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So we're getting better and better, people. From a bird's P38 in Bushwig Brr Brooklyn, joined as usual with Nastasia de Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Nastasia? You doing alright? Got Matthew in the booth, how you doing?
Feeling great. So Nastasi is not wearing headphones this week. We could talk more about like uh last week's conversation about zero my term zero tasking, because we had someone write in who is uh a supporter of Nastasia, initially a supporter of me, supporter of Nastasi, if we have time later in the show, but I doubt we will because we've got an insane number of people with very interesting and different skills here at the program today. So I'm just gonna go through who we have. Pick up your phones, call in your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. First of all, we have longtime uh friend. You haven't been a guest uh as often as I'd like. Harold McGee, the uh grandmaster of uh science as it relates to the practice of delicious things in the kitchen. Sitting next to Harold, we have Ed Coronel, the maestro of Milk Cult in DC.
Fabulous ice cream joint, which I have not visited live, but you have sent me the ice cream. How are you doing? Doing good. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Uh then to my immediate right, we have Ariel Johnson, the chief science officer of Good Eats. Uh, what are you, a professor in MIT? What the hell are you? No, uh I'm I'm I'm a independent scholar. Ooh, independent scholar.
I was uh I was a fellow at MIT for a while. Fellow. And you know, the NOMA fermentation, it's just what the volatile characteristics of of bitters uh you know and boozes as they're put through a GCMS with a sniffing thing. I mean, it's whatever you want to know about that kind of crap to Ariel's. I try I try to know all the things that you can know about flavor and chemistry and cooking.
There you are. Hey, you know what? It's too bad that you guys agree uh so often because since Harold is just finishing a since Harold is just finishing a book on a similar subject, like a cage match would have been awesome. But I've never seen you guys, I mean, it would be, I guess, like good press fodder, someone could be like the dueling books about flavor, but um, but then you you'd have to do that. I'm I'm amazed by it, and I wish I'd you know embarrassed.
I haven't written something that's good. Yeah, Nastasia and I once met the his n the guy who wrote Dueling Banjos. Wow. And he remember when we met him? Um Brinkman, remember Sophie's Sophie's dad?
He, among other things, wrote dueling banjos. And uh now I'm imagining, you know, bing ling bing ming ning ming ming ming while you guys are like fighting it out. Bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bang. I mean like as I I said many times, like he's done many things. He's one of those egot weasels.
Oh, the the Emmy Grammy Oscar. Yeah, and most of those are like huge cheats. They're just cheating. They're like, because like they write some freaking song that wins a Tony because it's in a freaking play, then that play is made into a freaking movie, and then they win an Oscar and they win a Grammy for the same song. I mean, boop boop but then if they put that sucker on TV, there's the Emmy!
I mean, you did one freaking thing and you get four freaky become an e-got? Ridiculous. Like people who do it in all different things, like I believe he won one in all different things, four different works. That is actually impressive then. Yeah, yeah.
But you might have to take that back if uh they make hustle and flow of the musical, and that way triple six mafia can be on their way to an egot. Oh, is that what they what they what they win their what what movie was it that they won the Oscar uh for the best song? Well, I mean, honestly, they'd have to do a television broadcast of the musical to also win the Emmy. I mean, my favorite But did you guys see like the the Jesus Christ Superstar live? I did not.
Nastasia is an enjoyer, a consumer of live television. I am not, but she wanted me to watch it. I forget why I didn't, because I'm constantly singing small riffs from Jesus Christ Superstar. Right, Nastasia? Um apparently, uh shh.
Oh no, I can't remember. There's a classical composer that's like a big fan of Jesus Christ Superstar. Uh, as we all know from someone that Nastasia met many years ago, you cannot trust the musical tastes of classical music. Even virtuosas have bad taste in pop music. Right, Nastasia?
And lastly, but certainly not leastly, uh, we have David Carp, the fruit. Now you go fruit detective. I'm a scientist specializing in fruit journalist and grower. Now we mentioned you on last week's program for those people who uh tuned in because we met you in Los Angeles at the Houdini party and at the uh Santa Monica Farmers Market, and we talked about Barhee Grapes last uh sorry, Barhee uh dates uh last week. And I also mentioned something I thought was interesting is that you are the rare lover of both temperate and tropical fruits.
You never see that. I think there are a lot of people that love mangoes and apples, at least certainly at the Santa Monica Farmers Market where I sell and write from um there are a lot of people who like who like both. Oh yeah? They're made tastes very I I would not I I wouldn't say that that's necessarily the case. But people who love lychees and who love grapes.
Yeah. I don't know, man. All I'm saying is that whenever I go to visit, like, okay, so here are the places I visited. I visited the one in betweeners are like the citrus people. And you hang out with the citrus people because you've done a lot of work with the citrus people trying to.
Oh, by the way, before we start, I'll I'll I'll finish this and then we'll start. So it's like when I visited Geneva, they didn't care about fruit. Phil Force line, maybe a little bit. That's where we keep that's the Noah's Ark of apples in the United States. When I visited the Brogdale, which is the you know, Defra's Noah's Ark of Apples in England in Kent, Nastasi and I visited once, Harold and I visited once.
Didn't care anything about the fruit. The various vigor of the trees was important, but not the fruit. They didn't care about it, and neither did they care about tropical fruit. Uh ditto most I mean, like whenever I deal with, especially apple, pear, and small fruit people, they're just grooving on the freaking plants. And you yourself told me yesterday, David, that that the freaking Noah's Ark of small fruits in the United States and Corvalis in Oregon, right?
Which should be the very freaking pinnacle of temperate fruit pomology in terms of deliciousness. They don't even grow them so they fruit. They put them in a greenhouse. They don't even they don't even fruit, they keep them in little pots. It's the most pathetic thing I heard.
I almost cried yesterday when you told me this. Well, those are just the strawberries that I was talking about. They do have pear trees, medler trees. Um how do you stop a pear from fruiting? I mean, that's the thing.
I mean pear trees are outside and they do fruit. Well, I mean the the strawberries are grown indoors and they don't. And do most of those people groove on the pears or are they sitting there? Well, they do, very much so. Really?
They are real connoisseurs after a fashion. You gotta get to know them. You visit a tropical fruit place and they go completely bonkers for the fruit. They're all about the fruit. You know what's his name?
Campbell at the Fairchild? Fruit all day. Guy just talks about fruit. I didn't hear him say one thing about a tree. Not one.
I didn't hear him say anything about leaves, vigor. He was like, this fruit, best. All he cared about was fruit. I think the trees are secondary to him. This is my kind of mental breakdown of like the maybe only a dozen or so.
You're the only person I know, I've met who cares about like kind of the whole, like the kind of broad spectrum of fruits in a deep way. How about that? Well, there's a reason for that. There are wine writers who care about a broad range of of wine, but there are very few people who have written about fruit professionally for their career. Like really just need for the general public in interpreting it.
Why is that? There are no ads, or when there were ads in newspaper food sections. Um there were very rarely that many ads, specifically for from farmers or or from from producers. And I guess the editors figured there was no reason why people would want to know about fruit, so nobody specialized in it. Huh.
Not not enough fruit service journalism. Or you have to you have to write a racy fruit stone fruit novel, like the orchid thief of fruit. It's been done. Look at and right here, as you would expect in Brooklyn, track down the lemon about a man's obsession with the f that very fruit. Why would someone write a book about growing lemons from Brooklyn?
