This episode is brought to you by Bend to Table, a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. Learn more at bend to table.com. That's B E N T O T A B L E dot com. And when you use code H R N for a new subscription, you get $20 off and HRN gets ten dollars. Nastasia, you do it.
And Nastasia, from that moment on, normally has stopped listening. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live somewhere from my house, the lower east side. Nastasia, where are you? Are you uh where are you?
Are you in you in Connecticut or you in New York? I'm in Hell's Kitchen. You're what uh in Hell's Kitchen, and we got uh we got Matt. Where are you? You're in like something like Park Slope or something?
Still still in Rhode Island. Oh, Rhode Island, Rhode Island, Rhode Island, yeah. Yeah. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations! Uh what's the full name of your uh state there?
It's not my state, so I just know that it has a very long name. I do not remember. It's the along what you just said. It's the smallest state with the largest the longest name. It's like one of those whereas Delaware, I like to refer to it as the not even state, because it's not even the smallest.
It's not even Rhode Island. It's just like hi, we're the four you we're the forty-ninth state by size, but they have no tax, so they have that. They should cleave they should cleave off a portion of it to you know get ahead of us. What, did Delaware? You think Delaware should get rid of some of the Yeah.
I should get rid of some how there's gotta be some pieces of Delaware that don't matter. Cut 'em off. Get smaller. Do you know I've never spent an evening in Delaware? I've never spent an e Nastasia.
Have you ever spent an evening in Delaware? No. No, I haven't. Math, Matthew, you've spent in have you spent any of the things that I've done. I've been I don't think so.
I've been to the Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware while driving through, but it's kind of a drive-thru state, you know. Well, I mean, I'm sure it's nice, don't it border the Chesapeake there? Isn't there like nice river stuff there? Isn't there a nice like what? Yeah.
I just remembered I spent three days on a golf course in Delaware because that's where somebody chose to do their wedding. Oh. Yeah. How was that? Don't recommend that.
Yeah, don't do that. No. You're not a you're not a golfer? Well, driving the golf carts was great. I was all about that.
And they're the only mode of the main mode of transportation. But other than that. Yeah, I do like golf carts. So uh my sister-in-law, Miley Carpenter, who runs the is the Food Network magazine. She launched and runs the Food Network magazine.
I had a long illustrious career in food journalism prior to that. And uh, you know, my brother-in-law, Wiley Dufrein, well-known chef and now currently donut magnate. They are a they're a firm believer in the golf cart. They love a golf cart. Yeah, I mean, it was it was especially a novelty for Kate because she, my wife, does not know how to drive, is not licensed to drive.
So she got to just tool around. Did you just do the did you just do the Borat my wife? You did. You did the Borat. My wife.
God. I I was raised on that. I don't I don't even know how to say my wife without without Bore adding it. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, like uh Borat, I don't want to offend anyone out there. I hate that movie. I think that I think that look, Sasha Baron Cohen, I think he's like an extremely talented. My Dax, my son Dax just ran into the room saying that I'm a bad person because he you can see he they can hear you, you just can't hear them. You think Borat's the greatest movie ever made.
Yeah. Right? Here, Dax, come on, you come over here so they can hear you. You think that Borat's the greatest movie ever, right? I mean, it's funny, but it's some messed up stuff, so it's mean spirited.
See, I think someone your age, it's like, you know, a teenager doesn't understand the mean spirited nature of that program. It the humor is entirely mean spirited. That's why I don't like it. Like, it he's mean spirited towards other people. If he was just being mean spirited towards himself and his friends, I mean, that's one thing.
You know what I mean? Yeah, it's true, but you know, that's just my that's just my my take on it. Uh what do you think, Stasi? You like that stuff? I don't really remember it that well.
Um I thought it was okay. I mean, yeah, it's mean spirited, but it still made me laugh a lot. Dax is like, it was mean spirited but made me laugh a lot. Like, that's a good uh anyway. I have never I've definitely never seen the actual movie.
I've seen what was it, the LG show that was where the character came up, right? Uh well, yeah, he just does, you know, whatever. Whatever. Like I say, I think he's very talented. I think that stuff's mean-spirited.
Whatever. It is what it is. Uh, so what you know, Nastasia, you should get yourself a golf cart. You can get him real cheap. I'm not really spending money right now, so I know no one is.
We're locked, we're locked in rooms. We don't have any stuff. But I'm saying, you can go. But like this, this seems like the kind of thing you would go. You own a car, just trade it for a golf cart.
Imagine if you drove a golf cart on I 95. Listen, yeah, you you'd get there quicker. You'd get if you drove from your house on now, it's not legal, but you definitely get there quicker. You go right along the right along the uh the shoulder. For those of you that don't know, the corridor between where Nastasia's place is plays his in connecticut and New York City is just I mean, Nastasia comes from LA, so she's used to bad traffic, but like that is like the worst chunk of road in in a hundred mile radius from here, probably I-95, right?
I mean it's just garbage all the time. Garbage. Yeah, but now it only takes me 42 minutes door to door because there's nobody on the road. Oh, everyone just staying home, huh? Yeah.
Speaking of, this is the I did two hours and fifty-eight minutes from Newport to my apartment in Brooklyn the other day. That's a land speed record. Yeah. Do you like not worry about speeding? Are the cops out getting getting I have not left my house other than to walk my dogs in a week.
I'm on the second starting my second week of self-quarantine because I've I've felt sick, so I just haven't gone out, haven't gone shopping, haven't done any of that stuff. So I'm totally, you know, I'm totally disconnect. I've started to like disconnect myself from reality here at this point. So that's me. By the way, speaking of this, let's talk let's talk corona for a second.
Thanks everyone who's supported the uh the uh GoFundMe for the staff at uh existing conditions, by the way. Once that's done, that's gonna be split equally among all of the people that we had to um unfortunately lay off. Speaking of this, Nastasi, have you heard that uh Jose Andres uh is continuing to pay his staff in uh DC even though the restaurant shut down? That's awesome. I I wish we could I wish we could afford to do that.
