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. Oh Jesus.
Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Zoom from the Lower East Side. Nastasia Lopez as usual from Stanford, Connecticut. How are you doing, Nastasia? Good.
Yeah. I was real nervous because when they booted up the uh the sound, it was like it was playing at like Barry White half speed and sounded kind of like real torqued, uh, whatever it's called, chopped and screwed. Uh, but I feel like we're back to normal, so so we're okay. We got Matt, Matt, what booth are you in? Are you in the Rhode Island booth or in the Brook uh Brook Brooklyn?
Brooklyn booth. And that's an exciting development that plays uh weird speed for you guys. Uh don't even want to think about that right now. I definitely don't want to think about it. So we have a special show.
We have a bunch of guests uh today. So uh, you know, Nastasia, you've known him for uh a while. Uh I've you know, met him a couple times, but the the guest for today is Adam Leonte. But it Adam Leonte, you there, Adam? I'm here.
Uh not just a not just uh uh, you know, well-known chef chef, worked uh your first big job was what, with uh Mark Vetri or Yeah, I was in Vetrie for about 10 years. Yeah. So chef, but then somehow like went into the world of uh first through pasta, right? But then into bread. Um, and then also into milling your own flour via like some sort of like style like work that you did for a couple years in Italy, right?
So it's like this kind of long road, but you've become one of the gurus of the mill your own uh flour and bread baking movement. Would you say that's accurate? That is accurate. Yeah. So you wrote a uh yeah, yeah, uh Adam's book, uh the The Flower Lab, no relation to the food lab, by the way, the Flower Lab is uh came out in 2019, and I think no one really expected it, but with the COVID, there's been an explosion in interest in kind of home milling.
Uh so Nastasi and I contacted Adam to be on the show, and then it turns out that he had his own idea. So uh here is what Adam Adam wants to do for those of you that are listening. Adam wants to do a show that is a mashup of kind of car talk for bakers, but like 3 a.m. like cable access love line call in kind of a situation. Would they say that's accurate?
That is accurate. I get a lot of uh desperate messages early in the morning, and so I thought it was only appropriate for the time. Right. So now we can't really have callers in here uh, you know, now because we're not like you know, we're we just don't have that capability right now. So what we did was is we we're we're doing a test run of Adam's like poker after dark bread baking love line situation uh in cooking issues, and we've gotten people to write in the questions, and then Nastasia has some of her friends, my friends, her friends, who are going to read the people's questions as though they were calling you at 3 a.m.
to answer these things, right? Perfect. Alright, alright. So, oh by the way, before we get started, I know that you know, probably our listeners aren't like this, but um Adam's bread, just if you hadn't had it. Adam's bread is extremely delicious.
I'm just gonna go ahead and say that it's extremely delicious. And it kind of the the first time I had it, because the Brooklyn uh bread lab, which is where I first tasted your bread, is right near Roberta's uh pizzeria. Uh so we stopped after the radio show a couple years ago and we we got a loaf. And you're I know you're no longer there, but at the time you were, you gave us it tour. I tasted a loaf.
And it kind of changed my whole mental attitude of a what uh a whole wheat loaf could be, even kind of what a like a sourdough Levan loaf could be, and kind of like the what freshly milled flour can do for you, because he had this mill in the center of the of the lab. He was making the the flour and then baking the bread, and the bread was, you know, as a kid of the 70s, like whole wheat was kind of this dense, like kind of terrible thing that people ate kind of for health reasons, and things that were considered sourdough were typically rather like they'd come from slack doughs because they had gone overly acidic and the kind of structure had been lost on the inside, and they had a chew and a crust to match that, right? Like the acidic dough would have. And this was none of those things. It was incredibly delicious, like amazing crumb structure, great taste.
And I was like, I gotta learn how this guy makes this bread this way. So that's you know, that's why I was interested in reaching out to have you on the show. So that's just a uh He's also making bread at Sophia's constantly. So you can still get it. Nice.
All right. So anything you want to say before we uh start this or no? I think that was a great introduction. I mean, you kind of covered it all. Um, so let's go for it.
All right, and then after this, I'll pester you with my questions from your book, and we'll talk about my misadventures in flour milling. By the way, those of you who are old like me and tried milling flour in the past with some things like let's say a kitchen aid grain mill, like that's if you have ever used one of those grain mills, maybe that's why you don't like grinding flour, because they are garbage. Yeah. I mean, I like the KitchenAid Corporation, but those things are garbage. Anyway, we'll talk about it later.
Unless you're brewing beer, in which case it's fine. Okay, uh, so the first question in is going to be, and it's about sourdough, is gonna be from uh Harry Cuthbertson, and it's gonna be read by Mike Van Dorn, friend of the show, boondoggler's uh fiance and adult diaper expert. Mike, go. Hey Dave, the hammer, Matt in Pants, Adam, and any others that I've missed. I'm a pastor and a chef from Tasmania, Australia, and I'm the stereotype for your show.
I'm 36, white, male, married. I buy too much kitchen equipment, but my wife's cool with it, and it's a tax write-off wink. I'll make sourdough at home with local but commercially available baker's flour. It's pretty stock standard flour. Is there any real benefit to milling at home?
Is it worth the hassle? The bread I'm currently baking is good, but how much better could it get? Thanks for your show. You guys are the best. Seems like New York is uh coping a massive pummeling from this COVID-19 virus.
You guys are in my prayers. Cheers, Harry C. Alright. So, uh correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe folks from Tasmania really love coffee, and kind of the uh same idea applies from coffee to milling your grains, is a lot of folks are used to having maybe, you know, in their youth something pre-ground for coffee every day. But as soon as you start to get, you know, into the more modern era of espresso and you in your little espresso bar from down the street, you realize when they mill it to order, it kind of makes all the difference.
So if you're gonna improve your bread and you're already happy with it, if you add in a portion of fresh milk flour, it kind of it definitely has the same effect. Um it just doesn't oxidize, and therefore all the flavor is there for when you put it into your dough. Well, let me see what you think about this, Adam. So it's like having just tested, because I'm sure you don't go out and bake bread anymore with you know flour that you buy at the store, right? But Dax has been right.
