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Wisconsin cheesemakers produce over 600 varieties, types, and styles of cheese. That's twice as much as any other state. Learn more about Wisconsin's cheesemaking history at WisconsinCheese.com. 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 whenever I get here.
Tell about one from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick. Brooklyn! Joined as usual with Nastasia Hammer Lopez. How are you doing? Good?
Yeah? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Got Matt in the booth.
How are you doing? I'm doing great. Yeah. Either of you two uh eating anything uh good past week? Oh boy.
Uh no. Not that comes to mind right now. I just went to uh should I call him by his real name? Fabian von Howski and uh Jeremiah's new place, Peoples, not Mr. Peebles from the Gill of Gorilla, which is I call last night's good.
It's good, nice. Yeah. Now we got a good business going there. It's in the uh Essex Street Market in the market line downstairs. Yeah.
You guys went nowhere. And no, it's fantastic. Don't you go out like three, four times a week? Yeah. I haven't gone there.
Anywhere? You guys know where good? Oh. No. Not that I want to talk about now.
Wow, all right. All right then. Great. Uh, calling your questions to 718497-2128. That's 718497-288.
What? Wait. 718497-2128. Right, Matt? Ding-ding-ding.
I don't know. Uh, so next week, I believe, Nastasi, we have on the show. Is this correct? This time they're coming in. The Oura King New Zealand salmon.
Booker, my son Booker's favorite salmon. Do you think I should try to get him off of school so he can come in and talk to the Oracing people directly? Yeah. Definitely. Yeah?
Are they gonna get, by the way, uh, if the if we still have the listener who turned the Booker saying, shut up, Dad, into a ringtone, Booker is lobbying to have me get rid of that as my ringtone. Because he's like, it makes me sound mean, Dad. And then but then if I if I say anything about it, he'll just still say, Shut up, Dad. You know what I mean? But anyway, he wants me to change the ringtone, but I still appreciate that someone made that for me.
Anyway, I'll try to maybe get Booker off so he can come in. Are they bringing salmon in? It's here, right, Matt? No, no, no. It's coming, yeah.
Next yes, and it will be here. Is it gonna be cured, raw, cooked? What are they bringing? Do you know? I have no idea.
I mean, am I expected to bring a Searzole and cook it live here? I mean, what? I don't know. Alright. Uh speaking of, we I don't know about the Sears All.
I really don't. Amazon's really hosing us. Are our are our Sears alls allowed to be sold yet? The ones that we own yet? Super.
By the way, people, everyone knows how much uh Nastasi and I love the Amazon, so I won't belabor it. But we're since we control still the cocktail cube and the spinzall, the sale is still going on the spinzole and the cocktail cube. I'm just gonna go ahead and say for 999, a cocktail cube was a good gift for the bot tender in your life because then they could just use it, put it in their bucket, and when they go to somebody's house and that person has crappy ice, they're still gonna get a good texture, shake and drink. Nastasi, right, right? So our Searzol order was late, right?
Because of a Chinese holiday. And so they were like, it's late. We're gonna dock you. They meaning Amazon. Yeah, and they said, give us the reason it was late.
So I gave them a reason why it was late. And they said, Well, that's not true because Chinese holiday was from this date to this date. Please dive deeper into your delay reason and let us know. What? How to improve your future shipments.
Oh my god. Dive deeper into your delay reason. Dive deeper into my delay reason. Alright, well, I'm pretty sure Nastasia is. First of all, Amazon, Amazon done took the water out of that pool.
So as soon as you dive in, your face hits the concrete. There's nowhere deeper you can go without it without a drilling rig. I mean, jerks. Anyway. Unbelievable.
Biff writes in regarding vegan creamer. I want to go vegan with my coffee cream. Uh, but all the options seem subpar. Uh it seems like separation and flocculating, or flocculation, are issues with most of the milks. Uh, is there any method or doping that resolves this or any brands that have cracked it?
Thanks, Biff from Philadelphia. Well, okay. Uh Nastasia, you got your vegan face? Mm-hmm. She can't even that's just your normal face now.
You just walk around in a perpetual vegan? She just has her normal face on it. I'm so depressed. I already read that question at home, so I made it when I so you can't be bothered to make it now. Is the vegan face the face she makes when she has served something vegan?
No, like, okay, like let's say, let's say someone shows up. So the for those of you that have never been to Roberta's, that the radio is in the back in a container, and there's like a large window, and then there's this kind of atrium that they kind of fake put a roof over. I don't know how the heck it's allowed by the department of Uh Buildings or whatever, but we we don't talk about that. Yeah, and then, but like, so we just sit here at this picture window and we see people come in and out. So the vegan face is the same face, Matt, so you would know that she makes when she sees like an inappropriate midriff.
Uh-huh. It's the same face. Or, and by the way, that's not a gendered thing. I mean, you have male, female midriff. I mean, yeah, most of the yeah, yeah, yes.
Yeah. Or like when she sees like a giant like wad of pit hair, something like this. They're putting your pizza down. Which is a it's a new it's a Brooklyn thing, people. It's a Brooklyn thing.
