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 Mosman Waddler, and before I leave you in the incredibly capable hands of Team HRN, we're 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 in tow. 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 to whenever a river is pizza bushwake as usual with this hammer lopez. How you doing?
Good. Yeah. Got Matt in the booth, how you doing? Do you have a turkey in your throat? I can do it again and again.
Um well every time you do it, I'm doing better and better. Play that Wu Tang again and again. Uh listen. Uh how you guys doing? I'm having a great day.
Are you? Yeah. Nice. Nice. Uh what why?
I got uh I got trainee engineer Jess in the booth. Jess, how you doing? Yell to the people. Awesome. Yeah?
And uh trainee, so you are a sound engineer? In training. I mean, get out the microphone. But this is what you wanted. This is in other words, this is you're not a food person.
You're more of a are you both a food person and a sound person? Yeah, of course. I'm at Heritage. I didn't get a good look at you when I came in. Do you have the traditional mullet haircut of sound engineers?
You know, maybe soon. Gotta go mullet. Matt's never gotten them. We've never had a full-on mullet. I guess because you guys aren't real, like, you know, back of the club sound people like I used to deal with in the 80s.
Like if you didn't have a mullet back in the 80s when you were on the boards, no one would respect you. They're like, who's that idiot without a mullet? We could we could incorporate me getting a mullet into some sort of giveaway or um You do not want to rock the mullet. You have such nice long hair. If you mulletized it, then like how are you gonna demuletize it?
I can't handle that much party in my life. But no, you'd be restricting the party just to the back. Right now you have an all-around party. Oh yeah, that's right. I already have too much party.
Yeah, my my life does feel out of balance. So, Jess, what are what are your food interests other than your sound engineering interests? How did you arrive at Heritage Foods? Oh man, uh I spent a year actually as an au pair in Paris, and I cooked for a family for an entire year. So that was crazy.
So is that considered an in like an inverse au pair? I thought it always went to I always hear about Americans getting Europeans. I've never heard about Americans going to Europe. I didn't realize it was a two-sided kind of exchange. Yeah, I don't really know why they wanted me.
Wow. It's good confidence you got there. No, I mean in terms of the food. Oh, okay, okay. But you were cooking for them, but had you grown up cooking?
Uh yes and no. I mean, like cooking with my family, but nothing crazy. And where in where in France were you? Paris. Paris.
Where in Paris? Well, I technically was in the suburbs in a place near Versailles in Vaux Cresson. Oh, that's so not uh that you know what? You know what people don't realize? Versailles is a great place to visit all year round.
All year round it's great. Every single season, Versailles is an amazing place to visit. Because if you go in the wintertime, you can see the architecture, not the physic, but the landscape architecture of the park is made clear by the fact that you can see through all of the all of the vegetation. Then obviously in the spring it's amazing. Obviously, in the summer it's amazing, and obviously in the fall it's amazing.
It's a it's a four-season kind of thing. Did you go often or were you one of those weirdos who was like, I'm not gonna go hang out at Versailles, the best garden ever anywhere? Um I didn't actually go. But I've I spent a lot of time in Paris. You didn't go to Versailles the entire time you were there?
No, I didn't. You did listen, maybe you were turned off by like the by like the giant buildings with all the mirrors. Like maybe that's not your jam, but you didn't go to the garden? Oh, it's amazing. It really is.
I just uh, you know, when you're spending all your time with some crazy kids. You know what's a good place to take kids? The garden in Versailles! True, true. Big mistake.
Huge mistake. You still have time though. You're still alive. You can go back and visit it. I will.
Yeah. So what were you cooking for them? Were you cooking like down home American fare for them, or were you cooking French stuff for them? Neither. They were very strange and really wanted me to just like grill up some meat, steam some veggies, plop some bread on the table.
Not fun. What kind of meat were you grilling? A lot of veal. Oh, okay. I like veal.
Feels good. Like the like breast, you had to like peel it and do all that stuff and like kind of splay it out flats. Did you stuff it? Like are you doing any of the old school French stuff, or literally just like I'm gonna salt some pepper, some veal, throw it on the grill, and have done with it? Once in a while I would do a fancy thing, but really they never appreciated it, so I would never try to.
They were French and they didn't appreciate food? I know. It makes no sense. How were their kids? Just as bad.
Wow. Wow. Well, you know. Since they uh I mean, uh, the odds that they ever hear that you're bad mouthing them are roughly zero, so I think it's fine. Yeah.
Uh what about you, Nastasia? Anything good happened this week? Anything good food and or beverage uh things? I saw that you found the picture of you cooking all of those chickens. And so you can put that up on the uh on the internet.
Oh yeah, I will. Now, I don't want to say nothing, but were the ones in the lower part of the picture like raw and you smashed them up against the cooked ones? Yeah. No, a lot of them are wrong. Because who cares if the Swiss kids get salmonella?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We we re redid it. Oh, I see. You just like you thoroughly renew renewed all of it. Yes.
Don't straighten it. It's better with your finger in it all crooked. Give it to people. Nastasia sends me a snap of a snap. It's already, it's what is it, 12 years, 13 years old?
So it's already faded a little bit. You know what I mean? And then she just has it all crooked. It's like that's straight up Nastasia style. You can't do it any other way.
Chickens, Switzerland. Chicken Switzerland. Dedicated listeners have our have seen this picture recently. No, no, it's a different picture. Different picture.
Of Nastasia with the chickens. Yeah. Call in all of your Nastasia cooking in Switzerland related questions to 718497-2128. That's 718497-2128. By the way, Nastasia, so I said before, now we'll see whether uh this is all on Nastasia because I'm never gonna get in touch with my uh rare book person.
So we can just forget that. Maybe generally because I don't get in touch with people. I I don't get in touch with people. Hard to argue with that. Yeah.
But you know who I ran into at the bar last week was uh Matt Sartwell from uh Kitchen Arts and Letters, one of the owners of Kitchen Arts and Letters, and he also agreed to come on the show and do a Kitchen Arts and Letters versions, uh, you know, episode of Classics in the Field, which I think would be amazing. I mean, who better to do a classics in the field than the owner of Kitchen Arts and Letters? Am I right? For those of you that don't know what Kitchen Arts and Letters is, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you?
It's like the cookbook store in the United States, as far as I can tell. I visited, and I'm gonna talk about it a little bit later, I forget what it was. In Edinburgh, there was a cookbook store. I don't know if it still exists, this was you know 18 years ago, owned by the uh two fat ladies people. There was an amazing cookbook store.
Uh, but in terms of just you know, a cookbook store, you're not gonna find a better cookbook store than Kitchen Arts and Letters. It's just it's just great. And it's uh up in the 90s on uh in Lexington. So if you come to New York, put it on your stop of places to go. Now I know what you're saying.
You're saying I can buy these books at Amazon, but and that's true. Uh and I remember the very first time uh I went there, I was planning on buying it at the book I was looking for at a bargain bookstore, but I wanted to see it first because at the time there was no look inside or whatever, so I wanted to go see it. And I realized that that having them curate the selection, the knowledge that they have in that store is worth paying the extra to go buy it from them in person. Plus, plus, they will turn you on to things that you had no idea that you needed in cookbook land. So if you're doing research uh for cooking or you just like good things, go to Kitchen Arts and Letters.
And by the way, if you go there uh and you buy I my book is there, uh Liquid Intelligence. If you buy my book there, I gave for them uh a recipe that I hand wrote out uh that they Xerox it is only in the copies of the book you get at Kitchen Arts and Letters. It's my milk syrup recipe, but it's the only place that has been well, not really published. I hand wrote it on a piece of paper and gave it to them. Anyway.