Dax has been baking bread, uh, you know, primarily he's doing the the Jim Leahy No Need bread, right? But he's been baking it with, you know, relatively decent, you know, uh flour, AP heckers, and it's good, right? The texture of it's good. Uh we let it, you know, we retard it in the fridge for a couple, it does a slow rise for like 24 hours, then we retard it in the fridge for a couple of days, so it you know it builds up some flavor. It's good.
You know what I mean? Um but then when we used um we use first some relatively recent uh stuff milled by somebody else, but when we started milling our own uh warthog, which is the wheat we're using, it's like you're like, oh, all of those flavors that are things that you need to hide that are off flavors when the stuff's been milled and sitting around for a long time with the germ and the brand and it oxidizing. Those are actually things that you crave and love if you use it right after you mill it, right? Wouldn't you say that's true? 100%.
Couldn't agree more. So I mean, like let's not like bread made from flour, if you make good bread is going to be delicious, but there are these other flavors, and I think this is where like the coffee thing really comes through. There are these other flavors that in general you see as bad things in in kind of old stale commercially milled flour because they are bad at that point. They've been ruined, they've been oxidizing. They've gone rancid, yeah, exactly.
Right. But when you have them fresh, they're great. And so I think that's the difference. So I mean, as a recent convert, because I just got a decent grain mill up working for that time. I I I think it's I think it's good.
Anyway. So I guess we have uh also, yeah. Who knows who's up who's up next? Okay, so long time listener uh of the show, Capri Sun. Uh Capri Sun's question will be read by Jordana Rothman, friend of the show.
Uh long time uh she likes to pummel us, so we use Peter Kim as our punching bag, and then Jordana comes in and punches on us pretty much. Why haven't people pushed the tuning and development of home grain mills to the extent that has taken place with current high-end espresso grinders? Does it just not matter in the final product? Loaf of bread, shot of espresso. Well, I mean, the I think the answer is in the word espresso, meaning like express really fast, to have your result, you know, end up in about 30 seconds from an espresso is immediately gratifying.
Where bread making inherently is a long process. Even even the shortest made our time to make bread is is still at least 45 minutes. So a lot of folks aren't all that patient. I think one of the reasons why bread baking is taken off so much since we've been in quarantine is that there's a lot of time on folks' hands. So um it's not that the uh milling isn't it's not worth it's not that it's not worth it for flavor.
It's a hundred it's absolutely worth it for flavor. It's just that the time that's needed to then make bread after milling. The milling only takes a few a few seconds or maybe a few minutes if you're gonna make block. Yeah, you're you're not using a home mill if it only takes a few seconds, dude. A few minutes if if you're doing it at home, maybe 10 or 15, you know, not too bad.
Um, but certainly not as quick as it is for um just a few ounces of coffee, like an espresso. I'll give another uh uh thing on this as well is that if you go back in time, if you you know are old enough to go back in time to like 2001, 2002, like nobody uh nobody had commercial espresso machines, machines or grinders at home. Nobody. And there were websites devoted to uh, you know, how to try to get the best professional shot out of your Europiccolo, and you know, the best grinders that you could get at home were these kind of uh burr grinders. Kind of um with the advent, and an espresso wasn't that huge a deal, frankly, in the United States either.
Like, like you know, uh uh none of the huge stuff had really hit and hit here, like on the West Coast in Seattle, you had you know, Schomer and Vivace, and you had other people who were starting like the rumblings of the kind of espresso revolution here, but it hadn't happened. The what happened is a bunch of rich people started buying commercial espresso equipment at home. And then, you know, people who weren't rich, like myself, started buying commercial espresso stuff used on eBay, and there was already a big market for commercial espresso grinders and commercial espresso machines, like four uh espresso bars. And once big companies realized that there was this next tier of idiots like me who wanted this kind of like semi-pro crab, then that semi-pro crab, which was just dumbed down versions of the commercial stuff became available, like the Ranchillo Rocky grinder, which I still use to this day. So I think the reason, another reason is is that there was this whole tier of things that could be dumbed down to home use.
And Adam, you were actually talking to these mill people saying that they should hit the pros. If a bunch of pros have it, then eventually it'll trickle down to the home jerks like myself, right? Absolutely. Yeah, uh that was that was really the idea when I started talking to folks from different mill companies was if we can get it into a commercial kitchen and and people start to talk about it at that level, then it can trickle down exactly. Yeah, because because what you don't understand, what most people don't understand as uh as not manufacturers is that the cost to make like a hundred mils, mock mills, is like per mil is extremely high.
Now, if you were making, you know, 15,000 of them a year, then the price drops considerably. Also, the amount it costs you as a seller to sell each individual one, because your salary is going to stay pretty much the same. The cost to sell each one of these units goes way down, and things can become cheaper, they can become more reasonable. You can you can use different kinds of tooling, different kinds of manufacturing, you can get it much cheaper. So it's very hard to market something inexpensively unless you're making a lot of them, you know.
Absolutely. Um we have uh friend of the show, uh Deep Voice Master and our favorite uh Grinch stand in for every uh Christmas episode, Phil Bravo, to read a question, and we had this for you, Adam, because uh I know that you are a lover of olive oil and a lover of things Italian. So uh he's going to read uh Ashmeet Jately's question. Hey Dave and the issues gang. I have a question about olive oil.
Now it's gonna be inflammatory for some people, so prior discretion. I think that olive oil is not that intrinsically superior than most oils in the market. I'm not talking about the health aspects, which honestly I don't, and you don't care about, but the actual taste of it. The extremists evidently enjoy the taste of raw olive oil by itself. Now, I get that that could be nice with like a reduced tomato sauce or something, but just in its raw form, unaided, it's so overpowering and tannic to me.
As a North Indian, I am obviously not that exposed to it, which might explain my dislike. I much, much prefer ghee, or if anything, mustard oil in my cooking. Now, the question is, is raw olive oil really that great? Am I just an outlier, or is it not? And there are cultural and historical factors at play, or both in some sense.
Also, I've tried converting myself by daily tasting 10 grams of raw EV or olive oil by itself for one month just in case I might eventually like the taste of it. And the result is that I hated myself for that period. Thank you. And hope you all stay well. And so sorry for this question being this long.