This is not meant to be, you know, pejorative, I don't think. Anyway, that's the same face she makes. It's the same, same relative face. Yeah. Uh anyway.
Uh so Biff, I don't have any actual knowledge with non-dairy creamer. By the way, if you say just say non-dairy creamer to somebody, and you're talking about the stuff that was developed, oh, I don't know, in the 50s or whenever, that stuff isn't necessarily vegan. It just doesn't have milk in it, right? So most of those non-dairy creamers have casein in it that is in fact derived from milk. It's just not actually milk.
And I don't know how they get away with calling it non-dairy creamer, but a lot of vegans uh don't trust that non like labels like non-dairy cream are like coffee mate, creamora, which I don't even know if they make anymore. There's the liquid ones and the powdered ones. So while I was researching this, though, by the way, sorry I'm gonna go off on a little bit of a tangent here. Uh I had forgotten, I did it one time know this, that it is possible to use non-dairy creamer uh to make giant fireballs. So the next time Nastasi, you want to make these at uh at Stanford?
No. Why not? You don't like a giant fireball? I thought you loved Pyrotechnics. This strikes me as possibly the best use of non-dairy cream.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you get any size can you want, right? All the way from a small can up to, and there's a website, I wish I had written it down, that gives you number of ounces of pyrodex, like black powder to use for you know, per square, you know, per diameter of can. So you punch a hole in the bottom of the can, you put a fuse, long fuse, into the bottom of the can, you pour the pour the black powder in a line, then you then you take, and you know how like when you're cooking uh, you know what are the old school cooking methods for uh veg uh or even some braises is you cut like a you cut a you fold up, you fold a parchment paper into like uh in into like a pot into like a wedge shape, and then you cut a circle and then a little thing so you can stick it into the pan so that it can gently cover, but like not have a pan way up top way up high. Are you familiar with this technique?
Absolutely not. Okay, well, anyway, it's a technique. Uh for a lot of times cooking veg. Now, but instead of cutting a hole in the middle, right? Uh you just cut a circle out of something thin, like tissue claw tissue paper or something like this, stick it on top of the black powder, and then and you want to do this in the place where you're gonna light it because you don't want the stuff to get compacted, and God forbid you don't want to create an electrostatic spark or anything like this that sets off the uh the black powder.
But you just start dumping like non-dairy creamer or like uh milk replacer from like a feedlot store, even flour or confectioner sugar on top, like a layer of it on like a fairly you know a decent layer. You fill up the can like you know, half full or something like this, uh and then you light the fuse and you run. And what happens is uh you familiar with grain silo explosions, Nastasia? Yeah, Matt? Uh yes, I am.
Yeah, okay. So, like uh flour, grain like these places that deal with dust in big containers really have to worry about explosions. And on the internet, you can see flour explosions. People will make these anyway. So, what happens is the black powder injects the thing instantly into a dust cloud and simultaneously ignites it.
So, like a five-gallon bucket like from Home Depot set up this way can make a fireball that's like 70 feet tall. I've always wanted to see this while also not wanting to see this. Oh, I totally want to see this, but the reason it's germane to this topic is that in the biz, the website I was reading this morning, because it was originally done with cremora, non-dairy creamer powder, which isn't even, I don't think available anymore. The entire genre of like uh creamer or other powder-based fireballs are referred to just as creamoras. Like that?
Anyway, I thought that was interesting information. Nastasia, not so much, which is weird because usually she loves pyrotechnics. I don't know what it is. Yeah, what is it about it? You don't like but what you love pyrotechnics?
How come you're not excited by the cremora? I don't know. Seasonal affected, uh, whatever. I don't know. Yeah, it's weird though, because usually any kind of explosion you're in.
Yeah. All right, next week in the studio, we uh you can't you can't exp you can't explain why you're not uh anyway. So uh other than blowing it up, because I have honestly never consumed in my life a non-dairy creamer, I can't really state whether one is good or better than another. And I also noticed looking at websites on this, I looked at other people's reviews of this, that um person's favorite brand is another person's yuck brand. So I think you really have to kind of look at them.
That said, I did what I recommend anyone do this, by the way. So this is gonna become all of a sudden this is gonna become a uh a pseudo-answer that is applicable only to Biff and the people who are interested in non-dairy creamers, to anyone who is trying to figure out anything about any kind of commercial food. If somebody does something even remotely similar to what you want, the good news is that the ingredients are very clearly listed, and the ingredients are typically always available on the internet. So I just went to three people who had good reviews uh by you know people who consume non-dairy creamer and looked at the looked at the ingredients and then looked at why people liked certain ones versus other ones. So they could do this on their own?
Yeah, but then we'd be out of a job. Not that we're paid. But the uh here's the thing. So uh I believe it's Kitchen, their favorite brand is Ripple, right? And not Ripple, the like 20-something percent 1970s like out like sweet alcohol product that uh Fred Sanford from Sanford and Sun enjoyed.
Uh but Ripple, the non-dairy brand founded by one person and the other person who founded Method. Do you buy those soaps, Method? No. Anyway. Uh but you're familiar with it.
