This episode is brought to you by Bend the Table, a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. Learn more at bendtatable.com. That's B-E-N-T-O-T-A-B-L-E.com. And when you use code H R N for a new subscription, you get $20 off, and we at HRN get $10. Alright, here we go.
Ready? Three, two, one. Oh my god, wait, how's the song actually go? You gotta go badly. You gotta I can't do anything without the biddle dance.
But but in but it's that's too late, though, right? That's too far along. Uh crap on it. Hello and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave.
Oh, some cooking issues coming to you. Pre-recorded from my house because of COVID 19. What is the heritage radio? What is it? What do we call this?
From Manhattan. Here we are. We got Matt in some booth somewhere. Where the hell are you, Matt? I am in Rhode Island.
Yeah. Are you on coastal Rhode Island or not? Indeed. Yeah. Newport.
Uh yeah, it's nice over there. Are you are did you break into the breaker's house? Are you living in some robber baron house right now? I sleep in one mansion, but I record HRN shows in a different one. Yeah, I mean, the the trick of that is, right, that uh those things are all closed down because of the COVID, so you could totally throw a rock through that and just live in one of those things.
That'd be pretty sweet. Well, yeah, and if I can live long enough, I establish squatters rights, and then we're in the money. Yeah, sweet. You know, at least one of us will have some money coming out of this thing. What about you, Stas?
Where are you? I'm in Hell's Kitchen. Where do you want to be? I came from Connecticut. Yeah, yeah.
I don't have good reception there. People, I want you to know the only reason Nastasia came back into this COVID hotbed of New York City is for you people, so that she could have decent internet so that she could record this. Is that true, Nastasia? Yeah, my internet's okay, but I wasn't a hundred percent sure. Yeah.
We also got Kat. Kat, what's up? I'm still in Bushwick. Uh so one of the things. I'm still here.
So uh for those of you that don't know, uh, you know, we're not allowed to congregate together. The radio uh booth is shut down. Roberta's is shut down, as are all restaurants uh except for takeout here in New York. Uh so we will not take calls this week, but hopefully, Matt, we can figure out in on you know coming weeks how to take calls and if we need to. Um so anyway, so we're doing this this way.
This is our first time doing it. Our chat room is still open. Not that you can know that because you can't listen to me live, but had you known, the chat room would be open now and you could be chatting in things to Matt while we're while we're doing this. Is that all accurate? And we did actually get a question from in the chat 28 minutes ago.
So uh do it. You know, we can we can do that. You want to do that now? Okay, but I'm gonna go ahead and do it. By the way, by the way, people I was not officially late.
I had pushed it to 12 30 because I was dealing with Museum of Food and Drink stuff and it wasn't gonna go live anyway. So I was not late because I didn't have to. Also, Dave was technically in this thing at like 11:30. Yeah, earliest appearance of all time. Well, I had to test the equipment, Matt.
I'm an equipment guy. I know. I really appreciate that. You are one of the only people to get a failure of the equipment here and figure it out yourself. Yeah, baby.
Yeah. I am a failure. I am a failure of equipment. All right, so you want to explain how this whole HRN thing is working, what's going on, or no? Uh I mean, we are doing everything remote.
We're trying to keep people. I mean, a lot of people are talking about, you know, coronavirus effects on the food industry. So we want to be uh keeping out all the getting getting all these shows to air. So we're just doing it. We're doing it over streams for now from across across the globe.
Yeah. Yeah. Is that what we're supposed to be talking about? The uh effect of COVID on the food industry because it's bad. It's real bad.
I think I think we can talk about that if you want to, and we can very intentionally not talk about that if you don't want to, because some people, I'm sure, are desperate to think about something else for a second. Yeah. Yeah. I know at existing conditions, we're still trying to figure out apparently. So for those of you that don't know how this works, in New York, bars and and restaurants are not allowed to serve cocktails to go, right?
It's just not allowed. So you know, when they order us to shut down for everything but takeout, that pretty much shuts us down straight up. So, you know, everyone's gone. And it turns out for a tipped employee, it's better usually to lay them off right away, uh, so that they can get their unemployment based on their wages, including tips, at least whatever they've declared. So they now is the only time in your life where it was good for you to have declared all of your tips on income taxes.
Um apparently New York City has said that they are relaxing um the rules for having cocktails leave the building. We haven't figured it out yet, but other places have. Part of that's the delivery issues. Nastasia places that are already hooked up with delivery issues because of food probably have an easier time of navigating this, but Nastasia has many choice words to say about seamless grub hub caviar and the like. Is that not true?
Some choice words, Nastasia. Yeah, and I think a lot of restaurant people like on social media have been asking um all those delivery places to stop charging the insane prices percentages that they take. Like I've seen everybody ask. So I think everyone vote the same way. Why don't you tell them what they tell them what they take?
They take like 25 to 30% of every order. Right. And so you're like, well, but then you don't have to have the service people. It's like, what, what, what? Like, you know what I mean?
It's like, like, honestly, like doing takeout, it would is great for our non-tipped staff, but I don't see how it even helps our our tip staff. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. I don't know. I don't know.
And so far, those organizations have not caved to that. They have offered like, what is it? They've offered like a stay on paying the commissions, but you the restaurants still owe that money. They just aren't gonna pay it right now, which is that's BS. That's not the same.
Yeah, yeah. That's also like like giving someone an interest-free loan. I mean, that's nice if you had planned on taking a loan out. That's great if you had planned on taking a loan out. I mean, when I want to borrow money, man, I want to borrow an interest free for sure.
You know what I mean? But like, you know, uh, yeah, whatever. Okay, enough COVID griping, enough COVID griping. Should we answer some wait, what's the chat question? Yeah, here we go.
Uh Nathan Page wrote in, I've got a question for cooking issues about some very heritage breed turkeys. It's less than a month before turkey season opens in North Carolina. For the last two years, I've been fortunate. They have a like a springtime turkey season there. Apparently.
Um, yeah. By the way, before you read this question, before you read this question, Nastasia and I were at Modernist Pantry. Uh ModernistPantry.com. Uh how long ago, Styles? Like last, like Friday, Thursday?
