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. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issue.
This is Dave Harlem, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the lower east side of Manhattan with John coming to you from Murray Hill. And Nastasia coming to you from Stanford, Connecticut. And Matt coming to you from the booth in Brooklyn, but God knows where in Brooklyn, because it ain't at Roberta's. How you guys doing? Good.
Doing great. Yeah. Doing good. So uh Stas, how are you like in your uh how you like in your Stanford only life now? It's fine.
Yeah? You don't have your air conditioner installed in your house yet? I don't have an air conditioner, no. Did you have central air in your New York apartment? Uh I had air con I had like the they were part of the apartment, yeah.
You know, I have an air conditioner in Connecticut you could borrow if you really need one. I don't I don't like air conditioners, but thank you. Wait, you come from Los Angeles and you don't like air conditioners? We never use the air conditioner in LA either. Oh my god.
Are you one of those like like why? I don't know. Power? Um what do you mean power? Like the power over your body to be uncomfortable, like No, like electricity, um you know, money spent on electricity.
But like. Okay. Huh. But you you didn't say you were worried about the money. You said you don't like air conditioning.
Yeah, well, I learned not to like it. I've never, like, we've never used it. I've never used it in New York. Like, I've been in cars with you in the summertime, and you definitely use air conditioners when you're No, I don't. What?
I put the windows down. How do you forget that? It's like one of your biggest pet peeves. Let me tell you something about air conditioning. He's blocked out.
Like, like, there are whole sections of this country that are completely unlivable without air conditioning. For instance, Arizona. Like, you wonder why you wonder why so many people got shot in the old west. It's because they didn't have air conditioning. Have I talked about this on the air?
Here's what here's what happened. You're in the old west, it's 118 or 120 degrees. It's just hot as anything. There is there, you can't spare the water to like just do ethaporative cooling on yourself because water's in freaking short supply. You have like terrible coffee, you have whiskey, and you have 118 degree heat and you have dust, right?
You're sitting there, someone comes into your saloon, and they give you guff. The only thing you have the energy to do is to pick up a gun and shoot them in the face. That's it. That's why that's why there are so many gunfights back then because like what else are you gonna do? You're not gonna go outside and have a fist fight too hot.
You ever guess you're wearing all that crap? All that leather, all the leather and the big felt hat, which you need for protection against the freaking cows and the freaking, like you know, Russian thistle tumbleweed garbages and freaking Seguaro cactuses or cacti or whatever they're called. So you're wearing all of this freaking gear, this giant protective hat that you need, otherwise you're gonna like light on fire because there ain't no sunscreen. Was it still that hot though, with the ozone layer being different back then? Oh, it was hot, dude.
First of all, like let's say it was one degree colder. Let's say it was 120 instead of 121. Like 120 degrees in Phoenix is I don't care what people say about dry heat. It's a dry heat. It's a try heat, it's a dry heat.
I love it. You step inside of an oven. You're like, don't worry, it's an oven, it's a dry heat. You know what I mean? It's like it's like 120 is just not tenable.
And I'm this is my theory is this is why so many people got shot in the old west. Just it's just you have no energy to do anything else. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, what would you mean you'd probably shoot people right out here in the east?
But it is true that wait, Gabe. How was you were in Connecticut in your house? Oh no, wait. Where where were you? No, Miley and Wiley.
So uh, you know, the family tested positive for the corona antibodies, and Jen's sisters have been odd uh Jen's sisters have been quarantining. Oh, what? Did you call yourself? Because that's what you always do to me during events. You like ring during events, you're like, it's no, is it clear?
This person is anyway. So uh for the like uh Matt, you can't cut that out now. Now that we've addressed it, you can't like normally Matt would have the ability to cut out. Oh no, okay. Yeah.
No, we've kind of been a warts and all operation for the past few months. Or as I like to call it all warts. It's like uh there's the Captain Crunch cereal that's all crunch berries. It goes on the cover, they go, oops! All berries.
Really, they did it on purpose. Not a bad thing. It wasn't a mistake, though. Oops! Anyway.
Oops. So we're positive. Dax was not positive. I said this last week. He was one point shy of becoming positive on his antibody titer.
And so his phrase, as I said, was I got a 64 on a pass failed test. So anyway, so he but then he got a slob test to show that he's not currently active. And so we've been quarantined for forever, and Jen's sisters have been quarantined together for forever. And so we brought the two of us together as like separately quarantined and tested groups. And so it was nice.
I didn't post anything from it because I didn't want to show non-distanced uh irresponsible media posting, but it was like super nice to be able to see like human beings again in a semi-normal uh environment. And I'm sure people would want to know like what you and Wiley cooked together since you're both, you know, clickbait for this type of thing. They ordered out. Click we did. Yeah, we did.
That'd be awesome. We ordered out. Yeah. Yeah. What do you imagine that we would order out?
If we were gonna order something out, what would it be? Hot oil pizza. What? What's hot oil pizza? I don't know, but I could you what is hot oil pizza?
I'm trying to figure it out. I'm gonna develop this recipe now. What is it? Hot oil that you love on pizza is a phone. Oh, sauce.
Instead of sauce, well, I mean, hey, hey, hey, hey, it's Doz. I you just came up with a brilliant idea. You know how? Because you know that like uh it's already exists. What do you mean?
I'm hot oil pizza is a thing here. It's called hot oil pizza. Yeah, I lived in Connecticut for many, many years. I've never heard of it. Who sells hot oil pizza?
Oh, in Stanford. Stanford is the Stanford, for those of you that don't know, Stanford, Connecticut is like the first kind of big town as you leave New York going up the coast city, uh going up the coast. I guess Rye, but come on, Stanford is bigger, a lot bigger than Rye. And it's the first one in Connecticut because it's a lot bigger than Greenwich. And so uh it is the ugliest skyline of any city I have ever seen in my life.
It has the ugliest architecture. Hartford? No, Stanford. Hartford is Stanley Burns. No, but don't you think Hartford is bad?
Oh, Hartford is terrible. No, Bridgeport is great. Bridgeport has blight. What? But all those old factory buildings are fantastic buildings.
Like the buildings themselves are awesome. It like it's been destroyed by years of neglect and punishment. Um and kind of you know, lack of investment and all sorts of problems, like, you know, like destroyed neighborhoods by putting highways through it and stuff. But the the actual bones of Bridgeport, the buildings themselves are not horrible. Stanford is where like it's it's like you know how when you become a tattoo artist, like you find a really good friend to let to to let you do the first tattoo because it's gonna suck.
This is like where every architect goes and is like, you know, they just graduated from using like Duplo blocks. They went from like Legos to Duplos because the bigger, they can make bigger things with duplos, and then they're like, okay, now you can build a freestanding structure in Stanford. And that's how ugly the buildings are in Stanford. Stanford is the city that brought you such amazing things as hey, it's the building we built upside down so that no floor gets light. Or, hey, listen.
You know what I'm talking about, Matt, right? I do know. I every time on the drive, I'm just like, what why did they do that? Why do they do that? Or they have a building where they're like, listen, we'll give you 15% off the glass if the glass is so wavy and pillowed that this thing looks like the entire building is is pressurized by air from a distance because the glass is so crappy.
You know what I mean? You know, like that. I think it's that Elizabeth Arden building that has the black kind of mirrored glass, it's just done so poorly that you you wish you could just take a wrecking ball to all those hideously ugly buildings. They have the most conspicuous, crappy parking lot right next to the highway. I mean, like, there's nothing good about the architecture of Stanford, and I'm saying this not as a professional architecture critic, but just as someone who has to drive by quite a lot.
