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Must be 21 and over. Please gamble response. Muckle Shoot. This episode is brought to you by Burlap and Barrel, a public benefit corporation working directly with smallholder spice farmers around the world to source unique, beautiful spices for professional chefs and home cooks. This week, on a special bonus episode of Meet and Three, we find out how Brexit could be changing the way that Brits eat.
If you're not getting your food from the European Union where Britain gets 30% directly, well, where are you gonna get it from? As I put very succinctly, Bubby Fresh Peaches from Italy, hello tinned peaches from Florida. Bubby Fresh Oranges, hello tinned oranges, Bubby Free Range Beef, hello hormone injected beef. Tune in to hear about the UK's struggle to stabilize its food system on Meet and Three, HRN's weekly food news roundup. Available wherever you listen to podcasts.
This is Dave Arrow, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Air Journey Network every Tuesday from whenever to whenever from Earth Pizzeria and Bush Brooklyn. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? Good. Uh got Matt in the booth.
How are you doing? I'm doing great. Yeah? Yeah. Uh so I'm I we have to do this every week.
Did you anything interesting? No. No. Nothing interesting. What about you, Matt?
Uh, no. God. People tune in just so they can see. You know what? Everybody else also doesn't do anything interesting during the week.
It's just not food related. I'm not gonna get into personal stuff. That's not what is that what you want? I don't know. Alright, let's hear about your ceviche.
I I have nothing special to say about the ceviche. I put acid on fish, I let it sit there, and then I ate it later. You should write a cookbook about this. Riven. I feel like where is ceviche in its arc now?
Like ceviche was like at the top of the universe for a while. Is it just gone back into kind of normal levels? I think it's normal. Like I, yeah, I was like, oh, I have fish. I don't want to do anything fancy.
Oh wait, ceviche exists. Okay. Oh. What are your thoughts on Ceviche? Do you enjoy it or do you still are you still like New York's sushi eating queen, or do you not do that anymore?
No, I don't do that anymore. You went through one like like a two-year period. But that's because I was with Mark. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm saying, but you had like the unbelievable sushi consumption repertoire.
You'd eaten at all the places. Like eat like so at the higher end places, people be like, it's the best. And you're like, me. Because you had been to all of them. Yeah.
Yeah. He spent all of his money in sushi. So you're saying that Mark Ladner is a lot like Booker, my son, who spends all of his money in sushi. Or Wesley Snipes, sorry. Are you like Wesley Snipes spends all of his money in sushi?
Wesley Snipes didn't pay his taxes. Yeah, but as a result of sushi consumption? Something consumption. Are you saying that Mark doesn't pay his taxes? Yeah.
Okay. You heard it here first, people. That's a big problem. Wesley Snipes and Mark Ladner. That's probably, is that the possibly the only thing they have in common?
They should both be on the same episode of Cooking As you. Yeah. Invite them in. Well, I told you, I don't, like, Wesley Snipes had the uh, I think it was Blade. Did we talk about this?
Blade, was it Blade Three? Is there a third blade? Blade Three? I think so. And then one of like the like modern, like uh white, like not too large human action figure.
One gosling? One of the was it gosling in blade three? Anyway, gosling equivalent white dude. And uh Wesley Snipes would only refer to him on set as that cracker and only in third person. So like if we were sitting here like this, he would say to the director, please get that cracker out of my sight line.
And I think that's the best. Like, if if I could like have a job every day where I was ignored by Wesley Snipes and referred to only in the third person as that cracker, I feel like I would have arrived. Yeah. That would be the best. What do you think, Matt?
I think you need to bulk up if you're gonna try and get that kind of role. I was saying he wasn't big. No, Wesley Snipes was Blade. And I believe that like random white dude who may or may not have been a gosling, I don't know, when we can look this stuff up, is uh was like, you know, kind of probably the guy who is just you know kind of caught up in the whole good guy vampire thing. Has any of you guys seen the Blade movies?
No. God no, we're also joined by uh two people in the studio. We have Kat Johnson, who is the communications director. Uh so in if this is the West Wing, which character is that? Is that Alice and Janny, or is it uh or is it that Toby guy?
Which which one are you? I think I want to be Alice and Janney. Yeah I'll go with that. All right. So what is it that you're here?
Oh, and we have unknown name, actually, longtime listener, hater of uh Gilden brand shirts. Uh did hates Gilded t-shirts. Gildan, right? Hates. I think so.
Hates. Has the correct belief if the if the handle is correct, if the social media handle is correct, hot dog is not a sandwich. No, hot dog is a sandwich. It's not a sandwich. Your handle is incorrect.
I'm gonna get in this argument again. Oh we'll save it. We'll save it. All right. All right, hold on.
So where do we want to go first? Kat, what's up? Oh, um, well, I have a thank you note for you. The thank you note is from Marcy Goldman. She said that one of her readers let her know on a recent episode that you gave her a shout-out about her recipes and called you, called her a freaking genius.
And she feels like she finally arrived. So she says thank you. Oh, well, please, thank you. You know what I mean? Like, all I did was give you a shout-out.
You gave me recipes that I'm gonna use for the rest of my life, so what a what a there's no better gift than that. No, really, right? I mean, like when whenever like uh someone comes up and they say, Oh, I I got XYZ tip, and that now I use that in my in my cooking routine or bar routine, I'm like, yes, that's the win. Yeah. You know what I mean?
That's the win. That's all you can, it's all you can hope for in this ratty world. You know what I mean? But what are you here to do specifically? Just to tell us cool stuff?
Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna talk to you after the show. Um It's private. You're not put oh, like Nastasia's private, private stuff. What? Dave knows everything about my life.
Oh. Please, more than more than I want. Do you want another question though? I have a couple more questions. You won't say anything personally embarrassing about yourself, yet you make me talk about my robotic vacuum.
You wanted to. And I have said something. Why is that embarrassing? The people needed to know about that, by the way. What's the number, Dave?
718498498. 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Have we gotten any uh comments on whether people think that Claire should come in and be my life coach? Someone's said that they want a whole episode with no commercials or anything dedicated to this.