Uh that's you know fantastic. I you know, we're gonna definitely need some uh help going forward. But uh I mean, we as an industry. Um, um here's something I thought of. Uh next time this happens, I'm gonna be so much better prepared in terms of my kind of disaster preparedness food situation.
Like back after 9 11, we started having what what we call like terror supplies at home. And then, but with something like this, you never know when you're gonna just have to be locked into your house for a couple weeks at a time. I would have planned much better. You know, Nastasi, you have a lot of pasta. Yeah.
So you're you're set for the one thing that I've stopped eating is what? Is meat. I stopped eating meat and chicken, yeah. Why? Yeah.
Because you don't have it? I just I've found it really gross, like, just really gross after like five days. What do you mean? And then just having like this raw animal. Like, I was just like, this is gross.
So, yeah, just not eating it. Huh. Hold on, hold on. I'm trying to I'm trying to try to put my head around this. So it's like the you're saying that the raw product is staying in your fridge too long, and so you're looking at it and you're like, that's gross.
You should freeze it. But then I have to thaw it, and then all right, let's let's talk about this. This is a good point. This is a good point. This is a good point.
Nastasia brings up a good point here. The tr the trick of this, and what I'm gonna do the next time around, or before the next time around, here's the issue. Let's say you go out, let's say you're gonna go full prepper, right? Let's say you're gonna go full Mormon prepper, and let's say you have a basement, because of course you do, and you have like a year's worth of food in 55 gallon drums, like you know, new nuclear Armageddon style in your basement. The issue with this is everything has a finite lifespan, right?
So the the what people do is you look on, you're like what canned goods can last for X number of years, blah, blah, blah. And then you end up with a bunch of canned and dry goods that are steadily turning to garbage in your pantry, right? Or in your fridge. Or you have a whole bunch of chicken, and since everyone else in your family got vaporized in the Armageddon, or if you're like Nastasia, you're just cooking for yourself anyway, then you you know, you have all of this stuff, and you don't want you can't thaw out an entire big block of it if it's only you're only eating that one piece of chicken that night, right? So, what to do?
First of all, invest in freezing individual portion controls. So as soon as you get the products that you get, take them down into individual portions. I know it's a little seems a little bit wasteful, but you're gonna be saving in the long run. Put them into quartz size or smaller quartz size uh ziploc bags, exclude the air using the water technique, which you can see on the cooking issues blog, if it still exists somewhere, on how to package uh it's also everyone else has it now. Uh you you put it, you get the air out of it, and then you freeze the individual packs.
Those individual packs can be thawed in uh running water in your sink in under 25 minutes. They're good to go. And now some of it can even be cooked from frozen and have it be uh passable. So uh so that's step step one right there with your frozen stuff, so that you're not staring as Nastasia had at a bunch of stuff. And then when you have that stuff there, you think you're gonna use it, you think people are gonna come over, they're not gonna come over because either you're quarantined or they've been, you know, already vaporized in a different kind of Armageddon.
So, anyway, so you have that. The second thing is, and this is what I'm gonna do the next time around, is I am going to buy uh my supply of food, and then every year I'm gonna make sure everything is good for two years minimum, and then every year I'm gonna donate all of it to a food pantry and buy it fresh. This way, I always have a year of uh shelf life left on my stuff. I'm not donating expired food to people, and yet I don't have to live off of my terror supplies on a normal basis. That's gonna be my plan going forward.
My terror slash pandemic supplies. So uh what I've run out of is because I live in a New York City apartment and I have extremely limited freezer space, is I have run out of vegetables. That's the main thing I've run out of is veg. But whatever. Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah. Uh all right, should we do some questions? Yeah, um, and all of it, there are actually a couple in the chat that I didn't see until now. Uh Elvin had a small logistics question about existing conditions. In addition to the GoFundMe, are there any other good ways to directly help the bar and staff?
Uh he tried to find some kind of gift card page, but wasn't able to find one. Any thoughts? Don Lee is uh working on that. Um on the gift card aspect. So for right now, you know, the GoFundMe, which is gonna go directly to the staff that's laid off, and it's we're we're dividing it.
Um, I'm pretty sure we're just dividing it on an equal basis, so we're not trying to, you know, play favorites with that or anything like that. It's just gonna be divided up and handed to the staff that um was laid off, and you know, uh as for anything else, we haven't started delivery yet because we're still setting up the uh seamless stuff. I won't be able to personally help with delivery until minimum um Monday because I shouldn't be handing people food, right? Uh because I'm on self-quarantine. Uh so other than that, yeah, other than that, I don't know.
But uh stay tuned to the existing conditions. Uh stay tuned to the existing conditions, uh, Instagram, and you know, anything that we're doing is gonna go up on that. Um what else you got in the chat room there, Matt? Uh let's see. So bread baking physics question from Wally.
Uh please explain to me again how a pot of water at 99C on the bottom shelf in the preheated convection oven is different than injecting steam at the beginning of my bake. I'm planning to run a silicone tube from my pressure cooker vent to the oven, but why would that be a good idea or not? Thanks. First of all, anytime anyone says tube and I'm on earphones like this, I can only think of uh Senator what was his name, Stevens from Alaska talking about the internet being a series of it's a series of tubes. Series of tubes.
Series of tubes uh over which we're now uh we're now talking. Uh so here's the difference. Uh when you put a pan of water in the oven, you are um taking a big chunk of the thermal load. So if you were to measure uh well, I've only measured it in a toaster oven because it's the only thing I can adequately measure the heat, uh the uh energy input on, but the energy input into my brevel toaster oven uh with a full pan of water in it versus not is a lot lot higher. Uh so you're dumping a lot of the thermal energy in.