You have a caller. Caller, you're on the air. Hey, uh Nastasha, Dave, Matt, I think, with Jessica. Uh this is Scott from Houston. How are you doing?
Good, good. Been uh listening for a long time, working through the back catalog and working my way through uh liquid intelligence. So I appreciate all the work you put into this. Have you gone to UP Preserve and had the cooking of of our good friend Nick Wong? That's on the agenda, but I haven't yet.
I loved Undervalley, and I heard on the on one of your shows that Nick Wong was there, and so I was like, shit, I gotta go. Yeah, Nick Wong's good people. Do you like that? Uh do you like the Bon Me shop that he likes? It's called something like California or California or Cali Sandwich?
Yeah. Yeah, that's one of my favorites. That's kind of like the chefs go to here locally. There's a couple others I like a lot with that one. All right.
Well, you want to call out the ones that you like? You want to you want to give the ones that you like as a recommendation? Yeah, sure. I mean, just Vietnamese food in Houston is amazing just because of a huge Vietnamese population here from the immigrants um back in uh you know 70s, I think. Yeah, yeah.
But anyway, uh my favorite Bon Me shops, Cali Sandwich in Midtown, and used to be in the Montrose area, but now up in the heights, there's one called Les Baguette. It's kind of spelled a little weird with a an apostrophe after the bah and before the get. I don't know, but uh you know, Google searching, it's a little bit it'll come up. But um that one's my favorite one because they use like a troffle aioli in it, which is maybe not I don't know that I want truffles in my Bon Mi, man. I hear you, but just you'd have to try it and take my word for it and try it once.
All right. I'll try anything once. But I'm not a huge truffle oil guy. No, it's very subtle. It's very subtle.
It's not it's not strong. I'm with you. I don't like truffle to overpower things. I mean I like truffles. I like truffles, but yeah, no, no, no.
All right. All right. Oh yeah, oh yeah, very much so. Nastasia also skeptical. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
What about you know, Matt? What about you? I totally get it. Uh you're vegetarian, crap on it. Do they make good vegetarian Bon Mi?
Yeah, of course. Tofu. Uh just okay. What about you, Jess? Uh yeah.
Jess, you a bon me person? Of course. Yeah? All right. What do you think about truffle oil in your in your bon me?
That sounds wrong. I will try it though. Listen, man. I'm not I I am uh I am a big believer in poo-pooing things beforehand, but still trying them with an open mind. I am not above being wrong on the regular.
Same here. All right. Good deal. Well, I'll be listening, you know, future episodes if you happen to try it and want to, you know, give your opinion on the air. I'll be listening.
All right, so what was your question? Hey, by the way, truffle oil, good for training your dogs. If you want to train your dogs to search for truffles, truffle oil is a cheap place to start. Now, then you gotta the problem is is once you train your dogs to search for truffles, as I did, I trained major to search for truffles. Hey, there's no truffles where we live.
So he wasn't able to find any. But he could find uh in a large yard any uh thing that had had touch uh truffle oil put onto it. Interesting. Yeah. Alright, go ahead.
Question. Well, and just to set the record straight, it's not truffle oil in the sandwich, it's truffle aioli, but I don't know if that makes difference. Well, what do you think that is mayonnaise made with truffles? Oil. Right, right, right.
But it's not just like the crappy truffle oil you get off a grocery store. It's like you're saying it's not like mayonnaise made with the crappy truffle oil? Well, I don't know. I just know that I don't hate it. All right.
It's fine. A friend of mine says he hates mayonnaise. I said, okay, I won't put any mayonnaise in it. How about I just put eggs, oil, and other flavors? He's like, I see what you're doing now.
Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. I'm always suspicious when I see like other flavors or something non-specific on the label. Don't get them.
Anyway, um, so I have two questions. You can take your pick for time's sake of which one is more interesting to you. Um I'll let Nastassi pick if you don't want. All right, sounds good. That's fine.
Uh so number one, I was making really great sourdough for a while there from the tartine process. Yeah, yeah. I have their bread book, and I had a great I made the starter according to the process. It was kicking butt for like four years. My bread was legendary among friends and family.
We moved. Subsequently, I made some bread. It was good. I don't know if it was as good as before. And then the starter ended up in the sink, and then things ended up on top of the starter, and it ended up getting washed down the sink, and I cried a little bit.
Yeah. Um, trying to start the process. Was it a family member or a guest? It was a combination of blame between well, I'll take the ultimate blame because I put it in the sink to begin with, because I was just gonna wipe off the outside. Uh-huh.
You know, it's like that con you know, if the world ever runs out of concrete, flour and water mixed together will be the substitute. So I was just trying to wash that off. Yeah. Yeah, I know I know what you mean. But well, do you what do you keep it in?
What kind of vessel did you keep in? Then my wife put stuff on top of it, but that wasn't her fault. She didn't know what it was. I get mad at my kids all the time because but the thing is is that here's what people don't realize who don't cook Nastas, you'll back me up on this, especially in a smaller kitchen. I think you'll back me up.
The sink itself, when you clean it out, becomes an area where food prep happens. You'll put a bowl down into it. You'll never put a bowl in the sink to sweep like trimmings into. You'll never put a pan in the sink, chop onions on the board and then swipe them into the pan. Yeah, because your friends are garbage.
But like when you're cooking by yourself, you can assume that people aren't going to come and turn the faucet on over the ingredients that you're working on. Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. No.
No, ultimately, like I said, I'm taking the blame. Strong. Anyways, I have not had much success getting a new starter going. I don't know, and I've used the same process. I used filtered water once and then things weren't working.
I was like, maybe I just need to use bottled water and make sure there's no chlorine. Maybe that was killing the yeast. You know, I've I've done it multiple, multiple times. Um and you when I used to make it, it would immediately within the first couple hours start to bubble up and I would it would be like I would use this little Pyrex glass canister or or jar and then like the plastic lid just loosely sitting over it or a dish towel, and then it would like push up to where it was touching what was over, even though it was only half full. It was getting that much volume.
Now what which what do they start on? Do they uh are are they the ones that do the grape start? Who like what what's their starter start again? Well, they just do a fifty fifty whole wheat and bread flour mix with just like equal parts water. Um for the for the very start, for the very beginning?
For the very beginning, yeah, and then you let that go for two days, and then once you see some activity and it smells a little funky, then you feed it again to kind of you know, you get a funky and then you train it so it's predictable. Right. Who is it that did the grape starting? That was Nancy Silverton way back in the day. Yeah, that's the Silverton thing, yeah.
Yeah. Um well, how far away did you move from where you used to be? Or no, that's maybe Alice Waters, but I think she does that too. Um I'm sorry. How far away did you move from where you used to live?
I mean, not far. Same basic water supply, I think. I don't know if it's like I mean, most of the yeast comes from the wheat germ, right? Not like what's in the environment and on your hands. Also remember, things change things change over time.
How how long did you have that first starter before you got really good at the bread? I mean, honestly, it's n it's all credit to the book and not myself, but the first bread I made with it was fantastic. Hmm. So it's not like it's not like the the 'cause you know the makeup of the starter will it takes a like a a a long more longer than you would think to kind of level out at what it's eventually going to be, assuming that you make bread at the same rate and store it at the same rate and feed it at the same rate, right? But you're saying that you're saying that Well it was very forgiving though.
