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. Learn more at Ben to Table.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 HRN gets $10. Dave Arnold dropped from the call.
Why can just no one make a program that just does this? Ah! This was the good one. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you.
Pre-recorded from my house on the lower east side. We got Nastasia Lopez in Stanford, Connecticut. We got Matt, uh not in the booth. He's in some booth. He's hopefully not in his chonies.
He promises he's not somewhere in the great state of Rhode Island. And Promise. Promise, no chonies. Remember, it's a no chony show. Uh no chonis on.
John, spelled Gene, so Gene John from Booker and Dax is is on. He can hear what we're saying now, but cannot talk because he's we can the only live listener. The one, the one live listener. So no one cares because they're not listening live anyway, but uh we we have now spent 15 minutes trying to get four people to whatever, whatever. Talk about it later.
The mechanism of recording. You'd think in this day and age we could do it, but no. But we have John, if you have any questions for us though, uh hit me up in the chat. Remember, uh for next time, you can chat us stuff live, but you can't talk to us until we figured that out if and when we ever do. Um today's special guest, though, and I I pray that we have not lost him.
Ben, are you there? Oh, oh my God. Wait, wait, wait. Wait, yes? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right. Hi, yes, I am here. All right. I have preemptively needed myself due to child noise. But I was about to flip the computer out of window.
Yeah, it was about to be, you know. The funny thing is I could throw my computer out the window now in the time of COVID, and people just give it a six foot wide berth around it, walk around it, and it'll be still be there. Yeah, it'll still be there. No one's that's the thing, it's like anyway. So we have as our special guest on the podcast today, Ben from Bend to Table.com.
Why don't you why don't you introduce, in case, in case they don't know, they haven't listened to the past couple of promos we've done, you're um sponsoring the cooking issues right now, and you have um kind of an online subscription service where what's the word you like to use? You cu curate kind of high-end pantry related items, or like could eat right now, like a lot of the canned fish kind of stuff, or or like kind of cool pantry stuff, very high quality stuff, send it out to people so that they can kind of take advantage of these maybe harder to get uh interesting products. Would you say it's accurate? That is very accurate. Said by a man who's been reading uh uh promo copy we've sent over.
Uh actually I have to say this. I never read any promo copy before I actually read it live. Perfect. Here's so like I s like if you if you're ever in the studio with us, uh what happens is Nastasia starts yelling at me. She preemptively gets angry with me, like about 10 minutes before the end of the radio uh show, and then starts yelling at me about how I have to do this thing that I had no idea I had to do, then hands me the copy, then gets mad at me because we will have 10 minutes of argument over the wording of the copy that I've never read before.
Then I read it and then it's over. Is it but is it that's Matt, back me up on this is how it works. Uh yeah, Kat Johnson's also often involved, but yeah, that's the basic lay of the land. Yeah, is she on she's not on, right? We can't we can't.
She's not on. No, no, she's not our secret listener right now. All right. So that that's a that's a great description. Um we are exactly a monthly subscription for amazing shelf stable pantry ingredients um from things like staples and you know, the the sort of rancho gordo and gichy boy mil type staples to interesting spreads and spices from places around the world and local.
Um, and I'm coming to you from New Haven, Connecticut. Yeah, New Haven. I believe you know well. I do. New Haven is the town, New Haven is the town that once everyone leaves it, they're like, not so bad.
I like it's like you know, Nastasia says that I'm the new haven of uh bosses. When people have worked for me, they hate it, and then as soon as they leave, they're like, well, Dave wasn't so bad. So Nastasia's just waiting to leave so that she can feel that way. What do you think? Okay, yeah, yeah.
You have to work with them every friggin' day. Right now. Yeah, but like I I like it's also the same with partners. It's like, you know, you have partners, partners are terrible, but then you get different partners and you're like, oh, you know what? That is true.
That is true. It wasn't so bad. And that has actually happened to you. That is happening to you. Let's not get into that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was like, you know, uh, yeah. So I'm proud to be the New Haven of partners slash, you know, bosses slash friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dave, he wasn't so bad.
The nice thing about New Haven really is kind of New Haven used to be, so for those of you that don't know, New Haven is kind of midway up the Connecticut shoreline. So you kind of think that the east coast of the United States is kind of a north-south situation, but in the Connecticut area, it's really kind of it's an east-west situation. Even though you're driving on I-95 north, you're really just traveling east-west. So Nastasia's Heidi Hole in Connecticut is all the way kind of to the west on the New York side. And New Haven is pretty much spot in the in the middle.
Um, and it used to be one of the most beautiful towns. You know, it was known as the as the Elm City. There were elms everywhere lining the streets, beautiful elm trees. And for those of you that don't know what an Elm looks like, because there's not that many around anymore, they have this beautiful American Elms anyway, this beautiful kind of vase shape. And in New Haven, we had a beer called Elm City Beer.
Everything is Elm City in New Haven because of uh Elm. They have a lot of beautiful old houses. Um what happened is is Dutch Elm Disease came in, wiped out all the elms. There was a lot of um kind of social blight. There was a when I-95 and the connectors got put through New Haven, they cut off whole neighborhoods and shafted whole neighborhoods, dropping them into poverty.
It's a whole thing. But New Haven is one of these cities that is always rising, it's always rising somehow. I don't understand how it's been, but for the past at least 30 years, it's been rising somehow, and yet here it is. Am I right about this, Ben? Am I I got New Haven pretty much right?
That sounds pretty accurate. Um it certainly has risen somewhat. Um we were here, my wife and I were were here uh 15 years ago, and then having moved back recently, it is definitely uh on the seems on the upswing. Yeah, I mean I think just in that timeline. And the the scale of New Haven is nice, right?
So like you can walk into the middle of the town area, you can live in a house and walk into the middle of the town area. So it's kind of it's a nice scale. It's a good, it's a good place, it's right on a train line. Uh the food and bar scene, I was there right before the um quarantine happened. Uh my partner at the bar, Don and I were doing a class at Yale, and um and uh yeah, it's it seems like it seems like it's happening.