The commercials keep the lights on, guys. I have to say that as the communications director. What? Are you willing to have her life? Okay, here's what this is what I think you should say.
You should say, how do I get to a place where I don't have to carry my own stuff? How do I get people to listen? Like that kind of stuff she will work through with you. She'll say something to the kin of throw all your stuff away, don't have a family and move to a foreign country, which is what she did. You have no idea what she's gonna say.
But that's what she did. Okay, but you have to be flexible and nice. Here's the thing. What does anyone out there actually want me to be flexible? Yeah.
Who wants me to be flexible? Well, we do to get here on time. Oh, that's not flexibility. That's just doing what you say you're gonna do. Which I in general like to do, but I don't know why.
I don't know why I have a uh uh I don't know why. I don't honestly I don't know why. I don't know why I'm always late. I really don't. You don't care about it.
We'll work on it. We'll work on it. We we have a caller on the air who I I think I recognize. Oh, yeah? Caller, you're on the air.
Hi, Jordan Rothman here. Hey, friend of the show, Jordana Rothman. How are you doing? Well, you know, I'm hanging in there, Dave. How are you?
Hey, I say, you know, fair to middling. Fair to middling. Yeah, I mean, that's the best we can hope for, I think. Yeah, yeah. That's the new win.
Like, like slight loss is the new big win. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Dave, listen, I had a little incident this weekend, and I wanted to top it over with you, see what you think. Do it.
Okay. So here's the thing. This is not the first time this has happened. Okay. That's the first thing you need to know.
Okay. It's the second time that it's happened. And the thing that happened is that I was visiting the sea wench, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. Wow. At her decommissioned lighthouse in the uh wilds of Stamford, Connecticut.
This is all semi true, by the way, people. Yeah, it's basically true. It's basically true. Okay, so I was visiting, and we were having like a really cozy time, you know. We're like talking through our feelings.
We were like painting our intention. We played a few hands of rummy. I made a delicious Robelita because she demanded it of me because I had wronged her, and she insisted that I cook her dinner. So it was time to go to bed, and Nastasia and I like to sleep and was not bedtime. It was time to go to bed.
Let her tell her story. Honestly, she's one of the worst people. But anyway, it was time to go to bed. And when we go to bed, we like to sleep like Charlie in the chocolate factory style. So, like the, you know, like we sleep head to toe style.
You know what I'm saying? I do, I do, but I don't remember like which ones, like Josephine and Joe. I don't remember the other two grandparents' names, do you? No, I don't really remember them, but it's sort of irrelevant, I think, ultimately. But you know, grant grandparents style in the bed, wild Saturday night in our pajamas.
We also went to Target. It was a big day. And uh we decided we were gonna light a fire in the fireplace upstairs. Okay. And this is the second time this has happened that we lit the fire and the room filled with smoke.
And I said, Nastasia, the room is filling with smoke. This seems dangerous. And she said, it's not, the smoke detector would go off if it was. Guess what? Smoke detector went off again and again.
We had to throw a flaming dura flame out a second story window into the churning sea from the balcony. Which by the way, that sounds fun. It was not fun. I'm gonna say this it's the reason it was the most the least fun is because I was an almost interrupt live. No, Jesus.
And she she, if you interrupt Saturday Night Live, that's literally it. Another thing you can't do is laugh louder than her or laugh if she is not laughing. Okay, couple of couple of things. You cannot laugh louder than Nastasia Lopez. One, not possible to do.
Second, if Saturday Night Live was about to come on, it was clearly not bedtime. So I'm gonna have to give it to Nastasia on this one. It may be bedtime for the rest of the world, but anyone that knows Nastasia Lopez knows that if you have to take a daytime, if you have to power nap, you're gonna be awake from 11:30 to one. Let me ask you something. When is it time to go to bed to get into bed?
That is bedtime. Like whether you're sleeping or not, it is time for bed. I see. I don't have a TV near my bed anymore, so I don't I it doesn't compute to me. Like, of course, I I fall asleep on the couch quite a lot, so you know.
Yeah, we never do that because the couch is for painting and for rummy, and the bed is for Saturday Night Live and for sleeping, and for pulling flaming dura flames out of the fireplace using a baking sheet and a pair of kitchen tongs and throwing it into the churning seat. So basically, why is it happening? And how can we stop it? And also, how can I convince Nastasia Lopez that it's dangerous and we shouldn't be lighting the fire because it's a bad idea. Okay, okay.
First of all, first of all, I'm gonna, I'm not giving this to Nastasia, so please don't yell at me, Jordana. But people over people overreact to a little bit of smoke. There's a couple things going on here. One, I'm assuming, I'm just assuming that you guys check to make sure the flu is open. Yeah, there's no flu.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, I mean, it's just a big hole. There's just you can see the night sky. Yeah. You can.
Okay. So people overreact, especially when a fire is starting. See, you know how everyone says where there's smoke, there's fire. What it really is is where there's smoke, there's inefficient fire, right? Yeah.
It's like the the, whenever a fire is starting, or if you have an inefficient burn, like whether the wood isn't totally dry or anything, you're gonna get much more smoke, right? Which is why when you're doing a smoker, you don't light a roaring fire, you smoke it, you smoldering, you do inefficient, you do inefficient burning of the of the wood. All right. So this is why, like, for instance, like uh fancy Japanese bins charcoal people like say, my charcoal makes no smoke. It's because like it's such that it supposedly burns efficiently enough that it's not creating a lot of smoke, it creates mainly heat, right?
Okay, right, right, okay. Uh, for those of you who are big on the on uh what's it called? Rudolph. Uh okay, so that's one. So anytime you're gonna start a fire, unless you're gonna start it, it's hard to start a fire completely efficiency efficiently, you're gonna get quite a bit of smoke on the startup.
And what that smoke is not gonna do is kill ya, right? It will make your clothes smell like smoke. It will mess up the paint on your walls eventually by turning it a dingy smoke color. So if you've ever gone to like an old house with like a hearth and you're like, man, this uh what? You know what I mean?
That that look, that will eventually happen. But as someone who doesn't have to pay the rent in that in that place, Jordana, it may make your clothes smell a little bit, but it's not gonna kill you. Because the good news is is that once it's going, the smoke's gonna go away because you're gonna start to draw. No one lets me get to that point. Okay.