Okay. Uh so they make an uh a half and half replacer that, and here are the ingredients water, uh, sunflower oil, and then ripple tea. Rippletine is their trademarked uh pea protein, right? Uh, and then less than 1% of lecithin, uh sunflower lecithin, uh, disodium phosphate, dipotassium phosphates, uh natural flavor, whatever the hell that is, and gel-an gum. Now, you get the things you want to pay attention to are the pea protein.
The pea protein is in there to um to substitute for the milk proteins that would otherwise be in there. The sunflower oil is there to substitute for the oil, right? The butter fat that would be in milk. Um the lecithin is there to help bind it. The phosphates are probably also there to keep things from from breaking in the same way that they are in um in uh imitate not imitate imitation cheese and also processed cheese.
If you look up, look up melting salts. They're probably there for a similar reason. And gel-an gum. Gelan gum is the one you really want to uh look at there because it shows up again, as does pea protein. If you look at so delicious oat milk, they have filtered water, whole oat flour, sunflower oil, ding ding, again, pea protein, ding ding, again, potassium citrate, which is also another um uh, you know, what's it called?
Melting salt that you would use in cheese. Sodium bicarbonate, why that's there, I don't know. Sea salt, natural flavor, and get ready for it, people, gelan gum. Almond breeze contains almond milk, cane sugar, almond oil, sunflower lecithin, there you are again. Dipotassium phosphate, natural flavors, pea protein, sea salt.
These guys also have guar gum, probably to stop the almond uh from uh separating on itself, and gelan gum, right? So guar gum plus gel an gum. It's actually guar plus gel-in' is an interesting system. I've done some research, but I don't have time to talk about it now. So, anyway, the key point here is they're all lightly stabilizing this stuff with gel-an, which is stable in heat or in cold.
They're adding either a citrate or a phosphate, which is probably also helping it from breaking, right? And then uh these guys, these three people are all using uh pea protein. Then the question is do they also have uh oat in it? Now remember, oat milk, the people who are doing it professionally make it a way that you can't. They use proprietary enzyme systems that break down the oat to help it be more milky, um, or or almond milk.
So I would say that I would look at those things as part of the stabilizing. By the way, if you want to just buy ripple, the people who make ripple make it to be like half and half. I think the people that hate it hate it because it doesn't have a lot of extra sugar, so it doesn't actually sweeten well at creams, and so they thought it was a one-to-one replacer for their other non-dairy liquid creamers, which are all fairly sweet. If you like it on the sweet side, take one of the ones that already has some sugar added, like almond breeze or so delicious, or one of these things. Although I don't know that so delicious necessarily has sugar.
Anyway, look into it. Elizabeth writes in about pig milk. How was it? We haven't talked about pig milk in a long time. How long ago was pig milk?
I don't know. Remember? I don't think I've ever heard you say the words pig milk. You think it was back in Jackie Molecules days? Maybe.
Uh on a previous episode, the question of pig milk came up, specifically why, and I've thought about this a lot, by the way, so I have my own reasons. We'll see what you say. Uh, specifically why cow, sheep, and goat milk uh are things, but not pig milk. I've never heard anything else on the show about it, but I might have missed it. Over Thanksgiving, I thought to ask my mom, who grew up on a dairy farm in central Kentucky, and also raised some pigs.
Her thoughts. It would just take too long to milk a pig. Cows, sheep, and goats, sheep. And goats typically only have one to three babies at a time, and a few teets that produce plenty of milk. Pigs have whole litters of ten or so, and many teets that each produce a small amount of milk.
It'd take all day to milk a sow. Hope that provides some closure on the pig milk issue. It does. Actually, it's interesting. I never thought about the fact that because they're smaller and there's so many of them, they'd be much harder to do, versus ones that are like concentrated in more udder-like situation.
I mean, that's obviously true. Uh I had always thought that it was just because they were raising so many, you know, pigs, and those pigs had to be raised through they, you know, all the way through. They weren't just like calfing and killing for veal or something, and then like raising solely dairy pigs, and that's why. But I like the I like the milking a sow it take all day route. But that said, if anyone out there wants to milk a sow and make us some pig milk cheese, Nastasia is first in line to eat the pig milk cheese, right, Sus?
Pig milk. You're not gonna eat pig milk cheese? If someone sent you pig milk cheese, you wouldn't eat it. I mean you would make me, so yes. But you wouldn't want to?
No, not really. What about you, mad pig milk cheese? Oh, you don't eat you eat cheese. Yeah. Yeah.
Pig milk cheese. I think a lot of people would want to try pig milk cheese once. You know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. Anyway.
Not that I want you to like, you know, kill the litter of pigs by not allowing them to have their, you know, mother's milk, but anyway. Devin writes in about the burger tender. For those of you that uh don't remember, the burger tender is the uh device, it's the steam chest that the Connecticut people use to make steamed cheeseburgers, which is only a thing in Connecticut. Please don't say that the people who put a lid over their pans when they're cooking burgers are making steamed cheeseburgers. That is not the same thing, and that only shows that you have never been to Connecticut and had a steamed cheeseburger, alright?