Is it just like the unattainable? I mean, it was just not like It's about a man who fell in love with a lemon and not in a platonic sense. I've seen some racy lemons in my time. Uh remember the lemon we found, Estasi? Uh-huh.
Yeah. Yeah. Real racy. I bet you did. Yeah.
I've seen I've seen little boy lemons and little girl lemons. I've seen all the racinesses of lemons. But why so, what size is this lemon? Is this a Kafka-esque kind of a situation? Or is it a normal-sized or like relatively large eureka lemon?
I think it's a normal-sized lemon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What well, if you're from California, what's a normal sized lemon to you? Like, show me your hands. Okay.
Like they're they range from this size to like this size, but when you get that big, if you're a farmer, you're losing money because the market doesn't want something that's so freaking huge. That's like the size of a small football. Um, you want something that's like the size of I don't know, a large plum to a small navel orange. All right. And uh by the way, anyone listening right now who wants to go in on the chat room, uh, David is looking for a good old-fashioned citron market.
I said that my old neighborhood in the Lower East Side used to be around Soko Time, used to be like Citron Central. Like there would literally be tables set out on the street with all the various wares and various different kinds of qualities and prices of unblemishness. But uh no longer. My neighborhood is now merely a shell of its former orthodox self, and so you'd have to like go somewhere. So if someone can give us a good location before the show's over.
Uh, I'd appreciate it. Now, one thing I'm gonna have you do before I go into general questions. My uh the people who listen to this podcast are the kind of people that are gonna smuggle seeds, fruits, spices into this country illegally, because that's just the kind of people that listen. So give them your pitch for how detrimental that can be. Don't do it.
That is responsible for billions of dollars worth of damage a year and an increased load of pesticides on our environment as farmers deal with invasive introduced pests and diseases that it's not just a threat to the farmers, it's a threat to anybody that eats. I guess that's everybody, right? Who produces uh farmers produce grain, fruits, vegetables? Um epidemiologists tell me that it's increasingly looking like every possible disease from around the world that could exist in a given growing area in the United States soon will exist, which is the ultimate nightmare for farmers and for anybody that wants to eat good, clean, reasonably priced food. Why?
Because it's a huge economic burden, it's a huge uh uh medical burden on the population of the United States to have to spray, to have to spend time and money exterminating pests that were brought in just so casually, um, because somebody thinks that, oh, I won't hurt anybody. You can't necessarily see that tiny little bug, that little mite that might be the vector of a deadly disease that you don't even know about. Don't do it. And if not for that reason, because if you get caught doing it, people do get put in jail and fined big time. So uh one of those things, greening is an is an important uh disease, right or no?
Yes, it's a citrus, a bacterial disease affecting citrus that's been responsible for the devastation of the citrus crop in Florida off 75% in the last 15 years. Shouldn't they have picked a scarier name? I mean, greening sounds like one lung bing, yellow dragon disease. Is that scary enough for you? Yeah, baby.
That's awful name. Now I don't want it. Give me that one again. One lung bing, HLB for short. I hate that.
I don't want any of that in my citrus. Yeah. But does it actually kill the tree or is it just reduce the marketability of the fruit? Both. It certainly does kill the tree.
Yeah, yeah. All right. Uh alright, so should we answer some questions, Nastancia? Anyone any uh anyone any questions for our for our panel, Matt? Um not as of yes, nor do you have a market recommendation.
People, you're disappointing me. Okay. Alex Cole writes in. He's uh he's an MD candidate at uh at the U.M. Miller School of Medicine.
Uh he'd like you to know. Uh horse conch. You guys ever eat horse conch? Are you familiar with conch? Yes.
Alright. You ever you lived in the Northeast for a while, Harold? You ever uh in your in Massachusetts, in fact. Do you ever go out there to the Cape and forage for welks? Uh no.
Uh I did. Have many, many times. Uh so these are just a much bigger variety. What about you, Ariel? Are you a welk and or conch person?
Um, I'll I'll eat them, but I haven't had the pleasure of foraging for them. I don't you don't strike me, because if you don't like scallops, you're not gonna you're not like a conch person to stash. What about you, Ed Conks? Uh no, no on conks. Good word though, right?
Conch. Anyways, so when you say conch, there are are a wide variety of actually not even the same, not just this not the same species, not the same genus uh of uh gastropod, you know, uh foot stomach things that go around. Now, what you were asked uh I should read the question first. Uh thanks for your time and effort in producing my favorite podcast. Well, thanks for listening.
I'm glad somebody does. Uh you have a great sense of humor and unique knowledge. This is my first time writing, and I have a few questions. I've caught and cleaned some giant horse conch, the bright orange type from Key Biscayne, Florida. I was wondering if you think this is safe to eat.
Yes. Uh, how can I determine what is safe to catch and eat as I explore the waters in Miami? Do you have any cooking recommendations for this conch? I'm an enthusiastic home cook with access to basic uh a basic kitchen, grill, smoker, immersion circulator, dehigh. That's dehydrator, uh, and a pressure cooker.
All right. So, first of all, before I go any further, the the best kind of and safest, i.e. conservative reference that you can get is it's on the internet, fish and fishery products, hazards and control guidance, fourth edition, August 2019 from the FDA.gov. And if you search horse horse uh horse conch or conch in general, they list like uh two two uh two genuses of uh of conch varieties that are eaten uh and kind of what what might be wrong with them. So the biggest problem uh that you're gonna get from one, which you're not gonna get where you come from, is uh paralytic shellfish poisoning, but that's you would know if the water that you went in and harvested your conch from, because you're harvesting them, if there was a high concentration of that stuff in the water.
So it's not gonna be a problem. I was not able to find any like parasites, even though the horse conch, unlike the queen conch, which is like the one that's being overfished right now and like is you know, it's problematic because of over harvesting, but delicious and people love it. Even uh that one is a is an herbivore from my research, and the one you eat eats animules, it's carn carnivorous thing. But even so, I wasn't able to find like uh Anasakis worm references or or anything. I wasn't able to find uh any sort of parasite reference to it whatsoever.
So usually in something like that, either it's gonna straight out poison you, right, or it's gonna have uh some sort of a parasite. Now parasites are usually frozen out. Now I looked at uh I looked at a couple people's preparation for it, including Miss Florida, Miss Florida 2014 or something like that. She has a blog on cooking things, including including conch, uh horse conch, and she uh what she does, which doesn't strike me, I mean, I get why she's doing it, right, is she puts the whole damn thing in a plastic bag in the freezer, right? And then for like two, three days.
Now, this to me, there's two things you're doing here. You're killing it, like you know, like the modernist cuisine folks do with their oysters, killing it. And then freezing it through, freezing it through is gonna be an antiparasitic treatment, right? Because that's the antiparasitic treatment par excellence, you know, for pork and whatnot. Then she keeps it in the bag and thaws it in like water in the sink, but it because the conch is so big.
Oh, so you're not even Florida. Listen, the Gulf course, the Gulf Coast is more than just Florida, though. There's more than just Florida in the Gulf Coast. So, like that includes what? Louisiana?
Alabama? Mississippi. Mississippi, Texas. Part of Texas. Yeah, so I mean, what's more impressive?
Miss Florida or Miss Gulf Coast? I mean, if you were impressed by such things, what would be more impressive? Gulf Coast. Oh, they go, okay. So uh so, anyways, so then she thaws it for like hours and hours because it's so damn big, and then of course it pops out because it's dead.