Now, where Nastasia lives in Stanford, quite nice. They should make a similar agreement with the graduates of the Wrecking Ball Academy, and they could have them do their first practice wrecking ball. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. Yeah, my dream would be to combine the smell, not of Elizabeth.
I know Elizabeth is a city where people enjoy it in New Jersey, but the smell of the New Jersey Turnpike as you travel next to the Ko Gen and next to the um uh oil like refinery spots in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I want to combine that smell with the 80s, 90s, early 2000s urban architecture of Stanford, right by I-95. If you could combine that into one thing, you'd get everyone's kind of conception of suburban nightmare. You know what I mean? Okay, what did you and Miley cook?
Yeah, I forgot that's what we're talking about. Yeah. Um, again, Nastasia's house in Stanford, quite nice, quite nice. Nastasia, like, I I like if you stuck a lighthouse beacon on top of Nastasia's uh lighthouse, she would be the William Defoe character from the lighthouse. Like, like this billy just pull your beans.
Like that? She'd be like just sitting there doing that over and over again. Which is weird because you wouldn't picture Nastasia living in a lighthouse because she hates things that are haunted, and I would guess that nine out of ten lighthouses are haunted. Well, I got over the haunting of this place, and I was like, you know what? F it.
Yeah. You need to move out. I'm gonna be here for a while. Nastasi and I weren't like well, yeah. And now since you're gonna be there for the rest of the life, you'll haunt it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, she has to murder the actual owners first so that she can then they'll haunt it first, and then when she dies, she can haunt it. But Nastasia and I and a group of other people were looking into this lighthouse in Fairfield, which is another place in Connecticut on the coast, and there's this jump. I love what you did.
What do you mean? What'd I do? We were gonna buy it, and then you were like, huh. It says that the that the fog horn goes off every, I think it was like nine minutes or something, and you were like, I wonder if I could tolerate that. So then in the lab, you you set a fog horn alarm to go off every nine minutes, and we were sitting in there, and we were like, no, no, no, we shouldn't buy this.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was that was a mistake, because at my parents' place in Newport, when it's foggy, they if that happens, and like you just you don't hear it, you see something if it's on top of your head, I think it's different. Oh yeah, it's like wearing a fog horn helmet. So, what happened is they have all these lighthouses that are going up the coast, and they used to need lighthouse keepers. So this particular one actually they say is haunted because there was a lighthouse keeper, I forget when maybe Nastasia members, early 1900s, and uh there was the lightkeeper and the assistant lighthouse keeper, and there's this long jetty, and so the lighthouse keeper had to go back to land during this storm for something.
The light, the the dinghy that that he was on founders, and he's in the water, and he's like, Yeah, yo. Uh well, we'll say it was Nastasi. Yo, Nastasia, help me out. And Stasi's like, nah, I think I want to be lighthouse keeper. And that's it.
And the guy drowned. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so then the guy who drowned apparently haunted the Fairfield Lighthouse. Anyway, the Fairfield Lighthouse is amazing.
So imagine like it's a pile of rocks and a house built on a foundation of a pile of rocks with a full 360 view, and you're like half a mile. You're in the water, you're half a mile down a jetty in the water. I mean, just amazing, but then it would have cost us a lot of money to fix it up and use it as like a multi-family like vacation place. And then, yeah, we looked it up. So they they mechanized all these lighthouses.
So the light going off, that's not a problem. That's cool, right? It's just that every time, every time there's inclement weather, there's an automated fog horn like in your house. You're like, oh my god, thank God that's a me uh. You know what I mean?
And it's it's not often enough that you can tune it out. You know how like when your neighbor's like you're like, okay, fine, I get it. You lock into the beat, but then the song changes and you get thrown out of the beat and you have to get re-locked in. Well, the interval of a fog horn is exactly designed to not have you get into your chills, chill zone. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, you need to hot rod the fog horn so it goes off on a more repetitive, like frequent basis. Yeah. So that would be like the unz. Yeah. Me yo, meep, meep, meep, meep, me yo.
And you'd be like, all right, I'm like, you know. Chef John Paul is in the chat questioning whether this is actually a cooking show. Uh, yeah. Wiley and you made anything, Dave? Okay, so I'll say this.
So uh Dax brought, so here's what we brought. I brought, uh it was generously uh sent to us uh a side of Ora King salmon. So Oh, did they pay you to talk about this? No. Oh.
You said what did you eat? You asked me what I ate. I asked you what you cooked. Wait, but because it was cured and sliced and not cooked. Did you did you make it?
Wiley, I gave it to Wiley. I described what I wanted to have happen. I don't like to do things in other people's freaking kitchens unless they specifically ask me to. Wait, cook what did you eat, and now you're saying I can't talk about it because you like what? Anyway, Oricing salmon.
They gave us a side of that, and um, and Booker, of course, wanted that. So Wiley did the old school cure that we like learned from the Gohan Society back in the day, which is like way overly complicated. Like, whenever I do the salmon, it's just like a little bit of sugar, salt, and then I like put the towel, like I take the skin off, obviously, and then I put I take off the you know the the blood lines and the the dark brown fat part. But then um I just wet a towel with a little bit of like water and and vinegar and put it over the fish and let it sit for a while before I cook it. Wiley did the full-on Gohan society where first it's a little sugar, then you wait, then it's a little salt, then you wait.
Then it's like the sport towel. By the way, sport towels are a thing. I don't think anyone like no one can afford sport towels, but like every sushi person that we uh dealt with back when we were doing the Gohan Society uh stuff at the FCI, and they were all about the sport towel, this incredibly expensive disposable towel that they would use for like all of the fish work. Amazing stuff. Anyway, so uh sport towel with a little bit of uh vinegar with a little bit of uh uh soy and a tiny tiny bit of sugar over the top and like let it let it cure out, and then of course because I asked him, I was like, yo, Wiley, you got your Yanagi in Connecticut, or he's like, I have a Yanagi in Connecticut, because of course Wiley doesn't have just one Yanagi, and so then they slice that up for uh for Booker, and then he made uh what else did we have?
Oh, I made some steaks. I bought a bunch of steaks and I did a pre-cook on them. So I uh because I'm lazy and stupid, I like I don't advocate this, although I kind of do, is that if the vac pack looks good that it comes in from the store, I'll literally just do my low temp uh for insurance on the vac pack. So uh, you know, Wegmans was selling a like four you know choice ribeyes for like like all in a big blister pack, you know. Like you know how pills come in a blister pack.
Imagine steaks in a giant blister pack. You know what I'm talking about, Nastasia? It's like four steaks like on a grid. So I was like, to hell with it. So I like I folded the uh like I took when you're cooking low temp, one mistake that a lot of people make, right, is to let the meat like sit together so that water can't flow in between the individual pieces of meat, and this increases so if you've therefore doubled the thickness of your steak, you've increased the amount of cooking time by a factor of four, right?
So you really want to make sure that water can get around all sides. So, what I always do when I'm spacing stuff out is uh I use a uh half lexan, a tall half lexan for most of my cooking, unless I'm doing a lot. It's a good size for circulators, it's a good size for um you know the amount of wattage that a uh uh immersion circulator can put out, it's a good amount of water, and it could cook a decent amount of food. Anyway, so uh what I have is I have quarter sheet cooling racks, and the quarter sheet cooling racks have little feet on them. Can you picture that?
Can you guys picture what I'm talking about? A cooling rack with the four little wire feet? Yeah. So what I do is is I put those things back to back. So I put the feet against each other, and what that makes is like uh like a sandwich that's I don't know, maybe three eighths of an inch um big, where water can get in between, and I put that in between all the pieces of meat so that there's always that little bit of water flowing in between them so that they cook quickly, anyway.