Yeah, but you're well but it but you're saying that it didn't that it's was good right off the bat and then you were just never able to get that result again. But you Well yeah, once I lost that original starter and tried to make a new starter, the new starter just is lazy yeast or something, it's just not doing what it's supposed to do. And I don't know. So here's the weird thing, it gets the flavor. Like the bread I baked from it, even though the s even though the starter wasn't right and everything wasn't looking right, I still was like, Well, let's just bake some bread and see what happens.
It it had the great flavor, like the subtle sourness, but not too sour. It just didn't get any oven spring. It didn't rise like while it was proofing and I got no oven spring. There were little holes, but not as much. King Arthur brand, whole wheat flour, King Arthur brand bread flour, all that same.
And the temperature of your kitchen is relatively stable, same. Yeah, you know, seventy to seventy-two. And you didn't move, so the humidity is roughly the same. Yeah, same place in Houston where it's just freaking hitting. And you haven't tried to you haven't tried to keep this starter for like a month to see whether it gets more healthy and just like keep feeding.
Well, keep feeding it. I've been feeding it for like yeah, for like two weeks straight, feeding it every day. Feeding it, dumping it, feeding it, dumping it, feeding it, dumping it. Right. Yeah, just resorbing like a tablespoon of what was there and then refeeding.
Well, you can keep more, it's not gonna get that acidic. You know what I mean? Well, I mean I don't I don't measure out an exact table spin. I mean it seems like you it seems like you need to up you know it seems like you need to up its leavening power, you need to up its yeah its activity, but you don't want it to get too sour, right? So but I think like at your initial now look, I'm not an expert in sourdough, maybe someone in the chat room is, but uh I haven't worked with it in in many years.
I I used to keep a starter I kept a starter for years and years, but then I haven't for years. And the the kind of um the level of knowledge around sourdough has gotten much, much greater since I have done it. So I would not consider myself uh, you know, twelve, fifteen years ago, you would have like, yeah, I know quite a bit about sour though. But right now, like not only am I, you know, t twel that many years distant from having done it a lot, but also the people's knowledge of it has increased a lot more since since that time. Uh but uh it sounds like you're just not getting if the flavor is right, it just sounds like you don't have a healthy enough, robust enough um culture in there yet, and that maybe you need to reserve more of it, feed it fresh to get it really kind of robust before you start uh you know pitching the almost the entire thing out and starting from completely fresh.
I mean you know it's like you'll change the you'll change the makeup depending on how fresh the medium is, you know, when you add when you when you when you dose it obviously it's gonna change the the makeup of the yeast and bacteria that are in it but you know I think that you're just not you're not vigorous enough. So I would I would not I would keep more of the original until it's hypervigorous and then once it's hypervigorous you can go back to your old kind of routine. Right. So one observation on its behavior that might give you a little insight into what's going on chemically um a difference in you know post-feeding the old starter would rise in volume and it would maintain its relative consistency viscosity pretty well and I could like drag a spoon through it and see all the bubbles and it seemed like there was some gluten development where it would stretch. But now it's just like a puddle of like really it'll start thick like a really thick pancake batter almost to a like almost a dough but then as it goes it'll loosen up and become really soupy and smell kind of sour.
So I don't do does that give you any insight as to like the balance of bacteria versus yeast if it's if it's more sour than you're if the other one had I mean it's hard to say but in general obviously um acidity uh reduces gluten strength. So if it you know if you're saying that the other one had more kind of uh kind of a you know more gluten left to it that would indicate to me that it had a lower uh and and the and the current one doesn't and it kind of has a very sour kind of lactic taste to it or vinegar depending like that you're getting a higher acid content in this one and that that would mean you probably have m you know a higher uh um lactic acid uh or bacterial content and maybe lower on yeast that was a guess again I'm no longer an expert in this right okay well I'll I'll go back to square one and or I'll just you know like you said give it a little bit more of the starter and then just dose you know feed it and let it go longer before I refeed and see what happens. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah get it to a place where you like and then and then keep it in stable mode. Right but it as far as you know it is correct that the majority of the yeast that dope say natural leaven is from the wheat germ not from like your hands in the environment right I don't know I haven't done I haven't done a lot of the a lot of the I haven't done any research on it you know you know I've done various wild ferments of uh you know yeast in fruit juices and s and stuff like this but again I've done that much more recently than I have um um bread I usually cheat though honestly and I buy a yeast I like I'm a cheater I'm not opposed to doing that as long as it makes a good product I'm a huge cheater I mean, like, you can buy like really good, interesting, well, in the in the brewing area, you can buy like immensely awesome yeasts you know. Yeah um okay I don't know about I don't know about bread baking.
I don't know if you can buy like super awesome yeast. But most people are like, I want the yeast that grows in my house, even if the yeast that grows in your house is not good. What if what if you have a house that with bad yeast? Yeah. What if your terroir doesn't want you to bake bread?
My new house is maybe my new house is just not yeasty enough. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. People are like, I want the terroir of where I live. Maybe, most likely, where you live is not good for what you want, right?
You know what I'm saying? Like, like it in upstate New York, like, unless you like it's good for some things. Squash, onions, great. You know what I mean? Like, but like, you know, certain things aren't just aren't going to be great there.
You know what I'm saying? Maybe your house is one of those places where the yeast is just not great. In which case you can cheat. Just cheat, add yeast, or break into your old house. Right, right.
Break into your old house. Yeah. Wait for the new owners to go on vacation. Okay. Right?
Right. You know where you know whatever window is the bad window that doesn't lock properly, right? We all do. We all know which one that window is. Break in there when they're on vacation.
Do a starter. Get what how the hell are they gonna know? They're not gonna know. By the way, I did not recommend on the radio that you break into someone's house. Yeah, yeah.
Sounds a lot like you did. All right. Okay. Well, I will not be breaking and entering, breaking any crimes, but um, you know, if they open the door and uh let me in. That's another alternative.
Just give them 50 bucks. Be like, hey, here's 50 bucks. Keep this on your counter for a couple of days and give it back to me. Right, right. Yeah.
Or maybe I could just go to the bakery down the road that makes pretty dang good sourdough and just ask them if I can have a small amount of their starter. Yeah, they might do it. Depends on the attitude. Why not? Well, it depends on their attitude.
Some some bakers are like, I remember there was a pizza place I used to go to back before pizzas were good, right? And they had a decent oven at the time. And uh I said to him, hey, you know, I'm interested in kind of you know how your dough works. He's like, I'll sell you the dough because you don't have the oven. There's no way you're gonna make a pizza like me.
So I was like, okay. And then, you know, he gave me the dough. You know what I mean? So it all depends on the attitude of the baker. Yeah.
Well, they once gave me a whole bunch of pastry crust without even asking questions when I needed to make some beef wellington. So yeah, seemed like they'll be game. Alright, cool. I'll give it a try. I'll let you know how it works out.
Yeah, let us know how it works. Twitter you or something. Alright, cool. Uh Zev wrote in, but he wrote it all. No, he didn't write all in caps.
My machine put it all in caps. Imagine if your name was Zev all in caps. That would be kind of that's very Cher already. Very what? Cher.
Did she write her name all in caps? Nastasia almost spent a weekend at Cher's house. Let's not talk about that. I've told you so many times that there's things you can't talk about in the world. That's all I said was you almost spent a weekend at Cher's house.
I didn't give any specifics. That's too much information. It could be any share. We don't even know which share. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
There is only one share. There's only one share. I got in a huge argument with someone about Cher the other week. Because huge huge argument. Because I I think, and I'm probably wrong about this, but she was a very early use of the creative auto-tune.