Friday. Friday. So we were we were driving up there soaking up the COVID on our ride up in a in a in a transit van that we had rented, getting all of the spinzalls that we're gonna refurbish. And on the way back, we're barreling down the highway at like, you know, I don't know, 7580 in this giant thing full of spinzalls. And what do I see on the side of the road is a a giant dead wild turkey?
No shoulder. No shoulder. How am I supposed to get it? How am I supposed to get it? And plus we needed to get back, and Stassi needed to eat dinner.
We thought we were gonna hit traffic going through, you know, on I95 on the way home, and we're there, and we had the opportunity to have the wild turkey for dinner, the wild turkey roadkill, and I feel like I'm never gonna have that opportunity. It looked in okay shape. I mean, its wing was hard effed. But right, Stas? Yeah.
We had the room in the back of the truck. You imagine just pull open the back, throw the turkey in with the spinzalls, and go. It's a lifelong dream. I've never been every time I've seen a major roadkill, I've never been in a situation where I had the proper vehicle, like something I could hose down, something that's a rental, you know what I mean? Or it's something big.
I mean, I'm not gonna eat a woodchuck off the side of the road. A lot of what you see on the side of the road over here is like woodchucks, like raccoon skunks. I've cooked raccoon, no thanks. You know what I mean? Like, but at least the raccoons over here have cooked, no thanks.
I mean, maybe a young raccoon's delicious, who knows? But you see a turkey on the side of the road that was clearly hit by a vehicle, and like that's prime eats right there. I'm very good to eat or not, like if it's been there too long. Well, when you feel it, right? You see how fresh it seems.
I mean, if it's gone into rigor, it's been there a long time, right? If it hasn't gone into rigor yet, and it seems relatively fresh, and it doesn't have any like effed up. Like, so sometimes if you look at stuff and it's all completely like you ever been to Fire Island? Any of you guys ever been to Fire Island? Yes.
Yeah. Yeah, you ever seen those demented mangy deer that they have there? Where like they have some sort of flesh-eating virus on the on the fur and their fur is all gone and they're covered in ticks and they're just like just the grossest deer in the whole world. You seen these? I just saw cute ones.
Nah, you didn't look close enough. Were you looking closely? Like, you know, now I guess not. Aside from the I mean, look, what Fire Island has is beaches, blueberries, poison ivy, and mangy deer. That's what they got.
You know what I mean? Ticks. Yeah, and ticks. Oh my god, so many ticks. So you got poison, you got your poison ivy and ticks.
These are my favorite things. Blueberry, and this mangy deer. But my point is if I saw that deer on the side of the road, I'd be like, pass. Pass. But this this turkey looked this turkey looked fantastic.
So, you know, anyway. So go on to Nate's turkey question. Uh I was just wondering, Nastasia, were you if he had pulled over the van, were you are you like down with this plan? You'd be like, yeah, all right, load it up. Yeah.
Alright, cool. Just checking. Uh all right. For the past two years, I've been fortunate enough to kill a turkey each spring, but I foolishly did not save any meat for Thanksgiving. Uh we're wondering what's going on.
Is this Nate talking or Matthew talking? Matthew's a vegetarian, so I'm assuming it's Nate talking. It's not, it's definitely not me. I've never killed anything bigger than a mosquito. I'm wondering what Dave or others might recommend if I should do if I'm fortunate enough to kill another bird.
Freeze whole, freeze one half of it, freeze only the breasts. My experience with the legs slash thighs has been that they need to be slow cooked. I'm not concerned about having a whole turkey to present for Thanksgiving either. Thanks, and I hope y'all are doing well through all of this. Well, you just you just you I mean, first of all, I know you've killed one of those water bugs.
So, mosquito, lie. Alright, fine. I've killed a silverfish. Oh, killed all the critters like that. Wait, is a silver fish same as an earwig with the weird horns on it?
No, the silverfish is the really long one that's got a bajillion legs. It's very disturbing to have in your apartment. Yeah, I don't like that. Is that the one that eats books? I don't know.
Anyway, uh, so what I would say is uh you should you lost me a little bit at I don't care about the whole bird at Thanksgiving, right? If you don't care about the whole bird at Thanksgiving, then sure, break it down into break it down into the the breast, the and the legs, bust out the other stuff for stock and and and do it. But what I would do is I would I would try to freeze it whole. I would use the salt, the salt freeze. So I would like I would do like a crushed ice salt, pack it in, it's gonna like kind of brine it as it freezes it, and then it'll freeze real fast so you get a real fast freeze, so you're not losing um so like you know, make like Clarence Bird's eye, the way they like these figured if you're freezing like thin layers, you do like Ziploc bags with salt and ice and you layer things in between the Ziploc bags, or you put something in the Ziploc bag and immerse it in the salt solution.
But if you were gonna brine the sucker anyway, why not just immerse it in the ice salt slush, get a little of the salt in beforehand, let it soak in. It should freeze very, very quickly. And I think that's gonna maintain the highest uh quality over time. So then the idea is is once it's frozen, you want to try to get as much of the oxygen out there, and the only problem with that's gonna be the cavity because the cavity, it's like unless you vacuum it, it's gonna be hard to get uh all of the air out, but it shouldn't be too much of a problem as long as you just get like you know, most of the air out. I don't think you're gonna get much freezer burn as long as you're in a very deep freeze situation that doesn't have a lot of movement up or down.
Most hunters, I would guess, have a fairly good chest freezer, uh, you know, that doesn't do a lot of defrosting, and so if you do that, you can maintain pretty high, uh, pretty high quality. Uh all right. Is that a was that not a reasonable answer? No, that sounds sounds great. All right.
All right, cool. Uh all right. So uh more chat questions, but again, you can't know that I'm asking you for them because you can't hear me. Okay. Um by the way, Booker is here eating a hard-boiled egg because of course there's no school in New York either.
So yeah, can you hear him in the background? Yeah. Booker, you have anything to say to the cooking issues, people. Um I miss you guys. Uh Booker, I don't know if you can hear him.
The microphone's over here, Booker. He says he misses coming on the show and talking to you guys. You can come more. And he doesn't, he no longer wants people to associate him with shut up, Dad. He no longer wishes to be associated with because it was cruel of me.