So, and then I put a cooling rack on the bottom so that water can get underneath it, and I put a cooling rack on top to keep everything sinking down. So, for this, I did my cooking rack sandwich, and then I folded the blister pack around it because there was just enough room in the blister pack to get it around without like hurting the steak. So I was able to cook the entire giant blister pack as one set of steaks. I did 55 for an hour, 55 Celsius for an hour, and then I dropped it to 52 for four or five hours, pulled it, uh, let it sit for uh a couple minutes, and then iced that sucker down and then brought it up, and then Wiley just hit it real hard on the grill uh outside. So that was our delicious salmon in that on the on the Sunday night.
And on the Saturday, Wiley was uh Wiley's been telling me he did some work for Breble, the uh the Breville people, and uh he got paid in equipment. This is an interesting thing you can do, uh, chef people out there is if you do work for some of these companies, like if you want their equipment, often they can give you more equipment than they can give you money if they pay you to do things, and so he did something where at least part of his remuneration was in equipment, and they gave him their pizza oven. And the pizza oven, he made a whole bunch of pizza uh in it. And I have to say, that pizza oven makes delicious pizza. It's like it uses 110, right?
It uses 110 um power, uh, regular, you know, regular plug. And but it actually has a fairly high refresh rate. In other words, you can cook like pizza after pizza in it, and it it gets like a sub-two-minute bake if you want it. It goes very, very high. The temperature goes very, very high.
And it doesn't make a lot of smoke and it doesn't throw off a lot of heat. And the way they do that is they only allow you to cook a 12-inch uh pizza and it's on a stone. It has three elements, and so you independently control the deck and the dome temperatures, right? And what happens is as you open it, it opens, it looks like it's gonna open like a toaster oven. But when it opens, the the stone actually lowers and comes forward.
You load the pizza on, and then when you close it, it crams the pizza up close to the dome again. So the actual area that it's heating is very, very small and very well insulated, and that's how they're able to get a good refresh rate and a very high temperature in a very small space. But I was shocked, he pumped like maybe 10, 11 pizzas, 12 pizzas out of that thing, kept it going, not a lot of smoke, not a lot of heat. I was quite impressed. But you know, it unlike uh those the outdoor the it's a thousand bucks, first of all.
It's kind of big. Imagine it's like slightly bigger than a microwave. So, like, you know, I can never use it here because I don't have a plate. He keeps it in the basement when he's not using it, but like I don't have a basement. But uh, if what you want to do is make indoor pizza, that sucker, that sucker makes indoor pizza, but you have to understand the limitations of it, which is you can't really cook anything else in it.
Like you can't cook something high, like a steak or anything like that, like you can in the outdoor, what's it called? UNI, UNA, whatever. I don't have one because I don't have an outdoor space now, but the $500 outdoor gas pizza oven. But for indoor electrical 110 stuff, I was quite impressed actually. You know what sucked?
They're they're peel. The bread peel on that thing is the worst, and they spent a lot of money on it too because it's stainless steel, right? There's two things you want a bread peel, there's several things you want a bread peel to be, but among them you want them to be relatively light and you want them to be stiff. This is both heavy and it goes whoop when you pick it up, it does not feel sturdy at all, and yet it is extremely heavy. And Wiley tells me it also sticks like a mother.
So the peel needs some work, but the oven itself, uh, I quite liked it. So that's what we had. Oh, and Dax made uh some uh more I ground some uh warthog wheat for him, and he made some 100% um wart hog, which is a red wheat uh bread, which was good. And also on Saturday on the way up to Connecticut, I stopped by uh the green market and bought another 50 pound sack of grain. This time I bought the the one that Adam uh was one of the ones Adam Leonti was talking about last week, which is Redeemer, which is one of his favorite wheats, it had been out of stock, and I got a 50-pound sack of Redeemer, and Jen was like, Dave, what the hell?
Our entire house is just sacks of wheat, just wheat everywhere. So now I just joke with her, my yo Jen, I gotta go out and get another 50 pound sack of wheat. Think about this. If you live in New York City and you don't have a basement or any closets that are aren't already being used, hey guys, people who live in New York, is there any extra space in your closet? Absolutely not.
No. There's no extra space for 50 pounds of wheat. Top to bottom. I sort of like shove the door closed whenever I'm done with the yeah. And so the other problem with wheat is did I already talk about this last week when we were talking about it?
When when I had uh at one point I bought like a 50-pound sack of rye from uh a supplier in Brooklyn. This is like, you know, 20 years ago. Uh 18, 20 years, 20 years ago. And I didn't repackage the rye. Now nowadays, prepper websites tell you all about what you're supposed to do is get like uh plastic buckets with like gamma seals or some sort of really heavy airtight seal.
Then you're supposed to stick your grain into mylar in like like mylar bags that are oxygen sealed. Then you seal, you throw in oxygen absorbers. And what the oxygen absorbers are fundamentally is iron filings. Those iron filings rust, and as they rust, they absorb the oxygen from the environment. And so it's an oxygen-free environment.
And in an oxygen-free environment, um bugs can't grow. If you don't do that and you just keep like a sack of rye around your house, and you're not like full of insects, they grow weevils. And then weevils are all in your rye, weevils are all over weevils everywhere. Nobody wants weevils everywhere. Um, uh, first of all, it's hard to get oxygen absorbers right now uh because everyone's prepped themselves into oblivion.
But second of all, I don't have room for giant buckets of stuff, so instead I just vac bag down all the stuff, like vact it hard, uh hoping. Now I know that oxygen will make it through the bag and bugs can eventually grow again, but I'm hoping to kill all of anything that is like right there right now, and then I'm cycling them through the freezer. Uh I'm cycling my bags through the freezer two pounds, uh, sorry, four and a half pounds at a time. So within a month or so, I should have been able to freeze down all of my currently 120 pounds of grain that I have chilling in my house. But anyway, whatever.
I have bread going right now. Anyway. All right. Oh, wait. Uh Chef John Paul asks in the chat, do you like a pizza steel above a pizza stone?
Okay, that's a good question. Um I don't have that much experience with a uh pizza steel since I'd already bought all of my gear by the time the modernist crew, uh Chris Young started talking about using steels uh as a thing. So I don't have I don't have that much experience with one. Nastasia and I bought one at the Elder Street Lab, not for that, but for a different reason. And we promptly accidentally melted three quart containers onto it.
And so then I was never able to adequately like I never took the time to adequately burn off all of the plastic that was on our steel. And then when we moved, uh I think it got pitched, right, Stas? Didn't that thing get pitched? Yeah, got pitched when we left. And so I've never had adequate uh experience with uh the steel.
I get the theory of it. My problem with all of these things is their refresh rate, right? So that's why, like when I was talking about the um the Breble pizza oven, the first thing I asked Wiley was, okay, so your first pizza cooks in 90 seconds. How long does your second pizza take? How long does your third pizza take?
How long does your fifth pizza take? Any sort of storage medium for your oven, whether this be a pizza stone or a steel, is limited by how fast you can dump the energy into it. Because they're all energy storage devices. Now, the nice thing about a steel, um, the bigger the mass, obviously, the better, is that um it loads up faster and can dump energy faster than a stone can. Um, so I get the theory of it.
I just don't have enough experience with it. You know what I mean. This episode is brought to you by Benditable, a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. So I recently received my France box, and uh one of the first things that popped out were uh rancho gordo beans that they called cassoulet beans. Now, everybody pretty much loves casserole, stas.
You like casole? Yeah. Yeah. Everybody loves it. But here in quarantine time, uh, I don't really have uh a bunch of duck lying around.