Well, that's an easy one. Well, you know, obviously flavor is and taste is subjective. However, um, I think sticking with the theme of freshness, I think uh fresh olive oil certainly is something that's not available to everyone. And if you're gonna go about your objective tasting, maybe start with something that was also freshly put on a stone mill, much like the wheats. Um, in Italy, a lot of times it's just in November when they start to press it, and you get this really bright fruity flavor, but you also have to consider just how many varieties of olives there are.
So perhaps the olive oil that you know you're tasting isn't the variety that's for you. So I would certainly try to exhaust those options before you write it off. Um, I think um a majority of the population of the Mediterranean would agree that the olive oil is maybe not superior, but certainly the olive the oil of choice for the table. And if that's not quite enough to convince you to keep, you know, researching, if you go down a YouTube hole of Turkish oil wrestling, which is all on the western side past Istanbul, you should get into some olive oil after that. So that's that's my answer.
So my two cents on this one is I'm gonna give you a little bit, I'm gonna give you a little bit in the sense that uh if you're gonna heat the oil, like a lot of its like uh taste properties, and you're right, I don't care about the health properties, the supposed health properties are kind of obliterated by by high heat. And as Adam says, if you don't like the taste of uh the olive oil, then by all means use something else. But um I mean, I just happen to love the taste. And the the way to learn to love olive oil isn't to taste it uh on its own. Um because also frankly, like if you take a spoon, where the olive oil hits you on the tongue and how you inhale air afterwards is gonna radically change.
Like you could have a sample of oil hit it, you don't get a lot of pepperiness, and then you hit it, but you inhale a different way, or it hits a different part of your throat and mouth, and you'll get an entirely different sensation of that oil. And this brings it back to the episode. The best way to taste olive oil is on bread. And I have to say, olive oil on bread with salt is right up there with butter on bread with salt as two of my favorite things to eat. So I mean, I would I would kind of try it, uh, I would try it uh that you know that way uh as something, but it's definitely uh a condiment, you know.
I think there's very few dishes that dishes that require it. Um yeah, finishing oil for sure, but I mean there's certain kind of pastries that kind of require that olive oil to really be themselves, and there's uh, you know, the famous olive oil ice uh gelato, but I get your point. If you don't like it, don't don't don't use it, right, Adam or no? Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah.
Um and I think, you know, I think the part of the answer that quit was in the question when he was talking about with a uh reduced tomato. That kind of um just what you were saying, it's a good condiment. You know, if something's very acidic, it's really nice to have something that's sort of fat and voluptuous to counter it. So certainly have it with items. I don't I don't think it's probably the best showing of just walking around drinking it by itself.
Yeah, also I will say this one last thing, sorry, but like the olive oil, the olive oil kind of uh the evil empire of olive oil hegemony is run by the Italians, right? And the it the Italians in general, for their judging, often favor extremely green, extremely raw-tasting, biting, heavy, phenolic kind of uh oil, not phenolic, uh, you know what I mean, uh like bugging kind of tannic oils. They they really they favor that, right? And so kind of the more throat ripping the the better. And one of the reasons, as Adam pointed to, is because that throat-ripping stuff goes away as olive oil uh sits around.
So even before an oil becomes rancid and actually becomes destroyed, it will lose some of that fresh green biting uh kind of flavor. And hence it is prized. There are many cultures around the Mediterranean uh who make uh and you know, also in California and also in Australia, who make olive oil that um doesn't fit those criteria, and yet the judging is still based around that. So perhaps you prefer one of the more quote unquote buttery uh olive oils, because there are a lot of olive oils that have a lot of flavor but aren't huge throat rippers. That said, I love a throat-ripping olive oil.
But that's me. You know what I mean? Uh, what do you think? Any anything more? You think we're good on this one?
Yeah, no, um, that's that's definitely true. I remember I spent a little bit of time in Spain when I was living in Italy and would visit Spain, and uh some of those olive oils were much fattier, um, which was really surprising, a little less throat ripping. Um, but then it kind of made sense with what we were eating because the food was actually a little bit more throat ripping on its own end. There was more spice involved, there was a little bit more you know, picante style heat, you know. So uh an olive oil um didn't really need all those characteristics, and you could see that definitely in the food and how they were making their olive oil.
So yeah, certainly cultural. That's that's that's a good way to look at it. Also, uh Nastasia like must be loving this format because she hasn't said squat. I'm sure how many pairs of shoes have you bought on Zappos while we're gonna be able to do that. I'm just keeping everybody in line that's waiting on you to finish the question so that they can read their questions they can get on with their day.
Well, let's go to snark on the waiting the question getting on with their day. The job is to answer the questions. I know, it's just like it's it's a bolly job. Anyway, as long as okay. I'm just waiting for you to have the last word on the question, and then I'm like, okay, get ready.
It's your turn. But tell them when it's their turn. They can hear me say their name. Some people zone out. Okay.
Uh now, the next person reading a question. I don't know, I know her, but I don't know her well enough to uh jab her or make fun of her. So I'll just say who it is. Uh uh reading uh that fan off of Instagram's uh pizza question will be uh Rachel Pisgoda. Why is a 60 to 90 second pizza bait different from three plus minutes, etc.?
Is it because there's less time for moisture to escape the dough or something else? That's the easy one. Um that comes from uh Naples, the city of Naples, which is where uh my grandmother's from. That's a very specific um dough cooking method to a town that has made its own system and hierarchy or of or of pizza. Um really what it does is it leaves a dough that's wet and kind of soupy.
A lot of people actually really don't care for it when they look at it over, say a New York pizza. Um I used to go to Naples maybe once a year and would bring someone with me that had never been, and they're always so surprised on how quickly it was baked and how unsatisfying it was to them. I think it's really interesting. I love when I'm down there to try it, but um, it's really a preference. Um in those ovens also, just to give it a little bit more than just the flavor or how it's culturally made, um, they're very hot.