I should not have done that. You know it was cruel of you, but to get rid of it. He can't hear he can't he can't hear you guys. He can't hear me? No, because I have headphones on.
This is how this works. This is like how this system works. He can't he can't hear you. But if you have a question, I can give it to him. Tell him it was cruel to not show up on time at work.
Uh Nastasia, your former boss says it was not cruel of you to not show up on time at work. So it was cruel of you to not show up at time. It was cruel of the F train to delay me 20 minutes and skip the and skip 14th Street. Oh, yeah. Tell us someone in the hour and a half.
He was late. There's no way it was 20 minutes. She says you were late over an hour and a half, and there's no possible excuse for that. That's almost a no-call no show. And if you weren't, you know, fundamentally family, you'd be on your ear.
Yes. What do you think? Did she even hear my response? Yes. Yeah, but she's not buying the delayed F train excuse.
See, like father like son with the delayed train excuse. Yeah. Yeah. Uh all right. So Mark wrote in from Camloops, which is that place in Canada we talked about.
What was it that they have in Camloops again? There was something that they do specifically in Camloops, but I can't remember what it was. Mark from Canneloops. By the way, Mark, you made a comment about Nastasi and moistness. She does not appreciate it, right, Stas?
Well, there's no equivalent dick thing, you know. Well, we're not gonna say what he's what do you mean? Nobody cares about checking your junk or his junk or any of it. What? What are you even talking about now?
Oh, is this not the question where you said speculum? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, what does this have to do with with uh uh uh a dude's junk? I don't understand the relation here. The only because I can't be like, well, it's not gross, like the word is not gross, it's just inappropriate, and I can't like shout back with some equivalent for him.
What about like uh proctologists or holding the holding the sack and cough, that sort of thing? I guess well, I it's not intrusive. No, you ever had someone grab your your sack and make you cough? That doesn't sounds so bad. It doesn't sound so bad.
Okay. Uh all right. We will ignore this section of the of the and go back to the question. I'm like, yeah, I'm just like, how long of a section does Pro Tools let me bleep? Okay, it'd be 30 seconds?
Not clear. I mean, it's not live anyway, so it's like the It's also part of being a human. It's not like, you know. No, the question is just about the word moist. The question is whether moist is a reasonable word.
That's what we're talking about. Moist is fine. Moist is fine. Anyway, so uh back to a separate thing about bleeping. Have you seen the the uh the new episodes or relatively new episodes of uh narco narcos Mexico?
In Narcos Mexico, there are actual Mexican government officials that they name and they instead of naming the real people like they do for like El Chapo and like uh you know, you know, uh Felix Sanhal Gallardo, all these people, they just say them on the TV and then bleep them, which is kind of funny. Anyway, uh that's neither here nor there. All right. That is it's neither here nor there. Anyway, uh Mark from Sonny Cam Loofs.
I was happy when you answered so happy when you answered my question on air. I felt like John Candy's character in Splash when he got his letter published in Penthouse. And by the way, I was having this discussion with a bunch of people earlier. Can you imagine there was a time in my lifetime where your only access to that sort of thing was to go purchase a magazine? How crazy is that?
Oh, on to the question. It was it was memorable. He really appreciated your participation in the conversation, the sauce. Going a little cam loopy here, locked in the house. Okay.
Uh I can't find enduja in this bucolic uh backwater. Stas, am I pronouncing that right, by the way. What? Is my induja? Yeah.
Induya? That's how you pronounce it? Yeah. Which? Ja or ya?
Ya ja, ya ja, ya ja. The way the cat said it. What? The way cat said it. Yah.
Induya. So let's just for what we're talking about. So this is an extremely high fat quote unquote sausage. It's really more of a spreadable sausage. It's kind of like it's a lie to say it has the texture of like a liverwurst because it like is more kind of grainy spready, but it's got a lot of fat in it.
It's it's roughly 50-50 fat and and uh meat, and not like hyper-lean meat either. And then a boat ton of spicy pepper, right? So that's what we're talking about uh for uh induya. It became you know very popular. The first one that I had in the US was made by Chris Costantino years ago uh at uh Encanto and his uh at his uh Celumeria.
Uh became fairly popular, fairly easy to get now in New York, but still relatively a niche product. I believe it's Calabrian. Anyway, uh I can't find uh Mark writes in I can't find Enduya in this bucolic backwater. I was wondering if Filipino Longanisa could be a substitute. The stuff I can find locally, apparently the Longanisa uh has aspergillus listed on the ingredients.
Thanks for your time. Love the show. Regards, Mark. So the aspergillus is just uh lactic acid uh bacteria, so that's like bactoferm. So you need um you're gonna uh all of these sausages are are gonna be somewhat fermented to drop the pH down.
So whether they add bacterm or whether they add aspergillus, and this goes for the Longanisa or for the Enduya, it's gonna have its pH dropped with with that. So I don't think that whether or not it has aspergillus is uh a measure of anything listed. It's interesting to list it on the menu because I mean I'm sorry, on the ingredients, because I didn't know that you had the list bacto firm on the ingredients. Anyway, um I don't Philip the Longanese is not gonna be an accurate substitute. Every recipe I looked at, every image I saw of the Filipino stuff is not spreadable, so it's not in due equivalent, more uh garlicky, less red peppery, not spreadable, lower fat ratio.
So I'm gonna go ahead and say no, not a substitute. What do you guys think? Uh I have no experience with this. Yeah. I got nothing.
Yeah. All right. Stasie. Stash is just a good one. Good job, Dave.
You did a good jam. You did a good jam. Why do you think she wouldn't be on Zappos now if she would be on Zappos while sitting right next to you? Not on Zappos. Hey, not on the Hey, hey.
But like uh anyway, we had some Twitter, we had some Twitter back and forth with some people after I said that if Nastasia pays attention, I'll be I'll be on time. I am paying attention. We've had it on kind of both sides, I've had it on both sides. I've had Twitter interactions on both sides of this issue. So we can talk about that later.
Cold Mike writes in about hot sauce. Hi Nastasia and Dave, a longtime listener, have a two-part question about hot sauce production. Nastasi's like, of course it's a two-part question. Uh I've been making and bottling hot sauce out of my restaurant, Magic Bird Fried Chicken, for the last year. I'm now at a point of setting up a production space just to keep up with the demand of the sauce.
