This episode is brought to you by Fair Kitchens. Learn about the Fair Kitchens code and join the movement at Fairkitchens.com. This week on Meet and Three, I'm about to go on maternity leave. This is Katie Moseman Waddler, and before I leave you in the incredibly capable hands of Team HRN, we are rounding out season five with a deep dive into the food rules, weird cravings, and overall hype about eating while pregnant. There are a lot of safe foods to eat, and we shouldn't be sort of assuming that just because something is raw that it's dangerous.
I just found myself feeling like there was an alien piloting my body and brain, and uh totally changed the way that I ate. So was it the eggplant? Sure. Why not? I just don't know.
Tune in to this week's episode of Meet and Three anywhere you listen to podcasts. I'll be back soon with our newest and tiniest producer intel. Hello and welcome to Cooking Kitcheners. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Kitchen's coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from whenever to whenever from Emergers Pizzeria, which is not a pizzeria today, but is in fact closed because they are putting a new oven in and they had to break the wall down because they couldn't get it through the big doors that they used to get it through when they first built the place because guess what? There's a radio station in the way, and it was actually easier to knock down the entire sidewall of the restaurant than it was to move the radio station from Bushwick Bronco!
See, I tangent brought it back to Bushwright. Yeah, yeah. Uh happy new year, folks. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing?
I'm good. We've not really hung out that much in the new year. I know. We've been avoiding each other, which is nice. So I haven't been avoiding you.
You haven't answered my calls. And we got uh Matt in the booth. How you doing? I'm doing lovely. Yeah?
Yeah. So since we haven't been uh by the way, call in all of your uh it's a new year and I don't know what to cook questions too. 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Uh so you have any interesting food related adventures or misadventures over the holidays, Nastasia?
No. No? Did you cook anything fun? No. Nothing?
Nothing. Nothing. Oh, awesome. That's good. Good story.
Glad glad thanks for sharing. What did you cook, Dave? Well, many things. I'll get onto mine because I can talk about that forever. Matt, what about you?
Uh one of my I got I got some good leftovers today. I did some Israeli couscous with uh green olives and dill and some lentils in there. I don't know, whatever else. So I remember when, like, you know, many years ago, when kind of, you know, Israeli couscous when it first kind of hit the New York kind of thingamajig, and everyone was like, oh my god, Israeli couscous is gonna be the hugest thing ever. You know what I mean?
It was like, for those of you who don't know, it's just like it's balls of pasta masquerading as couscous. It's one way for me to get even more pasta into my diet. Yeah, well, you know, you you vegoligans need to like can you believe that where by the way, people, just so you know, my older son Booker went on, he was a chick he considered chicken to be a fish, so he was a pollo pesco vegetarian. He wouldn't eat pork or or beef or lamb or goat. Any any kind of like what he considered to be uh red-blooded animal.
I guess he didn't he loves chickens, like as like live animals, but somehow he's like, I can't give up the chicken. Anyway, he's back on pork. Not doing beef, back on pork, though. I I had one other food adventure, which is that I was I went to a wedding of a cousin in Texas, and ahead of the wedding it occurred to me, man, I don't think they ever asked me about food preferences. This probably isn't good for the vegetarians in the room.
Yeah, yeah. And I ate more meat on that one evening than I probably will in the rest of 2020. So you didn't want to insult them by saying, Yo, I can't break bread with you on your wedding. Oh man. So like I'm a vegetarian, I'm not an idiot.
So what what kind of meat did they serve you? I had some very good barbecue brisket. Uh and then I mean everything. Every every food item, including the sides that absolutely did not need meat, had meat in it. So, you know, bacon wrap, whatever, and I don't know.
I mean, there's stuff. There was uh it was all over the place. I said was the standout. So that so but so you like the taste of it, so it's more like you just don't you you don't feel right eating eating meat from uh either a a moral or an environmental standpoint. Correct.
Okay. Which is it? Both? Either? I mean both.
Uh yeah. I don't like paying people to torture animals, and I think that the way that we do it is not great for the planet. Uh it what does Patrick think about this? Uh I don't know. Yeah.
You ever talked to him about it? I don't think so. I'm not sure. Ma maybe maybe don't want to talk to him about it. Who who knows?
You never know how fearless leader Patrick Martins is gonna respond to any any one given piece of input. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I don't have a pro like I think that things like heritage foods, companies like that, providers like that, should exist. I don't want people to stop I don't have a problem with killing an animal for food. It seems like a very natural thing to do.
But like CAFOs, maybe less so. So yeah. Caifo uh, you know, uh confined, uh what's it stand for? Confined animal feeding operation. Yeah, yeah.
Confined animal feed like uh terri get bad, but what a great kind of acronym, right? Caifo. It's my favorite acronym to say. Yeah, I mean it's it sounds like if I had to guess what it was, it's it's definitely sounds military. And it sounds like it sounds like something I wanna have when the crap hits the fan.
You know what I mean? It sounds like something you wanna have next to you. Stop! You got you it's happening! You got you caifo?
You know what I mean? When the zombie apocalypse hits, you think the caveos will be overrun by people being like, I don't know what you do, but I know I want to be here with you. I need it. I need whatever it is, yeah, because like Nastasia and I have regular conversations about like when you know it happens. Tell do you wanna tell them what yours is?
Well, the problem is is that I people can horn in on my thing. Here's the thing. So I think this is like what is gonna happen or is this the strategy for survival? Which you never do, by the way. You have 15 minutes.
Yeah, yeah, let's say you have two you have 15 minutes. You're host. But like that like here in New York City. I told you when I grew up, like the big thing was is that we know we all figured that we were gonna get at any moment someone was gonna, you know, make a mistake and and blow the whole world up. It wasn't even necessarily that there was gonna be like a war on purpose.
It was that someone would insult somebody else or some idiot in some silo somewhere would press a button. Or the flock of geese would trigger the, you know, nuclear radar. Yeah that that thing that has happened. Yeah, yeah. So it's my point is that like, you know, when I was a kid, it was all it's not it wasn't like, are we gonna die in a in a nuclear conflagration?
It is when is the nuclear conflagration gonna happen. And in fact, I used to say I'm never gonna, I live, I always grew up around New York. In the crater zone, I might add, because I used to plot that. I would look up like uh yield of current military weapons. I was so depressed.
There's a thing called you familiar with MERVs, Matt. No, what? Uh multiple independent re-entry vehicle ICBMs, intercontinent uh intercontinental ballistic missiles. So I used to, what I used to do is I'd be like, okay, for a certain kind of megaton uh style warhead, you know, I would put a compass on midtown Manhattan, sometimes downtown Manhattan, sometimes both, and I would draw kind of the blast radiuses and the radiation radiuses on maps to see kind of where I was in that kind of range, right? And then I go to my dad, who's a uh double E engineer and you know who's worked on you know these kinds of problems.
