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 bendthetable.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. And it'll hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from my house in Manhattan where Nastasia is somewhere. Where the hell are you now? I'm in Connecticut. You're in Connecticut. Matt's in Rhode Island.
John, you're in the you're in uh in uh wherever in the hell, what is that? Murray Hill. And there's nobody in the one in Brooklyn. We are a Brooklyn free. What?
Yeah, just zombies in Bushwork. We are now a Bush Week free show for the duration of the uh of the corona. Yeah. I do feel cleaner than usual. Wow.
A lot of harshness on the on the So I guess, you know, Matt, what you're talking about. And by the way, we have Nastasia Lopez as usual. How are you doing, Stas? Good. We got Matt in the booth, although someone pointed out you're no longer in a booth, unless you have a booth in Rhode Island.
I refer to the m this place as a booth. Well, what do you wear you really, though? Please tell me. I'm in an attic, but it's a nice, it's not like the dingy attic that you're imagining. It's a finished attic.
Alright. And you and you put on pants for the show, I hope. This is chony. I did my first two hours in my bathrobe and pajamas, but I did put on pants and a shirt for the show right now. Still wearing slippers, though.
Right. We are a family-friendly and also a chony-free show. So we are not recording. We we we treat the audience as though we respect them. We put on clothes to talk to them.
Right? I mean, in general, I hope. In general. Yeah, Stas can't can't co-sign so she must be still in her in her nighttime outfit okay and uh for the uh I think the first time on the show we have uh the new Booker and DAX customer service representative uh John Nihul how you doing John how you doing I'm doing great thanks for having me on so now if you have a problem with a Booker In DAX piece of equipment like his fault but it's it's our fault but he's gonna solve it going forward so you want to tell them a little something about your uh background there John yeah um I originally started out as a French major art history minor and undergrad went on to work in kitchens here in New York City I've been doing that for about 11 years now during that time I also went to grad school where I got my master's degree in art history and focused on uh food and art the relationship between the two and then worked at the University of Connecticut for a couple years as a professor and curator of the museum there then worked at MoFad as the culinary operations manager and curator and unfortunately things that are very lucrative job yes loaded filthy filthy lucre so speaking of uh food related art speaking of food related art so uh went back when I was in art school and just beforehand, well, you know, when I was graduating from college, so I graduated college in 93, went to art school from 95 to 97. And this was kind of the sweet spot for kind of uh body image related um art and also kind of you know nouveau relativism in um you know in the in the kind of the New York art scene at the time.
And so uh what do you what do you think about that era of food art? I was always I always kind of like it was never my thing in McJig. So, but as a specialist in the field, you know, like what what are your what are your thoughts? So, like what was so uh my research was a little more intense than just looking at that. It was, I took a really intense philosophical perspective, looking at a lot of Kant and Hume, because they back in the 18th century set up these notions of standards of taste when looking at art.
And so I use that dual notion of taste to look at food as well and show how certain types of cuisine or certain dishes could fit into the realm of what they call art that it makes you think more than it has a purposiveness without a perfect. Yeah. Well, first of all, Kant is a word you want to pronounce very carefully when you're speaking on the radio. Okay. K-A-N-T.
Yeah, yeah. And secondly, secondly, like, are you the other person on earth who's read Kant's Critique of Judgment? Because it's the weirdest view of art and aesthetics that you could possibly imagine. And anyone who says I like Kant, I'm like, what about how crazy his views of aesthetics are? They're freaking nuts.
Am I wrong about this? I mean, for those of you that don't know, Kant was a weird dude. I believe he's the one that had a giant head. He was a weird-looking dude and a weird dude. And he had he didn't travel more than I think three or four or five miles from his house because he had all sorts of strange mental issues.
Now I've told like my cousin James, who is a firm believer in not looking outside of the text of a work to get information about the text. He he hates whenever I do this, whenever I harp on someone's kind of personal, like mental attributes to discuss what's going on in their text. But especially for someone who is such a like uh you know a crazy, I mean, he's no Hegel. I mean, you can read Kant, right? But I mean, Kant also, you know, uh, let's just say he's not always the clearest with his writings.
And uh, so, you know, I am a big believer in saying, okay, yeah, let's take the text for what it is, but let's look at what an extreme nut job the person was in real life as well. You know what I mean? And so Kant, right, who is never leaving, you know, more than a couple of hours or a couple of uh miles from his house because among other things, it might make you late for appointments, right? Like, I mean, complete complete wingeding lunatic, has this idea of aesthetics whereby uh beauty and aesthetics are pleasure that you can derive from something completely removed from your personal interest in it, right? And so he has this notion of the beautiful and the sublime, which are frankly nuts, right?
So then, especially if you're gonna try to tie that in with food, which is an inherently kind of personal need and personal enjoyment thing, like so. I presume that you were kind of anti-Kantian, or were you did you somehow try to thread that needle? I took, I didn't really take a stance on his sanity or his positions of on things. I more just accepted that they were givens in the art historical record and that I chose those two those two philosophers specifically again because the notions of taste but also because their writings have shaped art history a lot in terms of like establishing what is beautiful and aesthetically pleasing and all that kind of stuff. And so I just wanted to show that using their own arguments when they have said that food cannot be art but using new cuisine like specifically for an Adria that his dishes could fit within their criteria for what is called art.
Alright judgment on their stuff it was more just trying to fit this stuff within their body of work. So just to be clear you're basically backhand complimenting Faron Adria by saying that his work is best enjoyed with no personal attachment to whether you get something out of it or not. Wow bang this is the craziest most crazy like over the top erudite backhanded compliment of Faron Adria that I've ever heard in my life ever in my life great glad I couldn't make that benchmark all right so now okay so that's what you're doing tonight at 5 30 so yeah so John it's at f it's at 5 30 right yes tonight at 5 30 on the mofad's Instagram uh account Dave will be joining in and making his cliff old fashioned uh cocktail on there is going to be demoing it and speaking with Sari the public programs manager over at the museum and yeah just uh chatting with Dave and watching him put together a cocktail while we're on all under quarantine. It's technically called Mofad happy Hour, but that Dave's been referring to it as the unhappy hour. Yeah.