Especially now, man. You know what? It's like, I wonder, we have so much. So yesterday when we went into I'll get I'm gonna get to your question. I'm gonna give you your time, Cold Mike.
But like we went into the bar yesterday and we had all of this fruit, and we're like, yo, we're not gonna open up. So we just juiced it all. I I have and we're gonna have to turn it all to cordial. I'm gonna have to take all of that lime juice that we were gonna shake and all that lemon juice we're gonna shake and turn it to cordial. Yeah, but who wants to buy, like, how much can I sell a bottle of cordral for?
Ask our rabbit listeners. I mean, okay. How much would you buy a bottle of cordial? Well, I mean, it's the let's be honest, it's the bar's stuff. I'm not gonna.
Yes, yes, yes, they'll make money there. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, whatever. Okay. As long as you brand it as coronavirus cordial, who wouldn't want to purchase that?
Oh, yeah. COVID acid ingesting COVIDCordial.com. Yeah, like everybody everybody wants that. The people are already logging in. I can see it.
By the way, the word of the week, clearly, the word of the week is foamite. You guys familiar with foamites? No. Really? You've made it through this whole so far Megilla, and you don't know the word foamite.
Oh my god. This is for anyone that doesn't know this word yet. This is the word of the week. F-O-M-I-T-E, fomite. And it is any surface that can sustain and transmit a virus or bacteria after it has left the host.
So for instance, elevator button, foamite, cardboard box, foamite. And the new studies that are coming out say that this sweet, sweet COVID can live for a long time on uh, you know, in a foamite situation on things like cardboard. So here's the thing like we're all going out and we're having our fresh direct, which I now call foamite direct, and the people who are doing that are all delivering this stuff. They're not, they're not gloved up, they're not masked up, and they're just foamiting all over all the stuff. So the good news is is that anyone in a warehouse that's touching your stuff and delivering it, right?
Is giving you the sweet, sweet foamite. Now, they haven't proven that there is too much transmission via foamites, but they have shown that the virus is uh viable on surfaces like cardboard and stainless for like days. So that's good news, right? Anyway. Yeah, this is making me feel great.
Foamite. Anyway, so like every time I walk around, I've been calling, I've been calling Dax a foamite. I've been calling my dog a foamite. My dog like picks up food off the ground outside, and I'm like, foamite! Because like, you know, it used to be my dog would pick up aluminum foil on the street and you would grab its its snout and try to rip, you know, prize his jaws apart and shake the aluminum foil out so that he doesn't swallow it and get you know gastric blockage.
Yes, he ate raisinettes off the ground once we thought he was gonna die. Did you know uh since you have a dog six hundred dollars? Yes, uh, we paid six hundred dollars to uh have the dog monitor for kidney failure. Grapes and raisins can kill a dog. Did you guys know this?
I did not know that. I didn't know that about grapes. Kidney failure, yeah. Yeah, weird. Like even a couple.
Good to know. Yeah. And and there's no way to know. What? Even a what?
Even a couple, even a couple grapes or raisins can take a dog down. And they haven't figured out why. They haven't figured out like some sort of genetic test to figure out whether your dog is gonna have that problem. Anyway, back to this hot sauce question. I've been making a bottling hot sauce out of Magic Bird Fried Kitchen for the last year.
I'm now at the point of setting up production space to keep up with the demand. My first question is what would be the best method to strain the cooked mash? Currently, I blend the cooked mash in a Vitamix and then pass it through a fine mesh chinois, but in the new space, we'll be cooking 75 liter batches and tilting kettles and blending them with a heavy-duty immersion blender. I am unsure of what the best way of straining that amount of sauce would be. Here's what I would do.
Uh so superbag material is nylon straining cloth. And if you go on Alibaba, uh Stas, is uh, are the Chinese factories back online yet? Yeah. All right, so you can go back on Alibaba, find this stuff. You need a like a mesh, uh, nylon mesh straining cloth.
And we use the same material at the bar that we use um that is used in make making actual super bags, which are the strainer bags. So then you make these big uh you don't even have to make a bag, you can just lay the cloth. It comes in like three foot or four foot wide, I think even taller, actually, maybe like four and a half foot wide um pieces. You lay it and then you just pour it the equivalent in into a giant colander. And if you really want to do it right, you then uh get yourself like we have, but my mine only does like I think 30 liters at a time, um, a like hydraulic press.
Go to Harbor Freight and get yourself like a uh a 20 uh ton hydraulic press and then just get some big plates made out of uh something that's food grade that won't bend, like for instance, uh Delrin or some kind of plastic, and make it fit inside of a large metal colander, put that on top of a Delrin uh piece so that it can drain properly, and just squeeze the ever-loving hell out of it in in one of these bags. Now I will warn you you should use like a triple double or triple layer of this nylon because once you really bear down on the press, you will uh burst the bag somewhat. And you need to also have the clearance between the colander and the and the pressing foot be just right. And also, I don't know if a regular colander will burst. I use I made my own kind of uh cider press out of Delrin.
You could just buy a cider press and then convert it to use a 20-ton uh press to do it if you want, but I think that's gonna give you the driest possible situation is uh is uh like a like a super bag slash paint strain or nylon in in a in some sort of a hydraulic press situation for that kind of quantity. What do you guys think? Good job. Yeah, good job. I did a good job.
I can't see any I look, people like normally, like I'm bad anyway. So like when you're giving a talk, people are like, how'd the taco? I'm like, what do I know? I'm on the spectrum. I can't tell what people think.
And then like now that I'm like talking into like a computer with no video, I really I can't see anything except for Booker coming up behind me and eating Cheerios. That's the only thing I can see. You know what I mean? So like I have no idea how this is going. Anyway.
There's been nothing but meals because, like, you know, Booker's current teacher with his distance learning is quote unquote sick. And so, you know, he's now not even distance learning. You know what I mean? Anyway. Uh, part two of uh Cold Mike's question is in order to keep the best consistency of my sauces, uh, are there any tools you would recommend?