It seems like it's cool. It's good stuff. It it punches above its weight, is is how I like to describe it. Yeah. You know, when in the 90s when I was there playing in bands in New Haven, we were one of the few kind of New Haven bands.
We sorry, uh Yale bands that also played with New Haven bands. Uh there was a couple, a couple of bands like that when we were there. And everyone was like, Yeah, New Haven, it's gonna, it's gonna happen. Like, you know, the whole southern Connecticut, like, the the whole music scene's gonna no never happen. The Southern Connecticut music scene never we were never, you know, we're gonna be the new Athens, Georgia.
No. No. That's not what happened. Anyway. Not what happened.
Yeah. Anyways, all right. So uh so what do you want to talk about, Ben? What do you you're here? Do you have anything to say?
You want to answer some questions? You want me to read some questions so you can answer them? If if you want, I uh, you know, don't go quite into the uh haven't gotten into nitro muddling just yet, but um do you have a supply of liquid nitrogen? That's something you can't send to people's houses, liquid nitrogen. No, it is not.
No, I I tend to go a bit more I guess classic on the cocktails, but would would love to get into XCON and try some of the some of these out when they're uh when you're back open. Yeah I would love for I would love to be back open. We're back with with with uh Ben Simon from Ben to Table. Now you go by you go by Ben just professionally or do you go by Benjamin in the real life or what do you do? I I go by Ben professionally and in the real life.
Oh nice you know how some people when they have like a when they have like a a name that's part of their company they'll use a slightly different version in the real life to try to keep their stuff separate. And I've never understood that. That seems like a garbage separation to me. Yeah, I agree. It's also like a big part of this is you kind of gotta buy into me at like my tastes.
And if you don't, you know, if if if if you don't see me as a as a real person who cooks and who you respect, uh, you know, not really gonna be the value proposition for you. So try try to go as real as possible. Nice. So now we were going back to kind of what you what you see, you you find these things. So we I cooked a bunch of this stuff that uh that you sent over, and some of some of the stuff I had already known, uh, some of it I I didn't, but um so where are you finding all this stuff?
You just like going down to to Charleston and hanging out with the the Geechee Boy Mills people, or like what how does this work? Actually, I had a trip uh planned that I had to cancel because of the COVID, unfortunately. But um so some of the stuff are things where so I moved to New Haven two years ago from San Francisco, and so part of the stuff is things that I used to be able to access quite easily, and then when I got here, sort of had a like, oh I I can't get this anymore without really searching it out. And I know a lot of people are in a similar situation, so part of it was thinking, oh, there's there's stuff that like rancho gordo beans that I used to be able to just walk to my corner fancy bodega and pick up that I would love to be able to help other people have easier access to, and then sort of expanding from there to things like Geechee Boy, which I actually um sort of tried out as I was thinking about this concept. Um I had initially been thinking Anson Mills, but they're sort of less well set up for retail, essentially.
Um and then other things were my sort of other other life and and career has been working on advocacy campaigns around the world, and so I've spent a lot of time in a lot of different places, and so thinking about amazing things I've had there that I could source either from a Spain, a Peru, a Greece, or where I could find interesting domestic producers and help them to find more customers and really help to try and find a way to help smaller producers who are working generally more sustainably, generally producing more delicious food to get to more people. Yeah. Cool. By the way, I've been cooking most of this stuff in my in my rice cooker. It has come to my attention that not everyone has a rice cooker.
And I think that that's fine because not everyone needs to have all these crazy things. But I think rice cooker is one of the things that people don't necessarily know that they really want if they don't have one. I don't have bear in mind, I don't have an Instapot. A lot of people have Instapots. I'd not have an Instapot.
I own a pressure cooker and a rice cooker. Is an Instapot any good as a as a rice cooker? Personally, I don't use it for rice, but I love it for the grits, actually, because you don't have to you just put it in and then it's done, basically. And you start that you don't have to do the whole stirring during and it comes out pretty much perfectly. Yeah, but I do that in my rice cooker.
I do that in my Zojirushi induction rice cooker. If you're ever gonna get, like, if you're ever gonna get married, or if you're just rich, or if you have someone who's rich who's gonna give you like a really nice gift, like uh ask for the top of the line Zoji Rushi rice cooker. I know that in other countries there are brands that are even more high-flying, but in the United States, the the Zoji Rushi uh like uh neurofuzzy logic in induction rice cookers are ridiculous. They are ridiculous. They never burn anything ever.
I once kept rice hot for uh a week and a half in one to see whether the taste would change in a way that I thought was interesting. Spoiler, it didn't. Um, but like it didn't burn, it didn't get messed up. I mean, those rice cookers, the Zoji Ruji rice cookers, are crazy. So I do my beans in the rice cooker, and I do my uh I do grits in the rice cooker, milk, no stirring, no breaking, no scorching, which is fantastic, right?
Um anyway, so I love it. But again, I don't have a lot of experience or any experience with the Instapot, so I don't know whether or not you know, an Instapot is a good substitute for the neurofuzzy logic Zojirushi induction rice cooker. But who knows? Who knows? I mean, it certainly probably doesn't have the programming that the Zojirushi does for rice.
So, like if you care about doing like brown rice, semi-brown rice, sushi rice, uh, you know, kanji, and getting them on the nose every time. I'm sure the Zojirushi is gonna be better than the Instapot for that, but I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, the the Instant Pot settings are mostly kind of nonsense, I think. Like I just used set the minutes based on how long it should take, as opposed to, you know, using the soup setting or whatever, which is meaningless.
Yeah, I also use the I I sometimes even use my rice cooker for reheating uh soups and stews and stuff like that. You just punch it on the reheat. I mean, that thing is ridiculous. I would say that, you know, I've had mine for oh, I don't know, uh 17 years, 16 years, and it's still going strong. Every once in a while it'll die on me.