I mean, come on, let's be honest. Can't we be honest? Hey, everybody, it was Dave's birthday yesterday. Happy birthday. 49, another year closer to the box.
Listen, uh going back to going back to the cliff old fashion. One last thing about Kant's critique of judgment. Please read the cliff notes. Don't bother, like, unless you're a scholar, like trying to wade through that, especially if you're not like already like well versed in like the critique of pure reason. Like the critique of judgment is not something you want to dive headlong into, I'd say.
What do you think there, John? I'd agree. There is one professor out at San Diego Mesa College, Dwight Furrow, who is really able to break it down in a very explainable way, especially. Yeah, I mean, alright. So like tune in to him and read that if you're interested in weird freak shows ideas of what is beautiful and sublime.
Uh so uh now back to the back to the museum thing. So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna get on Instagram live and make a cocktail, and then I'm gonna like drink it. Yeah, and talk with Sari. I think she's gonna have some questions for you and talk to you about the cocktail and why you do certain things the way you do.
Um why I do certain things the way I do. Yeah, all right. Okay. Yeah, it'll be straightforward. It'll be fun.
Should be fun. Okay, sure. Yeah, yeah. Um, all right, so we got some questions in. Uh dear, by the way, uh, you can't listen live, so you can't hear me, but if you listened last week, you can put things in live to the um chat room and Matt can read them.
Uh Matt can read them on on the air. So um, so with this we have in uh dear Dave, this is from Monty in Jacksonville. I burned my slash. So I think what Monty means is cuts down a bunch of stuff off of his property, puts them in a pile, and then burns it. So I burn my slash and can end up with a cone of coals two feet high, which is awesome, and five or six feet in diameter.
So a good thing of coals here. I often throw root vegetables in a Dutch oven and roast them up. I haven't done that with meat though, as it seems that the iron will get too hot and would burn the meat. Ideas for using this massive amount of heat without the work of turning a spit. Uh Monty from Jacksonville.
So uh I don't know. Uh what do you what do you think, John? You ever cooked with uh big uh coals? I haven't. It's something that I'd really like to do more of though.
So yeah, don't feel like I don't know, maybe just like yeah, go for it. The thing is is that um, you know, you you might just want to wait for the coals to kind of burn down. You know what I'm saying? Like uh like it's almost like if you could prepare this stuff ahead of time, you would burn it in a pit, kind of move it aside, put it in and bury it, and use the retain heat from the fact that you heated the hell out of the ground. You know what I mean?
Like that's how like a lot of like the large-scale like animal things work is they they basically treat the entire earth as a retained heat masonry oven, right? And you you just burn the heck out of it and then sweep the stuff aside and then bury it and let the carryover do it, right? So like all of your initial high heat browning stuff's happening at the beginning, and then it kind of uh goes through. But I've never actually done it myself. You know, I don't know whether you'd have to like bury thermocouples in it or or to test or or whatnot, or whether you just just don't care whether or not it gets a little overcooked.
But what do you think, John? You think something like that would work? Yeah, I think that would work too. And frankly, I would also just try putting the coals right on the like underneath the Dutch oven and on top of them, like separate from the rest of the fire. So it's a little bit more controlled and tempered.
But I know you know, I've seen online videos of people cooking hunks of meat and things like that. I know one of the modernist cuisine photographs is a Dutch oven cut in half with like a pork rack in there, and they've got the coals on the top and coals on the bottom as well. Um information out there. Most people's Dutch ovens nowadays, modern Dutch ovens, are not the Dutch ovens of old, right? So if you look at like an old school like uh camp oven, right?
The specifically it's the lid that's first of all, like they're all enameled now, they're all fancy, right? They're fancified. But as opposed to the old straight cast iron ones that are just cast iron in and out, no enamel. But also the old style, so if you look at the you know, the crusade, right? The lid on those things, if you were to pour liquid on the top of those, they it would just stream off, right?
But an old school camp oven has a lid, a lip on the lid that goes around, and the purpose of that lip is to hold coal, right? So that you could actually adjust the upper heat and the bottom heat. And there's a there's a uh a book out of Australia whose main uh thing is cooking, I forget the name of it. It's something like dampers, which is an Australian like camp biscuit, and and anyway, something like that, and it's about cooking uh in the outback in camp ovens. I forget the name, I have it somewhere.
I'll try to locate it, maybe put it on um, you know, send it to Matt so he can put it up on the on the thing here. Uh, but there's a whole bunch of recipes in there on how to cook with a camp oven, but by and large, and and if you read, and I have the all these books as well. If you read the kind of late 19th century, very early 20th century American camp literature, right, which was all based around basic, you know, based around rich white city men, right, uh hiring large amounts of often brown people to take them into the quote unquote woods, hack down giant amounts of trees, and like build crazy camps in the in the forest, like three or four or five hours outside of where they lived, right? So now it seems gross, but the technical literature of it is great on like building building camps, like large-scale camps like this, uh, is that they would build massive fires, but then most of the cooking was done on a smaller scale fire that they pull off. And the same is true uh in the Australian camp uh book.
So a lot of that Dutch oven cooking, you'd you would pull stuff off of your fire and then use it on the Dutch oven uh all the way around. And meat cooking works great in that as well. I just don't have a lot of experience with it personally. I would also say to look at some restaurants, you know, that do a lot of wood fire cooking, and then also, well, I don't like him too much, Francis Malman. You know, he does a lot of of work with that stuff as well.