Oh, she has a nifty trick though, which I think you could use no matter what. She drills a hole in like in the top section in the third spiral up, because that's the air section where the thing is, and she's and she says her words, and apparently everyone else is on the internet, because I did Google it, right? Uh, release the suction so you could get the conch out in one piece. Then you you clean off all of the gut, you know, the the kind of slimy gut parts, you cut off the uh the uh is it still called an operculum on that thing, Harold? I think so, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And the tough foot part, then you you skin it like you would a uh freaking uh uh gooey duck, right? And then you got the nice meat, which you slice thin, and then apparently everyone serves ceviche style and a salad for conch salad. That's like that's the thing. I have seen other people where they do the light boil, like I would do for a gooey duck, a very light kill boil that will also loosen the skin and make it easier to peel.
That's what I do on the gooey duck. Uh maybe I'm just uh weasel. I don't know. And then I saw this other guy who's like, Yeah, I just break the shell with the back of a cleaver. So he's like he like covers it with a towel and he like he hits it, he hits it, he goes, Um what I'm doing is I'm going around the hemisphere of the top, going clack, clack, clack.
You can see this guy on the internet's clack, clack, clack, clock, clack, breaking it, and it gets it apart. Then he like twists the unfrozen, which I think is gonna be better in this case. Although freezing will tenderize. Conch is conch is a tough meat and freezing it and actually will tenderize it. And the best way to tenderize something through freeze thawing is to create large crystals, and the best way to create large crystals is to freeze slowly and thaw slowly.
However, you'll get uh a lot of what is called in the trade drip loss. And I also don't know how many kind of as long as it stays around zero. I'm I'm a little worried about how long it takes to freeze. I don't think it's gonna lose freshness. It just seems a weak way to do it.
You're gonna get a lot of drip loss, but maybe it's the best texture-wise, because the people who cook it or par cook it, they beat the ever loving piss out of it to tenderize it before they serve it, right? And Miss Gulf Coast 19 or Miss Gulf Coast 2014, I don't think she was pounding on that stuff before she made the salad. No. No. Yeah, she was uh skilled, skilled at drilling it.
Uh, I thought. Anyway, uh, so the question for you then is you can go traditional Caribbean style. Remember, it's a different conch from the Queen Cock Conch, and I don't know whether it's gonna taste sweeter or less sweet. Make sure you clean off all the goop. When I eat whelks in uh in uh in Cape Cod, I eat the whole damn thing.
I just boil them, rip them out, grab the operculum, shove the whole, you know, maybe peel a little bit of the stuff off, and they can have a little bit of that, yeah. That grew up at the bottom of the ocean taste. You know what I'm saying? Uh whereas I think if you go through the trouble cleaning it all, it should be a relatively clean taste, but I don't know how sweet a horse conch is versus a queen conch. I've had what you buy when you buy conch at a restaurant is queen conch, typically, right?
Uh but and this is again a different genus, uh, and uh has a different diet. So I don't know, maybe eating snails and crabs makes it taste better. I mean, I'm I don't know. I like snails and crabs more than I like that's not true. I like a lot of seaweed.
I really do. I mean, whatever. Uh, was that an okay answer, Sus? Alright. Uh his second question.
Similarly, I can catch iguana, an invasive species in Miami, but I haven't found much more than a few basic rep recipes uh or advice on catching and eating them with a cursory web search. Any tips on determining if it's safe to eat? Yes, it is safe to eat. However, uh iguanas, I'm gonna, this is a crap paper. I'm gonna read uh read you the thing.
Any tips on cooking them? I've never cooked one, but I can still talk about it even with no knowledge. That's what I'm here to do. Uh I have successfully caught and cooked a few uh fish and lobster from the area, so I'm hoping I can develop a number of recipes with ingredients only from foraging and fishing to have an authentic South Florida dinner for myself and classmates October 19th. Okay.
Uh the issue with iguanas and reptiles in general, are that's gonna be parasites, right? That's the issue is gonna be parasites. So here is a garbage paper. The biological risks of eating reptiles, February 10th, 2010, the source, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology Summary. Reptiles are bred in captivity primarily for their skins, but some restaurants and population groups also want them for their meat.
A study shows that eating these animals can have side effects that call into question the wisdom of eating this delicacy. And then they mentioned all things that are fixed by normal cooking procedures. Or freezing for parasite procedure. All normal stuff. They're like, may contain trichinosis.
So may pork. You know what I mean? Like, although not anymore. But you know what I mean? And then a list of things that ain't nobody ever heard of, but will be killed by cooking.
For instance, I'm gonna see if any of you know any of these. Pentasomiasis. Nope. Uh, you know, guess what? You're not gonna get it, especially if you cook the stuff.
This one I pr I appreciate. Nathosomiasis, like with GN, like gnashing of teeth. You don't want it, but you're not gonna get it. Sparganosis. No.
And these are all theoretical, these are all theoretical things. They also, reptiles have mites on their skin and ticks. So they didn't like get some samples of reptile meat and then culture up these. Not to the best of my not to the best of my thing. The clearest microbiological risk comes from the possible uh presence of pathogenic bacteria, especially salmonella, shigella, and E.
coli, and you're senior. Okay, like all the other food we eat. It's like people are such jokers. Like, how could anyone in their right mind make this as a recommendation? No, you better hold off.
It's got all the same hazards as all the other meat that you eat. So it's it's not gonna be sushi grade, iguana. That's what you're saying. Well, no, because of the salmonella. However, all the rest of the stuff you can freeze kill.
Like all the pathogens, you can you could freeze kill them. Yeah, yeah. Uh so I was mad about that. Uh and then I read a lot about I've seen some people, they whole spit roast the iguana. Apparently, iguana is a little bit of a pain in the butt to skin until it's been cooked, right?
And a lot of the there are whole spit roasted iguanas that people eat. I just don't think that's gonna be my jam. I mean, I like whole spit roasted cooey, you know, the guinea pigs. Yeah. But a whole roasted iguana, I just don't know that there's gonna be enough meat there.
I'm also not a frog leg guy just because of the quantity of meat to bone ratio. I mean, I don't mind bones, and I like the taste of frog's legs, but uh when someone says you're gonna have frog's legs, I'm not like, oh yeah! You know what I mean? I'm like, okay. You know what I'm saying?
See the difference? Yeah. So anyway, what do you go? Any of you guys huge frog legs, people? Yeah, fried.
Fried, but yeah, but like still, do you like all those bones? You just don't you don't care? Okay. Okay. But would you seek them out?
No. No. Harold? It depends on how much meat they have on them. I mean, some are really nice and you know, they've they've exercised a lot or something.
Uh, but others are really scrawny and they're not worth it. You lived in France. Did they actually eat frog uh frog legs uh to a large degree where you were? No, no. We I was in duck country.
Uh much much better. Oh, speaking of later, we're gonna get to this. There's a place called the Cajun Kitchen that is selling alligator meat on the internet, and it says alligator loins, five pounds, and put up a picture of a duck breast. I'm like, I'm not stupid. I know what a duck breast looks like.
And sure shooting I'd rather have a duck breast than an alligator tail, but because duck breasts is like, I mean, come on. Duck breast, it's meat's up there. Um above many meats. Okay. Uh any other any frogs' legs ideas over here on this side of the I mean, just some things you have to prepare yourself for like doing some manual labor.