I'll unplug it and I'll like put it on an altar for like four or five days, and then I'll plug it back in again and it'll work again. The rice gods have smiled on me with my rice cooker. I remember when Booker was uh very young, so Booker's 18 now. When he was very young, he had a bunch of sensory issues about um music, specifically music coming on. And so he wouldn't allow, because it's a Japanese piece of kitchen equipment, it's got some goofy tune that it plays when it's done making the rice.
And Booker could not tolerate in other words, he would have anxiety about me making rice in anticipation of the music going off at the end of the Zoji Rushi. So I had to the I've avoided any sort of warranty. It was already past warranty at that point anyway, but I ripped it apart and ripped the speaker out of it. So I have silent Zoji Rushi, which I don't know, is that better or worse? Do you guys like the tunes that these things play?
No, that sounds great. Uh like the laundry machines that make this the happy jingle at the end. I don't I don't want to hear that. I'd much rather the silent version. That sounds like an improvement.
I mean, like, if you I mean, as a manufacturer of equipment, I mean Nastasi and I can like vouch for this, but like we could, anyone could just make a silent mode for this stuff, and it would cost literally an extra five cents. Literally an extra five cents. So for you, we're talking at like a retail, maybe it's an extra 75 cents. Do you know what I'm saying? For me, it's like five cents in retail, we're talking 75 cents.
And then you could just be like, you know what? No, I don't need to hear that. Wouldn't that be great? I mean, I think you guys should make a version of the Searzole that plays a jingle every time you boot it up or turn it off. And then charge extra for Yeah, charge extra for that.
I think it'd be easier with the center dude. Oh my god. So, like the um we I remember we had a bunch of people when we were first making Sears alls, and they were like, Can you can you like can you like make them different colors? Can you like put like rate can you put racing stripes on them? Can you do and we're like, uh no.
You idiot. It gets super freaking hot. It's glowing red. How am I supposed to paint it? You know, you know what I mean?
It's like people just have a fundamental lack of understanding about how this is working, right, Nastasia? That was one person and he was an idiot. But the good news is he was a person with power. So, like the the great thing about life is is it only takes one person in power to make you try to you know to spend a lot of time time seeing whether or not you can add color. Look, well, look, maybe we could enamel it.
Maybe I could like pull like an enamel. I'm like, no, you can't what? No, no, the enamel will shatter and then there'll be little pieces of glass in your food. Crazy. Missed opportunity because you guys could have been like a lacrosse.
I could have had my yellow cerezol, my you know, lime green cerez all. See, I knew I was capable of thinking like a total idiot. I have it in me. Now, if we ever make a torch, those we can make different colors, those we could put some racing stripes on. Do you know what's a like an under uh like an undeveloped market?
So Jeremiah Bullfrog from not Jeremiah Stone here, but Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog. I never even learned his real last name because he just went by Jeremiah Bullfrog in Miami, friend of ours from way back from back in the French culinary days. He had someone uh take a bunch of stainless steel like EC whippers and then do hand art over the EC whippers and then clear coat over to that. Now that's cool. Customized EC whippers, those are pretty sick.
You know what I'm saying? Like that's something you could do because who lights their EC on fire? Although Nastasi and I did once. Nastassi, remember when I had to make nachos for someone at home at their desk? I wasn't with you for that.
Why? Where were you? I don't know. Anyway, so like the idea was we're going to someone's uh desk at Complex magazine at First We Feast, and they were like, You're gonna make nachos uh at the desk. And I'm like, Well, what level of crazy do you want?
And um they were like, Well, crazy. I'm like, okay, then I'm gonna walk up to their desk. I'm gonna start with dried beans, and I'm gonna make beans for the nachos at their desk while they're sitting there. And I this is totally not cool, but I put dry beans into an EC whipper with excess water and salt and garlic, and then I put I sealed it and I put a torch on the side of the Easy Whipper so that I could build the pressure up to like 45, 50 psi with heat, so that I could cook the beans in like you know, in a minute. And so like I cooked from dry beans in a minute to make the beans for the nachos, and and I had liquid nitrogen for other stuff around me.
I was I totally invaded their desk and the looks of death and murder from the from the folks like uh on either side desk of me, I've never seen that much kind of wishing I was dead from someone outside my family. You know what I mean? It was like it was crazy, but the beans were good. But it's completely unsafe to put fire onto an easy and you shouldn't do it. Um anyway, I don't even know how we got onto that.
Well, I know how we got onto that. We're talking about uh rice cookers and grits. So what I did with your grits was uh I did it. Do you do your grits with milk or not with milk? I don't I usually add a little bit of milk at the end.
But you're you're um a water for most of the time guy? Yeah, so so I would I did them a few times. I was doing them sort of fully loaded, and then tried it just with nothing but water and salt, and found that that actually like brought out more of the kind of corn, like the corininess to it that I was kind of losing a little bit with everything else. So, first thing I'll say before Dax, my second son was born, we were trying to come up with you know how you give nicknames to well, maybe you don't. Like uh often you'll give nicknames to the babies before they're born that aren't their real names that you can use as kind of slang for what before they're born.
His was corny corn, yeah. Nice corny corn. Um, but the uh I did milk when I did it. I only cooked the the grits once, but I did shrimp and grits in the rice cookers. Now, the thing with shrimp and grits is shrimp and grits is delicious but super heavy.
So I tried to lighten it up a little bit. I did uh I did milk, but not I don't think a lot of cream. I used some very nice uh shrimp bacon and just a little bit of cheese folding it in, tried to keep the the corn and the grit level high and the soupiness and the kind of lead in your stomach down to a minimum. Because I feel shrimp and grits is something that is everyone finds delicious, but it's just like a brick, it's just so heavy that if it's gonna be the primary thing that you eat, like I can't do it traditionally. It's just too much.
What do you think, Ben? Is it too much, right? I would agree. Yeah, I love it as an app. Not like gotta be lighter for the main.