And if you don't want to turn a spit, right, but you have a really high tripod, you could do the uh you could do the tripod rotating string action and have it kind of self-rotate, but the top of it will always be under. So you'd have to flip it halfway between, but you could get that kind of rotation action or get it on the side. You know, I'm talking about, uh guys, the tripod with the string, yeah. Or, you know, you could do what they used to do back in the old days, uh, which is uh get a dog and have a dog running in a wheel, uh, you know, the spit dog, and then you know, the dog just sits there running like a hamster in a wheel, turning the turning the uh and I've been on the site, so Nastasia poked fun at me for a uh uh um a pilot that I did once. Remember this, Nastasia?
Time machine? Yeah. And one of the things that they were testing was spit dogs, and I believe my memory serves me, they actually had a dog in a large hamster wheel turning a spit. I think they actually did it, but I can't, I can't remember. If anyone has an experience taking, I guess you what would you use?
Like a sled dog kind of a dog? I mean, you wouldn't want something so furry because it's near a fire, but you'd need something that wants to just sit there and run. What do you like a terrier? What do you hold a piece of meat in front of the wheel and have it keep trying to get the meat? What do you do?
No one, no one suggests you. Do I have to have all the suggestions? You guys can't give me anything. I can't believe that in this in this trail or the in the pilot for this episode, they would have actually tried that. That that sounds well, no, no, they shot the whole, they shot the whole first episode.
They shot the whole first episode. And how did you have to come out? I forget. I don't even remember. Oh, no, I didn't come out of the fridge.
The chefs came out of the there was a fridge, there was a refrigerator time machine, and it had like the electric effects like uh like you get from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, which by the way, is a great movie. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is a great movie. I'm I'm I'm gonna go ahead and say that it ranks right. So I've always, I'm not one of these like, you know, like canoe come lately fans. Like I've been a uh a fan of uh Keno Reeves for like a long time, all right?
And I'm gonna say it's right up there with speed and the John Wick series. I'm gonna go ahead and say, and you know, which is saying a lot. Are you guys all Keno Reeves fans or no? No. Uh no?
What do you I enjoyed the hell out of the John Wick movies? They're stupid and they're great for just you know mindless violence. I love it. What about what about Bill and Ted's? I mean, Bill and Ted's is great.
All right, all right. Yeah, no. I mean, also like The Matrix, that was that was the movie when. Oh, yeah, I even forgot about Matrix. I forgot about the Matrix.
Uh anyway, Bill and Ted, right up there. Whatever happened to the other guy. What did he end up doing? I know what happened to Chris Farlin. He died.
Right? Anyway, a whole generation, my generation learned history from Bill and Ted's uh excellent adventure. Anyway, uh John's not weighing in. John, not a fan of Bill and Ted. I mean, I I haven't seen it.
I think, you know, not too familiar with uh Keanu Reeves's body of work. I can say the matrix, but other than that, not too familiar. What? Yeah. What about point break?
Haven't seen it. Like, Nastasia, how could you not be a fan? I I just don't like him. I don't like him. You're like, you had coffee with the guy, and you were like, this guy's an a-hole, and that was it.
I feel like you have to either like him or uh Nicolas Cage, and you can't do Nicholas Cage. I love Nicholas, I love Nicolas Cage. Now listen. You are a male in his late 40s, so of course you like both. Well, you just said you can't like both.
The rest of the thing. You just said you, your words, I'm not supposed to like both. Not my words, your words. And then you're like, well, of course, of course you like both. Yes, you're not supposed to like both.
How am I not supposed to? Why would you not? How like, so like on what planet, first of all, if if Nicholas Cage had never done another movie after Raising Arizona, he'd still be great. Because Raising Arizona is like one of the all-time classic movies. Holly Hunter and freaking uh John Goodman and Nicholas Cage and Randall Tex Cobb, the ex-boxer, as the uh lone rider of the apocalypse.
I mean, doesn't get much better in like an early corn brother. You're not gonna credit the baby by name? I don't know the baby's name. Do you? Not much of a super fan then.
No, I'm not gonna say it was a super fan, I just said it was a great movie. I'm not, you know, I ain't nobody's super fan, Matt. Anyway, uh, so we answered Monty's question from Jacksonville. Uh say Alexander Mann on the chat room last time was like, uh, hey guys, wanted to revisit my question for Dave or anyone else that might know. I've got barrel-aged tallow washed bourbon.
So here's the thing. So you tallow wash the bourbon and then re-barrel-aged it. That's what I'm getting out of this, right? That I'm making and using for burnt and bourbon cocktails. I'd like to use a hot poker for the for those hot caramelized flavors.
I'm currently using the pan method, but it doesn't work as quickly, and I'd like to make smaller batches. Any direction for where I can get a hot poker for home use? No. Like, listen, listen. Okay, so if there's no acid in it, you can do it the old school way, which is go on McMaster car, look for a soldering copper, right?
And get a big one. One that's uh, I don't remember the size, but ours were at least like an inch and a half around. They're big, right? Long, heavy. Keep those suckers on the fire for a long, long, long time, like on a very hot fire for a long time, and then use those.
Now, anything with acid in it, you're gonna get a little bit of uh kind of that sucking on a penny taste. But in a non-acidic environment, especially if you season it by using it a bunch first for a while, it works. And that's what we you that's what I used to use before I started building the hot pokers. But if you're gonna build a hot poker, like unless you get the exact one, which uh, you know, are the what are they four-inch, 500 watt Wattlow uh cartridge heaters, weld them on to the end of a stainless steel stick. I mean, it's kind of hard to get it right uh in a way that's gonna constantly light it on fire.
But if you if you don't think you need to light it on fire, you can try with a uh soldering copper. Um I would not use, I've tested slugs of stainless steel, they're no good. I've tested slugs of iron, they tasted terrible. I've tested uh a bunch of stuff. I've also used spiral heaters, they work.