So uh and that's not necessarily that you wouldn't think alone is going to necessarily change you know the dynamics of what's going on in the oven, but if you're expecting there to be a big heat wallop other than the steam uh available to you to to do something like let's say heat up pizza stone or whatnot, you would be mistaken because in fact you're heating up that water, and that water then is probably keeping that pizza stone at a lower overall temperature than it would be uh otherwise. That's my guess. Now, whereas if you make the steam in a separate thing and then inject it, right? You're only injecting the steam, you're not really affecting the temperature of the uh or the I should say the dynamics of the oven that much. And even if you were to do what a lot of people do do, which is drip water in and vaporize it in the oven, that extra heat load is only there for the time where you're vaporizing it as opposed to being in there on a constant basis, right?
So you're spending all of this uh energy keeping this like big pot of water hot and vaporizing a lot of water, right? As opposed to just injecting the steam when you want it and then having the steam take away. So I guess that would be the difference. That's just my guess. That makes sense.
How are people? I'm having a hard time visualing this though. How is he gonna be injecting steam from the pressure cooker like on a consistent basis into his functioning oven? Well, what I've always wanted to do is run a water line like along the bottom of the oven, let's say, and then you just turn the water on from an outside reservoir when you want it, and that would vaporize the steam. Now you'd be using the oven energy, like I said before, but typically, like especially a gas oven has excess energy.
So you'd heat up the you'd heat up the stone or whatever else you're using, the the steel piece, then you'd inject water into a part of the oven that doesn't matter as much, the bottom, let's say, and then that you'd use the excess energy from that to vaporize the steam. The steam would go, and then uh you know you'd you'd have your your your thing. So I mean I assume that would be slightly different. Who is enjoying a delicious crunchy snack during the radio show? Oh my god, you can hear that?
Of course. I was I was trying to chew, I I thought there was no way. Alright, fine. Yeah. All right.
I have to say, Stas, I thought it was gonna be you. I thought it was gonna be you. So I was it was closed mouth. I'm two feet from the friggin' computer. I'm I'm amazed.
It's fine. Everything's great. All right so listen, listen to the. So uh I took the 23andMe and Nastasia took the 23 in me. They by the way, they gave you the ability to look at your at the at the updated records, right, Stas?
Anyway, whatever. Yeah, so like Nastasia was an extremely early adopter giving her genetic information to the 23andMe Corporation. I was a late adopter. Only after it became apparent that they were stealing my genetic data and using it for nefarious purposes, did I give it to them because that's when it became interesting to me. Uh but the uh so anyway, so uh apparently, like some of us are more genetically disposed to hating the sound of crunching people crunching.
People in my family sit and eat and crunch things constantly, constantly. I can't stand it. It's like it's like I wanna soak every crunchy snack in this house in water for like a year or so that it turns to just a sopping wet thing, so I don't have to hear it. It's like Nastasia, I know you're with me on this. Like, yeah, is there anything worse?
Let's say, Nastasia, Nastasia. Let's say, let's go back a month and pretend that you're at one of the galler gatherings that you usually cook for when we're not in corona times, right? So you're you're back there and you're sitting there and you're cooking, right? And someone walks up behind you, you hear the rustle of the freaking pack, it's all plastic, crunchy pack. Nobody would do that.
Open up and then they're eating a chip or something behind your dang head when you're cooking, you'd punch them. That's why you put like a cheese plate out so that they're not nearing you ever. Right. Also, you know what's like worse than hearing somebody chew. Complete silence.
Oh, yeah. I mean, that's what you get now. That's like, right? That's you have now complete silence. You have to like uh yeah, Nastasi is gonna like hide like Nastasi will pay you to ramble on live in the background so that she doesn't have to deal with it when I was waiting for this show to happen, and you were like upset.
Well, we could all hear you. We were waiting, we were also waiting for the show to happen, but in order for the show to happen, you have to stop listening to your stuff. There was a confusing technical situation. It's fine. Don't worry.
I'm so I'm soaking my chips, all right? I'm soaking them in water. Everything's great. So I have been told that among the other things that I'm a bad person for is extr how extremely intolerant I am of crunching. But I especially hate crunching when I'm not eating.
If I'm not eating, right, and other people are crunching, what's worse than that, Nastasia? Well, but again, Dave, you you have people over, you put the cheese plate out, you expect to not eat because you're cooking and they're eating, and you pre-eat. Let's just let's take it to a different scenario. Let's say that there's a certain life coach who most of the time lives in Mexico and she's staying in your house, let's say, right? And you're and you're reading something, you're trying to read something.
You're like reading. And already, the already, like if you're in New York, right? New York is so intensely irritating, like every second there'll be some freaking jackhammer outside to take you away, and you have to reread that sentence 85 times. And then a certain life coach sits down, and it could be on the other side of the room, and all you hear is first of all, you're hungry, but you're not eating, right? You're you're hungry.
What she does, she does the finger flick. So she puts her hand in, she eats the let's say chips, and then she flicks all five fingers with the salt and the on the fingers, like sorry, onto the floor or like onto the into the ether, you know? That oh my god. Oh, geez, geez, geez, geez, geez. Listen, if you are with somebody else in the house and it's quiet time, and it's quiet time, right?
Don't eat crunchy food. Eat crunchy food on your own or in a non-quiet environment. Put on some put on some music. I always have music on, so that that, yeah. Music helps the crunch, for sure.
For sure, music helps the crunch. But this is why Nastasia doesn't go to movie theaters. But yes, that is true. And I know for a fact, right? That it's here's the thing.
If you're gonna sneak, well, there's no movies now, but if you were like when movie theaters open up again and you go to a movie theater, like have the decency to bring stuff in non-crinkly packaging, right? Right? If you're gonna sneak food in, I get it, you're gonna sneak food in. Have some decency. No crackling, right, Stuzz?
I told you that, and you were like, Yeah, you're crazy. And then you went to see the movie, and you were like, wow. Well, it's because I hadn't been to a movie in so long, you know, that when I finally went to a movie. Anyway, all right. Did you have any more questions in the chat or should I go to some of our preset questions?