Uh I'm already getting a pH meter, good to have, but I'm wondering if I should invest in a viscosimeter to uh to ensure all my batches have the same viscosity. I don't really know about that. That seems to me to be like, I don't really know, especially because I've never I've seen them, but I've never used one. And I mean, if you were gonna do very, very large batches, um, and you weren't gonna have be there to correct them by hand, I would say maybe, but I think if you're still having a little bit of a chef's touch in there, I don't really think that's necessary. But you say, should you getting a a bricks meter, i.e., or a fractometer to make sure the sugar content remains c uh constant from batch to batch.
Yes, you should definitely get one of those because uh you're gonna want to definitely correct for that. But you should do it of the mash if you can, but or get the bricks or the peppers before you add the salt because salt, depending on the uh percentage you add, is gonna radically kind of affect the um the bricks. Anyway, um thanks for taking the time to read this, and I will send some bottles of hot sauce once production starts in the summer cold mic. Sounds great. I'm excited for the hot sauce.
Yeah, I love a hot sauce. Wait, I have a thought, I have a thought on viscosimeters. Um my dad makes syrup. He makes cane syrup, and he did start using a viscosimeter, like a pretty low-tech one, but just as like a safety net. He still eyeballs it uh for the thickness, but he says that it's a nice tool to have.
Wait, what do you call me? Anyway, but he didn't he didn't he doesn't just go by bricks, he actually does a bricks and a viscosimeter. Uh I would have to follow up on that, but I do know that he checks the viscosity of the is there because part of the problem is um if he's gonna thicken this sauce with, let's say Xanthan, right? Xanthan has a very specific like shear thinning capability, so your stationary viscosity is gonna be much different from your lot of a lot of these hot sauces are thickened with Xanthan. So it's like I think a lot's gonna depend.
I mean, syrup is good because it's a relatively um like stable viscosity curve because it's not it's its viscosity isn't dependent upon long chain molecules like hydrocolloids. Uh I forget the name of the one that we looked at getting once, but yeah, but Kat, do you have some sort of ability to put into something that uh maybe Cold Mike could look at of the one that your dad uses? Yeah, I'll ask him what it is. Alright, cool. Uh actually, can we go to break right now?
And then uh we'll go to break. We're right back with cooking issues, COVID style. This episode is brought to you by Bend a Table, a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. Bend a table is founded by Ben Simon, a longtime food lover, advocate, and experimenter. Ben goes around the country finding the stuff that you would buy if you were vacationing somewhere cool like Charleston or California, and he buys it for you and sends it to you in a box.
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Start your monthly subscription at Benditable.com. That's B-E-N-T-O-T-A-B-L-E.com. Use the discount code H R N to get $20 off a new subscription, and Bend a Table will donate $10 to support cooking issues and all of H R N's programming. Alright, so you can come back whatever. Okay.
Wait, you mean like right away? Like right now. Okay. Like we're coming back. Exactly.
And we're back. Okay, so uh we have some questions here. Uh so Zhuao. I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Zhwao.
Right? J O with an N J O A with an Nya O. How would you pronounce that, Kat, since you're the pronunciation master today? Say it again. J Oh O.
A with uh with an Enya over the top. O. Zwau. Zhao. Zhao.
I don't know. Wow, Zhao. Isn't that you mean? You're supposed to know this, Kat. You're the person.
Anyway. I'm having a hard time visualizing that. Uh you don't know what. Okay, okay. Longtime listener, first time emailer, creepy dude that worked at Blanca and most Tuesdays.
Tried to get your attention, and a potential nickname failed. You couldn't have been that creepy. If Nastasia didn't give you a nickname, you could not have been that creepy. Am I right, Stas? Yeah.
I mean, Nastasia gives plenty of people nicknames. Wait, do we all have nicknames? Do I have a nickname? Nastasia. I think he's talking about the people that work at Roberto's.
Yeah, I got a big thing. Well, he's he's a blanket. I realize that if you're frequently nicknaming everyone around you. No, you don't have one. All right.
Remember Satan's little helper? Yes. Remember him that? He looked like a cross between the Hitler youth and Santa's Elf. And he would like go around.
I don't know which one that is. I know who Freddie Mercury is, but I don't know which one that is. Come on, man. Stas. You remember who I'm talking about, right?
He might have been before my time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Satan's little helper. Anyway. I'm also a French culinary institute slash ICC farm to table graduate and uh Senor Dave Arnold's antics endeavors are mythical. I sometimes work at the school's cookery events, and every time something explodes, Dave is mentioned. Have I mentioned uh on the air before the time when uh the pastry chef there, Jurgen, I think it was Jurgen David, is there, and we used to have these uh these ice cream machines, these Taylor ice cream machines.
So I think we had a Carpeggiani, like a like a LB 100, but we also had the the Taylor tabletop air-cooled uh you know batch machines. And uh Sam Mason, ice cream, you know, magnate Sam Mason from Oddfellow, uh was like, yo, can we carbonate ice cream? And I'm like, Sam, uh, you know, no, I don't think no, we can't because too much of the stuff is frozen, uh, and so there's not enough water base left. So it's not like a slushy machine where you know, over a third of the liquid is still liquid, and we can carbonate that. I was like, and plus those machines are meant to hold pressure, it's just not gonna work.
He's like, but can you do it? Can you do it? I'm like, you know what? Come to the school, we'll give it a shot. So he comes to school, and I try to plug all of the holes in the tailor up and just put like a light, like a light CO2 pressure into that thing while I was spinning.
Let's just say it took many days to get all the ice cream base off of all of the surfaces of that kitchen, and I was never forgiven ever in the pastry department for that. So the other time, Stas, do you do you remember the time we were trying to heat rocks in the kitchen? And I was like, this was upstairs on the fourth floor because we were working on hot stones, so like Korean stone bowls, I was working on hot stones. This is when we were developing the red hot poker, right? And so I was like, Well, what if we tried to heat just, you know, we tried to heat stones and we threw the stones in, you know, like the way that they do hot stones out of a fire for like, you know, like sauces and like boiling things in the old days.