Right. Because it can like traditionally it's just, oh my god. Like, I'm not, and I don't believe I'm not a general believer, by the way, that you know, like I'm not one of those guys who's like, oh, what I ate was so heavy. Oh, I don't feel good now. That's not me.
You know what I mean? But like if I would like eat the amount of shrimp and grits that I would just naturally eat if you put it in front of me, at the end I'll be like, oh my god, oh my god, shrimp and grits. But a lighter shrimp and grits with those um what are they called? Jimmy, uh the word just went out of my head. Jimmy Red grits.
Yeah, those grits are ridiculously good. Ridiculously good. Anyway, uh, let me get to some questions. Uh we had Jonathan from New Jersey write in to us uh saying, and this is just basically uh, you know, I put it out there uh I think on the show last week, and also just in general, uh, you know, we we want to hear how you guys are doing during the during the COVID. And uh he writes in big fan of the show.
Thanks for continuing to produce content during the crisis. Well, we're trying, Jonathan. I mean, we're trying. You know, it's like the we're now on Zoom, which uh we so we started with Zancaster today, went to Ringer, yes, and now now we're on Zoom, which will cut us like Nastasi, you should use Zoom all the time because it cuts you off hard after an hour. I do, and conversations I don't want to have.
It's oh nice, nice. This is a good thing to remember. We will run up against that wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh Nastasi's like, super, let's run against that wall quick.
Uh at the end of last week's show, you asked people to write in what they were doing during lockdown. As a grocery store worker, our experience is so different from many Americans uh that I thought you'd like to know. I see people posting on social media about how they're bored, stir crazy, etc. But we're still getting up and going to work every day. I'm a chef departe for a Whole Foods at the Jersey Shore, and normally my job involves coordinating food production and food safety for our salad bar, hot bar, hot bar, and other uh prepared food venues.
All of these have been shut down, and although the store is busy, our department has seen a massive revenue drop. Um we have commitments to our vendors who are continuing to deliver product that we are um uh that we are uh pre-ordered months in advance, but we now have no outlet for. I have tasked my cooks with preparing everything for us to donate to food banks, as well as preparing box lunches that we are donating to our area, uh hospital staff, police, and EMS. We are also providing family meal twice a day to our staff as an appreciation for their hard work, but also to reduce unnecessary contact with the public from standing online to purchase food during their breaks, which is a huge problem, by the way. For any of you like who are not in a city, it's like even places that are social distancing outside of their stores, it becomes kind of a free-for-all inside.
It's kind of nuts. Well, you're not in the cities. Who's John? Have you noticed that? Yeah, I've noticed it when I was at a supermarket the other week.
The manager was coming by as I was paying. He wanted to shut down the store because there were so many people in there. Yeah, but it's like well, it's like I I was in a store where like everyone was on their six-foot marker outside the store, face masked and six-foot marker, and then but you get in, and the way that they have it working, the lines are unbelievably long because those things have to be spaced out. So those things go into the shopping areas, and then they have fewer people on that are doing restock, so stocking stuff is in the aisles. So there's no way to make it through one of these stores without getting real bumped into somebody.
You know what I mean? Uh it's pretty it's pretty hardcore. Anyway, um, where was I? Uh twice a day uh during their breaks. Okay.
We've also implemented strict crowd control measures and a pre and pre-shift temperature checks for our employees. So it's like a probably a forehead temperature check, which is my worst nightmare when I used to fly to Hong Kong in China is that I would get quarantined. Uh did we tell a story about how you developed a fever on the airplane and I shoved Tylenol down your throat? Like months. It wasn't COVID, people.
Don't give me this. But remember that, Stas? Yeah, you were so angry. Well, you know, like I tell you that my biggest fear in life is flying to another country and and like getting sick, and especially in a country where back in the day they were already testing for fevers and quarantining people at the border, that you would like fly, not tell me that you have a fever until you're on the plane and then get on the plane. And so, like, you know, I'd Nastasia had like a blood Tylenol content of like 100%.
It was is like, I it's not true. I didn't overdose her on Tylenol. I did not endanger her liver. Anyway, uh, we've also implemented strict crowd control measures and pre-shift temperature checks for our employees. As a member of leadership, I've been manning the temperature station at the employee entrance as well as working the front door to limit both the total number of guests in the building as well as the density of shoppers in a given department, which is important.
I think that's where a lot of places are falling uh flat is is in that regard. Uh that's just a little bit of what's going on that people may not be aware of. Thanks again for continuing to put out episodes. I had the opportunity to visit XCON on my birthday in January. Oh, January.
Remember back in January when we used to have bars and restaurants? Um January. When we weren't going outside because it was just a little cold. Oh, January. Oh, brother.
We're like, oh yeah, it's a little nippy. Um, you know what I mean? Now we're like, oh my God. Well, well what I wouldn't do for February revenue. You know what I mean?
What I wouldn't give for some like, you know, normally, like we're hoping, everyone's hoping that we can reopen in the summer. Let's not forget, restaurant people, that like 99% of uh like of us hated the summer in New York. So some of you, like on the Jersey shore, maybe summer's great. If you live in the Hamptons, you're making all your money in the summer. But for those of you that live in New York City and have, you know, work in the industry here in New York City, like we're all like, oh my God, we're not making any money during because everybody leaves the city during the summer, right, Nastasia?
Yeah. But now we're like, now we're like, oh my God, we could reopen in the summer? I mean, I've never had so many people wish they could open in the summer. Like we opened uh existing conditions in the summer when we opened the first time, and we were all bent that we were opening during the summertime because it's such a crappy time to open, and now we're praying, praying, you know, for a for a summertime opening. Oh, let a little COVID'll do for you.
What do you guys think the odds are that we reopen? We meaning everyone, reopen in let's say June, July, and then have to close again in September. I don't even want to respond to that. I mean, I mean, I don't know. I don't even I don't I don't know.