Right? And then this person was like, Yeah, but Cher's, you know, yeah, Cher like always auto-tunes. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Cher's got an amazing voice. Cher does not need the auto-tune.
She used auto-tune as like uh an artistic tool in like a very particular era of Cher, late Cher, I have to say. And I think to good effect, I enjoy those. Do you enjoy those Cher songs, Sastasia? No. You like her earlier stuff better?
Do you like her back in the Sonny Bono days? Uh I like her, like when Half Breed, is that Sonny Bono days? When did they they broke up in the 70s, I think. I don't know. The many eras of Cher.
Cher great, right? Everyone likes Cher. If you don't like Cher, best not to talk about it. You know what I mean? Anyway.
Zev writes in, not about Cher, about books. I'm buying a gift for a produce enthusiast and considering a fruit or vegetable related coffee table or otherwise entertaining reference book. I know Dave has mentioned several times on the show a series of vintage books. The catalogs, fruits and vegetables of various regions, not various regions, New York. But I can't recall the publisher or the name.
That series is uh the fruits of New York and the vegetables of New York. And it's put out by the New York, uh, the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, N Y S A E S is the publisher. But uh they were put out between 1905 when Apples of New York was put out and the 20s. Now listen, do you live in New York? Because if you don't live in New York, or if the person you're giving the gift to doesn't live in New York, right?
They might not want a book that's about New York, but you can find the Apples of New York happens to be the best known one in 1905, two volume, small. Also, also not coffee table book, a normal-sized book. Uh, if you want coffee table size and you want to go with that series, you can go on the eBay. I looked this morning, and here are the things to search for. If you just search Fruits of New York, it'll only look up small fruits of New York.
But there is the grapes of New York, the plums of New York, the cherries of New York, the peaches of New York, the pears of New York, and the small fruits of New York. Now, the grapes of New York is normally the most expensive of the lot. Not sure why. I guess because we grow good grapes. For whatever reason, that's become one of the more collectible ones.
Many of them are available for under $100. But really, and I looked on the internet, that's true on eBay. But you know, if your person's not from New York, mm, I don't know. Uh the other thing is that uh I up until a couple of years ago, you could buy new copies of the vegetables of New York from them, the sweet corn, I believe, but I couldn't find the the source on the internet. The Cornell completely changed their internet setup, and I wasn't able to navigate through uh to find any more.
But I have to thank you, Zev, because I have the entire series, and I had all three, uh I had three of the four vegetables of New York, the small things that came out afterwards. I was missing only one, only one, the peas of New York. And I had had a search for years, for years to get the peas of New York. And this morning when I went to go search for you to see whether or not I could uh get a good price on the fruits of New York, there were not one, but two copies of the peas of New York uh that were up for sale. And because they were two copies for sale instead of one, the price went down, and so I was able to get one for less than 50 bucks.
Boom! Boom! Boom! I'm now own them all, stuckles! Yeah!
I'm now own the entire set. Busted! No one can say I don't. Thank you, Seth. Jesus.
Can I tell you something terrible that happened this morning? Sure. I had a call, like a random call, and I decided to pick it up. It was a debt collector. Oh jeez!
Go ahead. For my old restaurant, right? And it was Pasta Flyer. Yeah. And it was uh like for workers' comp 15K.
The guy's like, I'm gonna reduce it. Wait for workers' comp insurance? Yeah, it was like an audit. They accidentally mailed us a check for 15K and said, here we made a mistake. And if I know you, you cash that sucker right away.
Put it in the LLC, and then they're like, oh, that was a mistake. We need it back, but whatever. Anyway, so then the debt collector's like, we're gonna reduce it to 9K. I lost my mind. I lost my mind.
I wish I wish I could have been there and people I there's nothing better than Nastasia feeling wronged on the phone. We should talk about yesterday. Anyway, so uh so the guy's like, you know, he's not he doesn't give a crap. And uh and at the end of our conversation, I said, Do you like being a debt collector? And he said, It's a job.
I've been doing it for 26 years. Everyone hates their job, right? But we can't all win the lottery. And I said some really bad things, and I said, I love my job, and then I hung up on him. Aww.
That's the feel-good part. Well, yeah, but like that's just so sad, you know. Hey, listen. Yeah. Like I remember, I mean, I remember a tow truck truck tow truck drivers, too, right?
Because there's there's tow truck drivers that help you. There's tow truck drivers who what they do is they go to the side of the street and they help you when you need help the most. These are tow truck drivers that you that you know, the this is an honorable job. Do you know what I mean? And then there's the new Haven tow truck operators who just go around the city towing cars that uh that the city has said hasn't paid their parking tickets.
This is not an honorable job. No. So do you consider it similar to a debt collector? No, I think debt collector is the worst. And they're also like, we'll just pay it now.
And I'm like, I'm not worth that. Where am I getting this money? You know? And also, I mean, so did like, did you just I passed it on to the people that need to do that? Did you just hurl obscenities at them?
Uh no, I said, you know, I go crazy. Did we talk on air about you threatening the life of a UPS worker? Yes. Yeah. What about yesterday?
Yesterday my internet was out. Oh my God. Yeah, and I called the guy and he's like, we can't get anyone there till seven. He ran through all these tests. He said something's up with it.
I told him I was gonna buy a flight just so I could use their Wi-Fi because it was better than structural. And he was like, go ahead. There's nothing like impotent anger. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really agree with you.
Then I called you, uh, you were asked me a question, and then you were like, You just said the thing, and I and all of a sudden I realized it was plugged into the wrong thing and it worked. Yeah, because uh all it takes is caring about solving your problem, it turns out. Which this dude couldn't muster. He couldn't muster caring about it. Uh, did I tell my favorite kind of debt collection story?
I don't know. About the car? Uh I don't know, no, probably not. Oh, yeah, if you don't know the story, then I haven't told it on the air. So uh years ago, uh when I lived in New Haven, I had a car.
It was a complete beater. It was a I I forget which era this was. I think it was my 76 Pontiac, Bonneville, uh, that huge car, huge car, amazing. Uh, 10 miles to the gallon. I I bought it for 400 bucks.
I love that car. I ended up spray painting it gold and zip tying a uh uh a cow skull to the front. Love that car. Uh anyway, so uh I used to get parking tickets regularly in New Haven, and of course, you know, I didn't have any money at all, so I didn't pay them. This is back when I had just graduated from college.
This is back when Jen and I um we were living together, and literally we would buy one pound of bacon and make it last all week as a flavoring meat. You know what I mean? Because we didn't have the money to, you know what I'm saying? Like, we would eat only like beans, flour, and rice. We would figure out different ways to arrange beans, flour, and rice.
Yeah, you know what I mean? We allowed ourselves one six dollar bottle of wine a week. You know what I mean? It was like that, you know, that was kind of how you lived, you know what I mean? And uh, so anyway, so I wasn't paying my parking tickets, and they towed they towed my car, but I thought someone had stolen my car.
So I went to the police station or whatever it was in Town Hall in New Haven. I was like, okay, listen, uh, you know, uh my car, my car was uh, you know, my what was it? Oh no, no, no, it was worse. I went, I was like, my car is gone. I assume they had towed it because of the parking tickets.
This is what happened. I assume they towed it because of the parking tickets. So I went to the place where they towed the cars, and I said, Where did you tow my car? And she's like, I'm not gonna tell you where we towed your car. I'm like, what do you mean you're not gonna tell me where did you tow my car?