So I'm sorry. Yeah. Smoke detector, which doubles as a carbon monoxide detector and cooking detector. Okay. That doesn't seem safe.
So there's a couple of things with detectors of various sorts, right? No one makes a detector. Smoke detector is legitimately detecting smoke. Smoke detector shouldn't be anywhere near you're either cooking or lighting a fire. Because we keep it inside the fireplace.
You're saying that's wrong. The way the smoke detector works is it's got a little radioactive safe radioactive source in it, and it's constantly emitting a certain number of particles, and it's looking to see how many particles it's receiving on its sensor. And then when smoke goes through it, it could be anything. For instance, fog machines set off smoke detectors. So if you if you any particulate matter that goes in between the radioactive source and the detector, is gonna intercept some of the particles.
The smoke detector's gonna be like, What? And then it's gonna go off, right? So it could be, you know, smoke from your uh from your fog machine. I set off my entire building smoke detectors on Halloween with one of those things, which was a nightmare because I had to rush downstairs on a 20-story building and tell people that not to send the fire department based on my smoke detector while the trick-or-treaters were coming around. Um but in general, what a smoke detector is not there to do is to alert you to the fact that there's smoke in your house while you're awake because guess what?
You're awake and you know that, right? Smoke detector is there to alert you to smoke in the situations where you're not actively generating smoke. Like, for instance, your house catches on fire. So any small living situation is smoke detectors is I know we need them for safety people, but it's inherently problematic. Ditto, like carbon monoxide detectors, there are things we do that generate excess carbon monoxide, or you know, conversely, back when I used to have oxygen detectors around all the time at the French Culinary Institute, like oxygen detectors, they're not meant, they they they go off before you're in danger because they're meant to alert you to anything that's out of the norm.
Not none of these detectors are built around allowing you to enjoy known transient situations without wailing at you. Why would a smoke detector go off for just heat? They don't go off for heat. They shouldn't go off for heat. Mine does it's who is that person that's a hot this person believes two things that I'm aware of.
One, incorrect, the hot dog is a sandwich, which we can have this argument again, and two, not a sandwich, and two, that gilded shirts are created by Satan. Are you familiar with sure? Are you familiar with Gildan, the brand? No, but I like the idea of a gilded shirt. No, no, not gilded, gilded in the game.
Gilded in, guild in. And so the theory is that they're well, why don't you explain the theory? Okay, so the first thing with one it's Josh. Hey Josh. Um, what up, Josh?
Hi. Uh welcome to the family, Josh. Oh, you know. It's great to be here. Uh Gildan, just it's not that I hate Gildan shirts.
It's just that I choose not to like people are entitled to wear Gildan shirts. Uh they should exist. They serve, you know, a market of people who uh, you know, don't like shirts that are comfortable or like fit particularly well. Um the owner of Gilded. Was it you that sent on my social media the image of the owner of that shirt company saying that they had never seen a human torso?
Yeah, yeah. So and Josh's point is is that for a mere 50 cents extra, you could go up to anchor. Which I don't great shirts. These are I just Googled Gildan's shirt and they're selling for $1.69. I'm gonna say I aim a little higher, you know.
I like 50 cents higher? This is what I'm saying. Break into the $2 range, you know? No, I like an Everlane t-shirt, specifically the Raglin sleeve Everlane tee. It's got a nice mech line.
It's uh it's a it's uh traceable in terms of you know, it's factory or whatever. I really I I care for it. I do like it. She's right. Wait, Everline?
Is this uh do they make only uh women's shirts or do they make all kinds of t-shirts? All kinds of T's. I'll tell you what I like. I like the Bluffworks t-shirts. I think they're good.
Bluffworks is a good shirt. Yeah. What about you, Nastasi? What is your brand of shirt that you enjoy? Uh I don't know.
Not not any of the ones you're talking about. Have you tried any of the ones we've done? Have you tried this Everlane shirt? You didn't enjoy it? No.
Goof shirts. Goop shirts. Goop shirts. Is Goob a thing? Is this Gwyneth Baltrow's new thing?
Goob? Goob. What about you, Matt? What's your shirt? What's your shirt preference?
I don't have a t-shirt preference. What about like Matt wears a hair shirt? Wow. He's constantly doing tenants. Well, what does he do to you?
By the way, for those of you that don't know, they used to, it's like, have you have any of you ever worn as your under as your against the skin garment, like rough hewn, unworsted wool felt? Brawl? Belt? No. No, like as just a night shirt.
It's it's a nightmare. You wouldn't do it. Just take your wool overcoat and put it on against your skin, and you're like, yo, this would suck. So a hair shirt is like that, but worse. Even coarser.
Even more what? I'm sending the Safia a picture of a hair shirt that you can all enjoy. Yeah, yeah. Okay, nice. So is it is she correct, Matt?
Uh I no! I've never tried a hair shirt. I uh my hair, I'm covered in c always covered in my own hair, so that's kind of like an undergarment. Right. Are you are you a long johns on the outside winner kind of a guy?
Uh no, long john under t-shirt. And I don't care what brand t-shirt. Hmm. Forgive yourself, Matt. I uh I am an always wear a t-shirt no matter what.
I'm always a minimum two-shirt human. Shower with a t-shirt. But then I have to remove it. You know how hard it is to remove a wet t-shirt? Any idea how hard it is?
Do you know how many t-shirts I've ripped in half trying to reach over my back and remove off of my back wet? Like how many, like no, how many? Dozens? Like where you grab the back of the shirt and lift up on it, and this the whole collar just rips off of it. You've never had this happen?
So this more to the point, higher quality t-shirt doesn't rip when you're taking it off. Well, it's because I use t-shirts where other people wouldn't, like when I'm going into the ocean or like when I'm in a pool. Because I just don't, I'm never uncovered. You know what I'm saying? Never.
Never uncovered. Uh all right. So uh what about Hanes, traditional Hanes or Fruit of the Loom? Haynes is an okay t-shirt. This comes from like trauma from my teenage years where I worked in a place that made T was a screen printing place.