You know, there's somewhere between 650 and 800 degrees Fahrenheit. So one of the things is to get the dough in and out as quick as possible to get another pizza sold. Um, because it is a business and it's also uh an inexpensive food in Naples. Um so it's something to to have for lunch and and not necessarily, and I'm sure I'll get in trouble for this but don't take it too seriously just kind of eat it and go among uh you know about your day afterwards they're usually like um five to ten euro for what would be like 30 dollars here um but you you get a big burst of heat which makes all the CO2 in the dough expand really quickly so you get like the the big outside um corn you know cornuto the little corn uh on the outside the little holes um that comes from high heat and then you just get that soft interior it's really more stylistic than anything you could take those dough and bake them differently you could bake them longer you could get them crispier and it would just taste different and maybe you would like it or maybe you wouldn't and in your book Adam correct I mean correct me if I'm wrong but in your book you give different recipes for different styles of pizza dough and a lot of it has to do not just with the place. So you have a Naple you know Neapolitan you have a Roman one and a Connecticut one which we if we have time we can talk about later but then you talk about how the dough and not just the flour which you talk about a lot as well but that's you know getting in deep for people who aren't going to do their own milling but how the hydration changes depending on the oven that you're using and how the heat is applied.
And that's not something I think that a lot of people talk about in non-specialist non-pizza specialist books anyway. Yeah um try to get the idea across because if you're gonna bake in your home oven um to achieve something that tastes professional, you're gonna have to kind of deal with it. Um, I provide the recipe so that way you don't have to actually like create your own recipe, but to get an understanding that with a lower temperature or something that's not maybe um also equipped with a heavy stone, which helps keep heat regular and um and uh kind of the same throughout the whole time that you're baking. Um you have to mess with the hydration to kind of mimic your favorite style because the style that you're into or whoever is into to achieve it, you're gonna have to mess with the water because it's gonna be relative to the amount of time that's in your oven. So to have um you know a Neapolitan style pizza in your house, you're gonna have a higher hydration.
Um it's gonna ferment also a long time to also counteract that douginess that quick bake. So you're not really eating quote unquote raw flour, you're eating something that's been digested by yeast for a long time, so it's easier for it to bake, easier to digest, um, and also it just mimics that that feeling that maybe you had Naples. Um, when you have like a Detroit pizza, that's something that's baked in a pan. So inherently is gonna be slower because the pan's gonna be cold, it's something that you're gonna have to form in the pan and then put in the oven, so you're gonna have to kind of uh change for that effect on the time there. So that's gonna be you know, closer to 30 minutes, really, for something like that to bake, kind of like uh a baked pasta.
Um, and then the the other things are the water in the dough, is gonna determine how the dough stretches. Uh, more water, generally speaking, makes it easier and more elastic, the dough. So for Connecticut pizza, those are big pizzas, they're not the little um 350 gram dough weight. They're much bigger, they're like 20 something inches. Um, so you need a little bit more water in there too, um, so you can stretch it, uh, which is kind of interesting.
So they're all have an effect based really on what you're trying to achieve and the pizza that you're into. So it really comes out of style. Um, and pizza is I would say the food item that the people I know are most comfortable with um getting in a fight about. Uh, people love to argue about pizza in my uh experience. So yeah, just so people know, like some of your pizza recipes are like up like like almost 90% hydration, and then some of them are as low as like 56, 60% hydration.
So he's really he's not just he's really pushing the hydration in different directions based on what you want, right? Like your your pizza romana is looking at like 56 or 60 percent hydration. Yeah, exactly. Because those um those pizzas that you see in the windows um in Rome are are kind of like I mean, pizza and bread are are very much almost the same thing. Um, and those are a little bit more bread-like, a little bit uh they're not as thin, you know, they're not as delicate, they're slightly more hardy.
Um, and that that effect comes from having the lower hydration in 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. Here I am. I'll open up my box. Let me see here.
It comes with a uh a delicacies France and an essentials. I got fleur to sell now, fleur de cell now. Uh this is from I swear to swear to god, M. Gilles Hervé. And then I got Rancho Gordo's classic cassoulet bean.
I love uh I love cassoulet. It says a beautiful white runner bean developed by French farmers over generations to be the foundation of the classic cassoulet. Now, I have never made a cassoulet with the official bean before. I better hurry up and cook it though. It's gonna get too hot for Casserle soon.
Finally, Christmas lima beans, which I don't know anything about. All the meat of a conventional lima with a chestnut flavor, bold enough to handle chilies, curries, or just a drizzle of olive oils. Hmm. I'm interested in that. I've never I've never had this before.
It does not look like uh the kind of green lime as we have. It is white and it kind of looks like a drawing, like a wood block wood block cut of like wood and grain. It's got a real kind of cool look to it. Alright, I'm looking forward to cooking with it. Go to BendATable.com to start your own monthly subscription.
Use the discount code HRN to get $20 off a new subscription, and Bend a Table will donate $10 to support cooking issues and all of HRM's programming. Alright, next question in is from Aaron Melville and will be read by Jordana. It may be worth mentioning how much the quality of the flour can influence the pasta taste. I didn't fully appreciate this until I moved to Emilio Romagna from the US. The pasta, dried and especially fresh, can be so flavorful and varied here in Emilia Romagna, where I live now.
Supermarket flour can be very good here in Italy, where I live as well. But there are particularly fresh and excellent flowers from small local Italian, of course, producers that can change the taste of the pasta dramatically. Of course, I'm sure plenty of good producers are in the US that may be worth seeking out, but I wouldn't know because I live here in Italy. What do you have to say to Aaron slash Jordana? Well, um there is a certain amount of romance that goes in with pasta and oftentimes with bread dough starters.
People like to name their starters, but pasta is also something that the you know provenance of the flour sometimes evokes certain feelings and nostalgia. And the reason I mention it is because the reality is that a lot of Italian brands in Italy, serving in Italy, get their grain or even already pre-milled flour from the US. So that is uh something that you know is oftentimes confusing, but the arable land in the US, especially for grain, is many times larger than like the entire country of Italy, uh, which is pretty incredible when you think about it. If you go all the way down from Utah up to Canada, you know, that's a very large area, mostly growing wheat. So Italy buys a lot of it from the US, they also buy it from Australia and Ukraine.
So it's not always the effect of it being grown in Italy, but maybe the Italian standard on what it is they stock their shelves with. So the properties that you know these Italian producers are you know looking for is probably a little bit more flavor-driven. So when they make uh a wheat um kind of compilation, so when you buy an all-purpose flour, there's usually seven or more, sometimes eleven different wheats that go into what makes an all purpose, which would be double zero in Italy. And in the US, we might choose our combination for strength and to make it more foolproof to bake at home in Italy. Um, the double zero is oftentimes selected for flavor in addition to the other properties of maybe elasticity or protein.