The the problem with making a red hot poker is an electric one, is that if especially if you want something to catch on fire, it's a very fine balancing act because uh with the repeated in and out and the fact that you need it to heat up relatively quickly, it's hard to do um accurate temperature control at those very high temperatures and at those very high temperatures that you need for spontaneous ignition. Um if you overshoot by a hundred degrees, you burn out your elements very quickly. And so that's the that's the kind of an i issue that you run into. So you try to get uh a heating element that can just barely heat up to the right temperature in free air, right? And then you you you use that.
But it's a it's a it's a balancing act. It took me a while to get it right. So and don't and remember, personal health danger, yada yada, etc. etc. We did have one other person from the chat way in.
Uh it's really just more of a response than a question. Wally said, thanks for thinking about my ste uh uh oven steam quest. I used a silicon hose from the instant pot pressure weight nipple to a stainless steel drinking straw inside the oven. I may drill a hole in the side of the oven to mount the straw as the hose is crushed by the oven door seal, great crust and a bit more spring worth the effort. Cool, nice.
And speaking of uh speaking of uh steam and and oven spring, that that is the kind of the the crux of uh Jim Leahy's Dutch oven um bread, no need bread thing. It's like there's two things. There's the one is that you don't need to need it if you're gonna let it rise for a long, long, long time, right? Which he does for like 24 hours. And the second aspect of that is he cooks it in the in the Dutch oven or in a heavy uh pot, so that you're trapping the steam next to the bread for the initial part of the cook.
So I didn't mention that during the steam conversion, but that's you know, there's really two magical parts to Leahy's bread recipe. Uh, are we gonna get him back on again, Stas or what? If you're thinking about doing uh uh Instagram live with him, the next Instagram live. Okay. But then can we get can we get three people on an Instagram live?
Boy, friends. Um, but we are trying to find another system to include him. Or you and him can go at it. I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. Uh all right. So then let's take a break uh real quick here and then come back. All right, we'll be right back with cooking issues.
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. Today we're gonna talk about the essentials box. Ben sent me one here. It says ding dong, it's Ben. It's got a picture of half of his face on it.
All right. We got community greens pasta. Now, I've heard good things about community grains, but I've never actually tried it myself. Here we have a hard white winter wheat. Anyway, it looks good.
I'm anxious to try it. Rancho Gordo, by the way. Bunch of Rancho Gordo beans. We got some uh we got some Scarlet Runner beans. And then the one that I'm frankly most uh excited about is the Geechee Boy Mill stuff out of uh Charleston, South Carolina.
Uh they we have here some Jimmy Red grits, so Jimmy Red is a variety of corn delicious. The grits from this are, and I've made these because I bought it when I was in Charleston, brought it home with me, cooked it, gave it to my wife who grew up most of the time young in the south, and she was like, damn, them's good grits. And it's all kind of nice, easy to use, you know, not something that you're gonna have to make crazy recipes to get to use. All just very high quality products that are in the realm of what you would use in uh staples for a pantry. 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 to Table will donate $10 to support cooking issues and all of HRN's programming. Iman Akdemir wrote in and said, hello. I'm studying philosophy in Istanbul, but recently I spent most of the time uh trying to develop a simple and delicious drink for kids and for the millions of diabetics in my country. I am working on a sugar-free lemonade, which is sweetened with the stevia with stevia leaves instead of stevia extract or any other natural or artificial sweetener.
But the stevia stevia is a tricky plant. It contains a sweetness that comes along with a heavy liquorish taste. I would say poison taste when brewed. Until now we have achieved the best taste when simply cold brew with lemon peels and approximately two grams per liter of uh Paraguayan um stevia leaves for about seven to eight hours in the fridge with a splash of lemon juice. During my research I came across liquid intelligence, and I wondered if you have any ideas uh on how to improve the taste and preserve the drink without sacrificing taste.
Alright. So one of the issues on preserving lemon, and this is something that uh I'm gonna talk about the lemon first. Like, I personally don't like stevia. I think it tastes poisonous. Yes.
Yeah. John, what do you think about stevia? Yeah, not great. Matt. Never intentionally consumed stevia.
What? Haven't you had it in drinks? I don't uh what drink? Like what? Why?
Why would I buy that? Listen. Stevia. Matt in the booth is secretly a liar. I want everyone to know this that Matt in the booth lies constantly.
Just constantly liar. So, what drink have I had that would have stevia? I don't know. How do you walk around for like your whole life and never have had stevia? Nastasia, back me up on this.
It's true. It's true. Are you saying? So, okay, my experience of stevia is that I would choose in a coffee shop to put it in things. You're telling me that it's in like packaged goods that I might buy off the No, someone at some point in your life, someone's handed you something, you tasted it and been like, what is that?
And they're like, that's stevia. Well, okay, then I didn't know that that was the horrible, but I do remember spinning that drink out. It was really bad. Okay. So anyway, listen, the trick when you're working with any sort, so so sugar, sucrose, table sugar, right, has a number of different functions.
So uh one of them obviously is sweetness. And the the thing about sucrose is is that of all of the sweetness things that you can do, get used, it is the cleanest. Clean, right? Almost every other sweetener, either like a uh you know, natural or artificial, has some form of bitterness. Excuse me.
Some or some form of alternate flavor. It's not kind of pure clean sweetness. So there's there's that. You're almost always dealing with like all like flavors that go along with it. So you can either use those flavors to your advantage or not, right?
And when something has what is in general considered to be an off-putting taste, so I, you know, stevia, I mean, I you're being very kind to it by saying uh licorice. It's got like kind of to me, kind of like kind of bitter metallic notes in it that I find unpleasant. And by the way, you should test that with other people because not everyone has the same, especially two things that uh have bitterness in them. Um, bitterness has a much wider range, not just of perception in the terms of strength. Like, so with sugar, people are like, that's tea sweet, or that's tea dry.