You can't really have a real casole without duck. So I just kind of made something similar, i.e. something meaty and beanie. So what I did uh with them was uh first, I just in my house all the time, I have a whole bunch of reduced tomatoes, so I just buy the canned tomato, uh the canned tomatoes. You I blend them with a whole onion and with a bunch of garlic, and then I put it on an induction and reduce it by half so that I have this kind of like it's not tomato paste, it's like this kind of like thick, kind of reduced tomato that I have lying around.
Now don't add those to the beans right away, because you never want to cook beans with acid. Instead, I took more garlic, onion, sauteed it down, uh, threw the beans into my rice cooker with that, chicken stock, and I hit that with some of the uh some of the burlap and barrel flouring hiss up thyme that came into in with it. And also, sorry, Stas, I added a little rosemary. I know you hate that, I apologize. And then I threw in, because I don't have standard kind of casolet meat ingredients, I threw in two ham hocks and a bunch of sausage that I had, you know, different varieties, some hot, some not.
I hacked them up into pieces, threw them in, and just let that whole thing cook up. Once it was cooked out, and like, you know, and that the sauce was reduced down to just where I wanted it, I threw in the uh tomato reduction, folded that in, and then bread crumbed it and just glazed the top of it to get the bread comes out and served it on out. So it's not casolé by any stretch, but dang, was it delicious? Go to Benjatable.com to start your monthly subscription. Use the discount code HRN to get $20 off a new subscription, and Ben to Table will donate $10 to support cooking issues and all of HRN, which stands for Heritage Radio Networks programming.
By the way, uh, I don't want to forget this one. Ashley Bronstein writes in, by the way, why is it that people's names are spelled Stein but pronounced Stein? Where does that come from? I'm assuming it's Bronstein and not Bronstein. Germany is where it's not.
No, but in Germany, EIN is Stein. Yes. Oh, okay. Sorry, you're saying the opposite. But in America, I would bet that like well over half of people whose names are spelled Stein are pronounced Stein.
No? Like Victor Frankenstein from uh Nastasia's favorite movie, Young Young Frankenstein. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don't know. Interesting.
How did that happen? Where'd that come from? I don't know. None of us are etymologists, so you're asking. But is that is that in America only or is that worldwide?
I don't know, Dave. God, what the heck use of you people? You lived in Italy. I think we are. You lived in you lived in Belgium, didn't you?
What the hell? I lived in France. They're not really pronouncing those things that way. Alright, alright. Yeah.
Anyway, uh, Ashley uh writes in uh my boyfriend Jacob is a big fan of your podcast. His birthday is on Saturday, May 30th. Would you mind giving him a shout out? Shout out to Jacob! Happy birthday.
How's that? That was great. What did you say, Stasi? You cried? Did you say I cried?
No, I didn't. I said no. Oh. I thought you said I cried. This reminds me, my uh Gerard, my the George.
So my stepfather Gerard, so I'm while I'm not by blood, like you know, you know, grew up with him, you know, as you know, part of my life, he his Italian family in Boston is the source of like many, many uh hilarious stories in my life. So one of them was his his sister had gone to a uh a mafia, like a funeral of a of a daughter. So his sister was friends with uh a mafia Don's daughter because they just happened to you know go to the same school, and they're friends, and so she died at a very young age, and so this this goon that I'm about to describe to you reminds me of Nastasia. So, like, like the the Gerard and the sister, my stepfather Gerard and this and his sister Auntie Linda go up to this goon at the funeral, and they're like, Oh my god, this is terrible. They're so sad because this you know, this young woman is has died, and the goon goes, Yeah, real sad.
Oh, and that reminds me of Nastasia, and then there was another story where at the same funeral, I believe, someone on on the uh on the outside, another goon was handing out Kleenexes to peep tissues as people walked in, and they go, It's gonna be real sad. You're gonna cry, and hand it out the tissues to people. How crazy is that? Wow. People forcing you to cry.
It's gonna be real sad. You're gonna cry. Nobody's gonna cry at my funeral. Oh no, I feel like I'm not gonna be able to do it. No, I'm not saying that's sad about it.
Don't cry for you, Argentina. You're supposed to be immortal. That's all you wanted. Not much to ask for. Did you see that that Jimmy Fallon has been cancelled?
What do you mean canceled? Cancelled like he did something terrible or canceled like the show canceled. Listen, apparently in 2000, he did Blackface on SNL and it's just coming out now. Okay. Is this one of those things like Chris Cuomo where you're gonna have to dial this way back?
No. No. I mean, he has not been canceled, but he is uh it's like there's a hashtag, I don't know what it is right now. I have no, I I don't know. I have I have no data on this.
I it is true that he did blackface on SNL in the year 2000. Oh my god, bringing up a good old Conan thing, huh? I didn't know you were Conan fan. Dave, we've sang this song together. Uh yeah, it's true.
Do it, John. Do you even know what we're talking about? Are you too young to know about this? No. Matt, do you know this?
Uh my it's like in the year 2000. Yes, yes. Yeah, and well, and what was it, the trumpet player who used to sing it? There was this big trumpet guy, and he used this super high falsetto. Yeah, I can't even.
My voice is a little grow scratchy today, or I would do the, butt like in my head, I can hear it. And then they they would just like read off these things like in the year 2000, and then they would say something dumb, like some dumb thing, because it was before Conan. Anyway, interesting, you bring up Conan, and interesting, you bring up horribly racist things because I saw uh the document. I saw I saw the documentary on the Dana Carve show, which was kind of like an amazing documentary of the show that Dana Carvey did after he left Saturday Live in 1997, and like the the team on it is like here's who was here's who that was the team. It was Smeiggle, who's back, you know, does TV fun house for uh Saturday Live, right?
So Smeigle was, I guess, a showrunner. Dana Carvey was, you know, the the headline guy, and they were gonna have it be it was a sketch comedy show, so Nastasi would have enjoyed it. The the writers were Louis C.K. and he also acted on it, right? Uh Steven Colbert and Steve Corell, who I did not know were like friends who came up at Second City together, and uh who else?
Some other famous, so there's some other famous people that were on it, but it was kind of this who's who of people that became incredibly kind of famous and well known. But the sketches, they had so much like weird like racism in them. It's crazy. It's it's go back to see what was considered funny by people that we still consider to be funny people, even in the late 90s, was just crazy, crazy bad. You know what I mean?
Mm-hmm. Anyway, in the year 2000. Alright. Uh from a user in the Zoom demo chat room. That's that's very personal.
A user. Many users. Yes, many, many questions about it. Okay. Uh Dave and Nastasia mentioned that refurbished spinzalls might be available soon.
Any updates on this? I have decided to not sell refurbished spinzalls. It's just too much of a heartache. And the amount of money that you would save by buying the refurbished spinzalls. There's first of all, there's not that many of them.
And then, like, I am just loath to sell them to someone who I don't have direct daily contact with. I will tell you this though. Uh, for those of you that don't know, uh, one thing that has come of this kind of uh corona thing is that we've started. John has started doing um what's it called? Uh what's the word of them?
FaceTime. Yeah, face FaceTime uh meetings live. So we do now video troubleshooting if you're having a technical issue with your spinzall. So it is a really good time from a customer service standpoint to buy one. And I'll also say this.
John, for those of you that don't know the history of John, John is a professional uh, you know, one of the things he does is professional line cook. So he knows what your problems are, people. He can help you out. Um, so anyway, we decided to not do it. Just too much of it.
Imagine, Stas, if I if we then had to provide customer service on top of something that was fundamentally a break-even situation, it would be it would be a nightmare, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Although people are probably excited to get these Zoom things, they may just rake their spinzall to get that.
Now, you see what I mean, Stas? This is how much you hate human beings. This is how much you hate people. This is how much I know about human beings. God.