She's like, I won't tell you where your car was towed to until you pay all your parking tickets. I was like, I was like, that is cold. That is cold. Like, I need my car. I don't really have the money to pay these parking tickets.
You won't tell me where they towed it to? She's like, Nope. I will not tell you where you we towed your car until you pay the parking tickets. So I've got how much money in tickets. It was like that was like 150 bucks or something like this.
It was a lot at the time. You know what I mean? To me. And so I paid her the money, like 150, 200 bucks. I paid her the money.
I was so pissed. I was like, okay, where did you tow my car? And she's like, we didn't tow your car, it must have been stolen. Oh sick. Also, that person loves their job.
Oh, yes. I just hate the attitude of wouldn't it be nice if we could all win the lottery someday? Like, I hate that. I hate that. Yeah, don't wait to win the lottery, people.
Just win it now. Just win it now. Uh that's that's gonna be uh, oh, I bought a t-shirt on the internet. Uh I like they should that should be a t-shirt now. Like, just win the lottery now.
Just do it now. I bought a t-shirt with a slea stack on it. Do you know who what a slea stack is, man? Yeah, no, that's not like who did we call that? Well, there was that Democratic candidate whose name was C-Stack, which sounds a lot like slea stack, and then we called another person who looked like a slea stack, a slea stack, and then there used to be that haircut that I would call the slea stack haircut that was popular like three or four years ago, and it comes back every once in a while.
But I think about slea stacks, which is a land of the lost character, more than the average person. And so yesterday, Jen, my wife and I were making fun of the can candidate C-Stack, so we we were looking up slea stack again, and I saw someone like the internet. I hate how they monitor my feelings. But they gave me a they they put up a slea stack t-shirt that was like 15 bucks. I was like, you know what?
Okay. And I never buy things that are marketed to me on the internet ever. But I was like, slea stack. I have to give a I have to give a um an advertisement. Okay.
Claire wants to know. Claire? Wait. Okay. If there's anybody that wants a life coach out there to let her know.
She's she's like she wants to be the life coach? No. Oh my god, Dave, don't. Okay. Dave, I think you should sign up.
No well, look. If you want to be coached in the gentle art of the vegetti. No. If you want a career change or you want Claire to be your life coach. Now, for those of you that don't know, Claire.
Friend of the show, Claire. Claire was the person who wanted to know how to jam various things into her vegette properly. One. Also wanted some advice on how to officiate a wedding. Yeah, that was that was memorable.
Yeah. And then what was the other one that she did? Uh for a girl who's watching her figure. Yeah, but there was another one. Count chocolate.
Yeah. There's a whole host of things. Like, we should have just a Claire subsection of like oldies but goodies on in our archive. So just broken up into peace, like, you know. Yeah.
She's like, hi Dave, do you miss me? And you're like, oh. So yeah, anyway, so like if you're looking for that kind of a life coach, go ahead and reach out to Nastasia at the same place that you would send a question, which by the way, is Lopez.nastasia at gmail.com. Oh, uh, Zev also wrote in PS. I just got a Sears all for my birthday.
Uh, the number one use so far has been melting butter on toast. That's a good idea. Yeah. I've never done that. That's a good idea.
Thanks, Ev. Again, thank you. It's a second time Zev has helped me out in one day. Uh, not the most sophisticated application, but as someone who doesn't have a patience to let the butter soften up before spreading it, it's a godsend. Who has that kind of patience, Zev?
Who the hell can wait? Some people keep their butter out, right? So uh a piece of uh equipment that the people used to have was a butter cloche, right? So the some people just have the butter, the uh the the butter tray with the lid that you leave out, right? You ever do that, Sus?
Uh no, I don't. Anyway, but the idea is is that the problem is is that because of the air exposure, it can become rancid. So they used to make these butter cloches where you'd have a little bit of water, you'd pack the butter into the into the top of the bell, stick it in the water, and then it wouldn't go rancid because it was the equivalent of the sealed, but it would stay at whatever room temperature, like a wine cellar's actually not a wine cellar, but a wine, you know, McGillicutty is a good place to keep it. Uh what's a McGill cut? You know what I'm talking about?
Wine fridge. The little wine fridge. Yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
So or or like someplace cool, like not in the top shelf of your kitchen, which by the way, I've said this many times. I'll say it again. Get on to a stool in your go to your kitchen, get on a stool, uh, if you have high enough scenes, get on a ladder, and notice how much hotter it is at the top of your kitchen than down where you are. Especially if you do a lot of cooking, the air at the top of your kitchen gets very, very, very much hotter, like 10, 12 degrees hotter. So if you have fragile flavor-related stuff, store that stuff lower in your kitchen rather than higher in your kitchen.
Just a little, just a little little note, little note for you. Uh anyway, but the but butter cloche, so I had one, I was like, Booker, because Booker doesn't like Booker likes to spread the spreads butter all over the stuff, but he mutilates everything, mutilates it, and uses a lot. So I I got the cloche. I had soft butter. He's like, I don't like it soft, I like it hard.
Whoa. He likes his butter hard. Weird. Really weird, right? Your son, your son is strange.
And it shreds the hell out of a pancake. Hard butter on a pancake is like, please. You know what I mean? Yeah, that preference is just wrong. Right?
Some preferences are wrong. Speaking of uh the kids, uh Booker is really at this by the way, Booker and Dax's birthday today. Oh, wow, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh they turned 15 and 18.
And Booker has become truly offended by the shut up dad. I but I told him I'm not gonna erase, I'm gonna keep it for posterity, but I'm gonna have to change his ringtone away from Shut Up Dad because he's like, it makes me sound mean. Well said it then, huh? So uh Dax has requested tonight his uh the the cake, the sherry cake that I've talked about on the show a million times, where I can't tell you all the secrets or my mom will kill me, but it comes from Sunset Magazine, and it involves adding a um packet of uh instant lemon pudding to a yellow cake mix and sherry instead of milk. Uh that's all I will say.
It's you know, it's the best box cake situation. And I grew up on it, yeah. And and and from that has stemmed my love, which to this day is maintained of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry. Like, I just like the flavor of it. I don't go and drink it.
I'm not like, you know what, Jen? I'm gonna bust out and get a glass of Harvey's bristle cream sherry before dinner. I don't do that, right? I could, like, I could drink it like that, but I don't. But uh, I have a love for Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry, and I think it has a bad reputation just because of the 1970s, which is unfair.
Which is unfair. Uh wouldn't you love to see these two servers get in a cage match? Oh, uh Mr. Midriff, who's the other one? The other, the other one.
Also with midriff? No, but Battle of the Midriffs? Alright, wait. Question from the chat. Yeah.
Can we do this? Sure. Zach C. Uh first, went to MoFat over the holidays. Great exhibit.
Chef. Eric made some superb chicken and was an excellent storyteller. Give that man a raise. Actual question. I can't do that, but actual question.
I went to Sicily recently and fell in love with almond granita. I've been trying to recreate it at home, but can't maintain the frozen texture. I've been using two to two to nine unsweetened almond paste to sugar to water. I stir it frequently in the freezer. It will have the right texture for about 30 seconds when I pull it out, but then quickly melt in the brutal heat of Palermo.
It would last for five to ten minutes. Okay. Do I just need to up my sugar levels? No, listen. Listen, listen.