I don't know. Anyway, I mean, I I like what seems so actually I've got a a neighbor who's an epidemiologist who's been doing a bunch of the research on this stuff, and one of the it sounds to me a little bit like what we're headed for is these sort of partial reopenings and then partial closings, where like it's not that everything will have to shut down in September necessarily, but like there will be places where there's flare-ups and those places will have to shut down. And the challenge will be how do we predict where those are, and how do we account for that and like figure out how to adapt to that? Right. But also the thing is in our business, right?
It's like there's a couple of things, right? The business needs to make money because rent, etc. etc. Um, and the staff needs to make money because they're they're people and we need to take care of the staff. Now, what the hell?
You know what I mean? Like, like there's a certain like every restaurant, every bar, right? Every like, well, food carts are one person, can be one person operation, so that's a little bit different, can be, but like every business that was built, you know, on a normal business model, is designed to operate at a certain scale and does not operate efficiently at a different scale. So you pay the rent that you're gonna pay based on the number of people that are gonna be going through your establishment, the people you can put through your establishment. The landlords know this, which is why the rents in places where more people go are more expensive, which is why you pay more for a bigger space that you can get more in, or that you have mean like because they know that this is built into the models, right?
It takes a certain staff to staff a certain size place, right? Regardless of whether they're spread out. If I'm putting, if if I'm suddenly putting 50 people into two rooms, those two rooms are designed for a hundred people, right? I still need to have extra staff because like a person who's in the front room, even though they could service all the people and do a good job of service, they no longer have a line of sight to all of their guests. And without a line of sight, it's hard to do good service, right?
So it's it's like the scales, everyone's designed for a certain scale, and then we have to kind of turn these taps off and on, and then what? People are supposed to go on their insurance and then back on Cobra and then back on their insurance and back off Cobra as we as we hire and re-fire and hire and re-fire. I mean, how is this gonna work? Do you know what I mean? Like, I have no idea.
This is this is what keeps me up. You know what I mean? I definitely understand why it keeps you up. I mean, it's just it's just banana llamas. Um anyway, uh also Capri Sun, friend of the show.
I thought he was mad at me because he bought uh uh coffee grinder, and then I you know, I'm he should know. He's like, Do you want to buy the other coffee grinder? But I was like, it got confused. I'm very bad at communication, but anyway, I was supposed to in our Instagram live that Nastasi and I did show off my clam broth house. For those of you that have never seen the clam broth house sign, in uh in the across the river in New Jersey, there used to be a place called the clam broth house, and they had a big sign and it with a with a you know a neon sign with a hand, and that hand was pointing down in a kind of these nuts uh symbol, and it says clam broth house.
And it's like, and so like you know, Jack Shrimp from Existing Conditions. I walk around, be like, get your clam broth right here, right here, right here, and we point down with the you know, with the clam broth house sign. So, anyway, he made us uh the cooking issues clam broth house shirt, and I was supposed to show it on Instagram, but I always wear a button up over my shirt, so I forgot to unbutton my shirt and show it. So I'm apologizing to Capri Sun for that. Anyway, anyway.
And John. He did see the picture of you wearing it though. He did see it, all right. Yes. Uh Kieran wrote in and said, uh, originally Kieran wrote in asking about the like uses of and nutrition of Okara.
Okara is the spent pulp uh that you have when you're making uh soy products, soy milk, tofu, etc. etc. Uh wrote back in again and said, Do you have a reputable source to look up a nutrition information, i.e. the nutritional uh label info, not health advice. I'm trying to narrow down the root cause of some issues I've been having.
So having a resource like that would be very helpful since there's so much misinformation about out there. Now, first of all, Kieran, I'll say this. I do not trust the labels on the back of the only source of in general that I have is the label that's on the back of products. And luckily, most um processed manufacturers' goods, you can now find Google, um Google Docs of the nutritional information on the back. And in general, that's what I use for carbohydrate loads, ingredients, and things like that, because they they they have to be listed there.
That's just the law. I don't trust them in terms of levels because no one ever takes a piece of food, you know, puts it into a bomb calorimeter, burns it, and tries to figure out not even that that would be the way I don't even know how they do it, but no one does that. What they do is is they they take the list of um nutritional information that they get off of their raw ingredients that are published by uh the federal government and then extrapolate the um extrapolate the amount of those uh you know things that are in in yours. And so I've seen many, many math errors. I've seen many out and out, just you know, where the numbers don't match up.
So I don't know. I don't have a good source. What about any of you guys have good source for this stuff? No, no, no. Yeah, I have a general lack lack of trust, although I do enjoy serving size basically.
So, like uh, I like whenever whenever I buy a new product, I spin it around, I'm like, how many servings is this? You know what I mean? So I bought a half gallon jug of um Taiwanese fermented chili, and I'm like, hey folks, what's a serving size? And for these guys, a serving size of their of their fermented chili uh saw was two ounces, 60 milliliters, which is a preposterous amount of this stuff. You know, whereas like, you know, other people are like, you know, you'll look at the serving size on on something else, and it's like tiny, and they're like 395 servings.
You're like, it's so it's like I love playing serving size bingo. It's my absolute favorite, my absolute favorite uh label game to play. Um, I also a lot of times when you guys ask me questions on the air, uh like how to how do you do X, Y, or Z. Um, I look at the ingredient labels of um people who do it, you know, on a larger scale, and it's pretty, it's fairly easy if you have a little bit of knowledge of how individual ingredients work. You know, like if you know what Xanthan does, if you know what the different polysorbates are for, if you know what um, you know, if you know some basic uh ingredient, if you have a basic ingredient kind of what's the word literacy, you can figure out a lot of times what people are doing.
The exception, and we'll get to something kind of similar to this. Uh, the exception you get to that is when people are using very tweaked out functional ingredients that sometimes are listed or sometimes aren't, but that can radically affect like what's going on. So, for instance, Oatley, who makes the oat milk that everyone goes gaga for. I've never tried it. Any of you guys tried this oatly stuff?