It's the same person could think that one thing is too sweet, and then another person could think it's not sweet enough, but they both kind of agree on what sweetness is. With bitterness, it's not just a level of bitterness, but like some people, like for instance, I am uh don't have uh a strong reaction to prop, the bitter thing that they do when they test to see if you're a super taster or not, right? Whereas someone else sees that as intensely bitter, right? I I think that broccoli rob is bitter but not intensely bitter, and there's other bitter compounds that maybe I perceive more than let's say you do. So whenever you're dealing with something that has bitter notes, you want to make sure that you test it with a wide range of people, right?
So um, so you have that. So any alternative sweetener is gonna have these uh off notes. Now, something similar to what people do when they're kind of compounding gluten-free flours, is instead of just using one thing to replace wheat flour, they use a range of things, and they hope that by averaging this range of things, that you're not gonna notice the extreme beanie taste of let's say um uh you know, uh black-eyed pea flour or or whatever, right? Because you're and you're not gonna notice kind of like the textural hit you take if you use pure rice. So they average a lot of things together by using these blends, and that's one of the reasons you see kind of these blends in gluten-free flowers.
And the same is true for sweeteners, right? So you might want to look into other uh diabetic friendly sweeteners, non-caloric sweeteners, like for instance, monk fruit. Now, I happen to like the sweetness of uh monk fruit. It comes with other flavors, but to me, those other flavors aren't gross, they're tea-like, right? So if you have any sort of affinity for like um Chinese herbal teas, right, then you will like monk uh monk fruit or there's a bunch of different, you know, uh mormortica, what is it?
I forget the actual title, the actual you know name of it. But um so if you look at that, you'll see that like that has sweetness and some other flavors. So maybe a combination of stevia and monk fruit can help t tamp down some of those notes that when you use stevia only for the sweetness. Now on the second problem with preservation, so uh this is some experiments that I I would really like to run for various reasons, right? But when you're when you want to do a lemon juice and you want it to keep for a long time, I think the best thing to do is to make a cordial with it, right?
So you clarify it and yes I think you should buy a spinzall to clarify it or you know whatever centrifuge you're gonna use, but whatever. You don't have to you can you can do freeze thaw you could do um quick agar you could do any of these things because it's not going to be fresh right but now then when you make a cordial you save the peels you boil the peels with the um with the the juice the clarified juice and the sugar right now and then it becomes stable. So the sugar makes it stable because you know it's now at a simple syrup level and it's not gonna kind of spoil uh especially with the sugar and the acidity. The problem is is it and that the taste stays relatively stable for a long time, long time, like months. The problem is, and it tastes good, is I don't know if the sugar is necessary to the process.
So it's pretty simple test. It's just I haven't had the time to run it of just boiling just boiling the clarified juice on its own without the sugar, right? And seeing whether or not I get the state same stability, whether the reactions are the same that give that same stability. If it's just the heat that's necessary, well then you could just use boiled clarified lemon juice as your um lemon in it, and it's not gonna taste like fresh lemon, right? But especially with the peel, it'll have the notes of a good cordial, which are delicious, but not the same as fresh.
What do you guys think? Does this make sense? Yep. All right. Uh all right.
Hey, uh Nastasia, Dave, and Matt in the booth. If in fact you are still in a booth, but we already addressed this, right? This person accuses you, Micah in Minnesota, uh, Matt accuses you of being Matt on the couch. I'm not on the couch. That's a dirty lie.
All right. I'm in a regular chair. I'm sorry. It's not an impressive place to be. Well, we again, for all we know, we know you're a liar, so you may be on a couch.
You may be on a couch in your chonies because you're a well-known liar. You've lied to us about the stevia. Everything. I'm sipping up my stevia drink right now. I know it.
It is a gurgling stevia. Love it. I know. It's just wow, so weird. Anyway.
Uh hope you're doing well and staying safe in these crazy times. Uh Dave, you recently addressed someone's question regarding culturing cream to make butter and said that one should use buttermilk and not yogurt. Why is that? I know buttermilk is traditional/slash standard, but there are other options. I've used yogurt quite successfully myself and more experimentally, Koji.
By the way, we gotta have uh Rich on soon because uh his book is probably gonna be coming out, and it's a good time for people to be experimenting with Koji at home since everyone's home. Uh just curious as to why you so firmly recommend buttermilk. Thanks for continuing to put on the show, Mike in Minnesota. Well, Micah, uh, you're right. I mean, like, I just recommend it because it's traditional, and um I'm a huge believer in experimenting, so experiment with whatever you want.
You may think you're totally right. I think, but if you want more of a traditional cultured butter flavor, and by the way, John, uh, for those of you that don't know, John was the source of all my recommendations in Belgium. So, because of his recommendations of where to go, is why I own the uh HVD A57 uh Liege waffle maker. It's why I have a stockpile of the world's greatest mustard from uh Ghent in my fridge right now. So uh John might have some opinions on color.
Yeah, yeah, Nastasi, you love that mustard too, right? Yeah, but I don't know what to put it on now that I'm not eating meat. Cheese. Really? Yeah.
It's it's also it's great on cheese. So it's this mustard, by the way, is made only with uh this mustard's made only with mustard seed, brown mustard seed, uh, water, vinegar, and salt, and that's it. That's it, right? So it's all about the kind of purity of the thing. And so I I got back from the museum.
We'll talk more about the museum and COVID in a second, but I got back from the museum my wet grinder, and so as soon as uh John and I are allowed to hang out in the same room together, we're gonna take on for cooking issues uh listeners, uh, the task of recreating the Ghent mustard. Why would you do that? It's like because you can't go get it. Yeah, but like, okay. What do you mean why would I why why would you try to make something that you love?
Why would you try to make it? Why would you try to make something that you really want to have but can't get? I find it. I don't think that this is surprising. I would be like, Nastasia, if you said, why are you learning to make Twinkies?
I'd say, you're right. I can just go to the store and buy Twinkies. But I'm saying, like, it's almost insulting because these people like it's their life's work. And you're like, I'm just gonna do it and hopefully I get it right. And you know.