I said to him, uh, you know, you know, what do you think? He's like, oh, no, no, you don't understand. They have these things called MERVs, and so they don't even aim necessarily directly at the city anymore. They just have one missile go up and it splits into like 10 independent warheads, and they just ring the whole city. So we're actually probably in the center of a crater.
And I was like, Well, thanks, Dad. Thanks for that. Awesome. You know what I mean? So tell them your plan.
You have two hours. So you have two hours. So, like, you know, friend of the show, deep voiceman, Phil Bravo is just like, I'm gonna do nothing. I'm gonna sit on the top of Carnegie and drink, is what he said. Yeah, which by the way, I mean, come on, honestly, like the stuff you'd want to crack that you've never had needs a little breathing time anyway.
You know what I mean? It's not like, you know, oh, but oh my god! You know what I mean? Unless you're just gonna get like pounded on like scotch right out of the gate or some sort of like crazy whiskey, it's like you're gonna want to open some wines that are gonna need some time to develop. You know?
Good wine. No, he doesn't have that. Good wine's a he doesn't have anything you need. Wait, if you only have you throw a brick through through a wine shop and you get like, you know, but the thing is, is like, you know, a really great bottle of wine isn't like the stuff that you and I normally swill. It it's a relationship that takes at least a couple of hours to develop.
Okay. You know what I'm saying? Anyways. Uh so he's just gonna sit on a roof somewhere and drink. Now, the issue is if you live in Manhattan, right?
Or any big city, is so Nastasia's relatively close to the water. What's your plan? I was gonna find you. Oh, yeah, but I'm too far away already. I don't live close enough to the water.
If you lived on the water, you could just, you know, like I was gonna have an inflatable boat with a motor, like battery, like all battery powered, everything. You know, you keep it charged in, it fits on a rolling cart. You go in, you have a one-time use bottle where you're like it inflates the sucker just like you would on an airplane, motorboat, and out. But you gotta figure you're only doing like five or six knots on one of those things. That's only gonna help if the city is gonna- I thought you were gonna hot wire a cigarette boat.
I mean, that's the ideal. That'll get you out of town. You said you were gonna. But how do you know? I don't even know if you can hot wire things anymore.
When was the last time you hotwired a vehicle? Like, can you can I don't even know how like boat ignitions work. Sailboat, not fast enough. Although there will be a lot of wind. But uh, but like one thing, the one thing I wanted to do, and I think it's still it's kind of fascinating, is you can get a parachute.
Stay with me, Matt. You can get a parachute, right? And then a backpack propeller. And these suckers can fit in. But you can't take your whole family.
That's the problem. That's the issue. Is that I don't think Booker would strap on a propeller and a parachute, go to the top of our 20-story building and be like, goodbye. You were gonna punch him in the face, so that he's gonna be able to do it. Knock him out, yeah.
Mr. T style. For those of you that uh, the A-Team was a television program, and uh one of the standing gags was that Mr. T, his name was B.A. Barackis, and the show is kind of a big uh, you know, enforcer, but uh, you know, when he was like a uh a soldier in Vietnam, he developed a horrible fear of flying due to uh the pilot, Murdoch, Crazy Murdoch's like piloting ability.
And so he won't fly in any sort of aircraft, even if Murdoch's not flying it. So it the beginning of every show is them telling him that the gig that they're gonna do is far away, and then him saying, I'm not gonna get on a plane, and then they drug him and he knocks out and he wakes up wherever he is. I mean, you know what I'm saying? Like, how many you anyone? A team?
No? Anyway. Uh so whenever. I'm not going, I'm not going. I'm like, you know, I'm like, well, I would try to knock him out, but I don't have any sort of kind of like Mickey Finn style knockout drops in my uh I don't know.
In my propeller. It's hard to take someone who's screaming. Yeah, he would go on my propeller, sure. I'd have to like, you know, like kind of but he's bigger than I am. I mean, not he doesn't weighs a lot less.
He weighs like one pound, because all he eats is sushi and candy. He got sushi uh gift cards. That was his griff uh gif gift from uh his relatives. And he already just he walks in alone to the sushi place and just starts ordering whatever he wants on the gifts table and then just walks out. I am horrified to think what the table looks like where he is seated.
But yeah, that's what he's sent him out to sushi last year, and when he was done, he was like, Thanks, goodbye. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're waiting. Yeah, he doesn't understand kind of niceties. The other thing is, uh so like I tell you, he didn't want to go to Connecticut for the for after Christmas to go to my in-laws's house in Connecticut.
He's like, I'm not gonna go. I'm almost 18, I don't have to go. So Jen bribed him with a kilo of Ikura. A kilo of Ikura. Now, again, that's like that's a hundred dollar problem for those of you that are keeping track.
Ikura is a salmon row. And uh, so he buys it from a place called Aquabest here in New York. And uh $100 for the kilo. And we got it for him. Nastasia, I did not have one egg.
Dax did not have one egg, Jen did not have one egg. He finished the entire kilo of Ikura in under two days. Wow. He's just like Jesus. It's crazy, right?
Yeah. That when when last time we were on here and we had the New Zealand uh king uh people on, and they, you know, the Oura King salmon, they had their Ikura, and they gave like a jar. It was finished before I got home. That's like not even a snack. He's just like, but but where are the rest of the jars?
I'm like, what? I was like, it's so weird. Like the that and candy, that's it. Donuts, he'll eat donuts. Uh, should I do the rest of my non-food?
Oh, well, wait, I'll wait. I'll see if I get in the mood to yell about it. Before we get too far from it. Do you know about Nuke Map? Yes, we have looked at it.
Okay. Someone showed us the Nuke Map. Yeah, nice. It's based on the same data that we all use, which is the uh the US uh Department of Defense's uh handbook on uh uh nuclear warfare, which I I think I brought, did I bring it, I brought it into the show once, but did I do it as a classics in the field? No.
No, but I did do it on the show once, right? No. I never did the nuclear warfare book as a classic in the it's not really a classic in this field, and I'm I'm hard pressed to figure out how I could get it. How I could mentally say that it's even related to cooking. I don't think you can.
Certain things will cook when a bomb is dropped on them. Yeah. All things, actually. Yeah, well, it's real. I mean, how many I mean, whatever.
I I could go. I I have, in fact, just now gone on and on about it, but I could go more and more. Uh you want to see some nasty animal testing. See the uh, I believe it was I forget which one of the tests. I think it was Baker, which is one of the early uh nuclear tests in the Pacific where they were blowing up uh old World War II ships uh, you know, off of islands, and they they you know had a lot of live animals on those things that they subjected to close we subjected our actual soldiers to relatively long range, not really not long enough range, but to to blast effects and radiation effects.