God. Yes. I mean, I know if I didn't have a weekly meeting with you guys, I'd be breaking mine. You are an outlier, Matt. You you are not of the masses.
Jeez, Louise. Oh my god. All right. Uh from Elvin Young. This is a question that we haven't gotten to in a while.
I frequently use the cocktail calculus chapter of the book as a reference for sugar acid and ABV balancing. That is alcohol by volume balancing. I wonder why it is that Americans use alcohol by volume, whereas other countries use alcohol. Some other countries use alcohol by weight. I wonder why.
I wonder how that happened. Anyway, but I'm curious if there's anything I need to consider for drinks, uh, like a stir drinks with clarified juice and cordials, or B lower AB ABV drinks. I'm curious if these drinks tend to go above the typical acid percentage range for stirred stir drinks. Wait, so the what's the question here, John? Lower ABV drinks, do they have more acid than higher ABV drinks?
I think so. Yeah. I'm curious if it makes sense to build a drink with the same overall volume, sugar, and acid proportions, but just adjusting down the ABV by swapping out part of the base spirit with a fortified wine. I'm experimenting with different configurations, but not seeing particular patterns. All right, listen.
Elvin, I'm gonna tell you this. Uh, and I've said this on the air, but I'm gonna say it again. Biglycerin. And no, I don't mean mono and diglycerides, which for some reason the freaking Faron Adria Texturas group decided to call like their freaking mono and di glyceride flakes like glyce, and some people call it glycerin. It is not.
Listen, I'm gonna say this because I had a Twitter uh uh thing with someone, mono and glycerol, glycerol, which is what we generally refer to as glycerin, specifically vet vegetable glycerin, is a slightly sweet, extremely thick liquid. Okay, glycerin. The glycerol molecule is the backbone of, it's the it's the polar backbone of all uh fats and fatty acids. Okay, so a fat is a triglyceride, so that is three fatty acids on a glycerol backbone. So if you look at pictures of molecules of fat, it's like three fingers coming off of a backbone, and that's what a fat is.
You knock one of those fatty acid chains off and you have a diglyceride. Now the the fatty acid part is non-polar, right? So that that is like what is attracted to non-water, right? And then the glycerol part, that part that doesn't have the fatty acid, that part is uh polar, and so that gives it emulsification. Knock off a second one and you have a monoglyceride.
So the glit the flakes, the the solid things are mono and diglycerides, kind of a shotgun mix of those things, usually somewhat titrated to be able to use uh properly for thickening oils or for uh emulsifying, etc. etc. Uh the glycerin, the liquid, is what you want to buy, buy vegetable glycerin. They do taste differently, supplier to supplier, but just test them, uh, and you're only using them in very small percentages. You're talking like five grams to the liter or you know, maximum, maximum 10 grams to the liter, but you really wouldn't want to add that much, more like five grams to the liter.
And what happens is is that as you lower the alcohol percentage of uh a drink, uh a cocktail, right? You are as soon as the alcohol drops below a certain threshold, and it's usually somewhere like 12-13% alcohol. As soon as you go below that threshold, you'll notice that in order to get the flavor and the body and the mouthfeel where you want it, you start increasing the sugar, and therefore, as you increase the sugar, you start increasing the acid and become sweeter and sweeter. And when you get down to like where soda is at 0% uh alcohol, um, you're at like 10% sugar, which is a lot. It's quite sweet.
Um, so what you can do when you're lowering uh the alcohol level is to introduce some glycerin, and that for whatever reason, and it's poorly understood, uh, as far as I can tell, and I've read the scientific literature, I haven't read it in over a year, but the last time I read it, it was poorly understood exactly how it works. But uh as you add some glycerin, when you reduce alcohol all the way down to zero, you um bring back the like the kind of taste perception that the sugar and the acid had. In other words, if you would just take, if you just take something that's at five or six percent sugar, zero percent alcohol, and you taste it, it just tastes like I watered down your lemonade, right? It just tastes like the hell you do it. You water down my lemonade, jerk, cheapskate, right?
You add uh some glycerin to it, and now it gets back closer to the mouthfeel, viscosity, and balance that a cocktail at those ratios would have. So I would look into doing that as a test. In general, as you lower alcohol, you'll need to increase those other flavors, and I think it's probably for a fairly poorly understood reason. Uh, is that answer that question, uh guys, or no? Yep.
Yeah, I think so. Uh okay, see if they have it, okay. Um via email, does the spinz all clarify butter perfectly? I don't know, John, you gonna try that for me? Yeah.
Alright, try it for me, report back. I can do that. Listen, when you clarify butter, I mean, first of all, like, what are we talking about clarified perfectly? Like, what are we doing here? Like, are you talking like one or two sticks?
I don't know how well the butter solids are going to stick to the inside of the rotor because there's just not that much of it, right? Like in general, butter solids will compact into a puck, but I don't know how much of them you'd need to effectively stick to the side of the rotor. If you were gonna, and there's also the foam that comes up to the top. If you melt the stuff, let the foam settle out, right? The water and the any residual water in the melted butter and the butter fat solids will go to the inside of the rotor and you will be able to get the clarified butter out of the top.
And if you were doing like, oh, I don't know, like liters of it, then yeah, I'm sure it could clarify it very, very quickly, right? It'd be a pain in the patoot to clean that me as you dishwash it. But like imagine that butter film all over the inside of your spinz all nostassi. What do you think about that? But um, yeah, but um it would work, right?
But then the question I have is that last 500 milliliters, uh, which is 500 milliliters is roughly a pound of butter, right? That last pound of butter, um, would it, when you stop the rotor and pour it out, would the butter solids stick to the inside of the rotor or not? And if there was still liquid water, right? It's very hard to do liquid liquid separations, liquid-liquid separations, unless you just force the liquid out. So, what you could do, uh, and John, you could do you could add hot water to it and push the butter out.
That would work. But then you'd have to know, I mean, you'd have to do a couple of calculations, but yeah, you could. I know it would work. I mean, John, you could try doing a couple sticks, seeing whether it pours right, but unless you bore boil off all the water, you're gonna need to do a uh hot water push to push the other stuff off the top. Does that make sense, John?
Does that make sense to anyone but me? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know, that makes sense. That's like the the herboil infusion recipe that you have in the spinzall menu. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, because I mean you think about it, like liquid liquid is the toughest. Oh my god, do you know what I got the knockoff Searzol on Friday or Saturday? Did it flake dandruff into your food? I haven't used it yet because it made me so angry. How it's our box, our direction.
The directions are are I mean, the manual is printed on you know, eight and a half by eleven, and our manual is not, it's not folded correctly, it's not in the bag, it's all these things, and but it's insane because it's our logo, it's exactly the same. Well, we know for a fact exactly who's doing it. We know exactly who's doing it because they made a prototype for us once when you know we tried to switch, and in fact, it threw all the things. And we are suing the S H I T off of them because we are lawyer our So if you're listening now, we are suing you. I mean, like it's like I work with an idiot.
Who me? I'm like, here's the thing. Why is it that but like I like these people should be thrown off of a cliff? It's like they didn't just knock off the idea. Like what like what like what is that?
What is that? What is the other one called it? I don't remember, but yeah, I yeah. But they it's like it's like I remember once I spoke to uh I you know uh like Jen, my wife Jen, um, did a bunch of work and is friends with one of the you know partners of Kate Spade before Kate's Bay got sold to Neiman Marcus. And I once asked her, I was like, yo, how does it make you feel when you see these like all these knockoffs down on Canal Street?
And she's like, I hate it. I want to kill them. You know what I mean? And now I kind of know what it what it what it feels like. You know what I mean?