The Italians, the Italians want to tell you that everything they do is natural. All of those gelatos, all of those frozen things that they make are doped with unbelievable amounts of uh stabilizers, right? So it's like it's like everyone's like, oh my god, Italian, they're frozen treats is so they must be all natural because they're Italian. No, no. It's the same way that like Italians think that Americans are alcoholic because we'll have a cocktail, but we'll like you know, neti pot a whole bottle of wine.
You know what I mean? It's like they just don't seem to think about stabilizers as being bad things to use. Stassi, back me up on this. Yeah. Now, I don't know that they use stabilizers in uh in Palermo for this, and I don't know the recipe, but uh I mean think about this.
If you up the sugar content, right, you'll decrease the freezing, uh, you'll decrease the freeze. It should stay, it should melt faster if you if you increase the sugar. Because they asked about increasing the sugar, right? Yes. Yeah.
If you increase the sugar, you increase the melt rate, right? So, like in general, like the problem with low sugar recipes is that uh they're too hard, in fact. You know what I mean? So uh my guess is if you want to do it and you don't care about being fake or whatnot, I would make a gel-an fluid gel, right? Uh low acyl gel-an fluid gel with the water, right?
Uh, then blend that, then blend into it your sugar and your almond paste, and then make it from that, and it'll never melt. It'll just get less cold, right? You'll churn it, it'll get the right texture. Uh and be the reason I say gel-an is because gel-an has a uh you could also add some uh some thickener. If you add guar to it, it will uh it will get chewy, right?
Which is an effect I noticed years ago when I was making uh ice cream like all the time at the French Culinary Institute, and I made that chewy cellp Dunderma-like ice cream, which was a mixture of guar and um guar and gel-an. So if you use guar uh as an additional thickener uh just to get the viscosity up, then you'll get some weird, I like them, but weird textural effects. But uh just a straight gel-an fluid gel, if the texture of it's already good the way it is, will um definitely stop the meltdown. You might want to add a little bit of a thickener just so that uh just to give it a little more body. It's up to you.
I don't know how much body the almond paste is giving to it, but that gel-in fluid gel is gonna work. And the good thing about gel-an is that you're using very, very small amounts of it, uh, and it's relatively freeze thaw stable compared to agar. So uh that's what I would do. What do you think, Matt? Sound okay?
Seemed right to me. All right. Aaron writes in about uh from Oklahoma. Uh greetings from Oklahoma. Love the show, and I've been listening since approximately 2012.
I brought some Pectanex, SPL from Modernist Pantry. What? That one. That's not a midriff. That's like uh, I don't know what kind of suit that is.
But usually. Uh what'd you say? I said usually. Oh, and should be some sort of cage match. Yeah.
Uh do they still do cage matches? I think so. They're still the the um, what's that called? But in in MM MMA, is cage match still a thing? Yeah, yeah.
But is it any different from a regular match? I mean, like how do you decide the person's d out? I think they don't they have to tap out? I don't know. Matt?
Matt? I have no idea. Jess, you still there? This show is the closest thing I get to experience to a cage match. Locks us in a shipping container.
Who would win? You would win. No, depends on the one. You would totally win. Oh, Nastasia would wipe me out.
Depends on what you said before. It depends on it depends on the on the sentence that was said. Yeah, you could you could dope this room with a sentence that would set her off, and then we would all die. Or vice versa, you could set me off on something. And then and then I just, you know.
It's it's the question is which one of us is gonna be in a blind rage. That person would would win, I think. Right, Stas? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Um, uh, I bought some Pectanex SPL from Modernist Pantry. So far, I've tried it with grapefruit, orange, and tanglo. Tangelo or Tangelo? Tangelo. Tangelo.
So says California, so say we all. Uh I followed this procedure. Peeled and separated the segments, covered with water, added 1% total weight of Pectinex, uh, stored overnight in the fridge, rinse and dry segments. You could you don't have to do it overnight if you do it, if you don't refrigerate it. And I would you can if you can add a little more, you can speed it up.
Anyway, the results were good, but I thought that the grapefruit and the orange flavor was a little watered down. The tangela was very good. Did I get lame citrus or should I expect some loss of flavor to the water I'm soaking in? Any other tips for this procedure would be appreciated. Thanks, Aaron.
Okay. So uh what's going on here now is you're doing the supremes, and you can look, not the band, the like the segments of fruit. So if you go on the uh cooking issues, and uh you can still search this one, I think, uh, and you look up like citrus supremes, you can kind of see the technique. The amazing thing about the pectin X is it eats the um it eats all the white, so all of the albedo and the connective tissue between the segments and makes fundamentally supremes of citrus, except you haven't cut through, so like the the classic way of making supremes of citrus is to like is to peel the whole fruit and then cut in between the membranes with a knife, but when you're doing that, you're cutting all of the little like vesicles, right? And so they leach out.
When this is done properly, you haven't broken any of them. And in general, the water that's left over is it's got a bunch of melted uh albedo in it, which is the white, but doesn't have a lot of flavor. So I don't think you're leaching that much flavor. So for instance, when you clarify with pectinx ultra uh ultra SPL or um uh or pectinx SPL, when you clarify orange juice with that, you're taking out a lot of stuff and you're losing a lot of the flavor. But in general, the idea of uh doing the supremes is if you're not penetrating the actual flesh.
If you penetrate the flesh, the actual vesicles, then you'll wipe out the pectin on the inside. The the hope with the supremes is is that you're not doing that. So maybe you're soaking too long, and I would taste because you can, I have the the soaking liquid. And if the soaking liquid doesn't taste a lot like oranges, and you're probably not leaching out that much flavor. There is some flavor and some bitterness in the whites, but the question is does it taste less intense than a hand cut supreme?
That's what you should do. So my guess is that you probably have uh some lame citrus. That's just my guess. My dad and I made lemon cello, orange cello, and a mix of stuff over Christmas. Uh well, how long until it's ready to 90 days.
How many days from now? Well, Christmas. How much sugar did you add? Uh zero. You add that later.
Add it later. But you're gonna so like and is orange cello a thing? Yeah. And then we did a mix of grapefruit, cumcrouts, oranges, and myer lemons. You grow Myers?
Mm-hmm. Do you like Meyers? I've never become a huge Meyer fan. I need to get back on the Meijer bus. I can send you some.
Yeah? Mm-hmm. Do you think Meyer lemons I've never had one in a store that I love them that much? Do you think they need to be fresh? Really, really good.
But in order, do you think Myers are one of those fruits that like when you buy it in a store and it's been on a truck? Yeah, it's not the same. It's not the same. So it's not like a lemon which tastes okay in a supermarket. You think of Meyer, you need to have the tree.
Yes. It's really good. Very good. All right. All right.
Well, are you gonna have him send you some and we'll taste it on air? I'm gonna go out there in March. So yeah, I'll bring some. And you as you have you and your dad made this before? No, first time.
My mom the whole time just bitching us out. Really? Why about what? Who knows? It's got that extra savor from the why was she why would she don't know.
Every about everything. Anything we were doing. Well, why? Because we don't usually do the stuff like this, you know. Yeah, but So what?
I mean, it's not harming anyone. What is your father doing this for? Is he trying, you know? What? I don't understand.
Like, he has a new hobby, and she's like, F that. Why? I don't know. Why can't the man have a new hobby? Okay.
Dave, do you have this uh Haggis question coming up? Yeah. He's asking again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's the last question. And it leads into what would have been a yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all good. I got you. Okay.
I got you. Uh Jen writes in uh from North Carolina. Longtime listener from Milwaukee, appreciate your Milwaukee love. We gotta go back there. Yeah.