Uh we have we have one that just came in. Uh can I prepare in advance portions of chicken breast complete with spices and oil, uh, sealed in a zippy and frozen with the intention of going straight from the freezer to a low-temp water bath? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yes. The answer to this is yes. However, shortest answer of all time. Yeah, I mean, uh, depend depending on the salt level that you use, you're gonna get some textual changes, but usually those textural changes aren't hated in uh chicken. So there you have it.
Hey, has have you have have either of you been to this uh this uh takeout like southern chicken salad restaur uh chicken salad restaurant that's only open six days a week? Have you heard about it? I heard an NPR show on it. I wish I could remember the name of it. Have either of you been to it?
Haven't heard of it. Crazy story. Crazy story. Woman, woman starts a woman starts a chicken salad, like doesn't want to like, she has her kids, she wants to do something with chicken salad. She starts this restaurant, which then becomes franchise.
She gets, well, she gets divorced, finds another person who's interested in chicken salad, they get married, they have a franchise. This guy gets cancer, dies. She starts a foundation to help people with cancer with the chicken salad, and still sells chicken salad. I mean, like it's sounds like a crazy story, but the reason I was interested is she uses a none of that. Who cares about that stuff, right?
No, she uses a uh a boiled chicken, or she calls it boiled, but I'm sure it's not boiled boil, a boiled chicken versus a roast chicken for a chicken salad. And this is the way that Jacques Papin makes his chicken salad, which is also the way he was taught by famous uh actor, but also conductor and food uh bon vivant Danny Kay. So uh like Jacques Lepin in a classics in the field I did a long time ago, his 80s canop series has a uh chicken salad a la Danny K recipe in it, where the trick is you take the chicken, you cut it up, you I can't remember whether he makes like a like uh he starts with water, but I usually do it with chicken stock because why not, you know, cheap chicken stock. You put the veg and the chicken into the pot, like you pack it with chicken, pack it with chicken and just enough liquid around to like take up space, and then you bring it up to the boil, put the lid on it, and then let it ride. The whole chicken cooks through without getting too overcooked.
You reinforce the broth because you started with a broth, it doesn't reduce the flavor of the chicken that much, and that is how Danny Kay slash Jacques Papin makes his chicken salad. Sounds very similar to the way this lady makes her chicken for her chicken salad. So there you have it. And I love a chicken salad, and I know for a fact that Nastasia has a lot of raw chicken in her fridge right now that she's not eating. All I have is tofu, Saitan, vegetables, beans.
You don't strike me as a Satan person. What happened there? You decided to go Satan? I just decided to go non-meat. Yeah, but why?
Well, like you went from never buying that stuff. What would what kind of tofu did you get? I only I don't like silky. I got hard or whatever. It's firm.
Firm, what do you do with it? But how like how do you purchase it? You're just getting it at the supermarket? Yeah. What are you doing with it?
I've been putting it in oil and then putting in the oven. Finishing in the oven. There's like a lot of it's marinated. Some of them is marinated. It's good.
Yeah. Uh now is a good time if you're trapped at home. If you have soybeans and you already have some coagulant, making tofu is in fact a lot of fun. And not that hard. It's messy.
I'm not gonna I'd be lying to you if I said it wasn't messy, but it's not that hard. And the tofu you get when you make it yourself is just I mean, I it's just uh to me, it's a different product from the stuff you get in the stores because it's never been, it's never been soaked in water, you know, it's just like it's very kind of like tastes of itself and like has kind of a really cool texture to it. So I would recommend, and if you uh are on Amazon, you can either get the classics in the field that we did a couple of weeks ago on the book of uh shirtle's uh book of uh soy uh tofu and miso, or you can get uh Andrea Nguyen's uh Asian tofu book with which has perfectly good recipes on how to make tofu and go from never making tofu is definitely something to do if you have a lot of time on your hands. Speaking of, Dax wants to learn how to make brioche. That's what he wants to do.
I'm like, Dax, why don't you choose a bread that doesn't take so many eggs and so much butter? You know, because like that's the stuff I'm gonna run out of. We're gonna go through pounds and pounds and pounds of butter. You know, already every week I have to make liege waffles for the kid, and then he's also gonna eat the brioche on top of it. I'm like, I'll give you what I'll just give you, I'll give you like a gallon of oil.
You can just chug a gallon of oil if you want that much butter. Anyway. Uh we we should we should go to break. And then we do have a very, very we have a doozy of a question that I need to get to from the chat. Alright, so then when we come back though, you want to do the classics in the field or not?
Alright. Come right back with classics in the field. This episode is brought to you by Ben to Table, a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. Level up your pantry. Bend to table is kind of like Stitch Fix, but for your pantry.
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The global delicacies box, a way to explore the cuisine of a different country and culture. The bend to table box includes both pantry essentials and global delicacies. By purchasing any subscription, you'll help sustainable, well produced ingredients and small producers. Hey Nastasia, we're getting boxes. Start your monthly subscription at Bento Table.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 Ben to Table will donate $10 to support cooking issues and all of HRN's programming. So Nastasia, you would never consider making your own tofu, right? Not interested. Not interested.
Actually, I'm not I'm not even interested in cooking anymore. Like I just it's just like eating food right now. You're wanna wait. So you've you've like as a result of this, you've become one of those human cows that just sits there chewing on their cud, not caring. No, I barely eat.
Like, I'm like, what what ritual, you know, am I celebrating right now? Like, it's just me. Um that is true. Like, that's the that's the worst aspect of it. I mean, other people that are like, oh my god, I'm so happy to be with you know whoever they live with, and they're like, we're gonna try out like his grandmother's recipe for the first time.
I'm like, yeah, that's great. I'm gonna eat. I'm gonna eat a block of tofu. You're like, you're like, you're like, I'm just gonna I'm gonna soak it in neutral oil because I don't deserve flavor. I'm gonna just sustenance at this one.
Maybe I'll salt it. Maybe I won't. I guess I need electrolytes. Yeah. Wow, that's rough.