It's just what it means. If you're like, but I put a lid over my pin and it steams the burger and the cheese. Not freaking the same, all right? It's just not. I'm not saying that it doesn't have some steam quality, it doesn't add some steaminess to your burger, but you have not yet had a steamed cheeseburger.
Now, I've also said that I am not a gigundous fan of Do you ever go with me to that place, Taz? No. I'm not not a gigundous fan of the steamed burger itself, although I like it as a thing that exists. I'm glad that it exists, not necessarily that I want to ha have it. But the steamed cheese is amazing.
But anyway, the burger tender spelled B-U-R-G-R-T-N-D, and I believe another apostrophe R, two word, burger tender, is the steam chest that you make the Connecticut style cheese steamed cheeseburgers in. Uh now, uh Devin writes in regarding this. What is the best way to replicate the burger tender experience? Not sure if there is some special steaming mojo with that device. Would a pot with a steamer basket plus mini loaf pan work for just wanting to experience the squeak?
Now you only get the squeak, Devin, on the uh president brand. Uh oh my god, the name of it just went out of my head. Of the cheese. Just went out of my head. President Brand, it's their fake uh Swiss.
It's their fake Swiss, what's it called? President Brand, it'll come to me. Uh, but but even if you don't get that squeaky one, any of the cheeses is good. And I'll I'll give you some more information on steaming anyway. So, yeah, if you don't want to spend the $350 on on that, right?
You can, in fact, from them just by the trays. And three steaming trays, which do work in a basket, it's not quite as good because you tend to get more drip on it unless your steamer is designed well to not have a lot of drip down from the roof of the steamer into the things. But you can design it so it doesn't happen. But the the trays, uh, you can get three trays for 23.90 from the burger tender website, which is B-U-R-G-R-T-N-D-R dot com. And don't try to search for it.
It's impossible to search for it. You just have to go to the website, and they're only sold from this place in Connecticut. But before I got them, I did, in fact, experiment, and you could experiment as well, just with aluminum foil cups that I've made. I will give you the exact dimensions of a proper burger tender tray. It is first of all, the real ones are made of Ultem plastic, which are nice.
They used to be made of steel, I think. And they switched to Ultem, which is nice. It's a high-temp, clear uh sanitary plastic because it doesn't burn your hands when you pick it up because it doesn't really conduct heat very well. Uh they are 71 millimeters by 98 millimeters by 25 millimeters deep on the inside. Uh that's at the top, so they're slightly, they're slightly have a slight draft, so it's slightly smaller at the bottom.
That's about 2.8 inches by about 3.85 inches by about one inch. The nice ones have a handle. Uh for cheese, uh, I recommend a two-ounce block. And what you want to do is steam the stuff out for like 10 minutes, uh, at least 10 minutes. If you're doing a two-ounce, like two-ounce block of like mild cheddar, you do it two, let it steam for like 10 minutes until it totally melts out.
First spray, like make your trays out of aluminum foil, spray the inside with Pam, then put the cheese in, steam it out, uh let it steam, like I say, 10 minutes or until it totally levels out. If you use the uh the fake Emanthaler from Presidente, the the the super the super squeak guy, it's never madrigal. Madrigal, there you go. It's never gonna melt. It's never gonna melt.
So, but then what you do is is is that with the madrigal you can almost use it right away, but with something that's completely melted out, pull it, let it rest for anywhere between 30 seconds to a minute and a half until when you touch it with the top of your finger, it it just goes back to dough instead of like liquid. Then quickly dump the little bit of like oily steam water that's on in the bat in the thing out and then invert and it should come out as kind of one kind of piece. Now, if you have a hard thing, it's easier to get a spatula in to pop it out because the aluminum foil obviously is gonna crinkle up, but there you go. Yeah, you can give it a shot. That's what I did when I first started.
But the containers are nice. Robert from the chat, in addition to throwing out the cheese name, claims that Ted's steamed cheeseburgers would be much better with a better roll. That's a roll. I believe we discussed this at one point, but they use uh it's been a while since I've been there, but like a Kaiser style roll, which are rather dry and rather bready. Yeah, like you know, like choose the standard roll of your choice.
By the way, since Thanksgiving, Dax has gotten on a brioche kick, and he just goes to the store now and buys brioche on his own, and he doesn't want it toasted, he just wants for like all he started with all the turkey sandwiches, all his turkey sandwiches were on untoasted brioche, and Jen, my wife Jen, thought that he wasn't eating it, so she started eating his brioche. I'm like, Jen, what are you doing? That's Dax's brioche. He's like, Well, he's not even eating it. I'm like, no, he goes like every day to buy more brioche because he's eating so much brioche.
And remember, in my family, because Dax saw the word when he was very young and didn't know what it was, it's called Briocci in my house. Cause he was like, What is this brioche? I'm like, it's pronounced Brioche. Or it was. In my house, it's it's just Briacci.
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Nice to hear from somewhere in Austria. And by the way, there's someone else who came uh came up with this a couple of weeks ago. Phil Bravo was on the show and he was talking about we were talking about what a crappy instrument the recorder was, and he was talking about making instruments out of carrots, right? Wasn't that what he's talking about? So Florian wrote in and said, I've hoped in the I hope I got the right email.