No, yeah. You know, other thing about frogs legs that I don't enjoy is just the inefficiency of use to whole animal ratio. You know what I mean? It to me it's almost it's not as bad as uh shark fin, but it's like pretty close. You know what I mean?
They you cut the leg off, the two legs, and then you throw the rest of the body away. I've seen it like time and time again when people are selling frogs' legs, just cut the legs off, throw the body away. Like still living body. It's just like I just I mean, you know what I'm saying? Yeah.
I mean, like, look, if you lived in like a lakey swampy area, and you wanted to go out at night with your little frog fork and go frogging, you know what I mean? Because you were gonna eat it the next day and your place is overrun with frogs anyway, you sure, I get it. You know what I mean? But like the practice of raising these relatively large animals, specifically just to throw away the the greatest mass of their body into a trash can full of like things going with no legs on, it just I don't get it. I really don't.
Uh anyway, back to iguanas. So the problem with iguanas, uh, side from the relative boniness, apparently they they can taste very bad or not. So there was a there's a lady, also from Florida, who won some sort of contest for making iguana carnitas. And she, I think, just threw the stuff in a slow cooker and then picked it apart and then and then did it and served it. She didn't even taste it, which is I don't even know why they wrote the article about this person.
She didn't even taste it. Her 11-year-old tasted it. But she said something very interesting. She said the smell was terrible, and that she wouldn't cook it again because it smelled up her kitchen. And a lot of the traditional recipes that I uh looked at perform a traditional technique for many game birds going all the way back to Roman times and before, and that is a quick boil in water before the roast.
And so I'm guessing that there might be some, let's say, off putting stuff in the skin or areas around there. So I would say do the old school, which is a relatively quick boil, throw that water away, skin it after it's been parboiled, then shredder up, fry the meat, and I've seen people eat it that way on the internet, and they were happy. I mean, what do you think? What do you what do you think about those old Roman techniques? Parboiling.
In a pecious, the recipes look terrible because it looks like they're just boiling the piss out of everything and then overcooking the hell out of it. And I ran some tests. If you're dealing with like gamier meats, I can see it. Even like, you know, mo a lot of modern kind of hunting cooking manuals have the kind of pre-poach out. Uh, and a lot of people who um are doing uh bone stocks now do like the the low bring up skim to get rid of that initial kind of yeah, I mean it's sort of like a more uh assertive pre-soak.
I mean like brains or sweetbreads you usually eat brains? Um I have. I mean, like I mean I don't like seek out cow's brains, but we were doing like we were really like doing stuff with lamb's brains and in Copenhagen. Yeah, I don't eat brains anymore. I just too much is gonna go wrong.
It's it's just a matter of time. Like like it's just a matter of time before we before we all go kind of scrapie mad cow, like some sort of yeah, Jakob's Kreuzfeld variant, some sort of wasting disease. You know what I mean? Like, it's really just a matter of time, for sure. Yeah, yeah.
But they're so creamy. I mean, yeah, I mean I like brains. You know, I just don't I don't eat them anymore. I still eat marrow, and I guess that probably also has similar issues, huh? I mean marrow's good.
Right? If you Harold, if someone said to you you have to give up either marrow or brains, what would you give up? I'd give up marrow. Whoa! Because marrow is um it it just doesn't have the the delicacy, the range of flavors, the I mean the uh marrow can so easily just kind of fall apart into fat.
Yeah. So then are you giving up all stocks and all related marrow marrow related products? Oh that's a different no, that's a different story. But okay, so then let's have this discussion. How much in other words, marrow being primarily a fat-based fat-based vehicle, how much do you think the stock is actually benefiting from the marrow itself?
And how much is it just that the marrow happens to be there? No, I think I think its contribution is probably pretty minimal. Um, but if giving up marrow meant having to give up anything cooked with bones like stocks, then then I wouldn't make that trade. I see, I see. I see.
Huh. What about you guys? You guys uh brain aficionados over here. Well, you already said you like them, but I like them. I just don't eat them that often.
Yeah. I don't eat marrow more often than I eat brains. Do you know what? Like marrow on toast, I mean marrow on toast, like crusty toast, marrow. Yeah.
Real good. That that preparation alone, better than any brain preparation I've ever had. You look what do you how do you like your brains with eggs? Uh uh, no. Uh I mean just, you know, uh slowly roasted in brown butter with toast or something on the side.
I mean, toast is good. Everyone like I mean, like some people can't have toast. I don't know anyone that doesn't like it. You know? Yeah.
I told you, didn't I tell you I was in when I was in Iceland a couple of weeks ago, they served me the split slam's head without the brain in it. They pre-removed the brain. Yeah. They didn't leave it up to me to make that choice. And I have to say, although theoretically I'm angry at them for it, secretly I'm happy because I didn't then have to not eat something.
Yeah. Right? Yeah. All right. Uh okay.
So oh I didn't finish the oh I did finish the question. Right? We have a question from the chat. All right, chat, what do you got? R Lee thirty-two asks, any thoughts on using preparative liquid chromatography for flavor isolation.
Any chefs doing this? Ariel. Um yeah, I don't know of any chefs doing this. Um I mean it's possible that like the cooking lab in th in Bellevue has one. Um yeah, I mean, definitely it's something I've thought about a lot and been interested in trying.
Like the big roadblock would be solvents. Um most of the solvents that are really good for doing liquid chromatography are super nasty. So um I would avoid getting anywhere near like hexane or acetonitrile, uh, if you're a chef in the kitchen, unless you have a lot of knowledge about how to remove it well. So pot smokers often do extraction with very toxic things and then have you consume them. Is it just because they're doing something illegal anyway and they assume it's unhealthy?
Or like what do what are your thoughts on? Well, I don't know. I mean, now with um with like legal cannabis in so many states, uh, there are a lot of state level regulations about uh removing and testing for solvents, I believe. Um so like, you know, your buddy down the block, maybe he has some method for like removing all the hexane, but um uh certainly if you go to like Colorado or Massachusetts, they are going or they should be removing and testing for these things. Um I wanted to I wanted to do like solvent because I can't like I've have the supercriticals become reasonably priced yet.
Can I get a supercritical CO2 extractor for that won't blow up and kill my crew? Oh, to buy so I know d definitely people are getting more into supercritical extraction, which is a totally different process. It's clean liquid chromatography. I was gonna do butane. Yeah, so with liquid chromatography, you have basically tiny, tiny, tiny beads that are like sticky to organic molecules, and you like load a column of these with like your plant material and you push organic solvent through, and all the different flavor and other molecules stick to the solids at different rates and um come out in a separated way.
Uh whereas supercritical extraction you use carbon dioxide under like extreme pressure. Um so that actually acts as a like semi-liquid, semi-gaseous solvent, and you can tune the polarity of it based on like the pressure and the temperature. Right, but I mean I don't think the chromatography, I mean, just a first blush, I don't think it's gonna work because the yield's gonna be yeah, the yield's gonna be way too low, right? But if you're talking about stuff that has bad solvents, I mean first. Well, you're gonna I mean for like liquor chromatography, you have to use like a huge amount of solvent to get a separation.
Right. Yeah, because the because the the stuff you're trying to get off moves at a fraction of the rate of the stuff you're pouring on, so you'd be using like liters and liters and liters to get tiny amounts. To get tiny amounts. Maybe only need tiny amounts if you're just trying to get like you know, uh natural like eugenol from cloves. But I mean you should buy that crap.