Because like well, I think one way to make it even worse for for us in a sense, is that they, you know, like it was direct your customer service emails to us. Yeah. So it's just like a waste of my time and our time of doing all this for a completely bootleg product. Well, that's how we found out is that like, you know, a customer asked John about this thing throwing off flakes. And I was like, throwing off flakes.
The only flakes I've ever seen thrown off was that bootleg like proto, that company who was trying to make them instead of the company that we actually get to make them, sent us one, and I was like, your product sucks, it throws flakes off, and we never used them. And that's when it's that's when it struck, I guess, John or Nastasi, and they went back and found out that they weren't buying it from a person who had the the right to sell them. You know, it was like, because he he little hint. We make them all. So like there's no other seller other than the ones that we know we've sold to.
You know, you know what I mean? So it's like, man, man, that burns. Don't enjoy. Um all right. Uh let's see, another, another lot of spinzall questions.
I guess because we did a zoom seminar on spinzalls. That's why I have so many spins all questions. Uh hey, crew. Uh, thanks, uh, thanks to the whole team for an enjoyable informable uh informative seminar. I've been you we did it with Jack Schramm.
Uh uh, I've been using the spinzall as a home enthusiast uh since its launch with moderate success. I guess it's better than no success. Uh with the knowledge I gleaned from the seminar, I'm confident that my success rate will improve. I'm now planning to buy a CO2 injection system. When I look up the blue carbonation cap, which is I believe called the Carbacap or something like that.
It used to be called the Liquid Bread Corporation, but I think they changed their name. Liquid bread meaning beer. Uh I read many recent negative reviews. Most of the complaints about the cap are them not fitting most PET bottles. Do you know if this is uh if this is indeed the brand of cap you use?
Your sage advice is much appreciated. Best regards, David Sprintis. Uh okay. So the truth of the matter, uh, David, is that um there are two uh there are two main, maybe even three now main styles of screw threads that are uh made for uh uh soda bottles now. And they are somewhat interchangeable.
And so the carbonator cap will in fact fit on both of them. However, my main problem with the new carbonator caps is that they tend to cross-thread. So maybe what like people are talking about, and you need to on some of them you need to cut off the bands, the the white plastic uh anti-tamper bands, in order for them to set uh set properly. But I have I have been able I for years, for a couple of years during this main switchover, I used to search around for the old style bottles and vintage seltzer as the bastion of New York Seltzer Dome, uh was I think one of the last ones here to move over to the new style of bottles. So they used to have the taller, kind of more traditional, kind of more square.
If you look at the old soda bottle caps, they're kind of more square, more top-hatdy. And the newer ones are more kind of like uh a little shorter, a little more pork pie-like, uh, if to use the hat analogy. And um, but you can get them to seat on them. But I the new carbonator caps, the new plastic ones, I just find to be unpleasant in terms of their ability to cross-thread, but they they should work. Um Evan uh Flynn on Instagram says, I had a question, I was wondering if you could shed some light on.
I wasn't sure who to ask, so I figured uh that we'd be the most knowledgeable on the subject. I recently fat washed a bourbon with butter. Once completed, should I store it room temp or should it be in the fridge? I feel like normal root temp shouldn't be an issue, but because it was fat washed with a dairy product, now I'm not sure. Thanks so much.
Uh you and your bars are truly inspirable. Thank you so much, Evan. And you do not need to worry about it, it will not spoil. Um, even milk, if you add milk to uh like liquor, as long as the alcohol level is high enough, you're not going to get spoilage. Uh, what you do need to worry about is that if there is residual fat, that fat can go rancid.
And in fact, in general, what you need to worry about when fat washing is making sure that you don't use rancid fats or have residual fat in your product that can go rancid. So, like some things that go rancid very easily are like uh sunflower seed oil goes rancid very easily. Sesame seed oil goes rancid very easily. If you whip a lot of air into butter or keep it in the fridge, it can get a lot of rancidity fairly quickly on the outside. So it's more rancidity you have to guard against, but once you've fat washed it and you've gotten all the fat out, you should be a good to go.
Elliot Papadot wrote in, uh long time, uh long time listener of the show. Elliot writes in, and by the way, uh uh John, you pointed out uh where he grows on the farm. Uh why don't you want to talk about that for a second? Yeah, no, I actually got to when I went to Chicago to pick up the Ebonite Test kitchen. I got to go to uh this restaurant called the Loyalists, which is part of uh this restaurant group called Smith and the Loyalists.
It's run by John and Kern Shields. It's absolutely fantastic. Food. And Elliot grows all of or not all, but a lot of the produce for them on his place called The Farm. Uh, you should follow him on Instagram.
I think it's at underscore the farm underscore something like that. He's uh now loyalist to who? King King George III? I mean, who are they loyal to? I I don't know.
It didn't occur to for me to ask that. We don't cotton to loyalists. True. Uh 10 million. So uh Nastasia does.
The as I've said, the only now Nastasia, you know what you've done, right? So Nastasia, for people who know, you know, who've listened to the show for a long time, everybody knows that I love America. Nastasia does not. I made an American flag. Okay, so like whatever.
Everybody knows it. It's just true. So like, but the the butasia especially hates anything patriotic except fireworks and as it turns out, red, white, and blue sprinkles. Right. But so Nastasia sent Booker, and by the way, I have the I have the canned, I have three cans of uh of tinned white anchovies for you.
I haven't eaten one yet. I've saved them for you. And I told you I bought it for Booker and told him not to eat it without me so that I could see if they were good. And he was like, and he just did it anyway. I was like, how did you like them?
And this is classic Booker. He says, not as much. I was like, how did you like them? Not as much. As what?
And what he means is so any canned fish is rated against oil packed, skinless, boneless sardines. So like basically the height of tinned seafood for Booker is skinless, boneless, sardines packed in oil. And everything else is I didn't like it as much. Right? And so, oh, speaking of which, so anyway, I'll finish this.
So Nastasia drops off red, white, and blue uh sprinkles, and Booker's like, I'm gonna make her an American flat cake. Because no, she just likes the sprinkles. Yeah, but I don't remember a bean, maybe it's an English. Is she English? Yeah.
And then you burned it. Kidding. English? Yeah. Her her love of the sprinkles overrides her hatred for the she hasn't actually hate.
I don't want to hear anything from people. I'm just ribbing her. I'm just ribbing her. Okay. We're going down a really bad thing.
Yeah, yeah. So wait, so speaking of tinned fish, uh, John, you're planning on something interesting with tin fish, are you not? Yeah, I'm having a tin fish extravaganza on Wednesday night. I've been buying up this particular brand of tin fish that's supposed to be quite good from the Bass region in Spain called La Brujula. B-R-U-J-U-L-A.
And I've got like 16 different tins of seafood and gonna have a friend over who's been similarly quarantining. Um, and we're gonna taste them all and see what the verdict is. I'm looking forward to it. Um I have a question for the listeners out there or the in the chat room, and I don't want to research this. I want someone else to answer my question for a change.
In Willy Wonka, like the original, right? When Veruca Salt goes, I want a feast. I want a bean feast. What the heck is a bean feast? Does anyone know?
Has anyone heard of this thing? The bean feast? You guys remember the song, right? I want it now. Yes.
I want a feast, I want a bean feast. You know what? Uh a bean feast was an informal turn for a celebratory meal or party, especially an annual summer dinner given by an employer to his employer's employees. By who by his or by an employer to his or her emplo his or her. So we're talking about Mr.
Salt putting an extra one pound uh one pound uh bonus in their pay bucket if they find the golden ticket for Veruca. Remember this? I have the entire movie memorized, it's kind of weird. Um okay. Uh so as Elliot asked, uh, I want to get a vac chamber sealer for the farm.