But they put live animals like right in the thick of it, and then uh we did it to real people in in World War II as well. I mean, I it's not forget that, but um yeah, the videos are they're not I mean in general I like seeing atomic test videos, but those are somewhat disturbing. You know, you watch that stuff, Matt? I have not watched that, and I think I will pass. I have seen, I believe, all of the publicly available uh nuclear weapon weapons footage that exists.
Um anyway. So we should probably stop talking about nuclear war now. A little bit. Yeah. But what was it?
So you were just gonna come get me that's too late. That's all of your time. I thought you were gonna get some sort of She wants to be together. She wants to band back together. You're gonna have the best plan.
And uh waiting for anybody else. Like every year Jen and I could do it by myself, but I would definitely not wait for anybody else because they're gonna get people go bags. You need a plan, you know, look, at the end of the day, the problem is when you have a family, you're not willing to leave them behind. Like any good go plan is like if the word the a active word is go, but it's really more like you have to re-gather at some sort of meeting point that you can all get to. I guess I would city bike up the West Side Highway.
Okay. Because you don't have to return the city bike. Oh, yeah. You better get the key though, because if your cell phone's down, the city bike things won't work. I don't care if I'm out four hundred dollars for nothing.
It's not again. You have to unlock it. Oh, yeah, no. Oh, that's true. Yeah, I lost my view.
Yeah, so like the thing is is that uh you know the the the real issue, the the fun part about thinking about this stuff is is that when when the when the S hits the fan is that New York has like three or four ways to get out of it and they will be a ruined. You know what I mean? Like they will be so I mean it takes me an hour or just really hard to cross if you're in a boat. Uh in a rowboat? Up above Manhattan.
Oh, by Spoit and Duval? Yeah, yeah. I hear it's hard to that the the currents there where the kind of Hudson and the East River kind of meet and come around there. It's not the Hudson there, it's whatever, the Harlem, whatever. But like uh yeah, I hear that the currents there can get like there's the old legend of the person trying to cross that in the boat in spite of the devil's boy and double and then the boat gets kind of wiped out.
But uh that may or may not be apocalypse. Told that story when I was a small child and I still remember. But I'm told that swimming in these rivers can be difficult. And in fact, the currents in the East River were, I think, some hard enough that they put a prison on there without walls during uh, you know, the 19th century when it was Blackwells Island, and you know, they just assumed most people wouldn't swim off. Yeah.
And it's not that far away. You know what I mean? Like you look at it style, like, I could swim that. Yeah, no, no, no. I could definitely kayak that faster than my slow friend.
What? They currents go both ways, right? And that's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Uh so I was on the internet doing research for people asking me, you know, questions for here, and I saw one of those sites, and I don't know why I go into these clickbait things. I hate it, where they're like 60 pages, and to in to get to the thing that they say, you have to click like 8,000 times, and then the web page moves up like a half an inch, so you accidentally click on an ad. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, where they purposely load the ads like a half second later, so that when you go to click on it, the page just moves, and it's like, I don't need that.
Anyway, so like one of it was like unhealthy drinks that you should never have. And this was on liquor.com, so they should know better, right? Liquor.com should know better. And they said the daiquiry is a drink you should never consume. And here's what they said, Matt.
Piss me off. They had a picture of a real daiquy in a coop, right? A an honest to God, like rum, lime juice, sugar, shaken, daiquiri. Looks like it was made with a standard two ounces of booze, normal sized drink in a regular like five ounce coop. Uh, and then underneath that, which is by the way, a drink you should all feel good about consuming if you consume alcohol, is uh this drink will not get you in your bikini bottle.
Thank God, no one wants to see me in a bikini. Uh, similar to the pina colada, wrong. Similar to the pini colada, first of all, it's wrong. The daiquari is often made from a sugar-filled pre-made mix. This is just against and served in a huge goblet.
This is not even what they pictured on their freaking website. Then they say, you know those famous frozen daiquiries in New Orleans, which are not daiquaries, people. A 20-ounce to-go cup will average you a whopping thousand calories. A 20-ounce drink is over four normal freaking cocktails, people. Well, average you a whopping thousand calories, half of the recommended daily calorie intake for an average person.
Well, then don't order, that's like saying, oh, hamburgers are bad because if you go order a 30-pound hamburger, you know, with 18 buns and like double grease, then it's bad for you. That is not a daiquiri. And for liquor.com to say that a daiquiri is don't order giant format drinks. They have the same argument with margaritas. They're like, uh, well, a regular margarita, you know, whatever is fine, but like the margarita you're thinking about comes in a bucket.
You know what I mean? And also what I hate about those bucketized margaritas is that they're not stiff enough. I want a shorter, stiffer drink where I can taste the freaking booze, right? I'm not saying I want to consume more booze overall. I'm saying that when I'm drinking a cocktail with booze in it, I'm not just there to get the Crunch City as fast as possible.
I want to taste the booze. Like I like the flavor of the stuff. Damn it. I can't believe these liquor.com people would write something like that. I was so pissed.
When I saw that it was, I thought it was like one of these like crap hole, like, ma'am, eat healthy, eat this one thing, and melt off all of the fat websites that you always see on the side of everything that you do. But it was liquor.com. Mm-hmm. That hurts me, Stas. It hurts me.
Happy New Year. Oh, so you know how uh in the uh we spoke, I think only once about our trip to China and our uh our uh, you know, three-star three-star with Nastasia in a hoodie and flip-flops kind of a situation. Um free Michelin stars, by the way. Not that a Michelin star means what it used to people outside of Europe. You know what I'm saying?
Do you agree with that, right? Michelin Star is not the meaning of it isn't the same across the world. Uh-huh. Did you hear, did uh you hear someone told me that Jiro uh got knocked down of all the stars? Not because of the food, but because they updated their definition of what you need to be three-star in terms of I think reservations.
I think because they don't take reservations anymore. Michelin's was like, We don't get three stars if you don't take reservations. You know? But anyway, put out he's like 94, his kids are in their like 70s, and they still have never run a restaurant. So sad.
Yeah, we'll be sad when dad dies. Anyway, so uh for those of you I've uh said it uh a couple of times that I was super interested in these kind of Chinese street crepes foods called Jianbing. Uh but I started my Jian Bing experimentation. Now remember, for those of you that are gonna scream, appropriation. I'm not trying to make authentic many people many people.