I mean that the so this is the thing. If you're talking about chromatographic separations, most of the stuff you could buy from a flavor house is isolated that way. So like if you're talking about getting molecules uh, you know, uh methyl chavicol from basil from uh Ferminich is not going to be a different molecule than the one that you would get by doing that chromatography yourself. Right. So it's just for like bragging points.
Yeah, in other words, like that's why I hooked more on the idea of solvents, because solvents is something that I've wor wanted to use and don't because of the kind of you're using solvents. Well, and even I mean, like the the flavor and fragrance industry is moving as much as possible towards like so-called green solvents now, too. So they're trying to reduce the use of like hexane and other organic solvents and moving towards like water and microwaves and supercritical extraction. Right. But has anyone so back to my other question?
Has anyone made a reasonably priced safe supercritical CO2? I mean, like $20,000. Not reasonable for me. Call me when you sell it for five grand. Yeah, let if anyone out there knows of one cheaper than that, let us know.
But when I've been looking into it, that's the general. I think if it was five grand, a lot of people would buy it. I mean, at 20 grand a pot producer could buy it. Because presumably they're producing pot. You know what I mean?
Yeah, no, that would pay for itself if you're isolating TH. At my bar, I don't you know. Hey, I want to spend 20 grand. Why? Because flavor real fresh, real pure.
You know what I mean? Like, yeah, I don't see it. This episode is brought to you by Nourish and Flourish, a handcrafted, independent publication taking readers on a journey from the soil to the stars. Nourish and Flourish showcases thought-provoking stories from around the world and stunning photography. Each issue explores emerging trends in food, nutrition, recipes, soil health, technology, regenerative agriculture, travel, and more.
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Nourish and flourish. Connecting readers with the people and stories that make a difference in living a more balanced, healthier life. Subscribe today or find a retailer near you at nourish and flourish. Thanks for your enthusiasm. I'm well on the way to convincing my wife that we should book a trip to the fruit and spice park in Florida.
Dave, I'm glad you're here for this. We have a little research to do to pick the best season to visit. So what are your thoughts on? I know you said you haven't been there in a number of years, but what what are your thoughts on the best season in South? It's in Homestead, right?
Yes. In Homestead, Florida, to visit for the widest range of cool. And how do you book a trip there whereby someone will walk around with you and actually allow you to taste things? You know, I haven't been there for a number of years, so I'm not sure whether I know they do have festivals held there from time to time. I would go at the same time as the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden Mango Festival, which is usually held in the middle of July.
Not that from the point of view of climate, the most salubrious time to visit Florida. Nevertheless, um, you'll be able to taste mangoes, probably lychees, longan. Um, it's a pretty good time. Plus, it's in the middle of summer, which is convenient for a lot of people to travel. Like with some of the other stuff that I know that you're not a fan of.
I don't know what the bearing season is. Like they have a lot of different varieties of Chiboticaba there. Are they ever bearing? What are they? I I'm not I'm not sure.
We in California, I think things are probably different, so I can't I can't they have some nice mace. I don't know if that's seasonal. They have a lot of interesting aromatic leaves. They have starfruits. I don't but the thing is they have such a wide rate do you remember when we went Nastasia?
Were we in Harold? Well we might have gone once during uh the mango season time and they also add jackfruits but it's not like you can eat one of those off the tree anyway. You gotta have you ever has any of you listening ever gotten jackfruit latex on your freaking clothes damn I I I've still not gotten it out of the it wasn't it jack it's jackfruit right that has the vicious latex that you have to cut and let skim over after it hits the ground am I correct on this? I think I am yeah it's nasty. It does not come out of your clothes.
Is there an industrial use for that latex I don't know I know that Italian American teenagers used to tattoo themselves with fig sap which is sort of in I believe in the in the in the same family they would inscribe their girlfriends' names on their arms in fig sap. How long is that last? Infinitely I don't think so it's like it's like the henna so it's not a big commitment. It's like saying I like you it's like you and me for at least two weeks right uh I can't call on the show is live but I have two questions. We will be in New Orleans in two weeks do you have any awesome recommendations?
Food and drink are both equally enjoyable for us any of you guys been to New Orleans more recently than I have I went to Duke Chase's which is great. Get the shrimp clemenceau. Get the shrimp clemenceau now back when Leah Chase was alive, she published several recipes for shrimp clemen so. I have made this recipe, and it does not taste like the shrimp clemence so they serve at Duke Chase's. Which leads me to believe she was holding something back in that recipe.
Unless, and this is possible, golf shrimp are the best tasting shrimp that God has ever created. And no offense, Golf or Miss Golf 2014. I don't think so. You know what I mean? I don't think so.
I think they're adding some other stuff, but try their shrimp clements, so make sure you have a lot of other things to soak up all of the butter because you're gonna want to consume. The star of that isn't the necessarily the potatoes or the shrimp, it's the butter. Just like nom nom nom butter, butter. And then uh, and you know, have their fried chicken definitely, but also a block from there is Willie May's chicken, which is one of the original traditional like Louisiana fried chicken joints, well worth uh a visit. If you're gonna do muffalettas, uh just you need to have at least two different styles of muffaletta.
You need to have both a hot and a cold go. I know it's tourist trap, go to the central grocery, get the traditional muffaletta. I like it, some people do it. You that don't like them, Nastasia, do you think they're too pretty? Not you anyway, and go to Napoleon House to get the hot one, and while you're at Napoleon House, get you a Sazerac or a Pim's cup just because it's traditional there.
They ruined it like five, six years ago when they put air conditioning in. It used to just be a hot box all all year round, but it's a good old place. And then if you want to get out to a different neighborhoods, go to uh I don't know, go to Couchon or any one of those nice uh places out there, right? Also, do you have any experience with low temp alligator? No.
No. Uh it's a pretty crappy meat, right? Maybe not worth bringing home a giant chunk of frozen gator. Okay, so Nastasia Lopez, Piper Christensen, uh, and who else was on that trip with you? Grace.
And Papersmith. Yeah. We're in a motor home in Florida, maybe eight years ago. Yeah. Yeah.
They drove a motorhome all around Florida with a package of frozen gator, and then we had to cook it in the motorhome kitchen, and it has ruined me on gator. First of all, the frozen gator in a plasti thing is like not like a gator steak. It's like just like shredded, nasty gator meat that's been frozen and kind of weepy thawed, and it was just like it was unpleasant. I've had fried gator plenty of times at like tourist establishments, and you know what it tastes like? Fried.
It tastes like fried. Just tastes like fried. You know what I mean? It's fried. People were like, it's firm, it's uh it's like monkfish.
No, it's not. I've had a lot of monkfish. Uh I don't find it bad. I know it's the stuff that Piper bought was garb. It was like just garbage.
Like, but I've had it be fine, but if you locked me in a room and said what does alligator taste like, I'd say, uh I don't know. I don't know. I have no idea. You know what I mean? Uh have you what have you guys had good or bad gator experiences?
Yeah, I've had pretty good roasted gator, but it's always like been in a rice dish. It's never been like in a jambalaya with gator. It's never been like a gator steak, like gator tail steak or anything like that. Right. And so the jambalaye is so highly flavored, what the hell?