Um, so you you know, if you're getting something from a local mill in Emilia Romagna, that's great. Um, in the US, if you're lucky enough to live generally near bigger cities because they have a larger market, um, farms will bring their grains and flours there. But small towns often sometimes have less options. You know, we're lucky in New York to have a lot. Um, and in Italy, when I worked in Italy, we actually used uh all of our flour came from a mill right in town, wasn't just a few miles away from the restaurant.
Um, I hope that answers the question. By the way, uh you're reminding me at the end of the show. Hopefully, we have time, you know, Matt'll remind us, but Nastasia hates fresh pasta. So I want foy. Foy!
Anyway, uh Wally from New Orleans has the next question. Uh this one will be read by Mike Van Dorn. Like everyone else, I'm trying to make bread again. But like the last five years of attempts, I still can't get that Leidenheimer thin crust, light crumb that lasts exactly 12 hours before it needs to be used in bread pudding or crumbs. Po-boy loaf, actually pistolettes.
I've had some nice looking loaves since I piped steam in them from the pressure cooker. It's a great spring. But the crumb is still leaden. I found a bon mi recipe that looks doable, but it calls for bread enhancer. Well, there was is a run on that too.
What does it do and what can I substitute it for? I found lecithin, citric acid, wheat gluten. Also, I was robbed last week buying a pound of fresh saff instant gold dust. Ah, yeast, as the block that I bought in the Bahamas three years ago seemed a little tired, although it was only open for two. Any other advice other than go visit the family in New Orleans?
By the way, for those of you that don't know, the Leidenheimer, I believe, and Adam can correct me here, but that's the bakery in New Orleans that I think makes the official po'boy loaves. But it is a New Orleans uh bakery. Powboy, of course, is the sandwich that everyone gets in New Orleans, and people are as jazzed about that bread as the specific, like people are super jazzed about bon me uh loaves. But anyway, Adam, you have anything on this? Yeah, I think this is an interesting thought because it's not really a question um in the realm of health or like flavor, because typically those um those bon me's and and uh those kind of French bread things aren't known for flavor but known for textures.
It really sounds like this guy's trying to achieve a certain texture. Um I I wouldn't want to speak on behalf of specific bakeries, you know, don't uh on what they're using, but oftentimes um those kind of more industrialized products are you use a bromated um mixture, so they bromate the flour, which is uh sodium bromate, which is illegal um to use in a lot of European nations. But we embrace it here in the US. It's like a dough fixer, it helps things rise and also helps with the coloring in the crust. That would be one uh way to go about it is to use bromated flour for your texture because we're talking about texture here.
Um the other way is to use some malt. Um there's dry malt, there's a couple versions, but I prefer using the malt that kind of looks like uh honey, almost like a syrup. Um, a little bit of sugar goes a long way in a crust or texture. Um, so I once had it described uh that the crispiness of those Bon Mi breads should almost sound like walking on, you know, like fresh laid snow, that little bit of crunch. So that that comes from having a little bit of sugar inside the dough if you're not using uh a dough enhancer such as uh bromated flour.
Um, you know, get into the sugar realm a little bit, try that. Um, and then also uh before you bake, you can let a crust start to form on your dough. So make sure it's exposed to air for a certain amount of time before you bake it, and that'll also give a little bit more crispiness, but can make your bread a little more dense. So it's a slippery slope. All right, so I'm reading the ingredients here that are on one of them, and it looks like it's got weak gluten, so that's gonna increase rise, but also gonna take a little more water and make it harder to work with, right?
For sure. Uh it's got also whey and milk powder, that's gonna make it brown more, right? Yep, exactly. It's got now, as opposed to maltos to sugar, it's got diastatic malts, meaning they're adding enzymes that are also gonna break down some of the starch in the broken starch into sugar and cause the yeast to rise more dramatically. Is that correct?
Yeah, you'll get a faster rise from that that kind of mole. Uh, and then it also has ascorbic acid, which is vitamin C. What what what is the what is the antioxidant thing doing in there? What's the effect of vitamin C on the bread? So vitamin C and also uh in the presence of uh acidity too, if you actually add different like vinegars to doughs and whatnot, is uh is for strengthening it.
Um it kind of helps with the overall structure strength of the dough, which will really make it more dense. Um, it doesn't make it more elastic, it just improves the strength. So, i.e. whatever the product you're eating, they're probably using a softer flour. So that way it's an air like a lighter feeling bread.
Um, so that way it's got like a wonder grip quality, and then they add vitamin C to give it a little bit more strength. Um to achieve the crust. That's so funny because it's counterintuitive, right? Because you think that like over-acidic dose, if it's too much acid, obviously it weakens the gluten and makes the crust not brown, but a little bit of ascorbic acid kind of goes the other direction. It's kind of interesting.
Yeah, you can use it in puff pastry too. You'll see some people do that. Um that was where I first learned how to use it. Huh, cool. Uh all right.
Uh now we have from one manic ninja, Phil Bravo. Hi, to all of you out there in the far-flung reaches of Heritage Radio. I just bought a bag of beans called horse gram from my local Indian grocery store. They're tiny beans, and they vary in color from dark brown all the way to light tan, but unfortunately, so are the rocks that are hidden among the beans. Rinsing them in a colander has proven to be futile, as both the beans and the rocks are roughly the size of mung beans.
I've picked over the dry beans and then soaked them and picked them over again just to be sure. After pressure cooking, the beans are soft but remain intact, and you just you just can't tell when you spooned up a rock until you crunch one between your bowlers. Is there some magic bean-cleaning trick that I can try? Or as I have no horse, should I just throw them out to avoid breaking a tooth during this global pandemic? Love the show and grateful that y'all keep on keeping on during these trying C19 times.
Wow. Phil. Adam, before you answer that, I know some of the are that that's the last one of the ones that we're having read by callers. I want to thank uh Phil. I want to thank Mike.
I want to thank Rachel. I want to thank Jordana for uh reading those questions for us and doing the tests. Uh, we appreciate it. And Adam, the reason I had them read this one for you is because when you're buying wheat at home, sorting your wheat is another thing you're gonna have to do, wheat or rye. And so I thought maybe you could talk about that as well.