And rightly so, I'll say, uh, for a lot of reasons. Uh, but uh I'm you know not interested in I'm I mean I'm interested, but uh I'm not attempting to do any sort of authentic the way I operate is this when I go see somebody do something and I taste it and I watch what they're doing, and then I taste something that is not like I've tasted before. I've had other variants like that, but the one that this one lady made on the street, I was like, I really like the texture of what she was doing. So and kind of how it operated. And you're also wearing what she was wearing, so that's what I'm saying.
What do you mean? I was wearing home. That's what you're doing. Oh, at home. Yeah.
It's true. I was wearing her outfit. I took pictures and no, no, I didn't do that. Didn't do any of that. Uh I didn't do any of that.
None of that. Uh by the way, when you're at home cooking, so in a kitchen, uh in a work kitchen, if someone showed up at the kitchen wearing like open-toed shoes, be like, get out! Yeah. Right? Mm-hmm.
But at home, do you wear shoes when you cook? No. I mean neither. Isn't that messed up? Often I my standard walk around the house is to walk around the house in socks.
I'm a sock person. I like to wear socks. You know what's I hate? That's why I get so bent when people spill water in the kitchen and don't clean it up, because then because I'm the one who's normally working in the kitchen. So if they're doing it the sink, and then like the kids love to somehow like wash their hands and then just walk away dripping like like freaking the swamp creature or something.
You know what I mean? And then I step in it with my socks. Hate wet socks. Hate wet socks. But when I think about it now that I'm thinking about it, which I haven't thought before, s very stupid to cook in a I mean I cook with oil and all kinds of things that will completely mess up your day if they spill on your feet.
But I don't cook in in shoes at home. And what do you what I wonder what people in the chat room do? Does anyone when you cook at home, Matt, do you put shoes on? Absolutely not. Huh.
Yeah, me neither. But you know, maybe I I don't I don't like I don't like wearing shoes in my house, and I don't like other people to wear shoes in my house, although I don't force them to take them off, except my kids. But like, yeah, but I, you know, it's weird. Like maybe I should have some Mr. Rogers style slippers.
But like hard slippers. Uh for Christmas, my wife got me elf slippers. There are fewer people running around your kitchen doing things too, though, than in a real kitchen. Like the chance that you bump into someone and they drop a knife or they drop oil on like I I do think it's legitimately a less dangerous situation. Well using the same dangerous objects.
I get it. Like hot oil is still hot, a knife is still sharp. But I would imagine that many of the situations that come up with kitchens are about like miscommunication between two individuals who happen to be in the same place at the same time. Or high-intensity situations are you moving fast. Which you know, I do at home.
You don't do that at home shows? Not like in a real kitchen. But like, for instance, you would never cook shirtless because if you do something like bacon, it's gonna sh throw that thing of grease. Why would I ever cook shirtless? You wouldn't, I'm saying, but I'm saying, like, the shirt is a piece of protective gear.
Although Jordana said she cooks shirtless. Mistake. Mistake. Huge mistake. Yes.
You know what I mean? Huge error. God, just a mistake. Um anyway. Like, you still, though, shouldn't, if you're gonna wear shoes, don't you should wear sensible flats.
You know what I'm saying? Anyway. Uh, maybe I should get some kitchen slippers. Is that too goofy? No.
I have them in Connecticut. And do you cook in kitchen slippers there? Yeah. Why? Because the floor is cold.
I knew it, because the floor is cold. It is unpleasant cooking on extremely cold floors. Anyway, how do we get to- Oh, Jam Bing. So uh to refresh, so uh when I look at somebody doing something new, it's not that I want to then go make the authentic version of what they do. Although I do believe that you should travel around and eat uh various versions of things made by the people who actually do it right, because if you're following a recipe and making things based on your own knowledge and intuition, it's hard to get radically new textures, radically new flavors, radically new ideas or presentations because you're always coloring the words of the recipe or the idea through your own idea of what things should taste like before you even finish.
So you'll make corrections early on in a recipe that will affect the end of it based on what you know in your head, rather than waiting for someone who does it a different way than you do to make it all the way through and taste the results of what they have done, which is why you should like YouTube is very helpful for looking at other people in other places making things the way they make them, right? And it's a good check once you've gotten back from somewhere to look at other people's techniques to kind of brush up, especially for things like cutting fish, making crates, making noodles, any of these kinds of things. Um but that's no substitute for having gone and tasted various things that people make and judging kind of what you like. That said, I'm when I see something new to me that's interesting, it's more I'm more interested in what the results are that I can use for you know my own ways of cooking, how I can add I you know techniques to my repertoire than I am in trying to recreate something that somebody else is doing, because you know, I think that's where you get into the kind of shadier aspects of of uh, you know, white white man making other people food kind of a situation. But so to refresh you if you didn't listen or don't remember on what this particular now there's various so the Jian Bang is translated usually as like a Chinese crepe, it's a street food, um, right?
And the thing is is it can be made with variety of different batters. Uh some people say the original ones were with millet, which is you know a small grain millet uh flour, and then millet flour be mixed with you know nowadays regular wheat flour, um mung bean starch, which is what I used, uh, and we can we talk about it. So there's various different things, very many different ways to do it, but in general, it is a crepe with some eggs, usually with uh some sauce on it, uh, and then uh with cilantro typically, or other kind of sometimes with green onion that you uh cook and you fill with crunchy crackers, which some people use like fried wonton skins or the moral equ moral equivalent, and some people use the Chinese cullers that you would normally uh get in like a congee or something like this. So, anyway, so the lady I saw, what she did was is that she used, I believe, a mung bean uh based on the texture of what she was doing, among beanslash uh uh white flour mix, which is what I ended up doing here, and she would take the she used a French style crepe maker and a French style raplette, which is the crepe uh make spreader, which other I saw other people just using boards to do it on the street. But the lady that who I who's I like the best, she used a an actual raplette, French style raplette.
And uh so she put the batter in the center, went around like a crepe, didn't look so good. I thought she had bad skills, it was I was wrong. Then cracked a whole egg on top of before it cooked through, right after she had done the initial spread with the replet. By the way, for those of you that never made a a crepe, when you're making crepe batter, uh French crepe batter, a lot of the recipes tell you you need to let the stuff stand. Because the French crepe batter has in it, um, I haven't made it in a long time.
Eggs, butter or oil, uh, flour, uh, and I I think I use water, I don't think I use milk. And they're very thin, but you have to let it sit for a long time after you make it, so that uh, and I think that's mainly to get the kind of bubbles out. So when I need to get crepe batter on the fast, I typically pour the crepe batter through a fine strainer that gets out any lumps because you don't want a lump, because if you have a lump in a crepe batter, when you're pulling the raplette around, it will grab that lump and make a huge tear through your crepe, and you look like an like a like a butt head, like an a-hole. And if you don't let the if you don't let the um the batter sit and all the air come out, the first couple of crepes you make won't be very good because they they won't have the right the right texture and they won't have the right spread because the air is still working its way out of the batter. Anyway, so if you pour through a chinois, that'll one get the lumps out, and two, it will break a lot of the fine air bubbles so that you can use a crepe batter right away.