You did, because here I am talking about you. Uh in the last week's episode, you discussed uh with Phil Bravo how to make vegetable flutes. So I guess you might enjoy the first Viennese vegetable orchestra. So if you look at the uh Gamusa Orchestra, which is I guess.org, which is the uh Viennese Vegetable Orchestra's website, uh, you can uh check it out. And by the way, for the for the Nastasia's records, uh Florian is 38 with two kids.
Uh his wife is Italian and does not cook, neither does uh her mother. So that's going back to the Buggiali thing about not every Italian mother is a good cook. Uh so she was mostly fine with whatever I do in the kitchen. Best greetings from Vienna. So the um the first Vietnamese the first Viennese vegetable orchestra is about 10 people.
At one time it was about 12. You can go on their website and they did a crowdfunding thing like a couple of years ago for their most recent album, which is called the Green Album. But you you might actually enjoy this instead of crowdfunding Nastasia. You ready for it? Kraut funding.
Crowdfunding. Yeah. They make uh so like they make all of their stuff. They do they do a lot of work with cabbage, they do herbs, they have a lot of multi-fruit instruments, so like a carrot with the bell of a bell pepper on it to kind of make the thing. If you and all of their stuff is available on their website to kind of listen to.
And you know, I like some of it better than others. It's all kind of in the modern music kind of like realm. So, you know, it's don't expect like a lot of melody. You know what I mean? It's like it's like exploring the tonal landscape of vegetable music is kind of what they're doing most of the time for the for the three or four tracks that I listen to.
But it's all there, and you can get your groove on kind of vegetable music there. But I was also sent a rather amazing uh video, and you you'll I'll just I'll tell you first, it's uh the person's name, he's on the on the YouTubes is Poopsy, I believe it's pronounced poopsy, P-U-P-S-I, right? And a couple literally the day that Phil Bravo was talking about carrot flutes, uh, this guy put out a video where he plays uh All-Star by Smash Mouth completely on melons. And so the beginning part of his video, have you seen it yes, Daz? The beginning part, Matt, have you seen this?
I have a cue-up for the minute we finish the show. So they so the first section of it is him creating like different sized melon instruments to get the different ranges that he'll need to do Smash Mouth, and uh also he's constantly recording anything that he is doing, like scraping melons out or like you know, drilling them out with uh, you know, with his drills, tapping them, and so he's getting a lot of the percussion and a like a lot of the lower end and scratchy stuff that way, and then layering it presumably in Pro Tools or something like this, and then does the entire Smash Mouth uh all-star just Melon. Just melon. And I was like, wow, this is pretty good. Uh and then I went back and looked at his old videos.
So he starts, it's you should start at the maybe at the beginning of his career as a as a fruit and veg musician. He starts by covering Future's uh mask off with uh you know that song, Matt? I do not. Percocet, Molly Percocet, Percocet, Molly Percocet. You familiar with Future?
No, I don't listen to Future. Okay, but you know who future is. I'm aware that there is a person named Future. Okay. Well, anyway, so his first cover he does is that, but he completely cheats.
So he's doing, I think mainly carrots, right? But he also plays bass in it. So just an FYI. Poopsy, what he does, I think for a living, is make ocarinas, which is an instrument that I'm not really familiar with. And he said in a quote in his first thing, my ocarinas are like my children, which is kind of a weird.
And he says that you can get in touch with him and he'll make ocarinas with you. So I don't know whether this is some sort of weird, I don't know what it is. But anyway, so I was a little bit like, I get it, future that's cool, but you're playing bass, and I'd already seen Smashmouth. But then I have to say, he moved on from that to a sweet potato version of Toto's Africa, which is amazing. The sweet sweet potato Africa is amazing.
So you have to see that and then go see Smash Mouth. But the the innovation in Smashmouth that makes it, I think, uh super good, is that he takes two watermelons and joins them together to get a very low note so that he can do the lower notes in Smash Mouth, the bass notes, strictly on watermelon, so worth a watch. So what do you got there, Stas? What just came in? I think this is from Caprice Sun.
Indeed, it is. Yeah, what are we what do we got? Well, he was very wet when he dropped his off. Jesus. He didn't even come in and say hello.
He really wants to remain anonymous. Oh, got a clam broth house t-shirt. For all of you that don't know, the clam broth house was a restaurant in uh in New Jersey, and they had a sign that said, with a big hand it pointed down, and it's like clam broth, right here, clam broth. Oh yeah, we gotta look at a picture of that afterwards. And and so uh the restaurant sadly went out of business, but the way they used to have it is you'd walk in to the and a long sh longshoreman uh from the Jersey waterfront used to go work there, and they would just have an ever-flowing fountain of clam broth.
And you know, in addition, you buy drinks, but you just put your cup under the clam broth fountain to get clam broth. And Jack Shram from Existing Conditions and I were like, We're gonna do clam broth at the existing conditions, and my partner Don was like, no, no, you won't. And we're like, clam broth house? And he's like, no. And I was like, yo, clam broth, right here.