Is that what I said? I'm just gonna do it and hope I get it. I would rather say that I have a wicked and I've been thoroughly researching the technology of mustard making. Just go to Belgium every year and get it. That would be like the amount of time, which is money that you're gonna spend trying to recreate this is probably about the same as a flight to Belgium.
Well, listen, listen. I mean, like, in between getting my monocle repaired and like going to my you know, cigar shop. I will I will plan my yearly trip to Ghent so that I can pick up a jar of mustard. I'll have the plane land in Ghent, I'll have my driver go get the mustard while I wait and and eat tea sandwiches in my learjet styles. Or to make mustard.
Anyway. Yeah, one of those suggestions is reasonable. Uh we got about 10 minutes to go. Alright. Uh, this is Prashant.
What? Well, hold on. This is Prashant from Florida. I have a question on how to store fresh made pasta. I thought you'd enjoy this, Nastasia.
Because you hate fresh made pasta. Hey, hey, the one of them's gnocchi. That was the one you said maybe was different. Potato. Currently I make the pasta and uh freeze it overnight and then uh throw the throw them frozen into the boiling water.
But the two times I did this with both fettuccine and yucky, the pasta ends up sticking and becoming a massive clump while cooking. The fettuccine got stuck because of the way I put it in the freezer. They did he did the ness. Uh I think it's a heat. Prashant, yeah.
Uh he did the ness, right? Um, but I was more careful with the gnocchi and spaced them out to make sure they did not stick. I had similar results uh both times. So, what's the best way to store pasta uh to prevent it from sticking? Also, can I freeze leftover pasta dough for later?
I mean, it's slow moisture, probably. Uh I also have some bread making questions, so please let me know when Leahy is going to be on the air. I didn't want to get the questions mixed up. Okay. So I don't have a lot of experience freezing fresh pasta.
But I fresh pasta and then that's it. And then make it again, and then make it again. Why do you have to freeze it? Because you it's easier to make more than you need for one night and freeze it. I don't know.
Alright, whatever. Oh, says the lady who had a whole business built around freezing pasta. That was dry pasta. Fresh pasta is not supposed to be frozen. It wasn't, but it yours was a completely different from that.
You weren't you you're you were par cooking and freezing in I IQ IQFing, right? We had one, we had one fresh pasta that was frozen, and again, a technique that took decades to get down, and that's the secret, and I don't know how they did it, but what kind of fresh pasta was it? It was the fettuccine. The f oh and did you have any problems with it sticking? No.
But again, because these people worked for decades on how to do it right, and they are not telling anybody. Yeah, okay, okay, fine. Listen, uh, I'll tell you, like the way that uh smaller companies, like for instance, DiPalos, uh, when they freeze their um, when they freeze their pasta, they either use like uh a dusting of very coarse semolina or they use a or a cornmeal, depending on on which one they're doing. Um, on, for instance, their their ravioli, they they dust that stuff with that so that when it's in the freezer and it's single layer, right? So it's single layer and it's like coated with that stuff so that it won't stick to each other.
The theory, I guess, being that as long as it's frozen fast enough and you're not getting a lot of moisture migration out, uh, those little things act like babies or ball bearings and get it, but that's not gonna help you with fettuccine. That might help you with the with the gnocchi, but you're really I mean, the problem with gnocchi too is that I mean, I don't know about you, but you're freezing it before you boil it, or you're gonna parboil it and then reboil it when you're done. I mean, there's gonna be a lot of issues with moisture migration. So if you keep everything completely separate on a tray, give it a little bit of some ball bearings to roll around with, and then hard freeze it. I'm what I'm thinking is is that when you're repackaging them into servings, you're letting them um, what's the word I'm looking for?
You're letting them uh uh kind of thaw a little bit. And if there's any sort of thaw, you're gonna get moisture migration, they're gonna stick together unless you've got the little babies to separate them. Bebies meaning stuff like cornmeal or semolina. But then on a fettuccine, that's gonna ruin the texture of it if you have these kind of coarse garbages sticking around, don't you think, Nastasia? Yeah.
Yeah. So I don't know how you're gonna do it with the you know here's the here's what you do. I think also you're putting your fettuccine in way too wet. So you like you want to lay your fettuccine out on uh one of those uh like drying things, like you know, and then wait until it's just at the point where if you were gonna bend it, it would snap. Like just before then, when the outside's real kind of hard, not hard, but like really um, you know, almost semi-dry, then you could nest it and freeze it.
And I don't think the fettuccine is gonna stick together. But I think you're you're not waiting long enough before you um you do it. What do you think, Stuzz? You don't care, you don't want to give any advice because you're like, you should spend your whole life working on it. Yeah, yeah.
Or I just wants to make some freaking fettuccine. Great, make it, cook it, make it, cook it, make it. That's not the question. Make it, make it, make it. Now, I can we can all agree that Big Night's a great movie, can't we?
Yeah. That's what I should be watching while quarantining. Oh, you should watch Big Night. For anyone that has not seen Big Night, you need to stop what you're doing. You've already listened to enough of us for the day.
Go watch it. It's it's uh it's Tucci and Shaloube. And isn't Isabella Rossellini in it? There's all kinds of it's it's an amazing show. It's an amazing show.
And Tony Shaloube plays the the older brother, who's kind of like the the younger brother's the boss, right? And they're they have this Italian restaurant in uh where is it? Somewhere on the East Coast. And Tony Shaloub only wants to make stuff that's true to his roots. That's all he cares about.