You're welcome, crepe people. Anyway, so she did what I thought was a bad job, but it turns out that this stuff doesn't spread nearly as well as a as a it has a different kind of consistency than a French kind of crepe batter. She then cracked the whole egg on top, used the raplette to wipe the just the white around, and it was awesome to look at because you see the yolk like running around like a like a video game, like a Pac-Man, like going around as she's like wiping the raplet in a circular motion, getting the egg white to kind of wipe evenly, and then cracks the yolk with the raplette and then wipes the yolk around. So now your three layers your mung bean, your mung bean flour, your white, and your yolk. Here's the things that she did that some people do that not everyone does.
She puts sesame seeds all over it. And she didn't put the cilantro or the green onion on that side, which some people put the green onion on that side. And then she flipped it and that starts cooking, then the sauce, and then this, and then the crunchy crackers. So immediately when I saw this, I'm like, what would I what would my kids like? So I came home, I made uh the batter.
The batter I use is uh 50% uh mung bean flour, mung bean starch, uh, which is sometimes translated, I think, as green bean starch. Anyway, mung bean starch, you can get it at your local Chinatown, I mean at my local Chinatown, uh, and it's you know cheap. It's nasty though, it comes in these packages. Like only an idiot packages starches in double bags. So I cut the first bag, and then the inner bag isn't sealed right because I guess the machines that they use can't seal the bag with all the starch everywhere.
So the the inner bag has already been leaked, so there's like all this starch on the outside of the inner bag inside the outer bag, but you still have this like nasty bag, so then when you try to just pour it out, it just sits on the bag, and that inner bag is that stretchy plastic, you know what I'm talking about, Stas? That like kind of semi opaque, stretchy, disgusting plastic that like stretches so much before it breaks. So then you're frustrated, and this stuff is getting everywhere, and it's on your hands and on your pants, because you've already done this on your pants, and then that it it it like, then you're trying to you're just trying to be like, you don't want to go get scissors because you have this bag in your hand. You don't want to put it down because you don't want to get starch all over your counter, but your scissors are all the way across the room, so you're like, I'm just gonna tear it, and then like the bag is just like stretching and stretching and stretching, and powder's getting everywhere. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Like, anyway, that's what happened. So if you buy this product and you look inside the bag and notice it's a bag-in-bag situation, just put it on a counter over the sink, take an extremely sharp knife and cut through both bags at the same time. Because I was just like, I've had enough of this packaging material. On the side, you ever notice uh the things that kids don't understand about cooking? Uh so, like, for instance, like my kids love to measure flowers and liquids on one side of the kitchen and then carry them in the measuring cup over to the other side of the kitchen to put them where they belong.
I know they should be using a scale, but they follow knucklehead recipes that are written in cup measurements. Anyway, alright. So, like, but I'm like, yo, kids, why don't you, why don't you put that into that measuring cup over the vessel you're gonna pour it into so that you don't get it everywhere? And they're like, uh. And do you ever notice also, like, kids and probably people who don't understand how to get things out of pans in a reasonable fashion?
Like, they don't understand how to get, for instance, a sauce out of a pan without spilling it everywhere and without losing half of the sauce. You ever notice this does? You should someday come over and cook with my kids, who are by the way, 17 and 15. I mean, no, actually, I've seen Booker cook at my restaurant. Oh, right?
You're like, Booker, tilt it, take the spatula, wipe entirely around the outside so that all the stuff is on the one side, pour it in, use two hands, you know what I mean? Hold it up, scrape it out, scrape off the spatula, put the spatula back in the pan so it's the don't don't hold the spatula over the floor. Don't hold it over the floor. You know what I'm saying? Yep.
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So back to the jam bang. So I was like, what are my kids gonna like about this? I use 50% uh mung bean starch and 50% uh regular unbleached white flour. I didn't go get special, like you know, bun flour, you know, special bleach or any of that stuff. I just used, you know, I use hackers at home mostly.
Sorry, Bob's Red Mill. They don't pay us anymore. So what? I use mainly hackers, which just I don't know why. Like once you start using a brand, you're like, I'll just keep using that brand because it makes I've I'm used to it now.
So I use heckers. Uh unbleached. Uh so 50% that 50% unmeasured amount of salt. You know, I use my I only ever use uh diamond kosher, and I use you know what I consider to be quote unquote the right amount. I just add salt to it.
And then water. Uh so if if you're using, I use about a one-to-one ratio. So if I'm doing 300 grams of uh mung bean flour and 300 grams of wheat flour, I'll do uh 600 grams of water, blend the hell out of it because gluten's not gonna uh develop, then pour it through a sheenwap. I already told you that secret. But then when you put that onto by the way, if you've never had a crepe maker, crepe makers are awesome.
They are so much better than trying to make a crepe in a pan if you're going to make a very large crepe. Because the large crepe requires a an extremely flat surface to use the raplette on, and it's just a it's a whole technique. I really recommend that you use it or get a large griddle where you can do the standard kind of replet stuff, and where you can take a large offset spatula. How big is this, does? Uh 24 inches.
20. So get like a get an 18 to 24 inch, like large, not an offset, but a regular flat spatula to use when you're doing crepe work. I don't know why people use those goofy wooden thick ones. That is a waste of time and energy. Just get yourself a stainless steel, long, you know, how how wide is that?
Two? Two? Three, two, two, three inches? Wide. Yeah, uh, long spatula to do your crepe work.
Uh pour the more than you think batter because it doesn't spread that well, and pour kind of like around in a circle. Take your replet, which is some of they're like mini squeegeees, but they're made of wood, and then swirl around once. The difference between another difference between this batter and regular crepe batter is that the mung bean uh batter sets relatively quickly. So in a crepe, you have in a regular French crepe, you have a good two, three swirls of the raplette to get it to kind of even out. So you can do like one thing where you get the s the center of your crepe based good, and then another wipe around the edge to move the excess batter all the way out to the edge of the of the crepe maker.
And often if you look at somebody's crepes, you'll see kind of you can almost see this kind of dualness in the crepe that they've made if they're not like a super expert, like myself, not a super expert. With this, it's harder to get that second wipe. So you want to get this initial spread a little bit wider and try to do it in only one maximum two turns of the raplette. Crack the egg out, do like I said, do the same thing. The problem with the egg white that I've not fully done yet when you're doing a whole egg crack out like this, is that it's hard to get the thick part of the white to uh spread right because it the thick white wants to stay together.