Well, we discussed the farm and loyalists, and that's how we got on to Nastasi's Hateworth of the Country, but her love of sprinkles. Uh what? I want to get a VAC chamber sealer for the farm. And should I look at the poly science versus the vacmaster VP two fifteen uh or any other maker? Thanks for the help.
Okay, so both the VACMaster VP two fifteen and the poly science are in the thousand dollar range. Uh just you know, as you know, anyone who knows me knows, like I'm a fan of Philip Preston uh and poly science. I have used neither the VA I've not used any of the VACMaster products, nor have I used the poly science sealer. I will say this the VAC Master uh the 215 has an oil pump in it and the poly science has a dry pump in it. Now, I don't I couldn't find online the actual pump that the VAC master has, right?
But I will say that in general, um oil pumps outperform dry pumps. They require some maintenance, right? But uh oil pumps in general outperform dry pumps in general. Is it possible to get a dry pump that could, you know, uh like a a like a monster dry pump that could outperform like a weak oil pump? Yes.
Um, but in fact, the reason why most commercial, bigger commercial units cost so much money is they all have a pump made by the Busch Corporation, which is a German corporation, and those pumps are beasts, those oil pumps are beasts. And so what a large pump gives you, right? The reason why you care about the pump isn't really the ultimate vacuum, although that's important. It's how fast it can achieve a vacuum. So, like any vacuum machine that's worth its salt, i.e.
anything with a pump that's a lot better than let's say a food saver, right, can probably achieve a low enough ultimate vacuum for you to get the sealing results that you want. The question is, how often do you need to do it? So a machine with a giant pump, like a hard pump, will be able to do like three, four times as fast, well, two, maybe, three, maybe times fast a vacuum cycle to a given level of vacuum than a uh a smaller pump will. Likewise, uh, the bigger the pump, the bigger a chamber it can evacuate in a particular length of time. So, what you one of the main issues in a vacuum machine is the size of the item that you can vacuum down.
And so you really want to look at the chamber size and whether or not it is big enough to accomplish what you want. And the kind of weaker the pump, right, the um the longer and longer it takes, and the smaller and smaller a chamber needs to be. So to give you an idea, like most of the uh oil pumps are a pain in the butt when you're running them for uh rotary evaporation for distillation because they have to run for such a long time that they tend to volatilize uh oil into the kitchen smell bad, right? Uh and um so when those things are running, there's a very big incentive to not have an oil-based pump. So they have dry pumps.
Now I have run oil-based, even just like $200 oil-based refrigeration pumps like the Robinairs and whatnot on my uh rotary evaporator, and they are much faster and achieve a much lower vacuum. And those aren't even good. Those are nowhere near what like the bush pump in a commercial vacuum machine can do. And those blow blow that like the $900,000 dry vacuum pumps that they sell for rotary evaporation out of the water in terms of the speed and the ultimate uh uh vacuum they can achieve. So that's what you should look at.
But I have not used either of them, and as I said, and and John and I and Nastasia were talking about it. Uh, I don't really know how it would work. I I I'm loath to recommend a piece of equipment unless I've used it, right? Or at least seen it used or put my hands on it. And I've used neither of these, but uh I don't know how it would work because but you know, we're open to doing equipment reviews, right, guys?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Um Devin weighed in in the chat, he had also not used this, but he said if Elliot wants to be a guinea pig, he could try the made, quote, made with meat brand vac chamber. Uh it's the cheapest oil chamber vac other than weird eBay stuff. Seems to be from the same factory as VACMaster.
No idea of quality, though. A few weeks ago, there was a 25% off coupon coupon from them online, in addition to already being cheaper than the Backmaster and Backpack kit from Webstaurant store. No affiliation, but if you want to roll the dice, please let us know. Did you know that I'm made of meat? We all um so uh so Philip Preston.
I will tell you this story that he told me. Philip Preston once bought a very cheap uh vacuum uh chain chamber vacuum online because he does that. He'll he'll test other other pieces of equipment. Um he bought one that was an oil-based pump, and then when he ran liquids in it and the and the liquids vaporized inside of the chamber, like somehow it developed some sort of electrical short and made all this like crazy smoke inside of inside of inside of the chamber. So if it's made by the same factory, I'm sure it's fine.
But I will tell you this. When uh when a factory, when you go to a factory and they make something, right, and then they no longer have the manufacturer who cares about quality riding them, things slip. Just like the story I was telling you. This one company, we sent them, we sent them Searzals to see whether they could make the searzols for us, and the ones that they made didn't reach our quality requirements, and so we didn't use them, and they were cheaper, right? But they didn't reach our quality, and now they are knocking us off.
So just because something looks the same doesn't mean it's made to the same uh specifications. And I and I can say that like most factories don't use the equipment that they're making ever, like they're not cooks, and so they wouldn't even know how to figure out whether something worked right if they wanted to. Would you say that's accurate, Sas? Yeah. Uh John Sconzo, longtime friend, friend of the show.
Uh you know him as Doc Scans, perhaps on the Instagram. Hey Dave, any special tricks to clarifying mango with a spinzole? You mean fresh or you mean uh like in a Houstino? The issue with the Houstinos and mangoes is that they um your yield can be reduced somewhat because dried mango is is quite dry, depending like some some of it's like shoe leather. I would let it sit for a lot longer.
The problem with very dry mango is is, and I was talking about this in the in the spinzole thing, is that they can form little hard blebs, and these little hard blebs are hard to put through the pump, they're very hard. So I would say blend it a lot. Um, sometimes we will add a little bit of fresh mango in with dried mango into the ustino, and we're good to go. If you're talking about fresh mango, I've never had a problem with it, so let me know. It might be one of those things where you're better with uh doing um batch than doing uh continuous.
But uh Doc Scott's let us know exactly what your problems are, and John will hook you right up. Uh now, in the in the only 30 or so seconds or whatever that uh Matthew has uh allotted left for us. Um Alisio wrote in on Instagram, I watched a cookbook talk this morning with the Mets associate chief librarian Tony White, and he had a very high praise for liquid intelligence. Well, thank you. Uh I appreciate anyone that either likes the book or uses it to separate hot and cold foods like Nastasia does.
Uh, I'm also a special collections librarian in Toronto and love classics in the field. My favorite books in our collection are uh Scopi's Opera, which is the opera of Bartolomeo Scopi from 1570. Uh, and it's uh I've never read it. You ever read this? Read that book, Stas, when you're doing your Italian stuff.
It was like uh so the English translation was done, and I believe this guy is also Canadian, although I'm not sure, by Terrence Scully, who's one of the uh greatest ever scholars of um late medieval um cookery. Well, everyone's forget the name of Scully's like Scully's academic books, right? I have several of them, but Karen Scully is the translator of this book, and I don't know any more because it's been you know well over a decade since I last seriously studied these things, but at the time he was like the scholar, so I'm sure like he still likes to be. No one's stopping you, Dave. Everyone's going to be able to do it.
I have never read uh his translation of it, but I will uh look into it. I'm sure you have the original because you know you're the special collections uh librarian at Toronto, and your other favorite is Norman Douglas's Venus in the Kitchen. Now I did not know Venus in the Kitchen, uh, but uh it's available in uh paperback now. Uh they did a 2003 reprint in paperback, and you can get that on the Amazon for about four and a half bucks. Uh and it was published in 1952, and it's apparently like lists of crazy aphrodisiacs and weird things that that are like uh you know oysters, classic stuff, but like bulls test pie of bulls testicles.