And I made the the hand with the pointing down, and he's like, double no. But I appreciate the clam broth house t-shirt. What do you Oh, Anastasia has a hammer dripping blood. Now let me ask you a question. Because she is the hammer.
Let me ask you a question. What have you struck with the hammer that is causing it to be bloody? I think I know, but what do you think? I mean, I think we know it's your head, right? Yeah, I don't know.
Then you got this. What? What is it? Semolina from Bob's Red Mill. Oh, alright.
We have Bob's Red Mill Semolina. By the way, I don't know why they they hate us, but they don't they don't do our show anymore. But it's uh 32% hydration, hand mix with water, rest 30 minutes, extrude them. I can't read what this says. Oh, uh four oh, with a meat grinder uh with a with uh I can't read the dye number on it.
Anyway, cool. Uh I've never tried the meat grinder technique. Although uh Johnny Hunter swears by that. By the way, they're he's closing the underground butcher shop. He's still gonna do wholesale, but anyway, haven't talked to Johnny well.
Thanks for the shirts, thanks for the pasta. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Uh by the way, the uh album of the Viennese uh vegetable orchestra that I enjoyed the most was Onion Noise.
One word, onion noise. You like that? Onion noise. Uh and I'm sure everyone's already turned us off so they can go listen to Smashmouth. Yeah, that's also one way.
I just they paused. They paused immediately. Yeah. Uh coming in from it doesn't say, does it say who it is? Riley.
Uh I want to start by uh thanking you for all the great products and content you've released over the years. I've learned uh much from you and love all of the Booker Index products. My Black Friday spinzall has just arrived. Great. Uh I'm emailing you because I recently uh touched on a topic I didn't realize was so controversial.
That uh whether or not you should add butter to a vacuum bag when you're cooking a steak sous vide. Do you have an opinion on this? Well, you know I do because you quoted. Anyway, uh I conducted a taste test experiment and wrote up a blog post uh that outlines the current state of public opinions, including an article from yours in the cooking issues blog, as well as my results. Let me know if you have any feedback or comments that you would like me to add on your behalf.
Uh okay, so the controversy, I went and looked at the um uh at your you know the blog post. By the way, can we say what it is? What I don't have what it is. I saw it on the on the Instagram, but I I anyway. So the controversy.
One. The question, people is: should you put butter in the bag? And I'm gonna give my opinion after I read what the theoretical controversy is. Kenji Lopez Alt says he doesn't suggest adding fat, either butter or olive oil to the bag and cooking steak sous vide. He theorized that added fat was absorbing fat-soluble flavor compounds from the meat and then being poured down the drain with the bag juice slash butter.
I just don't think that I've I read that and I completely disagree. I don't think he tasted the butter after it came out or did any side-by-side tastes. That's just that's just theory. Uh two, Chef Steps has suggested adding butter and olive oil to the bag with steaks in several of their recipes and guides. Dave Arnold, that's me, has previously suggested putting butter in the bag when cooking Sous-Vide.
Yes. Modernist cuisine adds suet, uh i.e. fat to their Sous vide steak recipe. A little overboard. I guess the idea is beef on beef.
Uh please don't add, and I'm gonna talk about this in a minute. Don't add dry aged fat to the bag unless you want the whole thing to taste like dry aged fat. Okay? Just letting you know that. Sous vide Everything published a video to YouTube where they did a blind test taste test on a single person who preferred the steak without the butter.
There's no such there is no taste test on on one person, right, Riley. Okay, and then and then from your website, from your test, you said in order to reduce the number of variables and potential biases or inaccuracies, I chose a very simple preparation method and started with four New York strip steaks that were purchased together, etc. etc., etc. etc. sliced.
Now here and I'll give you my uh example on it. I think like, you know, Kenji's position here, I think is relatively untenable. That's just kind of a theoretical position. As I've said before, I had the um advantage of cooking the same test over and over again when I was teaching uh low-temp Sous-Vide at the French culinary for you know dozens of people at a time, dozens of times, which was kind of you know good. Uh my thing about uh why add butter or fat to the bag?
Well, the primary reason is because uh I'm not using a vacuum machine, okay? So if I'm not using a vacuum machine and I'm using, let's say, even say, let's say I was using a vacuum machine. We'll do two routes. Let's say I am not using a vacuum machine. Well, I want the bag to be in close contact with the meat, right?
Because that's how I'm gonna make sure that I get good heat transfer. That's how I'm gonna get rid of air in the bag so that I'm not having it like have like a little pocket that you know doesn't have good contact or where there's air in contact with it. I need something to help take up the space in the bag because there I don't have a vacuum where I can just suck all of the air out. So you need some sort of something to take up space in the bag, right? To help it mold around the product.
Now, you shouldn't use liquid because uh have you made broth before? Stas, you've made broth, right? Water a hundred percent leaches the flavor out of the meat. And if you have excess water, even if it's not leaching the flavor, the meat, and this isn't a theory, I can tell you this for sure, the meat ends up tasting more poached, more like pot à feu than than it does as though it was done in a dry cooking manner. So you don't want to add typically liquid to a bag unless you want it to taste more like a braise, right?