He doesn't want to make Americanized 50s uh like food right and so like this person asks for what is what do they ask for someone asked for like cheese on their seafood risotto or so someone else asks for like starch on like one starch on top of another starch like they wanted like risotto and pasta and Shalub's like I won't do it and Tucci comes in and this is where Nastasi gets and I both do this all the time Tucci just goes in to him and goes make it make it make it because just make what the customer wants make it make it right it's like it's it's it's just a fantastic fantastic movie for anyone that for anyone that loves food or loves Tucci or Shalub or loves um sticking to your guns even when it hurts right Stas? Yep Classics in the movie field John you've seen that movie right yeah yeah not in a while but I've seen it do you also like it or no yeah I enjoyed it didn't dislike it yeah didn't dislike it oh my god all right wait so one more one more thing so we got uh well we'll do this we'll do this next time someone sent in from Yahoo Mail wants to know more red liquid intelligence I don't have the name of the person who uh wrote it in but wants us to talk more about the spinz all on the air I'm happy to do that we should uh we should have a uh Stas like you and I should talk about things to do with centrifuges maybe next week as like a whole section a demo on the face on the Instagram live with that. So maybe we could do that too. Yeah. By the way, if you have any spinzall questions, John's gonna be your go-to person for the customer uh for customer service.
Right? Also, Andy John as in jeans. But you know, we should also just get John at BookerIndax.com because no one's listening to me, probably. So that if they email us a J-O-H-N at Booker Index. Oh, yeah, by the way.
So back when Mo Mofad had two Johns working, we had John Hutt, who we call John the Hutt, and John, who you're now listening to, whose name is spelled Gene, but it's pronounced John, so we will call him Gene John. I don't think he enjoyed that, Nastasia. Am I right, John? Well, I'm just saying we should get that email address from because you know that people are stupid, and so they're gonna email J-O-H-N at Booker and Dax. So I hope you guys enjoy that.
Nastasia just called you stupid. It's J-E-A-A-N. Why not and why not filter all the John the J-O-H-N's uh right to the trash as well? No, because then we're gonna get bad reviews and Twitter comments saying John never answered me. I mean, I know people do that.
So it's J-E-A-N at Bookerandax.com. That's J-E-A-N at Bookerin Dax.com. Uh all right. So so we have a question about uh cooking uh like vacuum sealing cooking proteins, which I guess we can we can handle that next time uh if if you if you want. And uh also email me and let us know if you liked our Instagram live or what you had changed during the per the person who wants us, the person who wants us to talk more about um spinzalls, uh, put as a side note, they had been making uh black garlic in uh in an excaliber, and they were also heat-aging garum in an excalibur, which is the dehydrator that we use uh at 141 degrees Fahrenheit.
Uh and they insulated it because it was in their garage, but they used uh this is an interesting fact because I've always wondered. They ran it for 10 weeks solid and it used 182 kilowatts, uh kilowatt hours of power. Now, in New York State, at our current electricity price, that is $30 or $3 a week. So if you want to know how much it's costing you to run and you live in New York and pay New York electricity prices, if you want to know how much it's costing you to run an Excalibur dehydrator day and night, it's about $3 a week, which I thought was interesting. To me, anyway, only to me.
Yeah. See? See? John, that's why I like having you on because Astasi doesn't care. You care about things like this.
See what I mean? Uh all right. So time for classic city of the field. All right, now we have uh listen, I might do this because I was looking through my books, uh, and I have I have many books. Uh not as many as I would like, but you know, I I haven't I haven't been buying books heavy for like well over a decade just because my my apartment is pretty full.
Uh but I love books. Uh we should actually have people send in like their suggestions for books that we should look at or get anyway. Uh but I realized that I have two categories of books that are classics. One are, well, I have many, but the two that I'm gonna talk about today are books that I think people might actually want to look at, and then books that are classics, like for instance, uh Kant's Critique of Judgment, uh, that uh no one is ever gonna want to read. So I thought I'd talk briefly about uh both kinds.
Uh and so for the first one, I'm going to talk about a book that came out that if you looked at it nowadays, you would say, oh, you know, yeah, I've seen a million books like that. But when this book came out, there was nothing like that. So and also anyone who's listening who is familiar with culture in the United Kingdom, this is going to be a very well known person and book, but not so much in the United States. And so, for instance, uh, John, what do you know about uh Hugh uh Fernley Whittingstall? Anything?
A lot? Love him. Yeah. You love it, right? But why is he so so he is a celebrity chef in uh in England, and he had a he owns a place called the River Cottage and has a series of TV shows and books.
And the first one came out in 2001 called the River Cottage Cookbook and complete revelation. Now, for some reason, not as famous in the US. Why, John? Why is he not as famous in the US? Even for British standards, like we got your Ramsey's over here, we got your you know, your Olivers over here, even your Heston Blumenthal's over here.
But not a lot of people know about the the Witting Stall here. Why do you think that is? I really have no idea. It doesn't make any sense because his meat book is one of the best books out there. I love like the little uh mini series of books on making alcohol or Prajutra or you know, dry aging hams or on herbs or things like that.
I don't know, like the whole river cottage everything is great. He just needs to be more popular here. By the way, uh friend of the show, Naomi Devlin, wrote the River Cottage gluten free uh book and is a member of kind of uh that collective, so shout out to her. Um so I had no idea who this guy was. Now you gotta remember that in the in he so he's famous before he had the river cottage, he did and has done over the years, a bunch of kind of crazy publicity stunts in the UK.
So in like '97, I think, 1997 or 98 on TV, he cooked uh a woman's placenta and served it at a party to her friends and family. And kind of, yeah, it let's just say people in the UK, you know, famously buttoned up people in the UK, not too pleased by this. You know what I mean? By the kind of like the placenta rama. And this was before kind of there was that like thank God short-lived thing where people were making uh cheese out of uh human um uh breast milk.
Not because there's anything wrong with it, just because it's such a precious commodity that to make cheese out of it seems incredibly disrespectful. But um for you know, for those of you that you know have been around having to, you know, get that for kids. It's like the idea of using it for cheese is just to me, bananas. But anyway, so he cooked up this placenta, had it had a huge thing. More recently, like in the 2010 or 2011, I think he cooked dog on the air.