But there's a texture in there, and I mean it's not bad, but it's it's like chicken-ish. Was it was the was the base uh like did they use a gator stock for liquid? No. Right. If you can't make a stock out of it, how good could it be?
You know what I mean? Like, chicken stock tastes like chicken stock. Turkey stock tastes like turkey stock, right? I've even made squab stock it in in in bags because it doesn't take as much bones to make a stock in bags, right? Beef stock, good, veal stock good.
Pork stock can be good if you get rid of some of the initial garbage stuff in it. Would it would frog stock be a good use of uh frog leg waste? You know, when I think of frog bodies and aroma, all I can think of is formalin cured frogs, you know, from dissection tables, or like the unpleasant experience I had of harvesting gastrocnemus muscles from frogs for my art projects where I was chloroforming and pithing frogs uh way back in the day. So uh I'm having a tough time thinking about the stock. But I would guess the problem with frogs also is that is that almost all of their musculature is in their legs, and then the inside of their bodies is mainly guts.
Right. You know what I mean? People aren't like getting excited over gut stock. Yeah, gut stock. Yes, gut stock.
What? Bone broth, yes, but yeah, bone broth which it was a joke about nomenclature. I know, but okay, not an excitement. Alright. Alright.
Uh just stock. Here you go. Uh no. Well, there's a new liquid nitrogen ice cream shop in our neighborhood. They have a very cool uh liquid nitrogen setup.
What's your thoughts on liquid nitrogen ice cream shops? It's um it's not a bad so for people who want to do it, I think it's a great business. Um it can be a great product because obviously you're you're you're chilling ice cream super fast, it's probably gonna have great texture. Um, but it just depends on where they're getting their ice cream base. If they're getting just run-of-the-mill, you know, not great ice cream base, then you know it's it's probably not gonna um taste that great, even though texture might be awesome.
And um it is because the cost of running that shop labor-wise, they can't churn through customers really fast. They're probably not going to get the best ice cream base. But maybe they are. I can't speak. But like, if you know if the spectral's nice and like a lot of my friends, their kids like it, so you know, go check it out.
I always say, like, if there's something you want to check out, you should go check it out. Uh, what kind of freezer do you use? So we have a carbigani LB502. Well, what size is the 502? Um usually we do like a 15-court batch uh for our batches.
And a lot of people on the call onto the show asking where to look for equipment, and there's a website, it's an aggregate called Turnkey Parlor, and they refurbish equipment because like there's always ice cream places and yogurt places going out of the business everywhere all over the United States, and they at least provide like a three to six month warranty on most of the stuff that they send back out into the world, and it's a pretty good resource for people who because people are always asking like where to equip and turnkey parlor, um, they have a website and they they're a pretty good source because they they they refurb. So how like how much would like I don't know if you look, but how much is like an old LB100? I mean, they don't make the LB 100 anymore. It's not actually that much cheaper than a 502. Really?
Yeah, because the countertop LB100, it's nice because it's like uh 220. Um, but and it's like a three to five quart batch. I've used a three-quart maybe. Yeah, and it's air-cooled, it's air-cooled, but it's still like seven to nine grand. You can get a nice, you can get a nice 502.
I have a theory about why the 502s are so cheap. Um Colts Coldstone, the chain, they were running all of their businesses on 502s for like a decade, and a bunch of them all went out of business. And so there are all these five refurb 502s on the market. And they're 12 grand, 10 10 grand, 12 grand, depending on where you get it refurbed. And you know, they last 20, 30 years.
Like they're it's like a stove. I mean it's a reverse out. Like there's there's there's nothing to break except your belt, and like I've replaced the motor on ours before, and I mean they just let it run. And the refrigeration system's pretty robust. Yeah, it's 404, and you know, if you need to get it recharged, it's not super cheap, it's not super expensive either.
And the front doesn't break like the LB100s used to break all. It's all stainless. So it doesn't have the plastic door, it has got a stainless door. And now, the reason I asked, what's the batch time on that? Oh, I mean, it's super quick.
I mean, depending, I mean, as low as three minutes and as high as like nine minutes for 15 core batch. Alright, listen very carefully, people. Theoretically, liquid nitrogen is going to give you smaller crystal size. If you have a machine that can do a batch of ice cream in three to what do you say, eight? Three to nine.
Three to nine minutes, your tongue is not an accurate enough texture measuring machine to tell the difference in ice crystal size uh at that freeze rate in a batch freezer. It it just isn't. The liquid nitrogen, it's a spectacle. It's a nice people like seeing it, you know, when they go into stores, you know, it's what I don't like is the people who are bad at it who get chunky pieces that are over frozen. It's not that they're bad, it's just like they need to be tempered out all to one temperature.
You know what I'm saying? I find more often than not, I would prefer someone make ice cream, draw it at the correct temperature, and then have it in a dipper case at the correct temperature for serving, and then serve it to me. I find that that is when ice cream tastes the best. Am I wrong about this? No, you're completely right.
I mean it's like serving if if but it's it's another like place where service can fall, is where what serving temperature is. People don't spend enough on their dipper cases? Uh no, they don't keep track of what's happening in the store. So if you know, if if it's if there's a big open window, it'll rate it'll pop the temperature of the dipping dipping case up like five, ten degrees, or they'll have it running like too cold through part of the day, or like it won't they'll keep everything in a hardening cabinet overnight, pull it out for service, but the first like three hours of service, everything's too cold. I'm assuming that the most of the dipping case is like you get that big thermal mass from underneath the like you have like inserts, right?
And so like are they separately refrigerating the top and bottom so that the No, it's it's one, it's usually one refrigeration coil that wraps around the whole thing, and they function really well because they're top open, and the air replacement when you open the top isn't as much as like a side open freezer. And so, and they have a lot of mass in there, which helps it keep cool as well. But usually those those fillers are just air. It's it's not um, there's not like large fillers that take up all the space. Uh this actually wasn't what they were asking about.
I just as an aside. Uh I'm sure the folks that work at the LN ice cream shop uh will eventually be convinced that I deserve to play around with some of their liquid nitrogen. All I have to do is buy enough ice cream to win them over, right? Uh if I were to nitromut drinks in their shop, first of all, they're not gonna let you nitrile muddle drinks. If they're if they have any brains, they will not let you touch anything in their shop.
Now, they might sell you some liquid nitrogen to take home in a thermos. But anyway, uh, how long would the herbs last? Assuming I muddled mixed with booze and then went home to make the drinks. Could the herb-infused liquor last long enough for tasty cocktails in the evening? No.
So, I mean, it depends. So, uh, oh, by the way, uh, Nastasia, for your records. Uh, big fan, uh, 36 male, no kids, patient wife who puts up with me spending too much money on cooking equipment. Aaron. All right.
Um, so the here's what it is. Uh, certain herbs are bulletproof, like parsley. Parsley is fine, parsley doesn't oxidize. Certain herbs like mint, minutes after you nitrile muddle them, they start turning swampy. Something like Thai basil's in the middle, a Thai basil daicquery batch that's been nitro muddled.