I'm drinking in my coffee. Remember, I gave up drunk. Yes. So you tried Oatly? I use Oatweat.
Is it good? It's the best non-milk milk. Fact. Especially for coffee. Yeah.
And you're and it lasts a long time, right? Yeah, it does. Yeah. So the thing about uh Oatley is that Oatly is doing something to the oat milk with enzymes, right? That and we talked about this on the air a while ago, that is doing a they're they're functionally altering the base product using an ingredient that is proprietary to them.
And so for that kind of stuff, it's kind of hard to back, it's kind of hard to kind of back figure what they're doing. But most of the time, people aren't doing that. That's the rare, that's the rare thing. So uh Oshmitt wrote in uh hey Nastasia and the cooking issues gang. My question is about Huey protein shakes.
Huey protein shakes. Uh I've never had a whey protein shake. You guys, any of you guys ever had a whey protein shake? Nope. No.
Uh the brand that I buy is a concentrate with added digestive enzymes. However, there's no mention of the amount of them. Uh what I do is that I make my drink and let it sit for 20 to 30 minutes. And my concern is that uh, if I immediately drink the shake, the enzymes might get denatured from all the stomach acid and other crap. Therefore, waiting some time could partially, in quotes, digest the proteins in the shake with the help of the enzymes.
Is this a legitimate concern? Does this waiting really help? Or is it a redundant step? Thanks so much, big fan. Sorry for the long question.
So, all right. Long like long story. There's a I had there's a lot to unpack here. All right. So most things that people add to products, I consider to be scams.
I'm just saying that straight up. Most things that people add that aren't to make something taste better, I think are scams. Most. Now there is the Herbalife, which is well known, I mean, say what you like, but they have been involved in some scammy things, right? They sell one of the enzyme things that is added to whey protein powders.
And when you look online for website for sorry, for peer-reviewed papers about doping enzymes into protein shakes, and there are a couple, guess who they were sponsored by? The Herbalife Corporation, right? So it's like you you you kind of have to be careful there. Now, I the the studies when they saw when they were looking to see whether or not you got a bigger spike of amino acids, uh I think they were checking one study I read, I think they were checking uh blood level of free amino acids, although I don't really even know what that means. And then uh they were also checking um excretion of nitrogen compounds in urine versus you know, control versus not.
And they were doping at the time of consumption. So they were not waiting, they were making the shake, adding the enzyme, and consuming it. Now, whether so, like presumably it takes X amount of time, and I've said this for this was one of my old uh diet things that I used to say, and people will always say I'm crazy, but I will reiterate it, even though this is not based in science, this is just based in logic. All right, I'm gonna pose you guys a logical question. Ready?
Yes. Okay. So if you uh what what what do they always say? How many calories is a pound? Something like what is it?
Does any of you guys remember 2000, whatever it is? No. So if you eat a teaspoon of oil, right, odds are your body can absorb that teaspoon of oil, right? Because your body can absorb that amount of oil in that amount of time, right? Now, uh, so let's say, let's say that you have the amount of oil that it would take to get your daily allowance of calories, right?
And you consume that. Great. Now, if I picked up a gallon of oil and I drank that gallon of oil all at once, do you think that my body would convert all of that oil into usable food calories? Or do you think that I would have an oil slick in my toilet? Oh.
You would you would definitely not process it in the calories. Right through you. It would go right through you, and you'd have a terrible cleanup job, right? There is a limit. There is a limit to how much your body can absorb at any one time of any one thing.
Now, I don't know what that is, right? But you know, this was, you know, years ago when I was younger, this was my I don't want to get into my like when I was younger quack theories, but it is definitely true that there is, and I don't know what it is, but there is some maximum rate of absorption. And so what people have uh said who believe in these digestive enzymes that you're adding to things, is that when you are eating a pro drinking a protein shake specifically to jack yourself with protein because you're working out, that your body cannot absorb whole protein quickly enough. I.e. you can't break it down into peptides and polypeptides fast enough that are absorbable into your system.
And therefore, if you add enzymes to it to break it down, that you increase the amount you can absorb in the relatively short transit time that that protein shake has in your gut. This may be the case, it may be true. Then you have to ask yourself do I actually need all that extra protein in my system? That is a separate question. Uh but adding it to break down early, it seems like if it works by swallowing it, it will work even better.
In quotes, doing it beforehand, but be aware that as you break protein down, you can develop uh bitter tasting things, bitter tasting polypeptides, especially because some of them use things like uh papayen, which is the um papaya-based uh protease enzyme, and that I know that can make bitter stuff because I've tested it. 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. So I'm opening the box. It's Spanish delicacies. Looks good.
Well, open over. By the way, these are these are the papara peppers. I don't what are they in? Are they in vinegar? What are they in?
I think they're in vinegar. Yeah. But this is uh pimentone. So this is gonna be probably smoked paymentone powder. Let's open her up.
And we have Harissa. Oh, yeah, it's nice. The smoked uh smoked, yeah. You like smoke pepperon. Yeah, that sounds good.
Start your monthly subscription at bend to 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. Just as we're as we're getting into clothes, one of the things that I wanted to add is when I started this, part of the thing was getting restaurant quality ingredients to people, and a lot of the suppliers I work with are tend to supply restaurants. And so since COVID, one of the things that I've been thinking about more, and partly because folks are telling me, is that uh in addition to the restaurant industry and sort of another part of the restaurant industry and restaurant workers story is the restaurant suppliers, many of whom are really hurting.
Um so a couple of the folks, so uh Piemont Deville or Boonville Barn Collective, they've got they make this amazing esplette pepper that's in my April box, for instance, and something like 85% of their orders dried up overnight because of that was restaurants. Geechee Boy Mill does a ton of work with restaurants, Diaspora Company does a bunch of work with restaurants. So I think it's a really interesting um just as a something for folks to think about as well is how to get ingredients outside of the grocery store supply chains, which obviously I'm here because that's part of what I'm doing, but I think there's also probably other ways that you can look at local suppliers in addition to, of course, tell me to bench table. Right. Well, you know, that it's it's interesting.