He uh, you know, because he was trying to show how hypocritical it is that we won't eat things like dogs, but we will eat things like pigs. So he's done a lot of things that are kind of on the edge that way, provocative, let's shall we say. But um, in the late 90s, he bought uh this place, the River Cottage, and in 2001, I think right around when the show was coming out, or or maybe even before, he came out with the first of the River Cottage cookbooks. And at the time, when you you look at it. I have the uh first English edition of it.
So not I don't did they, John, did they ever publish that one in the US, the original River Cottage has a US edition? Do you know? I don't think so, but I'm not 100% sure. So anyway, I have the original UK edition of it. And when this book came out, I I saw it used uh at the Strand.
So I used to, so Strand a used cookbook store in the in New York City, and I used to troll it just looking for books back when everything there, they weren't searching prices on the internet, so everything was just half pro half of half off the whatever the cover price was. So I think I paid $10 for it, and it was only uh probably a year or two old when I got it. And it the book itself was a complete revelation. First of all, no one at that time had done this kind of uh like back to simple thing. So he's pre-dating, you know, he's pre-dating when um what's his name?
Pollen became Food Jesus and talked about everyone going simple on everything. He predated a lot of that. And it is true that he comes from a rich family of landed gentry. His mom is a famous like flower designer who's won all these awards at the Chelsea Flower Show, right? So, you know, yes, it's a rather elitist thing for him to say you can go back to nature and raise your own pigs and do all and you know, the quote unquote simpler life, which is you know, obviously something that only someone with a good deal of privilege can do nowadays, but man was he good at it, right?
So, first of all, when you look at his books, like he had that kind of that kind of blown out color, like kind of uh, you know, the matte paper before it became popular. This is before like you'd see those kind of sh uh shots in Dave Chang's cookbook when it made a huge splash, like shots of like the dirty radishes that he's grown, you know, at the cottage, like just these kind of sh like like reality, like natural light shots, the kind of paper, the look, the feel, all amazing. Recipes also good. And the reason I bought the book at the Strand is he he had a series of pigs he raised, and he had a picture of this pig outside running around doing piggy things, and over it in white lines, he had drawn the cuts that he was going to cut the pig into after he slaughtered it on the image of the live pig. And when I saw that in the strand, I was like, oh my God, oh Jesus!
And I bought it immediately. I became a huge instant fan of uh this guy's work. So like it is impossible to imagine today's cookbooks, the way they look. I guess an early also kind of, although it was, I think black and white, is cooking by hand had that matte paper back in the day, but a very early harbinger of kind of the way food styling, cookbooks, and kind of the mentality around uh a return to old-style ingredients would look today. You can see it in 2001 in the River Cottage cookbook.
So please try to look at it with 20, you know, the eyes of a someone from 20 years ago. Then the second, real quick, because uh you know no one's gonna want to spend that much time with it. If you really like dry academic books that have had a huge influence on um thought and culture, yet literally like 10 people have maybe read it, check out Stephen uh Nissenbaum's uh 1980 or 1981 classic, Sex, Diet and Dability in Jacksonian America. Now, in uh before 1980, right, Sylvester Graham of Graham Cracker uh fame, right, and kind of graham bread fame was a very fringe historical figure that not a lot of people had paid attention to. But uh, and since that time, it's almost impossible, since since Stephen Nissenbaum wrote this book, it's almost impossible to talk about a history of fad dieting, nutrition, um, kind of the link between thoughts on food, sexuality, morality, and physical decline, right?
Uh, it's almost impossible to talk about the history of that in America without talking about Sylvester Graham. And the whole reason for it is this one book, Sex, Diet and Dobility in Jacksonian America, where um Nissenbaum draws the link, right, between Sylvester Graham, this physi famous Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, and ideas that happened just prior to the American Revolution in France, and the entire shift of a culture where it used to be if you wanted to feel strong, you did things that were robust. If you wanted to feel strong, you ate things that were strong. Kind of a kind of an additive effect to this idea that human beings have only a certain amount of energy, and that by, for instance, overextending your sexual energy would cause you to decline and die. All of these kinds of kind of crazy conservation that we only have a certain amount of stuff, and you have to be careful about what you consume in that way, really stems from this era in American culture.
And this book really points out, connects a lot of the dots that are now seen as kind of just, yeah, everybody knows that. But before this person wrote this book, um, it was kind of hard to connect those dots. So if you really want to get an idea of how we think to how we got to the way we think today about uh kind of food and health, right? Which I think is an incredibly fraught subject. We can do an entire cooking issues on that someday if you want.
Go and check out, although I know you won't, uh, Sex, Diet, and Dability in Jacksonian America by Steven Nissenbaum. What do you guys think? You read that one, John? I have not. Great.
Fantastic. If you like dry historical things, fantastic. Deserves to be more widely credited, if not read. Anyway, uh, and we'll get to the questions on vacuum packing and other things next week. Tune in by the way to the MoFed.
Also, uh, our love out to all of the people dealing. Obviously, like we're all dealing with it, but Corona, people I wish people would write in, let us know how they're doing. Um, let us know how they're how they're doing. I mean, I know it's it's tough. We didn't talk about it today.
I was gonna talk about um, I was gonna talk about the incentives and how they relate to the the incentives that just came out yesterday and the day before and how they relate to the restaurant industry. But maybe I'll wait a week to see how they are actually going to shake down. But I know that you guys are all at home right now instead of doing what you want to be doing, which is cooking for other people and hanging out with other people. So I hope you can stay strong. I hope you can spend some time learning things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to learn when you're at work, uh, either whether it's recipes, whether it's techniques, um, whether it's, you know, whatever, math, philosophy.
Hopefully, you can put this time to good use if you can't be out actually um helping people or doing things. Anyway, stay strong. Cooking issues. Cooking Issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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