologist.
Carp is a lover of all I'm gonna say he's a generalist, because generalist usually is pejorative, right? Nastasia has never forgiven me for using the word pejorative with non-English. With non-English speakers, where I said something that was possibly insulting. He said your rotovap is weak, and they were like, What is what is weak? I mean, what is weak?
And Dave was like, I I mean, I don't mean it in a pejorative way. And they were like, What? And I was like, Dave, if they don't understand the word weak, how are they gonna understand pejorative? So, anyway, so uh anyway, where was I? So uh he has a love of all fruits, so not a generalist, but like deep dive everywhere, which is kind of rare, and of course, something that I really like to see.
He actually uh, you know how uh Nastasia and I uh enjoyed dates, and uh we had, you know, a listener listener gave us a bunch of dates and we used them years ago. Uh we he introduced us to uh actually we had it before the Bar He date. So for those of you that don't know dates, it's just a some information about stuff he dates go through many ripening uh stages. Most dates when they're uh what you know fresh on the on the tree are uh too astringent to eat properly, right? Uh and that's called the kind of the kalal stage.
But bar he dates, which were in season for like the one week that we were there, right, are edible in that stage, and he gave us a bunch. They're still slightly astringent, but they're their own kind of, they have kind of like this kind of almost coconut-y kind of snack crunch to them. They're they're good. But I kept them and let them go through all the stages at home, all the way from uh the Kalal to Rutab to um Tamar, which is like the biggest one. And so if you have never done that, it's too late this year uh to get the Kalal uh Barhees, but if you can do that next year, get them fresh and then allow them, they won't all ripen properly when they're not on the tree, but allow them to go through the stages and just taste them as they go from that kind of crunchy stage all the way through to their fully sugared stage.
And it is an extremely fun experiment to do at home. But related to applehead dolls, uh carp always related to applehead dolls, which by the way, the very first toy that was ever made was most likely according to Trina Dotson. Adam and Eve were at the entry, yeah. They were Applehead doll aficionados, according to Drina Dotson, but we don't have her book right now. Anyways, uh the uh the book that he said he happens to own one of one of, if not the largest, pomological library in private hands, David Carp does.
And so when I started talking to him about applehead dolls, I was like, he did not have a copy of Drina uh Trina Dotson's Applehead Dolls for Pleasure and Profit. And so we showed it to him, and he's like, good find. Good find. I'll have to get that. And but, but he said, I do own an Apple art book called Les Pommes Libertine in French, which we have ordered but don't own yet.
So maybe we'll wait till we get it in. But here's how you all know, if you've ever listened to any cooking issues episode, you know how applehead dolls work. There is a there is a uh like I guess an 18th century French thing, and that they did it also, I think in Asia, but a French thing, where what you do is is you take apples early, early, early. You put a bag around them so the sun never hits them. They grow inside the bag, but they don't color.
Then in September, you uh you cut the bag open for a couple of days, let it kind of accustom itself to having light without getting blistered, then you paint gelatin over the whole apple and then put a stencil over it. A pornographic stencil. Well, I was gonna get to that. You can do anything, but to be official French, like 18th century French person, it better be highly pornographic. Then it colors up, you remove the stencil, and you have like a yellowish green porno silhouette on a completely red apple.
And you can, if you look up Les Pommes Libertine on the internet, you can see instructions and pictures of this. I don't like any of the modern ones. I think they should go, but like the like what's kind of weird is that you know how there's um uh like uh little uh pores uh on apples, those little dots, and those are on the skin of the porno people. It's like it's real weird. Real creepy.
So we're gonna try to do that, although it's not really our year. But like next year. We need to find an apple person next year willing to bag up some apples. Well, if you're close to us, we'll make the stencils, we'll bring the paper bags. It could either in New York or LA a tree.
Because I'm not gonna be in. Yeah, but well, we don't know what anyway. So a couple of things before we gotta go. No, before we get kicked off the air, today there might still be tickets. I don't know if there are.
Mofad is teaming up with Delmonico's restaurant. Dave Hood Wonderich is coming, the chef from Delmonico's is coming, and they're gonna do a sick event at MoFad uh about kind of the long history of Delmonico's New York's oldest uh restaurant name and like amazing history. You might have heard of such things as the Demonical Steak. Maybe you've heard of the wedge salad, the wedge. So uh Fabian von Husky from Contra Wild Air, we were he remember he made that eggplant?
He made that eggplant like remember that? He made an eggplant hummus. And I was like, just call it a wedge salad. He's like hands out this like Baba Ganoush thing, he's like, wedge salad. Can you tell the story about the two men in the suits?
Two minutes. Uh the what? Two men in the suits at the Houdini house. Next week. Next week.
Uh so anyway, there might still be tickets uh to that. Go check it out. The ebony test kitchen is now in uh is now in um in the Mofad for the African slash American uh exhibit that we're working on for next year. And people, it is sick. Now, for the classics in the field that I was gonna do today, which apparently I don't have time to do, I was going to do, and it's friggin' sick, Alexander Kira's classic, The Bathroom.
I was going to relate his classic The Bathroom, printed first in the 60s, late 60s, 67, reissued in 76. I have the 76 version here in front of me, which has, as far as I know, the only detailed study of spatter patterns of urinals with various urinal shapes that I have ever seen. And also the only document I have seen with full pressure diagrams for different kinds of potties for both male and female users and the correct usage of such. I was going to relate it to Taylorism in the kitchen and the Frankfurt kitchen. But maybe what we'll have to do, maybe we'll have to do a straight up only classics in the field episode once, where we just handle Trina, we handle Alexander Kira, we handle handle the Frankfurt kitchen, and we ha handle like uh Galbreth and Taylorism in the kitchen.
All fascinating subjects. I really believe, and I was going to go into a long diatribe about how architects, designers, and cooks need to get together to make the kitchen the kind of place that it can be because how many of you out there are disappointed with your kitchen if it's not a hundred percent, you're not looking close enough. Cooking issues. Cooking issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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Shop top brands like La Cornew or find your local showroom at Ferguson Home.com.
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