So we like manufactured t-shirts for people. And Gileans were always the worst. Their reps were all kind of jerks. Um, and the shirts are bad. So it's like, you know, if it was just a bad shirt, I would be less passionate about it.
But their reps were also jerks. Yep. Alright. I made the Satya custom t-shirt one. Was it a guild in?
No. American Apparel. Oh. Well, wait. American apparel, like, first of all, they're out of business and that guy was canceled, right?
Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, canceled. But were they good shirts back in the day? Yes.
Great shirts. Yeah, they were good shirts. I had her, I I had a shirt made that was American Apparel and it said gauche on it. And I gave to her as a gift, and then she immediately spilled kebab grease all over the bottom. No, it was red wine.
It was red wine. Red wine and kebab grease. Good pairing, comparing. Well, you know, living up to the gauche. By the way, like, is gauche an okay thing to say?
Is it is it anti-left-handed people? Or is it no, it's left, it's left bank. It's gauche like left bank of Paris. Reeve's gauche. So it comes from hating people on the left bank.
All right. That's fair. Well, I don't know. As long as it's not anti-left-handed people, I'm good with it. That's sinister.
Fear of left-handed people because I don't know, Satan or something. You have a fear of left-handed people? No, I'm saying that that I think that's like a sort of like deep in the culture. Yeah, that's where the word sinister comes from. But this is one of those things we need to get rid of.
Like anti-left-handedness is something we need to get rid of. In general. That's fair. But anyway, gauche is just a lacking of social experience or grace, not cashful and crude. And so I anyway, I got it for nostalgia.
Because of those lousy left bank Parisians. So gauche. So gauche. Which is weird. Well, I don't know.
So back to cooking. One, uh, always wear a shirt under your chef's jacket, people. This is the thing is always wear a shirt under your chef jacket because of this. Nobody in a restaurant wants to see pit stains on your whites. I'm telling you, there is a grand total of zero people on earth that want to see pit stains on your chef's whites.
And let me say this. All it takes for a lot of people like me, if I when I was a kid, I I told the story, right? When I was a kid, I went to this place where I ended up working when I was in high school, and the chef just joked with me. Joked with me that he was making the hamburger patties with his arm cut. And I couldn't eat for the whole meal.
I couldn't eat. The whole meal, I did, but my mom, which by the way, I can eat people. You know what I mean? Like, even when I was a kid, I could eat anything. I could eat my burger plus your burger plus the other person's burger.
All because my dad once, when I was a kid, you know this story? Yes, this one I thought you were telling. No. He ate my I won't get into it. He ate my hamburger because I was being a little weasel about not eating, and then I was scarved from that point.
So now I'm the fastest eater that anyone has ever seen in a non-competitive environment. I am the I am one of the faster non-competitive, just my normal speed of eating, and Nastasia hates me for it. True? Anyway, so he made this motion like he was gonna press the hamburger with it, and I couldn't eat the whole night. They thought I was sick because I couldn't eat it.
People don't want to eat in a restaurant where you have pit stains or sweat stains on your on your chef whites. Please wear a shirt under those chef lights. Hey Dave. Well, we still haven't talked about the smoke, but yes? Okay, we'll talk about the smoke, and then I think we should take a break so that we can pour wine.
Yes. And have a commercial. Here's what's good. Here's what happened to you. Uh depending on the I'll tell her what happened anyway.
Or you could tell her. Yeah. So what you need to do is uh you need to start the flu drawing. And once the flu starts to draw, then it's going to be a lot better. So a very fast way to do this, you might not be safe where you are, but it is there near the ocean, is to take a wad of newspaper and loosely crumple it like into a big ball and put it like right underneath the flu and light it.
And then do that once or twice, and you're gonna heat up all the air in the flu, and once you've heated all that dense air in the flu with a really fast fire, then the flu is gonna start to draw, and then any flame you have, the smoke is gonna draw up out of the thing, right? So get your fire ready to start, and then above where the fire is gonna be, light a couple of wads, big big old wads of newspaper, and whoosh, you'll get this huge flat fast fire, and you'll see that the stuff starts drawing up the chimney. Once you're drawing, then you can start your longer taking fires that's gonna have more smoldering before they get rolling, right? Is this a Searsol use case? Can you just point your Sears all up the chimney and let it rip for a little while?
I don't know that that's enough BTUs fast enough, but I like where you're going with this. I like where you're going. Uh another another thing is, you know, I haven't used a dura flame since I was like eight, because I start real fires. But uh I am. Yes.
Yeah, but I mean, aren't they designed to start burning pretty quickly? They do. I think the wood wet. The wood was not wet. The wood with big air coats around it, the dura wood.
Oh, it was the wood that was smoking. Yeah. Well, you should get the dura flame going first. Then after it is going and your f and your chimney is drying properly, then add the stuff that's gonna smolder. But I will tell you this.
Uh wood that is wet, right? Not dried properly, up to half of the heat output of the wood is used in boiling the water off. Wow. So it's like it's not even close. So, like if you have infinite wood, then sure, go ahead and burn wet wood.
It's gonna pop, it's gonna like throw crap onto your uh more creosote onto the outside of your chimneys, uh, etc. etc. But you're only gonna get about half the BTUs out of it. And I'm not gonna get into this argument about whether fireplaces actually heat or cool your house, depending. It's a huge thing on the internet.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, just Google it. I'm not gonna get into it here. I'm not. I just I don't know. I'm not.
Uh now, what do you say? Yeah, commercial break, pour wine, and then we'll talk about the wine. We'll be right back with cookie and juice. I'm Ethan Frisch, co-host of Why Food and co-founder of Burlap and Barrel, a public benefit corporation working directly with smallholder spice farmers around the world to source unique, beautiful spices for professional chefs and home cooks. We set our partner farmers up to export their own crops for the first time.
And they get access to a whole new market here in the U.S., and we get access to spices that other companies can't source. We're honored to work with restaurants including Eleven Madison Park, Blue Hill, and Chaypanese, as well as thousands of home cooks across the country. Visit us at burlap and barrel.com. Dave, go! And we're back!