The oldest form of boiling people, you get a leather, you get a leather container or a wooden container, you take a hot rock out of the fire, you throw it into the container, you boil. So I knew in the back of my head, I was like, look, a lot of rocks contain water in them, right? And if you got a rock that contains water and you heat the heck out of it, sucker might explode. So I was like, well, there's no one here. I'm just gonna put a bunch of rocks on this uh burner, turn it on, and walk away and see what happens.
And I didn't know that again, pastry, pastry chef was coming in to do some prep work, and Nastasi and I had gone down to our yeah, we had gone down to our trash hole because Nastasi and I worked in a trash room. Like uh, like literally we worked in a trash closet. Yeah. Uh and we were happy to have it. Uh and so we're like, boom!
And then like you like we ran downstairs, and oh my god, the look, the look on that chef's face, she was not pleased with us, like rock shards everywhere. Ever so uh come by, and then there was the time that like I think I told this one there was a time we were carbonating and I needed to carbonate something, and for some reason the school had uh uh what's it called? They had uh made a deal with Fiji water, and like I've never been a fan of shipping water thousands of miles, it makes no damn sense to me at all. But like, especially a water with no taste, right? And no offense to Fiji, I guess we're not gonna sponsor this, but like Fiji water is just water in a square bottle, right?
The other terrible thing about square bottles is they cannot take pressure. And so Nastasi, you know how impatient I get. Yeah, yeah. So like I'm I'm there, I'm down in the amphitheater. I'm like, I need a carbo bottle, nothing.
I need a carbo bottle, nothing. I need a carbo bottle, nothing. So I just dump a Fiji out. I'm like, F it. Boo.
It was coffee. I put the coffee in, I carb it, boom, boom. Just like caught like a line of coffee around the entire back of the amphitheater was awesome. It's the best. So anyway, I was sounds great.
Oh, it was great. It was great. I loved it. But you know, look, I would say a good 80% of the time, my crap on it, let's just get it done, actually does get it done. Right?
What do you think, Stash? Oh, I'd say 75%. Yeah, which I think is fine. It's close. Yeah, I mean fine.
So you know, Nastasi and I especially hate it when people sit around talking about what they could do and then doing nothing instead of just doing something and then feel like they're not. Twelve hour 12 straight hours to mean in fact. Yeah, just because and people are like, oh, but you could do this, or you could do that, or I could sit around talking about going and getting these things until I'm dead. I could just go. You know what I mean?
It's just like, even if it's not the best, do something. Doing something is almost always better than doing nothing. As long as you must as long as you must do something, do something, right? Or you know what makes me upset about this whole have to stay in thing? What's that?
Is that everybody's complaining about having to stay in? But before this, all people wanted to do was stay in and watch Netflix and watch their shows. So they're getting exactly what they wanted. I think this is you, Nastasia. You you hate those people, and so now you have some sort of thing against them because you don't have a Netflix account.
No, no, I have all the accounts, I just don't waste time doing that. But like people are like, man, I wish I could. So you just waste money paying for those accounts? What's going on here? Yeah.
There's like a comedy special like that I have to see, I'll watch it. But I probably turn those apps on like once every two months, once every three months. I was ready. I was ready to get all the cooking issues listeners together to fundraise for you to have like a Hulu account. No, no, no.
That's not the money. Hulu's good. Wait, Nasty. That they're not coming back for like yeah, yeah, that's the worst part of the who knows. That's the worst part.
That's the worst part. I mean, in terms of my entertainment, you know. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, people dying, like everyone loses in the world. In terms of my entertainment, I don't watch garbage like TV on whatever people watch.
Yeah. So Nastasia really really appreciates everyone else's entertainment tastes. People should be so they want they're fucking shows. Never. You can't have SNL without the audience.
Won't be the same. Exactly. That's what I said. Yeah, what are you gonna do? Put a canned laugh track on it?
Not gonna do that. Uh okay. So back to uh uh Joah's question. Uh the actual question: why are Paco Jets so expensive? What is up with that?
Is a uh better or cheaper option in BDX's future? Okay. Here's the thing. Uh we had initially looked into doing something uh maybe the reason they're expensive is because they're made, they they used to be expensive because they had a patent on them and only one person could make them. That the original patent has since run out.
And you can find the patent uh online. The pat the Paco jets are also um almost completely like the the gearing and the belts and all of that are relatively complicated because instead of um instead of doing the feed rate with uh microprocessor, it's all with gears and belts. So part of that's the expense. It's also made in Switzerland, and if you know how much people make in Switzerland, it's a lot. So like you have to pay like this Swiss person to make it.
And then also the euro, you know, uh, or the do they still they use euros in in Switzerland, right? They don't you do they use Swiss Franks? They're Franks. And the Swiss franc is probably doing well because no matter what happens, they'll take uh whatever your murder money is. The Swiss franc always does well.
People believe in the Swiss. Yeah, because you know, you you murder a bunch of people, you need some place to put your money, that's where you go, right? Where I put my murder money. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean?
Everyone, everyone on all sides needs a place to hide their murder money. Um so you have this the Swissness of it, and then you have uh mechanical parts. But the the fact of the matter is is that if you had to make one from scratch, uh if you were gonna make one in small units, like let's say I was gonna make one, Nastasia and I were gonna make one, it would probably cost the same if we were going to make it and try to be reasonable. Now, if someone like a Queasin art wanted to make one, then they would cheapen down the materials, it wouldn't be as robo, it would function kind of similarly. Uh, but they could probably get it done for I don't know what's 500 bucks, five, six hundred bucks.
But if you think about it, if Cuisinart is selling something for six hundred dollars, let's say Queas and Art, they don't really make anything that expensive, but if Cuisinart is selling something for six hundred dollars, it's they have to be able to make it in a factory for a quarter of that or less because they have their marketing money, their shipping money, the middle person, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you're saying that you have to get all the parts for that uh in at like 120, uh, 120, 130 dollars. And it's just I don't see having that robo a thing being manufactured right now for that amount of money. But there is no reason that the the it's like the V CRs. For those of you that remember what a VCR was, is like a video cassette recorder.
Like they were extremely expensive until they needed to make eight jillion of them, and then they were almost free. Even though the mechanics were difficult, it's just we're not in that um in that scale zone yet where it becomes reasonable to uh make. But what do you think? Good job. Tell me more, tell me more about this VCR.