A lot of people, especially kind of like higher higher quality, uh higher quality suppliers who don't have an infinite amount of product, uh, you know, as you know, Nastasia and I can vouch for this, it's hard to distribute into either big box or grocery stores. It's very hard to do that and to maintain, you know, because either you don't have the amount of product or you don't have the scale, uh, things get sent way out. It's hard to maintain kind of freshness and just takes it takes a lot of resources to have a product that you could push out nationwide into grocery stores. And so a lot of people don't do it, and a lot of small places would rather work farmers markets or sell directly to restaurants because a restaurant typically is gonna order a lot more than uh an individual human being is, and they're relatively reliable because they know they're gonna sell this dish, they get this ingredient in, they know they're gonna carry it, they can develop a relationship. There's fewer people to have to deal with than if you have to deal with individual customers mediated through a grocery store, mediated through a distributor, right?
So uh I think it's an incredibly valid point is that a lot of these people, their relationships, they're they're really their only lifetime to be able to continue to make these things has been temporarily cut off. So it's a it's a good thing to support right now, I think. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, no. Um let me rip these two questions real quick.
Peter Pa writes in uh hi Dave, uh, Matt, Nastasia. Hope you guys are safe and finding a way to cope with the various ramifications of the crisis. I'm working in the Danish craft beer scene as a distributor, so I'm also painfully aware of how devastating this is to the industry. But listening to you guys since the third episode, damn, you didn't go back and listen to the first two. What the hell?
Or do you mean listening live? Wouldn't that be crazy to listen to all eight billion episodes, just not the first two? That would be the craziest thing ever. I I kind of like that. Don't go back and listen to those first two.
Um, this is my first time writing in. If you're still keeping track of demographics, I'm 32 years old, male from Denmark, and living with my girlfriend. So where is that on the track, S. Uh, yeah, same. Right down the center?
Down the center. Right down the center. All right. My question is I've owned a couple different venting pressure cookers over the last 10 years and have now, by the way, I don't like pressure cookers that use venting as the mechanism of regulating pressure. So a lot of pressure cookers, when you like the literally the way they regulate pressure is to just shoot out stuff.
I've run some tests. You can go back on the cooking issues blog, which still exists. John is working on restarting it as a live thing, but you can go look at the tests, believe them, don't believe them, whatever. But I like Coon Recon. Anyway, uh, there's other good ones, but that's just the one I use at home.
Um I've owned a couple different venting pressure cookers over the last 10 years and have now finally decided to go all in and buy the the big one, the Coon Recon. However, after doing some research, I discovered that their pressure cookers, as well as all other pressure cookers sold in the European Union, only come up to about 0.8 bar, which is about 12 PSI. And naturally, I would like to pull the full one bar or 15 psi of pressure, which is what you know they're quoted at here, and what most of most of the ones that I do, except the electric ones, go to 15 BSI. And I don't know why a lot of the electric ones don't go. It's ridiculous.
They should just go to the 15 PSI. I've run extensive tests on several different ingredients at different pressures, and 15 PSI to get the extra brownness, the extra kind of meatiness brownness, um, is a better pressure to run at than 12. Anyway, uh, so I wrote Coon Recon to see if I could buy a replacement spring from the American market to achieve a higher pressure. And this is the answer I got. First of all, I appreciate the writing in.
That's a good uh cooking level one. Well, they give the, they give their their general listing here. Cooking level one is 0.4 bar uh and cooking level two is 0.8 bar uh is achieved when both red lines on the pressure indicator stem are visible. But here's the important part that Kun Recon gave you that you can hone in on. To maintain the desired cooking level, the amount of heat to the pressure cooker needs to be reduced.
A hissing sound accompanied by the escape of steam means that the maximum operating pressure, now hear this: the maximum operating pressure of 1.2 to 1.8 bar has been reached. Then you should reduce the heat or remove the pressure cooker uh until the second red line is just visible. What they're telling you, what they're telling you is, Peter, that you can get the pressure you want. You just have to jack it over that second line. Just don't jack it more than one point one point really does about 1.5 bar.
But just don't jack it so high that it starts to hiss and vent. But there's no reason you can't push it over that second red line. And it's always it's repeatable. So as long as you push it the exact same amount over that red line all the time, you'll always get the result you want. And I repeatedly here in the US do that.
I jack it over that red line, just not so much that it starts hissing. I hope that helps. Um Serena wrote in uh backing up Nastasia, but then also not throwing me under the bus. For the record, I agree with you with regards to the mustard debate. So for those of you that don't know, last week we had a debate on whether or not John and I should manufacture this uh manufacture mustard in the style of this mustard that we love that's from Ghent because you know, absent, you know, my Learjet and my monocle uh polishing facility, I don't have the ability to go to Ghent regularly and purchase this mustard.
It has a shelf life and whatever. And so like Nastasia was horrified that I would try to even make something in the style of what you know these people made. Uh, I think John is excited to at least learn how mustard is made with me, but whatever. Anyway, that was the mustard debate. Was is this accurate, people?
Yes. Yes. Okay. Uh for the record, I agree with uh Nastasia with regards to the mustard debate. It is very American to assume that you can just make in quotes a product that people have been making for decades and that have an embedded heritage.
I think Dave usually, here's where she doesn't throw me under the bus. I think Dave usually has the healthy approach of trying not to do the exact same thing exactly, but to learn the technique and try to honor the tradition in that way. Thank you, Serena. Backing Nastasi up without throwing me under the bus. If more people could try to see both sides of a uh of a debate, unlike some of these debates that are going on on Twitter.
Do you think Twitter's gotten more nasty recently just because people can't have real human interactions, so they just become nastier on Twitter? Or is it just I'm paying attention to it more because I'm locked in the house? The latter. Okay. It's always been like that.