I thought you said you were gonna bring the music back up. No, no. He comes out. How many years you've been doing this? And that comes, he's like, listen, we're gonna bring the music down, and we're gonna bring it back.
Last week, last week you guys are in there chair chatting away. There was no time for me to turn the all right. That's the whole show, cheer chattering away. That's all we do. We'll get better every week.
We'll get that's you know what? Good life goal. Just get a little better. A little bit better. Get a little better every time, get a little bit better.
That's the next big win. Just a little better. Just a little better. All right, so you have a question? Shoot.
Okay, the question is from Alex from Toronto. I recently dried a duck in my refrigerator following the instructions from Sirius Eats Sasha Marks. It was extremely delicious. Could I do this with a chicken? Would it also be delicious?
I don't know. I mean, look, yes, you could do it. Like, yes, you could do it. In other words, like the flesh of a chicken is no more conducive. As far as I know, the flesh of a chicken is no more conducive to growing bacteria than duck.
There's an assumption that it is more contaminated, right? But if you're applying treatments to it to cause uh, you know, microbes to not grow on it and to therefore and also to die out during the drying thing, I don't see why you could, I don't see why you couldn't do it. But then the question is, you have to get somebody to eat it, right? And therein lies, therein lies the rub, right? Is that uh a lot of people don't want to eat you know, uncooked, even if it's cured chicken, but I'm gonna bet you could do it.
You know, I would make sure that you're using uh a technique that is kind of guaranteed for um killing off uh you know the the bacteria of interest. But you could still cook it after you dry aged it. I mean, oh, dry aged or dried? Dry aged. Oh, no, don't do that.
I don't think chicken's gonna get any better. And here's why. Chicken is already so freaking tender. The average chicken that we have is like six, six and change weeks old when it's slaughtered. I thought you meant like make it like a like a pastrame, like a duck past or whatever you call it.
Like a charcuterie board thing. Yeah. That would be weird with a chicken, I would think. Yeah, uh, I don't really it's already tender as hell. Yeah.
So I would say don't. Just roast it. Uh yeah. If you want now, uh, so uh Jeremy, right? Omanski and from Larder and uh and Rich Sheeve, our cook quest, friend of the show, just wrote a book on Koji.
Did you beat it? I read it. I was supposed to give them a blurb. It was due yesterday. I have not written it yet.
Uh but I will write a blurb. It's never happening. It's not true. Anyway, Stasi just likes to be a jerk to me. It's never happening.
She likes to be a jerk. I'll put money on it. Okay, how much? Well, see, now you'll know how much. No, no, no.
How much? If it's never gonna happen, then you can put some money on it. How much money? Now you're gonna do it. How much more than I'm putting money on?
How much money? Nothing now. Everybody get in the chat. Start putting money down in the chat. We won't let them know.
Anyway, uh, so uh they're writing a book on Koji. First ever, I think, book solely on on Koji. So we have to have them on. Uh it's coming out, I think, in May. Yeah, do it.
Yeah, have them on. Yeah, anyway. So uh they would say that if your goal is to so there's a couple of things going on in dry aging, right? Uh in any kind of aging theoretically. One is you're tenderizing the proteins, enzymatic, like the enzymes are breaking down the muscle fibers in the protein, making them more tender, or as Jacques Depin used to say, more tender, tender.
But like he's you ever you ever go see him doing the demos at the French culinary? Tander. Anyway, so the uh that's one thing. The other thing is that as proteins uh are breaking down, but it's also dehydrating, and so with dehydration is gonna increase the um overall flavor of the meat just because you're getting rid of excess water. Um so there's that.
And then the last thing is is that as proteins break down, they turn into free amino acids, and free amino acids have flavor, whereas whole proteins do not, typically. Right? So those are the basic basic things. So what if Rich was here, I think what Rich would say is that if you if, you know, the tenderization is not a problem with chicken because it's basically veal at this point already, so just let it, you know, it's already tender enough. Have you ever said to yourself, man, unless they haven't overcooked the chicken, have you ever been like, chicken's tough, unless it's a foreign chicken, right?
Like like other countries' chicken, which are older chickens, are tough and have more flavor, right? American chickens, because they are the veal of chickens, they're the worldwide equivalent of veal for chickens, like they are tender enough. I don't need them to be more tender. What do you about you, Josh? You need your chicken to be more tender?
No, perfectly content with the tenderness of my chicken. That's right. No one's ever, people are like, oh, it's dry, it's overcooked. No one's ever like, it's well, Nastasi and I aren't going to get into tough chicken. Not gonna get into it.
We've already had this that we had an argument last week, off air. It was ugly, I ended up bloody. Anyway, um, so uh the one thing you might want to do if you want to up the umami profile is use some form of short-acting uh koji-based, uh, you know, enzymatic amaranade like uh shy o koji or something like this, but we'll talk more about that when you know, when they come on to talk about their their koji book. Yeah, right? Great.
Okay. Uh wine? Okay, what do we got here, Josh? Well, I get up the actual questions from the show. Uh so this is a sparkling chardonnay from a producer called Tebojson.
Uh former champagne producer, now making some really nifty wine in uh Charlottesville. Ah, this is from this is this from Charlottesville? Yeah. Oh cheers. Yeah, two Virginia wines for you.
Cheers. Cheers. Virginia, land of the uh land of the serpentine walls. Yeah. Yeah.
I suppose. What do you think, Nastasy? That's good. Do you like it? What does Claire say about Chardonnay?
She loves it, obviously. My favorite text. Dave my favorite text I've ever seen. It was a date. We cannot talk about her date.
I'm not talking about the date. That's not the important part. She but she said, and and we I use this now, as this is my go-to thing to say. Anytime someone says the word Chardonnay, she's like, I was having a glass of wine, charty ops. Charty ops?
Charty Ops. Charty Obs. I got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Charty Offs.
I'm like, I'm like, hell yeah. Is she an oaky buttery girl? Oh yeah. Big old big button. Big Kendall Jackson.
Yeah! Enough with her. What do you mean? I'm gonna get in trouble. What?