Yeah, no, it's a great question. Um what so here's the thing to that is also kind of uh breaking that fourth wall of the romance of baking and cooking, is you know, much like you know, I always talk about it with grandmothers, how people really adore grandmothers, but at one point they weren't grandmothers and probably did some pretty evil things. So don't always trust those sneaky nonas. Um, same thing is with farmers. We have this sort of adornment with all farmers, and as we should.
I mean, they do feed us, and it's kind of the most important job one of on the planet. But you know, there's a way to make ends meet, and there's certain farms that aren't really run by an individual and more of a larger company, and uh it all comes down to their care for the product. So, with grain specifically, like wheat, um, I always look at the grain before I buy it and kind of just mull over it. A few things you can learn just from looking at it with just a regular, like say bread-making wheat, whether it's hard or soft or spring or winter, look at if they are all the same size. If they're all the same size, then probably the seed that was used is more or less a seed that wasn't made for flavor but was bred for production.
So they're all kind of uniform, which will let you know that they won't have too many interesting flavors going on, kind of just one. But also, if you look past that, you if you see stones in your grain, then that means they're not using a seed cleaner, which kind of just sorts everything out. There is 120, 130-year-old equipment and patents out there on how to separate these things. So you don't have to separate all the rocks at home, except for maybe the errant one here or there. So if your beans are full of stones to the point where you're nervous of ruining your teeth, I would absolutely throw them in the bin and get a better quality bean, a bean that someone loved and someone cared about, and was like, what separate the stones out for you before they get there?
So that way when you check out, you know, if there's some stones, there's maybe only just one or two. Because if it's full of stones, um, then the farming practice really didn't take the time to clean it or take care of it, which means other things could be in there, other things that you don't want, or even in the growing process before. Who knows if your beans were just blasted with pesticide, and that would be worse than eating a rock, I imagine. So um, it just kind of means that someone didn't care for the beans, they're probably a inexpensive beans, and the jump in bean quality price isn't all that much. I wouldn't mind paying four dollars a pound as opposed to two if it meant you get to stay out of the dentist.
Right, and there's there's different ways that people separate things out commercially, right? So you can separate based on weight, and there are machines that separate based on density, and that's by the way, how you're supposed to get rid of them stones, because the odds that they weigh the exact same that they have a similar density to the bean, relatively low. Um another way is based on size. And so, for instance, uh I had a sack of uh organic warthog wheat from a relatively small producer, and clearly the classifier that they had dumped the wheat into to you know make sure that they weren't sending me whole rats or something like this was um exactly the same size as the cracked corn that they had just classified before it, and so like there was all pieces of cracked corn, not a lot, but like you know, maybe out of a 25-pound bag, maybe I got like 10-15 grams of cracked corn out of it. You know what I mean?
So uh, you know, and like errant buckwheat growth. I know rye often has a lot of like non-ry seeds in it, right? Yeah, uh, just because that's just how it works. Um, but yeah, I mean, sometimes these smaller producers, I think, have a tough time. But then some people like Rancho Gordo, you're paying for a lot for their beans, you never find anything kind of untoward in in those beans.
But I'll say this. You come across what I typically do with things I don't trust beforehand is I get a full-size sheet pan, full size. Then get like a a quart container, never more, and never fill it more than this, because a full like a full-size sheet pan will take about a full quart container. And then slowly sprinkle, sprinkle the stuff onto a big sheet pan, and then do a where's Waldo on the sheet pan and look around, and you'll get an idea just from one sheet pan's worth, Lana, what is hiding inside of your uh stuff. Now Dave, you know what my job was as a kid?
We used to have beans and rice like three times a week. I had to sort through all of the beans and pull out all the rocks, and for years, from like you know, three years old till 18. Hated it. So, how'd you do it? Uh you would they would we would put it in a bowl and then take handfuls and look through each handful and then put each bean that was a bean into the other bean bowl.
Oh, I wish I was dead. Yeah, and small little child hands, too. So that's the best. Yeah. Yeah.
Did your your mom also had you polish the inside of the ammunition, like you know, with your tiny hands? Um, yeah, well, that's rough stuff. I mean, like, you know what? I I like that I like that even you know, over a decade of working together, there's still little dark secrets I can learn about you. It's amazing.
I know. Uh yeah. Um, but another thing you should sort people, and I said this on the show before: pistachio nuts and coffee. I do the same thing with green coffee. Like, I don't care how good your supplier is of green coffee, the odds that you don't have some of those stinker beans, like horribly molded or crazy beans.
So anything like that that's like not quote unquote natural or like from like some sort of small thing and hasn't gone through some sort of industrial process until I trust that specific batch. I always do at least one sheet tray full of stuff to look at it and see where I'm going. Pistachio nuts, even the high expensive ones, uh, you always get a couple of shrivelers. And like I've done tests on making like pistachio orjah with unsorted pistachios versus sorted pistachios, even of expensive ones. And the one or two bad pistachios can destroy an orjah compared to what it would be like normally.
I don't know how how bad is it when you get one or two, like you know how you get those like weird fungusy wheat things every once in a while, those little weird black, you know, black wheat kernels. How much will one of those mess you up? Pretty good. And actually, when you're talking about rye, one of the things to look at with rye is if it's uh turned pink, you'll see these little pink uh rye beans sometimes, and that lets you know there's fungus on the rye. And it's even harder to distinguish because it's the same size, but it's definitely good advice to look through those things.
Look through any kind of uh organic um granule, you know, anything. You're gonna write a uh uh a young, a young adult boy novel called The Fungus in the Rye. Uh Ecklus. Of course, being misunderstood in a in a field of wheat for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Uh all right now we're gonna in the in the bar. Well, Jesus, it's not even one yet. What's wrong with you people? All right, I'm gonna rip through this, Adam.
Feel free to chime in on this. Uh we got a question on Instagram from at Foxwoods. Uh, what's Dave's take on negative percolation, how much flavor extraction, safety, etc. Now, this is a post on Instagram. You can look it up, Antonio underscore bartender, who is uh Antonio Filipini.