Yeah. Gotta hit some nails into that stump. Yeah. You know, I have a stump at the bar, but Don won't let me use it. And then I brought it upstairs after New Year's, but we didn't have any nails, and then Donald's like, you have to throw this away.
I don't know why Don hates the stump so much. Why does Don hate the stump? I don't know. He knows it will eventually be a little bit more. Is that the one from Harvard?
What? Is that stump from Harvard? No, the stump from Harvard's in my house. That was hollow. There was a uh there was a yellow wood tree that fell down in a church in Harvard, and they chopped while we were there, and they chopped it up, and I was like, I want that stump.
That's when Harold McGee almost got taken out by a banana peel. Yeah, you remember that? Yeah. It's like like Harold McGee, friend, friend of ours, not just friend of the show, but friend of ours. Like, we've stayed at his house, like, we've known him for years.
And Zoltar at the party, and yet to this day, all these years later, Nastasia's favorite fact about Harold McGee isn't what he's accomplished, or that he's like, you know, a really sweet guy, or any of that. Even his sonorous voice is not what she likes. It's that walking, uh walking towards Harvard Square one day, Harold McGee literally stepped on a banana peel and started the full and somehow caught himself without falling. But just that she saw the full the godfather of food science is taken out by a banana. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And she saw in her mind eye, so his heel did leave the ground. Yeah, but in her mind, in her mind's eye, she saw the full like arms, one up, one down, one leg up, one down. McGee on his back. He could own that place. Alright, well, Nastasi and I have this lifelong dream.
Do you think about winning the lottery? Our lifelong dream is showing us up at some place and getting horrifically injured. But then as we're in the air, it's not that we're doing it on purpose, we're not that kind of person, but as we're in the air, we're like, I own this place. Like, give me a Disneyland. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or the Apple store. I'm gonna they're gonna slow, I'm gonna get like just so other people can have that. I'm just gonna start seeding the Apple store with banana peels. Yeah, one in downtown Brooklyn has a Whole Foods right there, so the chances seem higher. Easy, easy.
By the way, Nastasi and I we did a shoot. All I needed was bananas, she ate them. We went. Oh, Christmas. Yeah, Nest.
I need to come out. I've we we started shooting a commercial for the cocktail cube and another one for Spinzall, but we didn't have time to put them out before Christmas. We should put them out anyway. Put him on anyway. This episode is brought to you by Fair Kitchens.
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Learn about the Fair Kitchens code and join the movement at Fairkitchens.com. Jen writes in longtime listener from Milwaukee. Okay, currently living in North Carolina. I buy these bars. They're these, they're they're bars.
They're like the fig bars, right? You can you get the picture up on your phone so I can you can read the ingredients. From a juice shop. Uh I love them, but my cheap butt wants to she used the A word, but you know, family show. But ass is a donkey, so I can say that, right?
Uh, my cheap ass wants to make them at home, but a key ingredient is maple flour. What the heck is that? Uh, see a picture of the ingredients to prove that I didn't make that up. So let me see uh let me see that. It's the Village Juice Company Figgy Bar, and the ingredients are oat flour, fig, maple flour, coconut, date, vanilla bean, water, and pink salt.
And it is raw plus vegan, gluten plus dairy plus soy free net. What's the net mean? I don't know. What does net mean? I don't know.
Soy free net. Soy free net. What is that? Anyway. Oh, wait, maybe I think I know what happened.
They were gonna put net weight and then up there. Okay, okay, okay. I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I looked this up.
Uh I didn't read the part that said it's raw, but uh here's the thing. So uh it used to be, and I'm assuming that they mean actual like flour from a uh a maple tree. It used to be back in the day. I remember in the well, way, way back in the day in the 1800s, people would adulterate bread all the time with wood flour, right? Because wood flour is free, they needed to get rid of it.
They wanted to bulk up the bread, so they would bulk up the bread with wood flour. Uh so that used to be a thing that people did. Um then they stopped doing that because people got upset that their bread was being made out of sawdust. Uh, but then in the 80s, when I was a kid, uh I remember uh they used to they came out with uh low-calorie high fiber bread, and I read the ingredients on it while I was a kid at the Grand Union in Englewood, New Jersey. So because it was then it had to be 1981-82, and I said, yo, dad, what is cellulose doing in this bread?
And he goes, That's there for idiots. And then that was it. So we never bought it. So in the 80s, they used to have this cellulose doped bread for fiber and for low calories. And then I think that fell by back by the wayside again.
Uh so it could be that they're just adding literally ground up wood flour, but uh the more charitable uh interpretation is they're using the inner bark of the maple tree. Now, the inner bark of trees, usually pine trees, is uh an often used ingredient in, for instance, the north of Scandinavia. So you can look up a lot of recipes for um bark breads uh that use kind of the inner part of pine bark, and you can look on the internet and a lot of people use it. And I did find that maple bark, sweet maple bark, especially, uh, can be used, the inner bark, not the hard part, can be dried and powdered and used as a uh kind of flour substitute, but I've never had it, so I don't know what it's like. The only uh I mean, obviously we all use bark, but we're use in things like cinnamon.
Uh I use hickory bark to make hickory bark syrup, uh, which we use at the bar, but these again are using a different part of the bark. So I'm assuming that uh that they're not just adding ground up sawdust to it, that they're probably using the inner bark of the maple, but I was not able to find a supplier for it, so maybe they have a hookup somewhere in North Carolina. We gotta go, Dave. Haggis uh Devin the Dude writes in, Dave, I have an this is I'm gonna read this just as is. Dave, I have a nice big clean bung that I'd like to pack with some nice meat in order to make a haggis.
I had questions about this. Okay. What's your questions? Well, I whether whether that was intended. Uh, yeah.
Yes. Okay, okay, okay. Any good substitutes for the traditional lung component or any thoughts on making haggis in general, it'll be my first time. Uh okay, so what is haggis? For those of you that had like, you know, I don't know, don't know haggis.
I don't know. For those of you that don't know haggis, uh, what it is is it's a mixture of uh pluck, sheep's pluck. Now, the pluck is that whole agglomeration of stuff that comes out of the the top of an animal when you kill it. So you're talking the hearts, the lungs, and the liver. Like that whole McGillocutty there is the pluck, right?
And so what it is is it's the pluck cooked, right, in what they would call like a metzel zip, but like a like a butcher's soup cooked, right? Pulled out, you chop up the hearts and the lungs. And the interesting thing about the lungs is it's got like a nice kind of a uh a sponge, spongy texture to it. You chop up the hearts and the lungs, you grate the liver, then you mix that with oatmeal and some of the leftover broth from that process, onions and like, you know, sage and thyme and all of that kind of good stuff, spices, salt, uh, and then you pack it into uh a sheep's stomach. Now, a sheep's stomach is actually the forestomach because uh sheep's also a ruminant, so it's only got uh an opening on the on the one side, right?
Now, if you buy a cow's stomach, it's called a bung. So when you're talking about a cow, you're not actually talking about its butt when you get the bung normally. When you talk about a pig bung, you are actually getting the butt end of the big intestine of the pig. See the difference here? Anyway, so uh if you have the the bung, if you're using uh uh, and I believe also in sheep, when you're getting the stomach, I believe the cecum, that forestomach, may be called a bung.