So the the best thing is if you're gonna save it, is what's called kind of blender muddling where you freeze, it's a combination, it's nitro blender. Don't just blender it, it gets oxidized, but like freeze like a relatively large quantity of the herb in liquid nitrogen, drain and reserve the liquid nitrogen if you don't have unlimited supplies like I do, put it into the vita prep, pulverize it frozen, and if it starts thawing out, add a little more liquid nitrogen, and then add uh the liquor and the rest of it briefly pulse to mimic shaking, which is where a lot of the color transfer takes place, is after you pulverize it in the shaking, is when you actually get a lot of the color and flavor transfer. Strain so that the herb particles aren't in the drink uh as you're storing it, and that's the way you can keep the batch the longest, and it can go anywhere from hours for a parsley to about 45 minutes for a Thai basil to about zero for mint. In my opinion, mint is the most fragile. It's like mint and limes are God laughing at us for trying to preserve things.
You know what I mean? Because they just don't want to they don't want to stay. You know. Um I don't have time to read this right now, Nastasia, because I got but I'm gonna I'll read I'll read Nick's thing. I'm on zero tasking next week when we're gonna go back for oh having zillions of guests too having probably no guests.
Uh but uh I thought it was interesting someone asked on the uh Twitter whether I was gonna do classics in the field this week after I said that we had this all star guest and I uh I I will because I have one that you know maybe David you could talk about. Ready? Ready? It's time for Classic City in the field yeah all right. Today we're gonna be talking about agricultural extensions, the land grant uh the Morrill Act, land grant colleges, and uh a little thing called the Geneva Agricultural Extension, UP Hedrick, and the fruits of New York.
Uh now those of you that don't know this, you have a let's say a relatively exhaustive uh collection on uh fruit, correct? Right, about 2,000 bucks. Yeah yeah which is a lot. As they say, a lot. It's a lot.
Uh so uh when I first met you I mentioned that one of my prize possessions is I have almost the complete fruits of New York. Now for those of you that don't know what I'm talking about you're in a little bit of luck. All of them have been put on the uh internet. They've been all been digitized. So in the 1860s, right?
Actually before in the 1850s, they tried to get uh the US government, federal government to give land to the states so that the states could then uh sell it and make money, but they needed to establish what's called land grant colleges to uh promulgate uh knowledge to kind of average average people farmers because this is during the time when agriculture and in fact all working professions were becoming more uh investigated by science. It was more of an idea of education built around trades and practices, right? So Buchanan, being the dumb bastard that he was as a president, uh did not sign the uh land grant uh that the Moral Act in soon when Abraham Lincoln came into power, he did. It was one of the things that he did during the Civil War, uh, and then after it, most of it took place. Michigan, I think was the first land grant uh college that was built, but Cornell not that far behind.
Uh now, these were funded by the states, which means that each individual state did their did their own uh thing. And in 1905, the agricultural extension, a guy named S.A. Beach, who was the second head of the horticultural uh thing there at uh in Geneva, New York is where it was, came out with a two-volume set called the Apples of New York. Now, for those of you that know anything about New York City, uh New York State, we know apples. We we do good apples here.
A lot of stuff we don't do that well, but apples, it's we're good, we're good. And back then, better, right? You know what I mean? Uh so it was true or false, like still is one of the top two or three references on apples that's ever been published. There have been dozens of books, so I'd have to think just what it is that we're talking about, but certainly it's indispensable.
It's a linchpin of the lineup of anybody's pomology collection. And it's gorgeous. It is, it's a beautiful set. Now, it's two volumes and it's relatively uh small compared to the format of not not in length, because it's two volumes, but in physical dimensions, it's length and width is more of a normal book size, not a coffee table book. But it had for the time very advanced color platework and has some of the prettiest pictures in it of any pomological text of that era.
Would you agree? I certainly would, yeah. Yeah. And now, SA Beach, like, I don't know, he wasn't here for the long haul. He leaves after 1905, and in comes a guy named UP Hedrick.
You want to talk a little bit about UP Hedrick? Ulysses Prentice Hedrick, who died, I think he was in his 90s in 1951, was one of the greatest pomologists, so much so that one of the orchards in which Andy Marianne and I grow stone fruit in Morgan Hill, California is named the Hedrick Orchard, the our largest orchard, in fact. And he was head of the the agricultural station and in Geneva for many years, including for six, I believe, of those large the the Apples of New York was an octavo-sized volume, if that means anything to book lovers out there. The um the main New York fruits of New York series was a quarto size. They're huge.
They're maybe the size of a Manhattan phone book and then some. Yeah, no one remembers what a phone book looks like. Just you and me. Yeah, but yes, yeah. And they're like, I don't know, 600 pages each.
There's the cherries, there's the peaches, there's the grapes, um, small fruit that the small fruit of of New York, the pears of New York. Yeah, yeah. I've got them all. Um but the rarest were the they were followed in the the the fruits series was started with 1905 with the apples. Most of the rest of them were the plums.
We didn't mention the plums, were from like 1910 to 1922 or something like that. And then the there was four volumes of the vegetables of New York, which are much, much rarer to find. There are the beans, the corn, the peas, and the cocurbits, which you have in your hand. Which I have in my hand, which is, I think, one of the prettiest. Why don't you pass this around and look, find some choice cucribits?
And first of all, uh, I just love the word cucurbit. Or I don't know even how I was pronounced. That's how I call it, because I'm singing in my head like old, you know, reggae songs. Cup bit, cucurbit, cucur bit, taking over. Anyway, so like the uh point is is that the pictures in this are awesome, and it's also one of those things where they grouped it botanically and not by eating.
So cucumbers and melons and pumpkins, all of the cucumbits are handled in the cucurbits of New York. Um, well, it's amazing, they had to go back to get funding from the state legislature. And these documents were put out when they were put out as part of the annual report of the agricultural station. And so they kept on getting into arguments about how much m you so the the beach volume they were produced in a limited number and distributed to people who needed them, like farmers and stakeholders and libraries in New York State. The beach ones were smaller, the SA Beach Apples in New York came in two volumes and were smaller.
But when UP Hedrick came on, he started making, as you say, these giant volumes that were quite expensive to produce, and I believe were relatively controversial in the state legislature. They were spending all this money on the production of these things. So by the time UP Hedrick was retiring in the in the mid-20s, or he wasn't doing that anymore in mid-20s, his understudy, who I think was chafing a little bit, Tapley, Tapley, right, he is the main author on half of the vegetables of New York, but they had they hadn't reduced their production value in terms of the pictures, but they'd stopped hardbinding them. They were they were cardboard bound and they came in these kind of awesome envelopes. The hardest one of these to find is, I believe, it's either peas or beans.
I forget which one is easy. If you go to Cornell's website right now, right now, and you go to the agricultural extension, they still sell for only, I think, $50 new old stock copies of the corn of New York, the sweet corn of New York, which is also a good find. So you can go buy original from the supplier a copy of one of the vegetables of New York. The rest of the stuff, uh, if you get a perfect, if you were going to collect these, which I recommend, because by the way, not only are the pictures awesome, but like he they go through at the time what was an exhaustive uh discussion of where the fruit came from and how it grows and tastes as grown in New York State. So especially for a New York person, it's like really cool to have.
It's very expensive to buy a complete collection. I suggest getting individual books as they as they as they come up. And these vegetables are printed on glossy, higher quality paper, in fact. They're very high quality. But I what I was told, and I can't remember who told me this was many years ago, uh, from somebody actually at the the station, was that they ran out of money during the depression.
They their vegetables were printed in the 1930s, and ultimately the state legislature said, all right, enough of that. And the series came to an end. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a shame. They were gonna keep, I think uh in the first one of the vegetables of New York, they write down all of the things that they planned on writing, and then yeah, they only made made four of them. There is a book not written, I think by the Ag extension, but funded by the same kind of thing called the Wildflowers of New York.