Uh I'm not gonna even get into some of the other some of the other things, but like historical lists of crazy, um crazy kind of aphrodisiac stuff. So uh eventually we'll we'll we'll get that. And in fact, the classics in the field that we're gonna do today was uh a book that I did not know. Do I have time to do the classics in the field? What does that mean?
Matthew's either gonna turn us off or not. You can open your window and Stas, you can open your window and let the birds chirp. Nastasia, we're starting. The reason we were to the oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The reason we were talking about air conditioning at the beginning of the show was because Nastasia had her window open and you could hear nothing but these freaking birds chirping like some sort of like freaking Mary Poppins thing with birds going around her head.
Just just do it quick. All right. John, literate mush is the handle, recommended uh classics in the field. Yeah! All right, recommended uh and pronounce his name.
In English, it would be Raymond Oliver. Pronounce it, John. Raymond. Oh my god, so sick. You always need to have a uh a French uh a francophone uh sitting around.
So it's a book called uh La Cuisine. And if you can picture this book, the English version of the book. It was first published in France in uh in night in 1967, and it it was published in 1969 in English, and the English, the American cover, the English cover of it, the La Cuisine is written in that Mary Tyler Morphant. Can you guys picture that Mary Tyler Morphant? You want to what?
That weird blocky, like sans serif, like so it's pretty, and then the top of it is like a hyper close up of his face. So for those of you that like know us, like what we'll do is you'll send us a picture and we'll look at like a person's face. Like I'll look at Nastas, there'll be a party. Let's say there's a party, right? And there's like 30 people, and they all get together and they take a picture, and I'll look and this and everyone's smiling except Nastasia.
So what I'll do is is I'll go to the Nastasia's picture and then I'll zoom in and take a screenshot of that, and then I'll zoom in further and zoom in further until it's basically just like like the dead look in her eye, as the picture that we send around on on uh on on our text messages, true or false does. Yeah. And she'll do it to me, like when I when someone says something to me that horrifies me, but like no one who doesn't know me knows I'm horrified because they can't read the look on my face because I always have a smile, but Nastasia can tell the difference between the horrified smile and the real smile. Anyway, so she'll just send me the horrified smile, Rice S. Yeah.
So anyway, like the cover of this book is is like Mary Tyler Moore, La Cuisine, and then just a super close up of his face, just like his eyeballs and his mouth with this kind of like stern look on it. So from the minute I saw this book, I realized that this was probably gonna be a classic that uh John had turned me on to, John, who's literate mush, not our John. And then if you look up this guy, Raymond Oliver, who was born in 1909, and he had kind of a crazy life. During World War II, he uh he you know fled, uh, I think he fled France to Switzerland and was joined a resistance cell and like, you know, uh helped Allied uh downed uh, you know, um pilots, all this other stuff, all kinds of cool stuff. After the war, buys uh a very famous uh restaurant that'd been around since the uh 1700s called uh well, how do you pronounce it?
Le Grand Vithur. How do you pronounce that crap, John? Give me give me the grand V4 in French. Le Grand V. Anyway, so he gets this and then is uh it at the time wasn't three stars.
He brings it up, gets like the third star. And so like this guy is at the top of his game. He is he also interestingly hated uh Nouvelle cuisine. So after World War II, there was this kind of revolution in French cooking, Nouvelle cuisine, uh, and it was kind of displacing what was kind of Escoffier's like classic cuisine at the time. Uh and so he was this old school old guard like kind of uh like classic cuisine guy, didn't like Nouvelle cuisine at the butt at the top of his game, three stars, had a TV show, and he writes this book that I can't believe I didn't already know about.
And it's got some crazy stuff, especially kind of crazy sexism, that weird kind of sexism where he thinks he's being nice. Like, for instance, he doesn't believe that uh men can set the table or do decoration properly because we'll just mess it up. That's like that kind of like weird, that weird sexism. Anyway, uh, it's full of that. But the beginning of the book is, and and the photos are amazing.
So he hires like all of these, as he says, quote unquote hostesses who he thinks are really good uh around Europe to set up their tables, and so there's all these crazy 60s table settings in full color that he has, which are just a joy to look at these kind of crazinesses, and also he has lots of um like awesome black and white pictures. Like, remember before when I was talking about classics in the field, I was talking about the uh River Cottage cookbook and how there was a uh a picture of uh a pig in it, and they had drawn uh the cuts of the pig on this pig. Now that picture was awesome because uh it was a pig just out like in a meadow in a field with the lines uh drawn in it. But of course, my man uh Raymond Oliver has uh the same thing, but in a more kind of stayed fashion. So the pictures are amazing, like the way he cuts up live cows with uh images of their cuts is amazing.
But if you want it for nothing else, you're gonna get this book for the polemic introduction. Now, the introduction alone is like uh when I got the book first, I read the entire thing to uh my family in kind of a stentorian voice. I don't have time to do that, but I'm gonna give you some choice, some choice nuggets. Now, in case they cut me off, I'm gonna give you this one first because uh I love now. This is very anti-modern, right?
But it's hilarious coming from an old school French chef. If you ever met the old school French chefs, you'd know what I mean. There is no such thing as the art of fixing leftovers. There are only tricks, and often a great deal of indulgence on the part of the guests. Once again, we're on the fringe of gastronomy.
By what outward signs may we judge this period of transition? So he's like railing against like like the art of the leftovers, so anti-modern, right, guys. Now that everyone's focused on trying to use leftovers, he's like, there is no art of the leftover, only tricks. And then he says, uh, what does he say? He goes, it is a widely held misconception that our ancestors were in their day incomparable gastronomes.
This deeply rooted error has also made them all into authentic gargantuas. By gargantua, he's uh referencing the hero of the Rablay, garg gargantua and panting rule. Uh so he's like, he goes in as kind of an anti-Nouvelle cuisine, kind of like like a person trying to uphold the classics, but then at the same time is like people in the past sucked. I love it. I just love the like the screaming.
And then he goes, he talks about uh making sure that your uh that that your environment is nice when you're when you're eating. He goes, cooking, divested of its decor, seems mutilated or reduced. Such settings, i.e., where you're eating uh play settings and whatnot, such settings may seem highly artificial, yet they are no less indispensable to the culinary art of which they are, moreover, an aspect. And here's where here's where uh this is like should I give a little bit of the sexism or no? Whatever you go out on, this is this is the one.
Oh, geez. If you want to do sexism. I don't want to go out on the sexism. Let me see what I can uh let me see. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Oh, nah. Now you're killing me. You're killing me. You're killing me. He has the part where he he describes the reason that John sent it to me was no, no, do not cheat in another one.
Is this the one? Oh no, now you're killing me. You're killing me. Let me see. Let me see.
Let me see. There let's see, you're killing me. Uh I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
No. No, there's this there's too much. There's too many words of wisdom. I guess. Well, sounds like people should go out and buy the book.
They should definitely buy this classic in the field, but I have so many things that are that are. All right. I'll leave this just because it fits with modern day uh thinking, even though it's not what I wanted to talk about. And and and Matthew won't let me uh he's Matthew now that I'm add. He won't let me.
Yeah, I can tell now I'm upset I'm at on Matthew. The photograph indicating the position of the hands, the shape of the knife, the place to stick in the fork, and a thousand other details becomes an absolute necessity. For in cooking, the technical lecture, which is not accompanied by a demonstration is totally useless. Now remember, this is relatively not, you know, not every book back in the day had photographs, like Ascalfia had no photographs. Color, with its precision, has completely changed the uses of photography.
Photographs have now become suggestive and appetizing. If one may say that, they are in any case favorable to inspiration. So a pre-love of the color photograph for Instagram and a reminder, as I've always said, don't listen to what the chef says. Look at their hands. Cooking issues.
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