That's rough. I don't even know if I you know what, man. I don't know if I can do classics off of that because I'm just feeling so rough. From Nastasia's sustenance. Oh, by the way, if you hear piano in the background, that I guess it that means it's time for Booker's music class.
Uh that he's in the in in the uh in the other room. And uh he hasn't, so he his violin broke. We handed it to Sam Ash, and then I wasn't able to go pick it up uh to get it fixed, so now he's playing quote unquote piano in his room. So there that's what that's what that is. All right, so I'll do some wait.
What was the doozy of a question you have me back? Because I have some questions I gotta eat. Are you legit we're not doing the question? I can't, I can't. I gotta do it, I gotta do it afterwards.
I can't I can't get all excited for classics in the field. I shower and wash my hair unlike a lot of other people, and I've been like getting dressed and I make my bed. So, like, that's not a problem. It's just I I have not yet done cooking issues in my chonies because I have to walk the dogs before the show. So this is a listeners, listeners, you can look forward to that someday.
I'm sure you'll feel the difference. Just so you can just so you can picture it. You are listening to a Nastasia has showered. She has clean hair. I can't, I don't know about you, Matt, but as far as I'm aware, you are listening to a fully clothed production of cooking issue.
I mean, everyone knows I'm always fully clothed. You know what I mean? But anyway. Anyway. All right.
Blair Gillespie Smith uh says, hi and hello from Poland. I'm putting some work into an espresso concentrate to be stored in individual. Oh, didn't we do this? Didn't we do this last week? Oh, wait.
Oh. Oh, that's the same espresso. Okay, of course it's the same espresso thing. Yeah, all right, sure. My bad.
All right, wait. Why? It only came in three days ago. I don't know. Maybe they haven't listened to the one from uh last week.
Uh it's alright. It was about trying to prevent the overextraction of residual solids and oxidation. Yeah, but I said I didn't think it was the residual solids. It's a it's it's other issues. Okay, this person must have just submitted the same question afterwards.
All right, great. Hey, Blair, listen to last week's episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, very on on a nicer note, they thank you for quite literally changing the course of their life through this podcast a few years ago. There you go.
So what happened is I went and just tried to push the computer over, but the crappy design on my laptop is that right at the corner is the sleep button. So if you go to just push the computer, like even like like a micro inch over, it just goes, oh, you wanted me to turn off? Okay. And then it turns off. All right.
Tom J. Wild wrote in on the Twitter, uh, hey cooking issues. Uh, given I have some downtime, I want to make masa out of corn rather than the whole wheat that I currently use. By the way, wheat, real messy, anyway, it doesn't matter. Uh, the issue is I cannot get non-chicken slash fish feed dried field corn here in the UK.
Should I use this? Hope you and your family are safe. Uh, thanks, Tom. Yes, uh, we are safe, but bored out of our skulls. And you here's the issue.
So, um, first of all, you can make masa out of popcorn. The issue with popcorn is is that uh popcorn varieties that they sell on the store are designed to have a very, very tough seed coat, uh, and you know, so that you get better explosions. And so uh they are consequently harder even after you make masa, but they can't you can make masa out of popcorn if you can only get a hold of popcorn. It's I've done it. It's you know, not ideal, but it's possible.
Um as for feed corn, there's a the couple issues with it. First of all, like the corn doesn't care what it was intended for, you know, the corn itself, right? And since uh, you know, I don't really, you know, care about whether or not it was GMO, etc. etc. Like, just take that where it is.
The main issue with feed corn versus human corn is one, it's gonna be a lot filthier, so you're gonna have uh you know a lot in I would guess that it would be a lot filthier in terms of like more rat poop, you know, slightly more rat poop, slightly more uh slightly more hair, slightly more uh slightly you know, more raccoon teeth in it than you would get in, you know, let's say one that was destined for human consumption, because you know, if your chicken eats, you know, one more rat dropping or one more ra uh raccoon tooth, what does it really matter, right? One more pigeon feather. Um so there's that, so you're gonna have to clean that clean the heck out of it, uh, you know, and maybe do better sorting than you otherwise would. The other issue is is that uh I'm pretty sure if I I looked this up a little bit, but I didn't have a lot of time. If you look up in the US, right, uh the question is is how much mold can grow on the corn.
So, and we we have a question about this in a second. So if you if you there are limits uh to for corn that humans are gonna eat on uh fungal contamination, and the reason is you don't want to have uh aflatoxins, which are mold-based toxins on the corn, and it's hard to see, right? So you wouldn't necessarily uh know. Now the good news is if you were gonna have that corn and it was uh designed to be fed to animals that people were gonna eat, then it also has limits on um on the fungus that can be in it, on the mycotoxins that can be in it. If, however, it's corn that is being destined for feeding to deer or to wildlife that you're that aren't gonna be consumed later by people, then I don't think there are a lot of limits.
So you might have had co corn that had been gotten wet and then moldy, uh, or you know, any one of a number of things. So if it was feed corn that was designed to feed to animals that people were then later gonna eat or eat their products, then I'd say you're fine as long as you give it a thorough uh washdown, and it doesn't matter if it gets wet because you're not grinding it into cornmeal, you're making it into masa, and I would just sort through it to get rid of any additional uh animal droppings or or whatnot. Now, Neil on a similar question from Los Angeles wrote in. That's um remember that woman that did my hair when we were prepping for an event to her brother. Yeah.
Uh yeah, we met both of them. Yeah. Yeah. So we went to uh we went to night market in uh and we were doing an event at night market, a staff training, and and actually a pop-up afterwards. And uh, and so Jack and I were doing this staff training, and Nastasia like was like, the hell it is.
What the hell is this? So she goes next door to get her hair did, and lady recognized your voice, right? Yeah, yeah. Lady lady recognize, yeah, lady recognizes Nastasia's voice. Well, you tell the story.
Yeah, as she's washing my hair, and then she's like, Do you have a podcast? And I was like, Yeah, and then she's like, Do you make the Searzol? And I was like, Yeah. And then my brother makes me listen to the podcast and use a Searsol, he's a huge fan. And then they both ended up coming to the to the thing that night that we were doing, the pop-up.