I don't know, because I can't really buy it here. So you stuff it in, and here's the trick when you're stuffing it in. You gotta stuff it in. Uh, you don't fill it up all the way because you're putting uncooked oatmeal into it. And the oatmeal is supposed to swell up and you know, absorb the the juices that you mix the thing with and take water from the outside stuff that you're gonna boil it in, and the meat, it's gonna swell up so that if you you gotta get the air out, but you don't wanna fully fill up the bung, because if you do, right, you're going to uh it's gonna explode on you.
It just won't won't work. So, and then you boil that sucker up and you serve it with uh mashed uh neeps and tatties. Now, uh interestingly, uh you can't get lung in the US, and you haven't been able to get it since I think the 20s. You can make friends with uh oh, you need suet too. You need suet to mix up with it.
Uh I had a friend who was a butcher back when I lived in uh in the garment district, and he would get me illegal lung. Uh so you could try to get a source of illegal lung, but if you can't do that, I saw someone that recommended tripe because tripe also has a spongy texture, so you might want to substitute tripen. It's not gonna be exactly the same, but it could give you some of that spongy stuff. Now, in weird, I was gonna use this as a classics in the field someday, but I'm gonna use it just for this for weird haggis recipe. So haggis is one of those things that's awesome and really can be, you know, it's just it gets a bad rep, but same way that scrapple does, any form of starch, whether it be oatmeal, uh buckwheat, groats, ground up, or cornmeal, mixed with cooked meat and broth, then chilled and then sliced and fried or heated up, is gonna be delicious, right?
It's got the gelatin, so it holds its shape, it's got the starch, so it holds its shape, it's rich from all of the meat that's in it. It's just inherently a good product. But they all get a bad wrap, right? Which is why I've always said that scrapple should just be marketed as polenta plus. If you just marketed scrapple as polenta Plus, people would buy it, don't you think, Sas?
But people in the in Philly love scrapples, so you don't need a people in Philly, but people outside of it don't. Yeah. Sure. But they should. It's delicious.
Anyway, I think of I think of haggis as kind of like a Scottish, almost, it's not really, it's a different texture from Scrapple, but almost as a Scottish grapple. But for those of you that are in the mood for weird, the English, just south of Scotland, in 1880s up to early 1900s, there was a book called The Uh Warren's Model Cookery put out by uh what was the name of the author? I cut her off. Her name was Mary, I think Mary uh Jury. Anyway, she wrote the craziest recipe for Haggis.
This is an English recipe for Haggis, the most demented recipe ever. Uh take the heart, the tongue. And so she must have misread lung for tongue. I don't know. Uh, or maybe that's what they use in England.
The heart, the tongue, and part of the liver of a sheep, uh, rather more than half the weight in bacon, which wouldn't be in a regular haggis, and would have been in England the entire cured side of the pig, not just the streaky bacon as we haul it. One French roll, the rind of a lemon, two eggs, a glass of wine, two anchovies, and pepper and salt, and grind all that, mix it all together, pack it into a pudding mold and steam it. And that's their haggis. It sounds like it would be good, but it ain't haggis. It ain't haggis.
Okay. Breadcrumbs. Well, I gotta do my classics in the field. All right. So for this week's, by the way, uh, and well, we'll get into it later.
Uh this week, uh, oh I got Classics in the field! Yeah! Uh this week we're doing, I think, one of my all-time uh favorite books. I found it kind of uh randomly. It's James Peterson uh sauces.
Now, James Peterson uh worked in France in uh the 70s in in you know very famous kitchens in France. Moved back to uh New York in the late 70s, early 80s, and among other places taught at the French Culinary Institute, uh, where he wrote a lot of their original kind of high-end curriculum. Now, uh Peterson has written a bunch of books. He wrote a book on vegetables, book on fish, but by far and away, my favorite book that he ever wrote, he wrote in 1991. It was called Sauces.
Now, Sauces, when it first came out in uh 91, won the James Beard Cookbook of the Year, and richly deserved it. He's come out with four editions of it. I have the first edition and I have the fourth edition. Now, I'm not saying that the fourth edition is bad, it's not. The fourth edition is a very much larger book than the first edition.
It came out in 2017, so three years ago, roughly. And it's a good book, right? But I highly recommend that you search out the original uh edition just because, and like most classics in the field, uh that I think are interesting. It not only was it an incredibly groundbreaking book at the time, I found it my copy used at the Strand, back when the Strand just had everything marked at half of whatever its list price was. Uh I probably got it in like 98 or something like this.
And I found it, and when I opened it, I was like, I don't really know that much about sauces. I mean, I had like Escoffier's book, and so I had read that, but I was like, I don't really know that much. So I took this book up and it is just like front to back, an incredibly thoughtful, amazing uh book. And not only that, like ideas that we kind of take for granted, like an integral sauce versus a non-integral sauce, in other words, a sauce that comes from the meat or product that you're cooking versus a sauce that doesn't come from that. Uh bound sauces versus not bound sauces as a categories, really were things introduced by Peterson in this book, sauces.
The newer one has all kinds of modernist techniques, which I wasn't as interested in because by the time it came out, I mean that's my job. So like other people's take on my, I mean, not to be whatever. I just wasn't as interested in it. But the other great thing about it is a lot of the things in the original thing, this was written at a very important time in cooking. It was written in the 90s by someone who had come up cooking in the 70s, uh late early and late 70s in France and spanned an era that is now kind of glossed over.
So nowadays, when you think of, and it was written in 91. So back in 91, people were still looking to France, professional French kitchens as being the height of high cooking. So here in the United States in the 90s, you wouldn't think of an incredibly fancy high-end Italian uh restaurant, right? There was no Del Post, none of those high-end places really existed. They'd existed, there was expensive Italian restaurants, but no one that was taken seriously on a culinary level the way the high-end French restaurants were.
France was still in professional cooking seen kind of as the apogee of what was going on and had been since basically the French Revolution. You hired yourself a French chef, a Swiss hotelier, and a Viennese uh pastry cook, right? That's what you did because they were like everyone said they were the best, right? So all throughout the you know, 19th century and you know, first half all the way up until then of the 20th century, like French chefs were seen as being like, you know, the French de French. A mere 10 years later, really, the Spanish had stolen the vanguard of what was going on in the high end cooking world.
And then from there on, from the 2000s on, I would say that in America here, we look anywhere in the world or to ourselves for guidance and not to the French anymore. So this was written at kind of the last point in time when France was the place to look. And it does have a particularly French attitude because that's where, you know, James Peterson learned to cook. But also it spans an interesting part in French cooking. So we tend to think of either modern cooking or kind of old school French cooking.
But really, it had gone through a whole series of uh a whole series of changes, right? The most famous of which, which isn't, I think studied as much as it used to be, much to the distress of uh, you know, the the people who were kind of my mentors, like Michael Batterbury, but like Nouvelle Cuisine. So Nouvelle Cuisine came up in the um in the 70s, in this in the late in the 60s, late 60s and 70s, right? Uh, which is different from the you know, cuisine mansour, which is like the super light stuff, but it was much lighter than the earlier sauces. But as Peterson points out so eloquently in the introduction to this book, uh, it actually is a change that happened after the sauces had already changed from the heavy flower-bound sauces of like Escoffier's uh era to being more like reduced cream sauces.
And so there are, and he he does the Nouvelle cuisine sauces, he does the boiled cream sauces and the flower-bound sauces in here. So it's kind of a a transition that's totally been glossed over in modern cooking. And so just for that alone, I love the recipes and the point of view that uh he brings about in this book. And so for a slice in time which has been lost, you must go read the original edition of sauces by James Peterson. I do not think you'll be disappointed.
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