Charty's good. I get uh harassed by my Somalia at work all the time for referring to it as Savvy B as well. Savvy B? Oh my god, that would be a great rap name. Right.
Savvy B. I had another one. Dax was gonna have some sort of food-related. Oh, uh, he was gonna be tiki mugs with a Z. Because Dax now exclusively drinks his seltzer out of a tiki mug.
He was given for Christmas time or his birthday, like a tiki mug. And so at the table, he's always pounding seltzer out of a tiki mug. It's good living. Yeah, right? It's a tiki mugs.
Tiki mugs. Tiki mugs. What what style of rap is tiki mugs? Is that like is that like a North Carolina rapper? That sounds like like it'll like bounce.
Trop house. Oh yeah. I was told, I was told, I met yesterday someone who did the exhibit design. My name is Rio. He did he does the did the exhibit design for the fourth floor of the uh African American Museum in DC where like the mothership is and Bootsy Collins and Public Enemy, all that music section, he did the curation for it.
And uh he told me that in Atlanta, TI has a trap museum. I'm not surprised. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life. Isn't it the pink house? Is that is he behind that one?
There's like a pink house they turned into a museum or something. I I don't know. I have not been to Atlanta. Anyway, uh just there. I missed it.
Well, apparently so I said like I I was just like, what? Like, what is that? Like is it like a bunch of like the the horror story in my mind is it's all a bunch of like white suburban teenagers going in to play. I don't know, to me it sounds like a huge nightmare. He had never been.
Is this sound like a huge nightmare to you? Uh probably, but no worse than the selfie museum. Oh boy, who just called out on the Oscars. Now, this is why now Nastasia hates movies to go see them because the mouth noises. Right?
And sitting next to people she doesn't know. This is why, if you ever ride the subway with Nastasia and she's known you longer than about eight minutes, she'll pull position and force you to sit next to her. By the way, on the subway, that means sitting at the seat that is by the pole so no one can sit on the one side and force you to sit next because she does not want to have any portion of her next to someone she doesn't know. Right? Yeah, yeah.
And she also doesn't want, as much as she likes to have friend of the show Paul on and make mouth noises to offend our listeners, doesn't enjoy mouth noises while she's watching movies. In fact, she's ruined movies for me now when I go, because now when I hear people's popcorn crunchling, like it's a quiet people wait for the loud part of the movie to go into that freaking plastic bag. And movie people, why are you giving people plastic bags in a movie? You know what I'm saying? That noise that the plastic bags make?
And then like you can't, you can't like rip the top of that bag open. You have to, every time you put your your grubby fist into that bag, you have to punch through it and make all those damn crinkly noises on the way to get whatever rancid thing you're getting out of it. You know what I mean? And if you're sneaking food in, which I know you are, I know you're doing that. Listen, I've done it.
Bring a noise-free bag. Like, what's the noise? Does someone make the equivalent of like a velvet food bag that you could just kind of slip into and out of? Get it, yes. Go in, get your snack.
Come out, eat it. Like, I'm that guy that when I used to sneak in, because now you know when I'm I'm too old to worry about sneaking stuff in, but we like uh, you know, like even the can used to make me nervous. You would cough. We would have to cough as kids. Well, just wait for the loud part, wait for everyone to get shot, and then as people are getting shot, because you know, it's click, you would cough.
I don't want to hear your coughing covering up the can. There's no usher in the film, Nastasia. This is your thing. There's no like authority figure. It was my mom.
Your mom, your mom out loud would be like, cough when you open the can, Nastasia. Well, first we had to do what did we have to do first? Oh, well. Ask at the bar. Well, can we talk about it?
I think so. So I have always so if any of you have ever worked in a situation where cans of soda are stored prior to their being used. You know that they're stored in filthy warehouses with uh dust on them, rat poop on them, rat pee. A lot of times they're not even overwrapped, they're being like stored in unsanitary situations. They're being loaded, people are picking their nose while they're loading it, wiping their butts and not washing.
All kinds of stuff is happening. So I'm a huge believer. This is why I like a bottle, first of all. I like a bottle. And it has been, I cannot remember a time I did not wipe the top of cans thoroughly before I drink out of them.
And I I urge all of you to look at the cans of soda that you get and look and see the filth ring. So the way the cans are built, there's a there's a canyon all the way around the thing for strength, right? Because the the top of the thing, you think of it as flat, but it's actually a dome. And there's like an imprint in the top. And in that little, in that little ridge, off more often than not, you will see micro and sometimes macro filth.
And so, like, I always kind of wipe it out. And it turns out Nastasia has also always done this, but for a different reason, because in Nastasia's family, it is believed that there is at some point a man, it's very important, a man somewhere in the production of the soda who will be wiping his genitals on the top of the can. And so you have to wipe the top of the can to remove the genital aspect of it. Is that true or false? Yes.
Yes. Yeah. So anytime for instance, in a couple of minutes, we're gonna be going to the uh takeout place uh at Roberta's here. We're gonna get two cans of seltzer, I'm gonna get a napkin, and I'm gonna hand it to Nastasia, and I'm gonna say for the genitals. And then she will wipe off her can and throw it away.
And that's what's gonna happen. But is that like is just a napkin wipe really enough to remove like whatever genital essence that I were gonna start a business where we I I don't think I can say that on air, but where you have a intentionally like a like a batch of of like of like baby wipe goo that is intentionally doped with said product, right? And then one that's not, and so then you have like dual-sided off on. So you can make your own sodas, you can make an official soda, you have to do the wipe on, and then when you're drinking it, you do the wipe off. I don't think anyone would buy it.
It's tough sell. Tough sell, tough sell. Tough sell, people. All right, so we have some questions. Let's get to them.
Oh, come on, face ID. There we go. Uh hey everyone in cooking issues, thanks for your show. I'm working through your episodes, I'm not sure if you've addressed this issue on your show yet. But I'm looking for any advice on high-altitude cooking you can give.
I just moved to Hipster Paradise, Denver, Colorado, and I'm not sure how to adjust my recipes. I'm assuming Sou Vide won't be affected. I will be using standard apartment electric stovetop until I find a better living situation. Any help will be appreciated more on the electric in a minute. Uh, thank you for your consideration.