Even on something that you're cooking low like a steak thing. It's just I don't think it's optimal, okay? Sometimes in something like a sausage, you can cook in a very, very highly flavored broth. And I've run some tests of cooking even meats in very highly flavored broths, what I call equilibrium broths. So, like hot dog water on the street is an equilibrium hot uh hot dog broth where the broth tastes exactly as much like a hot dog as the hot dog does, and so soaking a hot dog in it does not change its flavor at all.
But the vast majority of liquids that you add aren't like that to a bag. I'm just telling you, they're not. So in general, you don't want to use liquid that is water-based, you want to use a fat. Now, uh when you're sucking a vacuum, right? So the the liquid the fat is there for that reason, right?
To take up space in the bag. In a vacuum scenario, if you don't have any liquid and you're just vacuum, let's say a steak, the sides of the steak are gonna get crushed into a pillow shape, right? Or whatever you're choosing. Now sometimes, like with a duck breast, this is fine, you let it crush and then you mold it on a flat surface so that the skin side is flat, so that when you do your later finish, when you you know sear it after you do your low temping, right? Like it's flat because you molded it flat.
But it's very hard on something like a steak to get it to look nice unless you put something in the bag, and then you get those horrible kind of souvied looking steaks that look all angular and relatively bagged even after they're cooked. So in those scenarios, you want to use a fat just to take up space in the bag so that the bag has somewhere to go without crushing your meat. Now there you want to use a liquid fat uh because in a liquid fat, it will um a liquid fat will allow it to conform to the bag shape, right, uh very easily, but a sol uh whereas a solid fat won't, and if you used a warm solid fat, then you'd have to be vacuuming a meat that was not cold, and as we all know, you need your meat to be very cold if you're gonna vacuum it because all hell is gonna break loose because it will boil off a lot of the water, etc. etc. Complete nightmare.
Um, the flavor transfer off of the fat that you put into the bag is minimal. Now, the exceptions to this are if you use a highly so butter, I mean, sorry people, I love butter and the flavor of butter, but plain butter that hasn't been browned or anything is has good flavor, but it's a relatively light flavor. So when you pull a steak out and you sear the ever-loving crap out of it in a pan or with a searzole or with a broiler or on a grill, you're burning, you're torching off a lot of that, a lot of that butter. So maybe you would notice it, maybe it not. But in general, I serve my steaks with olive oil poured over the top of them.
And the olive oil is the primary flavor of oil that I get. If you have a highly flavored or rancid oil, a very tiny amount of that on the surface of the meat is enough to transfer the flavor, and so you want to avoid it, right? So certain things can be tasted in very small concentrations, even if they're just on the surface, right? And so for I would stay away from those oils unless you want those flavors. And this especially that goes for fish.
So a lot of highly flavored olive oils, I don't like the flavor of them, low-temped with fish, right? So there I'll use kind of a more neutral uh oil. Now I noticed in your tests, you're searing in canola, which is now a fairly neutral flavored oil, but back in the day, before they could properly deodorize it, was I think my least favorite oil. Everyone touted it for health, but I thought it was nasty. I couldn't smell anything or taste anything that was made with lower end canola oil.
This stuff doesn't uh have a bad taste anymore, so it's so it's fine. Uh but anyway, that's my uh feelings on on that on that subject. And by the way, Stas, uh, have I done yet uh chinchilla rabbits, the fur deluxe uh for classics in the field? I don't think so. Okay, so I'll do that next year because everyone needs to know how to raise uh chinchilla rabbits because you can raise them either for fur or for meat.
Do you like eating rabbits, Nastasia? Mm-hmm. Yeah? What is it you like about eating rabbits? They're good.
Really? I kind of like rabbits. What's your favorite style of rabbit? Do you like like a fricassee like a ra like catchatory? That was more like a roast brave.
I don't know. What about well, Matt, you don't eat rabbits. I do not eat a rabbit. I don't know. I like rabbit.
I don't cook it a lot. Uh we'll get into I'll talk more about cooking rabbits next week when although I should do a fish-based classics in the field if we're gonna have the salmon people here. Yeah. Anyway, so for this week, I'm going to do uh for this week's classics in the field. We'll do a quick one because I know that we have to scoot out of here.
Uh so one of the things I hate doing is carving. Hate it. Do you what do you think about carving styles? Do you mind it? Do you care about it?
I don't, I'm not good at it. But so I have always had kind of a little bit of agida about it, and I think it's because like people in my family, if you did a bad job carving, would make fun of you. I also something I don't like about it because like of the kind of head of household, like weird gender issues that had with it, and then you know, like the man should carve. But like the whole thing about it always bothered me. And also making a fool of myself, carving something in front of thing, and my family is the kind of family that will make fun of you if you're messing the stuff up as it carves.