That's an interesting document, but since you can't eat wildflowers, I just don't care about them. I do own it. I mean, you can eat wildflowers. I mean, some of them, right? Like what?
But which wildflower? Well, like tiger lilies, but is that considered a wildflower or is that an invasive species? Beach roses. Oh, the hips. Yeah, but this is literally the flowers.
Literally the flowers. How do they taste? Delicious. Really? Yeah.
I mean, like a tiny bit better, but they have this like amazing, like perfumed rose quality. That's a nitrum level those. Oh yeah. There are cookbooks of edible flowers. So yes, there are plenty of dandelions.
Dandelions, lavender. Dandelions, okay, okay. Dandelion wine, I've had, I've enjoyed. I have just put dandelions in my mouth and gone home homep, and I'm not like, you know what? I want to eat that again.
And most flower books. Yeah. Look, it's like mushroom people. Like they rate it, is it poisonous? Is it edible?
Is it choice? I'm gonna go ahead and say not choice. You know what I mean? Cattails, but you consider that a flower? Oh no, but we're talking about edible wild.
Yeah, but you eat the shoots and root. This is just flowers. It's not like this is not like Yule Gibbons. Like, this is wildflowers, like flowers. And I've never, I mean, I like nasturtiums, I guess.
There you go. What other flowers you guys like loved? Chive flowers, garlic flowers. Good, right? Yeah.
Uh Borridge. Good. Right. But like of the flowers that don't come from an otherwise known herb. Like, what's a flower where you're like, oh yeah, mustard flower is good.
Elderflower. Elderflower. Hmm. What's the deal with elder flower anyway? Like, is it true that like that that you can poison yourself off that stuff, or that there's some sort of the berries or poison?
What is it? Is it uh with elder berries? I'm not gonna get this completely right, but like be don't ever eat underripe ones. Don't eat the twigs, and like be very careful about drinking the juice. I was gonna bring my may apple in for all you guys to taste.
Speaking of the fruit, perhaps don't even drink the juice. There's both like a an alkaloid and a cyanide issue with elder berries. But not elder flowers. So uh elder I thought there was an elderberry wine. No, there is, but uh there have yeah, elderberry wine when you ferment it is fine.
Some varieties of elderberry juice are fine. There are also like public health records of people being poisoned from improperly prepared elderberry juice. Is it that they're actually picking the wrong stuff? No, it's the right stuff, but either the wrong time or they're getting twigs in it, and the wood is not good for you. Oh, it's the wood?
And the underripe berries. So uh I know we're running out of uh in fact we've run out of time, but uh one thing, Harold and I separately when we were at Harvard uh a couple of weeks ago, whatever it was, uh mentioned I was like, we passed by a U tree, bush. You know, they don't turn into trees here. You know, a U bush. Which uh for those of you that don't know, what's the genus says?
Taxodium? What is it? Uh anyway, U. Why? Texas.
I think it's Texas. Yeah, yeah. So it has a a very um, has a very, it's not technically, it's what what is it when it's not a fruit? An arrow, what is it? It's not a fruit because it's a conifer.
Arrow, is that what they're called? Little berry-like thing that's not actually a berry because it can't be a berry because it's not on an angiosperm. Anyways, the red thing on the U. And you can tell when you look at it that it's a U because it's like a cup-shaped. I'm just gonna call it a berry, people.
Please don't get mad at me. Uh it's like a cup-shaped berry with a seed on the okay, again, don't get mad, with a seed on the inside, right? Okay. And you've all seen these if you've been near an ornamental hedge in the northeast. All right?
Now. Deadly poisonous. The seeds. Deadly. Like, literally, like, how many seeds, Harold?
Like cup. Couple seeds. No idea, but not many. Not many. Like, it's one of those things where you have to warn your kids.
I mean, I don't know whether it's oleander poisonous, but it's like real poisonous, right? The fruit, not poisonous. And so I'd lived like, you know, whatever, 47, 48 years without ever tasting one, even though I grew up around them all the time. Harold, you also, and we talked about it, and you had also just recently tasted it. Yeah, in in Cambridge that that week.
Yeah, and so, and what are your thoughts? Uh to me, it didn't taste like much. Ding. There you go. Edible, not choice.
Don't bother. It's not worth the risk of ingesting the seeds. The Hawes, on the other hand. Oh my God. So uh I constantly make fun of the Harvard students every time I go because there's all these cool plants to forage from.
And Harold and I stayed at a place called the Sheraton Commander, near where uh what's his name? George Washington took command of uh the troops during the Revolutionary War. Uh anyway, so and as we walk to class every year for the past, I don't know, nine years. Stas, you tried it, I think you like it too. We passed this haw tree, and this year, the haws are always kind of okay.
They're real seedy, but they're they're they're high acid, punched, almost like a rose hippie taste, wouldn't you say? But like juicier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh this year, the haws were out of this world. Fantastic. Yeah. Amazing. I the best haw are the tr on that tree.
Big and juicy and aromatic and hanging right there. I mean, often in the past, we've had to jump to you know, get a couple of not so very good ones. These were right there. Yeah, and I noticed, and I was very happy to see this, that on the in the the science building is where the lectures happened. It's called the science building.
Good nice name. Anyway, so you go into it, and right outside of it are a bunch of staghorn sumacs. A bunch. And every year I would go eat some of the staghorn sumac on my way in, be chewing on it, go in, and casually remark to anyone that would listen, why don't you idiots use this staghorn sumac to make drinks? And this year somebody did.
When I walked there, they had harvested all of the low-hanging staghorn uh sumac things. And step so if any of you, if any of you live in a place that has sumacs, it's a little late, it's late in the year now, it's too late. Next year, uh, you know, when they get nice and red, please harvest them. Please like boil them, you know, into a tea. Make tea with it, serve it as a you alcoholic or non-alcoholic, you know.
You know, it's an amazing color, it's an amazing kind of acidic uh taste. It grows everywhere. It's free, and everyone has to do their part to get rid of the idea that it's poisonous. Because everyone thinks of the word poison sumac. They're unrelated.
Do you know how many sumac trees? I've seen innumerable, like biblically innumerable, innumerable sumacs, specifically where I am mostly staghorn, in my life. I can count on zero fingers. I would require zero hands to count the number of poison sumac trees, bushes, whatever they are in the Northeast that I've ever seen. And if it's got a red berry, it's not poison sumac.
All of those, all of those toxic, whatever they're toxidendrian, whatever in the hell those Eurythrol, like doped poison oak, poison sumac. No one's like, I'm afraid of an oak tree because of poison oak. But sumac, because no one's living with sumacs, they freak out. If it's got a white berry, stay the hell away from it. If it's got a red berry, please harvest it and turn it into tea.
What do you guys got? Any last uh before you guys head out? I just want to get uh one plug in for the Heritage Gala. Uh it's on Monday, November 11th. And if you go to Heritage Radio Network.org slash gala, you can take advantage of early bird tickets, which are only on sale for the next uh little over a week.
So yeah, you guys should hang out. Dave and Stasi were there last uh year and it was a good time. We we gotta get off the air. Oh man. Alright, well, thanks everyone for coming in.
Hope you guys had a good time. I did. Definitely. Thank you. Thank you.
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