I know him, and what he does is is he takes um he takes dry ice, throws it into a mocha pot. And for those of you, mocha pot are those like aluminum stovetop coffee makers. Uh, and so then you he throws in the dry ice, he throws in the uh the uh vanilla syrup and the and the alcohol and into the percolation basket puts coffee, then the dry ice chills and pressurizes the bottom container, which we normally do on the stove. It pushes the stuff up and over through the coffee and then makes an espresso martini, which he then pours into a glass. Apparently, also the glass has dry ice.
Uh look, if it tastes good, I don't think it's gonna blow up because those things are inherently not sealed and there's an overpressure safety. It makes me a little bit nervous because anytime you're putting freezing stuff in, uh freezing water can block all the safeties and cause there to be problems. So it makes me a little bit nervous, but there are multiple safeties, so it only makes me as long as gas is coming out of it. Uh uh if gas wasn't coming out of it, I would be excessively worried. But if as long as it's currently venting, I don't think it's gonna explode, so I think it's okay, but I never think it's an okay idea to serve dry ice to uh people.
Uh, you got any uh espresso martini ideas, guys? Okay. Steven DeSenta writes in from Chicago regarding Topo Chico Stelser. I'm a big fan of Topo Chico, both for cocktail applications and for general drinking. It seems to be more strongly carbonated and retained bubbles longer than other similar products, even long after the bottle is open, and definitely outperforms the water I carbonate with my own CO2 rig.
What's the best way to achieve this at home if it's even possible? So has it anything to do with the glass bottle packaging? Well, the glass bottle, by the way, is a lot better for long-term storage than anything else. Once you're going to store something, it better be in glass because the uh the plastic just leaks CO2. Um, any advice on how to choose something similar at home will be much appreciated, Steven for Chicago.
So the deal with Topochico is first of all, if you want that high level of carbonation, you need to get rid of all of the gas that's in the water before you do it. So, you know, in general, what we do is we do multiple carbonations, like four or five carbonation runs if you really care about it, and that'll blast out all of the gas. Commercially, what they do is they suck a vacuum on the water to suck all of the oxygen and nitrogen, everything out of it, and then replace it all with CO2, and then they use a much higher pressure. So you need very highly filtered water so it has no nucleation sites. You need then very clean glassware so that it's not nucleating.
You need to get all of the gas out beforehand and you need to car uh uh pressurize to a higher level. Stas good enough? Yep. All right. Uh Elvin Young wrote in about co you got anything on that, Adam or no?
I think what you're gonna say. No, no, it's good. All right, Dave, don't you want to continue with bread stuff since you have four minutes? Or you want to go more bread stuff? I'm ripping through the non-screen.
Oh, I thought you wanted to talk to me about stuff from his book. I do, but I'm gonna do that at the very end. Hold on a sec. Elvin Young wrote in about cocktails. I'll get you next week, Elvin, when we have more time for cocktails.
And uh uh Elisio wrote in about Instagram on Classics in the Field. I appreciate your comments. We'll do that next week when we do classics in the field again, because today's classic in the field is uh the flower lab, which you should go buy. Although, god dang it, Adam, you can't get that thing on Amazon. Anything bread related, you can't get on Amazon right now.
I didn't know. Buy it from uh it's everything's you have to buy the ePUB copy. Did you know that apparently your book is great on Kindle? In quotes, great on Kindle, and that if I buy your book on Kindle for I don't know, like 16 bucks, they'll give me 11 dollars in credit to buy some other ratty Kindle book. Did you know that?
I didn't. I mean, that sounds like a great deal. Yeah, now it is a great deal. Now you know, and knowing in this case is all the battle. Now I'm gonna pepper you with some bread questions, like Nastasia uh told me to.
Okay, listen. Your sourdough slash uh, how do you pronounce Levan anyway? Levan, how do you say it? Levane, Levan, Le Who? Uh Levan, that's what I always say.
Levan, Levan? Uh John, uh, Mr. Frenchman, how do you pronounce it? Levan. Ah, you all right.
So your recipe for that is rather professional in the sense that you gotta feed the sucker every 12 hours, like if you're gonna use it. You're like, yeah, you could keep it in the fridge for like a week, but then the day before you're gonna use it, you better start feeding it every 12 hours, or you're a jerk. Is there a way to make a home friendly like sourdough or lavan that doesn't need a full 24 hours to come back up, but that only requires that you bake once a week? Yes. Um, you can take a like a um a Levan from the fridge and mix it directly in and make bread.
It's just that your dough is gonna take a really long time to ferment because everything is in a slower state. Um, but you could go right from the fridge into a dough. Um, and instead of say six hours of total fermentation, it'll end up being 10 or 12 on its own. Um, but that'll cut out the 12 hours or 24 hours of bringing your Levant back. Uh the bread won't be as of high quality.
That's why I really try to um tell anyone that's baking at home. If you're looking to just have bread because you like bread and you and it's like part of your diet, um, don't be afraid of yeast, especially if you have a mill and you're making flour, because you'll still get a lot of flavor. You can still use yeast, you can ferment it overnight or two days, or you can really control the schedule. So don't be afraid of just buying some commercial yeast. But in order to really have a Levan um work properly, you're gonna have to bring it back.
Yeah. Uh what's the difference in quality, by the way? Like what's when you say slightly lower quality, like what what is the effect going to be flavor-wise? Quality. That's an interesting word, but uh when you use a wild yeast, you get many different strand strands of bacteria working all together.
So you get uh layered um flavor. Whereas if you use a commercial yeast, you're only really buying one or two different kinds of bacteria strands, and you're only gonna get that flavor profile. Um so you just get more flavor from a wild yeast. And also from uh a starter that you've let come back up to room temperature and feed twice before you use it. Yeah, exactly.
Because then you're um getting rid of all the dead yeast cells, um, which are not as pleasant to digest. Um you're replenishing it with a new food source, and so then you're you're and you're adding in living organisms as opposed to partially living, some dead um into the bread. You just reminded me of the DMX quote. It's hard to digest with the size of the hole in your chest. Man.
Oh it. So listen, uh you mentioned it, I think only once or twice, but other internet sources go off on the heat generated from the mill and trying to keep the flour below 110. Isn't that Fahrenheit? Don't you think that's kind of a garbage number, 110? I mean, it's not like you're gonna wipe out the enzymes as soon as it goes over 110, because the milling doesn't take that long anyway.