Well, yeah, but she said she hated us. She hated the show and she hated the Sears hates. So yeah. Yeah, yeah. I thought we can we converted her when she came to night market, we converted her, no?
No, I think she still hates the Sears all on the show. All right. Well, Neil, thanks for still watching. What? Isn't it good that I got my hair done?
Nastasia, just because like something good happens from something doesn't mean that the original decision was a good one. Two good things happened. All right, listen. So here's the thing. See the attached photos, which of course you guys can't see because you're on the radio and we don't have the photos on the radio.
I used crappy store-bought cream and equally crappy yogurt as a starter. I scraped off all the mold and churned the butter. Uh I haven't eaten it yet because I would prefer not to go to the hospital over some butter. That being said, I'd also uh not to I'd like to not waste the butter. Do you think it's safe to eat or would you feed it to your family?
Thanks, Neil from LA. Alright, Neil, I would not okay. Look, here here a couple of things. One. One, you uh you're in LA, so I I'm not I'm not supporting it as a great product or not, but if you need cream that doesn't have carragaenin in it to make butter with, or it's not carrageen anymore, it's gel an.
I'm pretty sure the Trader Joe's, at least on the East Coast, their cream does not have uh stabilizer, gel an stabilizer in it. So that's one way to go. Uh if you can, like uh if you if you have access to uh like the restaurant supply, like the ones we get from Dairyland are also just regular pasteurized instead of ultra pasteurized, and you'll get a better result with the butter. But anyway, that's not what you were asking, uh neither here nor there. I would not use yogurt as a starter, I would get some uh cultured buttermilk and use cultured buttermilk as the starter uh for it.
And then the last mistake that you've made is it does not require three days of fermentation at 70. I'd bring it up to room temp, let it get a little warmer than that, and like one day max, really, like in general, like 24 hours is all you're gonna need. You don't need three days uh to get the level of tang. And if you do, your temperature is too low and you should raise the temperature. I would not eat it when there's mold on top.
Once you get gray mold on top of your uh stuff, especially in something that's a semi-liquid, like just set clotted cream is uh the the actual mold goes much, much deeper into it. So anytime you get a growth like that on top of a liquid, uh you kind of have to discard it. So I would say I would, I mean, I would taste it because that's me, but I wouldn't necessarily feed it to your family. It's not gonna be that kind of aflatoxin if there is one, which you never know, right? And and it's impossible because there's so many different kinds of molds that grow.
It's impossible really to identify a mold on something like that. But uh because you didn't inoculate it with a specific known kind of mold, and it's not you know a known benign mold, you have to assume that it's not. Uh, and the other thing about it is um uh I forgot what I was gonna say. But yeah, I would I wouldn't need it. I would taste it for myself.
Oh, yeah, because the effects of aflatoxin aren't immediate and acute usually, they're kind of longer term, and so you never know whether or not that cancer that you get down the road is from uh, you know, you never know what it's from, but every little bit of aflatoxin, which is, you know, many aflatoxins are known kind of very potent carcinogens, like every little bit kind of, you know, pushes you closer towards that edge. So I would not, I would not use it. And in the future, I would um I would uh keep your your times a lot shorter. What do you think, Sus? Was that right?
This seems like an incredibly good time to avoid completely optional trips to the hospital. That is definitely true. That is definitely true. Um, all right. So and speaking of also bread, right?
We didn't we have a bread thing earlier. Uh Scott writes in and says, uh, should I just read I'll read the thing from Scott. So this is, by the way, uh, I was gonna ask him to come on, but I didn't have enough time when I read this, but we could get uh our friend uh Jim Leahy back on the on the show. The only person who is completely unable to not curse for like the very short time that we're on the radio. And uh people who know me in the real life know I know how to curse.
Nastasia, when I'm not on the radio, how how long a string of words can you and I put together without a curse in it? You and I are really bad cursors. It's just part of the language, but we really have here. Yeah, I mean, no, but I mean like when you're when you're with us normally, it's like a like a like a burbling brook of bad blue, you know, words, just you know, blah blah blah. Like like just like in like I I'm I'm I'm not gonna, you know, I don't want to like two our own words here.
It's usually directed at ourselves because we're like F, yeah. Yeah, but also like, you know, I think we have a we have a a talent, a real talent, for uh combining uh words and curses in unusual ways uh to good effect. This is a this is a skill that we have. You know what I mean? Uh I don't we don't use it on this radio program, but it is one of our known skills that you know that we can just sit there and and occasionally what you're saying, only frat boy you're friends with.
Yeah, yeah, Nastasi's the only fat boy I'm bringing. So in general, like she'll use kind of like f frattier insults than I will. But the uh I mean on on many, many, many occasions, Nastasi and I will be talking, and someone next to us will just turn their head and be like, what? What did you say? You know what I mean?
Like, it's just like random people, right? You know, and on only one occasion has it ever been like, wow, I think I recognized your voice from that show. Well, if you out more, maybe. Yeah, well, you know, obviously, like they, you know, they don't recognize it because you know, they're like, oh, those guys never curse. And so that's can't be them.
It can't be them because whoever that person is is cursing a blue streak. It's crazy. Anyway, uh, so uh we can get Leahy on, but we'll have to like just pre you can be on the bleep. We should really get him on because there's so many bread bakers right now. Be because of the COVID?
And because of it's ridiculous. It's kind of gross. And since we can't have live callers currently, we you know, guests is uh is much easier. Uh yeah, I'll I'll I'll diligently bleep him. We can do this.
Yeah, Nastasia says people are baking bread. It's kind of gross. It's kind of gross. What's gross about bread now? So do you do you hate this?