It's just functionally useless, right? I mean, like people ask me questions on Twitter and then I and then I answer them. But like when I go and look at the debates people are having on Twitter, it's just a freaking nightmare. It's just, I don't understand it. Uh oh, Serena added, I don't remember which podcast talk about this, but a similar idea someone had was doing American uh Hamoni Birico, and I'm making air quotes around that, is very similar and somewhat controversial.
It's from an America's Test Kitchen podcast, uh, done by the uh White Oak Pastures People's Pork. Listen, I am you should not make I do not believe that you should try to make and sell anything as somebody else's product. However, on ham specifically, Americans were doing nut-fed ham. Not the same, not the same as like uh uh Hamone Barico, Bayota fed, Hamon and Barico, but we had our own extremely high-end hams. And for years, for years, since the early 2000s, I have been saying that we need to kind of focus on what makes an American ham great instead of trying to recreate somebody else's ham.
I mean, I totally agree with that, but I don't whatever. I'm not gonna get back into the mustard debate. Do we have time for classics in the field or do we not have time for classics in the field? Uh not have time for classics in the field today. Oh my god, I had such a good classics in the field.
I was gonna talk about the book of edible nuts, these nuts. Next. Well, that isn't a good idea. Are you familiar? Listen, everybody wants to hear you tease these nuts, and we'll do the nuts next week.
Frederick Rhodes Rosengarten Jr., who I'm gonna talk about. Just you know what I can do, Matt? Can I put can I give you an image that you can put up beforehand? My favorite image of a human brain in cross-section versus a walnut in cross-section. Uh yeah, yeah.
Next week, babe. That's what I'm saying. I'm gonna give it to them for next week. Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now let me ask another question. People can write in. Let me know what's going on. So, like, I can do so. Like last week, I did two classics in the field to make up for the fact that I don't think we had one the week before.
One was one that I didn't think anyone would ever read, but had kind of important kind of cultural ramifications for how we look at kind of food and food politics. And the other one was one I thought that people might enjoy. If that's something people like, or just do the ones that people enjoy? Or because it like like versus my man, the book of edible nuts with Frederick Rodden Rosengarten uh Jr. would be my boy Sigfreed Gideon's mechanization takes command, which was important, but I don't think anyone's gonna read it.
What do you what do you what do you think? What do you think? I uh I would dole them out one a week if it was me, but you know, you can do what you want. But in other words, like one that people would like versus one people I don't know. Anyway, you guys think about it, you get back to me.
Ben, bend to table. How do people how do people order this? What do people normally order, by the way? First of all, have you seen a spike in people ordering now that everyone's at home? So what I've what I've really seen is a shift where it used to be that delicacies was the most popular order, and now people have really been tending toward the essential subscription.
And the difference is the the delicacies is what I sent. Nastasia, which is the like, you know, spreads and spices and stuff, and the essentials is the grits and grains and pastas. Um and but yeah, there has been an uptick in interest, um, and very much hoping, you know, uh shelf stable pantry items have become much more culturally relevant, I'd say, in the last couple months than they than they ever than they ever were before. Um listen, this is true. These are shelf stable, but also what you need to do is use them.
Don't stockpile these things, use them. Because Ben's choosing stuff that I swear to God, this stuff, yeah. I know that he's sponsoring the show and all, but the stuff is really delicious, should be consumed uh somewhat, you know, in a timely fashion, especially like those grits, like they they they stone mill them in small batches, send them out to you, and they really you shouldn't leave them for months and months on your on your shelf. In fact, if you can, you should free freeze them. Oh, I also did skillet.
You're like, so like a southerner would hate me. I did skillet cornbread with their blue cornmeal that was uh delicious, but um, you know, and I think it is true people are going to staples now a lot more, a because you know they can sit on your shelf for at least a while, but also since people are home more, they have more time to do things that take longer to cook. So people are doing more dried bean work, people are doing more um kind of things that they wouldn't otherwise do. But if you're into this, go ahead and get you something like an Instapot or a rice cooker to do it. Go and get uh, you know, bend a table, get some of these things.
If you've never had some of these, if you never had Rancho Gordo beans, delicious. If you've never had uh the Geechee Boys, those grits, those uh what are they called? Red Jimmy Red. Are they called again? Jimmy Red.
Those are delicious. Are they not delicious? They are super delicious, and it's also it's a really cool story of like you know, a small gardener essentially passing seeds down for generations and generations until it got to Sean Brock, who then got it to Geechee Boy and Anson Mills. Um the Geechee Boy people, are they actually from the islands or no? Are they gulla or are they Geechee?
Are they the same? They are they on is are is that company from one of the they're from basically there. I'm not a hundred percent, but I think they're from Edistow Island, which is where which is where Yeah, they are from Edistow Island. Oh, yeah, it's right, because John, you've worked with all those people, right? John's part of the Museum of Food and Drink has worked with these people.
Yeah, we didn't get to uh to work with the Geechee Boy folks, but when we did do a research trip down through there, we did pick up a bunch of their products and brought them back up, and yeah, they're super tasty. They're doing really awesome, awesome stuff. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, go go get that stuff. And people have more time to cook, so cook.
And so I would say thank you very much. And I would say, um, so bent to table.com, B-E-N-T-O-T-A-B-L-E dot com is the website. Um, and we are doing this thing with H R N where if you use the code H R N when you check out, it's a there's a little discount code place on the checkout page on the right side. Um you you'll get 20 bucks off your first month of the subscriptions, which are themselves uh $59.99 a month. And um we'll donate 10 bucks to HRN.
Sweet. All right. Well, there you have it. Next week uh we'll do the Book of Edible Nuts and the Book of Spices by my uh by Frederick Rosengarten and maybe Mechanization Takes Command by Ziggfried Gideon. Uh if you want to have Ben back ask specific questions about stuff that he's um selling, I'm sure he'd be willing to do that.
Otherwise, we'll see you next week on the cooking issues. Cooking issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you. For our freshest content, subscribe to our newsletter.
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