Yeah, yes. So it used to be that uh, you know, there was a small gnome inside of your television. That's why they were so deep. And uh you would plug this box, and there was like a there was like a large, like uh it was shaped. Uh, how do I describe this in something that a modern person could understand?
Like a milkbone dog treat box, and you would stick it in, and then the gnome would like take a scroll out of it and then draw like three or four lines of video very quickly on the inside of the television with like uh with like a light pen. And that's how television used to work. So yeah. So if you if you television's like Netflix for old people, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it used to be like if you look at like a uh uh a movie like Robocop, and you can really see what 80s television is because they really do, even on their 35 millimeter, which obviously is like 35. Oh my god, it's such a low depth format, but they show TVs, uh TVs going. If people are a little bit VCRs also like uh the VHS tapes uh degrade a lot over time. So it's a little unfair to say taking your your mom and dad's VHS tapes and playing them now is what we used to watch, uh, because they have degraded quite significantly since the 80s and 90s, but it's um it was still pretty bad. It was like a couple hundred lines of resolution at most, like three, four hundred lines, real lines.
They said it was uh six eight. So a standard TV definition is six six hundred and eighty pixels by uh 400 six six uh wait six wait 480, 640, 480. I think 640, 480. If that was the resolution of your iPhone, you would hurl it out the window and like stomp on it and like scream how you were being deprived of anything, and yet that was the maximum resolution any of us had. And we were we were glad to have it.
Glad we loved it. Anyway. He's a boomer. Yeah, okay, douche. Please, please say you're a boomer.
Please say boomer. I'm gonna just put is it okay if in the show notes I put boomer? No. No, because we're the forgotten generation. Everyone forgets that we exist.
Our parents are boomers. 5050. I'm my first move. Nastasia's Nastasia's parents are boomers, and Nastasi and I, even though she is 10 years younger, we're in the same generation. I'll put generation X slash boomer.
I'm a millennial, Dave. No, you're not. You're not a millennial. According to the year, I am, but not by temperament. You're not a millennial.
I don't even think by year. Like my sister's a millennial. No, it's a big thing. Nastasia hates the weakness of boomers. What weakness do boomers have.
Boomers made all the money, did all the stuff. Like, what weakness do boomers have? Like, it's X that it's X that's weak. Like, we have nothing. We what do we do?
You know what I mean? You're the survivors. It's two boomers that are running for president right now. No Xers are running for anything anymore. We all got nuked.
Yeah. That's why it's X. It has no meaning. Why do you think they call us Gen X? It wasn't because there was a T, a U and a V and a W before us.
It's because we have nothing. We are X, useless, nothing, blank. Generation nothing. Is that really what? Yes.
Yeah. And then Y comes after X. And Z comes after Y. Yeah, it's just like, but but at the time, everyone was like, oh, the boomers, they had this, you know, everyone came back from the we had the greatest generation because they fought the war. And then when they came home, they had a lot of sex and they made the boomers, and man, the economy exploded and all this stuff happened.
And then they're like, what are you? What do you do? And we're like, we have sex equals death, and we're the first generation to be more conservative than our parents. Yay. Do you think that there's gonna be a baby boom due to everyone being shut down, holed up for the next whatever?
A mini boom? Yeah, that's what people are saying. Having a great time over here. To be honest, Nastasia, it takes two people to create a boom. Oh, no, no, no.
Nastasia's focused on self-generating. Yeah. She's cloning her kids. Yeah, if you imagine. If we're if we're supposed to say six feet from each other, that's like kind of the only way.
Gotta figure it out. Yeah, uh it's gotta, you know, yeah. I don't know whether those kind of fluids are fomites, but I assume that they are. Okay. Okay.
Blair writes in, hi, and hello from Poland. Firstly, can I give some obligatory praise and thank you to this podcast? Changed the course of my life a few years ago. Um honestly, I'm delighted to now have a good reason to write in with a question. Here it goes.
Uh I was working on espresso concentrate to be stored in individual ampules. What do you think about the word ampule, Nastasia? To me, it reminds me of cyanide, like I'm gonna get killed. Oh. Um, it's it's okay.
I like the I like the mouth fuel, mouthfeel of ampule. Ampulle, pule. Yeah. How many syllables is it? Uh huh.
Ampulle. Two, two, right? Amp yule? Or it's two, right? It's two, but with a high uh letter to syllable ratio.
It's a chewy word. It's a seriously chewy word. Ampule. Yeah. Uh and rehydrated with hot water.
Hopefully with as little flavor degradation as possible when compared to the original product. So far, so far I'm pouring the shot directly onto a metal plate cooled by a recirculating chiller. Uh passing uh through a thick filter paper, vacuum sealing freezing, then concentrating through the melting process yields and it yields not an unpleasant result, although the aromatics are diminished and bitter planty flavors are emphasized. I've been working on the assumption that preventing the overextraction of residual solids and oxidation is the key. I'm planning on giving bentonite a try for a bit of fining.
Perhaps the cooking issues collective encyclopedia could suggest some further avenues for exploration as well as concentrating through melting. I'm assuming you mean freeze thaw. Um the the best way when quality is paramount. Uh love you guys, Blair. All right, here's what I'm gonna say about this.
I would love the chat room once it exists again live to weigh in on this. However, uh I'm gonna go ahead and say that I I don't I think oxidation is a thing. Also, um autolysis. So like the the compounds that are in uh espresso are changing that the minute they're made, and you kind of can't stop that from uh changing. Uh Ily, if you get the chemistry of quality, which is uh Ely's book, they've done a lot of research, and if you look on the online, go to do a search like on Elsevier or Google Google Scholar, and then uh go to um uh Sci Hub and you you can look it up.
People have done a lot of work on the change in the organoleptic qualities of espresso based on, for instance, your chill rate. So I had always thought that rapid chilling was was good, but the ILI people seem to think that rapid chilling is not the best. So this is all stuff that can be uh tweaked through. But I would say that the solids that are coming out of the shot are pretty much as extracted as they're going to be. And I wouldn't worry that's the problem.