So I'm still working on that. Break down the yolk, bub blah blah, went around, then uh, you know, cracked it, sesame seed, flip, and here's where I made it kid friendly. I basically turned it into like some sort of a uh like a more of a Mexican style thing. So Tex Mex, really. So like then uh sh uh I did a little bit of uh spicy refried bean instead of the instead of this you know classic sauce uh cheese, and then on the meat people I put some carnitas in it, and then instead of the crushed up wonton, crushed up tortilla chips, and that was where I was like, crushed up tortilla chips!
Because the whole thing about the Jan Bang, aside from what I really like, the stretchy texture of the crepe, people online have said that they want them crispy, and I had some that were crispy, but the lady who made me the one that I love the most, it was kind of a uh a chewy, kind of flexible thing. Anyway, so crushed up tortilla chips, and then we serve it, of course, with you know, standard like sour cream and all that. And I've made it two, two and a half times. I did a test, and then I made it for two large group one uh once, and it was great. The only problem is is that you kind of have to make each one individually, so you're cooking through the whole thing.
You know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. Anyway, Jan Bing. Jam bang. All right, so we have Australian sundries to taste.
Yeah. Yeah. What do we got? Well, where do you wanna start? Oh, by the way, we had a question and we should get to the one question.
I think I answered, basically, if you have written in a question and I have not answered me. Nastasi and I got into an argument about whether I Nastasi and I had an argument? What? We got into an argument about whether I had answered all the questions. I don't think so.
So email me. I think I have answered all the questions. If it first listen through 2019, then email me. Right. I mean, I know that there were certain ones because we had the salmon people on last time.
Yeah, Matt, do you remember that salmon was delicious, by the way. Did we answer any questions last time, Matt? I answered a bunch of questions. You answered some questions, but yeah, like especially the call-in ones. But there might have been questions that were written in that we didn't get to.
I don't know. I think I answered them all. I think there were aspects of it. So for instance, like like Wally Gomes wrote in and he said he was gonna uh put a PID, which is a uh, you know, one of the accurate temperature controls whose you know main things. You talked about that one.
Yeah, but you know, like w one thing, you know, I I didn't go into super depth about uh about like fryers. Like, so for instance, like he's saying that he was gonna buy a six-liter countertop fryer. Now I don't know whether that's rated in six liters of oil. Six liters of oil would be a lot for a countertop fryer. That's approaching like like good.
You know what I mean? But like six liters of total volume means you're only putting like a liter or two of oil in, and that just doesn't have enough thermal mass to act like a professional fryer. You know what I'm saying? So I I think what happened is I answered all of these questions, but maybe in a more cursory fashion than nostalgia's used to. You went through and you were like, blah and blah, blah, blah, and I'll get into it in the next time.
Well, I mean well, I don't know what I wanna like for instance. Well also we don't have that much time. So Josh in Somerset's too late because Christmas is over, got a jewel and was doing um a prime rib, and I spoke somewhat about timings on prime rib, but then Josh also wanted to know that if you if you extend a cook for a long, long time, is it gonna get mushy? And I talked about that a little bit, but kind of, you know, not like a lot lot. You know, it's in general to prevent that nowadays what I do folks is I'll do, you know, the bare minimum amount of time at the higher temperature, like let's say for uh prime rib, like fifty-five or so and then Celsius, and then I'll drop it down uh like to the minimum safe temperature, like fifty-two to keep it keep it going for a long time, and that will prevent mushiness in most things, but not in something like uh like fillet, which has no connective tissue.
But the we have a so I think I've answered all of your questions. Uh but Eric uh Jason Gros wrote in long time listener, uh don't have anything better to do. Ha ha, of course. Of course. I mean, true.
Uh wait, yes, Jason, yeah. Jason from Baton Rouge. I've never never been to Baton Rouge. Someday when I go down to uh New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail, I have to make some side trips. Never been to Baton Bridge.
Going to West Calwell, New Jersey on business. The hell's in West Calwell. Matt, what's in West Calwell? No idea. On business, was looking to head to New York for some free time.
And it's first time here. We'll have a rental car. Good luck. Up for suggestions on what to do with that. Burn it.
When you get the rental car in New York, light it on fire and say it was stolen. No, he needs it around New Jersey. Just drop it at whatever train station. Take the train in. Take the train into New York.
All right. Planning on hitting uh uh Corin, which is a fabulous knife place here. MoFad and existing conditions, what are some other cool places? Uh check out JB Prince, uh DePalo's, Russ and Daughters. Uh who else?
Who's got what's a what's a kind of classic New York place, Saz? Thinking. Uh, she'll think here. Also looking to grab a great bagel and uh great pizza. Was thinking about going to Brooklyn uh for uh to uh Roberta's, uh but thinking traditional as well.
So I was like, Nastasi and I are both like, well, we don't really we don't like there. Right? There's uh, you know, this is what some people do. So I so Jack, the bartender, uh uh head bartender at at Existing Conditions and formerly Booker Dax, he's one of those people. So he likes scars.
You ever uh for slices? What oh Matt, I I heard it, I heard a tongue tick. Oh, well, yeah, because I was gonna say we a bunch of HRN folks went around with Peter Reinhardt and they also landed on scars. Yeah. Scars is a freaking nightmare to order from.
But like I everyone says they're slice games on point because you get it right out, and you're not waiting a billion years to get it. You know what I mean? If you can wait online. Go to SCARS when it's not too crowded. You know what I mean?
And get the slice right away. I hear that their stuff is best right away. What do you agree with this or no? I have never had scars. The only time I ever had scars, we uh we ordered it, and then Dax walked in there and was on his phone and didn't realize they'd already made the pizza.
So it was sitting there for 40 minutes before we even got it into our hands. Then we then walked it home in the rain and ate it. So I'm not gonna go ahead and say that I had a real scars experience. You know what I mean? Uh but anyway, Scars Joe's, which is old school, Prince Street, which is famous for its uh pepperoni thing.
I didn't I was not a huge it's so doughy. Did you like you like uh Prince Feet? I don't think I've had it. But the pepperoni is really good. Everyone goes crazy because they have the super super super thick sliced pepperoni.
Uh Una Pizza, which is you know the the Neapolitan DOP one that Fabulous and Jeremiah uh worked on before. Uh Roberta's here, obviously, and old timers, John's of Bleagers, Arturo's, but that's like Wayback Machine, as he said. Uh, and then Jack says it'll take your whole day, and I've never been to these, Matt, maybe you have. I know Nastasia doesn't take these kinds of trips. Uh L and B, uh, what's it called?
L and B Spumoni, it's called Spumoni. L and B and uh De Faras uh over here, you know, in the in the outer birth. You ever been to either of those places, Matt? No. I have not, but I hear they're good.