I really appreciate all the hard work you do. Ryan, not a hipster. Although, Nastasia, have you bent at all on your feeling about hipsters? Are you still uh yeah, yeah. Now that everyone hates them, do you like them?
No. Okay. So uh a couple of things about altitude. First of all, the fact you have an electric stove. Remember to read his thing.
Oh, what? Isn't that a PS on the bottom or not? No. That's this PS. Oh, okay.
I'm here. Um anyway, so when you're at uh at Denver, and by the way, it gets even worse as you go up from there. As you go, so for all those of you that don't know how the United States works, right? We have this thing called the Great Plains, and then kind of at the end of the Great Plains, as you travel west, you hit the Rocky Mountains, right? So you get these kind of like high plateaus that are relatively flat, and then all of a sudden, bang, Rocky Mountains.
But those plateaus are quite high. So Denver is right before the mountains. So Denver is is this accurate, Matt? You're liking this? I cannot believe this is the most cooking issues thing you've ever done.
You're answering you're starting your answer of a question about high altitude cooking by explaining the geography of the United States. Hell yeah! Alright, let's go. So by the time you make it to Denver, and this is why, by the way, the Rockies, like they're really high, but they don't have the I forget what someone from uh Denver actually told me once. He's like, so like certain mountains, they start low and then they go real high, but since the Rockies are starting from a mile high anyway, because the plateau that they're coming out of is already a mile high, they don't necessarily seem as high as some other mountains that aren't technically as high.
Make sense? Anyway, yeah. So at Denver, before you get into the mountains, before you're going up to like 8,000 feet up in Aspen or whatever it is, eight, eight thousand, whatever the hell it is up there, right? You're already at a mile high, and the temperature at which water boils is going down steadily, right? So by the time you make it up to 5,280 feet at Denver, uh, you're looking at about 203 degrees uh uh Fahrenheit, which is I think like 93 or something, somewhere around there Celsius, right?
So water is boiling at uh a lower temperature. But that that's what everyone says, which is true, right? So you're like, and I had the unfortunate uh thing of trying to cook dry beans in Denver, not having thought about it, and yes, it takes forever. And rice takes a lot longer to cook in Denver than it takes down here. But that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Notice you said you had an electric stove. One thing that's true, the higher you go in altitude, now it should work fine in Denver, but the higher you go, the less powerful your gas burner is because the less oxygen there is. And you'd think that you could solve this by adding more uh gas, right? By changing out the orifice. So listeners of the show will remember that I had a situation once where I had to cook a turkey on Thanksgiving, it was too cold, I didn't get enough gas output, so I drilled out my orifice uh so that I could get more gas output, blah blah blah.
And if any of you want to have discussions of gas orifices, man, I will talk to you about it for freaking ever because we're dealing with it right now with the Sears all V8. But that's not the solution because it's not that you don't have enough gas coming out of your orifice, if you don't have enough freaking oxygen. So what you really need to do is derate your burners, or you need to somehow get more oxygen in, right? So you probably should get either just deal with the fact that you get a more powerful burner and it's not gonna be as efficient and you're gonna be throwing gas away and spending a lot of extra money, or get a burner that's built specifically to function better at higher altitudes. Same thing with your car, by the way.
Unless you have some sort of like forced air into your car, like a turbo or a supercharger, like you're gonna lose power at altitude in your car. That's why you need to have a more powerful car when you're at higher altitudes, right? Okay. So, or get an electric, get a Tesla, right? That's what Nastasia's gonna do.
Although right now you're driving what? I don't want to. Listen. Stop it. Listen, listen.
What make is it? Buick? No. Chevy? Yeah.
Chevy. I need some advice because Nastasi won't give me. Nastasia needs to get her car inspected, right? But it's got a check engine light. So some genius at Chevrolet, some idiot decided that a problem with the air conditioning system required instead of like a different light, the check engine light to come on.
And maybe they did this before this happened, but you cannot get your car passing inspection with the check engine light on, even if the mechanic puts their probe into your computer reader and the computer reader says, don't worry, it's only the air conditioner. Why? Because then you won't know when the check engine light comes on for something else because the check engine light hasn't been cleared. And so even though everyone who's ever owned a car from the 70s knows that when the air conditioner dies, just take the belt off and the car runs fine, it's just you're gonna be uncomfortable. Everybody knows this, right?
But you can't do that without getting inspected. So for any of you out there who knows how to defeat the sensor, what year? 82. What? 92?
90, 90 something Chevy, defeat the air conditioner sensor so Nastasia can get her car inspected. Let us know. Alright. So the other things that happen at altitude. So remember, the water boils at a lower temperature, so that's gonna be a problem.
Also, evaporative cooling is a huge problem up there, right? So you're gonna boil stuff and evap evaporation cool, so you have to make sure stuff is covered because stuff's gonna boil off a lot faster, right? And oven temperatures are also gonna be thrown off, not just by the fact that water's boiling at a lower temperature, but because water is evaporating off of your product a lot faster and doing a lot more evaporative cooling at the surface. So you might need to jack your temperature a little bit. You also might need to add more water to recipes because the stuff's gonna evaporate more, and so your stuff's not gonna be as moist.
Another thing is you'll have to lower the leavening that you use in recipes because you know they're gonna inflate faster. As they inflate faster, they're gonna collapse before they can set. So you have to reduce your leavening, increase your water, probably jack your temperatures a little bit. You're gonna have to take a lot longer to cook things that need to soften specific. Things that are protein-based, like meats, meats will cook at the same temperature.
Things that are, but again, you're gonna have extra drying at the surface, and it'll, you know, might take longer to get the temperature higher in a brace or something like this, but all in all, the temperature of protein is the temperature of protein. Things like vegetables, which cooking at a very high temperature, like 85 C and above, these things are just gonna take a lot longer to cook. Be be aware of it. Um get yourself a pressure cooker. Get yourself a pressure cooker, because then you can adjust the pressure for things like beans, rice, long cooking veg.
You'll be glad you did. Uh, secondly, look into induction when you're doing it because just do it. Right? All right. Uh so how long do I have there?