I think you're losing a lot through the filter paper, including a lot of the oils and things, um, if you're kind of worried or worried about that. I also don't have a lot of experience with freeze concentration other than with alcohol, and I'm assuming you're gonna lose uh a lot, although there are a lot of people working with freeze concentration now, so I could be wrong. I would say invest, find someone who owns one and do some freeze drying. So freeze drying is amazing. So then you just take you you you lay it out thin, you freeze dry it, it'll turn to a powder, it'll reconstitute pretty well.
And I'm gonna say that freeze drying is your best opportunity. And because freeze drying is done in a high vacuum, uh there's not going to be a lot of oxidation because there's not a lot of oxygen uh uh and the water is immobilized fairly quickly. So if there was a problem with continued uh extraction, I don't think it would be a continuing problem. Um freeze drying is is that obviously you are sucking uh, you know, you're losing a lot of volatiles because you're, you know, in a sense uh sublimating all the stuff off, but you're not losing as much as you would think, and I don't really understand why. I would not try bentonite.
I mean, try it. I I take that back. Try it. And then you can see how much flavor bentonite strips out. Bentonite is a bentonite's a mean son of a gun in terms of stripping flavor.
It's good at finding things, but it's very high stripping in terms of flavor. But give it a shot, let us know how it works. Uh Chris Wright writes in on olives. Hey everyone. Uh, this is on the chat.
Um, wondering if olive curing techniques can be applied to other fruits slash vegetables. Can you think of an agricultural product local to the Northeast? I'm in Pennsylvania that might be well suited for this. Um, I mean, the thing about curing olives, I mean, you could obviously uh oil cure uh things or salt cure things for sure, but the specific thing about an olive that is important is that it is intensely bitter, and so most of the curing processes in olives are about mitigating that bitterness. So I don't know that you're gonna, other than just like uh, you know, if you figure out some way to like salt, dehydrate, and then store something, sure, but I don't think you're gonna have the meeting or you're not doing it for the same reason in another vegetable as you are in an olive.
But you know, when the chat room people hear this, maybe they have some suggestions and they can come back on and give it to us for the next show. Uh Sam writes in about Sous Vide. I'm Sam from New Zealand. Uh I'm up to like podcast 370 at the moment. What are we up to now, Matt?
What do we what have we done? Oh god, uh, I know we're nearing 400. Oh my goodness. Uh, I think I must hate myself or just be the biggest beta male that exists. How's that, Sas?
You know, I hate that. Yeah. Uh my question is around proper sous-vide slash low temp technique. My problem has begun as a steak problem. My usual process is to dry brine.
By the way, Sam, dry brining. Where did this word come from? It's salting. Salting. Dry brine.
Everyone says this now, dry brining. You mean you mean you salted it? You salted it. Anyway. So my usual process is to dry brine between an hour and one day with between half a percent and one percent salt.
I'm guessing by weight. Then uh sous eating at 55 degrees uh Celsius for one to two hours. So 55 uh is like 100 and what is it, 130? Someone can look that up for me. I can't right now.
Then uh searing it off. Uh, this is a good steak, but I've noticed the hammy cure texture you've spoken about in the past. Uh I've also experienced this with debone lamb leg, which I deboned salted with uh uh three quarters of a percent salt, re-rolled and left in the fridge for 24 hours. Yeah, you're gonna cure that sucker up there. I then roasted this to an internal temp of 71 degrees Celsius uh to serve to my red phobic parents.
You should just blindfold them. Cook it to the right temperature and then blindfold them. Don't you think that's a better solution? Uh yeah, every dish should be uh uh served with a side of lying. No, you're not lying.
You're not saying what it is, it's just you're blindfolding them. You're like, here, have some land. It's cooked. All true. Or what if they wore, I wonder if you wore pink glasses, what people's reaction to pink meat would be if you wore pink glasses.
This would be an interesting test to force people to wear rose-colored glasses while they eat meats cooked at different things and see what their enjoyment is versus not. Wouldn't that be interesting? I I would do it. Because my get my well, you don't eat meat though, but you would for size. I know, that's why I'm a test subject.
Take one for the team. All right. Uh oh god, what's happening? What why is the f what what's going on over there, Matt? You're exploding over here.
That's not me. It's me. It's our 130, but I guess we're going. Okay. Well, no, we should, we we gotta get off.
I gotta finish this question. All right, go. All right. This was good, soft, salted throughout, but still had that texture, that hammy texture near the center of the meat. I missed the more traditional grain structure of the not dry brine meat, but don't want to give up the flavor and softness of a dry brine product.
Okay, listen. You gotta you got a bunch of different issues going on here. Don't salt the long cooked meat beforehand. Don't do it. On something that you want to have a steak texture on, right?
Don't salt it beforehand. Here's what you do. After you cook it, if you cook it for a long time, it's gonna get soft anyway. It just won't be hammy and firm if you don't salt it beforehand. Before you serve it, slice it thin and then salt the bejesus uh uh afterwards.
Or if you only salt it an hour, if you're gonna cook it only for a couple of hours, like a steak, you can salt, salt it, put it in the bag, cook it, and serve it relatively quickly. Also, if you're cooking to 55, uh after the internal reaches the temperature, depending on the thickness of your steak, drop the temperature down to like 52 to let it ride for a while so you don't get that because firmness will increase over time, even at 55. Uh so anyway, and so next week we'll deal with Eddie Donnell and his carbon carbonation question because I'm being told that we're we're leaving now. But leave it. I will say this, Eddie.
Cooling is still critical. Even the person whose video you sent me says so. Take a look at their comments, and we'll talk about it again next week. Oh, stay safe. What?
We should ask if they would like to see video of us doing this. We don't have the capability. I mean, I'm sure some program has a capability. Also, Kat was supposed to ask about all the stuff we cook from Ben's box. I cooked all this stuff.
I cooked the cooked the grits. We'll do that, we'll do that on a future time. I made shrimp and grits. I made delicious shrimp and grits. I cooked the rancho gordo beans, they were delicious.
You know, I've been cooking, I've been cooking up a storm with these. These are all things people need to do inside now that they're trapped inside. Beans. Darn it. We'll talk about it next week.
Next week. Next week. All right, cooking issues. Cooking issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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