Yeah, no, um, that problem is more for commercial milling, or if you were using a conical burr grinder that wasn't cooled. Um, and it's really like I'm not a scientist. This was just from when I spent time at the uh bread lab in Seattle, and just the information from Washington State University that was given to me is that the optimal amount of enzymatic activity and everything was below, you know, 114 degrees, um, give or take. Those folks are badasses, huh? Yeah, really badass for sure.
The WSU uh bread lab people. All right. Another thing, you do something which is, I think in the book, atypical in terms of uh how you do your sifting, right? So kind of like the way you see most people sifting, and the way I set up my sifting rig is is that I have a 40 mesh, a 50 mesh, and a 60 mesh screen, and then I put them through successively, right? And then I have like coarse, fine, finer, and flour, right?
Yeah. You put everything through a 70, which for most people, by the way, 70, what that means, people is 70 lines per inch, right? So uh, and then and then depending on uh how thin your wires are, there will be the opening space, isn't necessarily that that's what's messed up about using mesh sizes, is they don't necessarily say what the open space, what the whole size is, which is actually more important for what we're doing than how many wires per inch there are, but whatever. So like uh 70 is extremely fine, like finer than any one of those, like uh like finer than the than the the mill people make. They they do I think uh a 50 and a 60 or a 40.
Yeah, 50. 50 is pretty typical. Yeah. So and then you have and you also most people talk about extraction flour, so they'll say I use 85% flour, meaning 85% of the what I grind ends up in the flour, and 15% ends up as kind of the either I use for dusting or for whatever, right? The brand and stuff.
Uh whereas you remove everything appears that you remove everything that won't go through a 70 mesh and then add that in as a proportion of included brand and other things. How come you go that way? And what do you think the difference between the two methods uh or the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods? You know, I really thought um that the I you know I think if the book was gonna be successful, um, when I was working on fresh milled products, there weren't any, there wasn't any literature for me to learn. I had to really learn from um working with bakers.
So um the problem with brand is that it cuts your gluten structure as if it's a razor blade. Um so if you separate inherently with stone milling, there's always gonna be an amount of brand present, no matter how fine you go. So that's a good thing. There's a lot of flavor in brand, there's a lot of um nutrients. Um so by taking out the larger flakes of brand in the beginning, you now have a control of building the structure of the dough.
And with a lot of these, you know, higher hydration, uh, more artisanal loaves, there's a lot of folding going on after quite a bit of strength has been built. So to incorporate the brand later, you're going to get all of the health benefits, the flavor benefits, but you'll also have the structure. So by completely separating it, you can choose um in what realm of a product that you want to produce. Um that's important more and more. Like probably bread is the easiest to do, honestly.
You can make a bread without any sifting at all. Um, but if you want to make a really nice puff pastry, um, you're trying to capture all the uh gas from the butter melting at a high temperature, um, and all those milk solids going up. So or a piece of bran cutting a hole in your dough is not going to help that. So you're gonna need to extract, but you can then add the bran back in later or add it to the butter itself. Um, and it just gives you uh a tool on how to get closer to 100% use of the grain that you're buying.
But do you see a big like once you've removed it? So like a 70 is gonna get rid of almost anything, right? But then do you see there to be a big difference between, for instance, the stuff that is in between a 40 and a 50 versus the stuff that's in between a 50 and a 60 versus the stuff that's excluded by a 40? Is there and there's like do those does the size of those fractions, which is a huge difference for a user to feel in their fingers. Are all of those fractions equally, as you say, small knife cutting, or the finer they are, the less of an effect they have.
There's um there's a quite a bit of scientific information on that subject. Um, where is it even down the milling process? Is it better for dough structure at any inclusion to be stone milled or burr-ground? Um, because a stone mill kind of crushes it and you know, kind of like I said, permanently bonds the brand to a lot of the germ and starch, or where a burr grinder actually slices, keeping the the grain sliced almost evenly, um, you can have a better form of separation, which also is why people do roller mills for large production, is because it's really easy to separate the brand. Um, but incrementally, as it gets smaller, uh or sorry, the the finer, if you're going in between say very fine and very coarse, um it would be better to go very coarse to get the brand off in a larger piece to completely fully exclude it out.
Um, but between say 50, 60, 40, um it's not a whole world of difference for hands-on um bread making or dough making, as far as that effect of shortening the gluten strands. Cool. Now, uh one more. Uh the home mills, like the $300 style home mill, whether you're gonna get a mock mill or whether you're gonna get a um uh a coma or one of these other things. And uh, like I said, you are not a fan of, and neither have I been a fan of any of the kind of metal burr uh grain mills that are out there um are those that style that 300 in change dollar style of mill are they gonna get you the same kind of results if as long as you're willing to spend the time that you could get out of the kind of your bakery level mill yeah um I was using that's very recent that they've achieved that um in 2012 I was using a eight-inch stone um industrial mill and to get that quality really wasn't until the last uh three or four years with the mock mill which has like a one or two inch stone um the material is the same as synthetic stone um and the distance between the runner stone and the bedstone the stone that moves and the stone that stays um is now so easy to dial in that I prefer the small home mill and I use it for all the baking at the restaurant now because it just takes up less space and the bread making process is so long anyway that you can schedule milling you know to work with your with you know how you're operating um so the size of the mill isn't all that important until you really scale up and you just need a lot more flour.
Now uh all right so everyone should go on caviar and order you can order Adam's um flour and his starter and you can order bread and you can order pasta and you can order all that stuff if you live in New York City. So do that. Support a restaurant. That's open. Thank you.
Yes, you're welcome. Uh appreciate having you on. Stas, you want to get this caviar again is where you're going? Yeah, you're going to order from Sophia's S O F I A apostrophe S, right, Adam? Yep.
On uh Go Caviar. And you want to give him your social or people can ping back on you, Adam, and let them know about your uh bread talk uh show ideas. Social Security is what he's talking about. Yeah, yeah. 057.
Um it's uh Adam Leonti. That's that's it. Just my name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.
Adam, thanks a lot. Thanks for being on the show, and thanks again to our readers for reading the questions. See you next week. Cooking is cooking issues is powered by Simplecast. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network.
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