So, like, here's so those of you that know me personally, I don't know if I've talked about this on air. Like, I like, I think people should do yoga. I think it's great. But I don't like the yoga look on the street. For kind of because it's you're saying is the bread thing for you like the yoga thing on the street is for me, where it's like someone's calling attention, like me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
Like that? Maybe, I maybe. I think this whole thing is just sort of the whole the um, what are we in? Quarantine thing is kind of gross because people are like, I don't know. I I I don't know how to explain it.
Maybe I'll explain it next week when I wrap my head around it, but there's a certain thing that I really hate about it. About wait, but I'm trying to figure it out so that people can get ready for your explanation next week. So it's just the gist of it is, you know, people are always like, I can't wait to Netflix and chill. All I want to do is Netflix and chill and like stay inside, and all I do is look at my phone, and I hate work, and now everybody has the opportunity to stay home and they're like, this is awful. What the hell?
When's this gonna be like you know, I want to be outside? Nobody's ever wanted to be outside, you know, like kids never wanted to be outside, they want to be on their phone, and now they're like, Oh, why can't I go out? Like, what? What? I just don't get it.
So you're saying people got what they wish for and ended up hating it. And now they're like doing all these things like baking bread, which are things that like you would do, or people who are more ambitious would do, who like try to find the time to like do the stuff, you know, to like make the most of their life. And now all these people who really loved doing nothing are like, look at me, you know. They could have done that when we weren't quarantined, but they decided to watch that session. So all right, cooking issues people.
Uh discuss for next week. Yeah. Uh Dave, we should do classics because we gotta bounce. All right, I got one other thing first before classic. One of the can I do one thing and then the classics?
All right. All right, Eddie Danell, I'm eventually gonna get to you on carbonation because there's someone on the internet who is uh got also building a carbonation rig and they're gonna do some sort of blog on it. Listen, ask me all the carbonation questions you have for next week. Everyone's carbureting now, it's part of the thing that they're also doing now that they're stuck home alone. There's some classic mistakes.
Do not follow other people's mistakes who decided for like, you know, they decided one weekend that they were gonna become quote unquote carbonation experts and they build some sort of janky carbonation rig and then they post it on the YouTube. Listen to someone who's been doing it for like 25 years instead. All right, like, like all I care about is carbonated water and my family, and that's pretty much it. Uh so like so like ask me your questions, and I'm not gonna lie to you. And when I tell you something, I'm not kidding, I'm serious.
Also, realize this. If I say to if you give me a thing and I say I don't know, it's because I haven't tested it, although I've tested in millions of other things. I'm not gonna lie to you and tell you something makes a difference when it doesn't. That's just not my style. All right.
So um, I'm not posting anything on, I haven't posted anything on Instagram really, other than stuff for uh our bar or anything, just because you know this this is gonna sound kind of bad, Stas, but I feel like if I posted it, like the the the industry is in such a bad way right now. There is no industry. The industry is is is been halted, right? And so many people are shafted that for me to post something on the internet being like here's a recipe for blah blah to me. I just finished I just finished the book about the man surviving the Holocaust, and how you should not let guilt stand in the way of making yourself or other people happy.
So just because other people are going through something unfortunate right now, you can contribute and make people happy by posting things that they would find enjoyable and could and could possibly turn their you know sadness around. So, what's the difference between that and the Mario Batali cinnamon buns, or as we call them apology rolls? Um, because you didn't rape women, yeah, it's true. Yeah, yeah. Um not your fault, you know.
This so like do good and make people happy. Alright, alright. So I'll talk about this real quick. So uh for those of you that know, uh, I like non-melting squeaky cheeses. We've discussed this.
How Matt, how many times have we discussed squeaky cheese? Too many. Too many times, all the time. Right. So let's just go for one second.
There's a kind of cheese that I I made. I made it, I didn't talk about this. What do you mean, uh? Go anyway. So uh there's a finished cheese called uh Ustolepa, right?
Which uh, but it can also be written the other way, like lepa usto, which either means bread cheese or cheese bread, depending on which way you go. Uh, it's also made anywhere that there is like uh a lot of um Scandinavian influence in the US, so they make it in Wisconsin and up in Minnesota, and it is a non-melting cheese, but it is very different from any other sort of non-melting squeaky cheese, because to make it, you have to bake it, right? So it's literally baked as it's made. So very quickly, uh, in order for cheese to melt properly, and this is when people, you know, they add their salts, you know, they're what's called emulsifying salts, even though, or melting salts, even though that's you know, they're kind of a misnomer, to things like processed cheese to get them to do, or when you're adding your white wine to your fondue. Nastasi, you gotta do a fondue.
For who? Oh, it's true. Do you know what's depressing? You know what I did recently? I had to I went on one of these things where you just uh FaceTime or whatever Zoom chat, like your family, and we all sit there with a glass of wine in separate boxes and like look at each other.
And I have to say, wow, that's depressing, huh? It's so depressing. I mean, people enjoy it. It was good to see the people. It was good to see people, I guess, but something about it, like I don't know, something about it, the virtual happy hour, something about it.
Anyway um, so uh you have a when you when you have a cheese, right, and you need it to melt, you need to have just the right amount of acidity. If you have if a cheese is too acidic, right, or very acidic, uh, then it won't melt because you've so kind of glommed the uh casein uh together that you can't melt it to kind of break it apart. On the other hand, if there's not enough acidity, right, it also doesn't melt. So some cheeses that are high in acid, like feta or a lot of goat cheeses won't melt because they're high in acid. Whereas a lot of the cheeses that don't melt on the other side, like Halumi or uh like this finished squeaky cheese or quesa parafruere, which is another um, you know, which is the kind of the Dominican uh version of frying cheese, right?
These things don't melt because they have a very high pH. They don't have any acidity, they don't have enough acidity in them to be able to melt. And so what you do with these things, and so when you're making uh squeaky cheese curds, right, they're somewhat acidified, but they aren't, they are so fresh that they haven't had a time for their pH to drop enough or for them to lose their squeak. So that's why they lose their squeak. If you make a cheese with a very high pH in it, you know, very low acidity, right?