So, in general, I have stayed kind of uh away away from carving, right? And most people are so inept at carving nowadays that in general, even cookbooks are like present the animal, bird, whatever, the roast beast, as uh the Grinch would say, then take it back to the kitchen, kind of carve it in private, where you can like shove your fist into its cavity, rip it all apart, and make put it on a platter, and then bring the platter back out, right? And so I think that's kind of the average thing that people do now. But I remember when the one time I went to Danielle restaurant, Danielle. Did you ever go there, Sus?
Yeah. The one? Did you like it? Mm-hmm. I loved it.
The one time I went there, the uh server did old school like table side like carving service, and something so nice about it, about the formal nature of seeing the thing and the carving, like again brought tears, brought tears to my eyes. And so I think it's kind of worth uh worth doing, but there's a dearth, even now, there's a dearth of uh material on the subject out there, uh, carving. And this was the case even back in the 50s when the first edition in 1959 came out. And I will say uh I will say this one thing about the art of carving, which was by the editors of House and Garvin Garden, is uh it is a courtly of uh gender kind of craziness. I'll read it here.
So Harriet Burkett, who is the editor-in-chief of House and Garden in 1959, wrote: The art of carving came into being for a very personal reason. Two years ago, my husband and I got into a friendly argument about the best way to carve a leg of lamb. I mentioned it should be carved straight down as you carve a ham. He was all for the slanting cut. To settle our difference.
I looked for the definitive volume on carving a Christmas tree present for him. I thought I could, but I could find nothing. Despite the great wave of gourmet gift books, the subject of carving seems to have been completely overlooked. When I discussed this amazing omission with James Beard, House and Gardens food and wine consultant, we decided that it full-scale recognition of the neglected art of carving was overdue. That was the genesis of the House and Gardens monthly carving club series, for which we invited some of the world's master carvers to demonstrate demonstrate their skill before the camera and explain in words their tricks and techniques.
Now we have collected and printed the articles in this book, a book we believe you will want to give uh and to own. Now here's the interesting thing. She is looking for a book to give her husband on how to carve meat, right? So here it is, she's acknowledging the kind of the gendering of carving that took place. Like she was clearly gonna cook the meat, right?
And then the meat was gonna come out and clearly he was gonna carve it. But here's where the twist comes in and the kind of gender choral you of the book, which I think I find interesting, is that she was publishing the stuff in House and Garden magazines, so she had to publish the articles as though the woman was gonna do the carving because men weren't reading that magazine. So it's put in this kind of interesting spin where they're trying to do this women can carve too, which is like a weird thing in the 50s. But that's not the reason I really enjoy the book. I enjoy the book because of the crazy pictures of the owners of restaurants with their meats.
And it's very much I even like modern pictures. I love it when the owner or the uh chef who's not a media savvy chef, because this is in the 50s, none of these people were media savvy, where they just pull the person out of the kitchen in their whites, or the owner or their maid or D. You know the old school made or D look styles with the kind of black jackets and everything in the white, and they're standing there like this, like lurch, like standing there because they don't know what to do, but they're doing the very formal carving, and all of the meat is cooked in 1959 or 1960, so it has that kind of crazy look. And there's just something so charming about it that it's worth looking at and uh you know rereading for how to carve the old school joints of meat that come out. And this is the and it does everything.
There it does seafood, leg of lamb, varieties of beef. In fact, the very first one is uh he was a White House chef and became the corporate chef for uh Hamilton Beach, and so he shows how to carve a beef wellington using what people still use for beef wellington, an electric knife in 19 uh 59. The rest of it don't worry is with traditional stuff. James Beard co uh shows you how to carve a porterhouse steak in the style of uh like Luger's, although he makes the crucial error of discarding the bone after you take it out of the porter house instead of giving it to your most favored guest. Uh, but shows why the other like turkey carving section, which is uh from uh a famous hostess in Riverdale at the time, shows uh you know the proper use of the little paper things that they used to put on the backs of turkey legs, so which were for gripping the turkey leg when you were carving and for no other reason.
Uh so it's just an interesting old book, and I'll read the very first uh section that uh James Beard wrote in the intro. Carving is one of the more spectacular of the table arts if it is done properly. Uh what it what a treat it is to watch a host or hostess with good knives, a steady hand, and an understanding of anatomy and the skill to make each slice of meat fall rippling. And the last one of the last sections in it is how to hack up a lobster properly, and that one is by someone who's little known nowadays. Her name is uh Dionne Lucas, and she were Lucas, I guess, and she was kind of the progenitor of uh Julia Child, the very first woman to graduate from the uh Corden Blue Academy, started her own cooking academy in um in England, uh, and she died in 1971.
So I never saw any of her cooking show. She had the very first cooking show, in fact, in like 1950, television cooking show, I think, in England. So, anyway, if you're interested as I am in seeing old school formal ways of cutting things that I don't necessarily all agree with, uh, and uh just like looking at pictures of 50s and 60s meats uh and how they're carved. Go pick up uh the art of carving on uh ABE books or something. You know, I think copies cost like two bucks.
Anyway, classics in the field cooking issues, yeah. Cooking issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network, food radio supported by you. For our freshest content, subscribe to our newsletter, enter your email at the bottom of our website, Heritage Radio Network.org. Connect with us on Instagram and Twitter at heritage underscore radio.
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