Uh, if you really want to wait three hours for Lucali, get the Calzone. That's what I'm saying. Or know somebody. Do you know someone there? Yeah.
Is it good? Yeah, that I've been there. Is it do you like it? I've never been. I don't wait.
I don't like to wait. Yeah, I know you don't wait. You don't like to wait? I don't like I didn't wait. I hate waiting.
Anyway. Uh for bagels, I mean, for locks, Russ and Daughters, like clearly, just go to Russ and Daughters. I like the Barney Greengrass, Sturgeon King for their uh locks and and other cured fish. Almonds. You would say omelets.
The beer place with the cheese. Beer place with the cheese. The crackers. What, mix Orleans? They don't have bagels.
No, no, no. Oh, yeah, go to Mixorle's, but go before the uh finance D-bags show up. Uh you have to try an Essa, I guess, bagel if you're going uptown, like absolutely. I don't know who's got the best. I've never been to my land, and I haven't been to uh I haven't been to the what's the name of the uh Theresi place again that does the bagels?
Oh, yeah. Sidels? Sidels. Is it good? Yeah, that's really crowded.
And not where it's going, yeah. Don't go. There's plenty of good bagels. Like, if I were you, I would get a New York style bagel when you're in New York, and then go to Montreal to get a Montreal style bagel. Oh, let's leave it there.
And then go back to Jersey. Oh, when you're in Jersey. Oh, yeah, you're gonna say the mozzarella, right? That's right. Go to Hoboken.
There's a bunch of different ones. Oh my god, what's the name of the one that I that in Kensington that I really that's really good? Massamos. Has great mozzarella and it's off of the mozzarella trail, so not as many people go to it. Uh in um in Hoboken itself, which is mozzarella.
Good luck parking, by the way. But in Hoboken itself, uh, I like, I believe it's called MP Bianco uh Bianco Manos. Bianco Manos? Bianco Manos. Yes.
Yeah, MP Bianco Manos. Great mozzarella. Uh oh in the hoboken style, which I appreciate. They want you to make a they make them in these long kind of Rapunzel-like braids, like long, and you get it by the pound chopped off. They're not in like balls, like you would think of it.
Just get like a hunk of it. Get like some crusty bread. Don't bother making a sandwich. Bring some fantastic oil with you, because I don't know that they'll have any fantastic oil, and just just go to town. Just all you need bread, salt, mozzarella, maybe some tomatoes, although it's not that time of year to get the good tomatoes.
Get the semi-dried. So if you go to Di Palo's, get the semi-dried tomatoes, the little ones, like the they're like semi-dried cherry tomatoes. Those things are on point. Uh all right, now. Uh what?
Oh, we gotta taste this stuff. Should we let's taste this stuff? Okay, what do we got? What do we got? Okay, first one.
This is from the brain surgeon, right? Yes. This is called cherry rape, so I guess you can have just a little bit. I uh I've been taking shots at that. I mentioned I mentioned uh power sockets last week, right?
Yes. Yeah. I think you'll like it. Yeah, what's it? So what is it?
So it's cherry, dark chocolate, and coconut. Yeah, it looks like coconut. I like made by Cadbury. I really like it. You like it?
We can't both eat the same kind. It kind of tastes like now we both have something in our mouth. So Matt, you have to talk. Uh, this is delicious. Man, I can't believe how good this candy is.
We'll save you some cheeses. Okay, now what? That's very good. I enjoy that. Turkish delight.
By the way, I think it's always fun when you go to another country to taste their candies. Because it usually everyone's got their own kind of candy bar. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. This is interesting.
That does not look like a Turkish delight, though. No, it's covered in chocolate. It's covered in milk chocolate and it's a lot denser than a normal. So I'm gonna let Nastasia eat it. Is it rose flavored?
Yeah. Like Turkish? So it's it has that actual, and it's called Turkish Light. Alright, well, I'll eat it. I'll eat it.
It's not that. I don't really like that. Next. Well, you you you talk while I eat this one. Next, let's go to the water.
Yeah. I like I like locum though. So here's some wattle seed. I don't think we can eat this though. But it's cool.
So wattle seed comes from an acacia plant. There's a bunch of, which is a in the in the in the bean family. It's in a in the leguminaceae family. Um lot of beans are poisonous, so you gotta get the right uh a lot of bean plant trees. So for instance, like one that's toxic in the U.S., it's used as a and this is also used as a cocoa and a coffee substitute.
It's good. One of the ones that's used there in America. Remember when we tried to do this was the Kentucky coffee tree. I found some Kentucky coffee trees on Roosevelt Island. I brought the beans into our old lab and we tried to roast them.
We did all that work to make them not poisonous, and then we tasted it and we're like, this sucks. Oh, there's kind of like a session button thing in there that I don't like. There's probably well, there shouldn't be in this in the Tasmanian thing. I feel it on my tongue. Yeah, because you just tasted this.
I did not try this. Did you inhale it maybe? No. Because the wattle seed is a lot of times used in um so I read on the internet, so I've never done this. This wattle seeds was a little popular here for a while.
Um some guy puts it into their espresso machine and brews it as a tea in the espresso machine and repression. That you should do that. On the wattle seed? Alright, so this is Australian bush pepper, which I believe is the same as Tasmanian pepper. Now, this stuff I find creepy because you'll eat it and you'll be like, oh.
And then 30 seconds later you'll be like, oh, and then like another 10 seconds you're like, ah, because like it's got one of these slow build burns on it. I don't like that. We use this at the bar. Well, this is a blend. So it has other things in it other than that.
We use this straight stuff in the bar. Um for a drink, but you gotta be careful with it, like I say, because oh, she's uh washing it down with just some Cadbury milk. No, well, I we don't need to taste this. And this has crunchies in it. You have crunchies.
I'm not really all right. So here's what I'm gonna taste. Wait, no, do we need this too? Those are from contestants. So this is Australia.
So apparently, Bundaberg rum is the rum of Australia. Really? Yeah, it's like the most pop 10% of the entire country drinks Bunderberg rum. It's it was founded in like 1888 as a way to get rid of all the molasses from the sugar cane that they grow in Australia. And this stuff is like, this is like the legit Australian like swilling rum.
Like people drink that I've never had it. You? Nope. Do you like rum? Mm-hmm.
That's me drinking it. It's a little lower proof than ours. It's as low-proof. Underproof. Underproof.
Yeah. Well, it's at 37, but they it's at 37 there. It's good. It's relatively. It's relatively, you know, relatively.
You're gonna smell like your Uncle Ralph. No, like my Uncle Rick. Oh, yeah. Uncle Ralph, what does Uncle Ralph smell like? Uncle Ralph smells like smoke.