Four minutes. Five minutes, four minutes. She's Louise. Yep. Um.
I've been experimenting with extract brewing at home using malt extract. This is uh, I don't see, it doesn't say it was from. But whoever it is, they're a male in their early early 30s, but their girlfriend lives in another state, so they don't have a hard, they don't get to have a hard opinion on how many crazy cooking things they can splurge on, but we don't know who this person is because Nastasi didn't write it down. Uh I've been experimenting with extract home brewing for a couple of months now. Uh I was wanting to experiment with all grain boil in a bag, which is new.
Kevin. And also he didn't write his name in the thing, so okay. Uh boil in bag with my ANOVA uh circulator. However, my largest stock pot is six gallons. Upgrading isn't an option right now, given that most all-grain brewers use large kettles, around eight to ten gallons, to do uh, you know, a five-gallon batch.
I was wondering if I could simply downscale all the recipes to fit in a six-gallon kettle with sufficient headspace, would scaling everything down by a factor of 0.8 be acceptable. Yes! Yes, Kevin, you can do that. And I was excited to reel about uh read about boiling bag brewing. Back when I was doing it, all grain, right?
No one had thought of that yet. So we were all like doing our initial mash and a mash ton. Then we were doing sparging, which is where you put water over the grains to get the extra award out of them. Then boiling all that stuff down in hops in a pot. So it was like eight billion pots that you needed to use, and it made a huge mess in my kitchen, which is why I stopped doing all-grain beer brewing at my house, right?
As soon as my second son was born, I quit. Boil in a bag is even better with the scaled down recipe too, because that is heavy to get out of there if you're doing like 15-gallon batteries. Really? Yeah. So anyway, the yes, you can scale it.
The recipes were built from time immemorial around the standard size fermenter everyone used, which is the five-gallon carboy, or if you're like me, uh five-gallon corny kegs. But even five-gallon corny kegs, really, you only want to put about four gallons into them. So if it depends on what you're gonna ferment in, but there's there ain't no problem scaling it down. Matt, what do you say? Correct.
Yeah, ain't no problem scaling it down. So do that. So now, in the very few seconds I have left, we still have yet to do plastics in the field. Yeah. All right, today we're doing something that's a little bit not cooking, right?
It's uh it's a book that I thought you guys could all go by, but that people hadn't read. In fact, I used to own two copies of this, and I I had tr I I had trouble giving one away because nobody wants to read something unless they already know it's awesome. Have you noticed this, Josh? If you don't already know it's awesome, people don't want to read it. Unless you like get in, I'm a I'm a third chapter bailer sometimes.
Yeah. I'll take a risk and read a couple, and then if it's just not holding me, then I'll probably give it away. All right. So for those of you that don't know me, which I guess probably most of you do not, like personally know me. I I but you know, I've said this on air a bunch of times.
Um I am a fan of Western style knives, and I am a fan of traditional Japanese knives. I am not a giant fan of the kind of hybrid knives. I don't mind the thin knives. Uh I don't mind the I've gotten you know enough calluses on my uh which finger is this? Index.
Index finger, so that like it doesn't bother me to not have that bolster which sucks for sharpening on a classic German or French knife. Fine. But they they it's the uneven sharpening of like the you know, modern like Japanese Western style knife where it's not fully sharpened on one side, chisel sharpened the way that a Japanese knife is, or 50-50 sharpened the way an old German or French knife is. By 50-50, I mean like equal angles on both sides. Um but so anyway, I'm a fan of one or the other.
And for those of you that have never owned a traditional Japanese knife, do yourself a favor, go get a traditional Japanese knife. Don't even get a stainless one, and just learn to sharpen your traditional Japanese knife. They're a joy, they're a joy. Whatever, they're a joy. But the Japanese kitchen knife, right, is comes out of the tradition of a Japanese uh samurai sword and sword manufacturer in general.
Like that's where that tradition of knife making comes from. And for those of you that ever wondered what's so special about Japanese knife making, or what's so special about Japanese sword making, go read, go find this book, The Craft of the Japanese Sword. And it goes through for the first time in English. It was written by uh Leon and Hiroko Cap, who are the American Japanese sword collectors who wrote the book, and uh Yoshindo Yoshihara, who is a modern traditional Japanese sword maker. And it goes through in detail, first of all, how the how a thousand years ago, the techniques, in the absence of kind of modern science or industrial production, the techniques were made to make the finest blades that the world has probably ever known and may ever will know, right?
Uh and then how that technique works from traditional forging, how carbon, how you know how forging, so they the um the traditional Japanese steel is called Tamahagani. And when Nastasi and I went to Japan, I bought some, and it's made like a couple of times a year in traditional smelters. It's regulated by the Japanese government and then hand forged to the correct carbon, layered layer after layer after layer, and then sandwiched into a knife. And so if you've ever wanted to really appreciate how Japanese knives are made and the care that goes into each individual step, or if you just want to see what it's like to really take the process of making something seriously in terms of um just focusing on one thing and doing it to death, which is by the way, not an American thing. I don't recommend Americans act this way because I don't think we would die.
I've told the story on the air a bunch of times how a uh a famous Kaiseki chef looked at me and he's like, You've been doing this for what? Like 10 years? I've been doing of course he was from Kyoto, so he didn't talk like that. But he's like, I've been doing this for ten generations, jerk! And then he walked away.
You know what I mean? Because he didn't want to have a discussion with me about like innovation or changing or knowledge, because it's a completely different mentality, and most Americans I don't think would function well under the mentality of doing the same thing for 10 generations. It just would chafe us. Wouldn't it chafe you, Seth? Yes, David.
Anyway, so the craft of the Japanese sword, go check it out. I'm very like, see if you can do a look inside, see if you can find it. The picture by picture uh like breakdown of how polishing works, the polishing chapter alone is like holy crap. When you read it, the pictures of them forging and making uh the swords all by hand is like life-changing watching people do this. Unfortunately, on Amazon, probably due to a temporary blip, copies are going up for 159 dollars.
But check on ABE, see if you can get it. The craft of the Japanese Sword, greatest sword book ever written. Cooking Issues. Cooking Issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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