Then it doesn't lose its squeak, especially when it's reheated, because you have deactivated the uh you've deactivated the culture. There's no culture, either in the case of uh Finnish squeaky cheese, the uh Eustalepa, there's no culture in it at all. You've not cultured it at all. So there it's not the pH isn't dropping, it's not getting more acidic over time, especially because you're gonna bake it. So, what you do is you take your milk, you heat it up to like 90 Fahrenheit or something like this, you hit it with a lot of extra rennet because rennet, which you're by the way, I went to Calusteans, and I'm not making a knock against Calustians, but they did not refrigerate their liquid rennet.
I bought it anyway, which was stupid. This is before the COVID thing hit, and I wasted two gallons of milk, wasted, and then I ran a test on their rennet, and it's just garbage. I wish Calusteans would not sell stuff that's supposed to be refrigerated and not refrigerated. It really ticked me off because I wasted two gallons of milk and I lost the rennet. But modernist pantry.com, which is still shipping even during this COVID thing, gave me some rennet uh that I use tablet rennet.
Now, the tablet rennet, it costs more and it comes in these tablets, but it lasts a long time, doesn't need to be refrigerated. So it's good to use if you're gonna like not refrigerate or if you're gonna uh order over the internet. Anyway, modernistpantry.com. So I used a lot of extra rennet because uh I should probably tone it down a little bit. Set it, you cut it, uh, and it makes these clean curds.
Then once you get the curds and you weigh it, you let them like self-settle into a into a disc, you then put that disc on a rack in the in the in your oven and you broil it and you literally broil it till it gets brown on both sides, and the whey is streaming out, so you have to have it over a pan so that you catch the extra whey. But then that cheese is super delicious. It's called bread cheese. Look it up. Very easy to make, you just have to use extra rennet.
Um, and I like it because I like a squeaky cheese, I like a non-melting cheese, I like uh a baked cheese. Save the whey, which other people won't tell you on the internets, save the whey and make a ricotta. I made a delicious actual whey instead of a whole milk ricotta with the leftovers that was also delicious. So that's that's what I've been doing during these COVID times. Um, anyways.
Uh oh, also one thing to note. If you're like me and you're using um store-bought milk that is homogenized and pasteurized, make sure milk. Why? It's gross. When did you start drinking milk?
Wait, we gotta, we gotta go. Hold on a second. So uh when did you start drinking milk? Anyway, uh calcium, calcium chloride. You have to add some calcium chloride because uh you need to increase the amount of free calcium in the milk if it's been processed like this.
You normally drink milk? Coffee in coffee. Oh, yeah, well, but I never drank milk and coffee. That's gross to me. I know everyone else loves it.
To me, it's gross. Anyway. I do not love it, I find it gross. So wait, do I have time for my classics in the field? Quickly.
Very fast. Classics are in the field. Yeah. We didn't have it last week, so this week we have it. This week is a classic, first published in 1985.
It is the Razor Edge Book of Sharpening by John Jiranich. Now, this is the book when I first started uh researching how to sharpen things way, way, way, way back in the day that I bought. It's uh now it's written in 1985. So realize that it is uh what we would like to say out of date. So if you go on the Amazon, uh look, this is why it's a classic in the field.
You're not like you're not we when you read someone that was wrote something a long time ago, you don't blame them for not being up to date. Am I right about this, Matt? Yeah, you have to read it with the idea that it was written in 1985 and then apply your mental knowledge of it to that. So John Jiranich was a barber in the Korean War, and then later started a knife sharpening business where he became the whole family joined in on this knife sharpening business, where they would sharpen knives for food processing, and then became a world expert on how to keep things sharp and how to sharpen them. So mainly his main the main business, and you can still go to uh their website.
If you look up uh John Jiranich uh Razor Edge, you can go to Razor Edge System. They still manufacture things uh for um you know for like meat processing companies. But the cool thing about both John and his son is they hold, wait for it, the world record, the Guinness World Record in shaving, shaving with a double bit axe. And so, like this guy's standard trick was to go sharpen his double bit, you know, lumberjack axe and then shave off a giant beard with it. And there's a picture of him on the cover doing this.
He's got his full flannel, his, you know, his beanie on, and a and a and a honking double bit axe, and he's just sitting there and the hair is just flying off of his face. It's an amazing sight to see. But in this book, uh, he talks about a lot of uh things and how to sharpen all various different kinds of blades. And this is he got dinged about it. So, for instance, uh uh one of the one star reviews on Amazon.
This book is sadly outdated, long-winded and incomplete. It's long on folksy anecdote, but short on useful info. Discussion of steel types is limited to two categories, high carbon and stainless. Author seems clueless as to why one some one sometimes holds an edge longer than another. This this reviewer is an idiot.
They can't look and see the gem, the classic that's here, and then use the knowledge that John Juranich has given you from over 40 years, even at the time he was writing in the 80s, over 40 years of knowledge on keeping things sharp, right? And then applying that to what we now know about new steels and technologies. This is a good book. I originally, when I got it, uh was all nervous about sharpening knives. And you know, oh my god, how do you sharp?
So, like, if you don't know what I'm talking about, if you don't know how to raise a burr, read the book. If you don't know how, if you don't know what I'm talking about, raise a burr I don't have time to tell you about this. But if you don't know about raising a burr or how to test sharpness on a knife, read the book. Now, he wants you to buy his uh his guides, which are a crutch. You don't need them.
You can learn to freehand sharpen, right? But he made me not worried about using uh oil on a on a whetstone. He made me not worry about a lot of things, and he also talked about the the fundamental thing, which is two different bevels when you're sharpening. So doing your first where you hone it down, pick up a burr on both sides, and then your secondary edge, which maintains a longer cutting thing. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out the Razor Edge Book of Sharpening and realize that yes, things have changed in technology in the past, I don't know, 35 years since Mr.
Juranich wrote this book, but it doesn't mean that this is not a good basis of knowledge for what it means to keep something sharp. Stay safe out there, cooking issues. Cooking issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you.
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