My Uncle Ralph, the pit boss, former pit boss from Reno. And I haven't seen Uncle Ralph in years. Ever since uh ever since my Aunt Sandy died. He's being written off the rest of the family. He's written off the rest of the family.
He won't get in touch with us. Anyway, uh thank you, brain surgeon, our brain surgeon. He gave us some Kentucky honeys. Yes, Kentucky honey, bourbon creamed honey and a toasted pecan cream honey. That sounds delicious.
We'll just put them in pancakes. You put them in pancakes. You do it! Pancakes. That's what it says.
Both of them. By the way, I cook giant pancakes, people. For those of you that don't know, if you've never had a giant griddle and you've never been able to cook a giant pancake, I cook a giant pancake. How big is this, Nastasia? 18.
That's the size of my pancake. Because that is the exact size. So like what you do is I take my crate maker, my gas fire crate maker, which I'll talk about how much I love until until the day I die, and uh, and I put an aluminum foil splash rack all around it for when I flip these giant things because there's still some liquid batter on the top when I flip it. Giant splash rack of aluminum foil, and it's got one of those poof like one of those like you know, explosion lines of like grease, butter, and b batter all around it so that it's easy to clean up. And then you pour it over the whole thing, and then I flip it with a bread peel.
So I have like a I have a stainless steel, like a pizza peel, like similar to the one they use here, and you just go underneath it, and it's like whew, bam! And the noise that the giant pancake makes when it hits. And also it's so nice because I can feed a family of four with one pancake. It's like one thing, done, in, out. New pizza cut it.
Yeah, pizza cut pancake.com. That's the new business. Oh, okay, that's okay. So for this week, uh, I wanted to bring in a book that is not that old, but uh I think was really important, and you know, people should read it if they don't still read it. Um, maybe they do, but I I don't hear a lot of people talking about it anymore.
So this week's first one of the new year. Um by the way, Nastasia met and I also met separately. Anyway, so like Nastasia met a rare books dealer and I met a rare books dealer, uh in you know, who specialized in food over the you know, the Christmas and New Year's parties and whatnot. So we should see if there's any interest out there on the in uh in you know out there on the internet, but we would like to have like rare book experts come in with some classics in the field and then maybe some sort of maybe some sort of jello wrestling match. I don't know.
I mean, we'd have to move the books into the booth, Matt, so that the books wouldn't get jello matched. Yeah, no, we want to keep that jello in there. Also, every single classics in the field that I've done so far are books that I personally own and not books that I've read on the internet, and they're books that I've actually brought into the studio. But if you guys want me to also review ones that I don't actually own because they're too expensive, I can do that. Just let me know.
But this week's is uh Cooking by Hand by a guy named Paul Bertoli. Paul Bertoli uh started cooking uh at Shea Panisse, the you know the famous, you know, Alice Waters restaurant, Shea Panisse, uh in San Francisco. Uh was it San Francisco or is it Berkeley? I can never remember it. Anyway, it's out there somewhere.
There over there. Uh I never got to eat there. You ever been there? Nope. I didn't mean there.
Uh in the 80s, I think, in the early 80s. And he worked there and actually wrote uh with uh her the first uh Shea Panese cookbook and then started his own restaurant uh called Olivetto, which closed in 2005 and now uh has Fromani. You know Fromani, the uh major yeah. Yeah, he has Fermanni, which is what he's doing now. But by the time he wrote this book in cooking by hand in 2003, he'd already been kind of at the top of the professional game for over 20 years.
So what I love about this book is that it was written in 2003. Well, is that it's written by someone who's already had decades of experience really doing the stuff that he's talking about under his belt before he wrote the book. And although all of the individual chapters in it kind of have been uh, you know, handled in much greater depth and much much more recently, right? It was the first time that you could see in print uh like n like in a in a in a for normal consumption print. In the same way that like the French laundry cookbook was the one of the first modern cookbooks that actually told you how a restaurant did all of the crazy things that it did.
The reason French Laundry Cookbook was so crazy that anyone wrote it or that anyone bought it, was because they were telling you how to do things the way they actually did at the French Laundry. So the assumption was you were never going to be able to do it, but they told you how they did it anyway. Similarly, in cooking by hand, uh, you know, Paul Pertoli tells you how to, and I've never met the guy, I'd like to meet him. Tells you how to cure your own uh Salumian sausage and did so way before uh, you know, not way before, but before like the you know, original uh Roman Pulson charcuterie book came out. And you know, tells you how to make your own uh balsamic vinegar, and by that I don't mean some BS version, like he's like, first you gotta go get 15 different barrels made out of different kinds of wood and molding in Italy.
Then you gotta start. So at the beginning of this chap, just to give you an idea, at the beginning of the um balsamic vinegar chapter, he starts it, and the the other thing about it is that his his writing, assuming that he does it, his writing is just so good, kind of makes you want to cry. At the beginning is a picture of his infant son and himself, and it starts out, letter to my newborn son. And he says that when he was two months old, he got six separate boxes full of barrels from a friend in Italy, and he started his son's vinegar when his son was born. So this was you know, probably in 2002, so that stuff's already got like you know 18 years on it.
So think about it. You're supposed to do that in Italy, like if you're a maker, like you birth your kids' birth years. Yeah, and so like he does it, but he tells you actually kind of how it's done and and walks you through it. And you know, at the very beginning, you know, he says introduct introduction. Good cooking is trouble, so I am told, says Elizabeth David.
And but then he doesn't get bogged down in like quoting, he's like, I don't even remember, I couldn't find where she said it. But he goes on to say stuff like the trouble with cooking begins when you decide to take it seriously. This raises the question, what does seriously good cooking mean I must do? As long as I have been cooking in earnest, this question has led me down trails full of circles and switchbacks. That's the important thing, switchbacks.
Uh sometimes taking me directly into the brambles, and the learning never ends. The idea of mastering in quotes cooking now seems like more of an illusion than a goal. And this whole book is uh just uh a discussion of tastes, of eating, of cooking, of what it means to just cook a lot, taste a lot, and think a lot through the lens of someone who's interested in Italian, uh in Italian cooking. And the recipes such that I've tried, although I'm not much of a recipe trying guy, are uh, you know, they were they were good. But the book is an absolute classic.
You have to go look at it. One of the chapters is called 12 Ways of Looking at Tomatoes. Right up my alley. Right up right up right up my alley. Uh, interesting section on pasta.
Again, all of these things have been superseded, but just thinking about his uh kind of entire way of looking at cooking and in even on the um individual sections, definitely worth a read. I remember when I first looked at it, I was like, bouge bouge bought. I was like, this is a definite game changer. You know, you have lots of pretty books now, you have lots of books talking about ideas, but I think in 2003, when this came out, it has earned its place as a classic in the field. And it's cooking issues.
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